Tale for the Mirror (30 page)

That night, after the children were asleep, he and Amelia walked up the back hill, he swinging a lantern along the path, she carrying a basket of the toys for the treasure-hunt, which she had placed in the printed cotton bags they kept from year to year. Above them, the wood rose sharply, darkened even by day by an undergrowth of maple seedlings, dogwood, fern, by an ominous spreading of bush and brush whose names he did not even know. Thirty years ago, in the feudal time of gardeners and servants, the hillside had been worked and terraced, a carefully husbanded sampler of grape arbors and cold frames, of neatly curtailed dells. But now, in this suburban renaissance where people bought for the sake of the houses and the land was only extra and ignored, almost all the places along the road backed up against a dark encroachment like this one, where, here and there in the spring, an occasional old planting sparked with stunted fruit, or a sentinel iris pushed its spear through the honeysuckle, the sumac and the grass.

Just back of the house there was a large plateau where the garden officially ended, and it was here, in scuffed, already traditional places—in the hollow tree that held the swing, in the ledges behind the children’s tent, in the dry channels of last year’s squash vines, that he and Amelia cached the bags, not too well hidden, where the children might find them the next day. They looked lovely in the starlight, with their dim paisley scrolls and freckles—like the fey nesting of some wild and improbable bird. He swung the lantern in an arc above them—an efficient department store lantern, bought for those evening hours when he cadged a bit of time to chop wood, to fix the fan-belt on the pump. Silly or not, with its fake oil-lantern shape, it felt good to swing it in this ritual that their years here had already built for them, above these places which for the children were long since familiar and old.

Back at the kitchen door, Amelia stumbled in ahead of him, murmuring that the children had worn her to a frazzle, in and out of the house all day. He doused the lantern, and sat down on the porch steps, looking out at his acre, his back hill. At times it made him feel like an interloper, a defaulter. It came scratching at his door, not like the wilderness, but like a domestic animal, crying to be tended. This year he would have to burn back the brush, for sure.

Sometime before morning, he got up from bed to latch back a banging shutter. For a moment he thought he saw a figure move across the grass and merge behind the summerhouse. He waited, but saw nothing but the movement of the trees, stirring in the pre-dawn wind. He was about to go back to bed when he saw, down the long hall that led to the front windows, the first eastern flake of light. This was one of the privileges that went with living where he did, one dearly bought and seldom used, the privilege of watching the sun rise on the river from his own window, his own realm. He watched the yellow light shake itself into prisms on the leaves of his horse chestnut trees, waited until the red ball heaved itself out of the river at a spot where, if he remembered correctly, he had the right to seine shad. Then he went back to bed.

When Mr. Dee presented himself the next morning, Garner was alone, Amelia having gone to pick up Sukey at Sunday school, taking the others along for a ride. Neither Garner nor Amelia was a churchgoer, but Sukey’s recent request to go had been acceded to at once, lest she be damaged in her natural craving “to belong.” All the other city émigrés along the road were always making these little forays into the art of belonging—for this too was felt to be one of the privileges of living here. Watching as Mr. Dee picked his way toward him, carefully setting his freshly blacked shoes between the mud squelches that winter had raised on the poorly surfaced road, Garner wondered what it would feel like to be he, inhabitant of that lost steel-engraving world into which one had been born with all one’s affiliations incised.

On the doctor’s porch together, a few minutes later, they waited while the door chime sounded somewhere inside. It was an elaborate chime—a four- or five-tone affair.

“Dear me,” said Mr. Dee, shaking his head. He stared up at the cathedral-like architraves of the front door. “My understanding is—someone
gave
him the place!” he whispered.

A second sound, of steady hammering, blended with the repeated peal of the chime. Mr. Dee blenched. He looked side-ways at Garner’s Sunday morning garb of T shirt, army surplus slacks, and sneakers, dropped his glance covertly to his own dark vest, carnelian seal. “I understand also, however,” he whispered, “that his own credit is very infirm.”

Miss Daria opened the door. Her gaze met Mr. Dee first, approximated him. “Good morning,” she said, in a businesslike voice that went oddly with her waxed lashes, her dazzling blouse. “You’ve come to see about the rooms?”

“Indeed not!” said Mr. Dee, in a high voice. Garner, intervening, asked for the doctor.

“Come in,” she said, unsmiling, and led the way like an usher, through a hallway formed by the first arc of a spiral staircase, into a vast double room, where, in an oasis of furniture set against portieres that divided the regulation sitting room and parlor of such houses, the doctor sat, drinking tea. He had, Garner thought, almost an air of being “discovered” drinking tea. Indeed there was an air of theatrical arrangement, a floridly seedy, “rented” flavor to the whole scene. Garner looked about him, reminded that Amelia would want to know. Kemtone paint, in a number of purposefully intense, but somehow failing colors—pink, orchid, acid green—had been applied to the imperially molded ceiling, the high, cracked walls, and had been wreathed, like tulle around the ravaged throatline of an old beauty, up the underpinning of the spiral stairs. On a hotel-Moorish table, set among several baronial but battered plush chairs, incense bloomed suddenly from a pot, as if it had just been set burning. There was a determined attempt at Oriental mystery, but except for two huge ivory-inlaid teakwood screens, it remained a fatally auction-room Oriental. It was, Garner decided, remembering Miss Daria’s blouse, perhaps “the ladies’” idea of mystery.

“So, Misser Garner, you come to see me after all.”

Garner introduced Mr. Dee, in the latter’s capacity as board chairman.

“Ah, zoning,” said the doctor. His nod was sage, managing to indicate that he drew upon a vast, physicianly stock of unsurprise. He shook Mr. Dee’s hand, looked down at it searchingly for a moment, then gave it back to him. “Good arteries,” he said. “You will probably live forever.”

Mr. Dee, withdrawing slightly, bent down, not without a certain pride of spryness, to detach a bit of dried mud from his shoe.

“Very bad, yars, the road in front of my house,” said Bhatta. “Perhaps now it is spring, the village plans to repair.”

“On the contrary, sir.” Mr. Dee straightened, squaring his frail shoulders. “Last thing we want here is the heavy, beer-truck kind of traffic. Let them go round by the state road.”

“Ah?” said the doctor. “Of course, here in this house we do not smoke or drink. Alcoholism is a very characteristic symptom of Western neurosis. But I do not think it responds to superficial restraints.” He moved a hand toward his cup. “Darjeeling. A very soothing type of addiction. You will join me?” He clapped his hands together, but the sound was barely audible above an increased din of hammering in the rear of the house. He looked sideways at Garner, veiling a brown gleam of amusement with one lowered eyelid. “T-t-t. Those busy ladies.”

“You mistake me, sir,” said Mr. Dee. “We guard only the community, not its, er, personal habits. This is a unique preserve we have here. No coastal railway, one minor factory. On an international waterway, if you please, and
dangerously
near the city. One false step—why there are garden-apartment interests that watch us night and day. You have only to look at the other side of the river—”

Bhatta nodded, impressed not so much, Garner thought, by the phrase “the other side of the river,” whose weight of local scorn he might not realize, as by Mr. Dee’s competitive flow. He waved a slow hand toward the back of the house. “Well, as my unfortunate ears inform me, we are building our own Eden here. All night Miss Leeby insists on finishing the new bathroom, for the arrival of some guests. We have this evening a double celebration. First, the anniversary of Indian independence. Second, the arrival of my nephew from Allahabad, who comes to study medicine. I will get Miss Leeby to stop and bring tea.”

“No, really we can’t stay,” said Garner. A fluttering endorsement of this came from Mr. Dee. “We came merely to—”

“To be delightful and neighborly, of course. So you must allow me. Meanwhile make yourselves at home—there is material here and there that may interest you.” Bhatta motioned toward the piano, toward a pile of books in a corner, various framed papers on the walls. “Also, I must hear more of this zoning. Like this gentleman, I am also an enemy of progress.” He chuckled, and rose slowly. The plush chair fell backward from him, its withered ruffle exposing its bowed legs, like the comedy sprawl of an old character actress. “Not with his admirable structure, however.” He tapped the back of one of his hands sadly with two fingers of the other. “Adipose. Hypertensive. Probable final history—embolism,” he said, smiling, and left the room, leaving the chair upended behind him.

Mr. Dee moved closer to Garner. “Slippery,” he whispered. Chin sunk in his hard collar, he meditated, delving further, perhaps, into the penny-dreadfuls of his boyhood. The carnelian seal rotated slowly. His peaked face came up, triumphant. “Very slippery article. We’ll get nowhere with him. An injunction, I fear. If we can only find out precisely what his activities are.” He moved along one wall, examining. At an exclamation from him, Garner followed. He was reading a long card, in elaborate but somewhat amateurish print, held to the wall by passepartout. It was a restaurant menu. Under the title
NEW INDIA RESTAURANT,
a long list of curries followed, using a number of badly spaced different kinds of type.
Maharajah Curry (for two)
$3.50 headed the array. Leaning closer, Garner deciphered an italicized notation to the right.
With Turban
$5.00. The list declined in rank, price, and size of print as one neared the bottom, where it rose again with a final entry added in typewritten capitals:
Mahatma Ghandi Curry—One Dollar.

“Good God,” said Mr. Dee. “Do you suppose he’s running a restaurant?”

Garner, his mind full of turbans—would they be in the curry or on the customer?—was already standing in front of the next display. It was a very ordinarily framed diploma, granted in medicine to one Pandit Bhatta, from Iowa State University.

“Dear me,” said Mr. Dee. He looked up at Garner, his wrinkles focusing shrewdly. “There is an Iowa State University?” On Garner’s reassurance, his head sank. “Dear me.”

Above an old upright piano there was a large poster drawing of a veiled woman in an attitude of prayer, seated on a pedestal formed by the block letters
DESIRES.
On the music rack below, a single sheet of manuscript music lay carefully open, its many migratory arpeggios blackening the page. Both poster and music were signed
Bhatta.

They had reached the pile in the corner, fifty or more copies of the same book, a small volume, again by the Pandit, published by the Nirvana Press, with a flyleaf of other titles by the same author. Entitled
Rose Loves,
it seemed to be half poem, half paragraphs of meditation, apostrophes which had, here and there, an oddly medical turn of phrase. A description of the circulatory system swelled into diapason:
So the phagocytes swarm in my veins, stars eating stars; the ganglia make little rose-connections along the capillaries of the brain. I rise above. Swung by my dervish blood, I can return to the tree-towns of childhood, suspended above the city’s begging bowls I swing like a monkey from tree to tree.

A folded piece of paper dropped from between the leaves of the book. Garner picked it up, reinserted it, placed the book on the pile of others, and pretended to be studying the ivory inlay in the nearer of the screens, as the doctor entered, followed by the two women carrying the tea things, and a young man, who ran to pick up the fallen chair.

“Ah, Misser Garner, you admire the screens?”

“Yes, very beautiful work.”

“Yars. Very valuable…Miss Daria here wants me to sell them. For three hundred dollars, although they are worth much more than that. Eh, extravagant miss?” Miss Daria, engaged with Miss Leeby in settling Dee and Garner in chairs and passing round the cups, kept her face bent, expressionless. The doctor shook his head at her, including his guests in his mirth. “Probably for…two hundred, she would sell them, that girl!”

It was remarkable how, even as the two women served out the tea, the doctor, with fluently hospitable gestures, maintained the impression that he himself dispensed it. He introduced the young man, his nephew, with a flourish that gave the effect of the latter’s having been created on the spot for this purpose. The nephew, a slender brown young man in neat Western clothes, exhausted his cup in two rapid inhalations, and was quickly served again.

“He is very enthus-iastic,” said the doctor, looking at him meditatively. “Very anxious to get on.”

“Gate on,” said the young man, nodding repeatedly, with the grinning intensity of the foreigner who wishes to make it known that he understands. He rolled his eyes in an exquisite spasm of comprehension. “Gate on!”

The doctor looked at Garner. Again his eyelid drooped. “It is a Pres-byterian college—Allahabad.”

Mr. Dee picked up his cup. “Indeed?” he said, with a vague, reflexive politeness perhaps engendered by the cup. “Mrs. Dee and I are of course communicants of the Dutch Reformed.”

“Of course,” said the doctor, with an equal flexion. At a signal of his hand, the two women departed, followed by the nephew. “Very interesting,” said the doctor, turning back to Mr. Dee. His eyelid lifted suddenly. “Reformed—from what?”

Mr. Dee set down his cup, at which he had but sniffed. “It refers to the Dutch settlers, sir. This is an early settlement. Very early.”