Tale for the Mirror (7 page)

“Is his leg all right now?” I said.

“What?” she said.

“His leg. Is it all right now?”

“Yes, of course. That was donkey’s years ago.” She was vague, as if about a different person. Behind her, Luke shook his head at me.

“And now…” she said. “Now…come in where it’s warm.” And this time my ear picked up that tone of hers as it might a motif—that deep, rubato tone of possession fired by memory. She opened the door for us, but for a scant moment before, with her hand on the knob, she approached it as a curator might pause before his Cellini, or a hostess before the lion of her afternoon.

And here it was. The two fires burned at either end; the sultry hooded sidelights reflected here and there on the pale, unscarred dance floor. The little round tables were neatly stacked at its edge, all but one table that was set for service, as if now that it was 3
A.M.
or four, the fat proprietor and his headwaiter might just be sitting down for their morning bowl of soup. On the wall, behind the tables, flickered the eternal mural, elongated bal-masqué figures and vaudeville backdrops, painted dim even when new, and never meant to be really seen. It could be the one of the harlequin-faced young men with top hats and canes, doing a soft-shoe routine against an after-dark sky. Or it might be the one of the tapering Venuses with the not-quite bodies, behind prussian-blue intimations of Versailles. It did not matter. Here was the “Inn,” the “Club,” the “Spot,” the Glen Island, where one danced to Ozzie Nelson, the Log Cabin at Armonk, the one near Rumson, with the hot guitarist, the innumerable ones where, for an evening or a week of evenings, Vincent Lopez’s teeth glinted like piano keys under his mustache. The names would have varied somewhat from these names of the thirties, but here it was, with the orchestra shell waiting—the podium a little toward one end, so that the leader might ride sidesaddle, his suave cheek for the tables, his talented wrist for the band. Only the air was different, pure and still, without the hot, confectionery smell of the crowd. And the twin fires, though they were burning true and red, had fallen in a little, fallen back before the chill advance of the woods.

So, for the second time, we sat down to champagne with Mrs. Hawthorn. There was a big phonograph hidden in a corner; after a while she set it going, and we danced, Luke first with her, then with me. And now, as the champagne went to our heads, it was not the logs, or the chair arms that moved, but we who moved, looping and twirling to the succulent long-phrased music, laughing and excited with the extraordinary freedom of the floor. I thought of Dave, the little man, but Mrs. Hawthorn never mentioned his name. She was warm, gay—“like a young girl”—as I had heard it said now and then of an older woman. I had thought that this could not be so without grotesquerie, but now, with the wisdom of the wine, I imagined that it could—if it came from inside. She had the sudden, firm bloom of those people who really expand only in their own homes. For the first time, we were seeing her there.

Toward the evening’s height, she brought out some old jazz records, made specially for her, with the drum and cymbal parts left out, and from the wings back of the podium she drew out the traps, the cymbals, and the snare. In the old days, she told us, everybody who came did a turn. The turn with the drums had been hers. We made her play some of the songs for us, songs I remembered, or thought I remembered, from childhood, things like
Dardanella
and
Jadda Jadda Jing Jing Jing.
She had some almost new ones too—
Melancholy Baby,
and
Those Little White Lies.
We gave her a big hand.

Then, just as we began to speak of tiring, of going to bed because we had to drive back early the next day, she let the drumsticks fall, and put her fingers to her mouth. “Why, I forgot it!” she said. “I almost forgot to show you the best thing of all!” She reached up with the other hand, and turned off the big spotlight over the orchestra shell.

Once more, only the sidelights glowed, behind their tinted shades. Then the center ceiling light began to move. I hadn’t noticed it before; it was so much like what one expected of these places. That was the point—that it was. It was one of those fixtures made of several tiers of stained glass, with concealed slots of lights focused in some way, so that as it revolved, and the dancers revolved under it, bubbles of color would slide over their faces, run in chromatic patches over the tables, and dot the far corners of the room.

“Dance under it,” she said. “I’ll play for you.” Obediently, we put our arms around one another, and danced. She played
Good Night, Ladies.
The drums hardly sounded at all. When it was over, she let the sticks rest in her lap. The chandelier turned, silently. Oval blobs of light passed over her face, greening it and flushing it like long, colored tears. Between the lights, I imagined that she was looking at us, as if she knew something about us that we ourselves did not know. “It was lovely,” she said. “That first year.” And this time I could not have said which of her two voices she had used.

We left early the next morning. By prearrangement, she was to sleep late and not bother about us, and in a sense we did not see her again. But, as we drove down the private road, we stopped for a moment at a gap in the trees, to see the sun shining, great, over the sea. There was a tall, gray matchstick figure on the end of the dock. As we watched, it dove. She could not have seen us; probably she would not have wanted to. She was doing the exercise to keep her weight down, perhaps, or swimming around the dock, as she had done as a child. Or perhaps she was doing the only thing she cared to do alone. It was certainly she. For as the figure came up, we saw its arm—the one mailed arm, flashing in the sun.

During the next few years I often used to tell the story of our visit to Hawthornton. So many casual topics brought it up so naturally—Bermuda, the people one meets when one travels, the magnified eccentricities of the rich. When it became fashionable to see the twenties as the great arterial spurt of the century’s youth, I even told it that way, making her seem a symbol, a denizen of that time. I no longer speculated on why she had invited us; I never made that the point of the story. But for some time now I have known why, and now that I do, I know how to tell her story at last. For now that I know why, it is no longer Mrs. Hawthorn’s story. It is ours.

It is almost eighteen years since we were at Mrs. Hawthorn’s, just as it was then almost eighteen years since Harry had come back from France. I was never to meet anyone who knew them, nor was I ever to see her again. But I know now that there was never any special mystery about her and Harry. Only the ordinary mystery of the distance that seeps between people, even while they live and lie together as close as knives.

Luke is in the garden now. His face passes the window, intent on raking the leaves. Yet he is as far from me now as ever Harry was from Hawthornton, wherever Harry was that day. He and I are not rich; we do not have the externalizations of the rich. Yet, silently, silently, we too have drawn in our horns.

So, sometimes, when I walk in the woods near our house, it is to a night club that I walk. I sit down on a patch of moss, and I am sitting at the little round table on the unscarred floor. I fold my hands. Above me, the glass dome turns. I watch them—the two people, about whom I know something they themselves do not know. This is what I see:

It is a long, umber autumn afternoon. To the left the sun drops slowly, a red disc without penumbra. Along the country roads, the pines and firs are black-green, with the somber deadness of a tyro’s painting of Italy. Lights pop up in the soiled gray backs of towns. Inside the chugging little car the heater warms them; they are each with the one necessary person; they have made love the night before. The rest of the world, if it could, would be like them.

T
HROUGH THE CARNIVAL LOOPS
of the beginning of the bridge the cars, shining suddenly, crept slowly on their way to Manhattan. Back of their packed lines, the dark smear of Jersey, pricked with itinerant sparkles, gained mystery as it was left behind, but never enough to challenge the great swag of coastline that hung on the blackness opposite.

In front of Sam Boardman’s car the lines inched forward and stopped.

“Look at that!” he said. He leaned on his motionless wheel and stared south. “Will you look at that!”

Bee’s nearer earring, tiny, hard and excellent, flexed with light.

“There she is,” he said. “Just past your earring. One of the wonders of the world. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never get tired of it.”

Or of knowing I have a piece of it, he thought. The city was his hero, the only one he had ever had or would have. Born into it, funneled through its schools and its cynical, enchanting streets, he was still as tranced by it as all the boys and girls from out of town who ate it up with their eyes and hearts and were themselves eaten in the hunt for a piece of it. There it was, he thought, the seacoast of Bohemia, moving always a little forward as you went toward it, so that even now, when he saw his listing in the telephone directory,
Samuel Boardman atty
351 5 Av,
Residence
75
Cent Pk W
, he could hardly believe that he was an accredited citizen of the mirage.

“Give thanks you don’t have to look at it from Englewood,” she said. She lit a cigarette and blew vigorously on her furs. “How Irv and Dolly—of all people…”

Because of the kids, he thought, as they moved forward a few feet. We know damn well it was because of the kids. All the New Yorkers who grew up there as tough as weeds were convincing themselves that their children couldn’t have sound teeth or sound psyches unless they moved them to the country. Perhaps it was the last gesture, the final axing of the cocktail hour and the theater-ticket agency, by those who didn’t want to stay in town unless they could go on being on the town. Or perhaps it
was
decentralization—not of cities, but the last, the final decentralization—of the ego. At least they said it was because of the kids, and you didn’t say this aloud to a woman who had been trying to have one for ten years. You took pleasure, instead, in the quietly serviced apartment with the expansible dining nook and the contractible servant; and you were careful to voice this on occasion, perhaps at the little evening ritual when you were proffered the faultless drink from the crumb-less table, and you reached around to pat the behind, flat as a ghost’s, of the woman who had not let herself go.

Ahead of him, the lines melted slightly; he eased into a better lane and picked up some speed as they neared the city side. Through the surge of Irv’s after-dinner highballs, he shied away from the image of Bee, her platformed shoes tucked stiffly to one side on the toy-strewn rug, her blond wool lap held politely defenseless against the sticky advances of Irv’s twins. After all, there was a certain phoniness in the people who tweeded up and donned couturier brogues just because they were visiting the country; Bee’s bravura Saturday night chic was more honest. And she had patted the twins’ round fists and held on to them, if a little away from the lap, and had referred to herself as Aunt Bee.

“Talk about wonders,” she said. “To see Irv and Dolly Miller knee-deep in paint and dirt is one of them. Two months out of Sutton Place. And that gem of an apartment.”

“You realize they’re the fourth in a year?” he said. “The Kaufmans, in Stamford. Bill and Chick, in Roslyn. And the Baileys, in Pound Ridge.”

“Oh, it’s the same difference,” she said. “A perpetual stew of wallpapering.”

He slowed up for the traffic on the New York side. It was true, he thought; it was about the same difference. Country coy, all of them, as soon as they hit a mortgage—they made a morality of acreage and a virtue of inconvenience. In Stamford and Roslyn the “doing it over” might be less obsessively home-grown, perhaps, and at the Baileys’ there would be brandy instead of highballs after dinner—the glasses thinning appropriately with the neighborhoods, all along the way.

Even in the city though, the conversations of their friends were more and more loaded with the impedimenta of the parent. “That’s just like my Bobby” and “If you can just remember it’s a phase” floated above the bridge tables, and when the men coagulated in a corner afterward, even there, the inverted boasting of the successful male was likely to be expressed in terms of what it had been necessary to pay the orthodontist. When he and Bee met downtown for dinner these days, it was more and more often in a foursome with some couple older than they, some pair admiringly ticked off by others as “so devoted to one another” or “very close”—with only the faintest of innuendoes that this might be because there had been nothing else to come between.

Of a sudden, he turned away from the entrance to the express highway and wheeled up the entrance marked
LOCAL TRAFFIC.

“Aren’t you going down the highway?”

“Just thought I’d like to go by the old neighborhood.”

In front of them, Broadway jigged like a peddler’s market. Tonight, Saturday, it would be streaming with the hot, seeking current of young couples walking hand in hand, as Bee and he had once done, picking their futures on the cheap from the glassed-in cornucopias of the stores. He felt an immediate throb of intimacy with these buildings, their fronts pocked with bright store-cubicles, their gray, nameless stone comfortably sooted over with living. From the ocher and malachite entrance of the building where Bee and he lived now, one walked, every pore revealed, into a fluorescent sea of light tolerable only to those who had in some manner arrived—the man jingling pocket change he would never dream of counting, the woman swinging lightly from her shoulders the stole of success. Most of the houses here would have small, bleared hallways with an alcove under the stairs, and on each of the five or six flights above there would be a landing where a boy and a girl, scuffling apart or leaning together, could smell, from their paint-rank corner, the indescribable attar of what might be.

He touched the hydromatic foot pedal as they reached a stop light.