Tale for the Mirror (8 page)

“Not bad for a couple of kids from around here,” he said, slapping his free hand on the duvetyn seat.

“Not bad.” She smiled up at him eagerly, two lines on either side of her mouth slightly frogging her cheeks. Her almost gross hunger for compliment always touched him nevertheless; she seemed to need to amass his every approving remark—either personal or marginal—as evidence that their life together was what he wanted it to be. He watched her as she looked out the window and squinted slightly for lack of the glasses she would never wear except at home. If you had put the Bee of tonight in a red dress with too much braid on it and had substituted a hairdresser’s springy weekend curls for her present casually planed coiffure, she would be very like the girl who had ridden uptown from City College with him, with whom he had walked these streets on countless Saturday nights. Still, with the years, a woman had a choice of either spreading or withering, and behind her quick, compulsive smile he sometimes caught a glimpse of what she might be at fifty. It was less frightening to see only age in the face of someone you loved, than to see the kind of aging it could be. He saw her at fifty—one of those women like shrunken nymphs, all slenderness and simulacrum from the rear, who, turning, met your glance with faces like crushed valentines.

“Where on earth are you going?” she asked.

They had left the vivid, delicatessen reek of the main street, and were traveling slowly down a street that dead-ended on the Harlem River. He stopped the car on a street with a few furtive secondhand stores on the west and a murky fuzz of unregenerated park on the east. None of it had changed with the years.

“There’s High Bridge,” he said. “And there’s the water tower.” He was only half aware of her moving sharply to the far end of the seat.

He could just see the water tower, a dun cylinder that had never been much more than a neighborhood mark in the city’s proliferating stone. There it was though, a dingy minaret above the brush of the park. Any one of a number of paths led to its base, at the foot of which Bee and he had slept together one night, the first time for each, the only time before they had married. He could scarcely remember the innocence of that urban hedgerow lovemaking. Its details were lost forever, buried under hundreds of superimposed nights in bed. What he remembered was the imperative sense of “now,” which had been shuffled off somewhere along the way. And he remembered the city, assisting like a third presence—the river steaming softly behind them in the mosquito-bitten night, and the occasional start of the tugs.

It was early November now, but the air had a delayed softness, the doomed, uneasy gentleness of fall. He put a hand on her lap and found her gloved hand.

“Want to take a walk?”

“No.”

“Just for a minute. There’s an entrance down there.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Come on.”

“Sam…you tight?”

“Look,” he said, “I meant a
walk
.” He pressed her glove back on her lap and left it there.

Two capped men passed by, looking sideways at the car from vaguely identical foreign faces, and continued down the block, their feet slapping echoes on the dead street.

She watched them through her window, huddling into her furs. “I want to go home.”

“You didn’t used to be afraid of—neighborhoods,” he said.

She sat still for a minute. “Took you twelve years. To throw that at me.”

“Oh, look,” he said, “I just want to talk to you. Before we get back to that damned apartment.”

“I thought you liked the apartment.”

“We’re not so old we always have to be—inside places,” he said.

“God in heaven. Is this what comes of going to Englewood?”

He pulled out a cigarette and pressed the lighter on the dash. Through the windshield, as he leaned forward, he could sense the special outdoors of the city, its compound of peculiar, incessant harvestings from parks muted with dust and pavements oscillating with power.

He lit the cigarette. “I spoke to that woman in Tennessee yesterday. The agency woman.”

“You called Tennessee!”

“I figured, cut through the red tape. Look, Bee—we’ve had all the pictures and stuff. She can come in two weeks. She can bring either the four-month-old girl, or the nine months’ boy.”

“But I told you I wouldn’t…not from down there. It isn’t safe!”

“What’s
safe
?” he said. “Ten years ago it was the war. Before that—the depression. But the streets are still full of them.”

“That happens to be a different thing.” She averted her chin, in a way familiar to him. For the first time, he noted how familiar it was.

“It’s no one’s fault we had to rule that out,” he said gently.

“You can cut the chivalry,” she said. “And start the car.”

“Ahhh…damn,” he said.

“Sam—”

“Look,” he said, “are we people who want a kid, or—or comparison shoppers? We’ve gone along on all the proper lists in town for three years, and every year older we go down the list—not up. We’re thirty-six years old. We need one now—before it has to wheel us around.”

She sat up straight. “Need? Or want?”

“Take your choice,” he muttered.

“Maybe I will,” she said. “But not from the Ozarks.”

He started the car then, and they swept away from the curb in a dangerous arc and an ooze of gas, only to be stopped at the next corner by a red light.

“For your information,” he said, “they’re all born without shoes.”

He let her out in silence at their entrance, drove the car to the garage off Amsterdam, and slowly walked his way back. Even now, he was excited, as he never failed to be by those violent shifts of neighborhood which succeeded one another without warning everywhere in the city. Instruction lurked these streets, and in the end, evaded.

As he walked into his own building, he turned down the collar of his coat. The place was a decorator’s cave, so effectively contrived to deny the elements that not to cooperate seemed coarse. Like the apartment upstairs, to which Bee gave so much concentration, it made cunning use of all the sensuous affirmations of safety. In front of the elevator, which was actually self-service, a uniformed attendant lounged nevertheless, reduced to the level of that accessory given to people who had everything. Above the man’s head a
SHELTER
sign pointed, like a rude thumb.

He let himself into the apartment. In the long living room whose every possession schemed toward its perfect one—a casement framing Central Park—a few lamps glowed, but not too many, and the table in the bay held a plate of sandwiches, glasses, a decanter, a bottle of beer and an opener, as if Bee were saying to him: “This is my talent…don’t despise it…don’t be angry.” Long draperies, in a nervous pattern of darts and runs that he had once dubbed “thrills and chills,” and thereafter always referred to thus, had been slid across the window. People like themselves had so many pet names for things, so many terrible mutual coynesses. He pulled the draperies back. There it was—the diorama that never switched off. As he took off his coat, still looking at it, the hem caught the beer bottle, which slipped to the rug unbroken. Bending to pick it up from the soft pile, he saw that the bedroom door was open a crack, shedding light into the hall off the far end of the room.

“Bee. Come on in here.”

She came in, almost at once. With her, to be caught disheveled was to be caught out; even when ill, she managed it with patient artistry, covering up, under a feverish flow of perfumes and bed-jackets, the less savory fevers of the body. Now, in her pink robe, she looked as if she had put their quarrel under a hot shower, and had powdered over it. She picked up his hat and coat from the sofa where he had tossed them and hung them away in the quilted closet. He watched her until she came and sat down across the table from him, as they had sat together in the oval of thousands of evenings.

“O.K.,” he said. “Now we’re inside.”

They sat on, in silence.

“You going to make me do it all, Bee?” he said.

“I want you just to see that woman,” he said. “See those kids. I’ll get her to bring both, if you want. I’ll get Parker to check them, test them.” His voice trailed off.

“God in heaven!” he said. “It’s not usually the
man
…”

She got up from the table then and leaned against the window, her back to him.

“So it’s a risk,” he said. “Look out there. The whole world has a shelter sign on it. It always has. Some kind of a one.”

“Bee.” He went over to her and put an arm around her. “It’s why people have kids.” He rocked her gently back and forth. “Their own gamble.”

“But it wouldn’t be ours!” she said, and stiffened away from him. “It would never be ours!”

His arm, still on the shape of her, dropped to his side.

“Sit with them in the park sometime,” she said. “All those women. Like I do with Lil. They lean over the carriage and say, ‘Who does it take after?’ And I wouldn’t know.”

In the black and gold pane, her image, vague and beveled, looked back at him. “I’d get to love it—and all the time I’d be thinking…where’s the woman who had it…who’s the father? Even if we knew.

“Sure I’d love it,” she said, “but I’d always be
watching
it. Because it wasn’t mine.”

“Turn around,” he said. “
Turn around.
”

She turned.

“Those lists,” he said. “All those lists!”

She put out her hand, a short wheedling distance.

“Suppose we’d gotten to the top of one of those?” he said.

“You want the truth?”

He looked at her face unrefracted by glass. “If you happen to have some with you.”

Under the rosy cast of the lamps and her robe, the tears that immediately crumpled her eyes would be pink too, if he neared them. “I kept telling myself I could—that it would all iron out…when I got there.”

She reached into the pocket of the robe. It would be there—the handkerchief. It was there. “When you know you can’t handle something—isn’t it better to know beforehand?”

“Sure,” he said, “if you only want what you’re sure you can handle.”

“All right then. I’m sorry. Then I’m not big enough.” She put the handkerchief to her mouth. “Either way!” she said, and ran past him to the bedroom door. He watched her turn there.

“Sam. It’s not as if we weren’t close. Closer than most people.”

He looked at her, across the aisle of wood and leather and arranged cloth that was hers. “Give us time,” he said. “A few years—and nobody’ll be able to tell us apart. Just give us time.”

In the interval before the door closed there was no shading, nothing, between him and what he saw. Not even air.

After a time, he opened the door and walked down the hall. As he stood there, he could hear the tub running in the bathroom off the bedroom. Her remedy for everything, he thought. A washing away. A change of clothes, a lift of heart. His eyes felt hot. What had she done, what had she managed, all these years?

Stop it, he thought. It wasn’t so. Even without the endless roster of doctors, he knew that it wasn’t. If he was tempted to believe anything of her now, it was only because up to now he had believed everything. There was a raw, terminal sadness in it for them both, in that she had had to be the one to point out to him what her real limits were. And she had not so much concealed these as, briefly and pitiably, risen to an awareness of them—as a marionette might, for one extraordinary instant, see the strings that held it and achieve, in that same mourning instant, the moment when it stood alone.

He walked into the dining nook and poured himself a stiff drink from a cellarette in a corner. Carrying the drink with him, he walked the length of the living room, turning out lamps as he went. With each lamp that went out the city advanced toward him, until, with the last, it stood in the room—a presence—brilliant, and third.

He drank, watching it. It neither extorted nor gave. It was one of the wonders of the world, and had merely to be there. If its Bohemia had, after all, no seacoasts, this would hardly be noticed now, in a world that had all but deserted the horizontal laziness of ships. One could hanker there all one’s days and hardly notice that the piece of it earned had come out of oneself.

It was a vertical place for people like them, in which the only way out was up. He watched the two of them, a couple named Sam and Bee, climbing from tower to tower, in a gilt-edged monkeydom of closeness, to the spheric music of the brandy glasses that would get thinner along the climb.

He drank, watching them. Opposite him, against a sky humbled to a perpetual nude, the towers waited, like slowly fizzing rockets that never went out—or soared away.

M
Y FATHER, BORN IN
1862, and old enough to be my grandfather when I entered the world a year after his marriage to a woman twenty-two years younger than he, was by birth therefore a late Victorian. By 1900 he had already been of an age to have emigrated long since from South to North, and to have acquired both a business successful enough to permit him to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee at his usual haunts of Mouquin’s and Delmonico’s, and a rheumatism fashionable enough to require recuperation at Mount Clemens Spa. But like so many youngest sons of those large families whose fortunes have either declined or not been built, he had from the first shown a precocious, Alger-like energy that—in his case combined with some of the bright fairy-tale luck that comes to the third sons in Grimm—was to keep him all his life younger in appearance and temperament than others of his span, pushing him constantly toward modernity, even while he dragged his feet, protesting. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when I knew him best, he was, at the very least, early Edwardian.

Since he was the youngest of a family so long-lived that he and his sisters and brothers, all close to seventy, still had their mother, and one so close-knit that all its branches lived within round-the-corner call of each other in Manhattan, I spent the indoor part of my childhood with old people—people old enough to regard my mother, in her thirties and forties, as a young person of promise who still owed them deference but might now and then be admitted to the family councils in a listening capacity. Her own fluttering efforts, either to freshen the décor of the anciently cluttered household she had married into, or to cling weakly to some of the habits of her contemporaries, were looked upon somewhat as the
art nouveau
bric-a-brac of an incoming bride might be regarded by the chatelaines of a manor house—with the tolerant knowledge that all this nonsense would eventually disappear.