The Mirror

by Millhiser, Marlys

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  The Mirror

  Marlys Millhiser

  For Jay and Joy

  There is no winning in life, and no losing – not really – only continuance in a state of obedience to forces that don’t know a thing about us.

  – Ira Wolfert, An Epidemic of Genius

  BACKWARD

  The mirror was old. It had been old when Captain Bennet of the Merry Dolphin found it in the hold after his passengers disembarked in San Francisco Bay. The glass was grainy even then and reflected the light of the ship’s lantern in coarse undulations.

  Captain Bennet brought it to his cabin in case the owner should inquire for it, thinking that if the owner did not he’d have it pitched overboard. The stench of the oriental horde that overran his vessel on the return voyage still clung to his nostrils and he saw little possible value in any of their belongings.

  That night, after a particularly violent electrical storm, certain members of the crew returned from carousing on the waterfront to find the good captain dead on the floor of his cabin.

  A busy and perplexed doctor termed the cause of death apoplexy because of the profusion of blood under the skin of the face and the protrusion of the eyeballs.

  The distressed widow did not share her husband’s distaste for things oriental and took the mirror into her home as a memento of the captain’s last voyage. She soon succumbed, however, to a strange malaise of the mind that convinced her she was not herself but someone else, and she had to be removed to a place where she could be properly looked after and restrained.

  The mirror, a full-length looking glass that stood on its own base, remained for some years in her dark and shuttered parlor, until the house was sold. It was then to be found among other items of questionable origin in the dingy shop of one Edwin C. Pennypacker.

  The night after Mr. Pennypacker, for unknown reasons, hanged himself from the rafters of his storeroom, hoodlums broke into the shop and the mirror along with the rest of the inventory disappeared.

  It was next seen in the back of a wagon filled with a consignment of wares headed for the goldfields, and eventually stood beside the bar in a tent saloon.

  Rumor has placed the mirror over the next years in deserted mine shacks, Indian tepees, a Mormon farmhouse in Utah and in a palatial bawdy house in Cripple Creek, Colorado. But the next authenticated location was the home of Charles Pemberthy, a Cornish miner, in Central City, also in Colorado, in the year 1898. It was apparently not a treasured item in the household, for when the Pemberthys left their rented residence, they left the mirror also.

  John C. McCabe, the owner of this property, upon inspecting the house to discover why his renters had vacated so abruptly, espied the mirror. Having always been a man of unpredictable tastes, Mr. McCabe determined to transport it some miles over the mountains to his home in Boulder as a wedding gift for his daughter, Brandy.

  Thus the mirror continued its journey.…

  Part I

  Shay

  1

  The Gingerbread House sat sullenly in the downpour. Water gurgled in its eaves troughs, cascaded from its peaks and false turrets, dripped from lacy trim bordering porches and railings and overhangs.

  The streetlight pinpointed wet speartips on the ornate fence, made dancing leaves sweep shadows across the gate swinging in the wind. A hollow clang sounded over the noise of the storm as the gate returned to strike uselessly at its latch.

  In the grassy depression between the black fence and the city sidewalk, a puddle gathered, its spillover creeping under the gate.

  The Gingerbread House stood aloof from the surrounding city and from the rearing wall of mountains that crouched but a few blocks to the west, insulated by the storm, by its ancient trees, by its history in a neighborhood gone neon and brash.

  Storm sewers could not cope with this rare deluge and a car moved cautiously up the hill to the stop sign opposite, headlights piercing the spaces in the fence, reaching to the porches and windows of the house set far back in the protection of its lot.…

  Shay Garrett, sitting on the window seat in the upstairs hall, leaned into the curving window as the car turned the corner. Headlights twisted through the distortion of old glass and wind-driven rain to bring fire to the solitaire on her finger.

  She turned the ring so the diamond faced her palm, heard the mutter of voices downstairs, imagined a prickly tension waiting in the dark silence of the hall at her back.

  As she rubbed the stiffened muscles of her neck, she felt the diamond cold against her skin and wished that it could rain inside the house, wash away the dust of decades, generations, decay, boredom.

  Tomorrow a wedding band would be added to the solitaire. Tomorrow Shay would shake the dust of this house from her heels. Why then this uneasy feeling, this ennui so morbid and weighted it constricted her breathing?

  “Shay?” her mother’s voice came up the stairwell, sounding a bit frayed. “It’s time to take Grandma Bran up. Can you help?”

  Shay let her breath out slowly. “I’m coming.”

  “Why, the light’s not even on,” Rachael said below and Shay heard the switch click downstairs.

  Instant light glared on new flowered carpeting and wallpaper meant to look old. The imagined, energized tension in the air seemed heavier as Shay passed the door of her room.

  At the head of the stairs the wedding portrait was crooked and she paused to straighten it. The age-darkened photograph of Grandma Bran and her stiff-mustachioed husband. How could the woman in the picture be the same as the woman below, sprung from her eternal nursing home for the wedding tomorrow? Aging made no sense to Shay.

  She moved down the curving stairs, half-strangled with the oppression of family relics and forebears.

  “What were you doing up there with the lights off?” Rachael Garrett pushed the wheelchair to the bottom of the stairs and slid a hand under the old lady’s arm to lift her.

  Jerrold Garrett set his drink beside the telephone on the ancient buffet. “Probably leaning against a wall being winsomely bored.”

  A momentary tableau of the faces in front of Shay … her parents’ looks of helplessness, a touch of longing … the rather sweet vacancy of her grandmother’s stare. Shay forced a reassuring smile. “The gate’s off the latch, Daddy. It’s banging in the wind.” She took Grandma Bran’s other arm and it trembled at her touch.

  “I’ll get it.” He grabbed a raincoat from the hall tree and the smell of soaked wood rushed in at them as he slammed the door.

  Rachael smiled over the nodding white head between them, but through a mist of tears. “Well, what did you think of it?”

  “Think of what?”

  “Your wedding present … in your room. You couldn’t have missed it.”

  “I didn’t go in my room. What is it?”

  “The mirror from the attic. The one you were so intrigued with, remember? We’ve always called it the wedding mirror because it came into the family as a wedding present. It’s very old and I suspect valuable. I thought you should have something … of the family.”

  As Shay tried to remember a particular mirror from an attic stuffed with the discards of generations, Grandma Bran lurched forward.

  Her mother caught herself on the banister. But her grandmother clutched at Shay, pale lips forming soundless words, sudden intentness replacing the emptiness of her stare.

  “You don’t think she’s having another stroke?” Fear caught in Rachael’s whisper as they pushed the old woman back into the chair.

  A bony hand yanked at her wrist and Shay found herself on her knee
s in front of the wheelchair. “Mother, she’s trying to talk. It’s all right, Grandma.” But she couldn’t free her wrist. Nor believe how strong this tiny creature had become. Nor ward off the panic that seemed to pass from the frail body to her own.

  “Damn gate’s broken again.” Her father and the rain smell entered the hall together. “Why the hell you insist upon hanging onto every piece of junk your family ever – what’s the matter with her?”

  “I don’t know. I thought she might be having a stroke, but she seems to be trying to talk. Her color’s high, though, Jerry.”

  The pinks of the delicate flowers on the wallpaper swam into the reds. The darkness of the buffet levitated in the blurred periphery of Shay’s vision. She felt lost in her grandmother’s eyes, as if she were being pulled out of herself, merging with the agony of the old woman’s struggle as withered lips fought to form around something and sagging throat worked to give it voice.

  “What is it, Grandma?”

  “Mirror,” Grandma Bran answered clearly. It was the first word she’d spoken in twenty years.

  2

  Shay leaned the folded canvas and metal of the wheelchair against the wall in the guest room. Her father set Grandma Bran on the edge of the bed.

  Rachael grasped her husband’s arm as he straightened. “That’s the first thing she’s said since her stroke. Jerry, you don’t think there’s hope … after all this time?”

  “I think you never give up on anything.” He gestured toward the woman on the bed, whose vacant smile belied the brief lapse into reality they’d witnessed downstairs. “She’s probably happier where she is, wherever she’s gone. Leave her alone.”

  Shay still felt the impact of that emotional exchange. Her grandmother, after forcing out one word, had shuddered, looked confused and then lost all interest in further communication. “But why did she look so frightened when she said ‘mirror’?”

  “Oh, honey, she wasn’t frightened. She just can’t control her expressions that well.” Rachael touched the parchment cheek and the old lady patted her hand as if to offer comfort. “I just wish it’d lasted longer. There’s so much I want to say to her, ask her.”

  “Well, I still think it’s a mistake having Bran here for the wedding.” Jerry forced a creaking window open a few inches at the top. “She’s not going to know the difference and she might do something to wreck it.”

  “She’s never been any trouble. I’ll watch her.” When he was gone Rachael turned to Shay. “You understand, don’t you? You’re the only one of her grandchildren she responds to anymore. I’m not sure she recognizes her own sons. I thought she should be here.”

  “Mother, it’s fine. I’m glad Grandma will be at my wedding. And Marek won’t mind.”

  Rachael stared at Grandma Bran as if willing her to speak again, but the old lady was absorbed in folding her suit jacket. Sitting erect, she fumbled at the blouse’s buttons. She could do so much for herself. At the table she rarely spilled her food. Her walk was halting, a barely perceptible dragging of one foot. Only in the last few years had the doctor insisted a wheelchair be kept handy so she wouldn’t tire.

  Shay hovered near the bed with a nightgown and hoped she’d never live to grow this old.

  When Rachael returned with Grandma Bran from a trip to the bathroom, Shay helped to tuck the covers around the wasted body.

  “Honey, about tomorrow. It isn’t too late.”

  “Mother, don’t –”

  “Please, let me finish. I have to say this and I promise to say it only once. If you …” Rachael pushed back thick hair where any trace of gray had been camouflaged. “I’m not accusing you of anything, darling. Oh, I don’t know how to say this. But … if you –”

  “Mother, I can see you’re never going to get it right and we don’t have all night. Let me say it for you. Shay,” she tried to imitate her mother’s low voice, “if you’re pregnant your father and I will pay for you to have the baby at some home or even to have an abortion, but you do not have to marry that man tomorrow. How’s that?”

  Rachael sank onto the cedar chest at the foot of the bed and stared at Shay. Her face had gone as pale as Grandma Bran’s. “How did you know?”

  “That’s getting to be pretty standard for a night-before-the-wedding talk.”

  “Not when I was a girl. She …” Rachael turned to the woman in the bed, who appeared to be sleeping, and dropped her voice, “she gave a talk on the birds and the bees.”

  “Wouldn’t it be cool to know what her mother told her?” Shay laughed softly, switched off the light and sat beside Rachael. “Look, you’re exhausted. I’ve tried to keep the wedding as simple as possible, but there’s been a lot for you to do. There’s your work and worrying about Grandma and the big dinner tonight.”

  “To which your husband-to-be didn’t show.”

  “I told you about the bachelor party.”

  “He could’ve come to dinner and then gone to his party.”

  “What don’t you like about Marek?”

  “I don’t dislike him. I don’t even know him.” Rachael stood and walked to the door. “It’s just … just that you don’t love him.”

  Jerry Garrett collected the remaining glasses, carried them into the kitchen, where the dishwasher rinsed its second load of the evening. On his way back he struck a hipbone on a corner of the buffet in the hall.

  “Damn thing doesn’t belong in a hall anyway,” he muttered to the house. But the dining room had two buffets already and no room for more. They all had some family history which Rachael could rattle off at a moment’s notice. Both he and his daughter had tuned that out long ago.

  He sat in the one comfortable chair the house could manage and surveyed the white-and-silver wedding bows on the glass-fronted antique cabinets whose shelves were lined with knickknacks and Rachael’s cobalt-blue-glass collection. This room was too little even for the small ceremony to be held here in the morning. All cut up, with its many rooms overcrowded, the Gingerbread House was suited more for tiny fluttering old ladies like Bran than for full-grown males.

  “I wondered where you were.” Rachael glided in with a soft swish of her hostess gown and sat in the wooden platform rocker.

  “I’ve had the strangest feeling all day.” She glanced at the corners of the high ceiling.

  “That’s only natural.” But he’d noticed it too. So had the dinner guests. His brothers-in-law hadn’t bothered to tease each other. Ever since he’d carried that crappy old mirror down from the attic and gone to collect Bran from the nursing home, he’d had uneasy sensations in his middle. “Well, did you talk to her?”

  “More like she talked to me.” Rachael lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the chandelier. “She didn’t admit to anything.”

  “Is she angry with us?”

  “No. She just laughed in a nice …” Her lips trembled and she took a deep breath. “A nice condescending way. Why, Jerry? Why?”

  “She’s just bored. I hear it’s all the rage.” He wanted to cross the room, hold her. But he didn’t. “Just bored. She always has been. But Jesus, marriage. That’s like jumping off a bridge to scratch an itch.”

  “And she’s twenty years old. There’s nothing we can do.” Rachael stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette. “I suppose these days we should be relieved she’s marrying, not just moving in with him.” She stood and started for the doorway. “Mom didn’t say any more, maybe it was just a …”

  Jerry was staring over the rim of his glass at the figurine of a shepherdess on the mantel, but his mind was seeing the willowy shape of his daughter, the long pale hair, the contrast of a summer’s suntan, the sudden flashes of kinky wit that would light mischief in otherwise solemn, indifferent eyes …

  When someone screamed upstairs. When the figurine toppled, to crash against a bellows below. When the Gingerbread House shuddered to its gables with a strange explosive impact.…

  Shay sat beside her grandmother after Rachael left. The rain had stopped but wind still
lashed leaves around the streetlight and shadow silhouettes flickered across the bed.

  “Mother’s hopelessly old-fashioned, Grandma Bran,” Shay whispered to the sleeping form. “Love! I’ve got to make a change sometime.”

  A hand moved on the coverlet and lids lifted on faded eyes that looked through Shay. “Book,” Grandma Bran said, the bed shuddering as her body joined the struggle to say more.

  And again Shay had the sensation of being drawn out of herself. She slipped off the bed and rubbed bare arms. Hearing even two spoken words after years of silence made her skin crawl.

  If mind and speech were returning, would it be a blessing for someone almost a hundred years old?

  Mercifully, her grandmother subsided into sleep and Shay tiptoed out, crossing the hall to her own room, where the flowered carpeting and wallpaper continued from the hallways both upstairs and down. If she never saw another pink-and-red printed posy in her life, Shay vowed, it’d be too soon.

  Rachael’d decorated this room “little girl pretty.” The frills and flounces left small space for Shay and her belongings. And with her wedding gift sitting in the middle, it was almost too cramped for air. She leaned over stacks of L.P.’s that blocked the heat from the baseboard heater in winter and opened the window. Rain and wind had brought the clean pine scent down from the mountainsides.

  Shay turned to inspect her wedding gift. “Yuk! I remember you now.” Mother, I was fascinated by this monstrosity because it was so horrid, not because I liked it. She wondered what she and Marek would do with it.

  A full-length glass with a ragged crack running diagonally across the top. The crack would always cut across her face unless she stood on her head. But the worst was the frame, bronze molded in the shape of hands, long, slender but masculine-looking hands that slithered and entwined about each other like snakes, and all with talon-like fingernails. The base was a pair of hands turned downward, the mirror’s weight resting on the thumb, forefinger and little finger on each hand.