Tale for the Mirror

by Hortense Calisher

  Jim settled back and felt for Esther’s hand. As soon as they were away, out of that neighborhood, he would be released from his compulsion to compare, to remember. From here on, it would all be new. He was half aware that his unwilling memories were the more painful because his first marriage had been embarked upon in the same golden warmth and faith, the same sense of inevitability. It had been an October day, that day full of scudding cloud and changeableness, and this day, more than twelve years later, was all moist and May, with a muffled vibrato of approaching summer. But in essence each day held the same fixed dream of rightness, of an incredibly lucky voyage with the one person without whom the world dulled. In essence, one day had been, and one day was, the happiest day of his life. It was as if, carefully putting away a freshly inked guaranty in a drawer, he had come upon another, gilt-scrolled and bright and ridiculously voided by time.

  He looked at Esther, her serenely musing profile nodding faintly up and down with the movement of the cab. He was beyond seeing her, he knew, in any literal terms as a tall, good-looking girl with dark-blond hair, with features whose imbalance, stopping just short of strangeness, struck one on further scrutiny with their curiously personal beauty. For four years now, from the very beginning of the affair, she had seemed to him a medal struck once, and superbly, for him. Now she looked, as always, fresh and lovely. She always dressed, with wise chic, for the second glance, but today, in a gray dress he had seen once before, and a small spray of veil, she had been perhaps especially careful to avoid the flowery smirk of the bride. Neither of them had brought any huge emphasis to bear on today’s ceremony, held as they had been by an unspoken agreement that for two who had so long been lovers this would be silly, perhaps gross. On their way downtown, stopping around the corner from her place to buy her a camellia at the florist shop they always went to, he had found a pleasing element of continuity, almost a safety, in the benedictory smile of the Greek, in the way he handed the flower, as usual, to Jim, and watched, bowing a little, while Jim handed the flower to Esther. She was wearing it pinned not on her shoulder but on her belt.

  She looked around at him now with a smile, a slight pressure of the hand in his, then returned to her wide-eyed contemplation of the driver’s back, and he saw with a rush of warmth that she was surrounded by her own dream of rightness. If she was thinking of her own first wedding—that phlox-and-roses still life of a Connecticut lawn more than ten years back—he did not begrudge her this. Framed in black, it could lie in her memory only with the finality of a mourning card. The house and lawn of her parents had long since been sold; the boy, with whom she had never shared a house, dead within two months in Korea, could only tug importunately now and then at the rim of her remembrance. In a frightening way, he envied her this cameo of a memory, which must have for her the perfect finish given only by death. For her, there was no Marie, no young Jimmie, standing forever wounded, forever suppliant, on the fringe of conscience.

  He opened his mouth to speak, because one of them must soon speak, and closed it again, in fear of the random significance of the first thing to be said. It was a feeling like that on the birthdays of his boyhood, when he had hesitated, wary, at the childish chant “If you do it on your birthday, you do it all year around—if you cry on your birthday, you cry the whole year round.” The long affair had been an idyll, hardly shaken by the long divorce, so sure had they been of themselves and of the deep morality of the end in view. Now that they had it, he wanted to touch wood. He had never been more sure of the end; only the beginning troubled him a little.

  “Decided where to, Mister?” the driver asked.

  Jim looked over at Esther. She turned the palms of her hands upward, then clasped them lightly in her lap. “Where to…” she said, smiling, certain. He gave the driver the address of her apartment and leaned back, stretching his legs.

  The cab turned down her street—still hers, even though he had come there for years and his things were there now. “Maybe we should have gone off to the country somewhere,” he said. “Would you have liked that?”

  “No.” She shook her head slowly. “I like us just as we are.”

  He kissed her and let his face rest for a moment on her shoulder, lazily breathing her perfume, watching the sun and shade dapple her lap. When he had paid off the cab, he followed her down the steps to the dark-blue door, flanked with potted shrubs, through which one entered her building, and they stood in the areaway for a minute, looking down the two streets that converged before it. Spaced along the sidewalks, small, wire-bracketed trees had put out every straining leaf, each trunk holding its rosette of branches like a child’s head too heavy for the delicate stalk of neck. “What a day!” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely day!” She spun on her heel, and put her hands in his.

  “Lovely!” he said. It was the kind of day when the season, poised for the summer plunge, enclosed the city in a golden bubble whose faintly rounded walls distorted everything into a curve of beauty. Down the far distance, where the stores were, windows dazzled into cataracts, signs flew like pennants.

  “Spring’s the nearsighted season,” Esther said softly, and it was true that although he had his glasses on, everything did look blurred, merged, as if he might just have taken them off, except for the door, on whose knob she had put her hand. Over the years of evenings when he had walked toward it in light-footed, sensuous quickening, the door had become the image that had halved his life, first as a rendezvous, with all the giddy charade the word implied, later with urgency and conflict, and finally as a symbol of what he wanted to walk toward forever. During the business days before the nights when he was to see her, it had always been this he had gone toward in his mind, so much so that if anyone had casually asked, “You know Esther King, don’t you?” he would have been able to answer indifferently, but if anyone had said, “Do you know a house with a blue door?” he would have been left stammering and undone. Until the very last, when they had had to wrench themselves out into the open, once he had closed it behind him no one else had known where he was, nothing had been able to reach him, shuttered there in secrecy and love.

  “Well?” She smiled and twisted her hand on the knob, and again he was back in a forgotten birthday, standing in a clutter of wrapping paper, looking, choked and prayerful, at the largest and most beautiful box of all.

  “Too nice to go up yet,” he said. “What do you say we have a drink at Rolo’s?”

  “Yes, let’s,” she said. “Let’s go get a drink at Rolo’s,” she said singsong, tucking her hand under his arm, urging him back up the steps, as if this had been her idea, almost as if his thought had been hers.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” she said. She was sauntering along, eyes half closed, smiling. “Not to see you for a month, and then all of a sudden—this. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you’re not going to have to—go.”

  He squeezed the arm with her hand in it against his side. During the last weeks, they had kept apart; she had gone out of town while the decree became final and he went through the series of small obsequies—dreadful because they were so small—that had attended his final rupture with the house in New Canaan. Esther had wanted them to start clear, she had said, obsessed by a sudden, wistful grasp at propriety, and they had done so. On his last visit to the house, to get his summer clothes out of the attic and back to the hotel where he was staying, he had come down the attic stairs with his arms full, thinking, Was it only last summer—was it only last summer—that he had been living here? And he had run straight into Marie, who had always been carefully absent when he came before, on similar forays or for an appointed outing with young Jim. She had turned quickly into a room, shutting the door behind her, but not before he felt the same oddly monogamous twinge of guilt that had made his continued life there impossible. For it had been guilt, and a monogamous one—but its allegiance had been to Esther.

  “Down this way. Remember?” Esther said, and stopped him from continuing past Second Avenue. The bar, Rolo’s, w
as halfway down the block. It was a place they had first gone to one afternoon years before, out of a deep need to show their love in the company of someone. Little by little, as it became the one spot where they let themselves be seen, the magic comfort of such places gathered in its grimy red shadows, for here they were known to belong together. Here they had their own corner and their special drink; and their status, though never commented upon, had been well surmised and appraised—and this, too, made them happy. Finally, even the “characters” in the bar became dear to them, for in the eyes of these, they themselves were characters in their own romance.

  At the door of the bar, Jim hesitated. Perhaps she would be hurt, after all, if there were not some celebration, some tiny bursting of the rose, even if only among the supernumeraries here. “As we were?” he asked.

  “As we were.” She touched a finger to her lips, and the smile was still upon them.

  As we still are, he thought, following her in. He nodded to Tom, the bartender, raised two fingers, pulled out Esther’s chair, sat down in his own, and nodded again, this time to Lydia Matthews, a white-haired beauty of fifty, who returned the nod with the dainty, spectral smile of her five-o’clock Martini swoon. The bartender, coming over to their table to set down their vermouth-cassis, glanced back at her with a pitying shrug.

  Jim clinked his glass against Esther’s. “To things as they are,” he said. With a forefinger, he stroked the back of her hand. Over the raised rim of her glass, her eyes filled with tears.

  They sat there for a long time; they had supper there while the window behind them turned into a great ox eye of blue. When the bar was crowded, the place full, Lydia left, as she always did. They watched her thread her way out, a hostess speeding her guests, pausing here and there to lean over a table and drop the same muted phrases from the wry, aging dimple of her mouth. She stopped to speak to a couple at the table next to theirs. “Found your boy?” she asked the woman. “That’s right, darling. That’s everything there is.” The woman laughed.

  Lydia leaned over Esther. “Found your boy,” she said, nodding like a pink, ruined, grandmotherly girl.

  She drew herself up, her head queenly, her purse clasped tight in front of her. “Night, ducks,” she said, her voice round and warm, and walked past them, out the door, treading lightly on the civet flow of the Martinis, her head held high in the regency of drink.

  Glancing at each other, they rose, too, with intuitive rhythm, and left the place, walking silently through the blue element of the evening. And now he caught her around the hip and urged her, laughing, running, to the corner of their street. There they slackened, breathless, and again he urged her forward. On the brink of the steps, they teetered, then ran down them in unison; he flung the door open, pushed her inside, and caught her in his arms, listening with satisfaction to the door soothing shut behind them.

  “Oh, Lord!” she said, laughing, picking the spray of veil from her hair and hanging its circlet on her wrist, falling silent as he still held her. Together they looked through the lozenge of window set high in the door, thick glass through which the world outside appeared tiny, distorted, clever—a world in a bull’s-eye mirror. The young trees were holding their brave rosettes cleverly on high, the day was ending in an extraordinary gentleness, as if someone were pouring over it a knowing wash of dark, and he and she, standing close in its lambent shadow, were the cleverest of all.

  “I’ll just get the mail.” She darted a quick kiss at him and bent to fumble in her purse for the mailbox key. He felt in a pocket for his key to the inside door, opened it, and, when she had got the mail, pushed her childishly up the stairs in front of him, hearing, with another flicker of satisfaction, the inner door click closed below.

  Once inside the familiar oval of her one room, he sank down into a chair, winded and replete, watching her as she went about the room, turned a lamp on, then off, put her hands idly to her hair, flung open the casement, and leaned there, looking out. It was a room that he had never once returned to without feeling grateful that he was there again, another lap won. Now he sat there dizzy with gratitude, assessing each familiar symbol—the ashtray with the two deer beneath the glaze, the copper pot in which she made espresso coffee for them, the jar that variously held rhododendron and chrysanthemum, and now had willow in it. He almost resented the willow, because it was new, placed there in his absence, until he remembered that he would never have to resent change in this room again; he would always know what was in the jar.

  “Smell it,” she said, leaning out. “How can it smell like that—almost like the country? It’s like syringa, or honeysuckle.”

  “It’s the spring-blooming neons,” he said. “The lovely neon smell.”

  “A little dusty.” She stood up and brushed her hands together, then came and put her head down on him for a moment before she sat down across from him and looked through the mail. He sat watching, in his wonderful sloth of anticipation, thinking of what a remarkable rhythm women had for situation, and how they moved best, to some delicate inner pulse, in the situation of love. He found a moment of pity for the crude young couples they had seen at the marriage bureau, the visionary girls, the red, stammering boys, staring not at each other but past each other at some rigid pantomime of sex. This room was burned into his mind, and now that he sat in its center, it was lit from behind by all the banked hours that started up, once he set foot here, percussive as drums.

  She raised her head from an open letter on the pile in her lap. “From my brother. All good wishes—and they want us down for a weekend next month. The twentieth.”

  Jim took the letter she passed him, only skimming the welcoming words in his relief that now, and so easily, the strands were beginning to knit—all the good, associative strands of dinner with these, Sunday with those. We look for you two on the twentieth.

  “Why, and here’s one for you,” she said. “Forwarded from the hotel.” She handed it to him with a little flourish that said it was his first letter here, that she, too, had her satisfactions.

  One glance at the large, smudged envelope told him that it was from Jimmie. Thin at the crease, worn, with an old business address of his own in the upper corner, it was one of a stock of leftover letterheads that had been kept in the desk at New Canaan. The inscription was printed in purple indelible pencil. Mr. James Nevis, it said, then Esther’s address, in ink, above the canceled address of the hotel, and then: New York City. The United States. The World. The Universe.

  “The World, The Universe,” she said, leaning over him. “Ah, I used to do that, didn’t you?”

  “He always signs himself ‘your favorite child,’” Jim said. “Joke. Because he’s the only one.” He heard his tone, the careful deprecation with which parents boast to strangers of their heart’s blood.

  “His pictures are so like—” she said. “I want so much to—Jim, now we can have him visit here, can’t we?”

  “Yes,” Jim said. “We can have him.” He slit the letter open. Dear Jim, it said. This is to remind you the last time Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey, the circus, the last time is Sunday May 10. Hoping to here from you. Your favorite child. James R. Nevis. A clipping of a circus ad was attached, stuck on with Scotch tape.

  “But that was yesterday,” he said. “Oh, God damn! That was yesterday.”

  “What, dear?”

  He handed her the letter. A final sinking of the light outside the window sent prisms into the room, touching the wall, the jar, her bent head.

  “Oh, Jim!” she looked up, clutching the letter, then patted it tenderly straight and handed it back to him. “Oh, the poor—I wouldn’t have had it happen for the—”

  “Neither would I.”

  “Had you promised?” she asked.

  He nodded. “When I was up there last time,” he said. “I came downstairs and found him playing outside, but I’d bumped into Marie upstairs, and I just wanted to get out of there. Later on, it must have slipped my mind.”

  He had come
down the path, heavy with the unreasoning irritation the house always forced upon him lately, his arms clumsy with the clothes he was carrying, and Jimmie, dropping his ball, had rushed him, butting him in the stomach and uttering one of those comic-book noises that are the Esperanto of eight-year-olds: “Boinng!” Jim had replied feebly, “Playing ball?”

  Jimmie had followed him to the car, talking excitedly. Jim had stuffed the clothes hurriedly into the car, promised, and driven away.

  “I could have taken him yesterday,” Jim said. “I just hung around the hotel. It rained yesterday, though. Didn’t it rain yesterday?”

  “Yes. But they have it in the Garden.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Sure, that’s right.”

  Last year, Marie and the boy had been in Reno, but the spring before that Jim had taken him for the first time, not to a circus like the cheap-Jack traveling tents of his boyhood but to Madison Square Garden, where the big top was so far up that it was not there at all, and there were no cracks to admit the sky. He had been amused to find how girly the show had grown, but there had still been the all-powerful smell of horse. There had been so many rings in that circus that the most loving gaze could not do them all justice. He had given up, content to watch Jimmie, his head turning like a thatched brown bun, on the rack of delight.

  “Call him,” Esther said. “Why don’t you call him now?”

  “What could I say? No, I’ll call him tomorrow. I’ll think of something.” He weighed the letter on his palm. “Besides, he’ll be asleep by now.” Surely he would be asleep by now, deaf to The World and The Universe, his vigil over. “No. I’ll call him tomorrow,” Jim said.

  She sighed and stood up, looking down at him, her mouth rueful and soft. “Think I’ll take a shower,” she said. “Unless you want one first.”

  “No, go ahead.”

  The bathroom door closed behind her. He reached for his pipe, then chose a cigarette from a table. He turned on a lamp, and the room sprang up, limned and clear. Yes, they would have him come here. Marriage is a small room, too, Jim thought. She does not know that yet. And I have just begun to remember.