Tale for the Mirror

by Hortense Calisher

  When she padded out of the bathroom, flushed and lovely, she had on a housecoat he had never seen. She sat down opposite him for his notice, folding her hands in her lap, childishly hiding her feet under the stiff silk. He lit a cigarette and passed it to her. After a while, she leaned toward him, drew the letter from his fingers, and tucked it out of sight behind the jar of willows. She sat back, her lids lowered, her chin cupped in her hands. Her hair was loose on her shoulders and her face had the vulnerable look this gives to women. So many rings to the show now, he thought. And the loving heart must do each justice.

  He knelt and put his head in her lap, kneading his face against her knees. Once, he raised it, as if he heard something waning in the distance. She stretched out a draped arm then, and turned out the lamp. But in the darkness, his eyes retained the room in perfect memory, with that finish given only by death. So, in the darkness, he clung to her for a moment not as a lover but as he might cling to some foolish crony who had once been there together with him in the Arcady of the past.

  The Night Club in the Woods

  WE FIRST SAW HER, Mrs. Hawthorn, sitting alone, the first one down in the tender that waited to take us off the Bermuda boat. She was wearing a quilted taffeta suit, expensively flared at shoulder and hip, and a matching hat—one of those deep, real hats we were all wearing in the fall of 1935—and her arms were full, crammed full of tea roses. Under a city marquee, she would have had an enviable chic, but on the white deck of the tender, in the buttery Bermuda sun, she looked outlandishly urban for that travel-folder scene. As the rest of us climbed down into the tender, she made room for us with an apologetic shifting of the roses, but one could see, as she nestled her long, rouge-assisted face into the buds, that she was pleased with them.

  Later on, in the week that followed, we saw her at our hotel, and Luke and I, drifting in the ambience of our honeymooners’ table, idly watched her dinner entrances. Each evening, appearing late but consciously unflurried, in a different gown—one always too dominantly colorful and sparkling for the off-season crowd—she crossed to the table reserved for her and her companion, a dark, pear-shaped man, shorter than she, who received her with an anxious, hesitant courtesy.

  On the first evening, Luke, nudging me, had pointed to the single bird-of-paradise bud with which the hotel kept the tables adorned, each beaked bloom soaring from its coarse glass holder like an immoderately hued bird, and every evening thereafter, the analogy had kept us amused. One evening, however, as she passed us, her tall, haggard figure sheathed in green sequins that boomeranged the light, a child at a nearby table cried out: “Look, Mommy! Christmas tree!” As she stopped, and bent toward the child, the sequins not quite concealing the middle-aged line from breast to hip, we heard her say, in a mellow voice, as if she were indulgently amused at both the child and herself—“Yes, darling! Christmas tree!”—and we felt ashamed, and liked her.

  We met the two of them again, as we were all herded docilely into one of the glass-bottomed sightseeing boats, and she told us her name. The little man, tentative and deferential in the background, was one of those hovering people whose names one never catches, and we never did, although she told us it too. Again we saw her, alone on the beach in front of the hotel, in a maillot that was still somewhat scandalous for that time. We were a little embarrassed for her, not at the suit, but at its cruel, sagging revelation, and I remember that both of us, looking away with the instinctive distaste of the young for the fading, glanced down with satisfaction at our own bodies. One of her arms was almost covered from wrist to elbow with diamond and sapphire bracelets, and she must have seen me staring at them, or trying not to. She laughed, on the same mellow note.

  “I’d feel naked without them.” She turned, and slid into the water. She swam well, better than either of us, her long, water-sallowed face, which once must have been very handsome, sinking deep into the fervid blue of the water, the one mailed arm flashing in the sun.

  In those days, the thing to do was to go down on the Monarch and come back on the Queen. The little stenographers squandering their vacation on off-season rates, an “interchangeable” wardrobe, and one shattering evening dress, the honey-mooners, intent on seeming otherwise, all said it airily: “We came down on the Monarch and will go back on the Queen.” On the return voyage, we met Mrs. Hawthorn and her vague companion again. The ship had run into bad weather, the usual October storms of the Caribbean, and at dinnertime, the little stenographers had been unable to appear in their evening dresses after all.

  Luke had been affected too, although I was not. After dinner alone, I wandered into one of the ornate lounges that hollowed the ship. Seated in one of the gold chairs, her lamé gown blending so well that at first I did not see her, was Mrs. Hawthorn. She beckoned to me.

  “I see you’re a good sailor, too,” she said. “I never get sick. Dave—the friend who is traveling with me—is down in his cabin.” There was the slightest emphasis on “his.” “Women are the stronger sex, I always say. You two are newlyweds, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look,” she said. “Why don’t you and your husband come up to my stateroom and have champagne. It’s the best thing in the world for seasickness—and after all we really should celebrate for you two. Yes, do! We really must!”

  I went down to our cabin, and roused Luke. “You think you’re inveigling me,” he said. “But it’s really Mrs. Hawthorn who intrigues me.”

  We climbed the ladders from D deck to A. Up there, with no feel of more ship above us, the ocean, silhouetted against the looming slant of the stacks, seemed to shift its dark obliques more pervasively near us.

  “The water seems more intimate up here with the rich, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “Hmmm,” said Luke, “but it’s not an intimacy I care to develop at the moment.” I giggled, and lurching together, hip to hip, half with love, half with the movement of the deck, we entered Mrs. Hawthorn’s stateroom.

  The room was banked with flowers. Mrs. Hawthorn and her companion were waiting for us, sitting stiffly in the center of the blooms like unintroduced visitors in the anteroom of a funeral chapel. Wedged behind a coffee table blocked with bottles, Mrs. Hawthorn did not rise, but we greeted each other with that air of confederate gaiety adopted by hostess and guest at parties of whose success neither is sure. Across from her, behind an imitation hearth, a gas log burned insolently, as if a fireplace burning in the middle of the sea might serve to keep the elements in their place.

  “Life on the hypotenuse,” said Luke. He retrieved a bunch of gladioli, and set them back on the erring horizontal of a table.

  Mrs. Hawthorn shifted her bracelets. “Dave is the florist in our home town—Hawthornton, Connecticut. I needed a rest, so Dave came down with me. Senator Hawthorn couldn’t get away. He’s the senator from there, you know.”

  Luke and I nodded, eager to let her see that we took her explanation at its face value, unwilling to appear abashed at the malpractices of the rich and worn. I imagined her life—the idle, probably childless woman, burdened with an exuberance no longer matched by her exterior, drawing toward her, with the sequins of wealth and difference, the self-conscious little man, who was doggedly trying to fill the gap between them with the only largesse at his command—his abracadabra of flowers. Luke and I exchanged looks across the flowers, secure in our cocoon of beginnings, seeing before us an itinerary that repudiated compromise, and made no concessions to the temporal.

  As we drank, the fraudulent solidity of the room was displaced now and again by a deep, visceral sway that drained the chair arms from beneath our digging fingers, and the wine seemed only to accentuate the irrationality of the four of us so transiently, so unsuitably met. At one point, Mrs. Hawthorn told the blond, mild-featured Luke that he had a “sulphurous” look, which roused us all to unsteady laughter, and again I remember her asking, with the gaucherie so denied by her appearance, if he were a “college man.”

  Then, suddenly, with an incredulous
look on his face, Dave, the little man, stood up. Edging backwards, he felt for the doorknob, caught it, and disappeared around it. Ignoring his defection, the three of us sat on; then Luke, with a wild look at me, lurched through the flapping door and was gone.

  Mrs. Hawthorn and I sat on for a moment, united in that smug matriarchy which joins women whose men have acted similarly and disgracefully. The heat from the burning log brought out the reek of the flowers, until it seemed to me that I had drunk perfume instead of champagne. Slowly the log up-ended and pointed toward the ceiling, but this too had slid far to the right, so that the room hung in a momentary armistice with the storm, the implacable hearth still glowing in its center. I stood up, and moved toward the door. It sidled toward me, and I achieved the corridor, but not before I had caught a last glimpse of Mrs. Hawthorn. She was sitting there like one of those children one often sees at dusk in the playground or the corner lot, still concentrated in fierce, solitary energy on the spinning top or the chalked squares of the deserted game, unwilling to admit the default of the others who have wilted, conceded in the afternoon’s end, and acquiescently gone home.

  By the time Luke and I had made our separate ways to the cabin, the ship had ridden out the storm area and was running smoothly. We would dock next morning in New York Harbor. We greeted each other, and slid limply into bed. Luke put his arms around me with a protectiveness tinged, I could not help thinking, with a relief that I had not proved so indomitable after all. For a second, I held him at arm’s length. “Tell me first,” I said. “Are you a college man?” Then we nestled together, in the excluding, sure laughter of the young.

  At the docking the next day, we got through the lines early, without seeing anyone we knew. We had exchanged addresses with Mrs. Hawthorn, never really expecting to see her again, and in the busy weeks after, during which we returned to our jobs and our life together, we forgot her completely.

  About a month later, sometime in November, we got a note from her, written in a large, wasteful hand on highly colored, expensive notepaper, and followed, when we did not immediately answer, by a phone call, during which her voice came over the wire as gaily insistent as before. Would we come up for dinner and stay the night? We accepted without particular consideration, partly out of a reawakened interest in her and what she would be like at home with the Senator, and partly because it was a place to go with the Chevy—and no sense of the stringency of time had led us as yet to a carping evaluation of the people with whom we spent it.

  On the way up that Saturday, a run of about seventy miles, we drove steadily through a long, umber autumn afternoon. At our left the sun dropped slowly, a red disc without penumbra. Along the country roads, the escarpments of pines and firs were black-green, with the somber deadness of a tyro’s painting of Italy. Lights popped up in the soiled gray backs of towns, and a presage of winter tingled in our minds, its remembered icicle sliding down our spines. I was twenty-two, free, still catching up with a childhood where hot dogs had been forbidden. I made Luke stop for them twice. After that we drove silently, my head on Luke’s shoulder. Inside the chugging little car, the heater warmed us; we were each with the one necessary person; we had made love the night before.

  At seven, when we were expected, we were still twenty miles away. Luke stopped to phone. He came back to the car. “She says dinner will wait for us, not to rush. We’re to go on to a night club afterwards.”

  In a second my mind had raked over everything in my suitcase, had placed me at the dinner table—perhaps not quite at the Senator’s right—had moved me on to the little round table on the dance floor.

  “I just remembered,” I said. “I didn’t put in my evening shoes.”

  “I just remembered,” said Luke. “I didn’t bring a proper tie.”

  We burst into laughter, “We’ll swing round by way of New London,” said Luke. “We can get things there.”

  When we got to the main street of the town, it was crowded, but the clothing stores were closing. Luke rushed into a haberdashery shop and came out with a tie. At the dark end of the shopping district we found a shoe store whose proprietor, counting stock in his dim interior, opened his locked door. I bought a pair of silver, girl-graduate sandals, the first pair he showed me. “Gee, lady,” he said, as we whisked out of his shop, “I wish every lady was as quick as you.”

  Smiling to ourselves, we reentered the car. There was a charm that hung about us then, and we were not insensible of it, even aware that it had more to do with our situation than ourselves. We were still guests in the adult world of “lady” and “gentleman”; lightly we rode anchor in their harbor, partook of its perquisites, and escaped again to our enviable truancy. The rest of the world—we saw it in their faces—would be like us if it could. On the way through Hawthornton, I looked for a florist shop, but we passed too quickly by.

  Five miles through the woodland of the Hawthorns’ private road brought us to the house. There had been no others along the way. But the house that loomed before us, in a cleared area rather bleak and shrubless after the woods behind us, had no baronial mystery about it. By the lights under its porte-cochere, it looked to be about forty years old—one of those rambling, tasteless houses, half timbered, with thick stone porches, which “comfortably off” people built around the turn of the century, more for summer use, but providently made habitable for all year round. As we came to a stop under the porte-cochere, and the coupe’s engine died, I heard the rushing sound of water, and saw that we seemed to be on the tip of a promontory that ended several hundred feet beyond.

  “We on a lake?”

  “Only the Atlantic,” said Luke. “Don’t you ever know where you are? We’ve been driving toward it all afternoon.”

  “Hardly ever,” I said. “But we seem to be fated to meet Mrs. H. on one ocean or another.”

  A capped maid opened the door. Mrs. Hawthorn stood at the foot of the stairs to greet us. It was the first time I had seen her in black, a very low-cut, smart black, enlivened only by the cuff of bracelets on her right arm. It made her seem less of a “character,” placing her almost in my mother’s generation, although she may not have been quite that, and a little unsettling me. In my world, the different generations did not much visit each other, at least did not seek each other’s company as she had ours.

  She made a breezy stir of our welcome, giving us each a hand, directing the houseman as to our bags, referring us to separate corners for a wash. “Drinks in the dining room. See you there.”

  When we entered, she was seated at the long dining table, alone. Three places were set, not at the head, but down toward the middle, ours opposite hers. There was no evidence that anyone else was to dine, or had.

  I remember nothing of the room, except my surprise. As we clicked glasses, were served, I tried to recall her voice as it had come over the wire to New York; certainly her airy chitchat had given me the impression that we were to be members of a house party. Otherwise, considering the gap between us of situation, money, age—how odd it was of her to have singled us out! Her conversation seemed to be newly flecked with slang, a kind of slang she perhaps thought we used. “That way for the johns,” she had said, directing us to the bathrooms, and now, speaking of Bermuda, she asked us if we had not thought it “simply terrif.” She had found European travel “rather a frost.”

  “I get more of a boot out of cutting a dash at home,” she said, grinning.

  A second manservant and maid were serving us. “I keep the estate staffed the way it’s always been,” she said. “Even though a good bit of the time it’s only just me. Of course we’ve had to draw in our horns in lots of ways, like everyone else. But I’ve washed enough dishes in Hawthornton, I always say.” She smiled down at her bracelets.

  “Have you always lived in Hawthornton?” said Luke.

  She nodded. “The Senator’s people have always had the mills here. The Hawthorn Knitting Mills. And my father was the town parson—also the town drunk. But I married the mill-owner’
s son.” She chuckled, and we had to laugh with her, at the picture she drew for us. It was the same with all her allusions to her possessions—allusions which were frequent and childlike. As they ballooned into boasting, she pricked them, careful to show that she claimed no kind of eminence because of them. What she did claim was the puzzling thing, for I felt that “the estate” meant something to her beyond the ordinary, and that her choice of our company was somehow connected with that meaning. Certainly she was shrewd enough to see that our scale of living was not hers, although for a while I dallied with the idea that a real social ignorance—that of the daughter of the down-at-the-heel parson, suddenly transmuted into the millowner’s wife—had kept her insensitive to all the economic gradations between, had made her assume that because we were “college people,” had been on the Bermuda boat, and had an anonymous East Side address, our jobs and our battered Chevy were only our way of drawing in our horns. But she did not seem to be really interested in who we were, or what our parents had been. Something about what we had, or were now, had drawn her to us; in her queer little overtures of slang she seemed to be wistfully ranging herself on our side. But I did not know what she imagined “our side” to be.

  We took our coffee in what she referred to as “the big room”—at first it was hard to categorize as anything else. Large as a hotel lounge, it had something of the same imperviousness to personality. Sofas and club chairs, stodgy but solid, filled its middle spaces; there was a grand piano at either end, and all along the edges, beneath the irregularly nooked windows, there were many worn wicker-and-chintz settees. But, looking further, I saw the dark bookshelves filled with Elbert Hubbard editions, the burnt-leather cushions, of the kind that last a lifetime, scattering the wicker, the ponderous floor lamps, whose parchment umbrella shades were bound with fringe—and I began to recognize the room for what it was. This was a room from which the stags’ heads, the Tiffany glass had been cleared, perhaps, but it was still that room which lurked in albums and memoirs, behind pictures labeled The Family at—Summer of 1910. Bottom row my son Ned, later to fall in the Ardennes, daughters Julie and Christine, and their school friend, Mary X, now wife of my son George.