Tale for the Mirror

by Hortense Calisher

  The Seacoast of Bohemia

  THROUGH 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.

  “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 immedi
ately 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.