Tale for the Mirror

by Hortense Calisher

  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.

  Time, Gentlemen!

  MY 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.

  Down at the bottom, a pebble at the roots of this banyan tree, was I, leading a curious double life, half of me in one century, the other half very nearly in the one preceding it. Once out of the house, on my way to school or in the long, spinning afternoons, I had the urchin street-freedom that descends upon the middle-class apartment-dweller’s child at the age of seven or eight, when the nursemaid is passed on to the younger ones. As I whizzed around the block, one of a scabby-legged pack of skaters with two-wheelers clamped on their high brown shoes, or tore through forbidden cellars macaronied with steam pipes and elevator cables, leaving behind me shreds of plaid and a trail of bone underwear-buttons, I was as much a child of my sector of the new century as any other. Yet, once the brown metal, fireproof door of our apartment closed behind me and I stood listening in the foyer, whose dark air had a dried olive smell from the books musting double-rowed on the shelves, and a black-leather tint from the davenport that gloomed in the shadows, I stepped, without ever questioning it, into another element, one not present in the home-worlds of my fellows.

  Entering this element, the raw light of the new decade had to humble itself past towering cabinets, through bead-crowded, wood-carved space in order to glint on the round, gold-wired spectacles of elderly people as they sat endlessly over coffee that streamed like a continuous soothing syrup from the kitchen. From there the light had to cool itself against much marble and be strained through many yards of lace, before it might arrive, collected and plain once more, at the calm blue and white of my bedroom. Even then, it might have to rest resignedly on what someone had had the relentless patience to cut, sew and starch—my two weeks’ supply of fourteen white organdy sashes.

  The “element” itself, however, was composed of much more—of all the ways that people had found to carve intaglio from the smaller moments of their lives, and more significantly, of all the spaces in between, when they found nothing to do at all, and did not seem to notice or mind. Within it, all the violent temperaments in our family, the daily puppet-clashes and doge intrigues, lay swaddled in a fleece of security, where life might recompose itself in the thick texture of those novels whose undemanding dramas flamed at writing desks and petered out in morning rooms. This element was, of course, the Victorian sense of time.

  Possibly the best way to describe how it worked, or rather—since there was no sense of anything working—how things were, would be to chronicle the daily phenomenon known in our household as “getting Father off.” As a young man, my father had acquired a decorous old business that dealt wholesale in perfumes, soaps, complexion powders, essences and pomatums for the toilette, a trade of enough French frivolity to give his personality that tinge of the panache which it might not have had, had he dealt in staples. Since he was the owner, had long since placed the factory side under the supervision of one brother, the office under another, and had various cousins and brothers-in-law at a straggle of desks in between, he felt himself under no obligation to get downtown at any particular hour. Indeed, since he was a man of the most delicate family feelings and could not have borne to have any of his relatives think that he wished to lord it over them, it was probable that he preferred to schedule his arrival at the office at an hour late enough to keep him from ever knowing the hour of theirs.

  My mother, however, although she had never been in the business world, had certain convictions about it which would have done her credit in a later era. She believed that a business run with such unpressurized ease, even enjoyment, must be well on its way to ruin, that one so nepotically staffed could survive only at the price of eternal vigilance, and that even if my father had managed to do very well for years before he met her, he now owed it to her self-respect, to his own Dun & Bradstreet rating, and to their joint children, to give at least the appearance of frenzied toil. She was a woman who would have felt much safer breathing hard and fast in the wake of one of those lunchless men whose race with their calendar ends only with death. And she was never to comprehend the real truth: that people loved to do business with my father because, in an already accelerating age, his dandified air of the coffeehouse, his relaxed and charmingly circuitous tongue—which dwelt much on anecdote but only lightly on orders or due dates—and above all, his trust in the “plenty” of time, made them feel participants in a commercial romance, gentlemen met by chance on the Rialto, who had decided to nurture a little affair.

  But since she did not understand, each morning at home was a contest, a parable in which Conscientious Practicality, my mother, strove to get Imaginative Indolence, my father, out of the house somewhat nearer nine than noon. Imaginative always won, partly by refusing to notice the strategic lines of force sent out constantly, all morning, by Conscientious, and partly, as I came to believe, because Time itself, elsewhere being made to skip so violently, was coming to lean more and more sympathetically on my father’s side.

  I awake then, on a certain morning, almost any morning in the nineteen-twenties. Perhaps the milkman’s clop-clopping horse has already been replaced by a rubber-tired van, but I
hope not, since the horse’s reflective, frequently interrupted pace is so much more suitable to what is going to follow. It is some where between six and seven o’clock back there; Josie, the maid, is still curled in her central cubicle in the angle of the long, wandering L that is our apartment; my grandmother sleeps, as she will for hours yet, in her separate wing; even my mother and my two-year-old brother, those disciples of Achtung, are still fast on their pillows.

  But my father, strangely enough, as you might think, for a man who is always reassuring people that he and they have “all the time in the world,” is already up and about, puttering in the kitchen for himself, as he loves to do. Not strange at all—he who is at home in Time rises with interest at the prospect of a new stretch of it; only its minions need to bury their heads. And if there is a little of the insomnia of the aging in his early habit, then it is never fretful, but spry and accepting, like a man who has been offered more food than he is hungry for, but will do what he can.

  I get up too and go to the kitchen and we look at one another, each in our pajamas. And now a nice thing happens. He says nothing—no probing for the day’s beginning or for me, as I re-form myself out of dream—but merely reaches behind him, fumbling in a collection of brown paper bags he brought home last night, brings out a blood orange, of the kind he knows fascinates me, and hands it to me. Were my mother here she would say, “Say Good Morning to Your Father, say Thank You!”, not to me really, but to serve notice to the world that she is ready for her obligations, en garde for all the sword-thrusts of the day.

  But she is much younger than we are. Two of a kind, we enter the dining room without saying a word. He is carrying the pot of coffee he has made, a low thing for a man in his position to do, as we both know, and akin to the smelly kippers he will toast for breakfast if not watched, and to that itinerant hobnobbing in delicatessens which produces the brown paper bags.

  Saturdays, when my mother returns in a flurry of delivery boys, her beaver toque askew over cheeks fretted rosy from her plundering of the shops, and exclaims, “Done for the week, for the entire week!” my father may reply mildly, “A cuisine should saunter, m’dear. From day to day.” He is thinking then perhaps of his old housekeeper in New Orleans, who used to cuddle his pears in tissue paper and reverse his wine bottles of an evening; but he will say nothing, because of the cheese he hid and forgot, that my mother found last week, that waved in a blossom of maggots when she lifted the sweating, china dome—and because she believes that wine makes you drunk. It is difficult, he knows, for a woman to have married an old man so full of comparisons. But it is difficult too—although this he never says—to have married out of one’s century.

  Now, however, in this hour while the morning freshens at the window, and some of the lamps that are always left burning to chart our household through the night are still on, Time moves for him as it should, like treacle, or even, as in my child’s world, not at all.

  Then, all at once as it seems, the morning paper thumps outside the hall door, the veteran clock in the hall gives its strangled cluck for the half hour, Josie lets fly the flush handle in her bathroom with a bang that can be heard all over the house, the weakening lamps give up the ghost, my brother roars. My father gives me an untranslatable look that I understand perfectly. The century, this one, has spoken; the contest has begun.

  Mrs. Huber, my brother’s nurse, who is as much on my mother’s side as Josie, if anywhere, can be said to be on ours, passes us, bottle in hand, on her way to the kitchen, giving us a starched, thermometric nod for the tacky pair we are.

  “Run, stop the paper boy,” my father says to me. “I want to pay him.” He ambles after me, and I leave them deep in confab at the hall door. I return to the table, at which I find my mother, in her morning chain-mail of ribbon and lace. She wears a boudoir cap to match, shaped like an upside-down ruffled spittoon, but beneath it, her voice is edged with modernity.

  “Whom can he have found to talk to already!” she says.

  When my father returns he has some paper greenery that he tries to stuff into the nonexistent pants pocket of his pajamas. Tickets for the Irish Sweepstakes, it develops, that McDonough, the paper boy, has sold him. My mother sits still for a moment, then says in a stifled voice that of all the fifty heads of families in this building, it is probable that only my father has the time to learn the name of every mendicant who plies its halls, and hadn’t he got a similar packet of tickets last week?—to which my father incautiously replies that the more coverage the better in any gamble. Gamble is one of the money words which produce a known response in my mother; when it does not come as usual I say it for her, since I have my own reasons for currying her favor this morning, and I know by heart all the public expressions of her private terrors.

  “Everything going out,” I say, “nothing coming in.”

  My father’s reaction to this is such as requires her telling him not to encourage me, and her commanding me to dress at once, or else I shall be late for school.

  “Nonsense!” he says, for secretly he resents the school for daring to impose temporal restrictions on any flesh of his flesh. “She has plenty of time.” And such is my faith in his faith that, although he has thus made me late morning after morning, and I am consistently punished in the school world for being also a resident of his, it will be years before I am willing to admit that it was he who was out of step with them.

  “What time is it?” says my mother, and in the same instant closes her eyes and puts the back of her hand against her capped brow. For there are at least eight running clocks in our house in addition to broken ones in drawers and antique ones with stopped faces—almost one for every room—and not one agrees with any other. And this is so not only in our house, but in the houses of all the uncles and aunts on my paternal side. They all have something in their blood that slows clocks, my mother claims, but this is not true, for one clock we have breaks into rowdy tarantellas in the night and must be forcibly calmed—it is more probable that they confuse them. I do not mind our eight—it gives one such a choice.

  “Oh, do you have a headache too,” I say quickly. At once my father’s hand, dry with years, is at my forehead, as I knew it would be, feeling for temperature. I droop cooperatively and let him see that I, nicknamed “hungry Henrietta,” have pushed aside my plate. Death is a word never spoken in our family, since there are so many of an age to expect it, but my father, who will thus deny his own mortality, is always hearing its dragon breath snuffing near the heads of his children, as if he fears that Providence will surely snatch from him early what he neglected to take from it until so late.

  “Now, Joe,” says my mother, “you know as well as I do that she will recover like magic as soon as it’s safely ten o’clock!”

  “Ah, now, now,” he replies, his hand holding safe my cheek, “you know you’d never forgive yourself, if…”

  My mother throws up her hands, and I see that this will not be one of the mornings when, enraged, she will threaten castor oil or the enema, or when, half convinced, she will suggest citrate of magnesia or Feenamint, or any other of those mild unspecifics she claps down us to warn the dark powers that she is aware. She gives me up, the better to concentrate on him. “Tailor came last night,” she says. “He brought back your pearl-gray.”

  My father accepts the prod with grace, having won the first round, and goes off with a tuneless whistle, although he is not a whistling man. This means that even he does not believe me this morning. It is an expression also of his refusal to truckle to schools on principle, on the grounds that they are coarse instruments for the shaping of such quality material as he sends them. Above all, it means that his day has begun as a proper day should, easing itself so gently into the whorls of circumstance that it can scarcely be said to have moved, and with the first prerequisite of a Victorian household—with everybody home.

  My mother has barely time enough to dress and to make one rapid round-trip through the apartment, setting higher the fires u
nder everybody’s caldron, and there he is back at the table—shaved, spatted, cologne on handkerchief, stickpin in lilac tie. And this provokes her most of all, that while his long view of life is so deliberate, he is not at all dilatory about its detail; it is hardly to be borne that of the thousands of trains he has had to make in his life he has, by not only the neatest but the calmest of margins, never missed one. Time is her enemy, and, she knows, the natural enemy of us all; it is not fair that my father’s naïve trust in it works for him as pragmatically as some people’s trust in God. She sits at table, thinking of the enviable tohu-bohu of shaving cuts and indigestion in which the other fifty fathers have long since whirled away, and wonders if this morning, just this morning, after the incontestable interval of the Tribune and the grapefruit, she might not be able to get him off with a couple of three-minute eggs.

  “Fix you some calfs-brains, Misser Joe?” This is Josie, bearing the first cup of coffee, and one of the clocks has just struck ten. My mother flinches—calves’ brains have to be poached, and after the poaching, breaded, and after the breading, fried.

  “Mmmm,” he says, “and with black butter, eh Josie? Black butter, not brown.”

  Another clock—sometimes they do their best to be helpful—strikes the hour, and my mother murmurs rapidly and bitterly of all the duties before her, including the fact that she must be off to the bank, to which my father says nothing, for he knows that she will not leave the house before him, although he does not know why. It is because she must protect his reputation, since he will not, and she considers it infinitely low-class for a woman to be seen up and abroad when her man is still lounging at home. Forgotten by them, I listen, incognito unless I turn healthy before noon. Nested in the shawls that have been mustered against disease, I mull over which of them is the aristocrat, which the low, over why it is so hard to love the worthy, so warming to be in the presence of one who will allow himself to be deceived. Above all, I wonder which of them is right about Time, not knowing that it is more than my mother and father who do battle here. Contra, contra I hear their dividing voices, as, with a Eurasian aching, I hear them yet.