Tale for the Mirror

by Hortense Calisher

  Once more, she considered. The dignity with which she mulled my cheap dialectic already smote me. She raised up and looked at me. “Then I wears my white dress, and I plays my harp,” she said, her lip trembling, “and I praises the Lord God.”

  I ran and kissed her. “You’ll look just as beautiful, I bet. You’ll look pyorely beautiful, pretty as pie.”

  “You hush,” she said, sharp and starched. “Stop that talking like a nigger, you hear?” Yes, I forgot to mention that. She was the only one who ever said it in our house.

  The next night, Thursday, Somus came to call for her. I was peeping, to see her in the dress, and that was the last time I saw him. Ram of God again, height six cubits and a span. May-ry looked beautiful. But in about an hour she came back alone, then went out again. I was the only one who saw her. We had the phone call the next morning, one of the several voices never identified but familiar. May-ry’s Mooma was taken bad. May-ry was already on her way down there.

  The Saturday afternoon she returned, nine days later, my mother was out, as May-ry had known she would be. I heard May-ry’s voice, talking low to my father, in the parlor. Usually the sight of the place, left to the mercies of the day cleaners from the agencies, would enrage her at once, emboldening her enough to fling off her good clothes for her cleaning smock, bind up her hair, and set to work, meeting no one’s eye and loudly scolding the air. But this time, I could see by peeping that she was sitting in the stiffest chair and had not even removed her gloves.

  “No, Mr. Joe,” she was saying, nervously holding on to her pocketbook. “No, suh—no.” No. She had to leave us. Somus say he wouldn’t marry her unless she did.

  I heard my father “remonstrate” with her, as he always called it. This meant that he was using the same comfort voice that he used on us when delegated by Mother to punish us, the voice with which he helped us toward the first stage of being good again, by mending the amour-propre that we ourselves had injured in being bad.

  It was all right, he was saying. Why, it was going to be all right! Whoever expected a girl like her to stay single? Especially when she was being spoken for by a fine boy like Somus. But what was all the fuss about? Mustn’t she know that all along we had expected it—that some day or other she was going to want to get married and live out? He put his hands on his spread knees and leaned back, shaking his speckled ruff of hair at her. “Lord, what you women won’t do to get a little torment.” This too was part of the comfort, to put the offense as quickly as possible in the realm of human nature.

  She didn’t answer him, although she opened and closed her mouth several times.

  “I see,” he said after a while, biting at his mustache, “Somus doesn’t want you to work at all.”

  Oh nossuh, it wasn’t that. She was able to say this clearly; then she fell to mumbling, her head all the way down. Then she was silent again. He had a hard time getting it out of her. It wasn’t that, she said at last. She and Somus would surely have to count on her doing day work. But Somus say what the use of her being up North if she work for home folks? Somus say she won’t really be up North until she stop working for people from home.

  And now my father really was nonplussed at first, then angry enough to stomp around the room. “Why, good God in heaven, girl!” (This was just what he always said to me at such times.) What in the name of the Lord had got her into such monkey-shines? Was she going to let that boy sell her down the river? Who was going to treat her better than us—not to mention pay! Didn’t she know right well, from talking to the other maids on the roof when she hung out the washing, how some people treated colored folks up here?

  Yes, she knew. She said it in a voice like the Victrola’s when something was wrong with its insides, her head hanging down. She didn’t expect to be as well off, she said. And she would never forget his kindness—us. But Somus.

  So, at last, my father played trumps.

  He was standing over her by this time, looking down. “Day job or not, you’re going to want some kind of steady family people, aren’t you?” He said “ain’t you” really, or close to it. “Don’t tell me he wants to make you into one of those pitiful agency creatures working from dawn to dusk, getting somebody else’s piled-up dirt every day!”

  No suh. For the first time, she looked at the moldings.

  “Then—” he said, and hesitated. “Now then, May-ry—” His voice dropped to a conspirator’s. He rubbed the red spot left on his nose by his pince-nez, as always when he was embarrassed. “Now then, May-ry, what about…what about Roanoke? You know you got to go there, times you get laid up. You know right well not everybody going to give you the time off we do.”

  Yes, Mr. Joe. She whispered it. And this was the point at which she stood up, stopped her hands from their fooling with each other, and looked straight ahead of her, as if she were going to speak a piece, or were attending a wedding. “Somus say I got to have that out with you too.” She spoke quietly, but she could not look at him. “I never did go there but once a year, on my vacation. And you all knowed it.”

  He actually put up a hand to ward her off. “Now, now, don’t you go and say anything foolish, girl. No need to do what you might regret later on.”

  “It’s true,” she said. Even her accent had shifted, hardening toward something like Somus’s—who, by some steady effort, had almost none. “I get drunk.” Then she turned gray, and started to shiver.

  My father stepped back, and he too changed color. It was almost as if she had touched him.

  Then a most peculiar scene took place. My father positively refused to consider, to treat, to discuss, to tolerate a hint of what she wanted to tell him and he knew as well as she did. That she’d been lying all these years and wanted the dear privilege of saying so. And she followed him around the room in circles after him, snuffling her “Mr. Joe” at him, all the time growing more halfhearted, confused—ever so often looking over her shoulder to see if Somus, that tower of strength, mightn’t have appeared there. But he hadn’t. He’d told her what she must do, and left her to it. He was a stern man, Somus, and a smart one—and he understood my father right down to the ground.

  Finally, she stopped in the middle of the room and screamed it, exactly like a baby repudiating the universe, her face all maw. “I never was down there but once a year, and you know it. I was getting drunk over on One Hun’ Twenny-ninth Street. And you know it, and you know it.” Rocking back and forth, she beat her foot on the ground. “I’m going there now. And I’m not coming back.” But by this time she was crying like a baby too.

  When my father took her to the back elevator, she was still weeping. “Now, now, we’ll just forget everything you said,” he said. “We’ll just forget this whole afternoon. Why, getting married is a serious thing, girl—no wonder you all upset.” His voice took on the dreaminess with which he told us our goodnights. “Hush now, hush. You just have yourself a good rest down there in Roanoke.” By the time he rang the bell for her, she was already nodding.

  When the elevator door opened, she turned back to him. “I’d ruther…ruther—” But then she choked up again, and we never did hear what.

  “Hush now,” he said, patting her into the elevator. “And when you come back…it’ll be just like always, hear? Meantime, you send us up some of those peach jars.” As the door closed, she was still nodding.

  In the succeeding weeks, my mother and father kept a bet on. “You’ll see,” he’d say, even after the time had long since stretched beyond what May-ry had ever been away before. “She’ll have her jobs—and she’ll lose them. Nobody up here’s going to appreciate enough what she does do—and what she can’t. And she knows it, she knows it.” It was almost as if he were echoing May-ry, in a way. Other times, he just worried it aloud. He loved taking care of people. “Who’s going to take care of her like us?”

  Then, one morning, the box of jars came—the herald. But when the box was opened, the jars were found to be of grape—grape conserve. Now, grapes were all over
the shops right here, at the time—it was October. “Idiots,” said my father. “What was the address on the outer wrapping?” But it had already gone down the dumbwaiter with the trash. I think my mother knew, but she never said. She was never much for children really. Except for my father. And after that, as more weeks went by and we began the endless series of German “girls” whom I never quite liked or my father either, he submitted, and spoke no more of colored help, or of May-ry. My mother had won, it appeared—and Somus.

  But I still yearned sometimes, and wondered. Did she go back to Roanoke? I tried hard as I could to recollect whether there had ever been talk of grape arbors on Fox Road in Roanoke—in the tales that had come out of the peach jars. There had been damson, I knew, and elderberry. Damson too sour for you folks, and all the berries goes to the wine. Had she ever said there were grapes? I couldn’t remember, though every now and again for years I tried. Had she sent them from there, or from Harlem? I knew well enough what the box meant, though, same as my father had. It meant pure spontaneity, and love.

  Later on, years later when I was teaching in college, there was a girl who looked so much like May-ry—her eyes and that brow—that I had all I could do not to go up and speak to her, ask her who was her mother. Of course I couldn’t. How could I be sure, these days, of terms that would be pleasing to her? Besides, I never knew May-ry’s last name—or Somus’s. That was the way it was, in those days. So I’ll never know for sure whether Somus did marry May-ry and she got emancipated, at least enough to work for Northerners, and send that girl on to college. Or whether, by now, she’s only been emancipated as far as heaven. If so, I hope she has the dress she wants, and maybe even a little snifter after dinner—and I’m purely sorry I ever was mean enough to insinuate that heaven might be anything else. People should be able to get freed without having to be perfect for it beforehand. Maybe even Somus knows that now. I’m even big-hearted enough to hope that he’s with her, either here or there, and has been all along. She’d never be happy without him, so he must be. For if anything had gone wrong, she’d always know whom to come to. And it’s been a long time. It’s been thirty years now, and she hasn’t come back yet.

  Saturday Night

  THAT SATRUDAY AFTERNOON, AFTER he had left the analyst’s office for what might be the last time, he stopped in at the elegant little Viennese bakery in the same block, and bought a mocha cake for his wife. Although, even five years ago, Dorothy had been one of those out-of-towners who slipped into the ways of the city with only a little more emphasis than was natural, she had never lost her glee over the complicated, alien tidbits which were such a contrast to the pies and hefty layer cakes of her native Utica. The huge new “housing development” in which they had been lucky enough to get an apartment quartered only several glittering chain shops, which she had long since learned to snub.

  Waiting absently at the counter for his change, he found that actually he could not fully realign Dorothy’s face in his memory. Although he could summon a hundred images of their life together, before and now—the curve of her back as she offered the spoon to the child, the tilt of her head as she slumped, reading, in a chair—in full focus her face evaded him, remaining always in the rear, or to one side. A common enough occurrence, he knew. Nevertheless it left a curious hollow in his new-found assurance.

  As he left the store, he turned a last look on the block to which he had been coming for almost three years now. Although, when away from it, he could not have told between which two of the line of houses the one he visited was precisely located, the whole of the block reared itself in his mind like a composition, an entity whose significance had become the foreground of his life. Up three steps, in at the gray entrance, into one of those self-service elevators within whose clicking, measured suspension one rode always with a sense of doom, no matter to what event. Then the anonymous room, whose stepped-down colors and noncommittal furniture offered only the neuter comfort of no stimulus to either approval or dislike. Then, finally, another installment in the long, delicate auscultation of himself, during which, sometimes clamped in resistance, sometimes irrigated with relief, he had been free to pursue the quality of his fear.

  Turning away, he walked down to the corner and joined the vague group waiting for a bus. Wherever you went, at almost any time, on almost every corner, there would be such a group assembled. It was a deceptively impressive fact which, when elaborated on, he had long since learned, led nowhere. It was part of the provocative pulse of a city, of a world in which, if you did not learn to deflect the thousand casual contacts strewn at you, without attempting to seize upon them, to weld them into some philosophy of destination, you were lost indeed.

  He wedged himself onto the bus, carefully protecting the cake. Looking down at the white box, he thought tiredly of what a funny symbol it was of that daily switch-off in which, laying aside the engrossing thread of himself, he bought a cake, he took a bus, and—rapped smartly back into the secondary—he deserted for another day the re-creation of himself as a working being. As a working being, he cautioned himself, he heard himself being cautioned by the dry voice from behind him in the anonymous room. For if the whole process had not helped him to hold himself untremulously at last in a world where others managed, what had it been but an infinitely seductive excursion into ego, after which, as cut off from others as he had been in the beginning, he would find himself twice alone, holding together the explored corners of himself?

  Clutching the box in his cramped hand, he got off the bus at his stop. Less than a year ago, down here, there had been nothing but the great cylindrical gas tanks, nuzzled by tenements, slotted shops, and the exhausted outbuildings natural to the wharflike streets near an old river. Now the “housing development” loomed upward before him, an incredible collage pasted against the sky. Even remembering the excavations and the swarmed signs of contractors, even forcibly recalling the scores of families who were inside it going through their daily paces like tidy, trotting simulacra of each other, it was hard to believe that the whole organism had not been stroked from a lamp. Looking at it, the eye seemed always to be trying to wipe it away.

  He and Dorothy had already been drawn into the imitatively suburban life of the young couples who lived there. Dorothy, of course, he thought, much more than he—since whatever time he had away from his university job was already so prescribed. Again he strove for a better picture of her, brushing aside the recurrent blankness. In the mornings, waving to her as he passed the playground on the way to his classes, he had seen her sitting talking or reading or sewing with the other mothers, watching Libby as she played with the other beplaided and corduroyed toddlers in the austerely planned sandpit, already cluttered with buried rakes and spoons and lost tin fish. All of the mothers, still slender and attractive, looked like thirty-year-old versions of the college girls they once had been. Many of them had had careers or talents that marriage and children had interrupted or aborted, and to the memory of these they paid insistent and bitter homage, constantly totting up the frustrations of housewifery in remarks which were like a kind of bleak, allusive shorthand understood by them all. For now that they were women of the home, they felt an inferiority to their former selves, and so, too, they had constructed a technical patter full of words like “preschool” and “security” and references to “Gesell-and-Ilg,” as if by this subaqueous jargon they would return motherhood, with all its inconvenient secretions and scullion duties, to the status of a profession.

  With Dorothy, however, he thought thankfully, this defeated prattling never had been more than part of her half naïve acceptance of the New York “line.” She had been reared in a town where people, particularly the women, expected that life would deal with them according to those archaic truisms which, if no longer so hallowed as once, came to them, at least, without the friction of disappointment. It had been this certainty in her which had drawn him as much as her mild blond good looks, whose exact lineaments so curiously evaded him now; it had been to
this sureness that he, already deeply flawed with irresolution, had clung and married himself, in the sick hope of transference.

  How was he to have foreseen, he thought now, that this very ability of hers to cope, this health, would become formidable between them, sending him further into his cowl of preoccupation, leaving her beached on normality, so that, strangers now, too far apart even for conflict, they had gone on sharing the terrible binding familiarities of the joint board, the joint child, and, less and less often, the graceless despair of the common bed?

  For in the world of the normal, he knew now—he heard the dry voice say—to those whose qualms were always based on the tangible, the active, the real, how could he have seemed otherwise than intransigent, when he had insisted that in his world there was a basic, roiling chaos, over which the footage was never more than a series of staircases that dissolved as one trod them, in the midst of which alternatives faced one like knives—and people were only alternatives?

  He walked on through the circuitous approaches to his own building. Light skittered, noise faceted from the hived buildings about him, lazily compounding a day, redolent of livelier Saturdays and more expectant springs, which was like a percussive recall to health. Fear was all right, it said to him, as long as one could bring it out into the light and give it a name. He was almost up out of the ditch now, almost up on the other, the safe side, with Dorothy and all the people who knew where they were going, and could manage.

  He turned in at Number 6 Village Drive, noting, as always, the cozy term applied to the massive clinical building whose entrance halls, all of nude beige marble enlivened only by buttons, held the etherized silence of a museum. It was difficult to believe that on its upper floors hundreds of doors opened on interiors rumpled with living and the intimate sediment of people, on kitchens checkered with the aftermath of meals, bathrooms, clotted with diapers and cream pots, at whose windows stockings hung swinging in the dust motes and the sun.