Tale for the Mirror

by Hortense Calisher

  “And you, Missis Garner?”

  “Well…yes…about that.”

  “She has worked in the bank, they say, about twenty years. And according to the employment records, the Social Security, there would be almost another thirty before the retirement. She is thirty-six.” He nodded at their stricken faces. “Think of it. She would be about sixteen, when placed in the bank. Maybe a couple of years older when the father absconds. The bank lets her stay on; she is innocent, she has the mother to support. An ordinary story.” Bhatta clapped his hands together. “But from then on…imagine. The father sneaks back; the two women hide him. Sometime later, perhaps, the mother dies. Miss Prager goes back and forth to the bank, night and morning. And all those years, while she is working to keep the secret, the city is taking her secret away. The neighborhood changes; the old neighbors are blown away. Even in a bank, the city blows things away. Who is to notice, to remember, if an old man were to come out of his door, to come out on his stoop, among a hundred other stoops, and sit in the sun?”

  The Garners were silent. Then Garner spoke. “You’re convinced it was the father, then?”

  “A lawyer could perhaps check better,” said Bhatta. “But as for me, I am innerly convinced.” He looked down his hillside, wider and steeper than Garner’s, but as wild, although here and there old terraces had been brought into view. On the road at the bottom one of the long, red motorcoaches from the city came to a wheezing stop. “Such a pure case,” he said. “Such a classic of money-injury. All for a reason that no longer exists.”

  “You’ll…keep her indefinitely?” said Amelia.

  The doctor shrugged, threw up his hands. “Someone must. In any case, do not worry, Missis Garner. The ladies will soon build some places on the far side of the hill. Then we will put her there.”

  “There’s a very fine state hospital. Quite near by.” At the doctor’s look, Amelia paused, again with a flush.

  “And you say she has no resources?” asked Garner.

  “None. I am sure.” Bhatta’s tone was almost one of pride.

  “Quite the responsibility!” said Garner, and immediately regretted his own dry tone, its edge of disbelief, which the doctor was too subtle not to have caught. Ashamed, he told himself that it was a low envy which made one disparage in others the charity one had not got oneself. For after all, what did he have on the doctor, other than the mutterings of a few shopkeepers and his own carping intuition, both of which might be vulgar sides of the same thing, that fear of the stranger which was worse than vulgar, which college and International House and all that had taught him was the curse of the world? And which was against the very laissez faire of this place, which he had so boasted about in town.

  Down at the bottom of the road, the bus moved off, with the familiar air-brake groan that was the only city noise along here, discharging a flood of exhaust gas on the passengers it had left at the stop. There were fifteen or twenty of these, and from the direction of their slow assault on the hill, it was apparent that they were the doctor’s guests. Even at a distance they seemed a strangely assorted group—a periphery of nervous colors moving with brio around a more portly center of navies and browns. As they climbed nearer, Garner thought that they indeed resembled the lecture crowds he remembered from the days when he had had to squire his mother through her spiritualism period after the death of his father. In the center, there were a number of women very like his mother, vigorous elderly matrons, seemly in corsets and Footsaver shoes, wearing the flowered toques he had heard Amelia call “New Jersey hats.” A few sallow young women were with them, and several elderly men. Among these latter, one wore pince-nez attached to a heavy black ribbon, and there were two or three shocks of melodramatic white hair. The color that framed the group was Asian; it came from a mélange of brown skins, orange and yellow scarves, vanilla pongee suits topped here and there with a creamy turban, and the gauzy saris of three interchangeably lovely girls.

  The doctor raised an arm, and saluted the people below.

  “We must go, John,” said Amelia. “And Dr. Bhatta—I don’t want you to think that we…It’s certainly a very fine thing of you to do.”

  “Har?”

  “I mean, about Miss Prager.”

  The doctor’s glance was on his guests, who had lingered below to admire the garden behind the main house. “You think?” he said, turning, and his face, softened by a question, was for once, almost open. Then it closed. “After all,” he said, looking down the hill, “I receive so much. Possibly for me also—it is therapy to give.” He made them both a little bow, but his smile was pointed at Garner, and one eyelid drooped again, as if he had just offered him something very special, very risible indeed.

  “Yes, we must go,” said Garner. “But I do want to…it’s only fair for me to tip you off—” He was careful to make his voice friendly, surprised at how much he wanted it so. “If you do build without consulting the board…I’m afraid you’re in for a spot of trouble.”

  “Ah, in that case—” Bhatta’s voice was gay. He put a comforting hand on Garner’s shoulder. “In that case it will be good to have a friend at court.” He released Garner, waved again to the crowd below, and started off down the hill, carefully shuffling his carpet slippers along the narrow path. The grades were not easy to negotiate and the doctor’s slippers must have made it harder, but with each turn that brought him nearer his guests his carriage heightened, his demeanor expanded. A ridge of shrubbery obscured the moment when he met the group, then he emerged, borne along in its chattering center, his tonsure inclining, his arms stretched in greetings papal and serene. At a point just below the little summerhouse, the doctor turned suddenly, waved up at Amelia and Garner, and then went on. The three Indian girls, who were nearest him, stood arrested too, looking inquisitively upwards—three fays, peacock, citron and lapis, fox-printed in gold. One of them said something, giggling, and the strange words, rebutted by the air and the river, traveled upward to the couple on the hill. Two answering chirps came from the girl’s companions, then the three of them turned their backs, and a jingle of laughter wove between them as they ran after the doctor, who was just disappearing around the corner of the main house, his bald head shining well above the clustered others, a dark stamen in the declining sun. It was late that night, long after the slow evening which daylight-saving time had prolonged, when Garner, drowsing over the Sunday paper, raised his head, realizing that he had been asleep and had been startled awake. What he had heard must have been the wheeze of the last bus to the city, the voices and farewells of the doctor’s departing guests. Amelia had gone to bed early, as she so often did these days. “Never can understand why you insist on sitting up,” she had said, kissing him good night, “just to fall asleep in a chair.” He could not have said why himself, unless it was perhaps that by so doing, by this small intransigence against the wise routine for a man who had to get up at six, he was prolonging an illusion, a weak midnight illusion that time, undictated, was his own.

  He got up, kneading his eyes, and went to the window. Down the way, near Petty’s, the one faint roadlamp made a crooked pearl in the glass. Apparently there was a moon, from the look of the shadows on the road, but it must be high over the house already, and not large. It was the winter moons up here that were enormous, riding so close and intimate in the black air that the cornea felt itself naked against them. He remembered the first one of these they had seen their first winter up here—the great disc rising heavily from the water, as if unseen hands were having trouble pushing it upward, then the white path-shine on the water, and Amelia standing at the window, saying, “Look John…look! It’s coming in the window…If I opened my mouth…it would float right in.”

  Well, they’d come a long way since then, ten years, and his moments of such lyrism were not many. Before him, in the light of the single reading lamp under which he had fallen asleep, the house stretched, doubled in the gloom, but still such a large house—the sitting room where he stood now, the p
arlor, the dining room, all furnished with relics of both their families, and looking almost regal in shadows that obscured the raffiish touches of the children, the farm-size kitchen where they all really lived, the study off the hall. In the half-light, with the little Victorian effects with which Amelia had placated it here and there, it was true that its ancient purpose sometimes revealed itself too starkly, and it stood declared for what it was, a home that belonged with those feudal servants, that stipulated, at the very least, one of those vanished households of accessory spinsters and aunts. At these times, it was true, sometimes at the very moments when he and Amelia and their friends were congratulating each other on their living in a place where one did not have to keep up with the Joneses in the usual way, he had a sense of unease, as if the grain of their lives had too suddenly appeared, revealing them all in another silhouette—keeping up with the shadowier Joneses of the past.

  Late voices came again through the night—the remaining guests of his provocative neighbor, no doubt—he could hear one of the women calling the dog. “Lili…Lili…come on in, Lili…” the voice said. The air of America is so clear, Bhatta had said that morning—so very, very clear. Certainly the man had a passion for clarity, or else an irony for it—it ran through his conversation like a motif. One wondered what he was like at home, when not playing to the gallery. Perhaps he was a man who could never be at home—a strain on anybody, that. Hindu, Brahmin, whatever he was, with his hybrid education there would still be a kind of Eurasian sense of values—no harm to that, perhaps good. But if so, Bhatta would be sure to make capital of it. Yes, that would be his pitch, was his pitch. “We are none of us at home in the universe, lads—lords and ladies. I can show you how to handle that better than most. Meanwhile, let us share our amusement at our dilemma. And let us also share—” No honorarium to be required, of course. But, the universe being what it was, it was probable that the secretaries would pass the plate.

  Garner left the window, hesitated with his hand on the switch of the lamp, sat down again in the chair. Yes, that could be how the cult might be formed, the coterie. He found himself thinking of such, not this one, but some other suited to oneself—some warm little member-world, banded together in a decameron of talk.

  Stretching in his chair, he felt the small book in his pocket, the one Bhatta had given Amelia. He took it out, idly thumbing through it. This was for the gallery for sure, the power of print for the flowered toques. It was not in these fluent pages that one would find out where, in the happy slang phrase, Bhatta “lived.” He read on. Stone in the grass, I must examine you very carefully. You may be a piece of the North Star, cast upon the grass. No, not here. He snapped the book shut. A folded paper fell out of it, the same he had replaced in the book at the doctor’s this morning; Bhatta must have taken the same copy from the top of the pile. He hesitated; in general, though fallible, he’d managed a normal decency about such things. But probably it was only a grocery list, or perhaps the recipe for that inimitable curry. And in Bhatta’s case—case was a word that might well be used; the man himself went out of his way to present himself as a brief full of tantalizing pros and cons, teasing one to make of it what one could.

  Unfolding the paper, he saw that it was a letter addressed to Bhatta. Dear Dr. Bhatta, the letter said, I beg of you not to say that I must stop wearing my glasses at meetings or else pay the $700 fine. What I paid last time exhausted my funds until next quarter, and the family will not consider it. They will not realize what the meetings mean to me. I know that you do not agree about the glasses, but the truth is I cannot get about without them. I ask you please to reconsider. If you will ask Miss Daria to write and say I can come to the next meeting, it will make me very happy indeed. The letter, typed, was signed tremulously, almost indecipherably, in ink. Then there was a typed postscript: At the very next quarter I will pay what I can.

  So, thought Garner, so. So that’s where Bhatta lives. The old son-of-a-bitch. Underneath all that diversionary laughing gas, or tear gas—or rather, some formula that managed a sparkling precipitation of both—there had been only something as bare as this. If the letter had said “my crutches” for instance—well, one had heard of neurotic symbols which a doctor might reasonably be pressuring a patient to discard. One had heard also of the psychiatrists’ disarming emphasis on the importance—to the client, of course—of the latter’s psychic need to make payment. But eyeglasses! The letter postulated some sad fool, an old fool perhaps, with the aching, grave-humble naiveté of the old. Or one of those sclerotic old business eggs, who addle without warning. It would be a rich simpleton, or one at least with access to some money. No one knew better than Garner, a lawyer, how wistfully ingenuous the sudden simplicities of the rich could be. The worst of it was that Bhatta had at no time, in no sense given any of this the lie; if confronted he was quite capable of roguishly pointing this out. One taught the therapy of giving, quite naturally, Misser Garner, to those who could.

  Garner looked at the letter again—it was a definitively good address, midtown Park, engraved, and on thick bond. The signature, three-named, was shaky—William Something Bertram, or Benthan; added to the letter, the humility of the postscript, it did suggest some old gaffer hanging to the fringe of his family, of the world, some poor old mottled pear that would not fall. A person sick with nothing more than loneliness, perhaps even persistently healthy (if Bhatta had found nothing better than the glasses to fix on) and driving his family crazy, as such people often did. Wanting nothing more than still to be involved, to be one of the member-world.

  Garner stood up and pushed the book well back on a high shelf, the letter inside it. He’d been right about the fraudulence then—from the first. It was ugly to find oneself so handily corroborated. And to have been one of the simpletons, too. He had never examined the term “confidence man” for what it said, for what it shouted plain. He had merely lightly appraised Bhatta in the humorous terms of the sellers of gold bricks, of shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. Not as trafficking on the frozen-out, on people who only wanted to come in by some fire, to belong. No, this is too real, he thought. It sins somewhere, he thought, bending his head to an obscure inner heat, surprised at his own use of a word from which the leaflets had long since emancipated him.

  He turned out the light, and in the darkness the moment of the three of them by the river suddenly formed again, as if he had turned on another lamp that shed the triple-enclosed, mauve light of dusk. He saw the three of them again, he, Bhatta and Amelia, in that pause so warmly joined, laughing there by the river. Wasn’t that to be weighed in the scale for Bhatta? Or was it to be taken out of context as one of the good mysteries—exempted from its origin as was the true-love poem of the poet who frequented whores? “Ah, the hell with it,” he said aloud. To hell with it, whatever it was—living in the country, the long Sunday—whatever had made him feel the way he did. As he went up the stairs he still tasted it—acid, greensick—the feeling of the man who had been proven right.

  In bed, he could not sleep. It was that over-alert, hypertensive hour of the night when the tireless free-associational sheep ran on and on, one idea carrying another’s tail in its mouth, and still another part of the mind hallooed behind, catching, concluding, with a fake brilliance from which nothing ever could be salvaged the next day. The sheets were cool; he could be grateful for that, for in another few weeks, although the thick-ledged downstairs areas of these old houses would still be damply chill, the dormered top stories filled slowly with a summer-long hot must, through which one moved weakly, cramped for breath, regretting the flesh on one’s bones. Someday, when he had the cash, he would insulate. Yet, even as he lay here, flinching before the anticipated river-valley heat that would arrive, sometimes in June, inexorably in July, he felt a submerged pleasure at knowing how the summer nights would be here—the hot pall under the eaves, the languid spiders woven suddenly out of nowhere—each year. It was a satisfaction to a man not brought up to houses or the firm groove of the seasons,
to be able to say, sighing with the heat, that it was this way every year. His hand was in his grandfather’s; his grandfather was saying, “Tomorrow’s the twenty-eighth of August. Tomorrow the locusts will be here.” It corroborated something. It—

  He got up, swearing under his breath, and hunted for a cigarette. If his mind hadn’t circled him back to that word he could have been asleep by now, and he had, he had to get up at six. Noiselessly, he crossed past Amelia’s bed and opened the window from the bottom, so that the drifting smoke would not wake her. No moon just now. One sound, the faint tweaking of the river, heard only if one knew it was there. Nobody plying the hill tonight. He crept back to bed and sat listening, smoking. No sound from Miss Prager, the small and sealed.

  Curious that he did not believe that the doctor had lied about her, even in the light of the letter downstairs. He was a man who would not bother to lie. Rather, he was a man who had grasped the mordant advantages of telling the truth as he saw it—aware that he told it well, and that a peculiar vision was a prize for which people would pay. Tapping his paradoxes like a set of metaphysical tumblers, he would make a coaxing music that set his audience agape, and their pockets too. And always careful to remind them of the great paradox that was money, such a man, coming upon Miss Prager, that “classic of money-injury,” might carelessly keep her to remind himself.

  Creaking, the river moved against the land. Is all the evidence in, in? There was something that Bhatta had said—Ah, you think it devious, perhaps…from a priori to a posteriori—the history of the world…how wise of you, Misser Garner, not to admit the connection between money and the work one loves…banks should not be so jolly…Miss Prager has the importance to be mad.

  Garner put out his cigarette and lay back, tightly closing his eyes. No, there was something else—but with a man like that, the evidence would never all be in. Lucky for himself, no doubt, that he had found that letter—not having Mr. Dee’s prescience about tea. For Bhatta’s tunes were catchy indeed. His phrase for Dee, for instance. “The proxy dragon,” he had said, smiling—and there, for all time, was little Dee, fixing his small, gorgon face against the future, advancing like a lone stockholder waving a proxy from the past. And every now and then, in an aside as Elizabethan as the doctor’s handkerchief, there was the deliberate trail of a phrase pointing the listener to Bhatta himself.