Tale for the Mirror

by Hortense Calisher

  Garner sat up, straining forward. The doctor had been above him, on the steps. Behind him, the river lay like a thick darning needle; in front of him the wind had been making its shot-taffeta changes on the lawn. Once more the yellow kerchief whisked; the heavy finger probed the rose. “Well…” said the doctor’s voice, “every man has some little tale he tells himself in the dark, har? So as not to really see himself in the mirror the next morning.” Or had it been—so as to be able to look at himself in the mirror the next morning.

  No matter, thought Garner, leaning back on the pillow; it was Hobson’s choice. For, once you saw how much the man might want to be caught, you saw much indeed. “Perhaps for me also it is therapy to give.” How delicately, satirically he could have been showing them the irritating little wound of honesty that held him up by the heel! For then the storekeepers would be right, in a way—as, no doubt, storekeepers, until the last trump, always would be; Bhatta was not a successful swindler. Devious man that he was, it might be that life had withheld from him only the power to be consistently so. It would be no wonder then if he talked so much of clarity—this hoist illusionist who could not quite make himself disappear. And Miss Prager could be the tale by which he hung. Suppose that, a swindler, he still set a secret table for one of the swindled, for Miss Prager, hoaxed by someone greater than he? Suppose that he kept Miss Prager, for whom no funds would come next quarter, and this was the tale that he told to himself in the dark?

  Now certainly I should be able to sleep, thought Garner. But time passed and he did not. Lying there, he listened to the river moving against the land. I’m just past forty, he thought, and my own evidence is already more or less in. What would it be like for him and Amelia if they lasted to eighty, for people like them who, leaning against the leaflets, might find that they leaned against wind? Or did age always come, stripping the critical function with gentle narcosis, making of any past, because it was the past, a good backbone? He turned on the pillow. Lucky Bhatta, lucky Dee. Who each has his tale for the mirror, and therefore no doubt sleeps well. Less lucky Garner, who has so many tales to tell himself for the daytime—of Amelia, the house, the children—but for the six o’clock mirror has none.

  After a while he looked over at Amelia, a dark shape of comfort sleeping, but it was the hour past love, the courtroom hour of the night, when the soul, defending, shrank to the size of a pea. So, after a while, when he had reached that black level below pride, where one need no longer pretend that one was not pretending, he began cautiously to tell himself a tale he might once have had.

  He was walking along the river, according to the tale, and he was very near the place where he belonged, the real place—in fact he had only been away from it a day. It was just before dawn, and along the opposite shore there was a narrow stencil of light. He was up before it, because it was natural to be so when one worked the land, and he was wearing a thick sweater, because this was a short-summered region and the mornings were Appalachian-cool. Before him, as he walked, there was a whiteness along the grass that was sometimes hoar, sometimes the wind at the underside of the blades, but whatever the season, he always thought of it as the waking power of the ground. It ran ahead of him, leading him to the real place, and when he got there he stood for a moment, as he always did, standing on the land. This was the moment of safety, of a wholeness something like the moment after love. For although he was up a trifle earlier than the other people, he knew that they were somewhere nearby, and that they would soon be up and about with him in the simple member-world. All day long he and they would be working, in a nearness past need for arranging, and the land and the river worked with them, weaving them all the good backbone.

  This was where the tale always ended, whether it failed him or brought him through until morning. But tonight, just before he came to the end, there was a sound that brought him suddenly back to the real world outside. It was the sound of something soft brush-brushing across the grass, and at first, thudding with night-terror, he thought it was the whisp of a scythe. Then he heard, blended with it, the light scampering of an animal, and breathing, he took it to be the sound of someone walking a dog—the dog scratching here and there on the gravel, and behind it, the shush-shush, soft and irresolute, of carpet slippers on the grass.

  He stole to the window again, but nothing could be seen on the hill. Telling himself that the night made special fools, he crept downstairs and stepped outside his door.

  The doctor was standing still, his back to the stone urn in the center of his moonlit lawn, looking up at his house. His dog stood behind him, its eyes glinting like glass, waiting as it often waited during the doctor’s morning inspections—although it was always the women who walked the dog. Whining now, it tugged with its muzzle at the hem of the doctor’s coat. The doctor put a hand back of him to quiet it. “Eh Lili…shhh Lili…” he said. He had moved to face the hill, and was looking up at the summerhouse. Still the dog whined, bracing its hind legs in the direction of the gate, and at last the doctor turned. “Poor Lili…you want to take me for a walk, har?” he whispered, and the river brought his words to Garner’s ear. “Better take me, har. Better take your old man for a walk.”

  At the word “walk” the dog bounded, ran a few paces toward the gate, then stopped to look over its shoulder to be sure that the doctor followed, and in this way, with the dog alternately trotting and checking, the two of them came to the gate. The moonlight brought out the ungainly lines of the old bitch and the fallen-in silhouette of her master, his head prolapsed on his chest above the downcast belly, the long coat dribbling behind him like a nightshirt, making of him that poor show which any man might be at this hour, alone. I ought to get a dog again, thought Garner, hankering suddenly for the old mongrel, dead of age, whom they had not replaced last year. Nights like this, when a man can’t sleep, he can walk his dog. Or the dog can walk the man.

  Outside the hedge, the dog trotted north, along the road toward Garner’s house. Garner leaned into the shadows of his doorway, but the dog, head to the ground, nosed him out, snuffed familiarity and dismissed him, and intent on some trail now, trotted on. The doctor raised his head, and in the thin light of the roadlamp the two men looked at one another. By day, it was always the doctor who spoke first, and Garner, taken at a loss in his shadows, awaited the florid greeting. But Bhatta said nothing. Gravely he nodded, and again, and the nod was like a touch. Then, doffing a hand against his temple in mute salute, he bent his head and moved on.

  Garner listened to the sound of his shuffling, soft and hesitant and human, until it melted into the dark. It is the sound that ends the nightmare, he thought. Not the sound, necessarily, of mother or nurse or brother. Just the sound of other, of someone awake too, and dealing with the dark. A warmth crept up his throat. That the old man had not said anything, he thought—that was the thing. That such a man, so wedded to talk, should have signaled only, as between two who shared the freemasonry of mirrors, and have said not a lingering word.

  Sleep hit him then, a dead salt-wave, and only habit brought him back up the stairs, to his bed. Sinking down, he doffed two fingers against his temple, in the general direction of north. Let the night make its fools, their gestures, that daytime might well rescind. It was a good thing. Let it. It was a good thing—to have a friend at court.

  In the red-black landscape behind his lids, he sank down, down, watching the retinal images—tiny black dots circled with red—that swarmed ceaselessly upward only if he did not quite look at them, of whose origin he had wondered about since a child. They swarmed on; they were pinheads, they were people bent over the hillsides in the attitude of sowing; they were pulling salvation like turnips from the soil. Among them was a man, not Garner, somebody else, poor homunculus, and he was bent over too, hugging his image, his foolish tale. As he bent, his string dragged behind him, but he did not see it, for his chimera was strong. He was building a world, a little antique world of allegiance, where he would be hailed by name on the main street, nei
ghbored in sickness and until death, and there were roots for the commuter’s child. The people around him pretended not to see the string, for they had them too. Even as the fences went up, same on same, and houses burst upward like sown teeth, same on same, he and the people pretended, for they were building themselves into an antique perfection, into that necklace of fires upon the brotherly dark where once life burned steadily from farm to farm to farm.

  Watching them, Garner slept. His knees curled to his chin, like a child who had world without end before school, and in his dreams he smiled too, a child snailed in sleep. All around him were the unguided missiles of sleep, of dream, but he flew between them, above them, with his story. Across his still face the night moved at bay, harmless against this impermanent marble, so intact and warm. Whatever there was in the mirror, he would not have to look at it until morning, not until morning, world without end away. Until morning.

  About the Author

  Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1962 by Hortense Calisher

  Cover design by Kelly Parr

  978-1-4804-3892-7

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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