The Mirror

by Marlys Millhiser

  “I’m asking you.” He held her arm gently so she wouldn’t continue down the hill. “Why is she buried next to my mother?”

  “Because she’s your grandmother.”

  “The bogus Smith Foundation that supported me through boarding school and a year of college?”

  “Yes. Would you like to see the school? It’s changed but –”

  “My grandmother was Christine Pintor, not May Bell … May Bell. Was that the fat lady with the orange hair? You said she was a witch and she caught us peeking in her window.”

  “And you ran away, leaving me to face the music. I’ve never forgiven you that.”

  They were standing on the road between Doc Seaton’s old cabin and the house that had been the Binders’. The birdbath and the gate were gone. Rachael wanted to be gone too. But he tightened his hold.

  “Christine and May Bell were the same person? Why didn’t she tell me then? Why all this Smith Foundation business?” The loneliness she remembered in the little boy had stayed to mature in the man. It echoed in his voice, hollowed out his eyes. “Why?”

  “Because she was the town prostitute. And she didn’t want you to know.”

  He let go of her arm as if it was hot. “You always did like to drop bombs on people, didn’t you?”

  They walked in silence down the hill and through town, Jerry studying the toes of his shoes. He paused on the bridge to stare into Middle Boulder Creek.

  Rachael dared to slip her arm through his. “Jerry, my Grandfather Maddon was hanged for murder and no one even discusses my grandmother. It’s not such a terrible thing.”

  “It takes a little getting used to, though.” But she could feel his body relaxing.

  “Stay for dinner and talk with the folks. They’ve spoken of you often. Wondered how you were doing.”

  He considered her solemnly over the edge of his shoulder. “Do I have to kiss you for it?”

  Rachael laughed. “Oh, so you remember that too, do you?”

  Before she could remove the arm she’d slipped through his, Jerry Garrett’s arm swung at the elbow and came up behind her. It pressed along her back, tucking her against him, till his hand was on her neck under her hair.

  His brief smile returned, with a hint of mischief this time and a rather startling maturity.

  Rachael tried to regain her balance and think of some suitably flip remark. But he wrapped himself around her, kissing her not just with his lips but with his whole body. A series of dangerous squirming sensations prickled where she was caught up against his leg.

  9

  Jerry Garrett disappeared without a trace after dinner that night, without even asking Rachael to write. She knew that one of her mother’s predictions would prove wrong at least. He had no roots in Colorado. She’d never see him again. Or have any way of knowing if he were killed in the Pacific.

  She must forget him. Yet she thought of him every time she saw a navy uniform or crossed the bridge over Middle Boulder Creek.

  By the end of that summer Rachael didn’t have to cross that particular bridge any longer.

  Hutch Maddon had a heart attack in late August and moved into Community Hospital in Boulder. Brandy rented the cottage to a miner’s family and moved into the Gingerbread House to be near him.

  There were several offers to buy the cabin but Brandy refused them. “Jerry will need it to get away from this mausoleum sometimes.”

  “Jerry? Jerry Garrett? What’s he got to do with it?” Rachael asked.

  “Oh … he’ll show up. One of these years.”

  When Hutch recovered enough to join them at the Gingerbread House, a weak heart plus his arthritis made him a semi-invalid and he chafed against the added restrictions on his life.

  Brandy worried about him constantly.

  He worried about the twins, truly separated now, Dan in Africa and Remy in the Pacific.

  Rachael worried about the war spreading to the United States and the enemy dropping bombs on the Gingerbread House.

  And Sophie worried about the men who came to call on Rachael. They were generally older servicemen with medical discharges or home on leave. Sophie thought they drank too much and wanted only one thing of her granddaughter.

  When Rachael took up smoking and came home with alcohol on her breath, Sophie worried they were getting what they wanted.

  One night when Rachael was a junior, she returned from the campus library to find the Gingerbread House ablaze with lights and her father on the living-room floor. Brandy knelt beside him holding his hand.

  “We’ve called the doctor,” Sophie said. Her head had the permanent nodding quiver that very old people often have and she used a cane to steady her balance. “I’m afraid it’s his heart again.”

  Rachael sank down on the other side of him but when he opened his eyes they saw only her mother. “Bran?”

  “I’m here. Don’t try to talk.”

  “… twins, Bran? This war –”

  “They’ll be all right, Hutch. They come back alive. I’m sure. I know … Hutch?”

  But he stared past Brandy with a look of confusion. “That you, Lon?” Then he was just staring without seeing.

  Rachael and her grandmother watched with horror as Brandy put the heel of her hand against his chest and gave it a swift hard blow with the other hand. “Oh, dear God, it’s been so long since I’ve seen this done.” She socked Hutch’s chest again.

  “Mom?” Rachael said in a half-stupor. “Mom, he’s … Dad’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Rachael, what’s she doing? For heaven’s sake stop her.” Sophie waved her cane over them.

  But Rachael could only sit on her heels and blink away tears as her mother tilted back her father’s head and, with one hand pinching his nose, began blowing into his open mouth in slow, evenly measured breaths.

  “Rachael, she’s gone mad. Do something.”

  “Mom, please.” She reached over Hutch Maddon’s body but Brandy’s outstretched arm shoved her back. This was a nightmare beyond any Rachael’d known as a child. Through a buzzing noise in her ears she heard the chime of the doorbell, was aware that her grandmother had left the room.

  “Leave him be, Mrs. Maddon. Leave him be, I say.” The doctor pulled Brandy to her feet and Rachael’s dad stared sightlessly at the chandelier. “Rachael,” the doctor said gently, “your mother needs you now.”

  She had to push on the floor to stand. My mother needs me now. Her legs wobbled under her but she managed to walk around her father and catch up Brandy in her arms. My mother needs me … finally.

  Rachael steeled herself to make all the funeral arrangements. Brandy came out of her daze only long enough to cling, childlike, to her daughter. “It’s all right, Mom. I’ll take care of you.”

  She hoped now they’d finally establish that closer relationship for which she’d yearned so long, but when not clinging, Brandy was as elusive as ever.

  The family plots in Nederland were full and they buried Hutch in Columbia Cemetery, leaving a space by John McCabe for Sophie. Rachael ordered the stone and it was later placed on his grave. When Brandy seemed a little more lifelike Rachael asked if she’d like to see it.

  “No. It’s pink granite and I don’t want to see it.”

  “But how did you know?” And then Rachael remembered that day her mother refused to decorate graves because cemeteries reminded her of pink granite tombstones. Had she seen into the future?

  Brandy sighed and shook her head. “Life will be so different now. Hutch was many things. But he was never boring.”

  Sophie Euler McCabe passed away two days before President Roosevelt did the same. She left the Gingerbread House to Rachael.

  A month after the surrender of Germany, Rachael graduated from the University of Colorado with only Brandy left to attend the ceremonies. Her mother’s graduation gift was enough money to pay for repairs on the roof and porches of the house.

  By the time Japan surrendered, Rachael had a contract to teach
fifth-graders in a Boulder school.

  She’d been teaching only a few weeks when her mother announced she was leaving. “I can’t stand this house all day. I’ve always wanted to see Mexico. I think I will before –”

  “But why? You have a home here and I have a job.”

  “And you have your own life to get on with, Rachael. Your dad left me pretty well off and if I’m careful I ought to be able to see some of the world.”

  “But I thought we’d use that money to fix up the house. It needs so much.”

  “This house is your problem and you’re welcome to it.”

  Rachael was alone for the first time in her life. And lost.

  10

  Rachael saved enough money to have the house painted that winter. On weekends she painted woodwork and stripped furniture.

  This first year on her own, she discovered two things about herself. The tedious process of painting, sanding and varnishing drove her nuts.

  So did fifth-graders.

  “Why don’t you try writing?” her mother wrote the next summer when Rachael had admitted this in a letter. Brandy was now in Canada.

  “I’ll be damned if I will,” Rachael thought, and went back to weeding a flowerbed. “The old know-it-all, anyway.”

  But as she daydreamed among weeds and blossoms and sunshine, she thought of a young girl and boy exploring a cave and discovering a body there. Then she thought up a set of circumstances that would bring them to that cave.

  Before she knew it she’d looked into their backgrounds and personalities, considered names for them …

  Rachael set her trowel down and stared at a scarlet petunia. When had she begun to fashion stories out of idle daydreams?

  As she ate her solitary dinner in the gloomy kitchen she thought of all she’d do to this room if only she had the money.

  The imaginary children scampered, just out of sight around the corner of the pantry.

  Vowing she’d never mention this to her mother, Rachael hauled the typewriter she’d used for college papers down to the kitchen table and set to work. She sent the completed story to The Saturday Evening Post. It returned with a printed rejection and an unkind remark about her spelling.

  The school year had begun and she put aside her lesson plans long enough to correct the spelling, retype it and send it to another magazine. The story came back with a suggestion that it be slanted toward the children’s market. This she did and it returned again. Had she considered expanding it into a book-length manuscript for children?

  It would soon be Christmas and Brandy planned to stop in to spend the holidays before going on to Florida. Rachael hid all signs of her writing life and seethed over the money her mother frittered away on travel, while she worked so hard just to make the house livable.

  “How’s The Secret of the Lost Cave coming?” Brandy asked the first evening after her arrival. “Or is it The Mystery of the Lost Cave?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Rachael felt as if the bottom had fallen out of her stomach. She decided to rename the book she’d fashion out of her rejected story The Hidden Cave.

  “Well, you must be getting to it one of these years.”

  Two days before Christmas Rachael had a blind date with a sailor whose sister was the other fifth-grade teacher. After a movie he led her around a corner and down a flight of stairs to a basement door under a store. “Buddy of mine’s giving a party.”

  “I didn’t know there were apartments here,” she said.

  “Wasn’t meant to be, but all the G.I.’s coming back for school – you gotta be Truman to get a room in this town.”

  At first Rachael could see nothing through the cloud of cigarette smoke. The air was even staler and more packed with the human smell than a fifth-grade classroom.

  The first voice she recognized was Frank Sinatra’s. He moaned over the buzz of conversation from somewhere.

  “Larry? You got here, you son of a bitch. I want you to meet…”

  Larry disappeared into the smoke. A glass was shoved into Rachael’s hand and the press of bodies pushed her back onto a hard bench.

  Steam pipes crossed the ceiling. A concrete floor, two daybeds along the wall, a table, a stove and a refrigerator.

  Men outnumbered women. Wild gestures denoted planes diving and bombs exploding. Wives and girlfriends sat around the edges looking as bored as Rachael felt.

  Her interest picked up instantly when the crowd parted and she saw a man sitting on a mattress on the floor across the room.

  He looked older, thinner, harder. His hair had grown out from its military haircut. But he was still the man who’d kissed her on the bridge over Middle Boulder Creek.

  All my mother’s predictions, Rachael thought, staring into her drink. It’s as if I don’t have any control over my own life. Melting ice left a tiny eddy of foam in the center of the bourbon and Seven, reminding her of a whirlpool. She imagined herself being dragged down into one, imagined what it would be like to know you’d drown in a few seconds. She decided it’d be similar to having a fortune-teller for a mother.

  If she weren’t so polite, she’d walk out the door and home right now. But Larry would think she’d ditched him. Rachael, just because he’s in town doesn’t mean you’ll marry him.

  Larry carried two glasses across the room and tried to hand her one. “Sorry, I got sidetracked. Didn’t mean to leave you over here like a wallflower.”

  Rachael refused the drink. “Listen, I have a headache. Would you mind if I just walked on home? It’s not that far from here.”

  “I’ll walk you home.”

  “No, you stay and chat with your friends.” She slipped into her coat. Jerry had gotten to his feet across the room.

  “Well, if you don’t mind …”

  “I don’t. Really. And thanks for the movie.” She was soon in the fresh cold air and up the concrete steps.

  “Rachael? Rachael Maddon?” Jerry said behind her.

  She stopped under the streetlight and shrugged. “Hello, Jerry. How are you?”

  Jerry had registered at the university on the G.I. Bill and was due to start the second semester. He’d been out of the service for over a year, wandering. “I was so sure I wouldn’t live through the war I hadn’t made any plans,” he said as they walked toward the Gingerbread House. “Sounds melodramatic, but –”

  “Why did you choose Colorado? You’ve lived so many other places.” It must be strange to have no particular place or people.

  “I don’t really know. I remember liking the mountains. Even though my mother died here, I had some good memories of the place.”

  Rachael thought it would be horrible to have nothing personal, of one’s own. To be dependent on the kind of thing like the party they’d just left.

  She was suspicious of the welling of sympathy she felt for his aloneness, of her awareness of him beside her, of her mother’s inane predictions … “I’m dammed if I will!”

  “What?” He stopped jingling the change in his pocket. Snowflakes began to fall. They stuck in his hair.

  “Nothing. Looks like we may have snow for Christmas after all.” Christmas … an awful time to be alone. “This is where I live.” She stopped at the gate of the Gingerbread House.

  “You’ve changed, Rachael. You’re different.”

  I’m an old tired woman at twenty-three. “So have you.”

  The streetlight on the corner accentuated the hollows around his eyes. “Well … it was good seeing you again …”

  “Jerry? I’m starving and I think I’m going in there and scramble up some eggs. Would you like to come in? My coffee’s not the best but my eggs are out of this world.”

  “I had the feeling you were trying to avoid me tonight.”

  “I thought you probably had a date with you,” she lied. “And wouldn’t want to renew old acquaintances.” She opened the gate and paused to look at the Gingerbread House. The repairs and paint made it look happier, even at night with snow falling.<
br />
  “Do you rent a room here?”

  “My grandmother left it to me. Mom is visiting for the holidays and by the looks of all the lights on she’s probably still up.” And she won’t be a bit surprised to see you. Damn her eyes.

  INTERIM

  After Brandy left for Florida, Rachael wrote The Hidden Cave. It was published, but not before an editor changed the title to Secret of the Lost Cave. She sank the small advance into improvements on the Gingerbread House.

  She continued to see Jerry Garrett because she couldn’t help herself. They were married the next Christmas. Rachael wore her mother’s wedding veil.

  Brandy returned for the wedding and the night-before-it talk. “Now, the first thing is, there’s more to a successful marriage than sex.”

  “Well, I should hope so. Mom, this really isn’t necessary. I know about male and female anatomy. I’m twenty-four years old, for heaven’s sake.”

  But Brandy went beyond ovum and sperm, penis and vagina. “I know you’ve discovered you have one. What I’m saying is, there’s nothing wicked in using it.”

  “Mother!”

  “You’re still a prude, aren’t you?” Cobalt-blue eyes twinkled. “Rachael, that’s a healthy young man you’re getting there. If you’re going to have to wash his socks the rest of your life, you might as well enjoy him.”

  The renovation of the Gingerbread House slowed as Rachael invested her earnings as a writer and teacher into living expenses and helping her husband through law school.

  Up in the attic the wedding mirror slumbered on under its dusty blanket, forgotten.

  Brandy had invested in Dan’s used-car business and on the proceeds expanded her travels worldwide. Every year or so she’d stop for a few weeks at the Gingerbread House, and Rachael and Jerry often caught her writing in a leather-bound diary.

  “Do you suppose she’s writing her memoirs?”

  “Probably her version of Gulliver’s Travels.” Jerry thought his mother-in-law a dear but slightly batty old lady.

  When Jerry settled in an established law firm in Boulder (he was offered an excellent position in Poughkeepsie but Rachael wouldn’t move), she quit teaching and devoted herself to her writing. The Gingerbread House gradually acquired an all-new heating system, electrical wiring and plumbing. Whole rooms were replastered.