Tale for the Mirror

by Hortense Calisher

  Victor’s face had been in shadow, the sun behind him, but after more than forty years Robert could still sense in him the unnameable quality that had sent him fishing in his cravat. “Mmm. If your father doesn’t get to you first,” he said. And Robert’s father had got to him first, as, in Victor’s old age, he had got to Victor. Not a hard man, his father, but a dull one, of the powerful new breed that cherished its dullness for its safety, and meant to impose that, along with the rest of its worldly goods, on its sons. “Like that brew we had at lunch?” Victor had said, as they trotted the hamper along the shore. “And well you might,” he said, mentioning a name, a year. “Pity I’ve only daughters,” he sighed. “Women’ve no palate. Perfume kills it.” Above them, atop the green dunes of lawn that swept to the water’s edge, a small figure waved at them, his grandfather, guests sped, sauntering the veranda alone. “Will I have one, d’ya think?” asked Robert. “Mmm, can’t tell yet.” Robert considered. His grandfather, colorless and quiet, seemed to him much like his father, who drank only Saratoga water. “Does Bi?” he said with interest. Victor smiled, waving back. “He’s got me,” he said.

  And Grandfather was like me really, not like Father, thought Robert, returning to the Lampeys’, where conversation, as so often happened elsewhere, had rippled on without him. He was a dull man too, as I am, but like me with the different and often painful dimension of not valuing it, of knowing that somewhere, sometimes in the same room, conversation twinkled past him like a prism, a rosier life went by. Grandfather was like me. But Grandfather had Victor.

  And looking at the door through which Emily’s possibility was to come, telling himself that it was midsummer madness—of Victor’s daughters one was dead and the other last heard of years ago in a nursing order in Louisiana—he still told himself that he would not be surprised, not at all, if the woman who came through the door were to be huge and serenely fair, a great Flemish barmaid of a woman, with Victor’s florid curls.

  When Arietta walked through the door, he was surprised, at the depth of his disappointment. For what he saw was a slight woman, almost tiny, whose hair, sugared now like preserved ginger, might once, at youth’s best, have been russet, a small creature whose oddly tweaked face—one of those pulled noses, cheeks that looked as if each held the secret cherry of some joke—was the farthest possible from the classic sun-face he remembered. Even if she were some relation, she was nothing like. There was no point in asking, in opening a private memory to future rakings over whenever he paid a duty call on Emily. For what he was looking at, he reminded himself, all he was looking at was Emily’s future companion.

  As the evening progressed, he was not so sure. For the Lampeys’ protégé remained dumb. From their baffled glances he judged that this was not usual; he himself would have guessed that Mrs. Fay’s ordinary manner, if she had any, was more mobile. But for whatever reason, her eyes remained veiled, her hands folded in the lap of her pale, somewhat archaic skirt. A certain stubborn aura spread from her, but nothing else, certainly nothing of the subtle emanation they had been promised, and but rarely a word. Only Emily, impervious to this as she was to so much, noticed nothing, intent on numbering the occasional sips Mrs. Fay took of her wine.

  Nor could Arietta have explained. She could have said only that almost at once she had felt Miss Bissle to be a person she could never admire. Or tell the truth to, the truth about Miss Bissle being what it was. Not because Miss Bissle was dull—the best patrons necessarily had almost as much dullness as money—but that she did not suffer from it, whereas the real patrons, all the great ones, had a sweetening tremor of self-doubt at the core. If dullness was what had made them keep Minots, then this human (and useful) sweetening was what had made Minots keep them. But I must, thought Arietta. Roger, she said to herself. $126.35. Nevertheless, when Parker deftly introduced Nigeria, on which he had often heard her entertain, she heard herself furnish him three sentences on the cultivation of the cocoa nib, then fall still. It must be stage fright, her first professional engagement. Her father should have told her that the artist’s very piety and scruples were a considerable hindrance when the artist came down to dining out. In desperation she gulped the rest of her wine. Opposite her Miss Bissle blinked slowly at Robert, as if to say “I count on you.”

  “Arietta!” said Helen Lampey. It was half command, half plea. “Do tell us the story about your zebra.”

  “Zebra?” said Robert. “Have you hunted them, Mrs. Fay?”

  “No.” Mrs. Fay addressed her small, clenched hands. “That’s equatorial Africa.” She heard Helen sigh. “Have you?”

  Now, what none of them, what no one knew about Robert Bissle was that once in a while, under certain conditions, he lied. Not on the Exchange of course, or in any real situation. It was his only valve, his sole vice, and it escaped him, with the wistful sound of steam from an air-locked radiator, only when, as tonight, he deemed himself in the safe company of those even duller than he. He leaned back—on these occasions he always did. “Zebras are very beautiful creatures. I never molested them save to procure specimens for the museums, or food for the porters, who liked their rather rank flesh.”

  Mrs. Fay, for almost the first time, raised her eyes and looked closely at him. “Yes?” she said. Her nose, he observed, moved with speech. “Do go on.”

  “The hartebeest,” he said slowly. “Coke’s hartebeest, known locally by the Swahili name of kongoni—were at least as plentiful and almost as tame.”

  “Why Robert!” said Miss Bissle. “I never knew you were in Africa.”

  “Oh yes,” he said, still looking at his neighbor, in whose odd face—he had not noticed until now—all the lines went up. “One year when your back was turned.” He plunged on. “A few months before my arrival, a mixed herd of zebra and hartebeest rushed through the streets of Nairobi, several being killed by the inhabitants, and one of the victims falling just outside the Episcopal church.”

  “Handy,” said Helen Lampey, in spite of having been informed that the Episcopal was Miss Bissle’s own. She was watching Arietta and Robert—Arietta with Robert, smiling her pawkiest smile at him, and saying, “Yes, yes, do go on.”

  Robert took off his glasses. No, there was no resemblance, not even if he imagined a napkin tied round her neck, although for a moment there he had almost fancied an echo saying, “and now, a little more claret.” He shook his head. The company, whatever it was, was not as safe as he had thought. “Your turn,” he said. “Your zebra.”

  Arietta unfolded her hands. They trembled slightly. Miss Bissle’s cousin, and even richer one had heard—and even more. One of the old breed, she was sure of it—and she had almost missed him. “My zebra?” she said. “Mine was—” She had been about to say real. But one let people see one knew the truth about them only after one had won them, sometimes long after. And particularly these people. “Mine was—here,” she said. “Right here in the Hudson Valley. In our garden.”

  “So help me it was,” said Parker. “I saw it. Go on, Arietta.”

  So she did. It had been a Saturday morning, she said, and she had been sitting in her bath, when Roger, seven then, had knocked at her door and said there were policemen in the garden and she had called back, “Tell Daddy.” Minutes later, Roger had knocked again and said, “Mum, there’s a zebra in the garden,” and she had replied—“Tell Daddy.” “Now,” said Arietta, “Roger is not a fey child. I should have known.” She knew every periphrasis of this story, every calculated inflection and aside; this was the point where everyone always began to smile expectantly, and pausing, she saw that they had. “I’ve never been able to afford to disbelieve him since.” For then Carolingus had come up the stairs. “He looked,” said Mrs. Fay, delaying softly, expertly, “well—like a man who has just seen a zebra in his garden.” As, according to him, he had. She went downstairs—and so had he. She made them see the scene just as she had, the two policemen, Mack Sennett characters both of them, yelling “Stand back there!” from a point well be
hind Carolingus, and there, cornered in a cul-de-sac near the carriage house, flashing and snorting, the zebra, ribanded in the rhododendrons like a beast out of the douanier Rousseau.

  “The policemen,” she said, “had had no breakfast, so there I found myself, carrying a tray with sugar and cream and my best coffee cake—luckily I had baked on Friday—to two policemen and a zebra, in a back yard twenty-five miles from New York.” She rose, circled the room, holding the scene with her hands pressed lightly together, and as if absent-mindedly, poured Parker some coffee out of the Lampeys’ silver pot. Outside, in the Lampeys’ garden, a barn owl hooted—it was the atmosphere, conspiring gently with her as usual. She waited. At this point someone always asked, “But how?”

  “But how?” said Miss Bissle.

  “Ah, now,” said Mrs. Fay, “I have to double back. I have to tell you that across from us, in one of those very modern houses with the kitchen set just under the crown of the road, the family gets up very early. They garden, and the mother-in-law is a past president of the Audubon Society of Atlanta, Georgia.” Still circling the room, a diseuse gently fabricating her own spotlight, Mrs. Fay rested one hand, a brief wand, on Miss Bissle’s shoulder as she passed her. Robert watched, enthralled. There was nothing to it, yet she held them all. They sat like marionettes whom she was awakening slowly to a mild, quizzical sensation like the pleasure-pain in a sleeping foot. “And at about six o’clock that morning, the head of the County Police picked up the phone and heard a cultivated Southern voice say, ‘Ah should like to repo’t that jus’ now, as we wuh setten at breakfas’, we saw a zebra payss bah on the Rivuh Road.’” Parker laughed, and Mrs. Fay picked it up, wove him in quickly. “Ah yes,” she said, “can’t you hear her? And the chief thought to himself that the River Road is rather the bohemian part of his parish, and that Saturday morning comes, well—after Friday night. So he calls our policeman and says, ‘George, people down your neck of the woods seeing zebras.’ George decides to wait until, well, two or more people see it. Then Joe Zucca, the old caretaker at Fagan’s, telephones, babbling that a striped horse is crashing around his conservatory. And the chase is on. And they bring it to bay in our garden.”

  Parker guffawed. “There are zebras at the bottom of my garden.”

  Arietta, reaching her own chair, sat down in it. Someone always said that too. She looked round at their faces. Yes, she had them, particularly one. Quickly, quickly now, wind it up. And in a long, virtuoso breath, she wound it all up—how the village had filled the yard, a gold mine if she’d just had the lollipop concession, how her smart-aleck neighbor had stopped by the front gate, offering a drive to town, and when she’d said, “Wait a bit, Tom, we’ve got a zebra in the back yard,” had smirked and said “Yeah, I heard that one at Armando’s—and the horse said, ‘I've been trying to get it to take its pajamas off all night.’” And how it had been one of the great satisfactions in life to be able to lead him round to the carriage house. And how the cops had finally got hold of the Hudson River Cowboys Association—yes there was one, those kids in white satin chaps and ten-gallon hats who always rode palominos in the Independence Day Parade—and how they’d come, out of costume alas, but with their horse trailer, and how Carolingus and the cops had finally jockeyed the beast in, using a three-man lasso. And how, at the height of it—children screaming, yokels gaping, three heated men hanging on ropes, the whole garden spiraling like a circus suddenly descended from the sky, and in the center of it all, the louche and striped, the incredible—how Arietta’s eighty-five-year-old Cousin Beck from Port Washington, a once-a-year and always unheralded visitor, had steamed up the driveway in her ancient Lincoln, into the center of it all. “Oh, Cousine Beck,” she’d stammered—in French, she never knew why—“you find us a little en deshabille, we have us un zèbre.” And how Beck, taking one look, had eased her old limbs out of the car and grunted, “Arietta, you are dependable. Just bring me a chair.”

  Mrs. Fay folded her hands. Now someone would ask the other question. She gave a sigh. Next to her, her neighbor marveled. No, she was nothing like—no aureole. This one whisked herself in and out, like a conjuror’s pocket handkerchief. But the effect was the same. Small sensations, usually ignored, made themselves known, piped like a brigade of mice from their holes. There was a confused keenness in the ear…nose…air? One saw the draperies, peach-fleshed velour, and waited for their smell. The chandelier tinkled, an owl hooted, and a man could hear his own breath. The present, drawn from all its crevices, was here.

  “But where did the beast come from?” said Miss Bissle.

  Yes, it would be she, thought Arietta. The cousin, his glasses still off, was staring at her with eyes that were bright and vague. “A runaway,” she said in a cross voice. It always made her sulky to have to end the fun this way, with no punch line but fact. “There’s an animal importer up the mountain; we found out later. He buys them for zoos.” She turned pertly to the cousin. “Perhaps it was one of yours.”

  “I can’t think when, Robert,” said Miss Bissle. “I’ve always known exactly where you were.”

  Robert, before he replaced his glasses, had a vague impression that Mrs. Fay looked guilty, but she spoke so quickly that he must have been wrong.

  “Parker,” she said, “did you and Helen ever hear about Greatgrandfather Claude, and Mr. Henry Clay?”

  They hadn’t. Nor had they heard about Louis’s patron’s glass eye. Robert, saved, sank deeper in his chair. He was his father’s son after all, trained to fear the sycophant, and he brooded now on whether Mrs. Fay wanted something of him. Look how she had got round the Lampeys. Was she honest? Victor’s tonic honesty, he remembered, had spared no one; he never flattered individually but merely opened to dullards the gross, fine flattery of life alone. And what did he, Robert, want of her? If he closed his eyes, prisms of laughter floated past him, flick-flack, down the long cloth of another table; he could feel, there and here, the lax blush of the present in his limbs. He slouched in it, while Arietta told how, when Carolingus spoke for her, her father had said, “You know she has no dot.” And how Carolingus, who was slightly deaf, had replied, “I’ve no dough either.” And how in after years, both always amiably purported to be unsure of who had said which.

  And then Robert sat up in his chair. For Arietta was telling the story of the “beefies” and “les maigres.”

  So that’s it, he thought. I knew it, I knew it all the time. And in the recesses of his mind he felt that same rare satisfaction which came to him whenever he was able to add to a small fund he had kept in a downtown savings bank almost since boyhood, money separate from inheritance, made by his own acumen, on his own. I recognized her, he thought, and the feeling grew on him, as it had been growing all evening, that in the right company he was not such a dullard after all. He leaned back now and watched her—quiet now after her sally, unobtrusive whenever she chose. It was not wit she pretended to; her materials were as simple as a child’s. What was the quality she shared with Victor, born to it as the Bissles were born to money, that the others here felt too, for there was Lampey, murmuring ingenuously into his brandy-cup “Wonderful stuff, this, isn’t it?”—quite oblivious of the fact that it was his own—and there even was Emily, her broad feet lifted from the floor? Whatever Mrs. Fay did, its effect was as Victor’s had been, to peel some secondary skin from the ordinary, making wherever one was—if one was with her—loom like an object under a magnifying glass—large, majestic and there. She made one live in the now, as, time out of mind it seemed, he had once done for himself. But he did not know how she did it. Or whether she did. Watching her rise from her chair, begin to make her adieu, the thought came to him that he would not mind spending a lifetime finding out.

  “Let me go with you,” he said, standing up. “Let me drive you home.”

  But Emily had arisen too. “Mrs. Fay,” she said, her blinking fluttered, “have you had any experience with birds?”

  Arietta smiled between them. How lucky she had recog
nized him, the real thing, poor dear, even if his sad little blague—out of African Game Trails of course, old Teddy Roosevelt, on half the bookshelves in Nigeria—was not.

  “Do,” she said to him, “but let’s walk.” She turned to Miss Bissle. and let the truth escape from her with gusto. After all it was her own. “No, not really. Of course—I’ve shot them.” On the short way home, the river, lapping blandly, made conversation. Robert spoke once. “I don’t really think Emily would have suited you,” he said, and Mrs. Fay replied that it was nice of him to put it that way round.

  At Arietta’s doorway, they paused. But it was imperative that she find out what was on his mind. Or put something there.

  “I’d ask you in,” she said, “but I’ve nothing but dandelion wine.”

  “I’ve never had any,” said Robert. “I’d like to try it.”

  She led him through the hall, past the rack where Carolingus’s leather jacket hung, and her father’s, and the squirrel-skin weskit they had cured for Roger, then through the softly ruined downstairs rooms, up the stairs and into the little salon. It was an educative tour; it told him a great deal. And this was the family room; he sensed the intimate patchouli that always clung to the center of a house, even before he looked up and saw them all above the mantel, hanging on their velvet tree. While Arietta went for the wine, he moved forward to examine them. What a higgler’s collection they were, in their grim descent from ivory to pasteboard to Kodak, yet a firm insouciance went from face to face, as if each knew that its small idiom was an indispensable footnote to history, to the Sargents, Laverys, de Lászlós that people like him had at home. And there, in that small brown-tone. Yes, there.