Tale for the Mirror

by Hortense Calisher

  “Me?”

  Mr. Elkin nodded over her head at the aunts. “Louis Orenstein, wasn’t it, who started it with that telegram the day she was born. ‘Three cheers for the Coreopsis Kid.’”

  “What a fool you were that day, Joe,” said Flora, her jet quivering with chuckles. “What an old fool.”

  “Why not?” said Mr. Elkin. “I’d waited a long time for that day.”

  “And the telegrams you sent out later,” said Mamie with a pursed smile. “Eight hundred of them. ‘Greetings, from Oakley and Company and the Coreopsis Kid.’”

  “Well, the line’s known from coast to coast,” said Mr. Elkin. “And so am I.” He looked down at Hester. “And so is Hester. When I’m on the road I get it all the time. ‘How’s the Coreopsis Kid, Joe?’”

  Suddenly, turning a corner, they were at the Arch. It gleamed in front of them like an enormous croquet wicket massed with jewels. Then it was hidden by the blue bulk of a policeman. When he saw the card, his face cleared. “I’ll get you over to the curb, sir. You’ll have to wait there a bit, but we’ll get you through.”

  At the curb, the people packed swelling behind the barrier looked enviously into the long car. The two aunts held up their bosoms, looking stiffly ahead with the hauteur of influence. The car edged into a line of others and stopped, pointing straight at the Arch. To the north, south, and west, phalanx after phalanx of waiting uniforms quivered in the early morning sun. Here and there commands sparked suddenly above a continuous surf of sound. To the left of the car, a horse curvetted and was reined in, his nostrils distended but still.

  Hester looked at the Arch. Hung with a dazzle of light, it swayed with the sound of thousands of colors chiming softly together. It kept time with the dazzle in her chest, inside of which a music box tintinnabulated over and over, “Coreopsis…Coreopsis…Coreopsis Kid.”

  She stood up, and stepped on Mamie’s foot. At Mamie’s sharp yelp, she sat down again.

  “When that baby comes,” said Mamie, nursing her foot, “I know someone whose nose is going to be out of joint.”

  “Mamie,” said Mr. Elkin, “sometimes you haven’t the sense of a mule.”

  Hester stared at Mamie. Idly, she noted how well her aunt’s triangular mouth suited her sly bird-speech, was perhaps too small for anything more, but her own answer came from far below the stare. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess Daddy can afford us all.”

  A murmur from the crowd drowned out her father’s guffaw. The lines of soldiers tautened, each to a single glitter. Waves of brass washed over them, and the glitter moved with the drums. Now everyone in the crowd was throwing something—packs of cigarettes, oranges, paper rosettes, and streamers of tricolore. The aunts dug down in a hamper and brought out things to throw, too. From the windows around the Square, confetti flaked and fell through the air. Some of the brilliant bits spiraled onto the car, and Hester, leaning against her father, raised her face to receive them, as she did in winter with the first, slow feathers of snow. Her father held her, as he would uphold them all. And there was no other quite so dashing name in the whole Oakley and Company line.

  Then the band converged upon them. Its clangor invaded her chest. She burst into tears.

  “What…what?” said her father, bending down.

  “I loved it,” she whispered back. “I loved the war.” But her father shook his head, his smile half turning into a frown.

  Mrs. Katz leaned over the back seat. Her arms and hands were crammed full, and her muzzle was pleated with glee, with the joy of having things to throw away. She pressed an orange into Hester’s hand.

  “Throw!” she said, nodding her woolen lamb-curls. “Throw!”

  Hester cupped the orange in her hand. It was round, perfect, like the world at this moment. If there was a flaw in it, it could not yet be seen. She held onto it for as long as she could. Then, closing her eyes tight, she threw it.

  The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street

  WHEN THE SCREAM CAME, from downstairs in the street five flights below her bedroom window, Mrs. Hazlitt, who in her month’s tenancy of the flat had become the lightest of sleepers, stumbled up, groped her way past the empty second twin bed that stood nearer the window, and looked out. There was nothing to be seen of course—the apartment house she was in, though smartly kept up to the standards of the neighborhood, dated from the era of front fire escapes, and the sound, if it had come at all, had come from directly beneath them. From other half-insomniac nights she knew that the hour must be somewhere between three and four in the morning. The “all-night” doorman who guarded the huge façade of the apartment house opposite had retired, per custom, to some region behind its canopy; the one down the block at the corner of First, who blew his taxi-whistle so incessantly that she had for some nights mistaken it for a traffic policeman’s, had been quiet for a long time. Even the white-shaded lamp that burned all day and most of the night on the top floor of the little gray town house sandwiched between the tall buildings across the way—an invalid’s light perhaps—had been quenched. At this hour the wide expanse of the avenue, Fifty-seventh Street at its easternmost end, looked calm, reassuring and amazingly silent for one of the main arteries of the city. The cross-town bus service had long since ceased; the truck traffic over on First made only an occasional dim rumble. If she went into the next room, where there was a French window opening like a double door, and leaned out, absurd idea, in her nightgown, she would see, far down to the right, the lamps of a portion of the Queensboro Bridge, quietly necklaced on the night. In the blur beneath them, out of range but comfortable to imagine, the beautiful cul-de-sac of Sutton Square must be musing, Edwardian in the starlight, its one antique bow-front jutting over the river shimmering below. And in the façades opposite her, lights were still spotted here and there, as was always the case, even in the small hours, in New York. Other consciousnesses were awake, a vigil of anonymous neighbors whom she would never know, that still gave one the hive-sense of never being utterly alone.

  All was silent. No, she must have dreamed it, reinterpreted in her doze some routine sound, perhaps the siren of the police car that often keened through this street but never stopped, no doubt on its way to the more tumultuous West Side. Until the death of her husband, companion of twenty years, eight months ago, her ability to sleep had always been healthy and immediate; since then it had gradually, not unnaturally deteriorated, but this was the worst; she had never done this before. For she could still hear very clearly the character of the sound, or rather its lack of one—a long, oddly sustained note, then a shorter one, both perfectly even, not discernible as a man’s or a woman’s, and without—yes, without the color of any emotion—surely the sound that one heard in dreams. Never a woman of small midnight fears in either city or country, as a girl she had done settlement work on some of this city’s blackest streets, as a mining engineer’s wife had nestled peacefully within the shrieking velvet of an Andes night. Not to give herself special marks for this, it was still all the more reason why what she had heard, or thought she had heard, must have been hallucinatory. A harsh word, but she must be stern with herself at the very beginnings of any such, of what could presage the sort of disintegrating widowhood, full of the mouse-fears and softening self-indulgences of the manless, that she could not, would not abide. Scarcely a second or two could have elapsed between that long—yes, that was it, soulless—cry, and her arrival at the window. And look, down there on the street and upward, everything remained motionless. Not a soul, in answer, had erupted from a doorway. All the fanlights of the lobbies shone serenely. Up above, no one leaned, not a window had flapped wide. After twenty years of living outside of the city, she could still flatter herself that she knew New York down to the ground—she had been born here, and raised. Secretly mourning it, missing it through all the happiest suburban years, she had kept up with it like a scholar, building a red-book of it for herself even through all its savage, incontinent rebuilding. She still knew all its neighborhoods. She kne
w. And this was one in which such a sound would be policed at once, such a cry serviced at once, if only by doormen running. No, the fault, the disturbance, must be hers.

  Reaching into the pretty, built-in wardrobe on her right—the flat, with so many features that made it more like a house, fireplace, high ceilings, had attracted her from the first for this reason—she took out a warm dressing gown and sat down on the bed to put on her slippers. The window was wide open and she meant to leave it that way; country living had made unbearable the steam heat of her youth. There was no point to winter otherwise, and she—she and Sam—had always been ones to enjoy the weather as it came. Perhaps she had been unwise to give up the dog, excuse for walks early and late, outlet for talking aloud—the city was full of them. Unwise too, in the self-denuding impulse of loss, to have made herself that solitary in readiness for a city where she would have to remake friends, and no longer had kin. And charming as this flat was, wooed as she increasingly was by the delicately winning personality of its unknown, absent owner, Mrs. Berry, by her bric-a-brac, her cookbooks, even by her widowhood, almost as recent as Mrs. Hazlitt’s own—perhaps it would be best to do something about getting the empty second twin bed removed from this room. No doubt Mrs. Berry, fled to London, possibly even residing in the rooms of yet a third woman in search of recommended change, would understand. Mrs. Hazlitt stretched her arms, able to smile at this imagined procession of women inhabiting each other’s rooms, fallen one against the other like a pack of playing cards. How could she have forgotten what anyone who had reached middle age through the normal amount of trouble should know, that the very horizontal position itself of sleep, when one could not, laid one open to every attack from within, on a couch with no psychiatrist to listen but oneself. The best way to meet the horrors was on two feet, vertical. What she meant to do now was to fix herself a sensible hot drink, not coffee, reminiscent of shared midnight snacks, not even tea, but a nursery drink, cocoa. In a lifetime, she thought, there are probably two eras of the sleep that is utterly sound: the nursery sleep (if one had the lucky kind of childhood I did) and the sleep next or near the heart and body of the one permanently loved and loving, if one has been lucky enough for that too. I must learn from within, as well as without, that both are over. She stood up, tying her sash more firmly. And at that moment the scream came again.

  She listened, rigid. It came exactly as remembered, one shrilled long note, then the shorter second, like a cut-off Amen to the first and of the same timbre, dreadful in its cool, a madness expended almost with calm, near the edge of joy. No wonder she had thought of the siren; this had the same note of terror controlled. One could not tell whether it sped toward a victim or from one. As before, it seemed to come from directly below.

  Shaking, she leaned out, could see nothing because of the high sill, ran into the next room, opened the French window and all but stood on the fire escape. As she did so, the sound, certainly human, had just ceased; at the same moment a cab, going slowly down the middle of the avenue, its toplight up, veered directly toward her, as if the driver too had heard, poised there beneath her with its nose pointed toward the curb, then veered sharply back to the center of the street, gathered speed, and drove on. Immediately behind it another cab, toplight off, slowed up, performed exactly the same orbit, then it too, with a hasty squeal of brakes, made for the center street and sped away. In the confusion of noises she thought she heard the grind of a window-sash coming down, then a slam—perhaps the downstairs door of the adjoining set of flats, or of this one. Dropping to her knees, she leaned both palms on the floor-level lintel of the window and peered down through the iron slats of her fire escape and the successive ones below. Crouched that way, she could see straight back to the building line. To the left, a streetlamp cast a pale, even glow on empty sidewalk and the free space of curb either side of a hydrant; to the right, the shadows were obscure, but motionless. She saw nothing to conjure into a half-expected human bundle lying still, heard no footfall staggering or slipping away. Not more than a minute or two could have elapsed since she had heard the cry. Tilting her head up at the façades opposite, she saw that their simple pattern of lit windows seemed the same. While she stared, one of the squares blotted out, then another, both on floors not too high to have heard. Would no one, having heard, attend? Would she?

  Standing up, her hand on the hasp of the French window, she felt herself still shaking, not with fear, but with the effort to keep herself from in some way heeding that cry. Again she told herself that she had been born here, knew the city’s ways, had not the auslander’s incredulity about some of them. These ways had hardened since her day, people had warned her, to an indifference beyond that of any civilized city; there were no “good” neighborhoods now, none of any kind really, except the half-hostile enclosure that each family must build for itself. She had discounted this, knowing unsentimentally what city life was; even in the tender version of it that was her childhood there had been noises, human ones, that the most responsible people, the kindest, had shrugged away, saying, “Nothing, dear. Something outside.” What she had not taken into account was her own twenty years of living elsewhere, where such a cry in the night would be succored at once if only for gossip’s sake, if only because one gave up privacy—anonymity—forever, when one went to live in a house on a road. If only, she thought, holding herself rigid to stop her trembling, because it would be the cry of someone one knew. Nevertheless, it took all her strength not to rush downstairs, to hang on to the handle, while in her mind’s eye she ran out of her apartment door, remembering to take the key, pressed the elevator button and waited, went down at the car’s deliberate pace. After that there would be the inner, buzzer door to open, then at last the door to the outside. No, it would take too long, and it was already too late for the phone, by the time police could come or she could find the number of the superintendent in his back basement—and when either answered, what would she say? She looked at the fire escape. Not counting hers, there must be three others between herself and the street. Whether there was a ladder extending from the lowest one she could not remember; possibly one hung by one’s hands and dropped to the ground. Years ago there had been more of them, even the better houses had had them in their rear areaways, but she had never in her life seen one used. And this one fronted direct on the avenue. It was this that brought her to her senses—the vision of herself in her blue robe creeping down the front of a building on Fifty-seventh street, hanging by her hands until she dropped to the ground. She shut the long window quickly, leaning her weight against it to help the slightly swollen frame into place, and turned the handle counterclockwise, shooting the long vertical bolt. The bolt fell into place with a thump she had never noticed before but already seemed familiar. Probably, she thought, sighing, it was the kind of sound—old hardware on old wood—that more often went with a house.

  In the kitchen, over her cocoa, she shook herself with a reminiscent tremble, in the way one did after a narrow escape. It was a gesture made more often to a companion, an auditor. Easy enough to make the larger gestures involved in cutting down one’s life to the pattern of the single; the selling of a house, the arranging of income or new occupation. Even the abnegation of sex had a drama that lent one strength, made one hold up one’s head as one saw oneself traveling a clear, melancholy line. It was the small gestures for which there was no possible sublimation, the sudden phrase, posture—to no auditor, the constant clueing of identity in another’s—its cessation. “Dear me,” she would have said—they would have come to town for the winter months as they had often planned, and he would have just returned from an overnight business trip—“what do you suppose I’d have done, Sam, if I’d gone all the way, in my housecoat, really found myself outside? Funny how the distinction between outdoors and in breaks down in the country. I’d forgotten how absolute it is here—with so many barriers between.” Of course, she thought, that’s the simple reason why here, in the city, the sense of responsibility has to weaken.
Who could maintain it, through a door, an elevator, a door and a door, toward everyone, anyone, who screamed? Perhaps that was the real reason she had come here, she thought, washing the cup under the faucet. Where the walls are soundproofed there are no more “people next door” with their ready “casserole” pity, at worst with the harbored glow of their own family life peering from their averted eyelids like the lamplight from under their eaves. Perhaps she had known all along that the best way to learn how to live alone was to come to the place where people really were.

  She set the cup out for the morning and added a plate and a spoon. It was wiser not to let herself deteriorate to the utterly casual; besides, the sight of them always gave her a certain pleasure, like a greeting, if only from herself of the night before. Tomorrow she had a meeting, of one of the two hospital boards on which, luckily for now, she had served for years. There was plenty more of that kind of useful occupation available and no one would care a hoot whether what once she had done for conscience’ sake she now did for her own. The meeting was not scheduled until two. Before that she would manage to inquire very discreetly, careful not to appear either eccentric or too friendly, both of which made city people uneasy, as to whether anyone else in the building had heard what she had. This too she would do for discipline’s sake. There was no longer any doubt that the sound had been real.

  The next morning at eight-thirty, dressed to go out except for her coat, she waited just inside her door for one or the other of the tenants on her floor to emerge. Her heart pounded at the very queerness of what she was doing, but she overruled it; if she did feel somewhat too interested, too much as if she were embarking on a chase, then let her get it out of her system at once, and have done. How to do so was precisely what she had considered while dressing. The problem was not to make too many inquiries, too earnest ones, and not to seem to be making any personal overture, from which people would naturally withdraw. One did not make inconvenient, hothouse friendships in the place one lived in, here. Therefore she had decided to limit her approaches to three—the first to the girl who lived in the adjacent apartment, who could usually be encountered at this hour and was the only tenant she knew for sure lived in the front of the building—back tenants were less likely to have heard. For the rest, she must trust to luck. And whatever the outcome, she would not let herself pursue the matter beyond today.