Going down the path, his military gait made it clear that it was not assistance he required. At the car, the chauffeur, stooping, held open the rear door. He and Mr. Dee seemed of an age.
Mr. Dee paused. “From the board’s point of view, I find this unaccountable of you, Mr. Garner. Personally, I can see that man’s engaged your sympathy.” He put a hand on Garner’s arm. “Let me give you a warning my father gave me: Beware of the man who won’t admit he likes money—he’ll end up with yours.” He turned to get in the car, then paused again. “Darjeeling!” he whispered angrily. “If that was anything but plain pekoe, I should be very much surprised!”
Garner watched the car disappear up the road, half amused, half impatient over the way he had wasted the haven of his Sunday morning like a schoolboy dangling beneath the concerns of his elders. He had been interrupted in his soothing routine of those repetitive acts of repair for which his house, blessed incubus, had an endless appetite. Out of habit, he looked at the river, pouring along south as private and intent as the blue skeins one remembered to notice now and then in one’s wrists. How far up it did one have to go, these days, before one came to the real places, short-summered and Appalachian-cool, where a broken window was vital to life, a lantern was a lantern, and the ground woke every morning to its own importance? Too far for him, staked to the city like a dog on a string. This was as far as he could go.
Turning to go, he faced the doctor, who had followed him down the steps.
“He has much mo-ney, this Misser Dee?”
“No. Actually…almost none. The car was a friend’s.”
“It is not his own property he defends then, this little dragon?”
“Well—no.”
Bhatta burst into laughter. Silent chuckles shook his belly, tinted his jowl. “Excuse me, Misser Garner. Really I am laughing at myself—for not yet being assimilated.” He mopped at his eyes with a large ocher silk handkerchief. “So—he is only a proxy dragon, har?” He swung around for his usual appraisal of his own house. His eyes flicked past the summerhouse, and he bent to probe a heavy finger into a rose. “Well…every man has to tell himself some little tale in the dark, har? So as not to really see himself in the mirror the next morning.” The rose sprang back, released. “Even in this clear air. Even an early set-tler.”
Over at the far edge of his own property, Garner saw Amelia turning their car into their driveway. Children tumbled out of the car—his own, and several of the neighbors’—and ran into the house. He waved, but Amelia followed them in without seeing him. And perhaps because she had innocently not seen him malingering here, and because, although he rarely saw his children romantically, he had for a moment caught them aureoled against the silent witch-point of the summerhouse, he spoke in sudden anger. “It’s Miss Prager’s story I’d like to have. And if you please—the facts. I’m not much for metaphor.”
“Really?” The doctor squinted. “I would have said otherwise. But, as you say. Do not blame me if the facts are odd.” He motioned to a bench, on which they seated themselves. Bhatta buttoned the top button of his shirt, shot a cuff, making, as it were, professional corrections to his appearance, and began to speak, with astonishing briskness. “Last year, a patient is very grateful; he gives me a house. Before he sails for Europe, he says to me, ‘Bhatta, between us mo-ney would be an indelicacy. Take from me this house, which I have bought unseen for taxes, near the beautiful section of Brooklyn Heights.’”
Bhatta paused, shook his head mournfully, and went quickly on. “But when the ladies and I go there, I think probably he is not so grateful after all. Not a rescuable house. Even Miss Leeby shakes her head. We are sadly locking the door, so the wind will not blow it into the harbor, when Miss Leeby goes down cellar to look once more at the pipes. And there, in a room at the back, is Miss Prager. Fainted, we think. No—it is catatonic, and malnutrition. We talk with the neighbors; only one old lady is there who remembers. And what she tells us—”
The doctor spread his hands. His voice had become measurably softer. “Imagine, Misser Garner. A family has been mildewing in that house for twenty years. Years ago, there were three people, the father, the mother, the daughter. Lutherans, very strict, very distant. The father absconds from his bank—he was president—taking with him much mo-ney. Later on, gossip says that he comes secretly back, but no one is ever sure. Only the old woman we speak to remembers—the neighborhood is no longer Lutheran. Only Miss Prager, the daughter, is seen, night and morning for years now, coming from the bank, where she has always been cashier. The neighbors know of an invalid upstairs in the house, but not whether it is a man or a woman. There is never a doctor. At night, one light upstairs, one down. Then, some months before we come—a fire in the house next door. Prager’s is only smoked out, but the firemen remove for safety an old person from the top floor. Hugely fat, this person, too fat to move, long hair, and a dreadful sore on the leg. From the description—maybe diabetic ulcer. Even in the smoke, the neighbors say, they can remember the smell from the leg. After that—nothing. They do not remember when Miss Prager stops going to the bank. They do not know her. The house is closed. They do not remember when they no longer see her at all. It is a busy neighborhood, Brooklyn.”
Garner shivered in spite of himself, and shook himself to cover it, to shake himself free of the doctor’s persuasion, which, even in briskness, had a soft insistence, as if on some central metaphor to which his listener must be privy too. The wind had become more positive than the sun—and Amelia would be wanting him in. But he had been a boy in neighborhoods not too far from such as the doctor had described, and he was remembering, with the self-induced chill of childhood, crabbed parlor recluses candled fitfully between curtain slits, dim basement monks whose legend, leaking from the areaways at dusk, scattered the children from the stoops. “Was it…it was the father then?” he said.
Bhatta’s broad lips curved in a sudden Eastern symmetry. “A fact we do not check, Misser Garner. When we bring her home with us she is…” He shrugged. “She carries her cage with her, and we cannot persuade her out of it. To humor her fears, the ladies fix her the little place there.” He pointed up the hill. “But I find the bank, Misser Garner. Natur-ally,” he drawled, “if she has resources, we must find them for her. And what they tell me there, although they do not realize they are telling me it…” Bhatta paused, hands outspread. “Picture it, the same bank, but so modern, so airy now. At each desk, young ladies with hair like brass bowls. It is hard to imagine Miss Prager there. And the manager, in his cage that everyone can see is real—such a new young man, in a suit the color of chicken skin, and a bump in his throat that moves like a bobbin. He knows nothing of Miss Prager’s father. Such a man does not deal by memory. Such a place cannot afford a memory. But ‘Miss Prager,’ he says—‘until a year or so ago?—quite so. There is the Social Security index, the personnel file—and on the card there, yes, a little record of something that was not—quite so.’ Two or three telephone calls, two or three moves of the bobbin, and there on the manager’s desk—although of course he does not see her—lies Miss Prager and her twenty years.”
Bhatta paused again. There was no defense against his pauses, Garner thought with violence—one pushed against them in vain, as one resisted a concert conductor who inexorably took his music slow.
“Banks are so jolly in your country,” said Bhatta. “Like the one in the village here—a little white cottage with window boxes. And when your ladies take the children inside, the children do not hang on their mothers’ skirts. They slide on the floor, and sometimes the manager gives them a little plastic penny bank—the way the baker gives them a cookie. Banks should be like the English bank in India, when I was a boy. A stern place, full of dark whispers, where the teller scoops up the mo-ney with a black trowel, and weighs it on a swinging chain-scale from Manchester. Then, at least, a child can be warned.”
“You mean Miss Prager had embezzled?” said Garner.
Bhatta whisked out his ha
ndkerchief again, flirting it as if it concealed something maneuverable behind. “I forget you are a lawyer, Misser Garner. And so direct—like all Americans. Your honest men and your crooks—all so direct. It is a pity. You lose much.” He touched the handkerchief to his lips. “No, I do not mean. Miss Prager was true to the bank. She herself owed them nothing. And alas, they owed her nothing. She had embezzled—only herself.”
Across from them, the back door of Garner’s house flew open, and eight or ten children rushed pell-mell from it and ran up Garner’s hillside. Behind the high rhododendron and barberry, their creamy voices scuttled excitedly, belled by the loud, authoritative birthday voice of Sukey.
“I must go,” said Garner, getting up. “My kids are having a party. They’re up there now, having a treasure hunt. You see—our hill’s kind of their playground. Even if you gave me your assurance that Miss Prager is not…dangerous…I’d hate to think she might frighten them in any way.”
“She will not go near them, Misser Garner. She will not touch them.” The doctor rose too, placing a hand on Garner’s arm. “You see—literally she will not touch anything. She is afraid of her own hands. That is what the bank tells me. One morning they find her at the cashier’s window, in a daze. Her hands will not touch the mo-ney, she says. She is resting her hands now, she tells them. Naturally, what can they do? A cashier who will not touch mo-ney! That must be why she is starving when we find her. She tells us too that she is resting her hands. But actually she is afraid of them. She does not like to touch herself with them.” Bhatta smiled, releasing Garner’s arm. “Pitiful, har? Actually, rather a common form…but developed to the extreme. We have done pretty well with her. Now she feeds herself, and she will work at clearing the brush. But you have seen how sometimes she forgets, and holds her arms?” The doctor cocked his head, listening to the children’s voices. They were chattering excitedly, and syrupy wails came from the younger ones.
“Charming,” said Bhatta. “What is this game they are playing?”
Garner explained.
“But how charming! And what is in the little bags?”
“There’s my wife, coming after me I guess,” said Garner, and indeed Amelia was advancing toward them. Through the opening in the hedge, the children trooped after her and surrounded her. “Daddy! Daddy!” shrieked Sukey.
Amelia quieted her with a gesture. She nodded briefly to the doctor, and knitted her brows meaningfully at Garner. Her face was pink with reproach. “John! The bags are gone from the hill. Every one of them. There’s not one!”
“Somebody stole them! Somebody stole them!” Sukey danced up and down with excitement.
The other children took up the refrain and the dance. Garner looked at his youngest, Bobbie, who was aping the others with improvisatory glee. “You don’t suppose that he—?”
“John, he’s not capable of it. They’ve disappeared. Besides, the children have been with me every minute. We only put the bags out last night. You know what I think?” She took a step toward Bhatta, her mild face dilated. Taking their mood from her, the children clustered round her, staring at the doctor. There was no brood-hen room for them in her narrow tweed skirt, but she pressed them against her with her prematurely knuckled, detergent-worn hands. “I think it’s that person you—you have up there!”
“Thought I saw someone moving around up there this morning,” said Garner. “Before it was light. Forgot all about it.”
“Pos-sible,” said the doctor. “If so, remarkably interesting. Why do we not go and see?” He bent benevolently toward Sukey. “You are really having your hunt, har? Let us go and see.”
“Indeed not!” said Amelia. “You children come back to the house with me.” But led by Sukey, the children had already escaped her, and were running up to the hut. It was clear that the presence there was no news to them. Garner and the others reached them just as they drew back at the railing of the pavilion, their little ferreting noses arrested in uneasy obedience.
The doctor knocked gently at the center shutter, to which a knob of wood had been crudely affixed. Behind his bulbous, stooped form, the blind pavilion, little more than man-high, and puzzled together from old splinters of the past, had the queer coyness of a dollhouse in which something, always on the run from the giant thumb, might be living after all.
“Miss Prager?” said the doctor softly. “Miss Prager?”
There was no answer from within, nor did the doctor seem to expect one. He pushed inward the unlocked shutter, and stepped inside. For a moment they could see nothing except the small, swelling flame of a hurricane lamp. Then he opened a shutter at the back and daylight filtered in, neutering the lamp, winking it into place on a chain hung from the roof-point. Half the rough wood hexagonal table that had once filled the place, paralleling the sides, had been cut away, leaving room for a small pallet. Behind it, on part of the window seat that encircled the room, there was a pile of underclothes, a mackinaw, a pitcher, besides some cracker boxes still in their bright paper. Next to these, a pair of black house slippers with curled silk pompoms glistened unworn, as if presented by hopeful nieces to an intractable aunt. Behind the other side of the table sat Miss Prager. In the current of air between the two shutters, compounded of the hot funk of the oil lamp and the tobaccony damp of wood-mold, she sat motionless, upright, arms spread-eagled on the table, in front of all the little gutted bags.
Sukey cried out sharply, “There it—!” and hushed. But they had all seen the dime-store money, neatly rectangled in piles, the toy snakes and babies tumbled to one side.
At Sukey’s cry, Miss Prager wilted into consciousness. Her elbows contracted to her sides. She was working in a narrow space, the elbows said. Her hands moved forward, picked up a packet of the money and shuffled it expertly, counting it out. One two three four, thump. One two three four, thump, the hands went, moving of themselves. The middle right finger flicked the bills like the spoke of a wheel. At each fifth thump, the spatulate thumb came down. Miss Prager stared fixedly at the lamp, but all the while her hands moved so lucidly that one almost saw the red rubber casing on the middle finger, the morning business sun, glinting on withdrawals and deposits, behind the freshly wiped bronze bars. Beneath her fixed gaze, her hands went on transacting without her, and came to no conclusion.
This was what they saw before the doctor closed the door, and stood with his back to it. He looked over the children and picked out Sukey, who was standing well forward, one arm pressing her small brother to her stubby skirt, in angular imitation of her mother. The doctor beckoned to her, as to the natural leader of the children. And she was, she would always be, thought Garner, seeing his daughter in that quickened outline which drama penciled around the familiar. Here was no city febrile, here was none of that pavement wistfulness of tenure such as Amelia and he, even middle-class as they had been, had known as children. She was more intrepid, more secure, because they had grounded her here.
“She’s got our bags,” said Sukey.
“So she has,” said the doctor, smiling. “She has been ill, and did not know they were yours. I tell you what—suppose you all come back after lunch, har? Meanwhile, the ladies will put all the things back in the bags, and hide them on our side of the hill. That will be exciting, har, to hunt in a new place? And in each bag, for each child—there will be a prize from India!”
And so it was arranged. Garner, following behind Amelia to herd the children inside, saw Miss Leeby enter the summerhouse, and shut the door behind her. Later, after lunch, as he carried the debris of cake and ice cream into the kitchen, while the front of the house rang with the shrieks of blindman’s buff, he saw two figures through the kitchen window, which had a view of Kuyper’s hill as well as of his own.
It was the nephew and Miss Daria, stooping here and there on their part of the hillside, to hide the bags. He barely knew them, that ill-assorted pair, and it could be assumed that they scarcely knew each other, but he found himself looking at the two figures, rounded over in the
blameless posture of sowing, with the enmity of a proprietor watching his boundary lines, his preserves. It was not, surely, that he resented the foreigner, the alien. He and Amelia were of the college-disciplined generation that had made a zeal of tolerance. But for the first time, watching these two figures from a ménage that had suddenly bloomed next door to him like an overnight morel, he felt a shameful, a peasant creeping of resentment, almost an abdominal stiffening against persons that different—and that near. Let them keep their difference, but at a distance, he thought. At closer range, a foreign way of life, wrong or right, posed too many questions at one’s own. Questions that he was not up to answering as yet, that he was not interested in having answered. Bhatta no doubt made a career of posing questions at the uncertain, holding out the bait of answers to be rendered at a stiff fee. “Way of life” was a flabby phrase perhaps, thought Garner, but since he and Amelia were conducting themselves as thousands of well-meaning couples all over the country were, he presumed that they had one, although its outlines might be obscure. If their affiliations—he thought of Mr. Dee—were still too vague to bear perspective, he supposed that time would sculp them clearer, doing for the contemporary what it had done for all others. Perhaps his own affiliation to his way of living was not old enough, not deep enough, for self-scrutiny. “It doesn’t do to get too thick,” he muttered to himself. “It won’t do.”
So, when Miss Daria came to the door, with the message that “the Doctor would receive them now”—there was no doubt that the doctor’s ladies thought him the personage to others that he must be to them—Garner relayed the message to Amelia. She came into the kitchen, shunting the children before her, herding them with an abstracted tongue-lash here, a pat on the buttocks there, showing her own physical sense of herself as still their nursing center. All the neighborhood mothers of younger children had this; it was in the tugged hang of their daily clothes, in the tired but satiate burr of their voices, it was no doubt what grounded them.
Tale for the Mirror Page 25