Tale for the Mirror Read online

  “I never did much to this room except put in the pianos,” said Mrs. Hawthorn. “It’s practically the same as when we got married, the year Harry’s mother died, and he came back from France. We had some helluva parties here, though. Wonderful!” And now, as I followed her glance, I fancied that I detected in the room a faint, raffish overglaze of the early twenties, when I was too young to go to parties—here and there a hassock, still loudly black-and-white, a few of those ballerina book ends everyone used to have, and yes, there, hung in a corner, a couple of old batiks. Dozens of people could have sprawled here, the young men with their bell bottomed trousers, the girls with their Tutankhamen eardrops, pointed pumps, and orange-ice-colored silk knees. The weathered wicker would have absorbed the spilled drinks without comment, and cigarette burns would have been hilariously added to the burnt-leather cushions. Yes, it could have been a hell of a room for a party.

  Mrs. Hawthorn led us to the windows and pointed out into the dark, staring through it with the sure, commanding eye of the householder. “You can’t see, of course, but we’re on three bodies of water here—the river, the Sound, and the ocean. There’s the end of the dock—the Coast Guard still ties up there once in a while, although we don’t keep it up any more. When I was a kid, it used to be fitted out like a summer hotel. I used to swim around the point and watch them.” Then, I thought, she would not have been one of the three little girls in the bottom row of the picture—she would never have been in that picture at all.

  She closed the curtain. “Let me show you your room, then we’ll be off.” She led us upstairs, into a comfortable, nondescript bedroom. “That’s my door, across the hall. Knock when you’re ready.”

  “Oh, it won’t take a minute to change,” I said.

  “Change? Dear, you don’t have to change.”

  “Oh, but we’ve brought our evening things,” I said. “It’ll only take us a minute.” There was a slight wail to my voice.

  “Really it won’t,” said Luke. “We’re awfully sorry if we’ve delayed you, but we’ll rush.”

  We continued our protests for a minute, standing there in the hall. She leaned down and patted my shoulder, looking at me with that musing smile older women wore when they leaned over baby carriages. I had encountered that look often that year, among my mother’s friends. “No, run along, and never mind,” she said. “Nobody else is going to be there.”

  In front of the mirror in our room, I ran a comb through my curls. “Nobody who is anybody, I suppose she meant. I can’t imagine why else she picked on us. And when I think of those awful shoes!”

  “You can wear them at home,” said Luke. “I like women to be flashy around the house. Come on, you look wonderful.”

  “I’m going to change to them anyway. They’ll dance better.”

  “You’ll only have to dance half the dances.”

  “Luke—” I slid my feet into the shoes and twisted to check my stocking seams. “Do you suppose that little man, Dave, will be there? Do you suppose we’re being used as a sort of cover?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know. Come on.”

  “Don’t you think it’s funny she doesn’t say where the Senator is? At least make his excuses or something?”

  “Away on business, probably.”

  “Well, why isn’t she in Washington with him, then? I would be—if it were you.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “But how come you got through college? There’s no Connecticut senator to Washington named Hawthorn.”

  “Luke! I knew there was something fishy! Maybe there isn’t any Senator. Or maybe he’s divorced her, and nobody around here will know her. Or maybe she’s a little off, from his being dead, and wants to go on pretending he’s alive. With people like us—who wouldn’t know.”

  He put back his head in laughter. “Now I know how you did get through college.” He kissed the back of my neck, and pushed me through the door. “State senator, dope,” he whispered, as we knocked at Mrs. Hawthorn’s.

  “Ready?” She opened the door and held it back in such a way that we knew we were to look in. “This is the only room I changed,” she said. “I had it done again last year, the same way. I thought the man from Sloane would drop in his tracks when I insisted on the same thing. All that pink. Ninety yards of it in the curtains alone.” She laughed, as she had done at the child in Bermuda. “Of course I had no idea back then…I thought it was lovely, so help me. And now I’m used to it.”

  We looked around. All that pink, as she had said. The room, from its shape, must be directly above the big room below; its great windows jutted out like a huge pink prow, overlooking the three bodies of water. Chairs with the sickly sheen of hard candy pursed their Louis Quatorze legs on a rose madder rug, under lamps the tinge of old powder puffs. There were a few glossy prints on the walls—nymphs couched like bonbons in ambiguous verdure. Marble putti held back the curtains, and each morning, between ninety yards of rosy lingerie, there would rise the craggy, seamed face of the sea.

  Mrs. Hawthorn put her hand on one of the cherubs, and looked out. “We sailed from there on our honeymoon,” she said. “On the old Hawthorns’ yacht, right from the end of the dock. I remember thinking it would give, there were so many people on the end of it.” She took a fur from a chair, slung it around her shoulders, and walked to the door. At the door, she turned back and surveyed the room. “Ain’t it orful!” she said, in her normal voice. “Harry can’t bear it.”

  She had two voices, I thought, as we followed her downstairs and got in the car she referred to as her runabout, that she’d made Harry give her in place of the chauffeur-driven Rolls. One voice for that tranced tale of first possession—when the house, the dock, the boudoir, Harry were new. And one for now—slangy, agnostic, amused.

  She drove well, the way she swam, with a crisp, physical intensity. There had been bridle paths through these woods, she told us, but she hadn’t really minded giving up the horses; swimming was the only thing she liked to do alone. She swam every day; it kept her weight down to the same as when she married. “You’ll be having to pick yourself some exercise now too, honey,” she said, sighing. “And stick to it the rest of your days.”

  We would turn on to the main road soon, I thought, probably to one of those roadhouses full of Saturday night daters such as Luke and I had been the year before, spinning out the evening on the cover charge and a couple of setups, and looking down our noses at the fat middle-agers who did not have to watch the tab, but were such a nuisance on the floor.

  The car veered suddenly to the left, and reduced speed. Now we seemed to be riding on one of the overgrown paths. Twigs whipped through the open window and slurred out again as we passed. Beside me, Luke rolled up the window. We were all in the front seat together. No one spoke.

  We stopped. We must be in the heart of the woods, I thought. There was nothing except the blind probe of the headlamps against leaves, the scraping of the November wind.

  “Guess the switch from the house doesn’t work any more,” she said, half to herself. She took a flashlight from the compartment. “Wait here,” she said, and got out of the car. After she had gone, I opened the window and leaned across Luke, holding on to his hand. Above me, the stars were enlarged by the pure air. Off somewhere to the right, the flashlight made a weak, disappearing nimbus.

  Then, suddenly, the woods were en fête. Festoons of lights spattered from tree to tree. Ahead of us, necromanced from the dark wood, the pattern of a house sprang on the air. After a moment our slow eyes saw that strings of lights garlanded its low log-cabin eaves, and twined up the two thick thrusts of chimney at either end. The flashlight wigwagged to us. We got out of the car, and walked toward it. Mrs. Hawthorn was leaning against one of the illuminated trees, looking up at the house. The furs slung back from her shoulders in a conqueror’s arc. As we approached, she shook her head, in a swimmer’s shake. “Well, ladies and gents,” she said, in the cool, the vinaigrette voice, “here it is.”

  “Is it
—is this the night club?” I said.

  “This is it, baby,” she said, and the way she said it made me feel as if she had reached down and ruffled my curls. Instead, she reached up, and pressed a fuse box attached to the tree. For a minute, the red dazzle of the sign on the roof of the house made us blink. GINGER AND HARRY’S it said. There were one or two gaps in GINGER, and the second R of HARRY’S was gone, but the AND was perfect.

  “Woods are death on electric lines,” she said. Leading the way up the flagged path to the door, she bent down, muttering, and twitched at the weeds that had pushed up between the flags.

  She unlocked the door. “We no longer heat it, of course. The pipes are drained. But I had them build fires this afternoon.”

  It was cold in the vestibule, just as it often was in the boxlike entrances of the roadhouses we knew, and, with its bare wood and plaster, it was just like them too—as if the flash and jump were reserved for the sure customers inside. To our right was the hat-check stall, with its brass tags hung on hooks, and a white dish for quarters and dimes.

  “I never had any servants around here,” said Mrs. Hawthorn. “The girls used to take turns in the cloakroom, and the men used to tumble over themselves for a chance to tend bar, or be bouncer. Lord, it was fun. We had a kid from Hollywood here one night, one of the Wampas stars, and we sneaked her in as ladies’ matron, before anyone knew who she was. What a stampede there was, when the boys found out!”

  I bent down to decipher a tiled plaque in the plaster, with three initials and a date—1918. Mrs. Hawthorn saw me looking at it.

  “As my mother used to say,” she said. “Never have your picture taken in a hat.”

  Inside, she showed us the lounges for the men and the women—the men’s in red leather, hunting prints, and green baize. In the powder room, done in magenta and blue, with girandoles and ball fringe, with poufs and mirrored dressing tables, someone had hit even more precisely the exact note of the smart public retiring room—every woman a Pompadour, for ten minutes between dances.

  “I did this all myself,” she said. “From top to bottom. Harry had a bad leg when he came back—he was in an army hospital before we got married. He gave me my wedding present ahead of time—enough to remodel the old place, or build a new one. I surprised him. I built this place instead.”

  “Is his leg all right now?” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “His leg. Is it all right now?”

  “Yes, of course. That was donkey’s years ago.” She was vague, as if about a different person. Behind her, Luke shook his head at me.

  “And now…” she said. “Now…come in where it’s warm.” And this time my ear picked up that tone of hers as it might a motif—that deep, rubato tone of possession fired by memory. She opened the door for us, but for a scant moment before, with her hand on the knob, she approached it as a curator might pause before his Cellini, or a hostess before the lion of her afternoon.

  And here it was. The two fires burned at either end; the sultry hooded sidelights reflected here and there on the pale, unscarred dance floor. The little round tables were neatly stacked at its edge, all but one table that was set for service, as if now that it was 3 A.M. or four, the fat proprietor and his headwaiter might just be sitting down for their morning bowl of soup. On the wall, behind the tables, flickered the eternal mural, elongated bal-masqué figures and vaudeville backdrops, painted dim even when new, and never meant to be really seen. It could be the one of the harlequin-faced young men with top hats and canes, doing a soft-shoe routine against an after-dark sky. Or it might be the one of the tapering Venuses with the not-quite bodies, behind prussian-blue intimations of Versailles. It did not matter. Here was the “Inn,” the “Club,” the “Spot,” the Glen Island, where one danced to Ozzie Nelson, the Log Cabin at Armonk, the one near Rumson, with the hot guitarist, the innumerable ones where, for an evening or a week of evenings, Vincent Lopez’s teeth glinted like piano keys under his mustache. The names would have varied somewhat from these names of the thirties, but here it was, with the orchestra shell waiting—the podium a little toward one end, so that the leader might ride sidesaddle, his suave cheek for the tables, his talented wrist for the band. Only the air was different, pure and still, without the hot, confectionery smell of the crowd. And the twin fires, though they were burning true and red, had fallen in a little, fallen back before the chill advance of the woods.

  So, for the second time, we sat down to champagne with Mrs. Hawthorn. There was a big phonograph hidden in a corner; after a while she set it going, and we danced, Luke first with her, then with me. And now, as the champagne went to our heads, it was not the logs, or the chair arms that moved, but we who moved, looping and twirling to the succulent long-phrased music, laughing and excited with the extraordinary freedom of the floor. I thought of Dave, the little man, but Mrs. Hawthorn never mentioned his name. She was warm, gay—“like a young girl”—as I had heard it said now and then of an older woman. I had thought that this could not be so without grotesquerie, but now, with the wisdom of the wine, I imagined that it could—if it came from inside. She had the sudden, firm bloom of those people who really expand only in their own homes. For the first time, we were seeing her there.

  Toward the evening’s height, she brought out some old jazz records, made specially for her, with the drum and cymbal parts left out, and from the wings back of the podium she drew out the traps, the cymbals, and the snare. In the old days, she told us, everybody who came did a turn. The turn with the drums had been hers. We made her play some of the songs for us, songs I remembered, or thought I remembered, from childhood, things like Dardanella and Jadda Jadda Jing Jing Jing. She had some almost new ones too—Melancholy Baby, and Those Little White Lies. We gave her a big hand.

  Then, just as we began to speak of tiring, of going to bed because we had to drive back early the next day, she let the drumsticks fall, and put her fingers to her mouth. “Why, I forgot it!” she said. “I almost forgot to show you the best thing of all!” She reached up with the other hand, and turned off the big spotlight over the orchestra shell.

  Once more, only the sidelights glowed, behind their tinted shades. Then the center ceiling light began to move. I hadn’t noticed it before; it was so much like what one expected of these places. That was the point—that it was. It was one of those fixtures made of several tiers of stained glass, with concealed slots of lights focused in some way, so that as it revolved, and the dancers revolved under it, bubbles of color would slide over their faces, run in chromatic patches over the tables, and dot the far corners of the room.

  “Dance under it,” she said. “I’ll play for you.” Obediently, we put our arms around one another, and danced. She played Good Night, Ladies. The drums hardly sounded at all. When it was over, she let the sticks rest in her lap. The chandelier turned, silently. Oval blobs of light passed over her face, greening it and flushing it like long, colored tears. Between the lights, I imagined that she was looking at us, as if she knew something about us that we ourselves did not know. “It was lovely,” she said. “That first year.” And this time I could not have said which of her two voices she had used.

  We left early the next morning. By prearrangement, she was to sleep late and not bother about us, and in a sense we did not see her again. But, as we drove down the private road, we stopped for a moment at a gap in the trees, to see the sun shining, great, over the sea. There was a tall, gray matchstick figure on the end of the dock. As we watched, it dove. She could not have seen us; probably she would not have wanted to. She was doing the exercise to keep her weight down, perhaps, or swimming around the dock, as she had done as a child. Or perhaps she was doing the only thing she cared to do alone. It was certainly she. For as the figure came up, we saw its arm—the one mailed arm, flashing in the sun.

  During the next few years I often used to tell the story of our visit to Hawthornton. So many casual topics brought it up so naturally—Bermuda, the people one meets whe
n one travels, the magnified eccentricities of the rich. When it became fashionable to see the twenties as the great arterial spurt of the century’s youth, I even told it that way, making her seem a symbol, a denizen of that time. I no longer speculated on why she had invited us; I never made that the point of the story. But for some time now I have known why, and now that I do, I know how to tell her story at last. For now that I know why, it is no longer Mrs. Hawthorn’s story. It is ours.

  It is almost eighteen years since we were at Mrs. Hawthorn’s, just as it was then almost eighteen years since Harry had come back from France. I was never to meet anyone who knew them, nor was I ever to see her again. But I know now that there was never any special mystery about her and Harry. Only the ordinary mystery of the distance that seeps between people, even while they live and lie together as close as knives.

  Luke is in the garden now. His face passes the window, intent on raking the leaves. Yet he is as far from me now as ever Harry was from Hawthornton, wherever Harry was that day. He and I are not rich; we do not have the externalizations of the rich. Yet, silently, silently, we too have drawn in our horns.

  So, sometimes, when I walk in the woods near our house, it is to a night club that I walk. I sit down on a patch of moss, and I am sitting at the little round table on the unscarred floor. I fold my hands. Above me, the glass dome turns. I watch them—the two people, about whom I know something they themselves do not know. This is what I see:

  It is a long, umber autumn afternoon. To the left the sun drops slowly, a red disc without penumbra. Along the country roads, the pines and firs are black-green, with the somber deadness of a tyro’s painting of Italy. Lights pop up in the soiled gray backs of towns. Inside the chugging little car the heater warms them; they are each with the one necessary person; they have made love the night before. The rest of the world, if it could, would be like them.