Tale for the Mirror Page 8

  The doorbell rings and now my father rises, eager, nostrils sniffing the true pursuit of the morning. For the second prerequisite for a Victorian household is that all morning long its doors, front and back, be applied to by processions of those who either bring special services or require them. Before noon we will have had, besides our regular shipment of eggs from coquettishly pastoral places with names like Robin Roost, of French Vichy from the drugstore, and panatela cigars from the little Spaniard in Harlem, also various but unvarying visits from upholsterers, dressmakers, opticians, even a bootlegger whose ton, like all the others, so remarkably suits us—a rococo little man, trapped like us, between two eras, who carries a cardcase and deals only in wine. In between come the variables, perhaps a former servant girl with her new baby, or a long-lost cousin with her old debts (both of them aware that petitions will not do as well in the afternoon, which is my mother’s dominion), or perhaps an old-clothes man who does not yet know that we never ever sell anything off, we only buy. Even he is detained long enough to learn that he has one commodity for which my father will find some way to reward him—conversation.

  “It’s the Walker-Gordon man,” my mother says, in triumph, and my father sits down. This is the man who delivers the special acidophilus milk for my brother, a routine meant to cease in the first month after birth but prolonged by my father so that the heir may have his traditions too. In other respects it has been a failure—the Walker-Gordon man will not stop to talk.

  Providentially, Mrs. Huber enters to say that if my father wishes to pay his usual visit to the nursery, will he kindly do so at once, so that she may get her charge out in the sun “while it is high.” As soon as he is gone, my mother puts on her hat, not that he will take the hint, but it makes her feel better, and besides, since there is no routine left to him now except his half hour’s reading to my grandmother, and since this has been an exceptionally reasonable morning so far, it is just possible that, if no bells ring, she may get him off by eleven, which is at least a half hour better than par.

  I am quite used to seeing her go about her housewifery for hours on end thus hatted; she was wearing one on that extraordinary day when, in a similar period of waiting, she suddenly lifted her petticoats, revealing to my pleased eye that although she had laughed at my yellow satin Christmas garters she sometimes wore them, took three steps back, and kicked the dining-room clock. There is red in her eye now as she looks in on me in passing, but she will kick no more clocks. The subsequent sal volatile and sweeping-up provided my father with an hour’s valid delay, and the clock returned from repair “same like ever” just as the old watchmaker had promised, that is, running ten minutes later than the one in the hall.

  But joy of joys, here he is and it is only eleven, and he has actually already completed his devoirs to his mother, his matins to his son—it must be the spring, ding-a-ding, for matters ’gin arise, time’s on the run, and father makes for the hatrack, on which his bowler lies…And two bells ring.

  At the front door. At the back. And now there is no device of wit, verb or cachinnation by which I can follow the final counterpoint of my father, the a cappella exits and returns by which he halts, circles, hedges, rises to the high C of delay, and ultimately, coda, goes.

  Let me try. The ring at the front door belongs to Mr. Krauss the cabinetmaker, who comes to us once a month, to feed the furniture. There is nothing outré about this; we have masses of elderly wood and veneer that apartment-house heat withers, and Mr. Krauss spends an earnest day feeding linseed oil and casauba to our parched gargoyles, griffons and lion-footed tables, never troubled by any fantasy that he might do as well by placing his supplies in the center of the arena and quickly taking his leave. He is a tall, cavernous German, full of Hegelian pauses through which occasionally climbs one memorable phrase—the kind of old-fashioned workingman whose society is always courted by urban men like my father. The ring at the back door belongs to Cyril, one of the West Indian elevator boys, who can also talk Creole. He has come to borrow my father’s roulette wheel, and this I shall not bother to explain; if by now it does not seem perfectly natural, there is no more to be done. No, better to leave them at once, the three of them bogged there forever, Cyril’s winsome causerie on one side, Krauss’s silence on the other, and my father somewhere in between them, with his foot on the stile.

  He goes at last, of course, although I never seem to see him do it, only hearing his parting, customary cry. It is his one mock-fierce threat, one so gay, so mild, so aptly like him, yet its frisson always travels up my spine as no threat of the cat-o’-ninetails could. “Be a good girl!” he always cries. “Else I’ll throw you into the middle of next week!”

  Now my mother is left in her bevy of women, free to chivy us back into her century. As dusk advances, her siege of him will be renewed by telephone, and pointed the other way, toward us, as she begins to doubt that he will ever again come in the door she was at such pains to get him out of; for an office where there is plenty of time is just as hard to leave, and all the way up the avenue from the subway station there are cracker-barrels which know Mr. Joe. Now, however, she rests. One more morning has passed without realizing her worst fear—that the dreadful, shiftless day will come when he will still be there for lunch.

  But he comes, and evening with him, and all his clan gathered to him from block and cranny, and then his star rises to its full. For in the end he draws us all back with him into his calm antipodes. Supper-talk is slowed, appetites dreamy, now may our griffons protect us, our curtains swaddle. Even my mother has stopped her White Queen running and sinks in her chair, a little muzzy with life, as at those times when she can be persuaded to a single glass of ruby claret. I fall asleep on the davenport, smelling its ageless, mummy leather, hearing the murmur of the elders. The last thing I see is my father, his eyes sweet with triumph. The vital threads of existence are blending, yet endless, the furniture is fed. We are all together with him in the now, rocking in the upholstered moment, in the fur-lined teacup of Time. The lamps are lit for the night, against that death which is change. And tomorrow, da capo, it is all to do over again.

  And now I am awake on another night, tonight. Thirty years have gone by, and I no longer hear the murmuring of the elders. All around me, as I slept back there, my own century was coming to the fore. Flappers, streaking by me in Stutzes and Auburns, were already disappearing over the edge of their era; each day the stock market climbed like the horses of Apollo, yet at nightfall had not come down. Later would come the false stillness of the thirties when hands hung heavy; then, with a proletarian clanking of machinery we would be off again, into a war, into the self-induced palpitations of the forties, as, pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, we changed matter into light, outdistanced sound, and came roaring out upon the strait turnpike of the fifties in our new pink cars.

  And now there is nothing left to outdistance, except Time. I am awake wherever I am; is it on the rim of the world, the lip of the Time-machine? All around me there is a cold, sublunary glare, the sourceless light of science fiction, that greens the skin, divorces cell from cell.

  I know where I am now. If there are any gods in this place I must pray to them, as once one could to the comfortable old evils of Ra or Baal. I must pray to s-s-s, or b-oom. For this place is the middle of next week.

  Then, from over the rim of the world, I hear voices, the dividing voices.

  “Run! Run!” says my mother. “Can’t you run a little faster!”

  And then I hear my father’s voice, Rhadamanthine, serene. “You have time,” says my father. “All the time in the world.”

  And from the pinpoint where I stand, I can see it, the old place, lit up bravely as a fish bowl against the dark shadows of eternity, moving slowly while it persuades itself that it stands still—the whole improbable shebang, falling through the clear ether silently, with all its house lights on.

  May-ry

  MY FATHER, BORN IN Richmond about the time Grant took it, was a Southerner therefore, b
ut a very kind man. All of us—children of his sixties, with abolitionist consciences—knew that. The limits of his malice extended to flies, and to people who hit children or mistreated the helpless anywhere. His pocket was always to be picked by any applicant, and no matter how many times my mother, much more of a grenadier, pointed out where they did him in, he remained the softest touch in the world.

  His manners were persistently tender to everyone, and perhaps because he looked and dressed somewhat like Mark Twain and shared a small, redeeming slice of Twain’s humor, nobody ever seemed to find this saccharine. He was, for instance, the only person I ever knew who could chuck a carriage baby under its chin and goo at it—“Coo-chee-coo!”—without making anybody gag at the sight, or doubt for one minute that it was done out of pure spontaneity and love. Yes, he was the kindest man in the world. Yet, when the time came, it was my father who was purely unkind to our colored maid Mary—May-ry.

  May-ry, who must have been about thirty at the time I speak of, was no old family retainer; she had come to work for us, her first job in New York, through an ad in the Times ten years back, when I was very little. Even then, our family had already been forty years away from the South. But my father’s memories of the first twenty years of his youth there were deep and final. At bedtime he would often tell us of Awnt Nell, the mammy who had brought him up, although he never mentioned her in public—“too many Southern colonels around already.” Awnt Nell had been a freedwoman; even before the War our grandmother, his mother, would never have servants of any other description. He was so firmly proud of this that when I found, flattened away in the old Richmond Bible, a receipt made out to my grandfather for insurance on a slave, I slipped it back and never taxed him with it.

  In any case, all that our tradition had boiled down to was my father’s insistence that my mother always keep colored help. This was hard on her, since, being German, she could never quite manage or understand them. She had an inflexibly either-or attitude toward trust, plus a certain jealousy of other people’s hardships, that made her stiff with those who had more of them. Also, without any reason to be, she was always a bit afraid of May-ry, referring to her whenever she could as “Die Schwarze.” My father did not like this, and often caught her up on it. And nobody, at any time, ever said “nigger” in our house.

  Meanwhile, May-ry and my father kept up their special allegiances. There were of course a thousand ways in which he knew the life she had come from, and she “knew” us. Whenever he could be heard embarking on one of the ritually flamboyant regional anecdotes that my mother couldn’t bear, May-ry usually was to be seen edging closer to the company, only as decorous as a uniform could make her, her mouth drawn out like a tulip ready to burst at the familiar denouement—which brought shriek after shriek of her released laughter, followed, under my mother’s glance, by a quick retirement. But she and my father also shared more particular sympathy, or professed to, over the rheumatism. As a young man, he had had to take an eighteen-week cure for his at Mount Clemens Spa, and like many diseases contracted early, it had kept him youthful, healthy, and appreciated; on a dull day a loud twinge of it would suddenly announce itself to the house—and to his best audience.

  May-ry’s rheumatism was of another sort. It was her euphemism for the fact that, periodically, she drank. Whenever she felt a long attack coming on, about every four months or so, she always absented herself from our house on a short trip to Roanoke, where she could lay up in the sun a little. We all were aware of the probable truth—that she was holing up in Harlem with one or the other of the people she had originally come up here with in the wake of the preacher who had brought them all North together. My father knew she drank, and she knew that he knew, but the fiction of Roanoke was always maintained. She was a child—and he loved all children. Just so long as she kept herself seemly in front of him (and she never did anything else), she was only doing what was expected of her, and he the same. “What you recommend I do for my rheumatiz, May-ry?” he might sometimes tease, but this was as far as he ever went.

  Once a year, on her paid vacation, May-ry did go to Roanoke. We knew this because just before she was due back, a case of jars of home-canned peaches always arrived. She liked to use them during the year and tell us something about the farm as each jar was opened; these were her anecdotes, and I knew all of the characters in them, from Mooma and Daddy Gobbo down to the cow that always stood with its head over the gate, like a cow in a primer. On rheumatism vacations no jars ever came; only, of a sudden, there would be May-ry back again, scrubbing at the moldings as if these had to be whitened like her sins, cooking up for my father everything she could sink in the brown butter he adored. Between these times, once in a while she failed to come back from her Thursday night off until Monday; when she returned, it would not be she who had been sick, but one of the friends “over on One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Street.” But someone else there always had to phone for her, so we knew. On these occasions my mother would be furious. She wanted a German girl whose docile allegiance would be to her, whose ins and outs she would know the way my father knew May-ry’s. Patiently, he would explain these to her. “They’re children, that’s all. They can’t stand up to us. Never have been able to. Never will. But if you just give them their head a little, they’re the best servants in the world. And the loyalest.”

  Then came Somus. May-ry had always been allowed to entertain her many suitors, evenings and Sundays if she wished, in our kitchen, Father sometimes stopping in to chat with them, to let them know on what terms they were welcome, to have a little Southern cracker-barrel time—and to see that they were the right sort for May-ry. With Somus, this all vanished. Somus was the son of that same preacher of the Abyssinian Church of God who had brought May-ry up here, and he was the real reason (besides us, she said) why she had never married; she’d been in love with him, hopelessly until now, ever since they’d spatted mud pies together down home. Somus had quarreled with his own father almost from the moment they all came up here and had been away studying for a long time. Now he was here to take his civil-service examinations.

  Somus turned out to be just as handsome as she’d said he was. Rebel from the church he might be, but I could never see him, black in his black suit, without thinking Biblically, things like “the ram of God” and “His nose is as the tower of Lebanon that looketh forth toward Damascus.” There was not an inch of ornament upon him, beyond the strict ivory of his teeth, the white glare of his eye. Not that I saw much of him. When Somus took May-ry out, he did just that, took her out, never sat in our kitchen or ate in it; later on we knew that she’d had a bad time getting him to ring at the back door.

  Somus. Why he loved May-ry was not hard to tell, quite apart from the fact that she too was handsome, with a shapely mouth, a sweet breadth of brow and eye. She drank—and he didn’t approve of that. She dressed high and loud, not even in the New York way but in the bandanna bush colors that antedated Roanoke—and he was forever trying to get her to imitate that sister of his who wore navy blue with round organdy collars. She liked to dance at the Club Savoy—and it pained Somus to find himself still that good at it. Worst of all, she was the staunchest and most literal of Bible beaters, and to an emancipated man, this opium of his people must have been as the devil. So, all told, love between them was foreordained.

  She adored him, of course. He was just like his father, strong, dour, and, like many ministers’ sons before him, with the genes of faith coming up in him just as hot and strong in other ways—in the very form of his unbelief.

  I remember just when the trouble came. It could have been the red spring dress that sparked it. “Kah-whew!” I said, when she showed it to me. It was almost purple, and still trying. “Never get to heaven in that!” Heaven was a great topic between us. “Besides, it’ll run.”

  “Sho’ will.” She stuck out her chin, pushing her smile almost up to her nose, her nostrils taking deep draughts of the dress, as if it, all by itself, were perfume. “And me wit
h it. All the way.”

  “May-ry, tell us about heaven.” It was a dull day.

  Always willing, she answered me, explicit as if it were Roanoke, as if we had just opened the largest peach jar of all. It was a nice fleshly style of heaven but not rowdy; a touch of the Savoy maybe, but enough pasture for the cow. Triumphant, in the red dress, she entered it.

  “Where’s Somus? Isn’t he there? Where he gonna be?” In these exchanges, exactly like my father, I used to fall into her language.

  She cast her head down, furred up her brows under a forehead as smooth as a melon. “He be there,” she said after a while, in a low voice. Pushing out her chin again, she asserted it. “You just wait and see. He be!” And in the same moment she whirled around and caught me at the icebox, my hand in the evening dessert. Washing my hand at the tap, she warned me, “You go on like you been doing, you gonna come to no good end.”

  “If I do—how’m I gonna be up there, to see him!” She and I loved to crow at each other that way, to cap each other’s smart remarks, in the silly sequiturs of childhood. But this day, something else teased at me to tease her. It wasn’t my own unbelief; that had already been around for some time. But in other ways I could feel how I was going on, and I didn’t like it either. I was growing out of my childhood. Maybe, like somebody else, I envied her the perfection of hers.

  “Listen, May-ry,” I said, squinting. “Suppose…when you get there…it isn’t at all like you said it was. Suppose they don’t let you sashay around in any red dress—suppose they just hump you over your Bible in a plain old white one. No music either, except maybe a harp. Oh, May-ry—what the Sam Hill you gonna do if they give you a harp?”