Read Tale for the Mirror Online
Authors: Hortense Calisher
Tale for the Mirror
A Novella and Other Stories
Hortense Calisher
For
Bernice Cozzens
The Rehabilitation of Ginevra Leake
What a Thing, to Keep a Wolf in a Cage!
The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street
E
VER SINCE OUR STATE
Department published that address of Khrushchev’s to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, in which he noted the “posthumous rehabilitation” of a number of Russians who had been executed as enemies of the people, I’ve been nagged by the thought that I owe it to our bourgeois society to reveal what I know about the life of my friend Ginny Doll—or as she was known to her friends in the Party—Ginevra Leake. If you remember, Mr. Khrushchev’s speech was dotted with anecdotes that all wound to the same tender conclusion:
On February 4th Eihke was shot. It has been definitely established now that Eihke’s case was fabricated; he has been posthumously rehabilitated…Sentence was passed on Rudzutak in twenty minutes and he was shot. (Indignation in the hall)…After careful examination of the case in 1955 it was established that the accusation against Rudzutak was false. He has been rehabilitated posthumously…Suffice it to say that from 1954 to the present time, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court has rehabilitated 7,679 persons, many of whom were rehabilitated posthumously.
Being dead, Ginny Doll would certainly fall into the latter category if anyone chose to rehabilitate her, but since the manner of her death has elevated her, however erroneously, to martyrdom in the American branch of the Party, it’s unlikely that any of her crowd will see the need of arousing indignation in the hall. The task therefore devolves on me, not only as a friend of her girlhood, but as her only non-Party friend—kept on because I represented the past, always so sacred to a Southerner, and therefore no more disposable than the rose-painted lamps, walnut commodes and feather-stitched samplers in the midst of which she pursued life on the New York barricades, right to the end. If to no one else, I owe to the rest of us Southrons the rehabilitation of Ginny Doll, even if, as is most likely, it’s the last thing she’d want.
I first met Virginia Darley Leake, as she was christened, Ginny Doll as she was called by her mother and aunts, when she and I were about fifteen, both of us daughters of families who had recently emigrated from Virginia to New York, mine from Richmond, hers from the town that, until I grew up, I assumed was spelled “Lenchburg.” My father disliked professional Southerners, and would never answer invitations to join their ancestral societies. However, on one summer evening when he was feeling his age and there was absolutely no prospect of anyone dropping in to hear about it, he succumbed to momentary sentiment and went downtown to a meeting of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy. He came back snorting that they were nothing but old maids of both sexes, just as he’d expected; he’d been trapped into seeing home a Mrs. Darley Lyon Leake who’d clung to him like a limpet when she’d found they both lived on Madison Avenue, and he warned my mother that he was afraid the woman would call—his actual phrase for Mrs. Leake being “one of those tiny, clinging ones you can’t get off your hands—like peach fuzz.”
Mrs. Leake—a tiny, coronet-braided woman with a dry, bodiless neatness—did call, but only, as she carefully explained to my mother, for the purpose of securing a Southern, presumably genteel playmate for her daughter. My mother was not Southern, but she shared her caller’s opinion of the girls Ginny Doll and I brought home from school. The call was repaid once, by my mother with me in tow, after which it was understood that any
entente
was to be only between us girls; my parents and Mrs. Leake never saw each other again.
On that first call I had been relieved to find how much the Leake household, scantily composed of only three females—Mrs. Leake, Ginny Doll and Ida, the cook—still reminded me of our own crowded one, in its slow rhythm and antediluvian clutter. Three years spent trying to imitate the jumpy ways of my New York girl friends had made me ashamed of our peculiarities; it was comforting to be reminded that these were regional, and that at least there were two of us on Madison Avenue.
With the alchemic snobbery of her kind, Mrs. Leake had decreed that the intimacy must be all one way; Ginny Doll could not come to us. So it was always I who went there, at first I did not quite know why. For, like many of the children introduced to me by my parents, and as quickly shed, Ginny Doll was a lame duck. It would be unfair to suggest that she and her mother were types indigenous only to the South; nevertheless, anybody down there would have recognized them at once—the small woman whose specious femininity is really one of size and affectation, whose imperious ego always has a socially proper outlet (Mrs. Leake wore her heart trouble on her sleeve), and whose single daughter is always a great lumpy girl with a clayey complexion. At fifteen, Ginny Doll was already extremely tall, stooped, and heavy in a waistless way; only her thin nose was pink, and her curves were neither joyous nor warm; her long hand lay in one’s own like a length of suet just out of the icebox and her upper teeth preceded her smile. One glance at mother and daughter predicted their history; by producing a girl of such clearly unmarriageable aspect, the neatly turned Mrs. Leake had assured herself of a well-serviced life until her own death—at a probable eighty. After that, Ginny Doll’s fate would have been clearer in Lenchburg, for the South has never lost its gentle, feudal way of absorbing its maiden ladies in one family sinecure or another. But up here in the amorphous North, there was no foretelling what might happen, much less what did.
Ginny Doll also had manners whose archaic elegance I remembered from down home—it was these that my mother had hoped I would reacquire—but unfortunately hers were accompanied by a slippery voice, with a half-gushy catch to it, that gave her a final touch of the ridiculous. Still, I found myself unable to desert her. It appeared that I was her only friend (although her importunities were always so restrained that it took a keen ear to hear the tremor in them), and after I had gone there a few times I felt guilty at not liking her better, because I felt so sorry for her.
For it appeared also that my father had been accorded a signal honor in being allowed past their threshold. Mrs. Leake was not a widow as we had assumed, but a deserted woman, and it was because of this that nothing more masculine than the old pug, which she sometimes boarded for a rich sister-in-law, was ever allowed past her door. According to Ginny Doll, her mother had done nothing to merit desertion, unless it was having committed the
faux pas
of marrying a Texan. Indeed, her position was so honorable that conscience money from the sister-in-law, the husband’s sister, was the means by which she was quite adequately supported. Still, there was a stain upon them—it was the fact that Mr. Leake still lived. Somehow this fact committed them to an infinite circumspection, and was responsible for the exhausted, yet virulent femininity of their ménage. It was also to blame for Mrs. Leake’s one perverted economy, for which Ginny Doll was never to forgive her—her refusal to get Ginny Doll’s teeth straightened. When approached by the sister-in-law, Aunt Tot, on this matter, she would reply that she wouldn’t use conscience money to tamper with the work of the Lord. When approached by Ginny Doll, her reply came nearer the truth: “You didn’t get them from me.” As I came to know the Leakes better, I concluded that the stain was increased by the fact that Mr. Leake not only was, but was happy somewhere. Although Ginny Doll never spoke of him, I saw him clearly—a man still robust, with the slight coarseness of the too-far-south South, a man barreling along somewhere careless and carefree, a man who knew how to get peach fuzz off his hands.
By this time the household had won me, as it was to win so many—in later years I could well understand Ginny Doll’s unique position in the Party. How it must have salved Party spirits, after a hot day in the trenches of the
Daily Worker,
to enter an authentic version of that Southern parlor inside whose closed circle one sits so cozened and élite, pleating time’s fan! Our famed hospitality consists really of a welcome whose stylized warmth is even more affecting than genuine interest, plus the kind of stately consideration for the trivial that makes everybody feel importantly human—Ginny Doll did both to perfection. In my case, it was summertime when I met the Leakes, and our people do have a genius for hot weather. Inside their living room the shades were drawn cool and gray, white dust covers were slippery under bare legs, and a music box was set purling. No one was ever there long before Ida, a frustrated artist with only two to feed, came in bearing an enormous, tinkling tea which she replenished at intervals, urging us to keep up our strength. When, during the first of my visits, Ginny Doll happened to remark, “Your father is truly handsome; with that ahn-gree hair of his and that pahful nose, I declare he looks just like a sheik!” I took it for more of her Lenchburg manners. It was only later that I saw how the
idée fixe
“Men!” was the pivot from which, in opposite ways, the two Leakes swung.
When I was sixteen, my parents gave me a coming-out dance. After a carefully primed phone call to Mrs. Leake by my father, Ginny Doll was allowed to attend, on the stipulation that he bring her home at the stroke of twelve. At the dance I was too busy to pay her much mind, but later I heard my parents talking in their bedroom.
“She ought to take that girl back to Lenchburg,” said my father. “Up here, they don’t understand such takin’ ways, ’less a pretty face goes with ’em. That girl’ll get herself misunderstood—if she gets the chance.”
“Taking ways!” said my mother. “Why she followed the boys around as if they were unicorns! As if she’d never seen one before!”
My father’s shoes hit the floor. “Reckon not,” he said.
The next day, Ginny Doll telephoned, eager for postmortems on the dance, but I’d already been through that with several of my own crowd, and I didn’t get to see her until the end of the week. I found that she had spent the interval noting down the names of all the boys she had met at my house—out of a list of forty she had remembered twenty-nine names and some characteristic of each of the others, such as “real short, and serious, kind of like the Little Minister.” Opening her leather diary, she revealed that ever since their arrival in New York, she had kept a list of every male she had met; my dance had been a strike of the first magnitude, bringing her total, with the inclusion of two doctors, the landlord and a grocery boy, almost to fifty. And in a special column opposite each name she had recorded the owner’s type, much as an anthropologist might note “brachycephalic,” except that Ginny Doll’s categories were all culled from their “library,” that collection of safely post-Augustan classics, bound
Harper’s,
Thomas Nelson Page and E. P. Roe which used to be on half the musty bookshelves in the Valley of Virginia. There was a Charles Brandon, a Henry Esmond (one of the doctors), a Marlborough and a Bonnie Prince Charlie, as well as several other princes and chevaliers I’d never heard of before. A boy named Bobbie Locke, who’d brought a flask and made a general show of himself, was down as D’Artagnan, and my own beau, a nice quiet boy from St. Mark’s, was down as Gawain. My father was down as Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.
I remember being impressed at first; in Richmond we had been taught to admire “great readers,” even when female, and almost every family we knew had, or had had, at least one. But I also felt a faint, squirmy disquiet. Many of the girls I knew kept movie-star books, or had pashes on Gene Tunney or Admiral Byrd, but we never mixed up these legendary figures with the boys who took us to Huyler’s. I was uncomfortably reminded of my father’s cousin, old Miss Lavalette Buchanan, who still used more rouge than you could buy on Main Street, and wore gilt bows in her hair even to the Busy Bee.