Tale for the Mirror (16 page)

Left together by the flicking of the door, the two women stared at one another.

“Traveling alone?” said Miss Moon.

Jane nodded.

“Divorced too?”

“No,” said Jane. “I’m a widow.” Her head lifted. “I have two boys.”

Miss Moon seemed not to have heard this last. “Care to—join forces for dinner?”

No, thought Jane. Don’t settle for anybody’s company. As she does. As she has. Not yet. She gazed past Miss Moon, saw herself in the mirror, and looked quickly away. “Thanks,” she said, and her voice was kind. “I’m afraid…I have work to do too.”

“Oh, you work,” said Miss Moon eagerly. “What do
you
do?”

“I teach,” said Jane. “In a university.” I teach, an echo said inside her, and of course at home I have the two boys. And suddenly the echo, her breath, something, rammed itself hard against her chest, inside. Not enough, it said, beating behind the mapped crease between her breasts. Not enough. What a thing, it said, crying. What a thing!

“Well, back to the salt mines for us, eh?” said Miss Moon. Her voice was matey, unbearable. Just as if she too had smelled the scent, had heard the thing crying. As if she knew too that Jane, staring into the big, winged glasses, could see the two poor eyes beating against the glass.

And now they stood up quickly, gathered their purses and signaled for the waiter. When he came, they paid him with a dispatch unusual to women, and the lire notes left lying in his saucer were large enough for anybody here. For now they could not part quickly enough. For now, each said to herself, the other’s company was no longer to be borne. No, it was not to be borne. Not now. Now that they both knew what it was they had in common.

W
HEN I WAS IN
high school, my best friend for almost a year was another boy of about the same age by the name of Werner Hauser, who disappeared from his home one night and never came back. I am reminded of him indirectly sometimes, in a place like Luchow’s or Cavanagh’s or Hans Jaeger’s, when I am waited on by one of those rachitic-looking German waiters with narrow features, faded hair, and bad teeth, who serve one with an omniscience verging on contempt. Then I wonder whether Mr. Hauser, Werner’s father, ever got his own restaurant. I am never reminded directly of Werner by anybody, because I haven’t the slightest idea what he may have become, wherever he is. As for Mrs. Hauser, Werner’s mother—she was in a class by herself. I’ve never met anybody at all like her, and I don’t expect to.

Although Werner and I went to the same high school, like all the boys in the neighborhood except the dummies who had to go to trade school or the smart alecks who were picked for Townsend Harris, we were really friends because both our families had back apartments in the same house on Hamilton Terrace, a street which angled up a hill off Broadway and had nothing else very terrace-like about it, except that its five-story tan apartment buildings had no store fronts on the ground floors. Nowadays that part of Washington Heights is almost all Puerto Rican, but in those days nobody in particular lived around there. My parents had moved there supposedly because it was a little nearer to their jobs in the Seventh Avenue garment district than the Bronx had been—my father worked in the fur district on Twenty-eighth Street, and my mother still got work as a finisher when the season was on—but actually they had come on the insistence of my Aunt Luba, who lived nearby—a sister of my mother’s, of whom she was exceptionally fond and could not go a day without seeing.

When Luba talked about the Heights being higher-class than the Bronx, my parents got very annoyed. Like a lot of the garment workers of that day they were members of the Socialist Labor Party, although they no longer worked very hard at it. Occasionally, still, of an evening, after my father had gotten all worked up playing the violin with two or three of his cronies in the chamber music sessions that he loved, there would be a vibrant discussion over the cold cuts, with my mother, flushed and gay, putting in a sharp retort now and then as she handed round the wine; then too my older sister had been named after Ibsen’s Nora—which sounded pretty damn funny with a name like Rosenbloom—and of course nobody in the family ever went to a synagogue. That’s about all their radicalism had amounted to. My younger sister was named Carol.

The Hausers had been in the building for a month when we moved in on the regular moving day, October first; later a neighbor told my mother that they had gotten September rent-free as a month’s concession on a year’s lease—a practice which only became common in the next few years of the depression, and, as I heard my mother say, a neater trick than the Rosenblooms would ever think of. Shortly after they came, a sign was put up to the left of the house entrance—Mrs. Hauser had argued down the landlord on this too. The sign said
Erna Hauser. Weddings. Receptions. Parties,
and maybe the landlord was mollified after he saw it. It was black enamel and gold leaf under glass, and about twice the size of the dentist’s. When I got to know Werner, at the time of those first frank questions with which boys place one another, he told me that ever since he and his mother had been sent for to come from Germany five years before, the family had been living in Yorkville in a furnished “housekeeping” room slightly larger than the one Mr. Hauser had occupied during the eight years he had been in the United States alone. Now Mrs. Hauser would have her own kitchen and a place to receive her clientele, mostly ladies from the well-to-do Jewish families of the upper West Side, for whom she had hitherto “helped out” at parties and dinners in their homes. From now on she would no longer “help out”—she would cater.

Most of what I learned about Werner, though, I didn’t learn from Werner. He would answer a question readily enough, but very precisely, very much within the limits of the question, and no overtones thrown in. I guess I learned about him because he was my friend, by sucking it out of the air the way kids do, during the times I was in his house before he was forbidden to hang around with me, and during the dozens of times before and after, when he sneaked up to our place. He was at our place as often as he could get away.

Up there, a casual visitor might have taken him for one of the family, since he was blond and short-featured, like my mother and me. He was a head taller than me, though, with a good build on him that was surprising if you had already seen his father’s sunken, nutcracker face and bent-kneed waiter’s shuffle. It wasn’t that he had the special quiet of the very stupid or the very smart, or that he had any language difficulty; he spoke English as well as I did and got mostly nineties at school, where he made no bones about plugging hard and was held up as an example because he had only been in the country five years. It was just that he had almost no informal conversation. Because of this I never felt very close to him, even when we talked sex or smoked on the sly, and sometimes I had an uneasy feeling because I couldn’t tell whether he was stupid or smart. I suppose we were friends mostly out of convenience, the way boys in a neighborhood are. Our apartments partly faced each other at opposite sides of the small circular rear court of the building; by opening his bedroom window and our dining-room window we could shout to each other to come over, or to meet out in front. I could, that is, although my mother used to grumble about acting up like riffraff. He was not allowed to; once, even before the edict, I saw the window shut down hard on his shoulders by someone from behind. After the edict we used to raise the windows very slightly and whistle. Even then, I never felt really close to him until the day after he was gone.

Saturday mornings, when I was that age, seemed to have a special glow; surely there must have been rainy ones, but I remember them all in a powerful golden light, spattered with the gabble of the vegetable men as they sparred with women at the open stalls outside their stores, and ringing with the loud, pre-Sunday clang of the ash cans as the garbage collectors hoisted them into the trucks and the trucks moved on in a warm smell of settling ash. It was a Saturday morning when I first went up to the Hausers’, to see if Werner could get off to take the Dyckman Ferry with me for a hike along the Palisades. I already knew that he helped his mother with deliveries evenings and afternoons after school, but I had not yet learned how prescribed all his hours were. The hall door of the Hauser apartment was open a crack; through it came a yeasty current as strong as a bakery’s. I flicked the bell.

“Come,” said a firm, nasal voice. Or perhaps the word was “
Komm.
” I was never to hear Mrs. Hauser speak English except once, when Werner and I, who had not heard her come in, walked through the parlor where she was dealing with a lady who had come about a daughter’s wedding. That was the occasion at which I saw her smile—at the lady—a fixed grimace which dusted lightly over the neat surface of her face like the powdered sugar she shook over her coffee cakes.

I walked in, almost directly into the kitchen. It was very like ours, small and badly lighted, but it had two stoves. Rows of copper molds and pans of all shapes hung on the walls. One graduated row was all of
Bund
pans, like one my mother had, but it was the first time I had seen utensils of copper, or seen them hung on walls. Supplies, everything was in rows; nothing wandered or went askew in that kitchen; even its choke-sweet odor had no domestic vagary about it, but clamped the room in a hot, professional pall. Werner and his mother, bent over opposite ends of a cloth-covered table, were carefully stretching at a large plaque of strudel dough which almost covered its surface. Both of them glanced up briefly and bent their heads again; the making of strudel is the most intense and delicate of operations, in which the last stretching of the dough, already rolled and pulled to tissue thinness, is done on the backs of the hands, and balances on an instinctive, feathery tension. I held my breath and watched. Luba and my mother made strudel about once a year, in an atmosphere of confused merriment and operatic anguish when the dough broke. As I watched, red crept up on Werner’s face.

Almost opposite me, Mrs. Hauser bent and rose, angularly deft, but without grace. I had expected some meaty-armed
Hausfrau
trundling an ample bosom smeared with flour; here was the virginal silhouette of a governess, black and busked—a dressmaker’s form collared in lace. From the side, her face had a thin economy, a handsomeness that had meagered and was further strained by the sparse hair spicked back in a pale bun.

Suddenly she straightened. The paste had reached the edges of the cloth; in a few whisked motions it was dabbed with butter, filled, rolled, cut, and done. She brushed her hands together, blew on the spotless front of her dress, and faced me. She was not handsome at all. Her nose, blunt-ended, came out too far to meet one, her eyes protruded slightly with a lashless, committed stare, and the coinshaped mouth was too near the nose. She wore no make-up, and her face had the triumphant neatness of the woman who does not; next to it Luba’s and my mother’s would have looked vital, but messy. Her skin was too bloodless though, and her lips and the nails of her floured hands were tinged with lavender, almost stone-colored, as if she suffered from some attenuation of the heart.

Werner mumbled out my first name, and I mumbled back my errand.

Mrs. Hauser, holding her hands lightly in front of her, still gave me her stare, but it was to Werner that she spoke at last.

“
Sag ihm nein
,” she said, and turning on her heel, she left the room, still holding away from her dress the hands with the stone-colored nails.

After that, I knew enough not to go to Werner’s unless he asked me to, usually on evenings when his father was on night duty in the restaurant where he worked, and Mrs. Hauser had an engagement, or on Sundays, when she had an especially fancy wedding and Mr. Hauser, dressed in his waiter’s garb, went along to help her serve. I never got used to the way their apartment looked, compared with the way it smelled. When there was no cooking going on, and the hot fumes had a chance to separate and wander, then it was filled, furnished with enticing suggestions of cinnamon, vanilla, and anise, and the wonderful, warm caraway scent of little pastries stuffed with hot forcemeat—a specialty of Mrs. Hauser’s, of which her customers could never get enough. Standing outside the door, I used to think it smelled the way the house in
Hansel and Gretel
looked, in the opera to which my parents had taken me years before—a house from whose cornices and lintels one might break off a piece and find one’s mouth full of marzipan, an aerie promising happy troupes of children feasting within, in a blissful forever of maraschino and Nesselrode.

Actually, the four dim rooms, curtainless except for the blinds which the landlord supplied—one yellow, one dark green to a window—had an almost incredible lack of traces of personal occupancy, even after one knew that the Hausers never thought of the place as anything but temporary. It was furnished with a bleak minimum of tables and chairs like those in hired halls. Mrs. Hauser had procured everything from a restaurant supply house, all except the beds, which were little more than cots, and wore hard white cotton spreads of the kind seen in hotels. Here, in the bedrooms, some of the secondhand surfaces were protected with doilies, on which a few European family photographs had been placed. Years later, when I was staying in the luxurious house of a family which had managed to keep on its servants in the old-fashioned way, stumbling inadvertently into the servants’ wing, one morning, I came upon a room that reminded me instantly of the Hausers’, although even its dresser had a homely clutter of tawdry jewelry, dime-store boxes, and letters.

Even so, when Werner and I hung around awhile in his room, we never sat on the drill-neat bed. Usually we sat on the floor and leaned back against the bed. Except for the times we did our homework together, we either just talked or exchanged the contents of our pockets, for it was the kind of house in which there was simply nothing to do. Once or twice we smoked cigarettes there, carefully airing the room and chewing soda-mints afterward. I supplied both the cigarettes and the soda-mints, since it was an understood thing that Werner never had any money of his own; the considerable work he did for his mother was “for the business.” The rows of cakes, frilled cookies, and tiny
quenelles
that we sometimes passed, going through the kitchen, were for the business too. I never got anything to eat there.