Tale for the Mirror (20 page)

“Still has the old place. Old family hereabouts, the Minots,” said Parker, rising to replenish the drinks.

“Minot!” Robert said softly. “Did you say—Minot?”

“Yes, ever know any of them? Understand they were quite a family at one time.” Busy with the drinks, he did not note Robert’s lack of response, covered in any case by Miss Bissle.

“
Trigonocephalous contortrix
,” she said. “They don’t eat birds.”

Robert sat back in his chair. Yes, I knew a Minot, he thought. I knew Victor. Probably isn’t the same family; chances are it couldn’t be. Still, what Lampey had just said about the woman they were expecting—that was just the way Victor had been, turning life rosy and immediate wherever he was, and for adults too, as could be seen in the aureole that went round a room with him—not merely for Robert, the small boy on whom he had occasionally shone his great face, fair, hot and flame-colored as Falstaff's sun. Looking back on Victor now from the modern distance, it seemed to Robert that he must have dreamed him—that day on the Brandywine for instance, 1912 it must have been, when Victor had taken him fishing, the same day he had insisted on letting Robert join the men lunching at Robert’s grandfather’s table before the stockholders’ meeting, and had fed the boy wine. Robert could see him now, jutting like a Rubens from even that portly group, the starched ears of the napkin he had tied around his cravat shining blue in the water-light reflected from walls that were white instead of walnut because of his choice, the napkin flecked, as lunch went on, with sauces Victor had conspired with the cook, the heavy company meanwhile tasting him with the same negligent appreciation they gave the food, as now and then he sent a sally rolling down the table like a prism, or bent over Robert, saying, “A little more claret with the water, Robert?…And now, if you please—a little more water with the claret.” After lunch, Robert had seen him give his grandfather a sheaf of papers, saying, “Here they are, Bi—Robert and I are going out after turtle.” As they left, one of the men said, “Bi—where do you get your cigars?”—it was Victor who had started people calling Robert’s grandfather Bi. “Victor gets them for me in Philadelphia.” At the man’s murmured envy, his grandfather had taken a careful puff, gently guarding the long, firm ash, and had smiled.

And that afternoon on the dock, sitting over the lines that the caramel-colored Negroes in the shack behind them had lent them, had been a time he had remembered always, like a recurrent dream—a day on which absolutely nothing had happened except sun, water and the lax blush of the wine in his limbs. And Victor—doing nothing all afternoon except what he did everywhere, making one feel that whatever you and he were doing at the moment was “it,” that where you were was “here.” They had caught, Robert recalled, two turtles; he remembered being warned of their bite, and informed, lovingly, of their soup, “Victor,” he had asked suddenly, “what are you in?”—meaning chemicals, cotton, tin, this being the way men in those days, at that table, had spoken of what they did. “Oh I’m not ‘in’” had been the laughing answer. “You might say I’m—
with
.” Breathing hard, Victor had been peering in at the hamper that held the turtles. Robert had looked down at him. “So shall I be,” he had said. “Oh no you won’t. You’re already stuck with it, like these chaps. You’re already
in
.” Victor had risen, puffing. “Best you’ll be able to do is to have somebody around like me—way Bi does.” Robert had considered. “I’ll have you then if I may,” he had said.

Victor’s face had been in shadow, the sun behind him, but after more than forty years Robert could still sense in him the unnameable quality that had sent him fishing in his cravat. “Mmm. If your father doesn’t get to you first,” he said. And Robert’s father had got to him first, as, in Victor’s old age, he had got to Victor. Not a hard man, his father, but a dull one, of the powerful new breed that cherished its dullness for its safety, and meant to impose that, along with the rest of its worldly goods, on its sons. “Like that brew we had at lunch?” Victor had said, as they trotted the hamper along the shore. “And well you might,” he said, mentioning a name, a year. “Pity I’ve only daughters,” he sighed. “Women’ve no palate. Perfume kills it.” Above them, atop the green dunes of lawn that swept to the water’s edge, a small figure waved at them, his grandfather, guests sped, sauntering the veranda alone. “Will I have one, d’ya think?” asked Robert. “Mmm, can’t tell yet.” Robert considered. His grandfather, colorless and quiet, seemed to him much like his father, who drank only Saratoga water. “Does Bi?” he said with interest. Victor smiled, waving back. “He’s got me,” he said.

And Grandfather was like me really, not like Father, thought Robert, returning to the Lampeys’, where conversation, as so often happened elsewhere, had rippled on without him. He was a dull man too, as I am, but like me with the different and often painful dimension of not valuing it, of knowing that somewhere, sometimes in the same room, conversation twinkled past him like a prism, a rosier life went by. Grandfather was like me. But Grandfather had Victor.

And looking at the door through which Emily’s possibility was to come, telling himself that it was midsummer madness—of Victor’s daughters one was dead and the other last heard of years ago in a nursing order in Louisiana—he still told himself that he would not be surprised, not at all, if the woman who came through the door were to be huge and serenely fair, a great Flemish barmaid of a woman, with Victor’s florid curls.

When Arietta walked through the door, he was surprised, at the depth of his disappointment. For what he saw was a slight woman, almost tiny, whose hair, sugared now like preserved ginger, might once, at youth’s best, have been russet, a small creature whose oddly tweaked face—one of those pulled noses, cheeks that looked as if each held the secret cherry of some joke—was the farthest possible from the classic sun-face he remembered. Even if she were some relation, she was nothing like. There was no point in asking, in opening a private memory to future rakings over whenever he paid a duty call on Emily. For what he was looking at, he reminded himself, all he was looking at was Emily’s future companion.

As the evening progressed, he was not so sure. For the Lampeys’ protégé remained dumb. From their baffled glances he judged that this was not usual; he himself would have guessed that Mrs. Fay’s ordinary manner, if she had any, was more mobile. But for whatever reason, her eyes remained veiled, her hands folded in the lap of her pale, somewhat archaic skirt. A certain stubborn aura spread from her, but nothing else, certainly nothing of the subtle emanation they had been promised, and but rarely a word. Only Emily, impervious to this as she was to so much, noticed nothing, intent on numbering the occasional sips Mrs. Fay took of her wine.

Nor could Arietta have explained. She could have said only that almost at once she had felt Miss Bissle to be a person she could never admire. Or tell the truth to, the truth about Miss Bissle being what it was. Not because Miss Bissle was dull—the best patrons necessarily had almost as much dullness as money—but that she did not suffer from it, whereas the real patrons, all the great ones, had a sweetening tremor of self-doubt at the core. If dullness was what had made them keep Minots, then this human (and useful) sweetening was what had made Minots keep them. But I must, thought Arietta. Roger, she said to herself. $126.35. Nevertheless, when Parker deftly introduced Nigeria, on which he had often heard her entertain, she heard herself furnish him three sentences on the cultivation of the cocoa nib, then fall still. It must be stage fright, her first professional engagement. Her father should have told her that the artist’s very piety and scruples were a considerable hindrance when the artist came down to dining out. In desperation she gulped the rest of her wine. Opposite her Miss Bissle blinked slowly at Robert, as if to say “I count on you.”

“Arietta!” said Helen Lampey. It was half command, half plea. “Do tell us the story about your zebra.”

“Zebra?” said Robert. “Have you hunted them, Mrs. Fay?”

“No.” Mrs. Fay addressed her small, clenched hands. “That’s equatorial Africa.” She heard Helen sigh. “Have you?”

Now, what none of them, what no one knew about Robert Bissle was that once in a while, under certain conditions, he lied. Not on the Exchange of course, or in any real situation. It was his only valve, his sole vice, and it escaped him, with the wistful sound of steam from an air-locked radiator, only when, as tonight, he deemed himself in the safe company of those even duller than he. He leaned back—on these occasions he always did. “Zebras are very beautiful creatures. I never molested them save to procure specimens for the museums, or food for the porters, who liked their rather rank flesh.”

Mrs. Fay, for almost the first time, raised her eyes and looked closely at him. “Yes?” she said. Her nose, he observed, moved with speech. “Do go on.”

“The hartebeest,” he said slowly. “Coke’s hartebeest, known locally by the Swahili name of kongoni—were at least as plentiful and almost as tame.”

“Why Robert!” said Miss Bissle. “I never knew you were in Africa.”

“Oh yes,” he said, still looking at his neighbor, in whose odd face—he had not noticed until now—all the lines went up. “One year when your back was turned.” He plunged on. “A few months before my arrival, a mixed herd of zebra and hartebeest rushed through the streets of Nairobi, several being killed by the inhabitants, and one of the victims falling just outside the Episcopal church.”

“Handy,” said Helen Lampey, in spite of having been informed that the Episcopal was Miss Bissle’s own. She was watching Arietta and Robert—Arietta
with
Robert, smiling her pawkiest smile at him, and saying, “Yes, yes, do go on.”

Robert took off his glasses. No, there was no resemblance, not even if he imagined a napkin tied round her neck, although for a moment there he had almost fancied an echo saying, “and now, a little more claret.” He shook his head. The company, whatever it was, was not as safe as he had thought. “Your turn,” he said. “Your zebra.”

Arietta unfolded her hands. They trembled slightly. Miss Bissle’s cousin, and even richer one had heard—and even more. One of the old breed, she was sure of it—and she had almost missed him. “My zebra?” she said. “Mine was—” She had been about to say
real.
But one let people see one knew the truth about them only after one had won them, sometimes long after. And particularly these people. “Mine was—here,” she said. “Right here in the Hudson Valley. In our garden.”

“So help me it was,” said Parker. “I saw it. Go on, Arietta.”

So she did. It had been a Saturday morning, she said, and she had been sitting in her bath, when Roger, seven then, had knocked at her door and said there were policemen in the garden and she had called back, “Tell Daddy.” Minutes later, Roger had knocked again and said, “Mum, there’s a zebra in the garden,” and she had replied—“Tell Daddy.” “Now,” said Arietta, “Roger is not a fey child. I should have known.” She knew every periphrasis of this story, every calculated inflection and aside; this was the point where everyone always began to smile expectantly, and pausing, she saw that they had. “I’ve never been able to afford to disbelieve him since.” For then Carolingus had come up the stairs. “He looked,” said Mrs. Fay, delaying softly, expertly, “well—like a man who has just seen a zebra in his garden.” As, according to him, he had. She went downstairs—and so had he. She made them see the scene just as she had, the two policemen, Mack Sennett characters both of them, yelling “Stand back there!” from a point well behind Carolingus, and there, cornered in a cul-de-sac near the carriage house, flashing and snorting, the zebra, ribanded in the rhododendrons like a beast out of the
douanier
Rousseau.

“The policemen,” she said, “had had no breakfast, so there I found myself, carrying a tray with sugar and cream and my best coffee cake—luckily I had baked on Friday—to two policemen and a zebra, in a back yard twenty-five miles from New York.” She rose, circled the room, holding the scene with her hands pressed lightly together, and as if absent-mindedly, poured Parker some coffee out of the Lampeys’ silver pot. Outside, in the Lampeys’ garden, a barn owl hooted—it was the atmosphere, conspiring gently with her as usual. She waited. At this point someone always asked, “But how?”

“But
how
?” said Miss Bissle.

“Ah, now,” said Mrs. Fay, “I have to double back. I have to tell you that across from us, in one of those very modern houses with the kitchen set just under the crown of the road, the family gets up very early. They garden, and the mother-in-law is a past president of the Audubon Society of Atlanta, Georgia.” Still circling the room, a diseuse gently fabricating her own spotlight, Mrs. Fay rested one hand, a brief wand, on Miss Bissle’s shoulder as she passed her. Robert watched, enthralled. There was nothing to it, yet she held them all. They sat like marionettes whom she was awakening slowly to a mild, quizzical sensation like the pleasure-pain in a sleeping foot. “And at about six o’clock that morning, the head of the County Police picked up the phone and heard a cultivated Southern voice say, ‘Ah should like to repo’t that jus’ now, as we wuh setten at breakfas’, we saw a zebra payss bah on the Rivuh Road.’” Parker laughed, and Mrs. Fay picked it up, wove him in quickly. “Ah yes,” she said, “can’t you hear her? And the chief thought to himself that the River Road is rather the bohemian part of his parish, and that Saturday morning comes, well—after Friday night. So he calls our policeman and says, ‘George, people down your neck of the woods seeing zebras.’ George decides to wait until, well, two or more people see it. Then Joe Zucca, the old caretaker at Fagan’s, telephones, babbling that a striped horse is crashing around his conservatory. And the chase is on. And they bring it to bay in our garden.”

Parker guffawed. “There are zebras at the bottom of my garden.”

Arietta, reaching her own chair, sat down in it. Someone always said that too. She looked round at their faces. Yes, she had them, particularly one. Quickly, quickly now, wind it up. And in a long, virtuoso breath, she wound it all up—how the village had filled the yard, a gold mine if she’d just had the lollipop concession, how her smart-aleck neighbor had stopped by the front gate, offering a drive to town, and when she’d said, “Wait a bit, Tom, we’ve got a zebra in the back yard,” had smirked and said “Yeah, I heard that one at Armando’s—and the horse said, ‘I've been trying to get it to take its pajamas off all night.’” And how it had been one of the great satisfactions in life to be able to lead him round to the carriage house. And how the cops had finally got hold of the Hudson River Cowboys Association—yes there was one, those kids in white satin chaps and ten-gallon hats who always rode palominos in the Independence Day Parade—and how they’d come, out of costume alas, but with their horse trailer, and how Carolingus and the cops had finally jockeyed the beast in, using a three-man lasso. And how, at the height of it—children screaming, yokels gaping, three heated men hanging on ropes, the whole garden spiraling like a circus suddenly descended from the sky, and in the center of it all, the
louche
and striped, the incredible—how Arietta’s eighty-five-year-old Cousin Beck from Port Washington, a once-a-year and always unheralded visitor, had steamed up the driveway in her ancient Lincoln, into the center of it all. “Oh, Cousine Beck,” she’d stammered—in French, she never knew why—“you find us a little
en deshabille,
we have us
un zèbre.”
And how Beck, taking one look, had eased her old limbs out of the car and grunted, “Arietta, you
are
dependable. Just bring me a chair.”