Tale for the Mirror (22 page)

“I’ve set my foot down with Joe,” said Mrs. Elkin. A cup rang decisively in a saucer. “We’re not going to take on this place another summer, with the war ending, and nobody knowing what business will do. Now he’s even talking about a trained nurse, instead of a practical. When we should be cutting down—all along the line.”

“My brother’s extravagances are never for himself,” said Flora.

“No,” said Mrs. Elkin. “No,
indeed
.”

“The way he lets people run on at the factory!” Mamie put in hastily. “A place that size, without a proper chemist! But he lets that Lil, who I remember when she was nothing but the head girl…and now she won’t even tell Joe himself the formulas!”

Oakley and Company, as Mr. Elkin’s business was known, were wholesale purveyors of finely milled hand soaps, individually wrapped in paper printed with testimonials so genteel, so familiar to the devoted users, and in such fine type, that these were rarely read. In addition they had several lines of talcums and toilet water—old-fashioned essences of lilac, rose, coreopsis, lily of the valley, and violet, favored mostly by that trade which had once been carriage: gentlemen whose tastes had retired with their incomes, and
grandes dames
living in rooms already overheated with the floral essence of the past. As for the company itself—much of its staff was as old as its clientele.

“And Katz!” said Flora. “My God, Hattie, isn’t Joe going to do something about Katz? It’s a wonder the firm isn’t a laughingstock to the trade!”

“I keep telling him,” said Mrs. Elkin. “I had it out with him that awful day we came down here.”

That day, the trip had been made, as usual, in a touring car hired with driver for the occasion, and as usual it had been a caravan of hampers, floating motor veils, and hindsight ejaculations. At the last minute, the two aunts had arrived uninvited, with a bland coincidence that had overreached itself in their already having donned veils. At that minute which inevitably followed the very last one, “old man Katz,” the messenger boy attached to Mr. Elkin’s office, had arrived with a folder of money, checks, and notes that he seemed unwilling to surrender, standing there with an amnesia to which he was subject at times so apparent on his bewildered, age-spotted face that they had been afraid to leave him there on the street, and had wedged him in, too. Hester, squeezed in next to him for the long ride, sneaking looks at his shaky, almost luminous hands with the blue veins and the brown cemetery spots, had felt that he and she were kin. He and she were the worthless people, whom the practical people could not forever afford.

With her father, she and Katz were safe. Mr. Elkin, when pressed for an indulgence, might counter, “Money doesn’t grow on trees, daughter!” but this was a joke promptly nullified by the indulgence itself, provoking only a delightful image of a tree from which, in ropes and ribbons and spangles, money did somehow hang. But from her mother’s arpeggios of background complaint came another portent, tied to the lurking references to the baby, and focused not so much on living expenses as on the particular objects of Mr. Elkin’s headstrong altruism—of which Hester felt herself to be one. For with her father, one had only to be. But with Mrs. Elkin, some businesslike reason for being was expected. With her there was a status to be earned, either by a displayable beauty, like that of those cousins to whom Hester was never compared, or by some competence, of which, in company with Katz, Hester had only the lack. Lately, the predicted end of the war and the arrival of the baby had joined in Hester’s mind as the probable end of a halcyon time, after which expenses like herself and Katz, unless they could justify themselves in the meantime, might not be rescuable, even by her father, from her mother’s measurement of worth. All that uneasy summer she had listened with concern to the fluctuating dinner-table destiny of Katz, appraising it silently, feeling that it involved her own.

Today though, at the party’s beginning, Mrs. Elkin had sat in its midst in a peaceful mood that had thickened upon her of late, letting others do the bothering, with a
laissez faire
that was for her, and for them all, the ultimate extravagance. With the most lavish, reassuring touch of all—she had invited Mr. and Mrs. Katz.

Therefore, when Mr. and Mrs. Katz had trotted up the path this afternoon, it had at first seemed an augury of the best for them and Hester also, for expendables everywhere. For, judged by the least worldly of standards, the market value of the Katzes must be doubtful indeed. With matching white wool hair, stunted twin statures of something under five feet each, and flat, cartilaginous faces nodding, blanched and puzzled, over their hard Sunday black, they looked like two elderly lambs, somewhere between full size and mantelpiece. Lambs, moreover, between whom there must be a preliminary agreement that Mr. Katz was to do the gamboling for the family, and Mrs. Katz the baaing. While Mr. Katz, whisking back and forth between the guests, his hands tremulous with cake plates and cups, seemed determined to prove that his rickety legs and understanding were still capable of infinite errands, Mrs. Katz plodded from the edge of one group to another, looking up at the faces of the conversationalists until she caught a declarative sentence, which she would thereupon confirm with a loud, assenting “Annnnh!” Watching them, Hester thought it cheering that two of such small wit had not only found each other, but managed to grow old. Later, watching her mother, as Mr. Katz was uncoiled from his string, wiped, and sped on his way, she had seen that her mother had not been cheered.

Now she stretched out an arm and scuffed the strings of the guitar, which let out a plangent sigh.

“Hester! Come out in the open air!”

Outside, clouds of motes gyrated in the lustrous, Indian heat. Her mother bent again over her embroidery hoop. Aunt Mamie was crocheting in nervous jerks, and Aunt Flora was stringing the bronze beads and jet passementerie with which she would later adorn her front. Near them, in a circlet of their own, the five cousins were doing no fancywork, but such was the twiddling of curls by ringed fingers, the fluttering of chiffon kerchiefs drooped from airy wrists, that one had almost an impression that they were.

Behind the casement Hester stuck out a wrist and shook it, but the effect was not the same. She picked up the guitar, hugging it to her like a doll, and walked outside. Standing near the older women, she listened to the ripple of the cousins, the stirred flounces, the round-robin lilt of “the Casino,” “the Island,” “the Turkey Trot,” that went from velvety head to head of those five who so resembled one another in their dark-fanned eyes, fair necks, and cheeks that curved with rose.

“Will you look at that hem line,” said her mother. “Half up from her knees again!” Hester sat down, looking at herself. One was to be built up, yet one’s hem lines were to stay the same. There was no pleasing them—the practical ones. Yet they had to be pleased.

She looked over at the cousins. They are a wreath, she thought. They are like a rosy wreath. They were as closed to her as if they had locked hands against her, meanwhile interchanging the soft passwords of their pet names—Belle, Cile, Jessy, Trudy, Lina.

“Mother,” she said. “Why don’t I have a nickname? Why don’t I?”

Her mother’s needle speared a French knot. “Oh—I don’t know.” She held her work critically at arm’s length. “Daddy and I are just not a nickname family, maybe.”

“Nicknames come natural,” said Aunt Flora. “Drink more milk. Maybe one’ll float up.” She looked over at her Belle, her mouth smug.

Hester took a breath. “When the baby comes—will Daddy keep Mr. Katz?”

“Why, whatever put…?” Her mother glanced at the aunts, who looked down in their laps. “Why, that has nothing to…” Mrs. Elkin expelled her breath in a chiding sigh, as if at some unknown transgressor. “There’s a limit to what one can do for some people. Sometimes it isn’t even a kindness to do it.” Reddened, she stared at Hester, with severity, as if some of the unseen offender’s guilt had rubbed off on her.

Hester stood up. At the far end of the lawn, her father and the uncles were talking business, ratifying their words with large, blue puffs from their long cigars. She walked toward them.

“What do you know!” said her mother behind her.

“Out of the mouths!” said Mamie. “Out of the mouths.”

Hester sat down on the grass near her father’s chair. He was lighting a fresh cigar, and absently passed her the band. “Coronas!” her mother had said this morning, watching her father carefully slit a brown box. “Nothing too good for them, I suppose. Coronas!” But during the week her father smoked Garcia Vegas. “Here’s a quarter, Hester. Run down and get me three Garcia Vegas.”

Bending over, she saw her face in the shiny guitar, sallow, shuttered, and long. It must lack some endearing lineament, against which people and language might cuddle. For it, a nickname was a status to be earned. Leaning against her father’s chair, she fell asleep, rocking the guitar. Sometimes, in her doze, it was Mr. Katz she rocked, sometimes it was herself.

During the next days, after the Elkins’ return to the city, all New York seemed brimming with more than the autumn season. At school assemblies, teachers rehearsed “The Red Cross Nurse,” “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” “In Flanders Field,” with a zest that lilted through and contravened even the saddest days. During the day, street corners knotted up with chattering crowds, and at night, Hester, dreaming uneasily of farms, was awakened by the sound of windows upflung to the halloos of newsboys who ran below with indistinct, curdled wails.

On the morning of the Armistice, racing home from school declared off for the day, she was certain that this morning, in her absence, the baby must have been born, too. Her mother however was there as usual in toque and wide, shapeless coat edged in martin, waiting for Hester to eat her creamed carrots and change into her pink crepe. It was dancing-school day, and they were to go, though, because of traffic and people already shoaling the streets, they were to leave early and take a cab.

They were an hour getting to the place, normally a short ride away, for not only were cars and buses creeping bumper to bumper, but people trailed heedlessly between them, poking their grin-split faces into cars, swarming on the platforms and roofs of the buses, as if on this one day bodies were more indestructible than machines. Inside the brownstone which housed the dancing academy there was an air of desertion. The little anterooms where private pupils received coaching in “toe,” or young men and women initiated each other into the wicked mysteries of the Turkey Trot, were dark and quiet. In the grand ballroom, the rows of gilt chairs, where the mothers usually knitted and watched, were empty, but a few mothers clustered around Mr. Duryea, a loose-jointed, very tall man whose length seemed the more exaggerated because all significant detail—toupee, dental plate, ribboned eyeglass—was crowded together at the top. Now he detached himself from the twittering group, clapped his hands, and the lesson began. No commotion in the street was to interfere with the verity of the two-step, the waltz. At the end of the lesson, however, Mr. Duryea, pairing off the pupils, presented the girl of each couple with a single American Beauty rose, from the long stem of which dripped streamers of red, white, and blue. As often had been the case before, he had left out Hester to dance with himself. With a nod to the pianist they were off, for chorus after chorus of a bounding, exultant waltz, Mr. Duryea bending low so that Hester might approximate the correct position with her arms, in her fist the rose of peace.

Back in the returning cab, Hester held the bruised rose thoughtfully against her skirt, as one who was not easily to be tricked into believing that pink crepe and roses were her just and personal due. She glanced over at her mother. Sirens and whistles were keening overhead; as they drove slowly past a church they heard the continuous shrike-shrike of its bell. Her mother, holding her coat tightly around her, stared out fearfully at the crowds which caromed in the streets. Hester would not have been surprised if she had said, “Now that this has happened I must see about getting the baby born,” but her mother said nothing.

“Is the war really and truly over?” said Hester.

“Indeed it is, indeed it is,” said her mother, still looking out the window. Several people had been pushed off the curb nearest the cab. One of them, an elderly man, rose painfully, scrabbling for his hat.

Hester’s fingers tightened on the mauled rose. She put her hand on the fur band of her mother’s sleeve, then drew it back. There was no use asking her again about Mr. Katz. Just before they got out of the cab at their door, her hand crept out again and touched the sleeve. “Do you suppose…do you suppose it’s because I’m the
best
—that Mr. Duryea dances with me?”

Her mother, fumbling for change, looked up as if she were looking over the rims of eyeglasses, although she wore none. “Might be,” she said, and gave her a pat to hurry her out of the cab. “But it’s more likely because you’re far and away the tallest.”

In the weeks after the Armistice, the city faded slowly through an anticlimactic New Year into the liverish restlessness of off-season. It was now that almost weatherless time when even the sparrows seemed to idle in the trees, and through days the color of flat soda water one saw more clearly the chapped curbstones of the streets. At the Elkins’ there was quiet, too; even the number of family visitors had fallen off. A nurse had come to stay, whose only function seemed to be the arranging in the spare room of packages which arrived constantly, or to watch, squinting, while Mrs. Elkin, who spent most of her days in a wrapper, sat nibbling shamefacedly from little plates, or even from paper bags. Mornings Mr. Elkin could hardly be got out of the house, and he came home earlier and earlier, stopping to kiss Hester as she played, for the first time unsupervised, with the gangs of children in the streets.

There, as in the papers read aloud at the Elkin dinner table, the talk was all of a great victory parade with which the city was to greet General O’Ryan and the victorious Twenty-seventh. At Madison Square, statues and pylons of plaster were to form a Court of the Honored Dead. The Washington Arch was to be transformed into an electrified version of the Arc de Triomphe. Fifth Avenue was to have arches hung with glass jewels, in front of the longest continuous grandstand in history. And here, in the matter of the grandstand, history reached out to the Elkins’ dinner table. For according to the outcry in the papers, in spite of all that welter of plaster and wood and glass, no seats in the grandstand had been provided for those wounded soldiers who had been returned to their country in a condition which prevented their being honored either as part of the line of march—or in Madison Square. A group of merchants whose places of business fronted on Fifth Avenue had arranged, angrily and proudly, to accommodate these. Oakley and Company had been allotted four.