Tale for the Mirror (28 page)

It was such a house that Dr. Bhatta had bought, acquiring it with some sleight of hand whereby the accompanying gunpowder pops of bill-collectors from the other places where he had lived were delayed for several weeks. When these too came, the neighbors were not surprised. Houses like the Kuypers estate had been harmonious even in decline. Descended through relatives who had not been deeded the income to keep them up, they seemed destined to be lost again by owners whose need of grandeur exceeded their incomes, often by those who needed grandeur in order to acquire income. Fakirs, healers, dealers in correspondence course faith—the river road had seen them come and go—all of them sharers in the circuitous faith that if one lived in a castle one could more easily attract devotees from whom one might then borrow money to pay for the milk. Idly the road decided that Bhatta’s title of “doctor” was more than probably self-assumed, but this did not really matter. Charlatans, if one made it quickly clear that one would lend neither money nor credulity, often made very tractable neighbors. They could not afford to be like old Mrs. Patton, who had half a million but never painted her house, and let her lawn grow as high as her hedge. They painted quickly, lavishly, at least in all the spots that showed, and kept their sites trim for trade.

Not much was seen of the doctor that winter. It was an open winter, a mild one, but the doctor’s tall, corpulent form only showed itself occasionally, on the broad steps underneath his porte-cochere, calling to his dog, Lili, or shuffling in his carpet slippers as far as the greened bronzed griffins that guarded the gate, where he always turned to look critically at the house, his long maroon overcoat flapping at his ankles, the sun running like brown butter on his dark jowls and on the bald pate with its muttonchop of black hair. Occasionally he was seen, still in the coat and slippers, in front of the chain-store in the village, waiting while his two ladies made their purchases inside. Of anyone else it might have been said that he looked, at times, disconsolately cold, but to John Garner, his immediate neighbor on the road, and to others who established a greeting basis with him, the doctor’s comments on the world were always showily serene. Either he was a man of inner peace, or else his trade constrained him to appear so.

Whatever his trade was—and this had not been quite established, it was of too large a dignity to allow him to help “the ladies,” as he always called them, load the car. These, Miss Leeby and Miss Daria, were both blond, both small, both of uncertain age, but life had faded them in different ways. Miss Leeby’s hair and accent had a New England thinness and respectability, her pale eyes and stubby, broken-nailed hands the absent look of a worker uncomfortably away from her task. It was she who was seen from dawn to dusk on the grounds, grubbing and cutting, on the roof of the barn, hammering, and once, painting away on the cupola of the house itself. When encountered, she had the stifled voice, the ducking ways, of a tweeny. Conversely, if, as rumored, the ladies were not the doctor’s secretaries but his consorts, then it was Miss Daria who gave herself the airs of the boss-wife. Her streaked hair fell to her shoulders in cinematic curls, her eyes were sunk in sockets blackened with experience, or kohl, or occasionally, as gossip had it, the doctor’s fist. Under her haggard fur coat she wore blouses of no illusion, through which one saw the bright satin points of her brassieres. It was she who drove the car, since the doctor did not work with his hands, and managed the finances, since the doctor never handled money—some stores had already begun to complain that they had not yet handled any of his. But, as regarded the two women, he made no other distinction that anyone could see. When the dusty old car had been loaded, and sometimes pushed into starting, he detached himself from his stance against the wall, seated himself in the front seat between the two ladies, gave a portly nod, and was driven away.

But, with the earliest March thaw, activity burst its pod at the doctor’s, in advance of any place else. Armies of crocuses snapped to attention on the vast lawn, burlap was unwrapped to display dozens of rosebushes that must have been planted the fall before and were already beginning to twine properly up the chipped columns of the veranda, and all over the grounds there were peeping green evidences that Miss Leeby had indeed grubbed well. A truck came and groaned up and down the horseshoe driveway all one afternoon, depositing a sparkling white carpet of crushed stone. After it came the two women, raking it smooth, bordering it with two lines of whitewashed rocks that they lugged from the barn. When the mailman’s truck stopped at the gate, Miss Daria called to him, and with his dazed help a large, ugly cement urn was eased up the cellar stairs and dragged to the center of the lawn. When he left, with her nonchalant thanks, he looked angrily over his shoulder, and slammed hard the door of his truck, before he drove away. For, all that time, with eyes squinting happily in the tawny air, with powerful arms and chest revealed by the short sleeves and Byronic collar of his shirt, the doctor had been sitting on the stoop.

It was only during the next few days, however, that John Garner, his neighbor to the north, began to take any consistent notice of what was going on next door. Garner was no gossip; in the city during the business day he was conversely rather proud of the lazy, non-suburban tolerance of the road on which he lived, but a man who owns property, or nearly, has a natural vested interest in that of his neighbor. Ten years before, he and his wife Amelia had been “that nice young university couple” whom the cautious local bank had entrusted with a surprisingly large mortgage on the big old house next to the Kuyper place. Now they were “the Garners,” with four children, two in school, and during all that time both the house and the mortgage had remained a little too big for them. Garner’s father had been a trial lawyer who had enjoyed to the full the strutting side of the law; Garner had passed for the bar, married, and been in practice as a modestly salaried subordinate of a small firm for some years before he had finally admitted to himself that there was no side of the law that he would ever enjoy, and that he would never be anything more at it than a respectable drone.

Each work day, carrying the briefcase that had been given him when he passed the bar, he took the seven-thirty bus to the city, a tall man with thinning sandy hair, with cheeks whose tired creases quirked pleasantly when he smiled, and each evening, at half past six, he returned, a little thinner on top, a little more creased than he had seemed the day before. His father’s father had been a farmer in the magnificently tilled lands above the Finger Lakes, and when Garner, in his private shufflings of the past, thought of what might have been, he always returned to the same boyhood image of himself and the old man, his palm in the old man’s fist, and the two of them standing to watch whatever might be going on at the moment on the farm. In the evenings, the old man would sit at his roll-top desk in his catalogue-lined study, poring over his accounts, and it was the image of this too that Garner had retained, even more than the memory of the plump barns, and the tractor grooving the hills. It was a feeling of not “going to work,” as his father had done, but of working where you lived, where you stood, and of standing on the land. But his father had made the break to the city all too well; the son, gentled to pavements and collars, listening to the valedictorian tell him that he was standing “on the threshold of choice,” would have been as incredulous as the father at the idea that the grandfather’s life might have been one such choice. Only, some five years later, during that same year when he had come to terms with his private assessment of himself, he had bought the property adjoining the Kuypers estate.

Both properties fronted on the river (although the Kuypers place had a seven hundred footage to his two), and the acreages of both places ran back in a straight line up and over the hill that rose sharply behind, and were lost in the woodland at the crest. Amelia, his wife, always assumed that they had made the move for the children’s sake, and because here, just barely within commuting distance of the city, their bit of money had stretched to so much more than it could have done in a newer, neater suburb. Over the years, Garner had come to believe this himself. But certain references in the deed, surveyor’s jargon that granted him a portion of ground under his feet, phrases like “riparian rights,” that ceded him certain calculable powers over the river, also gave him an immeasurable delight. It was, obscurely, because of this that, although he left all other civic duties to Amelia, he had allowed himself to be voted in as a member of the road’s zoning board, which met three times a year to ratify building permits, to consider and defer the problem of repaying the road, and to reaffirm its one holy gesture against the cellularly creeping city to the south—that no commerce, no multiple dwelling of any kind was ever to be allowed. He had long since forgotten that his own house, stolid relic of a history too colorless to survive, had once reminded him of his grandfather’s place, and that when, on fine Sundays, he walked up the back acre to his part of the hilltop and looked down over the cascaded tips of the pines that still grew here, the great blue stare of the river, deceptively motionless and foreshortened by other hills, had a look of Lake Seneca. He was an indifferent gardener; he had never learned to pull salvation, like a turnip, from the soil. But each evening, when he crawled back from the multiple of multiples, there was a moment when he rested the briefcase on the porch steps, and plowed the river with his eyes.

It was at such a moment, at dusk on a Friday evening, when, turning from the river to note that his lawn should receive its first mowing in the morning, he saw that, over at the doctor’s, they had boarded up the little hexagonal summerhouse that perched halfway up the hill. The tiny peaked roof fitted like a dropped handkerchief over the columns that formed the sides; it had been a simple job to fit long wooden shutters, of which most of the houses along the road had an abandoned stock in the cellar, in the airy spaces beneath. Between two trees, in a small clearing hacked out for it, above the ground-honeysuckle that matted the entire hill, it glimmered now like a wintering carousel.

Strange, he thought, for what purpose would they have done this now, in the spring, and as he did so, a figure came from behind the pavilion and started slowly along the skinny footpath that zigzagged down the hill. It was a woman, carrying honeysuckle cuttings, two big sheaves of them that lifted her arms at right angles and trailed behind her, dragging the ground like a train. She passed him, quite close on the other side of the hedge, coarsely cut gray hair, emaciated eyes in a face he had never seen before, and trailed on through the opening in the hedge, down to the riverbank, where she let the cuttings fall into the river, and stood while they were borne away. She wheeled, and came back up the path. Even as he nodded, tentatively, into the uninflected face, he saw, with an inner, breaking “Ah!” of pity, that she must be mad. The eyes told him first—set motionless, aghast, as in those drawings where the doubled face was wrenched apart, the full eye set staring in the profiled nose. But it was the arms that told him for certain, arms still extended, cross-like, above the empty shape of the honeysuckle, as she marched back up the hill. She made three trips through the darkening air, each trip preceded by the sound of her scythe up above. When Garner finally entered his house, she had stopped coming, but he could still hear the slashing of the scythe among the vines.

He said nothing to Amelia, eating in the kitchen with her and the four chattering children, grateful for the familiar, perky pottery dishes, for the room’s bright chromium sanity. But that night, as they were undressing for bed, in their room that faced the hill, he told her, and they discussed it in low, troubled voices. “It’s about the
children
that I’m…” said Amelia. She turned out the light, as she always did before she put on her nightgown, although there was no one up the hill to see. “Look!” she said, leaning on the window sill. The shutters that had been used to board up the summerhouse, Garner remembered, had been of the kind with a small half-moon cut out of the wood, and now, in each of them that made up the blank façade, there was a weak spot of light.

The next morning, he was leaning on his new power mower (almost paid for now), and looking at his shaved lawn with a warm sense of satisfaction, when the doctor emerged for his morning tour. To date, his and Garner’s over-the-hedge interchanges had consisted mostly of Garner’s murmured assents to the doctor’s pronunciamentos on the beauties of what lay before them—Bhatta had a way of conversationally appropriating the glories of the universe, and pointing them out to his listener (as if the latter might not have noticed them without his help) that reminded Garner of some ministers he had known. Sometimes, at his approach, Garner, out of a shyness he would have phrased as not wanting to “get too thick” with neighbors, waved and moved on to a distant task, but today he stayed where he was.

“Good morning, Misser Garner.” Bhatta advanced majestically. “I see you have been up early, and worked well.” He waved an expansive hand. “Now comes the beautiful time, har? No fuel bills!”

Garner nodded, paying a moment’s silent tribute to the landscape, in accordance with the doctor’s gesture. “See you put in a fine lot of roses there.”

“Yars. In my country, the cultivation is very simple. Plenty of manure, plenty of roses. But here there is only
chicken
manure—and very expensive. A commentary, har?” Bhatta smiled broadly.

Garner smiled also—an overcompensating smile of the kind one used with people who spoke a foreign language. He could never get over a feeling, of the worst provinciality, he knew, that Bhatta was not speaking English, even at the very moment he so excellently was. “See you closed up the summerhouse.”

“Yars.” The doctor took another turn at the landscape.

“You, um…you moving your practice up here?”

“I do not have what you would call a pract-ice, Misser Garner.”