Tale for the Mirror (3 page)

“I’m not bitter,” she said. He had left her for the Party, and also to it. Her days had become as happily prescribed as a belle’s, her mail as full. She had found her “set.”

“And then—you know I went through analysis?” she said. She had chanced upon the Party during its great psychiatric era, when everybody was having his property-warped libido rearranged. Hers had resulted in the rearrangement of her teeth.

“The phases I went through!” She had gone through a period of wearing her hair in coronet braids; under her analyst’s guidance she cut it. With his approval—he was a Party member—she had changed her name to Ginevra. He would have preferred her to keep the teeth as they were, as a symbol that she no longer hankered after the frivolities of class. But they were the one piece of inherited property for which she had no sentiment. Too impatient for orthodontia, she had had them extracted, and a bridge inserted. “And do you know what I did with them?” she said. “He said I could, if I had to, and I did.”

“With the teeth?”

She giggled. “Honey, I put them in a bitty box, and I had the florist put a wreath around it. And I flew down to Lenchburg and put them on Mamma’s grave.”

Something moved under my feet, and I gave a slight scream. It wasn’t because of what she had just said. Down home, many a good family has its Poe touch of the weirdie, my own as well, and I quite understood. But something was looking out at me from under the sofa, with old, rheumy eyes. It was the pug.

“It’s Junius! But it can’t be!” I said.

“Basket, Junius! Go back to your basket!” she said. “It’s not the one you knew, of course. It’s that one’s child. Let’s see, she married her own brother, so I guess this one’s her cousin as well.” Her tone was rambling and genealogical, the same in which my old aunt still defined a cousinship as once, twice or thrice removed. And I saw that the tip of her nose could still blush. “Old Junius was really a lady, you know,” she said.

When I rose to leave, Ida followed us to the hallway. “You come back, Miss Charlotte,” she said. “You come back, hear? And bring your family with you. I’ll cook ’em a dinner. Be right nice to have you, ’stead all these tacky people Miss Ginny so took up with.”

“Now Ida,” said Ginny Doll. “Charlotte,” she said, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned—” Her moonstones glittered again, in the mirror over the credenza. It was the single time she ever expounded theory. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned—it’s that real people
are
tacky.”

I did go back of course, and now it was she who gave the social confidences, I who listened with fascination. Once or twice she had me to dinner with some of her “set,” not at all to convert me, but rather as a reigning hostess invites the quiet friend of other days to a brief glimpse of her larger orbit, the better to be able to talk about it later. For, as everyone now knows, she had become a great Party hostess. She gave little dinners, huge receptions, the
ton
of which was just as she would have kept it anywhere—excellent food, notable liqueurs and the Edwardian solicitude to which she had been born. As a Daughter and a D.A.R., she had a special exhibit value as well. Visiting dignitaries were brought to her as a matter of course; rising functionaries, when bidden there, knew how far they had risen. Her parlor was the scene of innumerable Young Communist weddings, and dozens of Marxian babies embarked on life with one of her silver spoons. The Party had had its Mother Bloor. Ginny Doll became its Aunt.

Meanwhile we kept each other on as extramural relaxation, the way people do keep the friend who knew them “when.” Just because it was so unlikely for either of us (I was teaching again), we sometimes sewed together, took in a matinée. But I had enough glimpses of her other world to know what she ignored in it. No doubt she enjoyed the sense of conspiracy—her hats grew a trifle larger each year. And she did her share of other activities—if always on the entertainment committee. But her heart held no ruse other than the pretty guile of the Virginian, and I never heard her utter a dialectical word. Had she had the luck to achieve a similar success in “Lenchburg” her response would have been the same—here, within a circle somewhat larger but still closed, the julep was minted for all. She lived for her friends, who happened to be carrying cards instead of leaving them.

She did
not,
however, die for her friends. Every newspaper reader, of course, knows how she died. She was blown up in that explosion in a union hall on Nineteenth Street, the one that also wrecked a delicatessen, a launderette and Mr. Kravetz’s tailoring shop next door. The union had had fierce anti-pro-Communist troubles for years, with beatings and disappearances for years, and when Ginny Doll’s remains, not much but enough, were found, it was taken for granted that she had died in the Party. The Communist press did nothing to deny this. Some maintained that she had been wiped out by the other side; others awarded her a higher martyrdom, claiming that she had gone there equipped like a matronly Kamikaze, having made of herself a living bomb. Memorial services were held, the Ginevra Leake Camp Fund was set going, and she was awarded an Order of Stalin, second class. She is a part of their hagiolatry forever.

But I happen to know otherwise. I happen to know that she was on Nineteenth Street because it was her shopping neighbor-hood, and because I had spoken to her on the telephone not an hour before. She was just going to drop a blouse by at Mr. Kravetz’s, she said, then she’d meet me at 2:30 at McCutcheon’s, where we were going to pick out some gros-point she wanted to make for her Flint & Horner chairs.

I remember waiting for her for over an hour, thinking that she must be sweet-talking Mr. Kravetz, who was an indifferent tailor but a real person. Then I phoned Ida, who knew nothing, and finally caught my train. We left on vacation the next day, saw no papers, and I didn’t hear of Ginny Doll’s death until my return.

When I went down to see Ida, she was already packing for Lynchburg. She had been left all Ginny Doll’s worldly goods and an annuity; the rest of Aunt Tot’s money must have gone you-know-where.

“Miss Charlotte, you pick yourself a momento,” said Ida. We were standing in the bedroom, and I saw Ida’s glance stray to the bureau, where two objects reposed in
nature morte.
“I just could’n leave ’em at the morgue, Miss Charlotte,” she said. “An’ now I can’t take ’em, I can’t throw ’em out.” It was Ginny Doll’s hat, floated clear of the blast, and her false teeth.

I knew Ida wanted me to take them. But I’m human. I chose the music box. As I wrapped it, I felt Ida’s eye on me. She knew what
noblesse oblige
meant, better than her betters. So I compromised, and popped the teeth in too.

When I got home, I hid them. I knew that the children, scavengers all, would sooner or later come upon them, but it seemed too dreadful to chuck them out. Finally, it came to me. I taped them in a bitty box, masqued with a black chiffon rose, and took them to our local florist, who sent them to a florist in Lynchburg, to be wreathed and set on Mrs. Leake’s grave.

Nevertheless, whenever I heard the children playing the music box, I felt guilty. I had somehow failed Ginny Doll, and the children too. Then, when Mr. Khrushchev’s speech came along, I knew why. I saw that no one but me could clear Ginny Doll’s name, and give her the manifesto she deserves.

Comrades! Fellow members of Bourgeois Society! Let there be indignation in the hall! It is my duty to tell you that Ginevra Leake, alias Virginia Darley, alias Ginny Doll, was never an enemy of Our People at all. She never deserted us, but died properly in the gracious world she was born to, inside whose charmed circle everyone, even the Juniuses, are cousins of one another! She was an arch-individualist, just as much as Stalin. She was a Southern Lady.

And now I can look my children in the eye again. The Russians needn’t think themselves the only ones to rehabilitate people posthumously. We Southrons can take care of our own.

H
E AND ESTHER WALKED
out of the marriage clerk’s office, past the other waiting couples and the wedding parties, out into the open air. Down here, the air had a remembered municipal grayness, as if its natural color had long since been gritted over with a light statistical dust. In 1949, though, surely he and Marie had gone to a different place to be married—or else this one had been remodeled. Jim recalled a dirty brownish cubicle stained with the tobacco-juice whiff of smalltime political stews, and a clerk with a whine and a conniving eye. This afternoon, the office had shone with a kind of cleanly bureaucracy, and the clerk, cool and dentifriced, had refused Jim’s large tip with a grave, ritual shake of the head.

Jim took Esther’s elbow and guided her through the corridors, down the steps to the pavement, where still more couples stood about in uncertain tableaux. Dingily new, the city edifices pressed too near, as if seen gigantically close in an opera glass, and looking at one façade, one felt another at the small of one’s back. Built in the hope of a Roman dignity, they had managed only a republican durability. They’re too close together, he thought—that’s it. There’s not enough space between them for majesty.

He hailed a cab, and got in after her. The driver looked inquiringly over a shoulder. “Drive uptown—up Fifth,” Jim said. The driver shrugged and started off.

Jim settled back and felt for Esther’s hand. As soon as they were away, out of that neighborhood, he would be released from his compulsion to compare, to remember. From here on, it would all be new. He was half aware that his unwilling memories were the more painful because his first marriage had been embarked upon in the same golden warmth and faith, the same sense of inevitability. It had been an October day, that day full of scudding cloud and changeableness, and this day, more than twelve years later, was all moist and May, with a muffled vibrato of approaching summer. But in essence each day held the same fixed dream of rightness, of an incredibly lucky voyage with the one person without whom the world dulled. In essence, one day had been, and one day was, the happiest day of his life. It was as if, carefully putting away a freshly inked guaranty in a drawer, he had come upon another, gilt-scrolled and bright and ridiculously voided by time.

He looked at Esther, her serenely musing profile nodding faintly up and down with the movement of the cab. He was beyond seeing her, he knew, in any literal terms as a tall, good-looking girl with dark-blond hair, with features whose imbalance, stopping just short of strangeness, struck one on further scrutiny with their curiously personal beauty. For four years now, from the very beginning of the affair, she had seemed to him a medal struck once, and superbly, for him. Now she looked, as always, fresh and lovely. She always dressed, with wise chic, for the second glance, but today, in a gray dress he had seen once before, and a small spray of veil, she had been perhaps especially careful to avoid the flowery smirk of the bride. Neither of them had brought any huge emphasis to bear on today’s ceremony, held as they had been by an unspoken agreement that for two who had so long been lovers this would be silly, perhaps gross. On their way downtown, stopping around the corner from her place to buy her a camellia at the florist shop they always went to, he had found a pleasing element of continuity, almost a safety, in the benedictory smile of the Greek, in the way he handed the flower, as usual, to Jim, and watched, bowing a little, while Jim handed the flower to Esther. She was wearing it pinned not on her shoulder but on her belt.

She looked around at him now with a smile, a slight pressure of the hand in his, then returned to her wide-eyed contemplation of the driver’s back, and he saw with a rush of warmth that she was surrounded by her own dream of rightness. If she was thinking of her own first wedding—that phlox-and-roses still life of a Connecticut lawn more than ten years back—he did not begrudge her this. Framed in black, it could lie in her memory only with the finality of a mourning card. The house and lawn of her parents had long since been sold; the boy, with whom she had never shared a house, dead within two months in Korea, could only tug importunately now and then at the rim of her remembrance. In a frightening way, he envied her this cameo of a memory, which must have for her the perfect finish given only by death. For her, there was no Marie, no young Jimmie, standing forever wounded, forever suppliant, on the fringe of conscience.

He opened his mouth to speak, because one of them must soon speak, and closed it again, in fear of the random significance of the first thing to be said. It was a feeling like that on the birthdays of his boyhood, when he had hesitated, wary, at the childish chant “If you do it on your birthday, you do it all year around—if you cry on your birthday, you cry the whole year round.” The long affair had been an idyll, hardly shaken by the long divorce, so sure had they been of themselves and of the deep morality of the end in view. Now that they had it, he wanted to touch wood. He had never been more sure of the end; only the beginning troubled him a little.

“Decided where to, Mister?” the driver asked.

Jim looked over at Esther. She turned the palms of her hands upward, then clasped them lightly in her lap. “Where to…” she said, smiling, certain. He gave the driver the address of her apartment and leaned back, stretching his legs.

The cab turned down her street—still hers, even though he had come there for years and his things were there now. “Maybe we should have gone off to the country somewhere,” he said. “Would you have liked that?”

“No.” She shook her head slowly. “I like us just as we are.”

He kissed her and let his face rest for a moment on her shoulder, lazily breathing her perfume, watching the sun and shade dapple her lap. When he had paid off the cab, he followed her down the steps to the dark-blue door, flanked with potted shrubs, through which one entered her building, and they stood in the areaway for a minute, looking down the two streets that converged before it. Spaced along the sidewalks, small, wire-bracketed trees had put out every straining leaf, each trunk holding its rosette of branches like a child’s head too heavy for the delicate stalk of neck. “What a day!” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely day!” She spun on her heel, and put her hands in his.