Tale for the Mirror (32 page)

“She will not go near them, Misser Garner. She will not touch them.” The doctor rose too, placing a hand on Garner’s arm. “You see—
literally
she will not touch anything. She is afraid of her own hands. That is what the bank tells me. One morning they find her at the cashier’s window, in a daze. Her hands will not touch the mo-ney, she says. She is resting her hands now, she tells them. Naturally, what can they do? A cashier who will not touch mo-ney! That must be why she is starving when we find her. She tells us too that she is resting her hands. But actually she is afraid of them. She does not like to touch herself with them.” Bhatta smiled, releasing Garner’s arm. “Pitiful, har? Actually, rather a common form…but developed to the extreme. We have done pretty well with her. Now she feeds herself, and she will work at clearing the brush. But you have seen how sometimes she forgets, and holds her arms?” The doctor cocked his head, listening to the children’s voices. They were chattering excitedly, and syrupy wails came from the younger ones.

“Charming,” said Bhatta. “What is this game they are playing?”

Garner explained.

“But how charming! And what is in the little bags?”

“There’s my wife, coming after me I guess,” said Garner, and indeed Amelia was advancing toward them. Through the opening in the hedge, the children trooped after her and surrounded her. “Daddy! Daddy!” shrieked Sukey.

Amelia quieted her with a gesture. She nodded briefly to the doctor, and knitted her brows meaningfully at Garner. Her face was pink with reproach. “John! The bags are gone from the hill. Every one of them. There’s not one!”

“Somebody stole them! Somebody stole them!” Sukey danced up and down with excitement.

The other children took up the refrain and the dance. Garner looked at his youngest, Bobbie, who was aping the others with improvisatory glee. “You don’t suppose that he—?”

“John, he’s not capable of it. They’ve disappeared. Besides, the children have been with me every minute. We only put the bags out last night. You know what I think?” She took a step toward Bhatta, her mild face dilated. Taking their mood from her, the children clustered round her, staring at the doctor. There was no brood-hen room for them in her narrow tweed skirt, but she pressed them against her with her prematurely knuckled, detergent-worn hands. “I think it’s that person you—you have up there!”

“Thought I saw someone moving around up there this morning,” said Garner. “Before it was light. Forgot all about it.”

“Pos-sible,” said the doctor. “If so, remarkably interesting. Why do we not go and see?” He bent benevolently toward Sukey. “You are really having your hunt, har? Let us go and see.”

“Indeed not!” said Amelia. “You children come back to the house with me.” But led by Sukey, the children had already escaped her, and were running up to the hut. It was clear that the presence there was no news to them. Garner and the others reached them just as they drew back at the railing of the pavilion, their little ferreting noses arrested in uneasy obedience.

The doctor knocked gently at the center shutter, to which a knob of wood had been crudely affixed. Behind his bulbous, stooped form, the blind pavilion, little more than man-high, and puzzled together from old splinters of the past, had the queer coyness of a dollhouse in which something, always on the run from the giant thumb, might be living after all.

“Miss Prager?” said the doctor softly. “Miss Prager?”

There was no answer from within, nor did the doctor seem to expect one. He pushed inward the unlocked shutter, and stepped inside. For a moment they could see nothing except the small, swelling flame of a hurricane lamp. Then he opened a shutter at the back and daylight filtered in, neutering the lamp, winking it into place on a chain hung from the roof-point. Half the rough wood hexagonal table that had once filled the place, paralleling the sides, had been cut away, leaving room for a small pallet. Behind it, on part of the window seat that encircled the room, there was a pile of underclothes, a mackinaw, a pitcher, besides some cracker boxes still in their bright paper. Next to these, a pair of black house slippers with curled silk pompoms glistened unworn, as if presented by hopeful nieces to an intractable aunt. Behind the other side of the table sat Miss Prager. In the current of air between the two shutters, compounded of the hot funk of the oil lamp and the tobaccony damp of wood-mold, she sat motionless, upright, arms spread-eagled on the table, in front of all the little gutted bags.

Sukey cried out sharply, “There it—!” and hushed. But they had all seen the dime-store money, neatly rectangled in piles, the toy snakes and babies tumbled to one side.

At Sukey’s cry, Miss Prager wilted into consciousness. Her elbows contracted to her sides. She was working in a narrow space, the elbows said. Her hands moved forward, picked up a packet of the money and shuffled it expertly, counting it out. One two three four, thump. One two three four, thump, the hands went, moving of themselves. The middle right finger flicked the bills like the spoke of a wheel. At each fifth thump, the spatulate thumb came down. Miss Prager stared fixedly at the lamp, but all the while her hands moved so lucidly that one almost saw the red rubber casing on the middle finger, the morning business sun, glinting on withdrawals and deposits, behind the freshly wiped bronze bars. Beneath her fixed gaze, her hands went on transacting without her, and came to no conclusion.

This was what they saw before the doctor closed the door, and stood with his back to it. He looked over the children and picked out Sukey, who was standing well forward, one arm pressing her small brother to her stubby skirt, in angular imitation of her mother. The doctor beckoned to her, as to the natural leader of the children. And she was, she would always be, thought Garner, seeing his daughter in that quickened outline which drama penciled around the familiar. Here was no city febrile, here was none of that pavement wistfulness of tenure such as Amelia and he, even middle-class as they had been, had known as children. She was more intrepid, more secure, because they had grounded her here.

“She’s got our bags,” said Sukey.

“So she has,” said the doctor, smiling. “She has been ill, and did not know they were yours. I tell you what—suppose you all come back after lunch, har? Meanwhile, the ladies will put all the things back in the bags, and hide them on our side of the hill. That will be exciting, har, to hunt in a new place? And in each bag, for each child—there will be a prize from India!”

And so it was arranged. Garner, following behind Amelia to herd the children inside, saw Miss Leeby enter the summerhouse, and shut the door behind her. Later, after lunch, as he carried the debris of cake and ice cream into the kitchen, while the front of the house rang with the shrieks of blindman’s buff, he saw two figures through the kitchen window, which had a view of Kuyper’s hill as well as of his own.

It was the nephew and Miss Daria, stooping here and there on their part of the hillside, to hide the bags. He barely knew them, that ill-assorted pair, and it could be assumed that they scarcely knew each other, but he found himself looking at the two figures, rounded over in the blameless posture of sowing, with the enmity of a proprietor watching his boundary lines, his preserves. It was not, surely, that he resented the foreigner, the alien. He and Amelia were of the college-disciplined generation that had made a zeal of tolerance. But for the first time, watching these two figures from a ménage that had suddenly bloomed next door to him like an overnight morel, he felt a shameful, a peasant creeping of resentment, almost an abdominal stiffening against persons that different—and that near. Let them keep their difference, but at a distance, he thought. At closer range, a foreign way of life, wrong or right, posed too many questions at one’s own. Questions that he was not up to answering as yet, that he was not interested in having answered. Bhatta no doubt made a career of posing questions at the uncertain, holding out the bait of answers to be rendered at a stiff fee. “Way of life” was a flabby phrase perhaps, thought Garner, but since he and Amelia were conducting themselves as thousands of well-meaning couples all over the country were, he presumed that they had one, although its outlines might be obscure. If their affiliations—he thought of Mr. Dee—were still too vague to bear perspective, he supposed that time would sculp them clearer, doing for the contemporary what it had done for all others. Perhaps his own affiliation to his way of living was not old enough, not deep enough, for self-scrutiny. “It doesn’t do to get too thick,” he muttered to himself. “It won’t do.”

So, when Miss Daria came to the door, with the message that “the Doctor would receive them now”—there was no doubt that the doctor’s ladies thought him the personage to others that he must be to them—Garner relayed the message to Amelia. She came into the kitchen, shunting the children before her, herding them with an abstracted tongue-lash here, a pat on the buttocks there, showing her own physical sense of herself as still their nursing center. All the neighborhood mothers of younger children had this; it was in the tugged hang of their daily clothes, in the tired but satiate burr of their voices, it was no doubt what grounded them.

“You’re coming too, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Thought I’d like to get that drain dug.” He heard his own tone, the plaintive bleat of the weekend householder.

“John—it’s Sukey’s birthday.” She went out the door without saying anything more, but he knew from her voice, her face, what she was thinking, was silently saying to him. “More contact with the children,” she was saying. Fathers must have more contact with their children. All the mothers prated this to one another, and to the husbands, bravely arranging weekend excursions in which fathers had the starring role, taking the briefcases from their deadened arms at nightfall and handing them the babies sleeked from the bath, sidling the older children nearer for advices, ukases from the giant combat world of downtown. “Touch them, put your arms around them more,” Amelia had once said to him. “Get down on your knees and play with them more,” all the conniving mothers said, trying to give substance to these vague father figures that flitted from home at something after seven and returned at something before. And the mothers had other fears, Garner thought, fears that they shared, squirming self-consciously in the naked antiseptic light shed upon them by the magazines they all read, the books by female anthropologists who warned them of momism, of silver cords, of sons turned feminine and daughters wailing in a Sapphic wilderness.

Now that he thought of it, the remarkable thing was that in this modern world—supposedly of such complexity, such bewilderment that one could only catch ideas, precepts, on the run, and hold on to them no longer than the draining of a cocktail—people like Amelia and himself and their friends here, people who would be referred to as the educated classes in any country less self-conscious than America, were actually all the time imprisoned in a vast sameness of ideas. It’s a loose theology we’re in, he thought, a jelly-ooze littered with leaflets, with warnings and totems, but it holds us, in its invertebrate way, as firmly as any codex thundered from those nineteenth-century pulpits from which we have long since decamped. Even the phrase “nineteenth-century,” which he had used without looking at it, as one spent a coin—was it anything more than a part of this, an old examination marker, a paper flag stuck in a bog?

Certainly his father, the lawyer, and Amelia’s, the professor in a minor college, both born in roughly the late eighties, had been holdovers from that century, and he remembered, with fair accuracy, that they had been, if anything, more remote from their children than he, Garner, was from his. He could hear their voices, his father’s, self-sufficient and nasal, spewing authority, and the professor’s, taciturn and weighty, but with the same mantle of importance. That is what these men had had, he thought, a sense of their own importance, a sense of their own identity, solidity, in a world where the enterprise rested with them. When they had entered the dining room, heavily, of an evening, they had brought with them an illusion of a larger, a giant world of combat, but—and this was the point—it had not been an illusion either for them or their wives. And this, thought Garner, this was really what Amelia and the other mothers were after. They were trying to recast the fathers of their children in the image of
their
fathers. They wanted this authority for their husbands, they wanted them to exude this importance to the children. Poor Amelia, Garner thought, biting his lip, but laughing inwardly, for it was funny, and what could one do, when afflicted with thoughts like these, except get into perspective, or out of it, and laugh? She didn’t want to let the children see, she didn’t want to see for herself that father thought of himself as only a dog on a string.

He slipped out the back door. In a few minutes he’d go up the hill, where he could hear the children, already hard at their hunting. He’d roughhouse with them, get down on the ground with them, anything Amelia prescribed. Through the leaves he could see her watching the play, preserving a certain distance from the doctor’s ladies, who were also watching, and the nephew, who was running and cavorting with the children—he could not be more than eighteen or twenty.

Above them, in its small clearing, the pavilion was quiet, as usual; there was no telling whether or not the doctor had removed his charge to the main house. How incredible it was, in hindsight, the calm way they all had acted, after that one fell glimpse into the private pit of that poor thing in there! For that is what it had seemed like—the tiny black core of the place, the one flame lighting the objects displayed there (he remembered the slippers—like the amphorae set beside graves), and outside it, above it somehow, the white, saved faces of the children, peering over the crater at the clockbound movements of the damned. Then the doctor had closed the door, and immediately they, the conniving adults, had all acted so very naturally—the doctor, of course, with that composure of his which was more than professional, almost artistic, and he and Amelia, acting at once in concert, on another tenet of their theology, the leaflet that said “Never show fears before children. Never communicate anxiety to the young.” In time of atom, in time of death and possible transfiguration, act secure, and they will take security from you. He sighed, and without meaning to, walked around to the front of the house, the river side. The leaflets never told you what to communicate, what to show.