Tale for the Mirror (33 page)

The river was in a quiet mood today, scarcely breathing, one of those days when its translucence gave a double depth to the air and moved like a philosophy behind the trees. He often thought of it as it must have been four hundred years before, when its shores, not yet massed with lives like pinheads on a map, had been hunting grounds for other Indians. Any gardener who went deep enough along here turned up their flints, their oyster shells. It must have moved along much as now, in the aboriginal silence, beneath an occasional arc of bird, the warning plumes of human smoke still countable above the pines. For almost two hundred of those years now, it had passed to the sea only through the piling cumulus of the city, that Babel of diversity so much feared by Mr. Dee. And now the people were returning north along its current—the diaspora of the pins—sailing northward on the frail skiffs of mortgages, wanting to take strength from the touch of the ground, from the original silence. For diversity had at last scared them, scared us, Garner thought, who were born to it. It is a busy neighborhood now, Brooklyn and all the other places, where birth and death are only a flicker of newsprint, and a life can embezzle itself, without a neighbor around to know. So we radiate, but only twenty miles or more at best—for there is still father’s string. But we’re all up here looking for identity, he thought, for a snatch at primeval sameness, and if we haven’t got it yet, if so far we have nothing but the looseleaf, newsprint theology that we brought with us, who’s to say what an emigration, what a man’s century can bring? He took a deep breath, and it seemed to him that the breath contained a moral effluence from the river, a clean draught of the natural beauty and goodness of the world.

So armed, he walked up his neighbor’s hill. Up at the crest, the hunt was over apparently; most of the children in view were squatted here and there, chattering and swapping over their loot. Some of them were waving the tiny silk flags and brilliant kerchiefs that must be the doctor’s prizes. They had certainly started something with their innocent hunt, their bread-and-milk birthday game. Wherever there were children, of course, it was always difficult to avoid interchange, keep one’s distance, but he imagined that Amelia, who managed their social life up here so efficiently, would find some firm way of maintaining the distance. Certainly she, like himself, would want to fend these people off, this extraordinary household whose difference, exhaled like the incense floating in its parlor, had invaded their calm, routine-drugged Sunday and made of it this lurid, uneasy day.

And that there was a fraudulence, too, about these people—he would bet on it, on his sense of something beyond the mere fact that incense always had a certain fraudulence to Western nostrils. If he, Garner, for instance, had seen part of his army service in India, instead of sweltering in the rum-and-Coke familiarities of Fort Bragg, he might at least have been able to judge better whether Bhatta’s rope-trick style of utterance came merely from that other way of life over there, in which Bhatta himself quite naturally believed. But even if Bhatta’s manner was actually only the stock-in-trade of those yogas who coined temples from California pensioners, or conned elderly occult-seekers in Fifty-seventh Street lecture halls, then, according to the storekeepers down in the village, Bhatta must be an unsuccessful specimen of that breed. “Beware of the man who won’t admit he likes money!” old Dee had said, having the advantage of
his
theology there. It was no trouble to place people, if you had long since been placed yourself, and Mr. Dee was like a clean old piece of litmus paper preserved from that simple experimental era when answers were either pink or blue. Bhatta, an intelligent man, whatever else he was, had tipped to this at once about old Dee, had immediately bypassed him in favor of more impressionable material like Garner himself perhaps, member of a generation that had been schooled so tonelessly free of prejudices that it had nothing left with which to anneal its convictions.

Gaining the crest of the hill, Garner saw the doctor talking to Amelia, who was listening politely, soothed enough, evidently, to have dropped for a moment her eternal watchtower count of the children. He was just in time, too, to see the doctor dismiss the two ladies and the nephew with a lordly sweep of the hand. They came down the path toward him, the nephew skipping ahead. He had one of the little flags in his hand, and he nodded and grinned like a jack-in-the-box as he skipped by, gurgling something in what Garner supposed to be Bengali, or Hindustani, or whatever the boy’s native language was—until the syllables separated themselves in his ear, and he realized that the boy had said, “Jollee good fun. Jollee good.” The doctor’s two secretaries followed behind. Their smallness, their washed out once-blondness suggested, if village rumors about their real status were true, that the doctor might have a certain predilection for type, but beyond this Garner noted again what scant similarity there was between them. Miss Daria’s short, surprisingly heavy legs stumped down the rocky path on high heels, her hair was sleazily girlish on her shoulders, and her dirty satins had the dead-beetle-wing shine of party clothes descended to daytime use. Beside her Miss Leeby, although earth-stained, looked cleaner; she had the inaudible gentility of a librarian whom some climacteric had turned gnome of the garden, and her hands were full of plant cuttings. Both women smiled vaguely on Garner as they passed, and he fancied then that there was a similarity—of smile. These were nun-smiles that they had rendered him, tokens floated down from a shared grace, and shed upon the unsaved. It was clear that the doctor’s ladies, at least, had found their messiah. What was less clear was whether the messiah believed in himself. There were these suddenly contracting glances of his, these graceful circumlocutions about money—certainly he couldn’t keep away from the word, if only to decry it—these heavy sighs over the gap between practice and principle. Were they the honest man’s ennui with the world—or intended to suggest such? Or if Bhatta was a swindler, was there some little subcutaneous grain of honesty that weighted him down? For at times there was certainly a suggestion that, although the doctor might climb his rope-ladder, even pull it up after him in full view of the spectators, at the last moment he could not quite make himself disappear.

“Oh there you are,” said Amelia. “Dr. Bhatta has been telling me about Miss Prager.” Garner picked up Bobbie, who was squatted over some private game in the middle of the path, and set him on his shoulders. Bobbie tightened his knees around Garner’s neck, hooting, then squirmed to be let down. Under Amelia’s quizzical look, Garner set him back on the path.

“Dr. Bhatta has given us a prize, too,” said Amelia. Glancing at it, he saw that it was one of the books that he had seen at the doctor’s house. He nodded his thanks to Bhatta, and slipped the book in a pocket.

“A few prin-ciples,” said Bhatta. “They would interest the little man, har? This Misser Dee?”

“He was more interested in your restaurant,” said Garner. “The menu on the wall.”

“Restaurant?” said Amelia.

“We had, at one time,” said Bhatta. “On Twenty-sixth Street. The ladies’ enterprise.” He smiled at Amelia, with a touch of the manner he had used to cozen Sukey. “All you American ladies have the desire to open a shop, har? The hat shop, the tea shop. You are remarkable ladies.”

“I gather you served both hats and tea,” said Garner.

“Har?”

“I mean, uh…‘Curry with Turban.’”

Bhatta chuckled. “My friend who gives me the house in Brooklyn, you remember. He is such a very smart businessman. A middleman, you call it. He tells them, ‘Package it. That’s what sells. The package.’ So they package it. Forty-two turbans in linen and silk, forty-two glass Kohinoors from Dennison’s. Special trays for the turbans. A special boy to carry, and to wind them on the customer.”

“What a clever idea!” said Amelia.

Clever enough to feint her away from dark thoughts of Miss Prager and the children, Garner thought, and for a moment he too smiled down on her, though fondly, with a touch of Bhatta’s condescension.

“Yars,” said the doctor. “But for our own friends, who have not the tourist mon-ey—I think that we must do something for them too. So we fix for them a nonprofit item.”

“Oh…‘The Mahatma Ghandi Curry,’” said Garner.

The doctor nodded, swaying happily in an undercurrent of the private merriment that seemed to dash him constantly between the joke on others and the joke on himself. “They are very enthusiastic. So, at the end—” He spread his hands. “We have all this Ghandi trade—and no Maharajahs!”

Garner and Amelia smiled, as they were plainly meant to do. It was really impossible not to be warmed, won, Garner thought, by the doctor’s disarming habit of making game of himself.

“Curry—with Loincloth?” said Garner.

The doctor threw back his head in a gust of laughter that set him jiggling from belly to cheek, with a violence almost alarming in a man of his weight. He laughed until his eyes watered; a tear overflowed and ran, mud-tinted, down his dark face. How seldom one sees that happen these days, thought Garner, meanwhile grinning with the sheepishness of the man whose quip has received more than its due.

Bhatta poked him in the ribs. “Now you are making the metaphors, har?” He mopped at the tear, loosened his belt a notch, easing his mirth as a woman might ease her girdle, and bent toward Garner and Amelia, meanwhile gazing absently out over the river, which was spotted with a flotilla of small boats, the larger craft of the professional shad-men who came every year under some immemorial right, and here and there a solitary fisherman, one of the householders from shore, sinking his long-handled net for the first early crab of the season. “You understand, of course,” said Bhatta, lowering his voice with mock secretiveness, “underneath the names and the trimmings—it was all the same curry!”

This time it was the Garners who, after an instant’s gap, exploded into laughter, while the doctor’s lips only curved in the slightest of smiles, his head nodding and nodding, his veiled eyes presiding above their laughter as if he had known all along that he would be able to nudge them toward friendliness. And this was the man’s talent, Garner thought, whatever lay beneath it—this talent for flipping the absurd and the serious over and over like a coin, a shell-game perhaps, at which the onlooker was dazzled, confused, but so warmed and joined that here were the three of them standing together, in a circle together under the gently dropping evening-light—three friends who have kindled, sighed, and lapsed into end-of-day quiet, each looking inward for a moment at the same tender picture, at the
faiblesse
of man, poor homunculus, with his absurd nets and boathooks, grappling for fish and for flashing non-fish in the salt wave-shadows of living.

It was Amelia who recovered first. “Where do you suppose Bobbie’s gone off to?” she murmured, indicting herself for this moment’s indulgence, in which she had forgotten to keep tabs. For as Garner knew, as she had often confessed, her servantless immersion in the children’s days, her almost never being apart from them, had somehow resulted in her being unable to enjoy without guilt those personal pauses which were every human’s need; it was as if she felt that her constant, tensed awareness of the children was the placenta through which they were nourished still, and at the second she truly forgot them, they would as surely die. “Doctor Bhatta—” she said. “Do you plan to…will you have other people like Miss Prager up here? To live?”

The doctor was looking up in the air. “Such a day!” he said. “Like a magnifying glass!” He pointed to one of the hemlocks, one of the great trees which always seemed to Garner to lift this region bodily out of the suburb into the misty realm of the uncorrupted, the undiscovered. “High as a church, har, that tree? Yet one sees the three twigs at the top.” He turned to Amelia. “Other people?”

“Well, I—I mean…”

He knows what you mean, thought Garner. And now the evasions will come twinkling down again, from the trees, from the air, from anything handy—a rain of silver, of silver-paper, on us, who are so regrettably direct.

“I mean—disturbed people,” said Amelia, bringing out the phrase with an unhappy flush.

“Disturbed?” said Bhatta. “Miss Prager has the importance to be mad—in an age that does not take its mad people seriously. A man splits in two? Shhh—he is only upset. He must learn better how to swallow his century. If not—a very sad case of hic-coughs.” He turned to look at the summerhouse. “And all the time,” he said softly, “there are these sealed-off lives, these pieces of crystal—” He turned back to the Garners. “You have seen her. You would say she is—how old?”

Garner thought of the leathered skin, the dead hair hanging like a ledge from the over-articulated skull. “Perhaps—fifty?”

“And you, Missis Garner?”

“Well…yes…about that.”

“She has worked in the bank, they say, about twenty years. And according to the employment records, the Social Security, there would be almost another thirty before the retirement. She is thirty-six.” He nodded at their stricken faces. “Think of it. She would be about sixteen, when placed in the bank. Maybe a couple of years older when the father absconds. The bank lets her stay on; she is innocent, she has the mother to support. An ordinary story.” Bhatta clapped his hands together. “But from then on…imagine. The father sneaks back; the two women hide him. Sometime later, perhaps, the mother dies. Miss Prager goes back and forth to the bank, night and morning. And all those years, while she is working to keep the secret, the city is taking her secret away. The neighborhood changes; the old neighbors are blown away. Even in a bank, the city blows things away. Who is to notice, to remember, if an old man were to come out of his door, to come out on his stoop, among a hundred other stoops, and sit in the sun?”

The Garners were silent. Then Garner spoke. “You’re convinced it was the father, then?”

“A lawyer could perhaps check better,” said Bhatta. “But as for me, I am innerly convinced.” He looked down his hillside, wider and steeper than Garner’s, but as wild, although here and there old terraces had been brought into view. On the road at the bottom one of the long, red motorcoaches from the city came to a wheezing stop. “Such a pure case,” he said. “Such a classic of money-injury. All for a reason that no longer exists.”