The Mirror of Her Dreams (2 page)

Yet the man who fought for her did so for no reason she could see except that she was being attacked. And he didn't know his danger: he was still trying to wrest his blade from the body of the rider he had just felled, and his back was turned.

Startling herself and the horseman and the sharp cold, she cried, 'Watch out!'

The effort of the warning jerked her into a sitting position. She was still in bed. Her shout made her throat ache, and an unaccustomed panic pounded through her veins.

She recognized herself in the mirrors of her bedroom. Lit by the nightlight plugged into the wall socket behind the bed, she was hardly more than a shadow in the glass all around her; but she was herself, the shadow she had always been.

And yet, while her pulse still laboured and a slick of sweat oozed from her face, she thought she heard beyond the comfortless noises of the city a distant calling of horns, too faint to be certain-and too intimate to be ignored.

Of course, nothing was changed. She got up the next morning when her alarm clock went off; and her appearance in her mirrors was as rumpled and wan as usual. Though she studied her face for any sign that it was real enough for men on horseback to hate so fiercely, it seemed as void of meaning as always-so unmarked by experience, decision, or impact that she was dimly surprised to find it still able to cast a reflection. Surely she was fading? Surely she would wake up one morning, look at herself in the mirror, and see nothing? Perhaps, but not today. Today she looked just as she remembered herself-beautifully made, but to no purpose, and slightly tinged with sorrow.

So she showered as usual, dressed herself as usual in the sort of plain skirt and demure sweater her father preferred for her, breakfasted as usual-watching herself in the mirrors between bites of toast-and put on a raincoat before leaving her apartment to go to work. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the way she looked, or about her apartment as she left it, or about the elevator ride down to the lobby of her building. The only thing out of the ordinary was the way she felt.

To herself, so privately that none of it showed on her face, she kept remembering her dream.

Outside, rain fell heavily onto the street, flooding the gutters, hissing like hail off the roofs of the cars, muffling the noises of traffic. Dispirited by the grey air and the wet, she tied a plastic bandana over her head, then walked past the security guard (who ignored her, as usual) and out through the revolving doors into the downpour.

With her head down and her concentration on the sidewalk, she moved in the direction of the mission where she worked.

Without warning, she seemed to hear the horns again.

Involuntarily, she stopped, jerked up her head, looked around her like a frightened woman. They weren't car-horns: they were wind-instruments such as a hunter or musician might use. The chord of their call was so far away and out of place that she couldn't possibly have heard it, not in that city, in that rain, while rush-hour traffic filled the streets and fought the downpour. And yet the sensation of having heard the sound made everything she saw appear sharper and less dreary, more important. The rain had the force of a determined cleansing: the streaked grey of the buildings looked less like despair, more like the elusive potential of the borderland between day and night; the people jostling past her on the pavement were driven by courage and conviction, rather than by disgust at the weather or fear of their employers. Everything around her had a tang of vitality she had never seen before.

Then the sensation faded; and she couldn't possibly have heard rich horns calling to her heart; and the tang was gone.

Baffled and sad, she resumed her sodden walk to work.

At the mission, her day was more full of drudgery than usual. In the administrative office, seated at her desk with the ancient typewriter crouching in front of her like a foul-tempered beast of burden, she found a message from Rev Thatcher, the old man who ran the mission: it said that the mission's copying costs were too high, so would she please type two hundred and fifty copies of the attached letter in addition to her other duties, This letter was aimed at most of the philanthropic organizations in the city, and it contained yet another appeal for money, couched in Rev Thatcher's customary futility. She could hardly bear to read it as she typed; but of course she had to read it over and over again to get it right.

While she typed, she seemed to feel herself becoming physically less solid, as if she were slowly being dissolved by the pointless-

ness of what she did. By noon, she had the letter memorized; and she was watching in a state that resembled suspense the line of letters her typewriter made, waiting for each new character because it proved that she was still there and she couldn't honestly say she expected it to appear.

She and Rev Thatcher usually ate lunch together-by his choice, not hers. Since she was quiet and watched his face attentively, he probably thought she was a sympathetic listener. But most of the time she hardly heard what he said. His talk was like his letters: there was nothing she could do to help. She was quiet because that was the only way she knew how to be; she watched his face because she hoped it would betray some indication of her own reality-some flicker of interest or concentration of notice which might indicate that she was actually present with another person. So she sat with him in one corner of the soup kitchen the mission ran in its basement, and she kept her face turned towards him while he talked.

From a distance, he appeared bald, but that was because his mottled pink skin showed clearly through his fine, pale hair, which he kept cut short. The veins in his temples were prominent and seemed fragile, with the result that whenever he became agitated, they looked like they might burst. Today she expected him to rehash his latest letter, which she had already typed nearly two hundred times. That was his usual pattern: while they ate the bland, thin lunch provided by the kitchen, he would tell her things she already knew about his work, his voice quavering whenever he came back to the uselessness of what he was doing. This time, however, he surprised her.

'Miss Morgan,' he said without quite looking at her, 'have I ever told you about my wife?'

In fact, he hadn't, though he referred to her often. But Terisa knew some of his family history from the previous mission secretary, who had given up the job in defeat and disgust. Nevertheless she said, 'No, Rev Thatcher. You've mentioned her, naturally. But you've never told me about her.'

'
She died nearly fifteen years ago,' he said, still wistfully. 'But she was a fine, Christian woman, a strong woman, God rest her soul. Without her, I would have been weak, Miss Morgan-too weak to do what needed doing.'

Though she hadn't considered the question closely, Terisa thought of him as weak. He sounded weak now, even when he wasn't talking about his failure to do better for the mission. But he also sounded fond and saddened.

'I remember the time-oh, it was years ago, long before you were born, Miss Morgan-I was out of seminary'-he smiled past her left shoulder-'with all kinds of honours, would you believe it? And I had just finished serving an assistant pastorship at one of the best churches in the city.

'
At the time, they wanted me to stay on as an associate pastor. With God's help, I had done well there, and they gave me a call to become one of their permanent shepherds. I can tell you, Miss Morgan, that was quite gratifying. But for some reason my heart wasn't quiet about it. I had the feeling God was trying to tell me something. You see, just at that time I had learned that this mission needed a new director. I had no desire for the job. Being a weak man, I was pleased by my position in the church. I was well rewarded for my work, both financially and personally. And yet I couldn't forget the question of this mission. It was true that the church called me to serve them. But what did God call me to do?

'It was Mrs Thatcher who resolved my dilemma. Putting her hand on her hip, as she always did when she meant to be taken seriously, she said, 'Now don't you be a fool, Albert Thatcher. When Our Lord came into the world, he didn't do it to serve the rich. This church is a fine place-but if you leave, they'll have their choice of a hundred fine men to replace you. Not one of those men will consider a call to the mission.'

'So I came here,' he concluded. 'Mrs Thatcher didn't care that we were poor. She only cared that we were serving God. I've done that, Miss Morgan, for forty years.'

Ordinarily, a comment like that would have been a prelude to another of his long discussions of his unending and often fruitless efforts to keep the mission viable. Ordinarily, she could hear those discussions coming and steel herself against them, so that her own unreality in the face of the mission's need and his penury wouldn't overwhelm her.

But this time what she heard was the faraway cry of horns.

They carried the command of the hunt and the appeal of music, two different sounds that formed a chord in her heart, blending together so that she wanted to leap up inside herself and shout an answer. And while she heard them, everything around her changed.

The soup kitchen no longer looked dingy and worn out: it looked well used, a place of single-minded dedication. The grizzled and tattered men and women seated at the tables were no longer reduced to mere hunched human wreckage: now they took in hope and possibility with their soup. Even the edges of the tables were more distinct, more tangible and important, than ordinary Formica and tubed steel. And Rev Thatcher himself was changed. The pulse beating in his temples wasn't the agitation of uselessness: it was the strong rhythm of his determination to do good. There was valour in his pink skin, in the earned lines of his face, and the focus of his eyes was so distant because it was fixed, not on futility, but on God.

The change lasted for only a moment. Then she could no longer hear the horns, even though she yearned for them; and the air of defeat seeped slowly back into her surroundings.

Filled with loss, she thought she would start to weep if Rev Thatcher began another of his discussions. Fortunately, he didn't. He had some phone calls to make, hoping to catch certain influential people while they were taking their lunch breaks; so he excused himself and left her, unaware that for a moment he had been covered by a glamour in her eyes. She returned to her desk almost gratefully: at her typewriter, she would be able to strike the keys and see her existence proven in the black characters she made on paper.

The afternoon passed slowly. Through the one, bare window, she could see the rain still flooding down, drenching everything until even the buildings across the street looked like wet cardboard. The few people hurrying up and down the pavements might have been wearing raingear, or they might not: the downpour seemed to erase the difference. Rain pounded on the outside of the window; gloom soaked in through the glass. Terisa found herself typing the same mistakes over and over again. She wanted to hear horns again-wanted to re-experience the tang and sharpness that came with them. But they had been nothing more than the residue of one of her infrequent dreams. She couldn't recapture them.

At leaving time, she put her work away, shrugged her shoulders into her raincoat, and tied her plastic bandana over her head. But when she was ready to go, she hesitated. On impulse she knocked on the door of the tiny cubicle Rev Thatcher used as a private office. At first, she didn't hear anything. Then he answered faintly,

'Come in.'

She opened the door.

There was just room in the cubicle for her and one folding chair between his desk and the wall. His seat at the other side of the desk was so tightly blocked in with file cabinets that when he wanted to leave he could barely squeeze out of his niche. As Terisa entered the room, he was staring blankly at his telephone as if it sucked all his attention and hope away.

'Miss Morgan. Quitting time?'

She nodded.

He didn't seem to notice that she hadn't said anything. 'You know,' he told her distantly, 'I talked to forty-two people today. Thirty-nine of them turned me down.'

If she let the impulse which had brought her here to dissipate, she would have that much less reason to believe in her own existence; so she said rather abruptly, 'I'm sorry about Mrs Thatcher.'

Softly, as if she hadn't changed the subject, he replied, 'I miss her. I need her to tell me I'm doing the right thing.'

Because she wanted to make him look at her, she said, 'You
are
doing the right thing.' As she spoke, she realized she believed it. The memory of horns had changed that for her, if nothing else. 'I wasn't sure before, but I am now.'

His vague gaze remained fixed on the phone, however. 'Maybe if I call her brother,' he muttered to himself. 'He hasn't made a contribution for a year now. Maybe he'll listen to me this time.'