Tale for the Mirror (31 page)

“Ah, ah,” said Bhatta. “And I come to it so late.”

Mr. Dee lifted his chin above his collar. Under his parochial gaze the doctor’s little pleasantry vanished, incense into ozone. “You understand, therefore, the board’s concern over your plans?”

“Plans?” The doctor’s shoulders vibrated to his smile. “They sprout around me like roses—these plans. But I myself—”

From under Mr. Dee’s carnelian seal, the newspaper clip was withdrawn, and laid on the Moorish table. “Yours, sir?” he said. He sat back. A thin pink elated his starved cheek. He coughed once, and then again, and the cough had a dry, preserved tang to it, an old flute long laid away in the musty confabulations of lost authority.

“T-t-t,” said the doctor, studying the clipping. “Always in such a hurry, those terrible ladies.” He chuckled. “A man’s castle is not his house, har?” He leaned forward to place the paper back on Mr. Dee’s side of the table, studying him. “You would like yourself to build a guest-house here, Misser Dee?”

“Garner—” said Mr. Dee. It was a measure of his feelings that he did not append “Mr.,” and of his arteries perhaps, that they held.

“Dr. Bhatta—” said Garner. “Perhaps you’re not yet…aware of the road’s laws on this.” He hesitated, then, squirming like a boy under the tutorial glare of Mr. Dee, he repeated them: no commercial enterprise, no subdivided renting, no double dwellings. “And no additions to existent buildings,” he concluded. “Except of course for members of the same family. It’s a—” He stopped. “Well—it’s a hopeful attempt to keep things as they are.”

“It is a real phil-osophy, this zoning,” said Bhatta. “How lucky for me that Indian families are so large.”

“Not large enough, sir, I think, to include all the readers of the
Times
,” said Mr. Dee.

“What a peaceable world that would be,” said the doctor. He sighed. “Then, perhaps the
Tribune.
But certainly, first the
Times
.” He cast a sudden glance at Garner; it was the practiced side glance of the dead-pan joker, that mere facial cracking by which he chooses to honor a chosen auditor. “But you need not worry, Misser Dee. Miss Leeby is very talented—you should see the new bathroom. But she is not yet capable of a gar-den apartment.”

Mr. Dee stood up. He bowed, and his bow too had a stored flavor, like the cough. “As Mr. Garner would have to tell you legally, it’s the principle of the thing.”

“Prin-ciples,” said the doctor. He studied his hands, as if he had a number of such concealed there. He sighed, looking up at Garner. “The distance from
a priori
to
a posteriori,
that is the history of the world, har, Misser Garner? That is what I keep telling the ladies. Love is infinite; therefore its services should be. Then they come running from the kitchen to tell me the curry is finite.” He stood up, turning to Dee. “It is a Christian dilemma also. You have had experience of this, perhaps…in the Dutch Reform?”

“Do I understand sir…?” Mr. Dee’s voice dropped to the whisper reserved for indecency. “That you
charge
for meals at these celebrations?”

“No, no, Misser Dee. It is like the party some people ask us here at New Year’s. The ladies to bring casseroles. The men to bring bottles. It is the same with us. Only without bottles.” He paused. “Perhaps you will stay today. A special occasion. No casserole required.” He too bowed, with a plastic gesture toward the rear of the house, and Garner became aware that the noise from that region had been replaced by a powerful, spice-scented breath of cookery.

Mr. Dee flushed, and moved stiffly toward the door. In the nacreous light from its one high pane, his nostrils quivered once, membrane-pink, and were pinched still. “I thank you, sir. But Mrs. Dee has something very specially prepared.”

As the doctor opened the door for them, Garner spoke. “Matter of fact, Dr. Bhatta…my wife and I did want to ask you. It’s, er…it’s about the lady who seems to be living in the summerhouse. Because of the children, we were—naturally a bit concerned.”

“Ah, Miss Prager. Yars.” The air coming through the door was balmy, but the doctor’s face seemed to Garner for a moment as it had seemed on their winter encounters in front of the stores—as if it denied any imputation that it could suffer cold. “Tell your wife there is no cause to be concerned,” he said. “Miss Prager will not touch anybody.” His voice lingered on the word “touch,” and with this his glance returned to Garner, its customary air of inner amusement regained.

“Summerhouse!” Mr. Dee pecked past both men and angled his head outside the door. Turning from what he saw, he confronted Garner. His chin sank into his collar. “So you already knew, sir, that we had a case in point there!”

An elderly limousine rolled slowly up to the doctor’s gate. It stopped, motor running. Its klaxon sounded once—not with the tut-tut of present-day horns, but with an “Ay—ooyah” Garner had not heard for years.

“Ah, how kind of them!” Mr. Dee waved a gay, an intimate acceptance toward the car. He nodded stiffly at the doctor. “If you don’t mind, Garner, perhaps you’ll walk me to the car?”

Going down the path, his military gait made it clear that it was not assistance he required. At the car, the chauffeur, stooping, held open the rear door. He and Mr. Dee seemed of an age.

Mr. Dee paused. “From the board’s point of view, I find this unaccountable of you, Mr. Garner. Personally, I can see that man’s engaged your sympathy.” He put a hand on Garner’s arm. “Let me give you a warning my father gave me: Beware of the man who won’t admit he likes money—he’ll end up with yours.” He turned to get in the car, then paused again. “Darjeeling!” he whispered angrily. “If that was anything but plain pekoe, I should be very much surprised!”

Garner watched the car disappear up the road, half amused, half impatient over the way he had wasted the haven of his Sunday morning like a schoolboy dangling beneath the concerns of his elders. He had been interrupted in his soothing routine of those repetitive acts of repair for which his house, blessed incubus, had an endless appetite. Out of habit, he looked at the river, pouring along south as private and intent as the blue skeins one remembered to notice now and then in one’s wrists. How far up it did one have to go, these days, before one came to the real places, short-summered and Appalachian-cool, where a broken window was vital to life, a lantern was a lantern, and the ground woke every morning to its own importance? Too far for him, staked to the city like a dog on a string. This was as far as he could go.

Turning to go, he faced the doctor, who had followed him down the steps.

“He has much mo-ney, this Misser Dee?”

“No. Actually…almost none. The car was a friend’s.”

“It is not his own property he defends then, this little dragon?”

“Well—no.”

Bhatta burst into laughter. Silent chuckles shook his belly, tinted his jowl. “Excuse me, Misser Garner. Really I am laughing at myself—for not yet being assimilated.” He mopped at his eyes with a large ocher silk handkerchief. “So—he is only a proxy dragon, har?” He swung around for his usual appraisal of his own house. His eyes flicked past the summerhouse, and he bent to probe a heavy finger into a rose. “Well…every man has to tell himself some little tale in the dark, har? So as not to really see himself in the mirror the next morning.” The rose sprang back, released. “Even in this clear air. Even an early set-tler.”

Over at the far edge of his own property, Garner saw Amelia turning their car into their driveway. Children tumbled out of the car—his own, and several of the neighbors’—and ran into the house. He waved, but Amelia followed them in without seeing him. And perhaps because she had innocently not seen him malingering here, and because, although he rarely saw his children romantically, he had for a moment caught them aureoled against the silent witch-point of the summerhouse, he spoke in sudden anger. “It’s Miss Prager’s story I’d like to have. And if you please—the facts. I’m not much for metaphor.”

“Really?” The doctor squinted. “I would have said otherwise. But, as you say. Do not blame me if the facts are odd.” He motioned to a bench, on which they seated themselves. Bhatta buttoned the top button of his shirt, shot a cuff, making, as it were, professional corrections to his appearance, and began to speak, with astonishing briskness. “Last year, a patient is very grateful; he gives me a house. Before he sails for Europe, he says to me, ‘Bhatta, between us mo-ney would be an indelicacy. Take from me this house, which I have bought unseen for taxes, near the beautiful section of Brooklyn Heights.’”

Bhatta paused, shook his head mournfully, and went quickly on. “But when the ladies and I go there, I think probably he is not so grateful after all. Not a rescuable house. Even Miss Leeby shakes her head. We are sadly locking the door, so the wind will not blow it into the harbor, when Miss Leeby goes down cellar to look once more at the pipes. And there, in a room at the back, is Miss Prager. Fainted, we think. No—it is catatonic, and malnutrition. We talk with the neighbors; only one old lady is there who remembers. And what she tells us—”

The doctor spread his hands. His voice had become measurably softer. “Imagine, Misser Garner. A family has been mildewing in that house for twenty years. Years ago, there were three people, the father, the mother, the daughter. Lutherans, very strict, very distant. The father absconds from his bank—he was president—taking with him much mo-ney. Later on, gossip says that he comes secretly back, but no one is ever sure. Only the old woman we speak to remembers—the neighborhood is no longer Lutheran. Only Miss Prager, the daughter, is seen, night and morning for years now, coming from the bank, where she has always been cashier. The neighbors know of an invalid upstairs in the house, but not whether it is a man or a woman. There is never a doctor. At night, one light upstairs, one down. Then, some months before we come—a fire in the house next door. Prager’s is only smoked out, but the firemen remove for safety an old person from the top floor. Hugely fat, this person, too fat to move, long hair, and a dreadful sore on the leg. From the description—maybe diabetic ulcer. Even in the smoke, the neighbors say, they can remember the smell from the leg. After that—nothing. They do not remember when Miss Prager stops going to the bank. They do not know her. The house is closed. They do not remember when they no longer see her at all. It is a busy neighborhood, Brooklyn.”

Garner shivered in spite of himself, and shook himself to cover it, to shake himself free of the doctor’s persuasion, which, even in briskness, had a soft insistence, as if on some central metaphor to which his listener must be privy too. The wind had become more positive than the sun—and Amelia would be wanting him in. But he had been a boy in neighborhoods not too far from such as the doctor had described, and he was remembering, with the self-induced chill of childhood, crabbed parlor recluses candled fitfully between curtain slits, dim basement monks whose legend, leaking from the areaways at dusk, scattered the children from the stoops. “Was it…it was the father then?” he said.

Bhatta’s broad lips curved in a sudden Eastern symmetry. “A fact we do not check, Misser Garner. When we bring her home with us she is…” He shrugged. “She carries her cage with her, and we cannot persuade her out of it. To humor her fears, the ladies fix her the little place there.” He pointed up the hill. “But I find the bank, Misser Garner. Natur-ally,” he drawled, “if she has resources, we must find them for her. And what they tell me there, although they do not realize they are telling me it…” Bhatta paused, hands outspread. “Picture it, the same bank, but so modern, so airy now. At each desk, young ladies with hair like brass bowls. It is hard to imagine Miss Prager there. And the manager, in his cage that everyone can see is real—such a new young man, in a suit the color of chicken skin, and a bump in his throat that moves like a bobbin. He knows nothing of Miss Prager’s father. Such a man does not deal by memory. Such a place cannot afford a memory. But ‘Miss Prager,’ he says—‘until a year or so ago?—quite so. There is the Social Security index, the personnel file—and on the card there, yes, a little record of something that was not—quite so.’ Two or three telephone calls, two or three moves of the bobbin, and there on the manager’s desk—although of course he does not see her—lies Miss Prager and her twenty years.”

Bhatta paused again. There was no defense against his pauses, Garner thought with violence—one pushed against them in vain, as one resisted a concert conductor who inexorably took his music slow.

“Banks are so jolly in your country,” said Bhatta. “Like the one in the village here—a little white cottage with window boxes. And when your ladies take the children inside, the children do not hang on their mothers’ skirts. They slide on the floor, and sometimes the manager gives them a little plastic penny bank—the way the baker gives them a cookie. Banks should be like the English bank in India, when I was a boy. A stern place, full of dark whispers, where the teller scoops up the mo-ney with a black trowel, and weighs it on a swinging chain-scale from Manchester. Then, at least, a child can be warned.”

“You mean Miss Prager had embezzled?” said Garner.

Bhatta whisked out his handkerchief again, flirting it as if it concealed something maneuverable behind. “I forget you are a lawyer, Misser Garner. And so direct—like all Americans. Your honest men and your crooks—all so direct. It is a pity. You lose much.” He touched the handkerchief to his lips. “No, I do not mean. Miss Prager was true to the bank. She herself owed them nothing. And alas, they owed her nothing. She had embezzled—only herself.”

Across from them, the back door of Garner’s house flew open, and eight or ten children rushed pell-mell from it and ran up Garner’s hillside. Behind the high rhododendron and barberry, their creamy voices scuttled excitedly, belled by the loud, authoritative birthday voice of Sukey.

“I must go,” said Garner, getting up. “My kids are having a party. They’re up there now, having a treasure hunt. You see—our hill’s kind of their playground. Even if you gave me your assurance that Miss Prager is not…dangerous…I’d hate to think she might frighten them in any way.”