Tale for the Mirror by Hortense Calisher

of one of those?” he said.
    “You want the truth?”
    He looked at her face unrefracted by glass. “If you happen to have some with you.”
    Under the rosy cast of the lamps and her robe, the tears that immediately crumpled her eyes would be pink too, if he neared them. “I kept telling myself I could—that it would all iron out…when I got there.”
    She reached into the pocket of the robe. It would be there—the handkerchief. It was there. “When you know you can’t handle something—isn’t it better to know beforehand?”
    “Sure,” he said, “if you only want what you’re sure you can handle.”
    “All right then. I’m sorry. Then I’m not big enough.” She put the handkerchief to her mouth. “Either way!” she said, and ran past him to the bedroom door. He watched her turn there.
    “Sam. It’s not as if we weren’t close. Closer than most people.”
    He looked at her, across the aisle of wood and leather and arranged cloth that was hers. “Give us time,” he said. “A few years—and nobody’ll be able to tell us apart. Just give us time.”
    In the interval before the door closed there was no shading, nothing, between him and what he saw. Not even air.
    After a time, he opened the door and walked down the hall. As he stood there, he could hear the tub running in the bathroom off the bedroom. Her remedy for everything, he thought. A washing away. A change of clothes, a lift of heart. His eyes felt hot. What had she done, what had she managed, all these years?
    Stop it, he thought. It wasn’t so. Even without the endless roster of doctors, he knew that it wasn’t. If he was tempted to believe anything of her now, it was only because up to now he had believed everything. There was a raw, terminal sadness in it for them both, in that she had had to be the one to point out to him what her real limits were. And she had not so much concealed these as, briefly and pitiably, risen to an awareness of them—as a marionette might, for one extraordinary instant, see the strings that held it and achieve, in that same mourning instant, the moment when it stood alone.
    He walked into the dining nook and poured himself a stiff drink from a cellarette in a corner. Carrying the drink with him, he walked the length of the living room, turning out lamps as he went. With each lamp that went out the city advanced toward him, until, with the last, it stood in the room—a presence—brilliant, and third.
    He drank, watching it. It neither extorted nor gave. It was one of the wonders of the world, and had merely to be there. If its Bohemia had, after all, no seacoasts, this would hardly be noticed now, in a world that had all but deserted the horizontal laziness of ships. One could hanker there all one’s days and hardly notice that the piece of it earned had come out of oneself.
    It was a vertical place for people like them, in which the only way out was up. He watched the two of them, a couple named Sam and Bee, climbing from tower to tower, in a gilt-edged monkeydom of closeness, to the spheric music of the brandy glasses that would get thinner along the climb.
    He drank, watching them. Opposite him, against a sky humbled to a perpetual nude, the towers waited, like slowly fizzing rockets that never went out—or soared away.

Time, Gentlemen!
    M Y FATHER, BORN IN 1862, and old enough to be my grandfather when I entered the world a year after his marriage to a woman twenty-two years younger than he, was by birth therefore a late Victorian. By 1900 he had already been of an age to have emigrated long since from South to North, and to have acquired both a business successful enough to permit him to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee at his usual haunts of Mouquin’s and Delmonico’s, and a rheumatism fashionable enough to require recuperation at Mount Clemens Spa. But like so many youngest sons of those large families whose fortunes have either declined or not been built, he had from the first shown a precocious,