Tale for the Mirror by Hortense Calisher Page A

Alger-like energy that—in his case combined with some of the bright fairy-tale luck that comes to the third sons in Grimm—was to keep him all his life younger in appearance and temperament than others of his span, pushing him constantly toward modernity, even while he dragged his feet, protesting. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when I knew him best, he was, at the very least, early Edwardian.
    Since he was the youngest of a family so long-lived that he and his sisters and brothers, all close to seventy, still had their mother, and one so close-knit that all its branches lived within round-the-corner call of each other in Manhattan, I spent the indoor part of my childhood with old people—people old enough to regard my mother, in her thirties and forties, as a young person of promise who still owed them deference but might now and then be admitted to the family councils in a listening capacity. Her own fluttering efforts, either to freshen the décor of the anciently cluttered household she had married into, or to cling weakly to some of the habits of her contemporaries, were looked upon somewhat as the art nouveau bric-a-brac of an incoming bride might be regarded by the chatelaines of a manor house—with the tolerant knowledge that all this nonsense would eventually disappear.
    Down at the bottom, a pebble at the roots of this banyan tree, was I, leading a curious double life, half of me in one century, the other half very nearly in the one preceding it. Once out of the house, on my way to school or in the long, spinning afternoons, I had the urchin street-freedom that descends upon the middle-class apartment-dweller’s child at the age of seven or eight, when the nursemaid is passed on to the younger ones. As I whizzed around the block, one of a scabby-legged pack of skaters with two-wheelers clamped on their high brown shoes, or tore through forbidden cellars macaronied with steam pipes and elevator cables, leaving behind me shreds of plaid and a trail of bone underwear-buttons, I was as much a child of my sector of the new century as any other. Yet, once the brown metal, fireproof door of our apartment closed behind me and I stood listening in the foyer, whose dark air had a dried olive smell from the books musting double-rowed on the shelves, and a black-leather tint from the davenport that gloomed in the shadows, I stepped, without ever questioning it, into another element, one not present in the home-worlds of my fellows.
    Entering this element, the raw light of the new decade had to humble itself past towering cabinets, through bead-crowded, wood-carved space in order to glint on the round, gold-wired spectacles of elderly people as they sat endlessly over coffee that streamed like a continuous soothing syrup from the kitchen. From there the light had to cool itself against much marble and be strained through many yards of lace, before it might arrive, collected and plain once more, at the calm blue and white of my bedroom. Even then, it might have to rest resignedly on what someone had had the relentless patience to cut, sew and starch—my two weeks’ supply of fourteen white organdy sashes.
    The “element” itself, however, was composed of much more—of all the ways that people had found to carve intaglio from the smaller moments of their lives, and more significantly, of all the spaces in between, when they found nothing to do at all, and did not seem to notice or mind. Within it, all the violent temperaments in our family, the daily puppet-clashes and doge intrigues, lay swaddled in a fleece of security, where life might recompose itself in the thick texture of those novels whose undemanding dramas flamed at writing desks and petered out in morning rooms. This element was, of course, the Victorian sense of time.
    Possibly the best way to describe how it worked, or rather—since there was no sense of anything working—how things were, would be to chronicle the daily phenomenon known in our