Tale for the Mirror by Hortense Calisher Page B

household as “getting Father off.” As a young man, my father had acquired a decorous old business that dealt wholesale in perfumes, soaps, complexion powders, essences and pomatums for the toilette, a trade of enough French frivolity to give his personality that tinge of the panache which it might not have had, had he dealt in staples. Since he was the owner, had long since placed the factory side under the supervision of one brother, the office under another, and had various cousins and brothers-in-law at a straggle of desks in between, he felt himself under no obligation to get downtown at any particular hour. Indeed, since he was a man of the most delicate family feelings and could not have borne to have any of his relatives think that he wished to lord it over them, it was probable that he preferred to schedule his arrival at the office at an hour late enough to keep him from ever knowing the hour of theirs.
    My mother, however, although she had never been in the business world, had certain convictions about it which would have done her credit in a later era. She believed that a business run with such unpressurized ease, even enjoyment, must be well on its way to ruin, that one so nepotically staffed could survive only at the price of eternal vigilance, and that even if my father had managed to do very well for years before he met her, he now owed it to her self-respect, to his own Dun & Bradstreet rating, and to their joint children, to give at least the appearance of frenzied toil. She was a woman who would have felt much safer breathing hard and fast in the wake of one of those lunchless men whose race with their calendar ends only with death. And she was never to comprehend the real truth: that people loved to do business with my father because, in an already accelerating age, his dandified air of the coffeehouse, his relaxed and charmingly circuitous tongue—which dwelt much on anecdote but only lightly on orders or due dates—and above all, his trust in the “plenty” of time, made them feel participants in a commercial romance, gentlemen met by chance on the Rialto, who had decided to nurture a little affair.
    But since she did not understand, each morning at home was a contest, a parable in which Conscientious Practicality, my mother, strove to get Imaginative Indolence, my father, out of the house somewhat nearer nine than noon. Imaginative always won, partly by refusing to notice the strategic lines of force sent out constantly, all morning, by Conscientious, and partly, as I came to believe, because Time itself, elsewhere being made to skip so violently, was coming to lean more and more sympathetically on my father’s side.
    I awake then, on a certain morning, almost any morning in the nineteen-twenties. Perhaps the milkman’s clop-clopping horse has already been replaced by a rubber-tired van, but I hope not, since the horse’s reflective, frequently interrupted pace is so much more suitable to what is going to follow. It is some where between six and seven o’clock back there; Josie, the maid, is still curled in her central cubicle in the angle of the long, wandering L that is our apartment; my grandmother sleeps, as she will for hours yet, in her separate wing; even my mother and my two-year-old brother, those disciples of Achtung, are still fast on their pillows.
    But my father, strangely enough, as you might think, for a man who is always reassuring people that he and they have “all the time in the world,” is already up and about, puttering in the kitchen for himself, as he loves to do. Not strange at all—he who is at home in Time rises with interest at the prospect of a new stretch of it; only its minions need to bury their heads. And if there is a little of the insomnia of the aging in his early habit, then it is never fretful, but spry and accepting, like a man who has been offered more food than he is hungry for, but will do what he can.
    I get up too and go to the kitchen and we look