Torsade Literary Space The Mirrors (part one)
The Mirrors
i.
The odd-job man, today walking the yard setting mole traps. He unbent his back when Charmante called out, “Hey!”
The front parlor, the same as every day, the chimneypiece and its stony odor, the white sheers damping sunlight. The temperature, never mind the bloomed camellias flanking the portico, wintry.
No reason to feel this emptiness ghost-ridden.
Of course, it couldn’t well be. Her aunt, who liked the phrase for calling this and that, never had meant by it spooks… Was speaking, most times, of the solitary well-to-do, her clients, with their dusty drapes and cabinets, their spiderwebs of childhood ties, blowing loose, still clinging.
The men were in the attic, at the back of the house, where Mr. Rothesay did his scientific work. Voices just didn’t carry so far. They wouldn’t burn lights in a room not in use, or burn coal, in these hardship days, when the calendar said March.
And you got heated up soon enough, pushing a carpet sweeper. She had to get lunch on, two pots to boil, one pan to brown the chops, one in the oven for the rolls. She had to plug in the percolator and get the coffee started right off. And it was her day to inventory the cupboard. She would know how much to ask for, so tomorrow she could pick up things at the grocer’s.
Rothesay’s was one of a block-end of tall attached houses, survivors of a 1901 conflagration, no more of their kind ever built in the city. The house faced north, the garden getting all the pleasantness. Even the neglected patio set and quarter-circle bench were more wistfully inviting than the squat bungalow furnishings of the parlor.
The climbing rose and the bees it attracted, and intimate with this, the hoary trumpet vine that drew hummingbirds, were sweet life, and needed here.
To suit a fastidiousness of her own, Charmante would never sweep or dust while food was on the stove. She liked no dirtying of the air until the day’s cooking was done. She began by wiping down countertops and table, settling Rothesay’s evening plate and coffee cup in a sink of soapy water. She dropped a slab of bacon on the beans, lidded them, turned the burner a notch above simmer, then moved to the dining room buffet for the linen and silver.
And here was Mr. Rothesay’s friend.
1
He eyed himself through the glass of the curio door. He kept at it, his back to her, while she nudged him out of her way, ratcheting loose a drawer, one, two inches…enough to snag the cloth. He spoke, and she glanced over her shoulder, catching him quizzing her with a look. But this was reflected in the oval of a small mirror, on a shelf.
“You wouldn’t like to help me get that one down from over the fireplace, and carry it upstairs?”
“When I’ve had my lunch. And that means after I’ve got yours on the table.”
She had learned this, not to let their little enthusiasms run unchecked.
“If we introduce another, it will mean repositioning them all.”
“But I feel that’s just what we want to do,” Mr. Carmine answered Rothesay.
It was Charmante’s job to brave the gloom, but once she’d got things warmed with the stove, and once the smells began to penetrate the staircase, the men would filter to the dining room, carrying on their discussions, easing into their seats, telling her to ignore them.
With two absentminded hands tugging corners, hindering more than helping, she laid the cloth, placed knives and forks. All the while their theme was acceleration. Something that needed to complete a circle and emerge whole at the beginning again…
The angle of exposure wanted measuring, not the shape or condition…
“But we haven’t tested the arrangement at all, so we have no useful observations to build from. Think, Carmine, if there is any reason we might rather prefer to slow the process down.”
“I have thought…great minds and all. You’re right, sir, we need that trial. We need the two of us stationed in the other rooms, observing. I’d like, even, if it were possible, to set up a camera near the fixture. But tricky running a cable to it.”
“There I think…” Rothesay said.
Then: “Thank you, Mrs. Demorest.”
Charmante had carried in the tray, their two cups and the sugar. It was a foible of Rothesay’s, one he’d explained pink-faced not long after she’d come working for him, that he wished to drop the cubes in himself, watch each in its own time dissolve.
She got into the kitchen and out again, with the dinner and bread plates. She was not formal in her manners, not at ease using either “Mr. Rothesay” or “sir”, unless she’d caught him in a fog.
He had tapped her wrist, and silent, she waited.
“Carmine, this afternoon?”
“If we might have an hour of Mrs. Demorest’s time.”
2
He spoke sotto voce, not asking Charmante, but reminding Rothesay that time was money. Rothesay pinkened. She was paid by the week, so the calculation might require a bald offer.
“I’ll stay and help you if I can. What sort of thing…?”
“Easiest in the world,” Carmine said. “You’ll only be walking. But we may ask you to bear with three or four repetitions.”
“You put the extra in my envelope, Mr. Rothesay. I need to see about lunch.”
She left them, their conversation back at once to the question of the camera.
The house concealed one of the city’s showpieces, a brick wall latticed with diamond-shaped openings, artful handiwork forgotten now the neighborhood had fallen so far out of the way. From Mr. Wright, she had heard a fanciful story, the sort of romance a trolleyman tells his riders. But she couldn’t see it, why one would leave letters, or prayer candles, or flowers, or anything else in these niches. Hospitals were practical places; they employed crowds. Yes, there were quarantines—but also meals, fresh sheets, deliveries of medicines. People came and went.
The wall overlooked those tracks embedded in the lane and those beyond, the railroad’s. Next in view was a scrubby lot, a dump for losing and finding, one man’s trash a lowlier’s making-do. Then dead brush, peeling clapboards seen white at a distance, the riverside row of shanties.
She went out to sit by the climbing rose with her plate and cup.
“Here, ma’am,” Wright’s voice came to her. “You like to have this?”
She saw straight off she wouldn’t. But he’d pulled this wingless porcelain angel out of a molehill, and kept it for her in his pocket. She would be needlessly curt to say, throw it out.
She could do that later. “Oh, thank you. Poor little thing.”
“Well, see,” he said. “Look what I found.”
He held out a palm, to take the angel back, and edged to the wall. From a niche he pulled a moth, dead, its pale green wings splayed stiff.
“Glue that on.” He showed her, delicate in his handling, the Luna held to the back of the figurine, the angel bone white, still traced in gilt.
The notion was bizarre. The effect strangely moving.
3
The Mirrors
The Mirrors (part two)
(2020, Stephanie Foster)