Tale for the Mirror Read Online Free

had found her “set.”
    “And then—you know I went through analysis?” she said. She had chanced upon the Party during its great psychiatric era, when everybody was having his property-warped libido rearranged. Hers had resulted in the rearrangement of her teeth.
    “The phases I went through!” She had gone through a period of wearing her hair in coronet braids; under her analyst’s guidance she cut it. With his approval—he was a Party member—she had changed her name to Ginevra. He would have preferred her to keep the teeth as they were, as a symbol that she no longer hankered after the frivolities of class. But they were the one piece of inherited property for which she had no sentiment. Too impatient for orthodontia, she had had them extracted, and a bridge inserted. “And do you know what I did with them?” she said. “He said I could, if I had to, and I did.”
    “With the teeth?”
    She giggled. “Honey, I put them in a bitty box, and I had the florist put a wreath around it. And I flew down to Lenchburg and put them on Mamma’s grave.”
    Something moved under my feet, and I gave a slight scream. It wasn’t because of what she had just said. Down home, many a good family has its Poe touch of the weirdie, my own as well, and I quite understood. But something was looking out at me from under the sofa, with old, rheumy eyes. It was the pug.
    “It’s Junius! But it can’t be!” I said.
    “Basket, Junius! Go back to your basket!” she said. “It’s not the one you knew, of course. It’s that one’s child. Let’s see, she married her own brother, so I guess this one’s her cousin as well.” Her tone was rambling and genealogical, the same in which my old aunt still defined a cousinship as once, twice or thrice removed. And I saw that the tip of her nose could still blush. “Old Junius was really a lady, you know,” she said.
    When I rose to leave, Ida followed us to the hallway. “You come back, Miss Charlotte,” she said. “You come back, hear? And bring your family with you. I’ll cook ’em a dinner. Be right nice to have you, ’stead all these tacky people Miss Ginny so took up with.”
    “Now Ida,” said Ginny Doll. “Charlotte,” she said, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned—” Her moonstones glittered again, in the mirror over the credenza. It was the single time she ever expounded theory. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned—it’s that real people are tacky.”
    I did go back of course, and now it was she who gave the social confidences, I who listened with fascination. Once or twice she had me to dinner with some of her “set,” not at all to convert me, but rather as a reigning hostess invites the quiet friend of other days to a brief glimpse of her larger orbit, the better to be able to talk about it later. For, as everyone now knows, she had become a great Party hostess. She gave little dinners, huge receptions, the ton of which was just as she would have kept it anywhere—excellent food, notable liqueurs and the Edwardian solicitude to which she had been born. As a Daughter and a D.A.R., she had a special exhibit value as well. Visiting dignitaries were brought to her as a matter of course; rising functionaries, when bidden there, knew how far they had risen. Her parlor was the scene of innumerable Young Communist weddings, and dozens of Marxian babies embarked on life with one of her silver spoons. The Party had had its Mother Bloor. Ginny Doll became its Aunt.
    Meanwhile we kept each other on as extramural relaxation, the way people do keep the friend who knew them “when.” Just because it was so unlikely for either of us (I was teaching again), we sometimes sewed together, took in a matinée. But I had enough glimpses of her other world to know what she ignored in it. No doubt she enjoyed the sense of conspiracy—her hats grew a trifle larger each year. And she did her share of other activities—if always on the entertainment committee. But her