Tale for the Mirror Read Online Free Page B

Southern Lady.
    And now I can look my children in the eye again. The Russians needn’t think themselves the only ones to rehabilitate people posthumously. We Southrons can take care of our own.

So Many Rings to the Show
    H E AND ESTHER WALKED out of the marriage clerk’s office, past the other waiting couples and the wedding parties, out into the open air. Down here, the air had a remembered municipal grayness, as if its natural color had long since been gritted over with a light statistical dust. In 1949, though, surely he and Marie had gone to a different place to be married—or else this one had been remodeled. Jim recalled a dirty brownish cubicle stained with the tobacco-juice whiff of smalltime political stews, and a clerk with a whine and a conniving eye. This afternoon, the office had shone with a kind of cleanly bureaucracy, and the clerk, cool and dentifriced, had refused Jim’s large tip with a grave, ritual shake of the head.
    Jim took Esther’s elbow and guided her through the corridors, down the steps to the pavement, where still more couples stood about in uncertain tableaux. Dingily new, the city edifices pressed too near, as if seen gigantically close in an opera glass, and looking at one façade, one felt another at the small of one’s back. Built in the hope of a Roman dignity, they had managed only a republican durability. They’re too close together, he thought—that’s it. There’s not enough space between them for majesty.
    He hailed a cab, and got in after her. The driver looked inquiringly over a shoulder. “Drive uptown—up Fifth,” Jim said. The driver shrugged and started off.
    Jim settled back and felt for Esther’s hand. As soon as they were away, out of that neighborhood, he would be released from his compulsion to compare, to remember. From here on, it would all be new. He was half aware that his unwilling memories were the more painful because his first marriage had been embarked upon in the same golden warmth and faith, the same sense of inevitability. It had been an October day, that day full of scudding cloud and changeableness, and this day, more than twelve years later, was all moist and May, with a muffled vibrato of approaching summer. But in essence each day held the same fixed dream of rightness, of an incredibly lucky voyage with the one person without whom the world dulled. In essence, one day had been, and one day was, the happiest day of his life. It was as if, carefully putting away a freshly inked guaranty in a drawer, he had come upon another, gilt-scrolled and bright and ridiculously voided by time.
    He looked at Esther, her serenely musing profile nodding faintly up and down with the movement of the cab. He was beyond seeing her, he knew, in any literal terms as a tall, good-looking girl with dark-blond hair, with features whose imbalance, stopping just short of strangeness, struck one on further scrutiny with their curiously personal beauty. For four years now, from the very beginning of the affair, she had seemed to him a medal struck once, and superbly, for him. Now she looked, as always, fresh and lovely. She always dressed, with wise chic, for the second glance, but today, in a gray dress he had seen once before, and a small spray of veil, she had been perhaps especially careful to avoid the flowery smirk of the bride. Neither of them had brought any huge emphasis to bear on today’s ceremony, held as they had been by an unspoken agreement that for two who had so long been lovers this would be silly, perhaps gross. On their way downtown, stopping around the corner from her place to buy her a camellia at the florist shop they always went to, he had found a pleasing element of continuity, almost a safety, in the benedictory smile of the Greek, in the way he handed the flower, as usual, to Jim, and watched, bowing a little, while Jim handed the flower to Esther. She was wearing it pinned not on her shoulder but on her belt.
    She looked around at him now with