Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (20 page)

Harriet could hear the squeak of water faucets turning and then the gush of water filling a bathtub. She stood by the closet door, which she held open just a crack. Baths were usually just before bedtime in her experience, and the running-water sound made her worry that it was getting late, that her mother might be waiting for her at home.

“Does she give Jenny a bath before dinner?” Harriet wondered to Barbara, who was crawling around behind her, returning her mother’s shoes to their spot in the lineup.

“She’s really weird about baths,” Barbara said, without further explanation. They stood together, debating if they could sneak past the bathroom without Octavia’s notice. They probably could. Taking exaggerated giant tiptoe steps across the bedroom carpet, they reached the doorway and peered down the hall. Good—the bathroom door was closed, and Octavia’s voice could be heard within, asking questions and then answering them herself. Harriet and Barbara tiptoed past.

There was a horrible, wet slapping sound that jolted Harriet like an electric shock. For a moment, all she could hear was the sound of the bath running, but then Jenny began to scream, and scream, and scream. Harriet had never heard anything like it.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Barbara urged impatiently from the top of the stairs. Harriet skittered down the hall, then stopped in her tracks at the sound of another slap. Jenny’s screams ratcheted up a notch louder and more desperate. Harriet was frightened. She could hear, unbelievably, a singsongy crooning from Octavia, and then midscream, Jenny choked and coughed, and then, strangely, the bathwater was
turned off, and only Octavia’s humming and some splashing could be heard behind the closed bathroom door.

“Come on, slowpoke,” Barbara called up to Harriet from the bottom of the stairs. Harriet stepped down a few stairs, one at a time, her head cocked to one side as she listened for Jenny. She stopped again.

She looked at her hand as it gripped the polished banister, a banister identical to her own next door except the tone of the wood was a shade lighter, and the varnish was sticky. Her knuckles were white. She couldn’t feel the wood under her palm, which had become part of the banister. There was no way to breathe in air. The slow twirl of the ringmaster in the top hat, the lion behind bars, the elephant, the seal with the ball on his nose, the clown. Splashing, and then Octavia’s syrupy voice: “Feelin’ fainty, little lamb? Open your eyes, an’ look at your Anty Octavia.”

Harriet listened to the silence then. She could hear gunshots and squealing brakes, car doors slamming and police sirens, in the den downstairs, where Barbara, who had given up on her, was watching television with Debbie and Rachel. Somehow, she got free of the banister and backed up the steps, one by one. Past the bathroom door, she retraced her steps until she stood in the dark bedroom again. She circled Mr. and Mrs. Antler’s enormous bed, promising herself that one sound from Jenny and she could swim up from the bottom of this pool, up into the air, she could go watch television with the other children.

In the bathroom, Octavia hummed a snatch of her inside-out island tunes and then murmured, “I do not tolerate de longheartedness of a child, no I do not.”

Harriet picked up the telephone.

Ruth Rose in her Volkswagen, Anita Antler in her Dodge, and the police cruiser, silent but with lights flashing, turned into Rutland Close one after the other, as if in a planned, orderly sequence. Their headlight beams swept around the Close and all three cars stopped together. Harriet stood on her own dark front steps, hugging herself, her teeth chattering with a mixture of cold—she had left her jacket at the Antlers’—and fright. The sight of the policeman walking up the Antlers’ front steps with Mrs. Antler made it real. Ruth Rose, who had been eliminated from the scene by the policeman, whose abrupt questions made it clear that his interest lay in the Antler household, stood on the sidewalk holding two grocery bags and stared uncomprehendingly after them.

“Harriet—are you all right? Is somebody hurt? Are you sure you’re okay?” Her mother’s concern washed over Harriet pleasantly. It was unusual for her mother to be so focused. She just always seemed so sad. Harriet took a bag of groceries from her mother. Tobermorey was waiting by the door to get in. He meowed and stropped himself impatiently against Ruth Rose’s legs while she fumbled out her key.

Inside, Harriet felt as grateful as Tobermorey for the warmth.

Like him, she followed her mother to the kitchen, hoping for sustenance.

“Did one of the Antler kids fall?” Ruth Rose began to break eggs into a bowl. Harriet was pleased that they were going to have an omelette for supper; it was one of the few things her mother was really good at making.

Harriet asked if she could break the rest of the eggs, then carefully added a casual, “I don’t know—I was playing there earlier but I left when they were all watching television.”

“Well, it probably isn’t anything serious. The policeman said they had a report and he needed to see the children. I
wonder what that means. Do you think Octavia would call the police for some reason?” Ruth minced an onion and chopped up a handful of mushrooms. “Don’t just twirl the eggs, Harriet, beat them, please. Or let me do it.”

“Octavia,” Harriet replied, as carefully as she could, “would think the police should be called in if Archie peed on the furniture.” What was going on next door? Harriet wondered. Her mother was tuning the kitchen radio to a station with music. She zeroed in on Fred Astaire building up to an awful letdown and went back to cooking. Harriet parked the whisk in the mixing bowl and wandered over to the window. Behind her, her mother gave the eggs a more thorough beating. Mother and daughter making dinner together, thought Harriet. If someone looked in the window, that’s all that anyone could see.

She looked out the window again just as the policeman was getting into his car. He shut the door, then a light went on inside, and she could see him sitting behind the wheel, his head bent as he wrote his report. After several minutes, the light inside the patrol car went out, he started up the motor, his brake lights flared as he switched on his lights. The patrol car rolled slowly to the corner and without signaling turned right and disappeared from view. Wasn’t anything else going to happen?

Harriet felt an icy stab in her chest. Which would be worse? To be right, that Octavia had done something horrible to Jenny, or to be wrong, to have made the whispered, anonymous report in error? Harriet didn’t know what to wish for.

The next morning being a Saturday, Harriet’s mother let her sleep late. She woke to the sound of Mr. Antler shouting outside her window, and she got out of bed to look out through the blinds to see what was going on.

Mr. Antler was standing in his plaid bathrobe in the driveway, waving his arms and screaming in the face of a policewoman, who stood next to another woman, who was holding a blanket-wrapped bundle—Jenny—in her arms.

“The hell you’ll take this child anywhere. I told you I wouldn’t take her to a hospital for no good reason, and I told you she’s not going with you either! She’s not going anywhere! This is goddamned America, and we’re goddamned American citizens. Just who the hell do you think you are?” He was shouting so loud that even through the storm window Harriet could hear every word he was saying. The policewoman was saying something, but Harriet couldn’t hear her at all. The other three Antler children, in pajamas and bare feet, Mrs. Antler, in an overcoat clutched over her nightgown, and Octavia, in her white uniform, were stationed on the lawn watching, like pawns on a chessboard. Barbara looked up and saw Harriet, and their eyes met for a long moment. Harriet dropped the blind and backed away from the window. She didn’t know whether to feel triumphant or ashamed.

The policeman had filed a report that night stating that he had found Jennifer Antler asleep in her crib, in what appeared to be normal condition, and that the anonymous report of a possible drowning was therefore unfounded. However, owing to the anonymous report, and to some discrepancies in the way certain routine questions were answered by the adults in the household, he urgently requested an investigation within twenty-four hours by the Child Protective Services.

Harriet had seen the social worker removing Jennifer that next morning in order to take her to a hospital for a medical examination. Despite Mr. Antler’s objections, this had been done. X rays revealed that Jennifer Antler had sustained a fractured skull within the last few months. She had a broken rib
that was several weeks old, a healing fracture of her upper right arm, and a very recent burn on her back that was consistent with a burn from a lit cigarette. None of the other children had any injuries.

Harriet never saw the Antler children again, except for brief glimpses of them getting out of their car; or, sometimes, if Harriet kept a lookout for a very long time, she saw one of them in a bedroom for the instant between the time the light was turned on and the shade was drawn down. Octavia vanished instantly. Ruth Rose thought she had been deported because her papers weren’t right, but she might have elected to go back to whichever island it was instead of facing prosecution. Her papers, it turned out, weren’t really hers, but belonged to her sister. Octavia had never mentioned being a twin. She probably was quite crazy.

“You were always so funny,” Ruth reminisced to Harriet over lunch, the day Harriet got up the nerve to ask her mother about the Antlers. Harriet was in her second year at Cooper Union and had just won the Hadley Prize—the international photography award that was a herald of all that was to come—and this was a celebration.

These days, Ruth Rose seemed like a different person to Harriet from the mother with whom she had grown up. This woman eating lunch with her was
here.
Able to focus. Mother and daughter having lunch together.

Throughout high school, whenever a social studies teacher had referred to the Great Depression, Harriet had automatically thought of those darkest days, the weeks preceding hospitalization, when her mother had lain in bed (seriously suicidal, she later admitted, unable to proceed with plans for her death only because of Harriet), and then of those glimpses of the stranger who was Ruth Rose, drugged and expressionless
in that hospital room. Ruth’s year in the hospital was like a dividing line in Harriet’s personal history.

Ruth still seemed sad to Harriet, but in an ordinary way. The problem with the medication, for Harriet, was that with all the highs and lows ironed out, what was left had an inevitable flatness. Acerbity had been replaced by a kind of dullnormal niceness, and Harriet sometimes got the feeling that her mother was determined to get this right, to keep it up indefinitely. Harriet kept a wary lookout for signs of the old Ruth Rose, which she wasn’t sure if she would welcome or dread. Every time they were together, after the first few moments Harriet would feel a surge of loss about this agreeable middle-aged woman’s taking her mother’s place. You’ve changed, she would think sadly, each encounter a fresh disappointment.

They were in the West Village at a tiny bistro of Harriet’s choosing, which served only enormous tubs of soup with vast hunks of bread, and one kind of rough red wine, which she hoped her mother didn’t mind.

“You were so funny, Harriet, when you would ask, ‘How could Octavia be from more than one island?’ ”

“Well, how could she?” Harriet demanded.

The Antlers moved away that winter. The children and Mrs. Antler disappeared during the Christmas vacation, and one day in January, during that first hard week of school when you realize there’s nothing much to look forward to until spring, Harriet had trudged home for lunch through the snow—she could have walked on the shoveled sidewalks, but preferred a meandering course across untrod lawns—and discovered a moving van in front of the Antlers’ house. Mr. Antler’s car was in its usual place in the driveway, which was in itself unusual, but Harriet never did see him again, as both his car and the moving van were gone forever by the time she came home
from school again after three o’clock. Her jacket, long since replaced as lost, had been neatly draped over the ledge of the Roses’ brick stoop at some point in the afternoon.

The mailman said the Antlers’ mail was being forwarded to an address in Chapel Hill. That wasn’t proof they had moved to Chapel Hill, though, as Mrs. Antler’s mother lived there, and they might have just stayed with her for a while or had their mail sent there. Another neighbor, a woman who had volunteered in the thrift shop with Anita, had heard they were living in Minneapolis. No one seemed to know what had happened to Antler Glass and Mirror.

“So, did you think it was all Octavia?” Harriet asked her mother while they sipped coffee. They both studied the dessert menu, which Harriet propped at a tilt between them—it was a child’s blackboard in a wooden frame, ridiculously large as there were only three kinds of bread pudding from which to choose.

Ruth sighed. “That’s hard to answer. I wouldn’t have had any doubts about either Anita or Albert—you know they were really good neighbors, they were friends of the family, and Albert especially was very kind to us that night. You know …” She trailed off.