Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (21 page)

“The night Adam died,” Harriet prompted.

“Yes. Albert was always very fond of you. You used to play there all the time, I don’t know if you remember that.”

“I remember everything.”

“So you say.”

They sat in silence. The waitress came over to the table, and they declined anything further. She shrugged and plucked the blackboard from Harriet’s grasp.

“Where were you, on those afternoons when I came home
from school? It seemed as if you were never there,” Harriet asked suddenly.

“Oh, I don’t know. Out. Doing errands. Going to the therapist.” Ruth sighed and scratched the back of one hand with the other. Harriet was startled to note how old and veiny and loose her mother’s hands had become. When did that happen? Her mother used to have beautiful hands, small, like Harriet’s. “I think I probably kept myself busy doing errands in order to stay away from the house. It was so gloomy, I was so depressed, and you were so angry. I couldn’t bear to see the angry look on your face when you came home from school. I was a coward.”

This was much more of an answer than Harriet had expected, and she was a little stunned at the discovery that her mother seemed to know quite a bit more about herself, and about Harriet, than Harriet had ever imagined.

Ruth looked at her. “Since it’s truth time, let me ask you this: Where were you, when I was in Payne Whitney? You came to see me only five times that year. You were only a few blocks away, at Mother’s. She came twice a week and gave me reports. She made excuses for you, talked about your homework. I begged her to let you make your own decision about coming—I told her you weren’t to be pressured. But where were you?”

Harriet looked at her mother without speaking for a moment. Letting her thoughts and words form without the usual tumultuous rush, Harriet answered slowly, “I was a coward, too. I didn’t want to see you there. If I didn’t go, it wasn’t as real.”

“Did you miss me? Did it occur to you that I missed you? That I might have needed you?”

“I tried not to think about it. I think I didn’t want you to know that I needed you.” Harriet felt something painful coming loose and breaking up. She went on doggedly, like
someone wading into deeper and deeper water. “I guess I felt betrayed by a series of people disappearing: I mean, think about it. Adam, Simon, Carrie, the Antlers, then you. You wouldn’t admit to me that Simon—Daddy—had disappeared. Sometimes I thought it was my fault. Sometimes I thought you thought it was my fault that he left us. I felt that I had the power to make people disappear. Though, in a way, by not going to see you, I was making you disappear.”

Ruth smiled faintly and nodded that she understood. She shook her head and waved a hand between them as though to clear away something in the air.

“About the Antlers,” Ruth said, as if they had mutually agreed to change the topic. “I would never have thought for a moment that either of them were capable of hurting a child, but their behavior was very, very strange. Do you know, after that day, neither one of them ever called, or spoke to me, or to anyone else in the neighborhood? They acted very guilty of something. It was never very clear what the social workers thought had happened, either. None of the other children had a scratch on them, I remember that. But I don’t know what the official theory was. The records weren’t public because there was no criminal case. It was all in the newspapers at first, every day, right on the front page, because Octavia’s papers were forged, or something. Her green card turned out to belong to her twin sister.”

“I remember she was named Octavia because she was the eighth child. I wonder what her older sister was called. Septicemia?” Harriet wanted to make her mother laugh, and succeeded.

“But something was forged, too, I’m sure I remember that,” Ruth added.

Harriet thought about Octavia’s dark room at the top of the stairs and pictured Octavia, surrounded by her dolls, sitting
under an eyeshade, humming melodically while painstakingly creating forged documents in a perfect hand.

“But then the whole thing died down, and you know how newspapers never follow up to tell you how a story turns out months later when it isn’t hot news. There were plenty of rumors, though.” Ruth seemed to remember more as she spoke.

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was ten years ago. Some people thought Anita did it, and that Albert was covering up for her, that he had hired Octavia in order to keep an eye on the children, because she hadn’t been managing well on her own, and there had been other incidents, odd accidents. But you know, he was the one with the temper. He used to spank those children over every little thing. Do you know I told him myself, when you used to be in their house practically every afternoon, that he was never, ever to lay a finger on you, no matter how he disciplined his own children?” Harriet didn’t know this.

“And no one ever knew who made that call to the police that night—lots of wild stories went around. Someone, I don’t remember who, once tried to tell me that you did it. Can you imagine? You were ten.”

Harriet shifted uneasily in her seat, leaned forward, studying with great interest the brown sugar crystals this restaurant affected among its coffee condiments. She fiddled with the little wooden spoon standing in the bowl, flipping it back and forth.

“Did you ever try to speak to either Mr. or Mrs. Antler? I mean, they were probably embarrassed. Did you ever make a move toward them, offer them your friendship, or did you just let them keep their distance?”

“Harriet, that’s a real ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ kind of question. I don’t remember the specifics. I must have
made an effort to get in touch with them. Why wouldn’t I have? I was a friend of the family. I’m sure I did.” Ruth balled up her napkin and put it beside her plate in a gesture that was identical to Gay’s end-of-meal habits. She stood up and apologetically excused herself to find the ladies’ room, saying, “My back teeth are floating. With all that soup, a meal here gives an entirely different meaning to the term
liquid lunch.
”

Harriet brought out her camera from the bag at her feet while her mother was in the bathroom and toyed with the lens. She idly tested out the light meter and studied her reflection in the warped old mirror with an ornate carved frame that hung beside their table, making the restaurant seem larger, airier. She took a picture of herself in the mirror, then another, and then she took a picture of her mother standing next to the table, gazing down at the top of her daughter’s head. Harriet continued to look through the camera. She focused on her mother’s expression in the reflection without really seeing it, and then she did see it, and what she saw was a deep and abiding love, a mother’s absolute and undivided love for her child, a love that Harriet could swear had never been visible to the naked eye.

Anne was not by nature especially tidy. But in this cramped flat, and with fewer possessions in Geneva than the student-y accumulation with which she had surrounded herself in her New York life, she had developed routines that precluded a certain amount of mess. More important, neatness and order headed off a certain amount of criticism from Victor, who was obsessively neat with material objects, if not with the larger issues of his own domestic life.

These days, everywhere she looked in the flat there was evidence of Harriet’s presence. Once, the mere sight of these objects would have sent Anne’s spirit soaring. Now, it was a complication. Which wasn’t because Harriet was traveling with too much stuff; if anything, Harriet had impressively small quantities of clothing and camera equipment and personal things for someone away for a month.

On Eighth Street, Harriet had always been the austere one, opting for order, attempting steady sensibility in order to counterbalance both Anne’s habitual penuriousness and Anne’s haphazard bursts of crazy acquisition. Sometimes the two of them would stall in an aisle at the supermarket, creating a traffic jam while they argued about Harriet’s firm intention to procure one necessary can of tomato paste versus Anne’s
equally steadfast plan to fill the cart with two dozen because it was on sale. (“Sometimes,
more
is more,” Anne had unsuccessfully argued.)

Now, here, the problem wasn’t really the turnabout of roles, though it was a bit ironic; heretofore, Harriet had been the picker-upper and the organizer, while Anne had been the messy, clothes-heaped-on-the-chair-for-a-month slob. She had even been known to
wear
some of those clothes after they had languished thus.

The problem was Victor. And Anne saw no reasonable way to pass along Victor’s repeated complaints to Harriet. Every time Anne and Victor met in the flat for their lunchtime assignation, from the second day of Harriet’s visit, Victor had commented on Harriet’s toiletry kit taking up counter space in the bathroom, her camera equipment taking up too much of the closet, her two small piles of clothing occupying too much of the shelf beside the bed that Anne had cleared for her.

He didn’t care for the brand of breakfast cereal Harriet had put into the cupboard beside Anne’s health-food-store muesli. Harriet’s books (she was always in the middle of several at once; this month she was reading Anne’s books as well as her own Saki and Henry James stories) seemed to perplex Victor when he encountered them splayed on various surfaces throughout the flat. He would pick up each one, examine the title with a distracted air as though hoping for some explanation of something, and then close the book (thereby losing Harriet’s place) before putting it down.

The color of the miniature carnations Harriet had brought home from a flower stall and put into Anne’s one vase, a blue, earthenware pitcher Anne and Harriet had selected with care one Vermont weekend long ago, was not quite right. Victor preferred solid tones of white or pink for carnations; he did not approve of the purple edging on these, which struck him as vulgar. It occurred to Anne that Victor had until now been
the one source of flowers in her flat, and she noted a rivalrous tone to his criticism of Harriet’s flowers.

Suspended between Victor’s various reactions to Harriet and her own pleasure at the presence of Harriet, Anne felt herself caught in a crosscurrent. She had always been afraid of the undertow at beaches. She felt as though she were on the verge of being pulled apart.

Yesterday, when Victor let himself into the flat with his key moments after Anne’s own arrival and hasty ablutions and preparations in the bathroom, he had winced at the sight of an abandoned cup of coffee on the table. Observing with some significance that it was still warm, Victor emptied it into the kitchen sink, washed the cup, dried it with a dish towel, and placed it in its proper location on a cupboard shelf, as if by doing so he could eliminate Harriet’s presence from the flat.

Anne, slightly breathless from remaking the bed, did not remark on her own observation that Harriet’s perfume, Amazone, lingered faintly on the sheets she and Harriet shared at night, the sheets she had just stripped from the tightly tucked mattress (a Harriet Rose trademark, such fantastically, symmetrically organized bedding) in order to replace them with the set of sheets she kept in a plastic Bon Marché bag (the only souvenir of a Paris weekend with Victor) under the bed. This done, she adjusted the louvered shutters until the noon glare was filtered down to a dim coat of luminous dust on the surfaces in the room.

Only when the room was made ready in these ways did Victor beckon Anne with a tilt of his head that she should come over to where he stood watching her with his arms folded.

She went over and stood facing him for a long silent moment. The expectable erotic frisson that usually charged these moments was curiously absent. Something was missing.

Anne found herself thinking, absurdly, of Christmas Eve two years before, when she and Harriet had found themselves
at loose ends and had at the last minute decided to cook a turkey. It was late afternoon on Christmas Eve; all the fancy grocery stores in the Village were already closed. The only turkey they could locate sat alone in an empty case in a so-called convenience market, a seedy Sixth Avenue place with perpetually rotating chickens in the window and outdated milk in the leaking refrigerator case.

The clerks had hovered over them impatiently, sweeping and turning off lights, anxious to close the store, while Harriet and Anne debated the meaning of the tag on this scrawny, pathetic specimen. The tag read
PARTS MISSING
. She and Harriet had managed to create a decent dinner of the poor thing, and several friends had been invited at the last minute, and they had all drunk a hilarious toast to the roadkill, their bruised, wingless dinner.

PARTS MISSING
, thought Anne grimly,
c’est moi.

Victor raised a hand and reached out to touch under her chin with an extended finger; as he drew his hand back, she let him bring her face close to his. She willed herself to go blank, to have no feelings of any kind about anything. Victor, mistaking her expression for feigned resistance, laughed and pulled Anne toward him to begin what they had come there to do.