Free Tale for the Mirror by Hortense Calisher Page A

High Bridge,” he said. “And there’s the water tower.” He was only half aware of her moving sharply to the far end of the seat.
    He could just see the water tower, a dun cylinder that had never been much more than a neighborhood mark in the city’s proliferating stone. There it was though, a dingy minaret above the brush of the park. Any one of a number of paths led to its base, at the foot of which Bee and he had slept together one night, the first time for each, the only time before they had married. He could scarcely remember the innocence of that urban hedgerow lovemaking. Its details were lost forever, buried under hundreds of superimposed nights in bed. What he remembered was the imperative sense of “now,” which had been shuffled off somewhere along the way. And he remembered the city, assisting like a third presence—the river steaming softly behind them in the mosquito-bitten night, and the occasional start of the tugs.
    It was early November now, but the air had a delayed softness, the doomed, uneasy gentleness of fall. He put a hand on her lap and found her gloved hand.
    “Want to take a walk?”
    “No.”
    “Just for a minute. There’s an entrance down there.”
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “Come on.”
    “Sam…you tight?”
    “Look,” he said, “I meant a walk .” He pressed her glove back on her lap and left it there.
    Two capped men passed by, looking sideways at the car from vaguely identical foreign faces, and continued down the block, their feet slapping echoes on the dead street.
    She watched them through her window, huddling into her furs. “I want to go home.”
    “You didn’t used to be afraid of—neighborhoods,” he said.
    She sat still for a minute. “Took you twelve years. To throw that at me.”
    “Oh, look,” he said, “I just want to talk to you. Before we get back to that damned apartment.”
    “I thought you liked the apartment.”
    “We’re not so old we always have to be—inside places,” he said.
    “God in heaven. Is this what comes of going to Englewood?”
    He pulled out a cigarette and pressed the lighter on the dash. Through the windshield, as he leaned forward, he could sense the special outdoors of the city, its compound of peculiar, incessant harvestings from parks muted with dust and pavements oscillating with power.
    He lit the cigarette. “I spoke to that woman in Tennessee yesterday. The agency woman.”
    “You called Tennessee!”
    “I figured, cut through the red tape. Look, Bee—we’ve had all the pictures and stuff. She can come in two weeks. She can bring either the four-month-old girl, or the nine months’ boy.”
    “But I told you I wouldn’t…not from down there. It isn’t safe!”
    “What’s safe ?” he said. “Ten years ago it was the war. Before that—the depression. But the streets are still full of them.”
    “That happens to be a different thing.” She averted her chin, in a way familiar to him. For the first time, he noted how familiar it was.
    “It’s no one’s fault we had to rule that out,” he said gently.
    “You can cut the chivalry,” she said. “And start the car.”
    “Ahhh…damn,” he said.
    “Sam—”
    “Look,” he said, “are we people who want a kid, or—or comparison shoppers? We’ve gone along on all the proper lists in town for three years, and every year older we go down the list—not up. We’re thirty-six years old. We need one now—before it has to wheel us around.”
    She sat up straight. “Need? Or want?”
    “Take your choice,” he muttered.
    “Maybe I will,” she said. “But not from the Ozarks.”
    He started the car then, and they swept away from the curb in a dangerous arc and an ooze of gas, only to be stopped at the next corner by a red light.
    “For your information,” he said, “they’re all born without shoes.”
    He let her out in silence at their entrance, drove the car to the garage off Amsterdam, and slowly walked his way back. Even now, he was excited,