The Mirror (32 page)

A month after the surrender of Germany, Rachael graduated from the University of Colorado with only Brandy left to attend the ceremonies. Her mother's graduation gift was enough money to pay for repairs on the roof and porches of the house.

By the time Japan surrendered, Rachael had a contract to teach fifth-graders in a Boulder school.

She'd been teaching only a few weeks when her mother announced she was leaving. "I can't stand this house all day. I've always wanted to see Mexico. I think I will before--"

"But why? You have a home here and I have a job."

"And you have your own life to get on with, Rachael. Your dad left me pretty well off and if I'm careful I ought to be able to see some of the world."

"But I thought we'd use that money to fix up the house. It needs so much."

"The house is your problem and you're welcome to it."

Rachael was alone for the first time in her life. And lost.

10

Rachael saved enough money to have the house painted that winter. On weekends she painted woodwork and stripped furniture.

The first year on her own, she discovered two things about herself. The tedious process of painting, sanding and varnishing drove her nuts.

So did fifth-graders.

"Why don't you try writing?" her mother wrote the next summer when Rachael had admitted this in a letter. Brandy was now in Canada.

"I'll be damned if I will," Rachael thought, and went back to weeding a flowerbed. "The old know-it-all, anyway."

But as she daydreamed among weeds and blossoms and sunshine, she thought of a young girl and boy exploring a cave and discovering a body there. Then she thought up a set of circumstances that would bring them to that cave.

Before she knew it she'd looked into their backgrounds and personalities, considered names for them . .

Rachael set her trowel down and stared at a scarlet petunia. When had she begun to fashion stories out of idle daydreams?

As she ate her solitary dinner in the gloomy kitchen she thought of all she'd do to this room if only she had the money.

The imaginary children scampered, just out of sight around the corner of the pantry.

Vowing she'd never mention this to her mother, Rachael hauled the typewriter she'd used for college papers down to the kitchen table and set to work. She sent the completed story to
The Saturday Evening Post.
It returned with a printed rejection and an unkind remark about her spelling.

The school year had begun and she put aside her lesson plans long enough to correct the spelling, retype it and send it to another magazine. The story came back with a suggestion that it be slanted toward the children's market. This she did and it returned again. Had she considered expanding it into a book-length manuscript for children?

It would soon be Christmas and Brandy planned to stop in to spend the holidays before going on to Florida. Rachael hid all signs of her writing life and seethed over the money her mother frittered away on travel, while she worked so hard just to make the house livable.

"How's
The Secret of the Lost Cave
coming?" Brandy asked the first evening after her arrival. "Or is it
The Mystery of the Lost Cave?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Rachael felt as if the bottom had fallen out of her stomach. She decided to rename the book she'd fashion out of her rejected story,
The Hidden Cave.

"Well, you must be getting to it one of these years."

Two days before Christmas Rachael had a blind date with a sailor whose sister was the other fifth-grade teacher. After a movie he led her around a corner and down a flight of stairs to a basement door under a store. "Buddy of mine's giving a party."

"I didn't know there were apartments here," she said.

"Wasn't meant to be, but all the G.I.'s coming back for school--you gotta be Truman to get a room in this town."

At first Rachael could see nothing through the cloud of cigarette smoke. The air was even staler and more packed with the human smell than a fifth-grade classroom.

The first voice she recognized was Frank Sinatra's. He moaned over the buzz of conversation from somewhere.

"Larry? You got here, you son of a bitch. I want you to meet. . ."

Larry disappeared into the smoke. A glass was shoved into Rachael's hand and the press of bodies pushed her back onto a hard bench.

Steam pipes crossed the ceiling. A concrete floor, two daybeds along the wall, a table, a stove and a refrigerator.

Men outnumbered women. Wild gestures denoted planes diving and bombs exploding. Wives and girl friends sat around the edges looking as bored as Rachael felt.

Her interest picked up instantly when the crowd parted and she saw a man sitting on a mattress on the floor across the room.

He looked older, thinner, harder. His hair had grown out from its military haircut. But he was still the man who'd kissed her on the bridge over Middle Boulder Creek.

All my mother's predictions,
Rachael thought, staring into her drink.
It's as if I don't have any control over my own life.
Melting ice left a tiny eddy of foam in the center of the bourbon and Seven, reminding her of a whirlpool. She imagined herself being dragged down into one, imagined what it would be like to know you'd drown in a few seconds. She decided it'd be similar to having a fortune-teller for a mother.

If she weren't so polite, she'd walk out the door and home right now. But Larry would think she'd ditched him.
Rachael, just because he's in town doesn't mean you'll marry him.

Larry carried two glasses across the room and tried to hand her one. "Sorry, I got sidetracked. Didn't mean to leave you over here like a wall flower."

Rachael refused the drink. "Listen, I have a headache. Would you mind if I just walked on home? It's not that far from here."

"I'll walk you home."

"No, you stay and chat with your friends." She slipped into her coat. Jerry had gotten to his feet across the room.

"Well, if you don't mind . . ."

"I don't. Really. And thanks for the movie." She was soon in the fresh cold air and up the concrete steps.

"Rachael? Rachael Maddon?" Jerry said behind her.

She stopped under the streetlight and shrugged. "Hello, Jerry. How are you?"

Jerry had registered at the university on the G.I. Bill and was due to start the second semester. He'd been out of the service for over a year, wandering. "I was so sure I wouldn't live through the war I hadn't made any plans," he said as they walked toward the Gingerbread House. "Sounds melodramatic, but--"

"Why did you choose Colorado? You've lived so many other places." It must be strange to have no particular place or people.

"I don't really know. I remember liking the mountains. Even though my mother died here, I had some good memories of the place."

Rachael thought it would be horrible to have nothing personal, of one's own. To be dependent on the kind of thing like the party they'd just left.

She was suspicious of the welling of sympathy she felt for his aloneness, of her awareness of him beside her, of her mother's inane predictions . . . "I'm damned if I will!"

"What?" He stopped jingling the change in his pocket. Snowflakes began to fall. They stuck in his hair.

"Nothing. Looks like we may have snow for Christmas after all." Christmas ... an awful time to be alone. "This is where I live." She stopped at the gate of the Gingerbread House.

"You've changed, Rachael. You're different."

I'm an old tired -woman at twenty-three.
"So have you."

The streetlight on the corner accentuated the hollows around his eyes. "Well... it was good seeing you again . . ."

"Jerry? I'm starving and I think I'm going in there and scramble up some eggs. Would you like to come in? My coffee's not the best but my eggs are out of this world."

"I had the feeling you were trying to avoid me tonight."

"I
thought you probably had a date with you," she lied. "And wouldn't want to renew old acquaintances." She opened the gate and paused to look at the Gingerbread House. The repairs and paint made it look happier, even at night with snow falling.

"Do you rent a room here?"

"My grandmother left it to me. Mom is visiting for the holidays and by the looks of all the lights on she's probably still up."
And she won't he a bit surprised to see you. Damn her eyes.

INTERIM

After Brandy left for Florida, Rachael wrote
The Hidden Cave.
It was published, but not before an editor changed the tide to
Secret of the Lost Cave.
She sank the small advance into improvements on the Gingerbread House.

She continued to see Jerry Garrett because she couldn't help herself. They were married the next Christmas. Rachael wore her mother's wedding veil.

Brandy returned for the wedding and the night-before-it talk. "Now, the first thing is, there's more to a successful marriage than sex."

"Well, I should hope so. Mom, this really isn't necessary. I know about male and female anatomy. I'm twenty-four years old, for heaven's sake."

But Brandy went beyond ovum and sperm, penis and vagina. "I know you've discovered you have one. What I'm saying is, there's nothing wicked in using it."

"Mother!"

"You're still a prude, aren't you?" Cobalt-blue eyes twinkled. "Rachael, that's a healthy young man you're getting there. If you're going to have to wash his socks the rest of your life, you might as well enjoy him."

* * *

The renovation of the Gingerbread House slowed as Rachael invested her earnings as a writer and teacher into living expenses and helping her husband through law school.

Up in the attic the wedding mirror slumbered on under its dusty blanket, forgotten.

Brandy had invested in Dan's used-car business and so on the proceeds expanded her travels worldwide. Every year or so she'd stop for a few weeks at the Gingerbread House, and Rachael and Jerry often caught her writing in a leather-bound diary.

"Do you suppose she's writing her memoirs?"

"Probably her version of
Gulliver's Travels."
Jerry thought his mother-in-law a dear but slightly batty old lady.

When Jerry settled in an established law firm in Boulder (he was offered an excellent position in Poughkeepsie but Rachael wouldn't move), she quit teaching and devoted herself to her writing. The Gingerbread House gradually acquired an all-new heating system, electrical wiring and plumbing. Whole rooms were replastered.

But other large houses in the neighborhood were being chopped into apartments for student housing or torn down. Rachael attended town-council meetings to fight proposed zoning changes as downtown Boulder crept nearer.

The Garretts wanted children but as the years passed they began to give up hope. The doctors couldn't tell them why they remained childless. Rachael blamed her mother's advice on that night before her wedding.

"Nonsense," Brandy said on one of her visits. "You'll have one child. A daughter. And with your writing and obsession with this house, one will be all you can handle."

"When?" Rachael asked defensively. "Since you know everything."

"Nineteen-fifty-eight," her mother replied. "Which reminds me. I haven't seen the Orient yet."

"Mom, don't you think you should settle down?" Brandy would be seventy-five on her next birthday.

"Far too much time for that. The nursing home looms."

Brandy was in Hong Kong when the triumphant letter reached her. "The baby's due in early May," Rachael wrote.

Huh-uh. May
23.
That's one date I remember for sure.
Brandy sat on a high-backed rattan chair in her hotel lobby and stared at the letter.
This baby I've got to see. It ought to be interesting. There'll be two of us.

She planned to arrive on May 22, but due to a missed plane connection in Hawaii, Brandy's taxi drove up to the gate of the Gingerbread House about ten-thirty on the night of the twenty-third. It was dark and locked but she found the hidden key on the porch and had the driver carry in her bags.

"Must be at the hospital having me," she said to the quiet house. Carrying her cosmetic case and leaving the other suitcases in the hall for Jerry to bring up when he returned, she mounted the stairs. She was too old and tired to carry suitcases anymore or to travel either, she decided. This last trip had about done her in.
But still pretty spry for seventy-eight,
she thought with satisfaction. There'd even been an article in
Time
magazine last spring with her picture, entitled "The Amazing Traveling Grandmother."