Tale for the Mirror by Hortense Calisher

Author:Hortense Calisher [Calisher, Hortense]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480438927
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1962-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Coreopsis Kid

ON AN AFTERNOON LATE in the Indian summer of 1918, on the lawn of the house from which the Elkin family was returning to the city the next day, a garden party was ending, and the talk there was all of the war, which was ending too. But inside the house—in a room called the “music” room because it held chairs in which no one could settle, a piano on which no one played, and a broken guitar slanted in a corner like a stricken figure—the Elkin child, Hester, lay on the floor, wishing that the war would never end and that a little old couple called the Katzes had never come to the party at all.

Outside, in the pink, operatic light, all the town guests, most of them Mr. Elkin’s elderly retainers, had just gone, looking almost rakish out of their city serge, in the foulards, pongees, and sere straws they had thought proper to the occasion. Her father, who was the head of the family and of the business which supported it, attracted retainers—as her mother often said—as if he were royalty. Even when they were no kin and useless to the point of impossibility, like old Mr. Katz, they swam knowingly toward him out of the sea of incompetents, and he kept them on, out of sympathy, some vanity, and an utter lack of the executive violence necessary to have off with their heads.

Today, all of them had eaten greedily of cakes whose scarce ingredients had been so happily procured, had partaken reverently of Mr. Elkin’s claret—meanwhile chattering thinly of what the end of the war boom might do to such claret-consuming incomes as the one which maintained them—and ancient relatives whom Hester had never before seen out of chairs had sat daringly on the grass. Toward the end of the party, Mr. Katz (thought of by Hester as her Mr. Katz), who had drunk no claret, had nevertheless been found sitting on the grass too, dazedly preoccupied in wrapping remnants of cake and ice cream, plates and all, in some napkins and a length of string, yards of which projected from a ball in his pants pocket and coiled fecklessly in his lap. He and his wife had just gone, gathered up and reassembled by Miss Lil, Mr. Elkin’s forelady, a tall old woman with dead-black hair and a face like a white Jordan almond, who had shepherded them into a taxi, flapped her draperies officiously over their humbled, retreating backs, and climbed in after them with a great show of agility, as one whose competence age had not affected.

Outside the window now, Hester’s mother and Mr. Elkin’s sisters, Aunt Mamie and Aunt Flora, clinked and murmured over retrospective cups of coffee. The aunts, as per custom, had come out from the city the night before, to “help” in their peculiar way—Flora to check interminably on Mrs. Elkin: “What you have to pay for this chicken, your butter, these berries, Hattie?” and to cap

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