The Mirror (39 page)

He had a powerful urge to take her to his apartment as he probably would have the old Shay. But he couldn't take advantage of her confusion now.

She pushed the half-finished meal away and looked directly into his eyes, quickening something in him he hadn't known was there.

6

Brandy sat at the breakfast table with Shay's parents. The marvelous clothes-washing machine hummed in the pantry. The electric coffee maker gurgled on the counter and her head pounded from late-night pleading with the wedding mirror.

And then, over it all, Brandy McCabe heard the sound of church bells. "Is it Sunday . . . here?"

"It's Sunday everywhere, Shay." Jerry looked up from his newspaper.

"I would like to go to church," Brandy whispered.

"Church." Rachael carefully lowered the spoonful of grapefruit she'd just brought to her lips. "What church?"

"The Presbyterian church, of course."

"Of course." Rachael exchanged a glance with her husband.

"Didn't I. . . my grandmother go there?"

"Bran? She didn't belong to any church, did she, Rachael?"

"No. But
my
grandmother, Sophie McCabe, took me to the Presbyterian church when I lived with her. Thora K. hauled me into Nederland to Sunday school. I don't remember Mom ever going along."

"I would like to go to Sophie McCabe's church then." Just saying her mother's name brought tears to the borrowed eyes. "Please?"

"Okay, honey. Don't cry. Jerry, can you find yesterday's paper? It'll have the time of the services."

"You'll have to take her. I've got a golf date with your brothers." He left the room and returned with another paper. "Why not the Lutheran church? That's where you dragged us during your famous six-month conversion when you were thirteen."

As they hurried to finish breakfast, Brandy marveled at their eagerness to please their daughter. Even when they suspected her mind. Rachael helped her choose proper clothing without comment and they rushed to the carriage house, which had a cemented floor now and barely enough room to contain the large automobile.

It wasn't until she identified Boulder Creek that she realized the broad boulevard along which they sped was the Water Street of her time. Gone were the railroad tracks, the shacks of the poor, the houses of prostitution and gambling. Seeing the latter abominations missing on such a beautiful Sunday morning, Brandy thought it possible that God had not abandoned Boulder after all. She felt a welling of relief and determined to put the wicked Mr. Weir from her mind.

The Gingerbread House seemed to be almost all that was left of the Boulder she'd known. Except the mortuary, which she'd recognized as the Trevors' mansion, where she might have become mistress had she married
Mr. Trevors. Odd how the sturdy buildings, meant to last the ages, had disappeared in less than a century.

The First Presbyterian Church was now but a corner of a far larger
building tacked on around it. To the right of the entryway, doors opened
to the sanctuary and Brandy was comforted to see it much the same as she
remembered. Except that it was empty on a Sunday morning. She turned
to Rachael in surprise.

"You must be visitors." An elderly lady with legs as bare as theirs came up to them. "That's the chapel now. Lovely isn't it? Used to be the sanctuary. It's been restored you know. The new one is over here. You'd better hurry, I think the service is about to begin." She led them to a vast auditorium that was so crowded they had to sit in a front pew.

No subdued chatter of friends. No crying of babes. Scarcely any coughing or clearing of throats. Just a man playing a piano softly. Brandy glanced over Shay's shoulder, amazed to find so many people congregated in such silence, apparently as much strangers to each other as they were to her. She saw only two youngsters. An enormous wooden cross, straight and unadorned, seemed built into the wall in front of her. Below it, she made out the chancel by its raised platform but was at a loss to identify the altar. There was only a long narrow table, a few chairs and a lectern.

Members of the choir sat robed and expressionless.

Cold white walls and sharp graceless angles reminded her of Marek's NCAR, which to herself she'd dubbed the devil's castle.

A man appeared at the lectern to discuss collecting money from the congregation for a new organ and Brandy felt more at home. But the sum required was staggering.

The choir sang. The minister led them through a program of singing, speaking and answering unfamiliar to her. She understood his lengthy sermon even less but gathered he'd made a minute study of the least-known portions of the Bible and surmised that mankind could survive only by finding the key to unlock the mysterious solutions hidden in the Scriptures. He did assure them that God still existed.

If God was in this place, he didn't speak to Brandy. But the congregation followed the minister's words with rapt attention. The young man sitting next to her actually took notes and Brandy could feel his intensity. Was there nothing relaxed about Shay's world?

She longed for the stirring words of the Reverend Dr. Wilson and the warm presence of Sophie and Elton. John McCabe gave generously of his wealth to the church but rarely attended.

Beside her, Rachael Garrett squirmed and tried to hide her yawns.

When it was over, they were admonished to shake hands with those next to them. The intense young man stuck his pencil between his teeth, gave her a clammy handclasp and stared right through her.

On Monday morning Rachael announced she must work because of something called a "deadline" and would Shay please stay nearby in the "den."

She led Brandy to the cellar, where instead of the coal bins, fruit-and-vegetable storage, and giant furnace, there was now a series of smaller rooms. The one in which she left Brandy had a cushioned carpet, deep sofa and chairs, and walls lined with bookcases. At one end stood a polished box with a glass front resembling those she'd seen at the devil's castle with Marek. "Zenith Solid-State Chroma-color II" was printed on a panel beside the gray glass and beneath these meaningless words two rectangular buttons. One labeled "Chromatic" and the other, "Off/On."

The Off/On wouldn't turn so she punched it. The box began to talk and she backed away until she was sure what else it would do. A flash of colored dots on the glass formed into a moving picture of a slender woman running along a sidewalk.

"Aren't you glad
you
use Dial?" the box asked.

Brandy backed to the sofa and sank into it.

The runner vanished and, while music played, the picture of a large room appeared where many women sat in elevated rows of chairs. A lone woman sat on a platform in front of them.

A man who looked young but had silver hair walked among the chairs and held out a stick on the end of a black rope. A woman would stand, lean toward the stick and ask a question of the lady on the platform.

The discussion had much to do with love, sex, self-stimulation, intimacy, foreplay, climax, masturbation, sexual intercourse, orgasm, and the stupidity of men while making love. All this constantly interspersed with the words "you know."

She slid deeper into the cushions of the sofa with the guilty suspicion she was witnessing a public discussion of cleaving unto. Shay's face grew hot. Brandy's curiosity had already gotten her into enough trouble.

But every time one of those women said "you know," Brandy wanted to shout, "No, I don't know."

She scanned the spines of the shelved books until she came across a dictionary. Brandy didn't know the correct spelling and it took her some time to locate "masturbation," which led her to "genitals" and "genitalia." She decided it meant the self-abuse she'd read of in a book on health that had warned such activities led to insanity and the mysterious female diseases.

There followed a series of game shows. People jumped about, screaming and acting embarrassingly silly.

And constantly interrupting all of this were short plays to advertise an array of wares. Here women, all as slender as Shay, set great store by the scrubbing of floors, ovens and windows. By the polishing of commodes and the spots from glassware.

Yet the entire time Brandy'd been in Shay's world she'd yet to see Rachael so much as pick up a dust rag.

But after dinner that evening Brandy demonstrated she could load the dishwasher and fill it with soap powder.

Then she went back to the picture box in the cellar.

When she climbed the stairs, Shay's eyes burned, her body felt sluggish. Too exhausted to plead with the wedding mirror, Brandy fell into bed, only to wake often from bad dreams.

But the picture box held her captive for the rest of the week while Rachael worked next door, often clicking a typewriting machine much different from those Brandy'd seen used in the bank.

"At least it keeps her from wandering," she overheard Jerry tell his wife.

One morning a young couple arrived to solve the problem of how Rachael kept the Gingerbread House so tidy by ignoring it. Laughing, quarreling, cursing, they swept through the upstairs and down. Dust flew. A noisy metal machine sucked grit from the rugs.

The girl, Sarah, wore three earrings dangling from holes in the lobe of one ear. Chris stared moodily through thick spectacles but moved swiftly. Just before they left he handed Rachael a sheaf of papers.

"Christ, I've told you I don't know anything about poetry and other than the little magazines I don't know where you'd find a market for it. Everybody's writing it, but nobody's buying it."

"Little Mags don't pay anything. Think I want to clean houses all my life?"

"Then write something someone wants to read."

"Don't see why anybody'd want to read the garbage you write."

"Have you ever read any of it?"

"I know it's for kids and it isn't poetry so who needs it?" He grabbed the papers and the money she offered and slammed the door on his way out.

"Don't mind him." Sarah rolled her eyes under a heap of hair with frayed ends. "He doesn't buy poetry either."

Rachael settled herself in a chair across the desk from Gale Sampson in his office. "Well?"

"Well, nothing. She wouldn't talk to me." Gale relit his pipe and tossed the match into an ashtray filled with matches instead of ash. He was one of those men who smoked matches. "Oh, she was coolly polite but whenever I broached any topic to get her started, she looked at me as if I were being impertinent and clammed up."

"She's known you for years--"

"And acts as if she's never seen me before."

"Amnesia?"

"Amnesiacs don't forget how to take showers or shave their legs. Rachael, I want you to go over everything again, from the beginning."

She started with the night her mother died and tried to remember any odd action, reaction or word. There were many.

". . . and when her friends call, she refuses to see them. She loves to ride in the car but won't drive it. She never cared much for TV and now she has it on till it's driving me bananas. She never plays her stereo anymore. Her attitude toward her fiance has changed. I can't explain it . . . almost like a schoolgirl crush. At least she's stopped telling us she's her grandmother. But, Gale, it's a total personality change. As if she's experiencing things for the first time like . . . well, as I've said, she told us she learned to shave her legs and shampoo her hair properly from a TV commercial."

Gale sucked on a dead pipe and doodled on his notepad. Finally he looked up with a frown. "I don't know why the term 'culture shock' keeps popping into my head."

"But this is the culture she was born to."

"I know. There are pieces of all kinds of things here. But no recognizable pattern. I'd like a full medical report. Who's she seeing?"

"Jeff Haffenbach. He's checked her quickly since this . . . thing started and found nothing, but he didn't have time to schedule a complete physical till the end of July."

"I'd like to see her again next week. Keep me posted and keep a watch on her. I can't tell you what this is, Rachael." He reached across the desk and took her hand. "But I can tell you one thing. It isn't remotely normal."

7

The box everyone called TV came to control Brandy's life. It was a way to numb her terrible homesickness.

Jerry tried to coax her on walks or for rides in his automobile. She finally asked him to leave her be and then felt remorse at the look of pain that crossed his face.

Marek left for Wyoming, where his mother lay near death. Brandy decided if he were Satan this world was filled with them.

Rachael and her husband began to quarrel and Brandy withdrew further.

The wedding mirror remained vacant but for the image of Shay Garrett. Several weeks passed, interrupted only by her visits to Dr. Sampson. She couldn't convince Shay's parents that she didn't need a doctor and that the man only irritated her. Rather than cause unpleasantness Brandy sat through sessions that grew increasingly uncommunicative. TV taught her he was a doctor of the mind and not the body. She resented his attempts to invade the privacy of her thoughts.