Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

Yet now, as she stood surveying the handsome new layout of the room, she had to admit that the overall effect was rather pleasing. The dark mahogany antiques lent an air of blue-blood distinction. She found herself, to her surprise, loving the faded Aubusson rug, the richly tasseled French draperies, the magnificent collection of Cecilia Caldwell’s Meissen in the ceiling-high buffet; and the enormous Venetian mirror in its eighteenth-century frame made her feel almost giddy. She paused before it now, smiling at her well-coiffed, recently blond reflection—and was startled to see a tall, dusky shape rise behind her. For the duration of one wild heartbeat, she imagined that the mirror held an olive-skinned gypsy in swirls of fiery skirts, but when she swung around, the vision resolved into Mrs. Simmons in her somber widow’s clothes, standing just past the threshold, her old-fashioned black handbag in the crook of her arm.

“I didn’t hear you come in!” Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed with a flustered laugh. She had forgotten that it was a Thursday, had thought herself alone in the house. “You move like a cat. Are you on your way out?”

Paying no heed to Mrs. Caldwell’s question, the housekeeper in turn studied the room. “It looks different,” she said at last, her austere, thin-lipped, long-nosed face without expression. “The furniture is fancier. And there is more of it.”

“This is really a memorial to Paul’s parents,” said Mrs. Caldwell.

Her heart still had not subsided all the way.

Keeping firm hold on her bag, Mrs. Simmons walked over to a painting on the far wall, touched the top edge of its gilded frame, peered at her darkened finger.

“Lots of new knickknacks to dust,” she said.

Mrs. Caldwell noted disapproval in her housekeeper’s voice. On Mondays and Thursdays, ten to two, it would indeed fall to Mrs. Simmons to do the dusting, and Mrs. Caldwell felt a light itching of guilt, which, however, she was able to dismiss with relative ease: Mrs. Simmons received more than adequate wages.

“I’m certain it can be managed,” she said, a little dryly.

Without looking at her, Mrs. Simmons moved about the room, prodding here, poking there. “Do you ever wonder why it is so hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven?” she suddenly said. Mrs. Caldwell stared at her. “It’s because the rich have so little time. Time, you know, is what you give up to own all the things you own. Because every new thing you let into your life eats a tiny bit of your life away. The rugs need cleaning, the chairs upholstering, the silver polishing, the china washing—and even if you do none of it yourself, maids and handymen need supervising and keeping in line.”

“I believe I’ve always treated you with fairness,” Mrs. Caldwell said stiffly. She had never heard Mrs. Simmons offer any opinions on anything other than household matters, or say more than a few words at a time, and she was beginning to feel quite appalled.

Mrs. Simmons did not appear to have heard her. “So the more things you have,” she continued, and her ordinarily imperceptible accent came and went, making some of her words sound harsher, more foreign, “the faster your time runs through your fingers. In case you were ever wondering why that was. And then you have no time left to think about things that are distant and hard. Like God. Or death. Or poetry.” Mrs. Caldwell looked at her sharply, but the old woman seemed busy inspecting the sconces. “Well, but it must be worth it to you, or things would be different.”

Completing the circle of the room, she stopped in front of the mirror.

“What—what do you mean by that, Mrs. Simmons?” Mrs. Caldwell managed.

“Please, I’m no more Mrs. Simmons than you are Mrs. Caldwell,” the housekeeper said with growing irritation. “And you know perfectly well what I mean.”

For a moment their eyes met within the silvery pool of the priceless mirror. In spite of the old woman’s ill-tempered tone, her direct black gaze held no strife, only sadness and, underneath, some vast, vast disappointment. Mrs. Caldwell saw what the old woman was seeing—a plump, beautifully dressed forty-eight-year-old blonde with large pearls in her ears; the blonde’s painted mouth appeared to be working in soundless outrage, chewing, chewing on itself…

Mrs. Caldwell’s eyes thrashed and leapt away, like two slippery fish twisting free of their hooks and falling back into the rippled depths.

The old woman shrugged and, turning away, began to rummage through her monstrous black bag. “I’ve watched you for years and years, you know. And every day I kept expecting you to do something different. Just waiting for you to wake up one day and say: Now. Today. But you didn’t, and you haven’t, and you won’t. I must have misread your fortune, happens to the best of us—”

Mrs. Caldwell drew herself tall. Even at full height, she was a good head shorter than the old woman. “You forget yourself,” she said.

“No, I fear it’s you who forgot yourself,” said Mrs. Simmons, not glancing up from her bag. “Well, tell the children I love them. Especially Celia. She’s a bright little spirit, I’ll miss her. I’ll miss them all. Now, where in the world did I put them—”

“Are you giving notice, Mrs. Simmons?”

“Yes, I believe I am, Mrs. Caldwell… Ah, there they are. I will leave them right here for you.”

Mrs. Caldwell lunged to intercept the keys before they scratched the surface of the seventeenth-century table, and caught herself in mid-motion, and drew back, biting her lip. The old woman was looking straight at her, and her face was severe, and her eyes young and knowing. Mrs. Caldwell grew hot inside.

“I will send you your monthlong severance by mail,” she said.

“Good-bye,” said Mrs. Simmons whose name was not Mrs. Simmons.

Mrs. Caldwell heard the front door open and close, but she did not move to see the housekeeper off. She was shaking. There had been an instant when their eyes had met within the mirror and she had felt seen —and felt, too, that in that one instant she had seen herself, seen herself with an absolute, pitiless clarity, and had found herself lacking, and had shrunk back from the fullness of her knowledge.

She turned to the mirror.

Had her longing for art and beauty somehow, without her noticing, become a longing for Aubusson rugs and Venetian mirrors? Or had it been that all along? Had her first-grade teacher been right after all—had her childhood yearning for a fairy-tale palace been nothing but bourgeois rot? Was that why she had chosen to trade her home, her language, her aging parents, for the land of walk-in closets and golden faucets? Was that why she had left the man she had left, and married the man she had married? And later, after her marriage had become what it became, was that why she had not let her husband go, binding him tighter to herself with yet another child?

Horrified, she looked at the blonde in the mirror.

When Paul returned from work that night, the house lay swollen with winter darkness, torpid and still.

“Hello?” he called out.

“I’m here,” she said.

He stopped on the threshold of the unlit living room, peered into the dimness, saw her sitting on the shadowy couch against the shadowy wall in the cavern of shadows.

“What are you doing in the dark?” he asked, taking off his coat.

“Waiting for you. It’s all finished. Turn on the light, go ahead—it will make you less sad.”

He flipped the switch, and saw the room, and gasped.

“Just like home,” he said; but he did not look less sad. “The piano is a perfect fit. And the buffet. And the mirror—oh no! Was the crack always there, or did the movers damage it?”

“It was always there,” she said, standing to straighten the photographs of sepia-tinted children on the side table. “But don’t worry, I’ve spoken to the restorers already. They have some period glass they can use to replace it. They are coming to do the measurements on Monday.”