CHLOE AND I LIVED WITH MY MOTHER AND MY SISTER, Bernice, in the Leary household until Chloe pointed out that I earned a fair salary and said as how the two of us should probably find a place of our own. It’s not that there was any friction in the domicile, mind. On the contrary, the mother was very partial to Chloe—as was Bernice—and often the joint was nothing but those three giggling and conducting womanly business. But Chloe had a certain idea in her mind of what married life should be, and heading the list was that we two should live in our own place. Anyway, they’d just finished building some luxury apartments over on St. Nicholas Street, the Sherwood the building was called, and I took out a lease on one of them.
So one day Manfred came over with the largest of the Ozikean family farm carts, and we loaded all our belongings into it. Now this is slightly humorous, because all our belongings amounted to diddley-squat. After everything was loaded, it was apparent that Manfred could have borrowed the family wheelbarrow. Myself in particular owned nothing. I scoured the household in pursuit of items I might lay claim to, but about all I came up with was my skates and some hockey sticks, my hat and dragon-head cane, a few of Lloyd’s storybooks. Chloe had more stuff—mysterious boxes on which she’d written room names—and my mother pressed on us a set of dishes and some silverware. But that was it. Rather than being depressed by this state of affairs, as I was close to being, Chloe was delighted. It suited her mental picture of young newlyweds that they should be impoverished, I suppose. She turned right romantic on me during the move, throwing her arms around my neck for no good reason and covering my cheeks with lipstick. Manfred was his usual self, pointing out that the more things one owned, the greater the risk of loss through theft, fire, and acts of God. At any rate, we threw this meager assemblage into the Ozikean cart and hauled it through the streets of Bytown. Kids ran alongside, chattering to me and Manny. We told them to eat their veggies. When the tykes called Chloe “Mrs. Leary” she beamed, telling them to eat their veggies and always brush their teeth. The children wondered how brushing their teeth would make them better hockey players, and I thought they made a point. But Chloe told them to brush their teeth and clean their fingernails, for Jesus’ sake, and in like manner the mule hauled us across town and down St. Nicholas.
The doorman, Johannsen, eyed our cartful and raised a single brow. “Delivery for the Leary household?”
“What do you mean?” I asked him. “We are the Leary household!”
“Oh?” Johannsen looked confused. “But—”
“Come on, Percival,” said Manfred, jumping off the driver’s bench. “Let’s take this stuff up.”
“Right.” Manny and I grabbed some stuff (Manfred toting most of the cart’s contents) and we went up in the elevator. Chloe thought the elevator was rather stylish, but it made quite a few noises, odd groans and such, and I never did feel at ease in the contraption all the years we lived in the Sherwood. We went up to the fourth floor, which is all the floors available, and went to the door marked 4A. The letters were done in burnished brass. Manny and I set the stuff down, and I opened up the door.
Well, sir, it was as big a surprise as I’ve had in my lifetime, and you’re talking to a man who once found some baby mice in his underwear drawer. The place was done up like in a magazine. There was a sofa, a love seat, a little table, and that was just what I could see from the hallway! “What gives?” I wondered aloud. Manfred started to laugh, he pushed me into the apartment so that I could see a big oaken table set up in a dining area. The far wall was almost completely taken over by a spectacularly large mirror. The kitchen was through a little doorway, but I could see pots hanging on the wall, a block of knives sitting on the counter. “This must be the wrong place,” I whispered to Chloe, who was holding on to my arm, her eyes bugged open and her jaw slack as an ape’s.
“Wrong place,” chuckled Manfred, steering us down a hallway toward a bedroom.
Lying on top of a huge four-poster, rumpled and a little drunken, was Clay Bors Clinton.
“You don’t mind if I break it in, do you?” he asked. A glass of bubbly sat on a bedside table. “There’s nothing worse than a virgin bed, except—never mind.” Clay swung his legs around and sat up. “Welcome home, Mr. and Mrs. Leary.”
The toilet flushed down the hallway and a moment later Jane rushed into the room. She gave out with a short “Oh!” Janey’s flowery dress was cockled up and creased.
Chloe burst into tears right then, and she and her sister embraced each other. The happier Chloe got, the more she cried. Chloe was perverse in that regard.
“And now,” Manfred announced, “I’m going to cook.”
“Allow me to assist,” said Clay. He got off the bed and smoothed his trousers. He winked at me. “A bit nonplussed are we, Percy, my prince?”
“I’d say so.”
“Into the kitchen with us,” said Clinton. “Leave these women to blubber in peace.”
“You should have seen Percival’s face,” said Manfred. “And you know what? He thought we were in the wrong apartment.”
“He was right, of course.” Clay would sometimes say strange things like that. It was best to ignore him.
I said, “It’s the fanciest digs I ever saw.”
“I have a certain flair for home decoration,” Clay admitted. “That impossibly gaudy mirror over there, that is Ozikean’s doing.”
“You need a mirror!” said Manfred, in that overexcited way he had. “When a room doesn’t have a mirror, bad things can’t get out, and good things can’t get in.”
“What sort of things did you have in mind?” I asked Manny.
“It is aboriginal mumbo-jumbo,” stated Clinton.
“What do you mean, aboriginal mumbo-jumbo?” Manfred had colored slightly.
“Isn’t this something you learnt from your bizarre Grandfather Rivers?”
“You know who told me about mirrors? Brother Isaiah.”
“Oh, no. Not the blind monk creature again!”
“If Brother Isaiah says a room needs a mirror,” I said, “she stays right there on the wall. That boy knows his stuff.”
But the mirror didn’t stay on the wall. It was, I’ll own, an extremely large affair, that mirror. Often people will stick up a mirror and other people will say, “It’s like there’s a whole other room over there.” In this case, it was like there was a whole other universe. So Chloe had me take it down, and I stored it in the Sherwood’s basement. And I often wondered what sort of bad things were trapped inside our apartment, and what good things were banging on the walls, trying to get in.