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“So?” Fritz growled.
“There were names and now no names, just like there were pictures and now no pictures.”
“Told you,” said Henry.
“How come the sightless are never the wordless?” said Fritz.
“Got to do something to fill the time. Shall I recite the names?”
I said the names from memory.
“You left out Carmen Carlotta,” said Henry.
“Oh, yeah. Carlotta.”
Fritz glanced up.
“And whoever swiped the pictures upstairs?”
“Cleaned and scraped the mirrors.”
“So all those ladies are like they never was,” said Henry.
He leaned in along the line of mirrors and gave a last brush with his blind fingertips to the glass here, there, and farther on down. “Yeah. Empty. Damn. Those names were caked on. Took lots to scrub it off. Who?”
“Henrietta, Mabel, Gloria, Lydia, Alice …”
“They all came down to clean up?”
“They did and they didn’t. We’ve already said it, Henry, that all of those women came and went, were born and died, and wrote their names, like grave markers.”
“So?”
“And those names were not written all at once. So starting back in the twenties, those women, ladies, whatever, came down here for their obsequies, a funeral of one. When they looked in their first mirror, they saw one face, and when they moved to the next, the face was changed.”
“Now you’re cooking.”
“So, Henry, what’s here is a grand parade of funerals, births, and burials, all done with the same two hands and one spade.”
“But the scribbles”—Henry reached out to emptiness—“were different.”
“People change. She couldn’t make up her mind to one life or how to live it. So she stood in front of the mirror and wiped off her lipstick and painted another mouth, and washed off her eyebrows and painted better ones, or widened her eyes and raised her hairline and tilted her hat like a lampshade or took it off and threw it, or took off her dress and stood here starkers.”
“Starkers.” Henry smiled. “Now you got it.”
“Hush,” I said.
“That’s work,” Henry continued. “Scribbling those mirrors, looking to see how she changed.”
“Didn’t happen overnight. Once a year, maybe two years, and she’d show up with a smaller mouth or a thinner shape and liked what she saw and went away to become that person for half a year or just one summer. How’s that, Henry?”
Henry moved his lips, whispering, “Constance.
“Sure,” he murmured, “she never smelled the same way twice.” Henry shuffled, touching the mirrors until he reached the open manhole. “I’m near, right?”
“One more step would do it, Henry.”
We looked down at the round hole in the cement. From below came sounds of winds blowing in from San Fernando, Glendale, and who knows where else—Far Rockaway? The light rain runoff was sliding below, a mere trickle, hardly enough to cool your ankles.
