Boy in the Mirror

Brad McConnell studied the features of the ten-year old face which peered back at him in the mirror: the tousled brown hair, hazel eyes with bright green flecks like a cat’s, thick wiry eyebrows, wide nose and thin lips. He had the pale, smooth skin of a boy well short of the onset of puberty, his rounded cheeks lacking the angularity which would mark the face of the man he might become. What would he look like as a man in ten, twenty years? Would he resemble his father? He looked past his own image in his mother’s large dressing mirror to the photograph of his father she kept on the table by her bed. Sometimes when he was alone in the house he would speak with his father in this way, now four years after the accident, his reflection paired with his father’s, as if the two were able to speak together on matters which concerned him, matters which required an older man’s thoughts.

Brad dressed, a Pittsburgh Pirates jersey with his chinos, donned a pair of Keds and hurried downstairs to the kitchen. His grandmother, Ida Mae Malone, was at the stove, stirring some scrambled eggs, a Chesterfield King perched in the corner of her mouth, with a long ash dangling precariously at its tip. A fine cook, there was nonetheless an extra dash of “pepper” in everything she prepared.

“Your mother’s gone back downtown to pick up some groceries. She picked up some of that good bread and a dozen yeast rolls from the Kittanning Bakery. Get some bacon on the table there. Eggs will be ready in a minute.”

“Thanks, Grandma. Smells good.”

“You’re to go down to Schuey’s today and get a haircut…” She turned and looked over her glasses at him sternly. “And mind, don’t get caught up with any of them rough types in there. Some of them birds are up to no good.”

“Okay. I won’t.”

Brad didn’t see how he could get mixed up in too much trouble just getting a haircut, but he said nothing. Since his father died, there was just the three of them in the house and both women tended to baby him at times. He sighed.

Ida Mae brought the frying pan over to the table and scraped the eggs onto two plates. She moved awkwardly. Her bad hip made her wobble as she walked as if she might tip over any moment without warning. Fifty years of childbearing, raising a family and running the cafeteria at the Catholic grade school had taken their toll. Her feet swollen and thickly veined, crippled by bunions and hammer toes testified to a hard life forged by the Great Depression. In those years, transients riding the rails looking for work or a meal would mark the houses where a meal might be found, a piece of pie, a sandwich, a pitcher of cool water or coffee. Their house would be marked. There would be a place on the porch where she would set out food for those who came by, even when her own large family had little.

Brad finished his breakfast, scooped up the two dollars his mother left him for the haircut and bounded out the back door and down the porch steps. The wash was already out drying on the line, snapping in the breeze as he ducked under it to head toward downtown. In the alley behind the house, he could hear the loud metallic clink of a horse-shoe hitting a stake. There was a grassy patch next to the alley where an old garage had been torn down. The old men on the street were already deep into their weekend horse-shoe matches, something they took very seriously. He wanted to stay and watch but thought better of it. He waved to the two old men playing, who paid him no mind.

Schuey’s was one of several barber shops in town, but certainly the busiest. They employed three full time barbers and boasted a room in the back where several pool tables were set up. The pool tables attracted some of the local rowdies his grandmother warned him about. The exterior of the building was like most of the other small businesses in town, red brick structures little changed since they were built decades ago. Merchant’s Bank had ornate designs added to its exterior in the twenties, which someone had once told him was art-deco, whatever that was. Isaly’s, the local ice cream shop, which also employed a grill for cooking up hamburgers, was a popular place to eat in town.

Brad walked into Schuey’s with a combination of pride and apprehension. This was a building where men gathered, not schoolboys. He tried not to display his anxiety as he strode purposefully toward the waiting area. Green leather upholstered chairs with heavy oak legs lined the back wall. He took a chair next to a slim middle-aged man with his arms folded over his chest, most likely a farmer. He wore faded denim coveralls and a sweat-stained cap with a feed company logo on the front. The man smelled faintly of cow manure and dark streaks marked his well-worn shoes. He nodded to Brad as the boy sat down stiffly in his chair. The farmer then reached in front of him to the table where a variety of magazines lay carelessly strewn. The man picked up a copy of Field and Stream and leaned back in his chair, reaching into an inside pocket of his coveralls for a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses.

On Brad’s right sat a young man in his late teens or early twenties with thick, black-framed glasses. He had a severe case of acne. Brad saw a pimple on his chin which looked like it might pop at any time. Too much Pepsi, he thought. “Pepsi gives you pimples” his grandmother had told him. An unruly cowlick stood at attention atop his scalp. A dab of Vaseline the man had tried to use to wage a battle against it shone dully in the light. The young man was thumbing through a True Detective, which featured a blonde woman on the cover, clad in tight blouse and slacks. She was gripped from behind by a desperate looking man in a dark suit. The pimple-faced man nervously held the magazine close to his face, so others could not see what he was reading.

The table held a wide array of magazines befitting this exclusively male redoubt. Field and Stream, Guns and Ammo, Argosy and a few others Brad would only peek at from the corner of his eye. He casually reached for a copy of Popular Mechanics. Cigarette smoke swirled thickly about the room as the farmer reached into another pocket of his coverall and pulled out a pipe and a packet of Middleton Cherry Blend.

Brad felt that he was privy to a secret male retreat, a sanctuary where men communicated with others about things he had yet to learn, things he whispered to his father’s photo about in the dressing mirror as if he could reach him there in the glass reflection and ask him what lay in store for him. About him, the men in the room spoke easily with one another. They traded jokes, stories, tales of bravado and derring-do. The cigarette smoke hung in the air as if disguising a magic act. But among all the things, that which most fascinated Brad, were the mirrors. Each barber station held a large mirror above the table of barber tools and nostrums. Directly opposite, at the rear of the shop running its entire length, four or five feet high and extending from the entrance to the pool room was a wall mirror. The room was like a grand stage, set up for the illusions created in that atmosphere of smoke and mirrors. The images reflected in the mirrors from front to back were multiplied to infinity. This was what held the greatest fascination for Brad, reflections receding into forever. He saw the thousand images of the boy with the acne, his black glasses perched carelessly on the barber’s table, squinting into the mirror as Tony murmured something quietly to him. He nodded to the barber in reply and thousands of his reflected image before and behind him nodded in unison, as if a great sea of bobble heads sat in audience.

Brad sat transfixed, gazing into the mirror world. Each barber turning about his client, clippers whirring, scissors flashing, straight razors whisked briskly up and down the leather honing strap danced in a panoply of images as the smoke stirred by the overhead fans, blue and gray in cottony puffs of clouds rose and fell in the breeze. As his eyes became lost in the collage of images, the noise in the room seem to come in unintelligible waves, the quiet hum of the fan motor, the buzz of conversation between barbers and clients, the crack of the pool balls, the laughter from the players. It was a carnival of sensations. Brad found himself lost in it.

“Young man, young man…yeah, you. I’m talking to you.” Angelo, the oldest of the trio of barbers, was beckoning to Brad from behind his open chair. “You wanna haircut or you gonna just sit? What’s your name, son?”

“Oh, sorry, sir. Sorry. It’s Brad,” the boy responded sheepishly and hurried over to the barber chair. He leaned on one arm of the chair and swung himself up into the large leather seat. From this position, the image reflected in the mirrors was his own and the barber standing behind him, a trim white haired thickly mustachioed gentleman in a crisp white barber jacket. His name, Angelo, was embroidered in bold script over his pocket, from which protruded a pair of scissors and a shiny long black comb.

 “Okay, Brad,” the barber said. “Don’t tell me. Lemme guess,” the barber said to the boy’s image in the mirror before him, “The Princeton. You gonna be a Princeton haircut man. No crew cut for you. Am I right?”

“I, I guess so,” Brad responded. He had no idea what a Princeton was, but who was he to argue?

“I knew it. Plus, that’s what you got now, so we just go there again, yes?”

Brad smiled. “Sure. You’re the boss. A Princeton.” He felt at ease with the kindly old man.

Ben was the third barber, Schuey’s brother-in-law, and the most talkative of the three men. His station was in the middle, and he alternated conversations between the other two barbers and the clients in the three chairs. He held his straight razor up to the light and then began sharpening it rapidly on the honing strop at his side as he addressed the customer in his chair.

Brad was no longer paying much attention to the conversation. He was concentrating his gaze on the mirror. There was something odd going on. As he watched his reflection in the mirror, the multitude of Brads, he saw it again, a movement in one of the many faces, a face out of sync with the others. Was that possible? No, couldn’t be. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes.

“Careful there, son,” Angelo said quietly. “He was trimming the short hair at his temple with the scissors. “Hold still, please.” 

Angelo paused with Brad’s trim, continuing his conversation with the customer in the next chair. “I caught the biggest fish that day, a Northern, something like thirty inches long and eight pounds. That was something.” He smiled to himself at the recollection, before turning to resume the trim around Brad’s left ear.

Then Brad jumped. He was gazing into the mirror. There was no mistake. One of the images was laughing silently in the mirror. He was staring back at Brad and laughing.

Angelo, not expecting the sudden movement, felt his scissors cut into Brad’s ear lobe. A small cut, but it began to bleed slightly. A bead of blood oozed slowly down Brad’s ear, In the mirror, dozens of ears were bleeding. Angelo promptly reached for a tissue on his table and touched it to Brad’s cut. He was mortified. How could he cut a customer?!

“Ouch,” Brad said. He looked at Angelo in the mirror, who was ashen faced, concerned that he’d nicked a customer, and a boy at that.

“I’m so sorry, young man. You jumped, and my scissors nicked your ear…”

“Did you see that!” Brad interjected. “In the mirror?”

All three barbers and their customers looked at Brad’s image in the mirror, the countless images fading into infinity.

“See what?” Hank asked. I don’t see anything unusual. But you better check that cut, Angelo”

“One of the images was… well, different!” Brad exclaimed.  

“Different how,” Ben asked. “They are the same, son. What was it you think you saw?”

“Look, I know this sounds crazy, but I think I saw one of the faces in the mirror laughing.”

“Laughing? I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Bill said quietly. “They’re just many reflections of you.”

The men all looked at Brad. He squirmed a little under their stares.

“Yeah, sorry. Guess I was just seeing things.” Brad’s voice trailed off. He was sure of what he saw, but the others all regarded him curiously.

Angelo pinched a tissue over the cut to stem the bleeding. “You okay, young Brad? I swear I never cut a customer before. How does your ear feel?”

“Aw, it’s okay. Brad replied. I shouldn’t have jumped like that. It’s just that when I saw… I… uh, never mind.”

“I think it’s a small cut. Not bleeding much now,” Angelo said. He peeked at the cut, then applied a small fresh tissue to the wound. Blood immediately soaked into the tissue.

Hank cleared his throat noisily. “Well, anyway, that sounds like a nice sized Northern, Angelo.” He wanted to steer the conversation back to fishing.

Maybe it was the cut on his ear, maybe the smoke in the room, but Brad tuned out of the men’s conversation as he stared at the mirror. The laughing image winked at him. It was unmistakable. As Brad watched spellbound, other faces began to move. Some looked up and down others began conversing silently among themselves. It was as if dozens of Brad images were all discussing something important. Occasionally, one image would stop talking and turn to look at Brad in the barber chair. He would say something aloud to the others and more would turn to look at him looking back at them. What were they talking about?

Angelo said something to Brad, interrupting his reverie. When he looked at Angelo in the mirror, the reflections resumed their normal position simply reflecting Brad’s face back into infinity.

“I’m sorry, sir, what was that?” Brad asked.

“How does the ear feel, now?” Angelo inquired. “The bleeding seems to be stopping.” Angelo removed the second bloody tissue and replaced it with a fresh one. It began to redden around the cut, but more slowly. Angelo was standing between Brad and the mirror blocking his view.

“Uh, it’s okay. No big deal, really.” Brad squirmed in his seat. He wanted to see if his reflections had stopped their antics. Angelo moved back to Brad’s side and resumed trimming the boy’s hair.

As the barber moved, with his back to the mirror, Brad noted the images began their independent movement once again. Talking excitedly among themselves the Brads all seemed to be looking toward the rear of the mirror towards the smallest of the images. Then they all ceased talking at once. Brad squinted to see what they were all looking at. Then he saw. It was his father’s face, the one in the photo from his mother’s dressing table. He was looking at Brad and smiling. Then, from the back of the mirror, his father’s image was replacing the mirror images of Brad. They grew larger and larger as the image drew closer to Brad in his chair. His father’s image now replaced his own in the reflection. It was speaking to him. Brad couldn’t hear him but from reading his father’s lips, the message was unmistakable.

“Come with me,” it said.

Angelo finished the trim and spoke to Brad’s image in the mirror. “There you are, my boy, the Princeton. Is it all right?”

Brad turned his gaze in the mirror to Angelo then to his hair cut.

“Yes, very good. Thank you.”

The barber held up a large hand mirror to the back of his head.

“Perfect.” The boy said.

Angelo put the mirror back on his table and turned his attention to Brad’s ear. He carefully pulled the bloody tissue away from the wound and peered at it closely.

“That’s funny,” the barber murmured. “Now, I can’t see a cut at all. Good!”

The boy in the barber chair looked at his ear in the mirror. Indeed, there was no blood at all. As Angelo whisked away the cutting cape from his shoulders, the boy studied his face in the mirror. His reflection looked back as the many images receded into infinity. Then, he noted one image out of sync, in the rear, fading into the distance.

 One solitary image bore a small spot of crimson at the tip of its left ear.