Arthur

Arthur held his father’s hand tightly. His cap fixed to his head, breeches cinched at his waist with a small leather belt. His first tie knotted at his collar, his father showing him how to tie it as he did it for his young son.

Arthur was studious, even at the young age of seven. Serious. Determined. He absorbed everything he could and kept records. First in his head. As he aged, in journals. Anything he found interesting or useful.

He peered from the bench into the casket, seeing for the first time a dead body. He knew this one before. Before it was a body, it was his grandmother.

Afterwards, Arthur endured the awkward family time at his grandmother’s house, with the awkward consolations, each sounding more contrived than the previous: “Now the healing begins”; “She’s in a better place”; “She’s at peace”.

Arthur couldn’t picture his grandmother being peaceful. She always seemed worried to him. Even at his age, he recognized his grandmother as a nervous and sad person.

His last visit with her was just three weeks earlier. She had been napping in her bedroom. Arthur’s parents took the brief moment of peace to slip away to rest and collect themselves, leaving Arthur alone to watch his grandmother’s chest rise and fall, her breath coming in long wheezing draws.

It startled him when she spoke.

“How long have you been there?” his grandmother asked.

Arthur didn’t know. “A while,” he said.

His grandmother began to cough, waving frantically for Arthur, who obligingly came to her bedside, his grandmother directing him to the nightstand and a glass of water that Arthur handed her, his grandmother, holding it with both hands, sipping with her eyes clenched shut. A pause, a deep breath, and relaxing as the cough subsided.

She passed the glass back to Arthur, who returned it to the nightstand. “Hand me my mirror,” his grandmother instructed.

The small hand mirror lay on the stand next to the water, a handkerchief, vase of gardenias, and a copy of the King James Bible.

Arthur watched as his grandmother looked into the mirror. She had an expression like she was staring at something far away, not just her reflection inches before her. She finally sighed and closed her eyes, pressing the mirror closer to her chest.

“Life goes so quickly,” she said to no one in particular and then to Arthur, “I was your age only yesterday.”

Arthur didn’t understand. He wasn’t sure how old his grandmother was. He was told it was impolite to ask such things. But he was certain she was much older than seven yesterday.

“Look at yourself,” his grandmother said, passing him her mirror. “Take a good look at yourself, Arthur.”

Arthur again did as instructed. He saw his reflection, his blue eyes, his dark hair, combed neatly for the visit, the small scratch on his left cheek he’d gotten from a tree branch the day before.

“Don’t forget this moment, Arthur,” his grandmother said. “It will all go by so fast. Never forget who you are. Now. In the present.”

Arthur didn’t quite understand what his grandmother was saying. He did know it was making him uncomfortable and that he wished his parents would get back soon, glancing back over his shoulder towards the door.

“Do you know why they call it the present?” his grandmother asked.

Arthur shook his head.

“Because it’s a gift,” she said, and she smiled for the first time that Arthur could remember. And for the last time.

Arthur slipped into his grandmother’s empty room and sat in the chair, staring at the empty bed. He felt better being there. Sad, but better.

The quiet was interrupted by his mother, calling in to him. “Arthur, come out here and talk with the guests,” she said, ducking her head in the door quickly. “Now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Arthur said, but waited a few moments more. He ran his hand over the mirror on the bed stand where he’d left it. Turning it over, he looked into it and remembered what his grandmother said but didn’t feel like the present was a particularly wonderful gift at that moment. He was tired of adults ordering him around. He just wanted to be older and respected and no longer treated like a child.

In his hand, the image of himself in the mirror, shimmered. He thought he imagined it. Then it happened again, and then it blurred, and the reflection was no longer of Arthur at age 7. It was Arthur, at least it resembled Arthur, but older now. In uniform. And looking confident.

Arthur turned to his parents, shaking his father’s hand, kissing his mother on the cheek, swinging his bag over his shoulder and heading to the waiting car to drive him to the train station and the train to San Francisco, and the ship waiting there to take him overseas.

On the train, at night, Arthur the only one still awake, he watched the dark shapes of the fields of Nebraska whir by and wondered when and if he would ever get home. He wondered if he would ever see his parents again, his sister, his dog. Whether he would ever have a career or a family of his own, or if he would just join the constantly growing list of young men who would not.

Arthur dug around in his pack and found it. The mirror. He’d stolen it from his grandmother’s bedside that morning of her funeral. He’d felt an attachment to it, to his grandmother through it. His talisman he never told anyone about. Not even his sister to whom he felt he could tell everything.

He wasn’t sure if he could keep it safe or hidden once on his ship, but he was going to try.

He glanced at it, at his reflection in it. He saw himself, thought he saw himself, but Arthur wasn’t sure. The dim light of the train car provided just enough to make out his features, but so dim his features appeared to alter with each jostle and bump of the tracks, altered his hair line enough that it began to recede, the corners of his eyes to crease, his forehead to wrinkle. Arthur sat at his desk, a pile of overdue warehousing reports on the most recent project the huge food conglomerate he worked for had ordered, involving the processing, storage and distribution of cherries in Wisconsin and Michigan, from where he had just returned. A two-week trip away from his wife and children, a formal portrait of them squarely on Arthur’s desk. Arthur in his usual brown suit, his son in a similar version, each with mustard yellow shirts and matching orange and brown striped ties. His wife, bouffant hair freshly coiffed from the salon, his daughter in a handmade dress with zoo animals on it. Three of them smiled. Arthur just looked like he wanted the picture over with.

The phone rang. His wife calling with a request to stop at the market and pick up pork chops and a head of lettuce. Arthur felt a grumble grow in him. He was exhausted. He just wanted to go home. How did this mundane errand fall upon him when he was out working fifty hour weeks to provide that food for his family.

After dinner that night, when the house was asleep and Arthur was not, Arthur slipped from the bed and to the chest he kept in the basement. No one else had the key but him. It contained the remnants of the life before now. Jar of marbles, Boy Scout sash and memorabilia, Navy uniform, and his grandmother’s mirror.

In the dust of the basement illuminated by the bare bulb in the fixture overhead, Arthur looked again into the mirror, hoping for something better. Whether that better existed in his future or was left in his past, he wasn’t certain. He just hoped.

And the reflection that remained was that of an old man, blue blazer, striped tie, bifocals, his head almost completely bald save a thin gray rim around the edge. He looked like he was smiling, for Arthur. For many people it would have appeared he was only trying to not not smile.

In his small one-bedroom apartment in the retirement home, Arthur looked at the wall of pictures over his breakfast table. Faded black-and-whites of his parents, his childhood, his time in the service. Once bright kodachromes of his wedding, his early years with his wife, his early years with his children, the color bleaching out over years along with Arthur’s expression. Then only pictures of him with his wife and daughter. And then only with his daughter.

Arthur looked at his grandmother’s mirror in his hand and wondered where the time had gone. 

He set it down on his bed stand, his hand unsteady, his daughter catching her father’s arm and the mirror before either crashed onto the stand. She lay the mirror safely to the side and Arthur’s arm comfortably back across his chest.

Arthur closed his eyes. His breath came in deeper gasps, longer gaps between them. And then it stopped.

“Dad?” his daughter asked.

Seven-year-old Arthur stood behind his daughter, watching her cry on the old man in the bed. He turned back to look over his shoulder as a gentle hand rested upon it. 

His grandmother, younger than he remembered her ever being, looked down on him and smiled.

“I told you,” she said. “It all goes so quickly.”