by Ray Bradbury
And then the oldest, the darkest, most childish thought of all. There’s only one way to finish a woman whose mouth is the color of blood. Being what she is, no relative, not an aunt or a great-grandmother, surprise her with a stake driven through her heart!
I heard her scream. It was so loud, all the night birds jumped from the trees to cover the stars.
I lay back down. Dear Christian Anna Marie. I thought, what’s this? Do you want to kill? Yes, for why not kill a killer, a woman who strangled her child in his crib and has not loosened the throttling cord since? He is so pale, poor man, because he has not breathed free air, all of his life.
And then, unbidden, the lines of an old poem stood up in my head. Where I had read them or who had put them down, or if I had written them myself, within my head over the years. I could not say. But the lines were there and I read them in the dark:
Some live like Lazarus
In a tomb of life
And come forth curious late to twilight hospitals
And mortuary rooms.
The lines vanished. For a while I could recall no more, and then, unable to fend it off, for it came of itself, a last fragment appeared in the dark:
Better cold skies seen bitter to the North
Than stillborn stay, all blind and gone to ghost.
If Rio is lost, well, love the Arctic Coast!
O ancient Lazarus
Come ye forth.
There the poem stopped and let me be. At last I slept, restless, hoping for the dawn, and good and final news.
The next day I saw him pushing her along the pier and thought, Yes, that’s it! She’ll vanish and be found a week from now, on the shore, like a sea monster floating, all face and no body.
That day passed. Well, surely, I thought, tomorrow…
The second day of the week, the third, the fourth and then the fifth and sixth passed, and on the seventh day one of the maids came running up the path, shrieking.
‘Oh, it’s terrible, terrible!’
‘Mrs Harrison?’ I cried. I felt a terrible and quite uncontrollable smile on my face.
‘No, no, her son! He’s hung himself!’
‘Hung himself?’ I said ridiculously, and found myself, stunned, explaining to her. ‘Oh, no, it wasn’t him was going to die, it was—’ I babbled. I stopped, for the maid was clutching, pulling my arm.
‘We cut him down, oh, God, he’s still alive, quick!’
Still alive? He still breathed, yes, and walked around through the other years, yes, but alive? No.
It was she who gained strength and lived through his attempt to escape her. She never forgave his trying to run off.
‘What do you mean by that, what do you mean?’ I remember her screaming at him as he lay feeling his throat, in the cottage, his eyes shut, wilted, and I hurried in the door. ‘What do you mean doing that, what, what?’
And looking at him there I knew he had tried to run away from both of us, we were both impossible to him. I did not forgive him that either, for a while. But I did feel my old hatred of him become something else, a kind of dull pain, as I turned and went back for a doctor.
‘What do you mean, you silly boy?’ she cried.
I married Paul that autumn.
After that, the years poured through the glass swiftly. Once each year. Roger led himself into the pavilion to sit eating mint ice with his limp empty-gloved hands, but he never called me by my name again, nor did he mention the old promise.
Here and there in the hundreds of months that passed I thought, For his own sake now, for no one else, sometime, somehow he must simply up and destroy the dragon with the hideous bellows face and the rustscaled hands. For Roger and only for Roger, Roger must do it.
Surely this year, I thought, when he was fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two. Between seasons I caught myself examining occasional Chicago papers, hoping to find a picture of her lying slit like a monstrous yellow chicken. But no, but no, but no…
I’d almost forgotten them when they returned this morning. He’s very old now, more like a doddering husband than a son. Baked gray clay he is, with milky blue eyes, a toothless mouth, and manicured fingernails which seem stronger because the flesh has baked away.
At noon today, after a moment of standing out, a lone gray wingless hawk staring at a sky in which he had never soared or flown, he came inside and spoke to me, his voice rising.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Tell you what?’ I said, scooping out his ice cream before he asked for it.
‘One of the maids just mentioned, your husband died five years ago! You should have told me!’
‘Well, now you know,’ I said.
He sat down slowly. ‘Lord,’ he said, tasting the ice cream and savoring it, eyes shut, ‘this is bitter.’ Then, a long time later, he said, ‘Anna, I never asked. Were there ever any children?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know why. I guess I’ll never know why.’
I left him sitting there and went to wash the dishes.
At nine tonight I heard someone laughing by the lake. I hadn’t heard Roger laugh since he was a child, so I didn’t think it was him until the doors burst wide and he entered, flinging his arms about, unable to control his almost weeping hilarity.
‘Roger!’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing! Oh, nothing!’ he cried. ‘Everything’s lovely! A root beer, Anna! Take one yourself! Drink with me!’
We drank together, he laughed, winked, then got immensely calm. Still smiling, though, he looked suddenly, beautifully young.
‘Anna,’ he whispered intensely, leaning forward, ‘guess what? I’m flying to China tomorrow! Then India! Then London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Mexico City!’
‘You are, Roger?’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘I, I, I, not we, we, we, but I, Roger Bidwell Harrison, I, I, I!’
I stared at him and he gazed quietly back at me, and I must have gasped. For then I knew what he had finally done tonight, this hour, within the last few minutes.
Oh, no, my lips must have murmured.
Oh, but yes, yes, his eyes upon me replied, incredible miracle of miracles, after all these waiting years. Tonight at last. Tonight.
I let him talk. After Rome it was Vienna and Stockholm, he’d saved thousands of schedules, flight charts and hotel bulletins for forty years; he knew the moons and tides, the goings and comings of everything on the sea and in the sky.
‘But best of all,’ he said at last, ‘Anna, Anna, will you come along with me? I’ve lots of money put away, don’t let me run on! Anna, tell me, will you?’
I came around the counter slowly and saw myself in the mirror, a woman in her seventieth year going to a party half a century late.
I sat down beside him and shook my head.
‘Oh, but, Anna, why not, there’s no reason why!’
‘There is a reason,’ I said. ‘You.’
‘Me, but I don’t count!’
‘That’s just it, Roger, you do.’
‘Anna, we could have a wonderful time—’
‘I daresay. But, Roger, you’ve been married for seventy years. Now, for the first time, you’re not married. You don’t want to turn around and get married again right off, do you?’
‘Don’t I?’ he asked, blinking.
‘You don’t, you really don’t. You deserve a little while, at least, off by yourself, to see the world, to know who Roger Harrison is. A little while away from women. Then, when you’ve gone around the world and come back, is time to think of other things.’
‘If you say so—’
‘No. It mustn’t be anything I say or know or tell you to do. Right now it must be you telling yourself what to know and see and do. Go have a grand time. If you can, be happy.’
‘Will you be here waiting for me when I come back?’
‘I haven’t it in me any more to wait, but I’ll be here.’
He moved toward the door, then stopped and looked at me as if surprised
by some new question that had come into his mind.
‘Anna,’ he said. ‘if all this had happened forty, fifty years ago, would you have gone away with me then? Would you really have married me?’
I did not answer.
‘Anna?’ he asked.
After a long while I said, ‘There are some questions that should never be asked.’
Because, I went on, thinking, there can be no answers. Looking down the years toward the lake, I could not remember, so I could not say, whether we could have ever been happy. Perhaps even as a child, sensing the impossible in Roger. I had clenched the impossible, and therefore the rare, to my heart, simply because it was impossible and rare. He was a sprig of farewell summer pressed in an old book, to be taken out, turned over, admired, once a year, but more than that? Who could say? Surely not I, so long, so late in the day. Life is questions, not answers.
Roger had come very close to read my face, my mind, while I thought all this. What he saw there made him look away, close his eyes, then take my hand and press it to his cheek.
‘I’ll be back. I swear I will!’
Outside the door he stood bewildered for a moment in the moonlight, looking at the world and all its directions, east, west, north, south, like a child out of school for his first summer not knowing which way to go first, just breathing, just listening, just seeing.
‘Don’t hurry!’ I said fervently. ‘Oh, God, whatever you do, please, enjoy yourself, don’t hurry!’
I saw him run off toward the limousine near the cottage where I am supposed to rap in the morning and where I will get no answer. But I know that I will not go to the cottage and that I’ll keep the maids from going there because the old lady has given orders not to be bothered. That will give Roger the chance, the start he needs. In a week or two or three. I might call the police. Then if they met Roger coming back on the boat from all those wild places, it won’t matter.
Police? Perhaps not even them, Perhaps she died of a heart attack and poor Roger only thinks he killed her and now proudly sails off into the world, his pride not allowing him to know that only her own self-made death released him.
But then again, if at last all the murder he put away for seventy years forced him tonight to lay hands on and kill the hideous turkey, I could not find it in my heart to weep for her but only for the great time it has taken to act out the sentence.
The road is silent. An hour has passed since the limousine roared away down the road.
Now I have just put out the lights and stand alone in the pavilion looking out at the shining lake where in another century, under another sun, a small boy with an old face was first touched to play tag with me and now, very late, has tagged me back, has kissed my hand and run away, and this time myself, stunned, not following.
Many things I do not know, tonight.
But one thing I’m sure of.
I do not hate Roger Harrison any more.
The Best of All Possible Worlds
The two men sat swaying side by side, unspeaking for the long while it took for the train to move through cold December twilight, pausing at one country station after another. As the twelfth depot was left behind, the older of the two men muttered, ‘Idiot, Idiot!’ under his breath.
‘What?’ The younger man glanced up from his Times.
The old man nodded bleakly. ‘Did you see that damn fool rush off just now, stumbling after that woman who smelled of Chanel?’
‘Oh, her?’ The young man looked as if he could not decide whether to laugh or be depressed. ‘I followed her off the train once myself.’
The old man snorted and closed his eyes. ‘I too, five years ago.’
The young man stared at his companion as if he had found a friend in a most unlikely spot.
‘Did—did the same thing happen once you reached the end of the platform?’
‘Perhaps. Go on.’
‘Well, I was twenty feet behind her and closing up fast when her husband drove into the station with a carload of kids! Bang! The car door slammed. I saw her Cheshire-cat smile as she drove away. I waited half an hour, chilled to the bone, for another train. It taught me something, by God!’
‘It taught you nothing whatsoever,’ replied the older man dryly. ‘Idiot bulls, that’s all of us, you, me, them, silly boys jerking like laboratory frogs if someone scratches our itch.’
‘My grandpa once said. “Big in the hunkus, small in the brain, that is man’s fate.”’
‘A wise man. But, now, what do you make of her?’
‘That woman? Oh, she likes to keep in trim. It must pep up her liver to know that with a little mild eye-rolling she can make the lemmings swarm any night on this train. She has the best of all possible worlds, don’t you think? Husband, children, plus the knowledge she’s neat packaging and can prove it five trips a week, hurting no one, least of all herself. And, everything considered, she’s not much to look at. It’s just she smells so good.’
‘Tripe,’ said the old man. ‘It won’t wash. Purely and simply, she’s a woman. All women are women, all men are dirty goats. Until you accept that, you will be rationalizing your glands all your life. As it is, you will know no rest until you are seventy or thereabouts. Meanwhile, selfknowledge may give you whatever solace can be had in a sticky situation. Given all these essential and inescapable truths, few men ever strike a balance. Ask a man if he is happy and he will immediately think you are asking if he is satisfied. Satiety is most men’s Edenic dream. I have known only one man who came heir to the very best of all possible worlds, as you used the phrase.’
‘Good Lord,’ said the young man, his eyes shining. ‘I wouldn’t mind hearing about him.’
‘I hope there’s time. This chap is the happiest ram, the most carefree bull, in history. Wives and girl friends galore, as the sales pitch says. Yet he has no qualms, guilts, no feverish nights of lament and self-chastisement.’
‘Impossible,’ the young man put in. ‘You can’t eat your cake and digest it, too!’
‘He did, he does, he will! Not a tremor, not a trace of moral seasickness after an all-night journey over a choppy sea of innersprings! Successful businessman. Apartment in New York on the best street, the proper height above traffic, plus a long-weekend Bucks County place on a more than correct little country stream where he herds his nannies, the happy farmer. But I met him first at his New York apartment last year, when he had just married. At dinner, his wife was truly gorgeous, snow-cream arms, fruity lips, an amplitude of harvest land below the line, a plenitude above. Honey in the horn, the full apple barrel through winter, she seemed thus to me and her husband, who nipped her bicep in passing. Leaving, at midnight, I found myself raising a hand to slap her on the flat of her flank like a thoroughbred. Falling down in the elevator, life floated out from under me. I nickered.’
‘Your powers of description,’ said the young commuter, breathing heavily, ‘are incredible.’
‘I write advertising copy,’ said the older. ‘But to continue. I met let us call him Smith again not two weeks later. Through sheer coincidence I was invited to crash a party by a friend. When I arrived in Bucks County, whose place should it turn out to be but Smith’s! And near him, in the center of the living room, stood this dark Italian beauty, all tawny panther, all midnight and moonstones, dressed in earth colors, browns, siennas, tans, umbers, all the tones of a riotously fruitful autumn. In the babble I lost her name. Later I saw Smith crush her like a great sunwarmed vine of lush October grapes in his arms. Idiot fool, I thought. Lucky dog, I thought. Wife in town, mistress in country. He is trampling out the vintage, et cetera, and all that. Glorious. But I shall not stay for the wine festival, I thought, and slipped away, unnoticed.’
‘I can’t stand too much of this talk,’ said the young commuter, trying to raise the window.
‘Don’t interrupt,’ said the older man. ‘Where was I?’
‘Trampled. Vintage.’
‘Oh, yes! Well, as the party broke up. I finally caught the lovely
Italian’s name. Mrs Smith!’
‘He’d married again, eh?’
‘Hardly. Not enough time. Stunned, I thought quickly: He must have two sets of friends. One set knows his city wife. The other set knows this mistress whom he calls wife. Smith’s too smart for bigamy. No other answer. Mystery.’
‘Go on, go on,’ said the young commuter feverishly.
‘Smith, in high spirits, drove me to the train station that night. On the way he said. “What do you think of my wives?”
‘“Wives, plural?” I said.
‘“Plural, hell,” he said. “I’ve had twenty in the last three years, each better than the last! Twenty, count them, twenty! Here!” As we stopped at the station he pulled out a thick photo wallet. He glanced at my face as he handed it over. “No, no,” he laughed, “I’m not Bluebeard with a score of old theater trunks in the attic crammed full of former mates. Look!”
‘I flipped the pictures. They flew by like an animated film. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, the plain, the exotic, the fabulously impertinent or the sublimely docile gazed out at me, smiling, frowning. The flutter-flicker hypnotized, then haunted me. There was something terribly familiar about each photo.
‘“Smith,” I said, “you must be very rich to afford all these wives.”
‘“Not rich, no. Look again!”
‘I flipped the montage in my hands. I gasped. I knew.
‘“The Mrs Smith I met tonight, the Italian beauty, is the one and only Mrs Smith,” I said. “But, at the same time, the woman I met in New York two weeks ago is also the one and only Mrs Smith. It can only follow that both women are one and the same!”