She was on Ward Street, one block from home. Bursts of wind still drove between the buildings, and the clouds that scudded just above the rooftops looked too wet to be able to stay aloft much longer. It was the rush hour. Tension was in the air, as bitter to the taste as the exhaust fumes that swirled over the sidewalks. There was a traffic tie-up at every corner. Above the clamor of the horns Susan could hear the voices of a cabbie and a truck driver inviting each other to “just step out in the street and say that again, wise guy!”
“Yoohoo! Little girl!”
‘No,’ Susan thought, quickening her pace. But then curiosity got the better of her and she turned.
A strange sight! An old woman, so enveloped in flapping loose ends of clothing that she looked like a dark wind-whipped flame. Her arms were full of unidentifiable objects. She nodded down the street, crying plaintively, “Little girl! My hat!” And certainly there was something — Susan could not recognize it at that distance and in that light as a hat — being harried along the sidewalk by the wind.
‘Little girl!’ Susan snorted to herself; but the old woman looked so helpless that she repented, and called out, “All right, all right!” and self-consciously set out in pursuit.
It was uncanny how agile the hat was. It dodged between people’s legs and shot out from under their hands as they stooped, and twice it actually leaped into the air to escape her clutch. Everyone on the block seemed to be gaping or grinning at her as she hurried along. Her face felt as though it must be glowing like neon. ‘Hope it blows into the street and gets smashed by a ten ton truck,’ she thought furiously. But just at the corner the wind failed for a moment, and with a great leap she had the thing trapped under her foot.
It was made of green plush, and covered with broken plumes and scraps of fur and glass beads and paper roses and little tucks of chiffon. It was dusty without and greasy within, and smelled of cheap pomade.
Susan picked it up distastefully by the end of one plume, and trudged back up-wind again. She was not eager to meet the owner. Her one glimpse in the failing light had given her the impression that the old woman was one of those crones with safety pins stuck in their ruined coats and packets of newspaper in their pockets, who wander about the city streets mumbling to themselves and poking in trash cans. They are hard to face when you are warmly dressed and well fed. But she was wrong. This woman was not one of those. And yet what an extraordinary creature she was! She had on a shawl and a muffler and three overcoats, one on top of another, and numerous skirts and underskirts and petticoats. Each garment was a different color, each was loose and ill-fastened, and all were making violent efforts to go the way the hat had gone. Her withered hands were encrusted with dimestore bracelets and rings. Her hair was henna-rinsed, and streamed out in loose ends like the thatches that sparrows build behind drainpipes. Her face was covered with white powder, rouge, eye-shadow, lipstick; but everything was slightly askew: one cheek spot was higher than the other, her eyebrows had different slants, her mouth was smeared at the corners.
But her eyes were bright as a lizard’s.
“Thank you, dearie,” she crooned. “So sweet. Children are so unmannerly these days, usually. Oops, my shawl! Nasty weather. Nicky’ll be along in just a minute. Oh dear! Oh my!”
She had been making efforts to shift her burdens, which included an umbrella, a newspaper, and a bulging paper bag. Now as her momentarily free hand clutched her hat, the bag tipped over and discharged a quantity of potatoes.
“Oh my! Contrary things. Help me, dearie, I can’t bend over. Lumbago.”
The potatoes seemed infected with the same passion for freedom that the hat had shown. They rolled into the gutter and under the feet of the passersby, while Susan scrambled about on her hands and knees after them. The old woman struggled with the wind and her clothes, saying “Oh my, oh dear, oops” in a quavering, plaintive tone. And when Susan had finally gotten most of the potatoes together, and stood up with her arms full of them, and two clamped under her chin, the old woman’s umbrella said Flump!! and blew inside out right in her face. Of course she dropped the potatoes again, and the bag ripped open and spilled more. Susan muttered a word that only fathers should use. But the old woman just said, “Hurry, dearie, Nicky’s coming,” so down on her knees she had to go once more.
“Put the spuds in my shawl, dearie. That’s it. Oops, mind the muffler.” That raveled length of wool had taken a dislike to Susan, and was flogging her face unmercifully. But this time she kept her hold on the potatoes. The old woman beat the muffler down and got it under control; but meanwhile part of the newspaper saw its chance for escape, and seized it, and went flapping and disintegrating down-wind.
“Oh dear. Well, don’t mind it, dearie, all lies anyway, I expect. Just so long as I’ve got the want ads.”
Somehow everything was clawed, clutched or crammed into order again. The potatoes were bundled up in the shawl, the rebellious muffler defeated for good and tucked under the collar of the second overcoat, the shattered umbrella turned right side out and furled with most of its ribs in place.
“Thank you, dearie. So sweet. Now then, I’ll give you three. No more!”
“Beg pardon?” said Susan.
“Ooh, there’s Nicky! Yoohoo! Right over here, dearie!”
A powerful motorcycle had appeared at the curb. Its rider was dressed in black from head to foot — black boots, black pants, black leather jacket and gauntlets and helmet. The upper half of his face was covered by immense goggles, while the lower half was either lost in shadow or covered with a dense and closely-cropped beard. The old woman hopped briskly on the pillion saddle. “Just three!” she called back, and her cut-glass rings winked as she held up three skinny claws. Then the wind caught her unawares again, the motorcycle blasted away into the traffic, and they rapidly vanished from sight, leaving a wake of bouncing potatoes and newspaper sheets and blue smoke.
“Well!” said Susan. Everything had happened so quickly that only now could she sort out what had been a series of confused impressions and sights and sounds; but, sorting them, she saw how queer it had all been.
‘Three?’ she wondered, crossing the street to her own block. ‘Three what? Potatoes? But she didn’t actually hold them out to me or anything. Maybe I was supposed to pick them up when she dropped them from the motorcycle. No, that couldn’t be it. Oh, wasn’t she a marvelous type! If I ever have to be a crazy woman in a play, I’ll try to look just like her — all those clothes and that weird make-up. Funny, the wind never stopped where she was. And that umbrella. Sort of like Mary Poppins. “Just three,” she said. Awfully strange. Like a fairy story — oh no! Oh no!’
Three!
Three wishes?
‘Susan Shaw,’ she said fiercely in her mind, ‘don’t be stupid!’ But she stopped walking in spite of herself, and her heart tightened. The whole episode had been just strange enough …
She had loved fairy stories in her younger years. But how irritated she had always been at the people in those stories who were granted three wishes only to make a mess of everything! In those days such things still seemed to be within the realm of possibility, so she had decided how she would proceed if it ever happened to her. It was very simple and logical. On the first wish she would ask for something small and harmless, just to make sure she really had the power. Then, very quickly, before she could think of something silly and spoil it all, she would wish that she might never make mistakes, or ask for anything that could get out of control. And then on the third wish she would wish that she could have an unlimited number of wishes. And then —!
“It’s all nonsense,” she whispered. “I wish—” She looked quickly about her. Her face was hot with shame at her silliness; but her heart thudded with impossible hope. “I wish,” she mumbled into the wind for her first, or testing, wish, “I wish there was a ring — let’s see, make it a gold ring with a small emerald — in my coat pocket.”
Her trembling hands crept into her pockets.
&nb
sp; There was no ring.
“I told you!” she muttered savagely. “Gosh, what a — oh, honestly, Susan Shaw, they ought to put you in a mental institution!”
It was just the sort of trick you could expect of a day like this. As if she hadn’t had sufficient warning from everything else that had happened!
Mrs. Clutchett was dusting when she entered the apartment.
“Well, there she is, home from school. How the day flies! Susie, you should’ve worn a warmer coat, you could catch your death in this wind. Why, child, what’s the matter?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Here, now, you just let me fix you a nice hot cup of cocoa. There’s nothing like —”
“No!”
“Well, I’m sure!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Clutchett. I mean, no thank you. Really I’m sorry. It’s just been such an awful day.”
“Hasn’t it, though! I never saw such weather. It’s those atom bombs, you mark my words. We never had such days when I was a girl, believe me. And you with nothing on your legs and a skimpy little coat! Now, Missy, you sit by the radiator. I’m going to fix some hot cocoa and you’re going to drink it. Catching your death! Talk about awful days,” she continued from the kitchen, “don’t tell me! If my vacuum cleaner didn’t go on the fritz three times! That Mr. Bodoni stuck his screwdriver in it to see what was the matter, and didn’t pull the plug first, and almost got electrocuted and blew the fuse. I don’t know about that man. Those slow ones are awfully deep sometimes, you never know what they’re really up to. Not that I need the vacuum cleaner here. It’s like taking money from a baby to clean here, you keep it so neat. Not like some I could name. You take that Mr. Ormondroyd — socks on the floor, shirts on the floor, cracker crumbs — you wouldn’t believe it! Keeps his papers locked up, though, oh yes, tight as a drum, you can’t even get a peek at them. I wonder if he isn’t up to something. Writers! Mr. Clutchett knew a writer once, this fellow claimed he was a writer, but — well, you may believe this or not, but it’s the gospel: that man was a counterfeiter. Yes sir. They came and took him away one fine day. Twenty-dollar bills, that’s what he wrote.”
The cocoa had a skin on it.
Mrs. Clutchett resumed her work, still talking. As soon as her back was turned Susan poured the cocoa into the rubber-plant pot; cocoa skin made her stomach turn. Mrs. Clutchett rattled on unheeded. Susan kicked her legs back and forth and chewed her knuckle. After a while she tried the television set. Nothing but commercials; toothpaste, breakfast food, scouring powder, smiles, smiles, smiles. She turned it off. The evening paper was on the sofa. She flopped on the floor and began to leaf through it from back to front. The funnies weren’t funny — why did she read them any more? The astrology column told her to take her time and to be on the lookout for a great opportunity — ‘such as three wishes?’ she thought, loathing herself. The Hollywood column had an article about her favorite star, a beautiful woman whose roles of courage, nobility and self-sacrifice always left Susan with a lump in her throat. The star was getting her fourth divorce under lurid circumstances. “Citizens Should Support Proposed Bond Issue,” said the editorial. She sighed and turned to the front page.
FORTUNE FOUND AT CONSTRUCTION SITE
There was a map, with the caption “Thar’s Gold In That Thar Playground, Podner!” Why, she knew the place. It was a few blocks up Ward, around the corner, and down a side street. Her mother used to take her there. Oak Park, everyone had called it, although it was only a small square of asphalt without a tree in sight. With a flicker of interest she read:
“Gold!”
The heart-stirring cry of Sutter’s Mill and the Yukon was heard here today as construction workers unearthed a fortune in old U.S. coins in a condemned playground.
The lucky finder was Frank M. Zalewski, 27, a bulldozer operator employed by the Delta-Schirmerhorn Construction Company. The company is erecting a 12-story office building on the 93rd Street site (see map).
“The ’dozer blade lifted it out,” Zalewski said. “It was only about a foot under. I saw all this stuff shining in the dirt, and then everybody started hollering ‘Gold!’ ”
The treasure consists of $60,000 in “eagles,” or $10 gold pieces. The coins all date from 1863 or earlier. It is believed that the owner may have been killed in the Civil War and thus was unable to reclaim the buried hoard.
Martin Van Tromp, numismatics expert at the
See Page 4, Col. 7
The trouble with treasure, she thought, stifling a yawn, was that it was always found by someone else. Any other news?
MAYOR ASKS BOND ISSUE FOR WATER
A burst of sleet rattled against the window. Oh foo! It was too hot in here. She tossed the paper aside, stood up, stretched, and said, “I’m going to the top.”
As she pressed the elevator button the thought came to her again: ‘What did the old woman mean by three? Three what?’
5. The Elevator Misbehaves
That elevator always reminded me of a tired old horse. It groaned when it started and groaned when it stopped. It labored up or down the shaft at such a plodding gait that you wondered if you were ever going to arrive. The door sighed when it opened or shut. I once suggested to Mr. Bodoni that we should either put the poor thing out to pasture or have it shot. “Yeah,” he said, not getting the joke but willing to be amiable about it.
Around the top of the inside walls was a little frieze of cast-metal rosettes and curlicues. Mr. Bodoni, inspired one year by both the Spring weather and a sudden urge to express himself, had begun to paint these red. I don’t know which gave out first, his paint or his inspiration; at any rate he stopped halfway through the fourteenth rosette, and has not finished the job to this day. The rest of the inside was painted buff.
There was the usual bank of buttons — ten of them, including the basement stop, the emergency stop, and the alarm — and a dial-and-arrow above the door to show which floor you were approaching. A yellow ticket assured anyone who wanted to read it that the mechanism had been inspected and found satisfactory by a Mr. Scrawl Blot Scribble, who I sincerely hope is a better inspector than he is a penman. Mr. Bodoni had also hung up a ticket, with No Smokking in Elvater, Please! thickly pencilled thereon. (His own cigar was always dead, and didn’t count, of course.) Finally there was a metal plate which said Capacity 1500 Lbs. I remember that when I first met Susan she was staring at this, moving her lips and ticking off her fingers.
“How does it come out?” I asked.
“I can’t make it come out right,” she said. “If everybody weighed a hundred and fifty pounds you could get ten people in, but what if they all weighed two hundred pounds? I’m not very good at arithmetic.”
“Hmm,” I said, and I began to work on it too. But I’m not very good at arithmetic either, and she had gotten off at her floor before I arrived at an answer.
Going up the elevator now, Susan occupied her mind with the usual arithmetical speculations. ‘Fifteen hundred ulbs,’ she thought. ‘Or is it libs? Almost a ton. Or is a ton one thousand? No, two thousand. Suppose everybody weighed a hundred and seventy-five. Let’s see, one seventy-five into … um. I wish Mr. Bodoni’d learn to spell. One seventy-five into fifteen hundred, make it nine, nine times five is … um. At least Elsie Mautner’s even dumber than I am in arithmetic. Try eight. Eight fives are forty, that’s a zero, maybe it’ll come out even, let’s see, carry the four … um. Wonder how many people do weigh a hundred seventy-five? Pretty heavy. Oh well, almost at the top. I’ll work it out on the way down.’ For the arrow was creeping past six. Too bad there weren’t arrows in the classrooms at school to save you when you were stuck on a problem … The arrow plodded up to seven and stopped.
The elevator kept on going.
It was the strangest sensation — as if the elevator were forcing its way up through something sticky in the shaft, like molasses or chewing gum. There was a thin humming noise all around her, and the light dimmed. She was startled, and a little frightened. B
ut of course there were only seven floors, so the elevator would have to stop at the seventh. The arrow must be out of order. She would have to tell Mr. Bodoni. He’d look mournful, the way he always did when something went wrong, as if it were all your fault.
Now the elevator stopped. The door said “Sighhh …” and opened. Susan clutched her hands together and said, “Oh!”
‘They must be redecorating,’ she thought in astonishment. ‘No, that can’t be it; you don’t redecorate a hallway. Maybe it’s a private suite? But why should the public elevator open into a —?’
It was a hallway she was looking into, but it certainly wasn’t the seventh-floor hallway of the apartment building as she remembered it. For one thing, the floor, instead of being covered with brown carpeting, was bare parqueted wood, beautifully polished. For another thing, there were no numbered doors opposite; the wall there was solidly wainscotted with oak. Against it stood a marble-topped table with carved lyre-shaped legs, on which were a vase of paper flowers and a stuffed owl under a glass bell. Everything was glowing with — was it sunlight? Sunlight on a March evening like this?
She became aware of sounds. There must be a clock nearby, and a large one too: tock — tock — tock, a stately sound. A bird was singing; not a canary, something richer and wilder and much more inventive. And wait a minute — yes — no — chickens? Impossible! And another sound; a serene whispering murmur, rising and dying. It could only be one thing, a breeze rustling through foliage. And yet only a few minutes ago, downstairs in the apartment, she had heard the rattling gusts of March against the window.
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