"Smell, smell, smell?"
"Sarsaparilla." She sniffed suspiciously. "That's what it is!"
"Oh, it couldn't be!" His hysterical happiness stopped as quickly as if she'd switched him off. He seemed stunned, ill at ease, and suddenly very careful.
"Where did you go this morning?" she asked.
"You know I was cleaning the attic."
"Mooning over a lot of trash. I didn't hear a sound. Thought maybe you weren't in the attic at all. What's that?" She pointed.
"Well, now how did those get there?" he asked the world.
He peered down at the pair of black spring-metal bicycle clips that bound his thin pants cuffs to his bony ankles.
"Found them in the attic," he answered himself. "Remember when we got out on the gravel road in the early morning on our tandem bike, Cora, forty years ago, everything fresh and new?"
"If you don't finish that attic today, I'll come up and toss everything out myself."
"Oh, no," he cried. "I have everything the way I want it!"
She looked at him coldly.
"Cora," he said, eating his lunch, relaxing, beginning to enthuse again, "you know what attics are? They're Time Machines, in which old, dim-witted men like me can travel back forty years to a time when it was summer all year round and children raided ice wagons. Remember how it tasted? You held the ice in your handkerchief. It was like sucking the flavor of linen and snow at the same time."
Cora fidgeted.
It's not impossible, he thought, half closing his eyes, trying to see it and build it. Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic's a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if you stand in the very center of it, straight and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long Ago, why, it . . .
He stopped, realizing he had spoken some of this aloud. Cora was eating rapidly.
"Well, wouldn't it be interesting," he asked the part in her hair, "if Time Travel could occur? And what more logical, proper place for it to happen than in an attic like ours, eh?"
"It's not always summer back in the old days," she said. "It's just your crazy memory. You remember all the good things and forget the bad. It wasn't always summer."
"Figuratively speaking, Cora, it was."
"Wasn't."
"What I mean is this," he said, whispering excitedly, bending forward to see the image he was tracing on the blank dining-room wall. "If you rode your unicycle carefully between the years, balancing, hands out, careful, careful, if you rode from year to year, spent a week in 1909, a day in 1900, a month or a fortnight somewhere else, 1905, 1898, you could stay with summer the rest of your life."
"Unicycle?"
"You know, one of those tall chromium one-wheeled bikes, single-seater, the performers ride in vaudeville shows, juggling. Balance, true balance, it takes, not to fall off, to keep the bright objects flying in the air, beautiful, up and up, a light, a flash, a sparkle, a bomb of brilliant colors, red, yellow, blue, green, white, gold; all the Junes and Julys and Augusts that ever were, in the air, about you, at once, hardly touching your hands, flying, suspended, and you, smiling, among them. Balance, Cora, balance."
"Blah," she said, "blah, blah." And added, "blah!"
He climbed the long cold stairs to the attic, shivering. There were nights in winter when he woke with porcelain in his bones, with cool chimes blowing in his ears, with frost piercing his nerves in a raw illumination like white-cold fireworks exploding and showering down in flaming snows upon a silent land deep in his subconscious. He was cold, cold, cold, and it would take a score of endless summers, with their green torches and bronze suns to thaw him free of his wintry sheath. He was a great tasteless chunk of brittle ice, a snowman put to bed each night, full of confetti dreams, tumbles of crystal and flurry. And there lay winter outside forever, a great leaden wine press smashing down its colorless lid of sky, squashing them all like so many grapes, mashing color and sense and being from everyone, save the children who fled on skis and toboggans down mirrored hills which reflected the crushing iron shield that hung lower above town each day and every eternal night.
Mr. Finch lifted the attic trap door. But here, here. A dust of summer sprang up about him. The attic dust simmered with heat left over from other seasons. Quietly, he shut the trap door down.
He began to smile.
The attic was quiet as a thundercloud before a storm. On occasion, Cora Finch heard her husband murmuring, murmuring, high up there.
At five in the afternoon, singing My Isle of Golden Dreams, Mr. Finch flipped a crisp new straw hat in the kitchen door, "Boo!"
"Did you sleep all afternoon?" snapped his wife, "I called up at you four times and no answer."
"Sleep?" He considered this and laughed, then put his hand quickly over his mouth. "Well, I guess I did."
Suddenly she saw him. "My God!" she cried, "where'd you get that coat?"
He wore a red candy-striped coat, a high white, choking collar and ice cream pants. You could smell the straw hat like a handful of fresh hay fanned in the air.
"Found 'em in an old trunk."
She sniffed. "Don't smell of moth balls. Looks brand-new."
"Oh, no!" he said hastily. He looked stiff and uncomfortable as she eyed his costume.
"This isn't a summer-stock company," she said.
"Can't a fellow have a little fun?"
"That's all you've ever had." She slammed the oven door. "While I've stayed home and knitted, lord knows, you've been down at the store helping ladies' elbows in and out doors."
He refused to be bothered. "Cora." He looked deep into the crackling straw hat. "Wouldn't it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress whishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlor and smell the drugstore the way they used to smell? Why don't drugstores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan's Pier for a box supper and listen to the brass band. How about it?"
"Supper's ready. Take that dreadful uniform off."
"If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-laned country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?" he insisted, watching her.
"Those old roads were dirty. We came home looking like Africans. Anyway," she picked up a sugar jar and shook it, "this morning I had forty dollars here. Now it's gone! Don't tell me you ordered those clothes from a costume house. They're brand-new; they didn't come from any trunk!"
"I'm—" he said.
She raved for half an hour, but he could not bring himself to say anything. The November wind shook the house and as she talked, the snows of winter began to fall again in the cold steel sky.
"Answer me!" she cried. "Are you crazy, spending our money that way, on clothes you can't wear?"
"The attic," he started to say.
She walked off and sat in the living room.
The snow was falling fast now and it was a cold dark November evening. She heard him climb up the stepladder, slowly, into the attic, into that dusty place of other years, into that black place of costumes and props and Time, into a world separate from this world below.
He closed the trap door down. The flashlight, snapped on, was company enough. Yes, here was all of Time compressed in a Japanese paper flower. At the touch of memory, everything would unfold into the clear water of the mind, in beautiful blooms, in spring breezes, larger than life. Each of the bureau drawers slid forth, might contain aunts and cousins and grand-mamas, ermined in dust. Yes, Time was here. You could feel it breathing, an atmospheric instead of a mechanical clock.
Now the house below was as remote as another day in the past. He half shut his eyes and looked and looked on every side of the waiting attic.
Here,
in prismed chandelier, were rainbows and mornings and noons as bright as new rivers flowing endlessly back through time. His flashlight caught and flickered them alive, the rainbows leapt up to curve the shadows back with colors, with colors like plums and strawberries and Concord grapes, with colors like cut lemons and the sky where the clouds drew off after storming and the blue was there. And the dust of the attic was incense burning and all of time burning, and all you need do was peer into the flames. It was indeed a great machine of Time, this attic, he knew, he felt, he was sure, and if you touched prisms here, doorknobs there, plucked tassels, chimed crystals, swirled dust, punched trunk hasps and gusted the vox humana of the old hearth bellows until it puffed the soot of a thousand ancient fires into your eyes, if, indeed, you played this instrument, this warm machine of parts, if you fondled all of its bits and pieces, its levers and changers and movers, then, then, then!
He thrust out his hands to orchestrate, to conduct, to flourish. There was music in his head, in his mouth shut tight, and he played the great machine, the thunderously silent organ, bass, tenor, soprano, low, high, and at last, at last, a chord that shuddered him so that he had to shut his eyes.
About nine o'clock that night she heard him calling, "Cora!" She went upstairs. His head peered down at her from above, smiling at her. He waved his hat. "Good-by, Cora."
"What do you mean?" she cried.
"I've thought it over for three days and I'm saying good-by."
"Come down out of there, you fool!"
"I drew five hundred dollars from the bank yesterday. I've been thinking about this. And then when it happened, well . . . Cora . . ." He shoved his eager hand down. "For the last time, will you come along with me?"
"In the attic? Hand down that stepladder, William Finch. I'll climb up there and run you out of that filthy place!"
"I'm going to Hannahan's Pier for a bowl of clam chowder," he said. "And I'm requesting the brass band to play 'Moonlight Bay.' Oh, come on, Cora . . ." He motioned his extended hand.
She simply stared at his gentle, questioning face.
"Good-by," he said.
He waved gently, gently. Then his face was gone, the straw hat was gone.
"William!" she screamed.
The attic was dark and silent.
Shrieking, she ran and got a chair and used it to groan her way up into the musty darkness. She flourished a flashlight. "William! William!"
The dark spaces were empty. A winter wind shook the house.
Then she saw the far west attic window, ajar.
She fumbled over to it. She hesitated, held her breath. Then, slowly, she opened it. The ladder was placed outside the window, leading down onto a porch roof.
She pulled back from the window.
Outside the opened frame the apple trees shone bright green, it was twilight of a summer day in July. Faintly, she heard explosions, firecrackers going off. She heard laughter and distant voices. Rockets burst in the warm air, softly, red, white, and blue, fading.
She slammed the window and stood reeling. "William!"
Wintry November light glowed up through the trap in the attic floor behind her. Bent to it, she saw the snow whispering against the cold clear panes down in that November world where she would spend the next thirty years.
She did not go near the window again. She sat alone in the black attic, smelling the one smell that did not seem to fade. It lingered like a sigh of satisfaction, on the air. She took a deep, long breath.
The old, the familiar, the unforgettable scent of drugstore sarsaparilla.
10 ICARUS MONTGOLFIER WRIGHT
He lay on his bed and the wind blew through the window over his ears and over his half-opened mouth so it whispered to him in his dream. It was like the wind of time hollowing the Delphic caves to say what must be said of yesterday, today, tomorrow. Sometimes one voice gave a shout far off away, sometimes two, a dozen, an entire race of men cried out through his mouth, but their words were always the same:
"Look, look, we've done it!"
For suddenly he, they, one or many, were flung in the dream, and flew. The air spread in a soft warm sea where he swam, disbelieving.
"Look, look! It's done!"
But he didn't ask the world to watch; he was only shocking his senses wide to see, taste, smell, touch the air, the wind, the rising moon. He swam alone in the sky. The heavy earth was gone.
But wait, he thought, wait now!
Tonight—what night is this?
The night before, of course. The night before the first flight of a rocket to the Moon. Beyond this room on the baked desert floor one hundred yards away the rocket waits for me.
Well, does it now? Is there really a rocket?
Hold on! he thought, and twisted, turned, sweating, eyes tight, to the wall, the fierce whisper in his teeth. Be certain-sure! You, now, who are you?
Me? he thought. My name?
Jedediah Prentiss, born 1938, college graduate 1959, licensed rocket pilot, 1965. Jedediah Prentiss . . . Jedediah Prentiss. . . .
The wind whistled his name away! He grabbed for it, yelling.
Then, gone quiet, he waited for the wind to bring his name back. He waited a long while, and there was only silence, and then after a thousand heartbeats he felt motion.
The sky opened out like a soft blue flower. The Aegean Sea stirred soft white fans through a distant wine-colored surf.
In the wash of the waves on the shore, he heard his name.
Icarus.
And again in a breathing whisper.
Icarus.
Someone shook his arm and it was his father saying his name and shaking away the night. And he himself lay small, half-turned to the window and the shore below and the deep sky, feeling the first wind of morning ruffle the golden feathers bedded in amber wax lying by the side of his cot. Golden wings stirred half-alive in his father's arms, and the faint down on his own shoulders quilled trembling as he looked at these wings and beyond them to the cliff,
"Father, how's the wind?"
"Enough for me, but never enough for you. ..."
"Father, don't worry. The wings seem clumsy now, but my bones in the feathers will make them strong, my blood in the wax will make it five!"
"My blood, my bones too, remember; each man lends his flesh to his children, asking that they tend it well. Promise you'll not go high, Icarus. The sun or my son, the heat of one, the fever of the other, could melt these wings. Take care!"
And they carried the splendid golden wings into the morning and heard them whisper in their arms, whisper his name or a name or some name that blew, spun, and settled like a feather on the soft air.
Montgolfier.
His hands touched fiery rope, bright linen, stitched thread gone hot as summer. His hands fed wool and straw to a breathing flame.
Montgolfier.
And his eye soared up along the swell and sway, the oceanic tug and pull, the immensely wafted silver pear still filling with the shimmering tidal airs channeled up from the blaze. Silent as a god tilted slumbering above French countryside, this delicate linen envelope, this swelling sack of oven-baked air would soon pluck itself free. Draughting upward to blue worlds of silence, his mind and his brother's mind would sail with it, muted, serene among island clouds where uncivilized lightnings slept. Into that uncharted gulf and abyss where no birdsong or shout of man could follow, the balloon would hush itself. So cast adrift, he, Montgolfier, and all men, might hear the unmeasured breathing of God and the cathedral tread of eternity.
"Ah . . ." He moved, the crowd moved, shadowed by the warm balloon. "Everything's ready, everything's right. . . ."
Right. His lips twitched in his dream. Right. Hiss, whisper, flutter, rush. Right.
From his father's hands a toy jumped to the ceilmg, whirled in its own wind, suspended, while he and his brother stared to see it flicker, rustle, whistle, heard it murmuring their names.
Wright.
Whispering: wind, sky, cloud, space, wing, fly . . .
"Wilbur, Orville? Look, how's that?"
Ah. In his sleep, his mouth sighed.
The toy helicopter hummed, bumped the ceiling, murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk; murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk. Whispered eagle, whispered raven, and at last, fluttering to their hands with a susurration, a wash of blowing weather from summers yet to come, with a last whir and exhalation, whispered hawk.
Dreaming, he smiled.
He saw the clouds rush down the Aegean sky.
He felt the balloon sway drunkenly, its great bulk ready for the clear running wind.
He felt the sand hiss up the Atlantic shelves from the soft dunes that might save him if he, a fledgling bird, should fall. The framework struts hummed and chorded like a harp, and himself caught up in its music.
Beyond this room he felt the primed rocket glide on the desert field, its fire-wings folded, its fire-breath kept, held ready to speak for three billion men. In a moment he would wake and walk slowly out to that rocket.
And stand on the rim of the cliff.
Stand cool in the shadow of the warm balloon.
Stand whipped by tidal sands drummed over Kitty Hawk.
And sheathe his boy's wrists, arms, hands, fingers with golden wings in golden wax.
And touch for a final time the captured breath of man, the warm gasp of awe and wonder siphoned and sewn to lift their dreams.
And spark the gasoline engine.
And take his father's hand and wish him well with his own wings, flexed and ready, here on the precipice.
Then whirl and jump.
Then cut the cords to free the great balloon.
Then rev the motor, prop the plane on air.
And crack the switch, to fire the rocket fuse.
And together in a single leap, swim, rush, flail, jump, sail, and glide, upturned to sun, moon, stars, they would go above Atlantic, Mediterranean; over country, wilderness, city, town; in gaseous silence, riffling feather, rattle-drum frame, in volcanic eruption, in timid, sputtering roar; in start, jar, hesitation, then steady ascension, beautifully held, wondrously transported, they would laugh and cry each his own name to himself. Or shout the names of others unborn or others long-dead and blown away by the wine wind or the salt wind or the silent hush of balloon wind or the wind of chemical fire. Each feeling the bright feathers stir and bud deep-buried and thrusting to burst from their riven shoulder blades! Each leaving behind the echo of their flying, a sound to encircle, recircle the earth in the winds and speak again in other years to the sons of the sons of their sons, asleep but hearing the restless midnight sky.
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