A rap on the door. Quickly he hid the phone under his lap robe.
The nurse entered. “Hello,” she said. “Have you been good?”
“Yes.” The old man’s voice was mechanical. He could hardly see. The shock of a simple rap on the door was such that part of him was still in another city, far removed. He waited for his mind to rush home—it must be here to answer questions, act sane, be polite.
“I’ve come to check your pulse.”
“Not now!” said the old man.
“You’re not going anywhere, are you?” She smiled.
He looked at the nurse steadily. He hadn’t been anywhere in ten years.
“Give me your wrist.”
Her fingers, hard and precise, searched for the sickness in his pulse like a pair of calipers.
“What’ve you been doing to excite yourself?” she demanded.
“Nothing.”
Her gaze shifted and stopped on the empty phone table. At that instant a horn sounded faintly, two thousand miles away.
She took the receiver from under the lap robe and held it before his face. “Why do you do this to yourself? You promised you wouldn’t. That’s how you hurt yourself in the first place, isn’t it? Getting excited, talking too much. Those boys up here jumping around—”
“They sat quietly and listened,” said the colonel. “And I told them things they’d never heard. The buffalo, I told them, the bison. It was worth it. I don’t care. I was in a pure fever and I was alive. It doesn’t matter if being so alive kills a man; it’s better to have the quick fever every time. Now give me that phone. If you won’t let the boys come up and sit politely I can at least talk to someone outside the room.”
“I’m sorry, Colonel. Your grandson will have to know about this. I prevented his having the phone taken out last week. Now it looks like I’ll let him go ahead.
“This is my house, my phone. I pay your salary!” he said.
“To make you well, not get you excited.” She wheeled his chair across the room. “To bed with you now, young man!”
From bed he looked back at the phone and kept looking at it.
“I’m going to the store for a few minutes,” the nurse said. “Just to be sure you don’t use the phone again, I’m hiding your wheel chair in the hall.”
She wheeled the empty chair out the door. In the downstairs entry, he heard her pause and dial the extension phone.
Was she phoning Mexico City? he wondered. She wouldn’t dare!
The front door shut.
He thought of the last week here, alone, in his room, and the secret, narcotic calls across continents, an isthmus, whole jungle countries of rain forest, blue-orchid plateaus, lakes and hills . . .talking . . . talking . . .to Buenos Aires . . .and . . .Lima . . .Rio de Janeiro . . .
He lifted himself in the cool bed. Tomorrow the telephone gone! What a greedy fool he had been! He slipped his brittle ivory legs down from the bed, marveling at their desiccation. They seemed to be things which had been fastened to his body while he slept one night, while his younger legs were taken off and burned in the cellar furnace. Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces. And now they were tampering with something more intangible—the memory; they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year.
He was across the room in a stumbling run. Grasping the phone, he took it with him as he slid down the wall to sit upon the floor. He got the long-distance operator, his heart exploding within him, faster and faster, a blackness in his eyes. “Hurry, hurry!”
He waited. “Bueno?”
“Jorge, we were cut off.”
“You must not phone again, Senior,” said the faraway voice. “Your nurse called me. She says you are very ill. I must hang up.”
“No, Jorge! Please!” the old man pleaded. “One last time, listen to me. They’re taking the phone out tomorrow. I can never call you again.
Jorge said nothing.
The old man went on. “For the love of God, Jorge! For friendship, then, for the old days! You don’t know what it means. You’re my age, but you can move! I haven’t moved anywhere in ten years.”
He dropped the phone and had trouble picking it up, his chest was so thick with pain. “Jorge! You are still there, aren’t you?”
“This will be the last time?” said Jorge.
“I promise!”
The phone was laid on a desk thousands of miles away. Once more, with that clear familiarity, the footsteps, the pause, and, at last, the raising of the window.
“Listen,” whispered the old man to himself.
And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing “La Marimba”—oh, a lovely, dancing tune.
With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot.
He wanted to say, “You’re still there, aren’t you? All of: you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I can’t believe I was ever among you. When you are away I: from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a ’ quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living . . .”
He sat with the receiver tightly pressed to his ear.
And at last, the dearest, most improbable sound of all—the sound of a green trolley car going around a comer—a trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire . . .
The old man sat on the floor.
Time passed.
A downstairs door opened slowly. Light footsteps came in, hesitated, then ventured up the stairs. Voices murmured.
“We shouldn’t be here!”
“He phoned me, I tell you. He needs visitors bad. We can’t let him down.”
“He’s sick!”
“Sure! But he said to come when the nurse’s out. We’ll only stay a second, say hello, and . . .”
The door to the bedroom moved wide. The three boys stood looking in at the old man seated there on the floor.
“Colonel Freeleigh?” said Douglas softly.
There was something in his silence that made them all shut up their mouths.
They approached, almost on tiptoe.
Douglas, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old man’s now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound.
Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window.
“Boom!!” said Tom. “Boom. Boom. Boom.”
He sat on the Civil War cannon in the courthouse square. Douglas, in front of the cannon, clutched his heart and fell down on the grass. But he did not get up; he just lay there, his face thoughtful.
“You look like you’re going to get out the old pencil any second now,” said Tom.
“Let me think!” said Douglas, looking at the cannon. He rolled over and gazed at the sky and the trees above him. “Tom, it just hit me.”
“What?”
“Yesterday Ching Ling Soo died. Yesterday the Civil War ended right here in this town forever. Yesterday Mr. Lincoln died right here and so did General Lee and General Grantl and a hundred thousand others facing north and south.
And yesterday afternoon, at Colonel Freeleigh’s house, a herd of buffalo-bison as big as all Green Town, Illinois, went off the cliff into nothing at all. Yesterday a whole lot of dust settled for good. And I didn’t even appreciate it at the time. It’s awful, Tom, it’s awful! What we going to do without all those soldiers and Generals Lee and Grant and Honest Abe; what we going to do without Ching Ling Soo? It never dreamed so many people could die so fast, Tom. But they did. They sure did!”
Tom sat astride the cannon, looking down at his brother as his voice trailed away.
“You got your tablet with you?”
Douglas shook his head.
“Better get home and put all that down before you forget it. It ain’t every day you got half the population of the world keeling over on you.”
Douglas sat up and then stood up. He walked across the courthouse lawn slowly, chewing his lower lip.
“Boom,” said Tom quietly. “Boom. Boom!”
Then he raised his voice:
“Doug! I killed you three times, crossing the grass! Doug, you hear me? Hey, Doug! Okay. All right for you.” He lay down on the cannon and sighted along the crusted barrel. He squinted one eye. “Boom!” he whispered at that dwindling figure. “Boom!”
“There!”
“Twenty-nine!”
“There!”
“Thirty!”
“There!”
“Thirty-one!”
The lever plunged. The tin caps, crushed atop the filled bottles, flickered bright yellow. Grandfather handed the last bottle to Douglas.
“Second harvest of the summer. June’s on the shelf. Here’s July. Now, just-August up ahead.”
Douglas raised the bottle of warm dandelion wine but did not set it on the shelf. He saw the other numbered bottles waiting there, one like another, in no way different, all bright, all regular, all self-contained.
There’s the day I found I was alive, he thought, and why isn’t it brighter than the others?
There’s the day John Huff fell off the edge of the world, gone; why isn’t it darker than the others?
Where, where all the summer dogs leaping like dolphins in the wind-braided and unbraided tides of what? Where lightning smell of Green Machine or trolley? Did the wine remember? It did not! Or seemed not, anyway.
Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. So much for sounds. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe.
And yet . . .looking here at this bottle which by its number signalized the day when Colonel Freeleigh had stumbled and fallen six feet into the earth, Douglas could not find so much as a gram of dark sediment, not a speck of the great flouring buffalo dust, not a flake of sulphur from the guns at Shiloh . . .
“August up ahead,” said Douglas. “Sure. But the way things are going, there’ll be no machines, no friends, and dam few dandelions for the last harvest.”
“Doom. Doom. You sound like a funeral bell tolling,” said Grandfather. “Talk like that is worse than swearing. I won’t wash out your mouth with soap, however. A thimbleful of dandelion wine is indicated. Here, now, swig it down. What’s it taste like?”
“I’m a fire-eater! Whoosh!”
“Now upstairs, run three times around the block, do five somersets, six pushups, climb two trees, and you’ll be concertmaster instead of chief mourner. Get!”
On his way, running, Douglas thought, Four pushups, one tree, and two somersets will do it!
And out there in the middle of the first day of August just getting into his car, was Bill Forrester, who shouted he Ir was going downtown for some extraordinary ice cream or other and would anyone join him? So, not five minutes later, jiggled and steamed into a better mood, Douglas found himself stepping in off the fiery pavements and moving through the grotto of soda-scented air, of vanilla freshness at the drugstore, to sit at the snow-marble fountain with Bill Forrester. They then asked for a recital of the most unusual ices and when the fountain man said, “Old fashioned lime-vanilla ice . . .”
“That’s it!” said Bill Forrester.
“Yes, sir!” said Douglas.
And, while waiting, they turned slowly on their rotating stools. The silver spigots, the gleaming mirrors, the hushed whirl-around ceiling fans, the green shades over the small windows, the harp-wire chairs, passed under their moving gaze. They stopped turning. Their eyes had touched upon the face and form of Miss Helen Loomis, ninety-five years old, ice-cream spoon in hand, ice cream in mouth.
“Young man,” she said to Bill Forrester, “you are a person of taste and imagination. Also, you have the will power of ten men; otherwise you would not dare veer away from the common flavors listed on the menu and order, straight out, without quibble or reservation, such an unheard-of thing as lime-vanilla ice.”
He bowed his head solemnly to her.
“Come sit with me, both of you,” she said. “We’ll talk of strange ice creams and such things as we seem to have a bent for. Don’t be afraid; I’ll foot the bill.”
Smiling, they carried their dishes to her table and sat.
“You look like a Spaulding,” she said to the boy. “You’ve got your grandfather’s head. And you, you’re William Forrester. You write for the Chronicle, a good enough column. I’ve heard more about you than I’d care to tell.”
“I know you,” said Bill Forrester. “You’re Helen Loomis.” He hesitated, then continued. “T was in love with you once,” he said.
“Now that’s the way I like a conversation to open.” She dug quietly at her ice cream. “That’s grounds for another meeting. No-don’t tell me where or when or how you were in love with me. We’ll save that for next time. You’ve taken away my appetite with your talk. Look there now! Well, I must get home anyway. Since you’re a reporter, come for tea tomorrow between three and four; it’s just possible I can sketch out the history of this town, since it was a trading post, for you. And, so we’ll both have something for our curiosity to chew on, Mr. Forrester, you remind me of a gentleman I went with seventy, yes, seventy years ago.
She sat across from them and it was like talking with a gray and lost quivering moth. The voice came from far away inside the grayness and the oldness, wrapped in the powders of pressed flowers and ancient butterflies.
“Well.” She arose. “Will you come tomorrow?”
“I most certainly will,” said Bill Forrester.
And she went off into the town on business, leaving the young boy and the young man there, looking after her, slowly finishing their ice cream.
William Forrester spent the next morning checking local news items for the paper, had time after lunch for some local news items for the paper, had time after lunch for some fishing in the river outside town, caught only some small fish which he threw back happily, and, without thinking about it, or at least not noticing that he had thought about it, at three o’clock he found his car taking him down a certain street, He watched with interest as his hands turned the steering wheel and motored him up a vast circular drive where he stopped under an ivy-covered entry. Letting himself out, he was conscious of the fact that his car was like his pipe old, chewed-on, unkempt in this huge green garden by this freshly painted, three-story Victorian house. He saw a faint ghostlike movement at the far end of the garden, heard a whispery cry, and saw that Miss Loomis was there, removed:I across time and distance, seated alone, t
he tea service glittering its soft silver surfaces, waiting for him.
“This is the first time a woman has ever been ready and, waiting,” he said, walking up. “It is also,” he admitted, “the first time in my life I have been on time for an appointment.”
“Why is that?” she asked, propped back in her wicker chair.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Well.” She started pouring tea. “To start things off, what do you think of the world?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.”
“You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years.”
“It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it’s an act and a mask, like every other act and mask Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn’t life a play? Don’t I play it well?”
They both laughed quietly. He sat back and let the laughter, come naturally from his mouth for the first time in many months. When they quieted she held her teacup in her two hands and looked into it. “Do you know, it’s lucky we met so late. I wouldn’t have wanted you to meet me when I was twenty-one and full of foolishness.”
“They have special laws for pretty girls twenty-one.”
“So you think I was pretty?”
He nodded good-humoredly.
“But how can you tell?” she asked. “When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth? That’s what it is—a body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven’t seen her for years. I can’t even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She’s safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn’t changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I’ll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I’ll swim in the lake, or I’ll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I’m in this old and ruined dragon. I’m the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming.”
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