This was the third night. Mr. Widmer thought of going over, of breaking the glass in the firebox, of setting fire to the porch of Miss Bidwell’s house, and of causing the firemen to roar up. That would bring her out, right into the old man’s arms, by Jupiter!
But wait! Ah, but wait.
Mr. Widmer’s eyes went to the ceiling. Up there, in the attic—wasn’t there a weapon there to be used against pride and time? In all that dust, wasn’t there something with which to strike out? Something as old as all of them—Mr. Widmer, the old man, the old lady? How long since the attic has been cleaned out? Never.
But it was too ridiculous. He wouldn’t dare!
And yet, this was the last night. A weapon must be provided.
Ten minutes later, he heard his wife cry out to him:
“Tom, Tom! What’s that noise! What are you doing in the attic?”
AT ELEVEN-THIRTY, there was the old man. He stood in front of the step-less house, as if not knowing what to try next. And then he took a quick step and looked down.
Mr. Widmer, from his upstairs window, whispered, “Yes, yes, go ahead.”
The old man bent over.
“Pick it up!” cried Mr. Widmer.
The old man extended his hands.
“Brush it off! I know, I know it’s dusty. But it’s still fair enough. Brush it off, use it!”
In the moonlight, the old man held a guitar in his hands. It had been lying in the middle of the lawn. There was a period of long waiting during which the old man turned it over with his fingers.
“Go on!” said Mr. Widmer.
There was a tentative chord of music.
“Go on!” said Mr. Widmer. “What voices can’t do, music can. That’s it! Play! You’re right, try it!” urged Mr. Widmer. And he thought: Sing under the windows, sing under the apple trees and near the back porch, sing until the guitar notes shake her, sing until she starts to cry. You get a woman to crying, and you’re on safe ground. Her pride will all wash away; and the best thing to start the dissolving and crying is music. Sing songs, sing “Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve, the years may come, the years may go,” and sing “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” and sing “We were Sailing Along on Moonlight Bay,” and sing “There’s a Long, Long Trail Awinding,” and sing all those old summer songs and old-time songs, any song that’s old and quiet and lovely; do that, and keep on doing that; sing soft and light, with a few notes of the guitar; sing and play and perhaps you’ll hear the key turn in the lock!
He listened.
As pure as drops of water falling in the night, the guitar played, soft, soft, and it was half an hour before the old man began to sing, and it was so faint no one could hear; no one except someone behind a wall in that house, in a bed, or standing in the dark behind a shaded window.
Mr. Widmer went to bed, numb, and lay there for an hour, hearing the faraway guitar.
THE NEXT morning, Mrs. Terle said, “I seen that prowler.”
“Yes?”
“He was there all night. Playing a guitar. Can you imagine? How silly can old people get? Who is he, anyway?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Mr. Widmer,
“Well, him and his guitar went away down the street at six this morning,” said Mrs. Terle.
“Did he? Didn’t he come back?”
“No.”
“Didn’t the door open for him?”
“No. Should it?”
“I suppose not. He’ll be back tonight.”
She went out.
Tonight will do it, thought Mr. Widmer. Tonight, just one more night. He’s not the sort to give up now. Now that he has the guitar, he’ll be back, and tonight will do it. Mr. Widmer whistled, moving about the store.
A truck drove up outside the store, and Mr. Frank Henderson climbed out, a kit of hammers and nails and a saw in his hands. He went around behind the truck and took out a couple of dozen fresh-cut, new pieces of raw, good-smelling lumber.
“Morning, Frank,” called Mr. Widmer. “How’s the carpentry business?”
“Picking up this morning,” said Frank. He sorted out the good, yellow lumber and the bright steel nails. “Got a job.”
“Where?”
“Miss Bidwell’s.”
“Yes?” Mr. Widmer felt his heart begin the familiar pounding.
“Yes. She phoned an hour ago. Wants me to build a new set of steps onto her front porch. Wants it done today.”
Mr. Widmer stood looking at the carpenter’s hands, at the hammer and nails, and the good fresh clean lumber. The sun was rising higher every minute now and the day was bright.
“Here,” said Mr. Widmer, picking up some of the wood. “Let me help.”
They walked across the brick street and over the lawn of Miss Bidwell’s house together, carrying the planks and the saw and the nails.
THE PUMPERNICKEL
MR. AND MRS. Welles walked away from the movie theater late at night and went into the quiet little store, a combination restaurant and delicatessen. They settled in a booth, and Mrs. Welles said, “Baked ham on pumpernickel.” Mr. Welles glanced toward the counter and there lay a loaf of pumpernickel.
“Why,” he murmured, “pumpernickel...Druce’s Lake...”
The night, the late hour, the empty restaurant—by now the pattern was familiar. Anything could set him off on a tide of reminiscence. The scent of autumn leaves, or midnight winds blowing, could stir him from himself, and memories would pour around him. Now in the unreal hour after the theater, in this lonely store, he saw a loaf of pumpernickel bread and, as on a thousand other nights, he found himself moved into the past.
“Druce’s Lake,” he said again.
“What?” His wife glanced up.
“Something I’d almost forgotten,” said Mr. Welles. “In 1910, when I was twenty, I nailed a loaf of pumpernickel to the top of my bureau mirror...”
In the hard, shiny crust of the bread, the boys at Druce’s Lake had cut their names: Tom, Nick, Bill, Alec, Paul, Jack. The finest picnic in history! Their faces tanned as they rattled down the dusty roads. Those were the days when roads were really dusty; a fine brown talcum floured up after your car. And the lake was always twice as good to reach as it would be later in life when you arrived immaculate, clean and unrumpled.
“That was the last time the old gang got together.” Mr. Welles said.
After that, college, work and marriage separated you. Suddenly you found yourself with some other group. And you never felt as comfortable or as much at ease again in all your life.
“I wonder,” said Mr. Welles. “I like to think maybe we all knew, somehow, that this picnic might be the last we’d have. You first get that empty feeling the day after high-school graduation. Then, when a little time passes and no one vanished immediately, you relax. But after a year you realize the old world is changing. And you want to do some one last thing before you lose one another. While you’re all still friends, home from college for the summer, this side of marriage, you’ve got to have something like a last ride and a swim in the cool lake.”
Mr. Welles remembered that rare summer morning, he and Tom lying under his father’s Ford, reaching up their hands to adjust this or that, talking about machines and women and the future. While they worked, that day got warm. At last Tom said, “Why don’t we drive out to Druce’s Lake?”
As simple as that.
Yet forty years later, you remember every detail of picking up the other fellows, everyone yelling under the green trees.
“Hey!” Alec beating everyone’s head with the pumpernickel and laughing. “This is for extra sandwiches, later.”
Nick had made the sandwiches that were already in the hamper—the garlic kind they would eat less of as the years passed and the girls moved in.
Then, squeezing three in the front, three in the rear, with their arms across one another’s shoulders, they drove through the boiling, dusty countryside, with a cake of ice in a tin washtub to cool the beer they’d buy.
&nbs
p; What was the special quality of that day that it should focus like a stereoscopic image, fresh and clear, forty years later? Perhaps each of them had an experience like his own. A few days before the picnic, he had found a photograph of his father twenty-five years younger, standing with a group of friends at college. The photograph had disturbed him, made him aware as he had not been before of the passing of time, the swift flow of the years away from youth. A picture taken of him as he was now would, in twenty-five years, look as strange to his own children as his father’s picture did to him—unbelievably young, a stranger out of a strange, never-returning time.
Was that how the final picnic had come about—with each of them knowing that in a few short years they would be crossing streets to avoid one another, or, if they met, saying, “We’ve got to have lunch sometime!” but never doing it? Whatever the reason, Mr. Welles could still hear the splashes as they’d plunged off the pier under a yellow sun. And then the beer and sandwiches underneath the shady trees.
We never ate that pumpernickel, Mr. Welles thought. Funny, if we’d been a bit hungrier, we’d have cut it up, and I wouldn’t have been reminded of it by that loaf there on the counter.
Lying under the trees in a golden peace that came from beer and sun and male companionship, they promised that in ten years they would meet at the courthouse on New Year’s Day, 1920, to see what they had done with their lives. Talking their rough easy talk, they carved their names in the pumpernickel.
“Driving home,” Mr. Welles said, “we sang ‘Moonlight Bay’.”
He remembered motoring along in the hot, dry night with their swim suits damp on the jolting floor boards. It was a ride of many detours taken just for the hell of it, which was the best reason in the world.
“Good night.” “So long.” “Good night.”
Then Welles was driving alone, at midnight, home to bed.
He nailed the pumpernickel to his bureau the next day.
“I almost cried when, two years later, my mother threw it in the incinerator while I was off at college.”
“What happened in 1920?” asked his wife. “On New Year’s Day?”
“Oh,” said Mr. Welles. “I was walking by the courthouse, by accident, at noon. It was snowing. I heard the clock strike. Lord, I thought, we were supposed to meet here today! I waited five minutes. Not right in front of the courthouse, no. I waited across the street.” He paused. “Nobody showed up.”
He got up from the table and paid the bill. “And I’ll take that loaf of unsliced pumpernickel there,” he said.
When he and his wife were walking home, he said, “I’ve got a crazy idea. I often wondered what happened to everyone.”
“Nick’s still in town with his café.”
“But what about the others?” Mr. Welles’s face was getting pink and he was smiling and waving his hands. “They moved away. I think Tom’s in Cincinnati. He looked quickly at his wife. “Just for the heck of it, I’ll send him this pumpernickel!”
“Oh, but—”
“Sure!” He laughed, walking faster, slapping the bread with the palm of his hand. “Have him carve his name on it and mail it on to the others if he knows their addresses. And finally back to me, with all their names on it!”
“But,” she said, taking his arm, “it’ll only make you unhappy. You’ve done things like this so many times before and...”
He wasn’t listening. Why do I never get these ideas by day? he thought. Why do I always get them after the sun goes down?
In the morning, first thing, he thought, I’ll mail this pumpernickel off, by God, to Tom and the others. And when it comes back I’ll have the loaf just as it was when it got thrown out and burned! Why not?
“Let’s see,” he said, as his wife opened the screen door and let him into the stuffy-smelling house to be greeted by silence and warm emptiness. “Let’s see. We also sang ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’, didn’t we?”
IN THE morning, he came down the hall stairs and paused a moment in the strong full sunlight, his face shaved, his teeth freshly brushed. Sunlight brightened every room. He looked in at the breakfast table.
His wife was busy there. Slowly, calmly, she was slicing the pumpernickel.
He sat down at the table in the warm sunlight and reached for the newspaper.
She picked up a slice of the newly cut bread, and kissed him on the cheek. He patted her arm.
“One or two pieces of toast, dear?” she asked gently.
“Two, I think,” he replied.
THE SCREAMING WOMAN
MY NAME IS Margaret Leary and I’m ten years old and in the fifth grade at Central School. I haven’t any brothers or sisters, but I’ve got a nice father and mother except they don’t pay much attention to me. And anyway, we never thought we’d have anything to do with a murdered woman. Or almost, anyway.
When you’re just living on a street like we live on, you don’t think awful things are going to happen, like shooting or stabbing or burying people under the ground, practically in your back yard. And when it does happen you don’t believe it. You just go on buttering your toast or baking a cake.
I got to tell you how it happened. It was a noon in the middle of July. It was hot and Mama said to me, “Margaret, you go to the store and buy some ice cream. It’s Saturday, Dad’s home for lunch, so we’ll have a treat.”
I ran out across the empty lot behind our house. It was a big lot, where kids had played baseball, and broken glass and stuff. And on my way back from the store with the ice cream I was just walking along, minding my own business, when all of a sudden it happened.
I heard the Screaming Woman.
I stopped and listened.
It was coming up out of the ground.
A woman was buried under the rocks and dirt and glass, and she was screaming, all wild and horrible, for someone to dig her out.
I just stood there, afraid. She kept screaming, muffled.
Then I started to run. I fell down, got up, and ran some more. I got in the screen door of my house and there was Mama, calm as you please, not knowing what I knew, that there was a real live woman buried out in back of our house, just a hundred yards away, screaming bloody murder.
“Mama,” I said.
“Don’t stand there with the ice cream,” said Mama.
“But, Mama,” I said.
“Put it in the icebox,” she said.
“Listen, Mama, there’s a Screaming Woman in the empty lot.”
“And wash your hands,” said Mama.
“She was screamin’ and screamin’...”
“Let’s see now, salt and pepper,” said Mama, far away.
“Listen to me,” I said, loud. “We got to dig her out. She’s buried under tons and tons of dirt and if we don’t dig her out, she’ll choke up and die.”
“I’m certain she can wait until after lunch,” said Mama.
“Mama, don’t you believe me?”
“Of course, dear. Now wash your hands and take this plate of meat in to your father.”
“I don’t even know who she is or how she got there,” I said. “But we got to help her before it’s too late.”
“Good gosh,” said Mama. “Look at this ice cream. What did you do, just stand in the sun and let it melt?”
“Well, the empty lot...”
“Go on, now, scoot.”
I went into the dining room.
“Hi, Dad, there’s a Screaming Woman in the empty lot.”
“I never knew a woman who didn’t,” said Dad.
“I’m serious,” I said.
“You look very grave,” said Father.
“We’ve got to get picks and shovels and excavate, like for an Egyptian mummy,” I said.
“I don’t feel like an archaeologist, Margaret,” said Father. “Now, some nice cool October day, I’ll take you up on that.”
“But we can’t wait that long,” I almost screamed. My heart was bursting in me. I was excited and scared and afraid and here was Dad, putting meat
on his plate, cutting and chewing and paying me no attention.
“Dad?” I said.
“Mmmm?” he said, chewing.
“Dad, you just gotta come out after lunch and help me,” I said. “Dad, Dad, I’ll give you all the money in my piggy bank!”
“Well,” said Dad, “so it’s a business proposition, is it? It must be important for you to offer your perfectly good money. How much money will you pay, by the hour?”
“I got five whole dollars it took me a year to save, and it’s all yours.”
Dad touched my arm. “I’m touched. I’m really touched. You want me to play with you and you’re willing to pay for my time. Honest, Margaret, you make your old Dad feel like a piker. I don’t give you enough time. Tell you what, after lunch, I’ll come out and listen to your screaming woman, free of charge.”
“Will you, oh, will you, really?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s what I’ll do,” said Dad. “But you must promise me one thing?”
“What?”
“If I come out, you must eat all of your lunch first.”
“I promise,” I said.
“Okay.”
Mother came in and sat down and we started to eat.