"How you do run on," cried Mother. "Marianne, tell us about this young man. What was his name again? Was it Isak Van Pelt?"
"What? Oh--Isak, yes." Marianne had been roving about her bed all night, sometimes flipping poetry books and reading incredible lines, sometimes lying flat on her back, sometimes on her tummy looking out at dreaming moonlit country. The smell of jasmine had touched the room all night and the excessive warmth of early spring (the thermometer read fifty-five degrees) had kept her awake. She looked like a dying moth, if anyone had peeked through the keyhole.
This morning she had clapped her hands over her head in the mirror and come to breakfast, remembering just in time to put on a dress.
Grandma laughed quietly all during breakfast. Finally she said, "You must eat, child, you must." So Marianne played with her toast and got half a piece down. Just then there was a loud honk outside. That was Isak! In his jalopy!
"Whoop!" cried Marianne, and ran upstairs quickly.
The young Isak Van Pelt was brought in and introduced around.
When Marianne was finally gone, Father sat down, wiping his forehead. "I don't know. This is too much."
"You were the one who suggested she start going out," said Mother.
"And I'm sorry I suggested it," he said. "But she's been visiting us for six months now, and six more months to go. I thought if she met some nice young man--"
"And they were married," husked Grandma darkly, "why, Marianne might move out almost immediately--is that it?"
"Well," said Father.
"Well," said Grandma.
"But now it's worse than before," said Father. "She floats around singing with her eyes shut, playing those infernal love records and talking to herself. A man can stand so much. She's getting so she laughs all the time, too. Do eighteen-year-old girls often wind up in the booby hatch?"
"He seems a nice young man," said Mother.
"Yes, we can always pray for that," said Father, taking out a little shot glass. "Here's to an early marriage."
The second morning Marianne was out of the house like a fireball when first she heard the jalopy horn. There was no time for the young man even to come to the door. Only Grandma saw them roar off together, from the parlor window.
"She almost knocked me down." Father brushed his mustache. "What's that? Brained eggs? Well."
In the afternoon, Marianne, home again, drifted about the living room to the phonograph records. The needle hiss filled the house. She played "That Old Black Magic" twenty-one times, going "la la la" as she swam with her eyes closed in the room.
"I'm afraid to go in my own parlor," said Father. "I retired from business to smoke cigars and enjoy living, not to have a limp relative humming about under the parlor chandelier."
"Hush," said Mother.
"This is a crisis," announced Father, "in my life. After all, she's just visiting."
"You know how visiting girls are. Away from home they think they're in Paris, France. She'll be gone in October. It's not so dreadful."
"Let's see," figured Father slowly. "I'll have been buried just about one hundred and thirty days out at Green Lawn Cemetery by then." He got up and threw his paper down into a little white tent on the floor. "By George, Mother, I'm talking to her right now!"
He went and stood in the parlor door, peering through it at the waltzing Marianne. "La," she sang to the music.
Clearing his throat, he stepped through.
"Marianne," he said.
"'That old black magic...'" sang Marianne. "Yes?"
He watched her hands swinging in the air. She gave him a sudden fiery look as she danced by.
"I want to talk to you." He straightened his tie.
"Dah dum dee dum dum dee dum dee dum dum," she sang.
"Did you hear me?" he demanded.
"He's so nice," she said.
"Evidently."
"Do you know, he bows and opens doors like a doorman and plays a trumpet like Harry James and brought me daisies this morning?"
"I wouldn't doubt."
"His eyes are blue." She looked at the ceiling.
He could find nothing at all on the ceiling to look at.
She kept looking, as she danced, at the ceiling as he came over and stood near her, looking up, but there wasn't a rain spot or a settling crack there, and he sighed, "Marianne."
"And we ate lobster at that river cafe."
"Lobster. I know, but we don't want you breaking down, getting weak. One day, tomorrow, you must stay home and help your aunt Math make her doilies--"
"Yes, sir." She dreamed around the room with her wings out.
"Did you hear me?" he demanded.
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes." Her eyes shut. "Oh yes, yes." Her skirts whished around. "Uncle," she said, her head back, lolling.
"You'll help your aunt with her doilies?" he cried.
"--with her doilies," she murmured.
"There!" He sat down in the kitchen, plucking up the paper. "I guess I told her!"
But next morning he was on the edge of his bed when he heard the hot-rod's thunderous muffler and heard Marianne fall downstairs, linger two seconds in the dining room for breakfast, hesitate by the bathroom long enough to consider whether she would be sick, and then the slam of the front door, the sound of the jalopy banging down the street, two people singing off key in it.
Father put his head in his hands. "Doilies," he said.
"What?" said Mother.
"Dooley's," said Father. "I'm going down to Dooley's for a morning visit."
"But Dooley's isn't open until ten."
"I'll wait," decided Father, eyes shut.
That night and seven other wild nights the porch swing sang a little creaking song, back and forth, back and forth. Father, hiding in the living room, could be seen in fierce relief whenever he drafted his ten-cent cigar and the cherry light illumined his immensely tragic face. The porch swing creaked. He waited for another creak. He heard little butterfly-soft sounds from outside, little palpitations of laughter and sweet nothings in small ears. "My porch," said Father. "My swing," he whispered to his cigar, looking at it. "My house." He listened for another creak. "My God," he said.
He went to the tool shed and appeared on the dark porch with a shiny oil can. "No, don't get up. Don't bother. There, and there." He oiled the swing joints. It was dark. He couldn't see Marianne; he could smell her. The perfume almost knocked him off into the rosebush. He couldn't see her gentleman friend, either. "Good night," he said. He went in and sat down and there was no more creaking. Now all he could hear was something that sounded like the mothlike flutter of Marianne's heart.
"He must be very nice," said Mother in the kitchen door, wiping a dinner dish.
"That's what I'm hoping," whispered Father. 'That's why I let them have the porch every night!"
"So many days in a row," said Mother. "A girl doesn't go with a nice young man that many times unless he's serious."
"Maybe he'll propose tonight!" was Father's happy thought.
"Hardly so soon. And she is so young."
"Still," he ruminated, "it might happen. It's got to happen, by the Lord Harry."
Grandma chuckled from her corner easy chair. It sounded like someone turning the pages of an ancient book.
"What's so funny?" said Father.
"Wait and see," said Grandma. "Tomorrow."
Father stared at the dark, but Grandma would say no more.
"Well, well," said Father at breakfast. He surveyed his eggs with a kindly, paternal eye. "Well, well, by gosh, last night, on the porch, there was more whispering. What's his name? Isak? Well, now, if I'm any judge at all, I think he proposed to Marianne last night; yes, I'm positive of it!"
"It would be nice," said Mother. "A spring marriage. But it's so soon."
"Look," said Father with full-mouthed logic. "Marianne's the kind of girl who marries quick and young. We can't stand in her way, can we?"
"For once I think you're right," said Mother. "A marriage w
ould be fine. Spring flowers, and Marianne looking nice in that gown I saw at Haydecker's last week."
They all peered anxiously at the stairs, waiting for Marianne to appear.
"Pardon me," rasped Grandma, sighting up from her morning toast. "But I wouldn't talk of getting rid of Marianne just yet if I were you."
"And why not?"
"Because."
"Because why?"
"I hate to spoil your plans," rustled Grandma, chuckling. She gestured with her little vinegary head. "But while you people were worrying about getting Marianne married, I've been keeping tab on her. Seven days now I've been watching this young fellow each day he came in his car and honked his horn outside. He must be an actor or a quick-change artist or something."
"What?" asked Father.
"Yep," said Grandma. "Because one day he was a young blond fellow, and next day he was a tall dark fellow, and Wednesday he was a chap with a brown mustache, and Thursday he had wavy red hair, and Friday he was shorter, with a Chevrolet stripped down instead of a Ford."
Mother and Father sat for a minute as if hit with hammers right behind the left ear.
At last Father, his face exploding with color, shouted, "Do you mean to say! You sat there, woman, you say; all those men, and you--"
"You were always hiding," snapped Grandma. "So you wouldn't spoil things. If you'd come out in the open you'd have seen the same as I. I never said a word. She'll simmer down. It's just her time of life. Every woman goes through it. It's hard, but they can survive. A new man every day does wonders for a girl's ego!"
"You, you, you, you, you!" Father choked on it, eyes wild, throat gorged too big for his collar. He fell back in his chair, exhausted. Mother sat, stunned.
"Good morning, everyone!" Marianne raced downstairs and popped into a chair. Father stared at her.
"You, you, you, you, you," he accused Grandma.
I shall run down the street shouting, thought Father wildly, and break the fire-alarm window and pull the lever and bring the fire engines and the hoses. Or perhaps there will be a late snowstorm and I shall set Marianne out in it to cool.
He did neither. The heat in the room being excessive, according to the wall calendar, everyone moved out onto the cool porch while Marianne sat looking at her orange juice.
21
HAIL AND FAREWELL
But of course he was going away, there was nothing else to do, the time was up, the clock had run out, and he was going very far away indeed. His suitcase was packed, his shoes were shined, his hair was brushed, he had expressly washed behind his ears, and it remained only for him to go down the stairs, out the front door, and up the street to the small-town station where the train would make a stop for him alone. Then Fox Hill, Illinois, would be left far off in his past. And he would go on, perhaps to Iowa, perhaps to Kansas, perhaps even to California; a small boy, twelve years old with a birth certificate in his valise to show he had been born forty-three years ago.
"Willie!" called a voice downstairs.
"Yes!" He hoisted his suitcase. In his bureau mirror he saw a face made of June dandelions and July apples and warm summer-morning milk. There, as always, was his look of the angel and the innocent, which might never, in the years of his life, change.
"Almost time," called the woman's voice.
"All right!" And he went down the stairs, grunting and smiling. In the living room sat Anna and Steve, their clothes painfully neat.
"Here I am!" cried Willie in the parlor door.
Anna looked like she was going to cry. "Oh, good Lord, you can't really be leaving us, can you, Willie?"
"People are beginning to talk," said Willie quietly. "I've been here three years now. But when people begin to talk, I know it's time to put on my shoes and buy a railway ticket."
"It's all so strange. I don't understand. It's so sudden," Anna said. "Willie, we'll miss you."
"I'll write you every Christmas, so help me. Don't you write me."
"It's been a great pleasure and satisfaction," said Steve, sitting there, his words the wrong size in his mouth. "It's a shame it had to stop. It's a shame you had to tell us about yourself. It's an awful shame you can't stay on."
"You're the nicest folks I ever had," said Willie, four feet high, in no need of a shave, the sunlight on his face.
And then Anna did cry. "Willie, Willie." And she sat down and looked as if she wanted to hold him but was afraid to hold him now; she looked at him with shock and amazement and her hands empty, not knowing what to do with him now.
"It's not easy to go," said Willie. "You get used to things. You want to stay. But it doesn't work. I tried to stay on once after people began to suspect. 'How horrible!' people said. 'All these years, playing with our innocent children,' they said, 'and us not guessing! Awful!' they said. And finally I had to just leave town one night. It's not easy. You know darned well how much I love both of you. Thanks for three swell years."
They all went to the front door. "Willie, where're you going?"
"I don't know. I just start traveling. When I see a town that looks green and nice, I settle in."
"Will you ever come back?"
"Yes," he said earnestly with his high voice. "In about twenty years it should begin to show in my face. When it does, I'm going to make a grand tour of all the mothers and fathers I've ever had."
They stood on the cool summer porch, reluctant to say the last words. Steve was looking steadily at an elm tree. "How many other folks've you stayed with, Willie? How many adoptions?"
Willie figured it, pleasantly enough. "I guess it's about five towns and five couples and over twenty years gone by since I started my tour."
"Well, we can't holler," said Steve. "Better to've had a son thirty-six months than none whatever."
"Well," said Willie, and kissed Anna quickly, seized at his luggage, and was gone up the street in the green noon light, under the trees, a very young boy indeed, not looking back, running steadily.
The boys were playing on the green park diamond when he came by. He stood a little while among the oak-tree shadows, watching them hurl the white, snowy baseball into the warm summer air, saw the baseball shadow fly like a dark bird over the grass, saw their hands open in mouths to catch this swift piece of summer that now seemed most especially important to hold onto. The boys' voices yelled. The ball lit on the grass near Willie.
Carrying the ball forward from under the shade trees, he thought of the last three years now spent to the penny, and the five years before that, and so on down the line to the year when he was really eleven and twelve and fourteen and the voices saying: "What's wrong with Willie, missus?" "Mrs. B., is Willie late a-growin'?" "Willie, you smokin' cigars lately?" The echoes died in summer light and color. His mother's voice: "Willie's twenty-one today!" And a thousand voices saying: "Come back, son, when you're fifteen; then maybe we'll give you a job."
He stared at the baseball in his trembling hand, as if it were his life, an interminable ball of years strung around and around and around, but always leading back to his twelfth birthday. He heard the kids walking toward him; he felt them blot out the sun, and they were older, standing around him.
"Willie! Where you goin'?" They kicked his suitcase.
How tall they stood in the sun. In the last few months it seemed the sun had passed a hand above their heads, beckoned, and they were warm metal drawn melting upward; they were golden taffy pulled by an immense gravity to the sky, thirteen, fourteen years old, looking down upon Willie, smiling, but already beginning to neglect him. It had started four months ago:
"Choose up sides! Who wants Willie?"
"Aw, Willie's too little; we don't play with 'kids.'"
And they raced ahead of him, drawn by the moon and the sun and the turning seasons of leaf and wind, and he was twelve years old and not of them any more. And the other voices beginning again on the old, the dreadfully familiar, the cool refrain: "Better feed that boy vitamins, Steve." "Anna, does shortness run in your family?" And the
cold fist knocking at your heart again and knowing that the roots would have to be pulled up again after so many good years with the "folks."
"Willie, where you goin'?"
He jerked his head. He was back among the towering, shadowing boys who milled around him like giants at a drinking fountain bending down.
"Goin' a few days visitin' a cousin of mine."
"Oh." There was a day, a year ago, when they would have cared very much indeed. But now there was only curiosity for his luggage, their enchantment with trains and trips and far places.
"How about a coupla fast ones?" said Willie.
They looked doubtful, but, considering the circumstances, nodded. He dropped his bag and ran out; the white baseball was up in the sun, away to their burning white figures in the far meadow, up in the sun again, rushing, life coming and going in a pattern. Here, there! Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hanlon, Creek Bend, Wisconsin, 1932, the first couple, the first year! Here, there! Henry and Alice Boltz, Limeville, Iowa, 1935! The baseball flying. The Smiths, the Eatons, the Robinsons! 1939! 1945! Husband and wife, husband and wife, husband and wife, no children, no children! A knock on this door, a knock on that.
"Pardon me. My name is William. I wonder if--"
"A sandwich? Come in, sit down. Where you from, son?"
The sandwich, a tall glass of cold milk, the smiling, the nodding, the comfortable, leisurely talking.
"Son, you look like you been traveling. You run off from somewhere?"
"No."
"Boy, are you an orphan?"
Another glass of milk.
"We always wanted kids. It never worked out. Never knew why. One of those things. Well, well. It's getting late, son. Don't you think you better hit for home?"
"Got no home."