“I don’t know,” he said.
“Neither do I. That’s what makes life interesting.”
August was almost over. The first cool touch of autumn moved slowly through the town and there was a softening and the first gradual burning fever of color in every tree, a faint flush and coloring in the hills, and the color of lions in the wheat fields. Now the pattern of days was familiar and repeated like a penman beautifully inscribing again and again, in practice, a series of l’s and w’s and m’s, day after day the line repeated in delicate rills.
William Forrester walked across the garden one early August afternoon to find Helen Loomis writing with great care at the tea table.
She put aside her pen and ink.
“I’ve been writing you a letter,” she said.
“Well, my being here saves you the trouble.”
“No, this is a special letter. Look at it.” She showed him the blue envelope, which she now sealed and pressed flat. “Remember how it looks. When you receive this in the mail, you’ll know I’m dead.”
“That’s no way to talk, is it?”
“Sit down and listen to me.”
He sat.
“My dear William,” she said, under the parasol shade. “In a few days I will be dead. No.” She put up her hand. “I don’t want you to say a thing. I’m not afraid. When you live as long as I’ve lived you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I’d never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can’t say I’m greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don’t fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it.” She motioned with her hands. “But enough of that. The important thing is that I shan’t be seeing you again. There will be no services. I believe that a woman who has passed through that particular door has as much right to privacy as a woman who has retired for the night.”
“You can’t predict death,” he said at last.
“For fifty years I’ve watched the grandfather clock in the hall, William. After it is wound I can predict to the hour when it will stop. Old people are no different. They can feel the machinery slow down and the last weights shift. Oh, please don’t look that way—please don’t.”
“I can’t help it,” he said.
“We’ve had a nice time, haven’t we? It has been very special here, talking every day. It was that much-overburdened and worn phrase referred to as a ‘meeting of the minds.’” She turned the blue envelope in her hands. “I’ve always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It’s essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don’t know. I only know there has been your mind here and my mind here, and the afternoons have been like none I can remember. There is still so much to talk about, but we must save it for another time.”
“We don’t seem to have much time now.”
“No, but perhaps there will be another time. Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. The cogs miss, the wheels turn, and lives interlace too early or too late. I lived too long, that much is certain. And you were born either too early or too late. It was a terrible bit of timing. But perhaps I am being punished for being a silly girl. Anyway, the next spin around, wheels might function right again. Meantime you must find a nice girl and be married and be happy. But you must promise me one thing.”
“Anything.”
“You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. If it is at all convenient, die before you’re fifty. It may take a bit of doing. But I advise this simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn’t it, if you lived on to be very, very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main Street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again? I don’t think we could go through any more afternoons like these we’ve had, no matter how pleasant, do you? A thousand gallons of tea and five hundred biscuits is enough for one friendship. So you must have an attack of pneumonia some time in about twenty years. For I don’t know how long they let you linger on the other side. Perhaps they send you back immediately. But I shall do my best, William, really I shall. And everything put right and in balance, do you know what might happen?”
“You tell me.”
“Some afternoon in 1985 or 1990 a young man named Tom Smith or John Green, or a name like that, will be walking downtown and will stop in the drugstore and order, appropriately, a dish of some unusual ice cream. A young girl the same age will be sitting there and when she hears the name of that ice cream, something will happen. I can’t say what or how. She won’t know why or how, assuredly. Nor will the young man. It will simply be that the name of that ice cream will be a very good thing to both of them. They’ll talk. And later, when they know each other’s names, they’ll walk from the drugstore together.”
She smiled at him.
“This is all very neat, but forgive an old lady for tying things in neat packets. It’s a silly trifle to leave you. Now let’s talk of something else. What shall we talk about? Is there any place in the world we haven’t traveled to yet? Have we been to Stockholm?”
“Yes, it’s a fine town.”
“Glasgow? Yes? Where then?”
“Why not Green Town, Illinois?” he said. “Here. We haven’t really visited our own town together at all.”
She settled back, as did he, and she said, “I’ll tell you how it was, then, when I was only nineteen, in this town, a long time ago. . . .”
It was a night in winter and she was skating lightly over a pond of white moon ice, her image gliding and whispering under her. It was a night in summer in this town of fire in the air, in the cheeks, in the heart, your eyes full of the glowing and shutting-off color of fireflies. It was a rustling night in October, and there she stood, pulling taffy from a hook in the kitchen, singing, and there she was, running on the moss by the river, and swimming in the granite pit beyond town on a spring night, in the soft deep warm waters, and now it was the Fourth of July with rockets slamming the sky and every porch full of now red-fire, now blue-fire, now white-fire faces, hers dazzling bright among them as the last rocket died.
“Can you see all these things?” asked Helen Loomis. “Can you see me doing them and being with them?”
“Yes,” said William Forrester, eyes closed. “I can see you.”
“And then,” she said, “and then . . .”
Her voice moved on and on as the afternoon grew late and the twilight deepened quickly, but her voice moved in the garden and anyone passing on the road, at a far distance, could have heard its moth sound, faintly, faintly. . . .
Two days later William Forrester was at his desk in his room when the letter came. Douglas brought it upstairs and handed it to Bill and looked as if he knew what was in it.
William Forrester recognized the blue envelope, but did not open it. He simply put it in his shirt pocket, looked at the boy for a moment, and said, “Come on, Doug; my treat.”
They walked downtown, saying very little, Douglas preserving the silence he sensed was necessary. Autumn, which had threatened for a time, was gone. Summer was back full, boiling the clouds and scouring the metal sky. They turned in at the drugstore and sat at the marble fountain. William Forrester took the letter out and laid it before him and still did not open it.
He looked out at the yellow sunlight on the concrete and on the green awnings and shining on the gold letters of the window signs across the street, and he looked at the calendar on the wall. August 27, 1928. He looked at his wrist watch and felt his heartbeat slowly, saw the second hand of the watch moving moving with no speed at all, saw the calendar frozen there with its one day seeming forever, the
sun nailed to the sky with no motion toward sunset whatever. The warm air spread under the sighing fans over his head. A number of women laughed by the open door and were gone through his vision, which was focused beyond them at the town itself and the high courthouse clock. He opened the letter and began to read.
He turned slowly on the revolving chair. He tried the words again and again, silently, on his tongue, and at last spoke them aloud and repeated them.
“A dish of lime-vanilla ice,” he said. “A dish of lime-vanilla ice.”
THE SEA SHELL
HE WANTED TO GET OUT AND RUN, bounding over hedges, kicking tin cans down the alley, shouting at all the windows for the gang to come and play. The sun was up and the day was bright, and here he was swaddled with bed clothes, sweating and scowling, and not liking it at all.
Johnny Bishop sat up in bed, sniffling. Orange juice, cough medicine and the perfume of his mother, lately gone from the room, hung in a shaft of sunlight that struck down to heat his toes. The entire lower half of the patch-work quilt was a circus banner of red, green, purple and blue. It practically yelled color into his eyes. Johnny fidgeted.
“I wanna go out,” he complained softly. “Darn it. Darn it.”
A fly buzzed, bumping again and again at the window pane with a dry staccato of its transparent wings.
Johnny looked at it, understanding how it wanted out, too.
He coughed a few times and decided that it was not the cough of a decrepit old man, but a youngster of eleven years who, next week this time, would be loose again to filch apples from the orchard trees or bean teacher with spit-balls.
He heard the trot of crisp footsteps in the freshly polished hall, the door opened, and mother was there. “Young man,” she said, “what are you doing sitting up in bed? Lie down.”
“I feel better already. Honest.”
“The doctor said two more days.”
“Two!” Consternation was the order of the moment. “Do I hafta be sick that long?”
Mom laughed. “Well—not sick. But in bed, anyway.” She spanked his left cheek very lightly. “Want some more orange juice?”
“With or without medicine?”
“Medicine?”
“I know you. You put medicine in my orange juice so I can’t taste it. but I taste it anyway.”
“This time—no medicine.”
“What’s that in your hand?”
“Oh, this?” Mother held out a round gleaming object. Johnny took it. It was hard and shiny and—pretty. “Doctor Hull dropped by a few minutes ago and left it. He thought you might have fun with it.”
Johnny looked palely dubious. His small hands brushed the slick surface. “How can I have fun with it? I don’t even know what it is!”
Mother’s smile was better than sunshine. “It’s a shell from the sea, Johnny. Doctor Hull picked it up on the Pacific shore last year when he was out there.”
“Hey, that’s all right. What kind of shell is it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Some form of sea life probably lived in it once, a long time ago.”
Johnny’s brows went up. “Lived in this? Made it a home?”
“Yes.”
“Aw—really?”
She adjusted it in his hand. “If you don’t believe me, listen for yourself, young man. Put this end—here—against your ear.”
“Like this?” He raised the shell to his small pink ear and pressed it tight. “Now, what do I do?”
Mother smiled. “Now, if you’re very quiet, and listen closely, you’ll hear something very, very familiar.”
Johnny listened. His ear opened imperceptibly like a small flower opening, waiting.
A titanic wave came in on a rocky shore and smashed itself down.
“The sea!” cried Johnny Bishop. “Oh, Mom! The ocean! The waves! The sea!”
Wave after wave came in on that distant, craggy shore. Johnny closed his eyes tight black and a smile folded his small face exactly in half. Wave after pounding wave roared in his small pinkly alert ear.
“Yes, Johnny,” said mother. “The sea.”
It was late afternoon. Johnny lay back on his pillow, cradling the sea shell in his small hands, smiling, and looking out the large window just to the right side of the bed. He had a good view of the vacant lot across the street. The kids were scuddling around over there like a cluster of indignant beetles, each one complaining, “Aw, I shot you dead first! Now, I got you first! Aw, you don’t play fair! I won’t play unless I can be Captain!”
Their voices seemed so far away, lazy, drifting on a tide of sun. The sunlight was just like deep yellow, lambent water, lapping at the summer, full tide. Slow, languorous, warm, lazy. The whole world was over its head in that tide and everything was slowed down. The clock ticked slower. The street car came down the avenue in warm metal slow motion. It was almost like seeing a motion film that is losing speed and noise. Everything was softer. Nothing seemed to count as much.
He wanted to get out and play, badly. He kept watching the kids climbing the fences, playing soft ball, roller skating in the warm languor. His head felt heavy, heavy, heavy. His eyelids were window sashes pulling down, down. The sea shell lay against his ear. He pressed it close.
Pounding, drumming, waves broke on a shore. A yellow sand shore. And when the waves went back out they left foam, like the suds of beer, on the sand. The suds broke and vanished, like dreams. And more waves came with more foam. And the sand crabs tumbled, salt-wet, scuttling brown, in the ripples. Cool green water pounding cold on the sand. The very sound of it conjured up visions; the ocean breeze soothed Johnny Bishop’s small body. Suddenly the hot afternoon was no longer hot and depressing. The clock started ticking faster. The street cars clanged metal quickly. The slowness of the summer world was spanked to crisp life by the pound-pound of waves on an unseen and brilliant beach.
This sea shell would be a valuable thing in the days to come. Whenever the afternoons stretched long and tiresome, he would press it around the lobe and rim of his ear and vacation on a wind-blown peninsula far, far off.
Four thirty, said the clock. Time for medicine, said mother’s exact trot in the gleaming hall.
She offered the medicine in a silver spoon. It tasted like, unfortunately—medicine. Johnny made a special kind of bitter face. Then when the taste was modified by a drink of refrigerated milk he looked up at the nice soft white face of mom and said, “Can we go to the seashore some day, huh?”
“I think we can. Maybe the Fourth of July, if your father gets his two weeks then. We can drive to the coast in two days, stay a week, and come back.”
Johnny settled himself, his eyes funny. “I’ve never really seen the ocean, except in movies. It smells different and looks different than Fox Lake, I bet. It’s bigger, and a heck of a lot better. Gosh, I wish I could go now.”
“It won’t be long. You children are so impatient.”
“I can’t help it.”
Mother sat down on the bed and held his hand. The things she said he couldn’t understand fully, but some of them made sense. “If I had to write a philosophy of children, I guess I’d title it impatience. Impatience with everything in life. You must have things—right now—or else. Tomorrow’s so far away, and yesterday is nothing. You’re a tribe of potential Omar Khayyam’s, that’s what. When you’re older, you’ll understand that waiting, planning, being patient, are attributes of maturity; that is, of being grown up.”
“I don’t wanna be patient. I don’t like being in bed. I want to go to the sea shore.”
“And last week it was a catcher’s mitt you wanted—right now. Please, pretty please, you said. Oh, gosh, Mom, it’s elegant. It’s the last one at the store.”
Mom was very strange, all right. She talked some more:
“I remember, I saw a doll once when I was a girl. I told my mother about it, said it was the last one for sale. I said I was afraid it would be sold before I could get it. The truth of the matter is there were a dozen others just like it.
I couldn’t wait. I was impatient, too.”
Johnny shifted on the bed. His eyes widened and got full of blue light. “But, Mom, I don’t want to wait. If I wait too long, I’ll be grown up, and then it won’t be any fun.”
That silenced mother. She just sort of sat there, her hands tightened, her eyes got all wet after a while, because she was thinking, maybe, to herself. She closed her eyes, opened them again, and said, “Sometimes—I think children know more about living than we do. Sometimes I think you’re—right. But I don’t dare tell you. It isn’t according to the rules—”
“What rules, Mom?”
“Civilization’s. Enjoy yourself, while you are young. Enjoy yourself, Johnny.” She said it strong, and funnylike.
Johnny put the shell to his ear. “Mom. Know what I’d like to do? I’d like to be at the seashore right now, running toward the water, holding my nose and yelling, ‘Last one in is a double-darned monkey!’” Johnny laughed.
The phone rang downstairs. Mother walked to answer it.
Johnny lay there, quietly, listening.
Two more days. Johnny tilted his head against the shell and sighed. Two more whole days. It was dark in his room. Stars were caught in the square glass corrals of the big window. A wind moved the trees. Roller skates rotated, scraping, on the cement sidewalks below.
Johnny closed his eyes. Downstairs, silverware was being clattered at the dinner table. Mom and Pop were eating. He heard Pop laughing his deep laughter.
The waves still came in, over and over, on the shore inside the sea shell. And—something else.
“Down where the waves lift, down where the waves play, down where the gulls swoop low on a summer’s day—”
“Huh?” Johnny listened. His body stiffened. He blinked his eyes.