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 the 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.
The Picasso Summer
George and Alice Smith detrained at Biarritz one summer noon and in an hour had run through their hotel onto the beach into the ocean and back out to bake upon the sand.
To see George Smith sprawled burning there, you’d think him only a tourist flown fresh as iced lettuce to Europe and soon to be transshipped home. But here was a man who loved art more than life itself.
‘There…’ George Smith sighed. Another ounce of perspiration trickled down his chest. Boil out the Ohio tap water, he thought, then drink down the best Bordeaux. Silt your blood with rich French sediment so you’ll see with native eyes!
Why? Why eat, breathe, drink everything French? So that, given time, he might really begin to understand the genius of one man.
His mouth moved, forming a name.
‘George?’ His wife loomed over him. ‘I know what you’ve been thinking, I can read your lips.’
He lay perfectly still, waiting.
‘And?’
‘Picasso,’ she said.
He winced. Someday she would learn to pronounce that name.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Relax. I know you heard the rumor this morning, but you should see your eyes—your tic is back. All right, Picasso’s here, down the coast a few miles away, visiting friends in some small fishing town. But you must forget it or our vacation’s ruined.’
‘I wish I’d never heard the rumor,’ he said honestly.
‘If only,’ she said, ‘you liked other painters.’
Others? Yes, there were others. He could breakfast most congenially on Caravaggio still lifes of autumn pears and midnight plums. For lunch: those fire-squirting, thick-wormed Van Gogh sunflowers, those blooms a blind man might read with one rush of scorched fingers down fiery canvas. But the great feast? The paintings he saved his palate for? There, filling the horizon like Neptune risen, crowned with limeweed, alabaster, coral, paintbrushes clenched like tridents in horn-nailed fists, and with fist-tail vast enough to fluke summer showers out over all Gibraltar—who else but the creator of Girl Before a Mirror and Guernica?
‘Alice,’ he said patiently, ‘how can I explain? Coming down on the train, I thought, Good Lord, it’s all Picasso country!’
But was it really? he wondered. The sky, the land, the people, the flushed pink bricks here, scrolled electric-blue ironwork balconies there, a mandolin ripe as a fruit in some man’s thousand fingerprinting hands, billboard tatters blowing like confetti in night winds—how much was Picasso, how much George Smith staring round the world with wild Picasso eyes? He despaired of answering. That old man had distilled turpentines and linseed oil so thoroughly through George Smith that they shaped his being, all Blue Period at twilight, all Rose Period at dawn.
‘I keep thinking,’ he said aloud, ‘if we saved our money…’
‘We’ll never have five thousand dollars.’
‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘But it’s nice thinking we might bring it off someday. Wouldn’t it be great to just step up to him, say “Pablo, here’s five thousand! Give us the sea, the sand, that sky, or any old thing you want, we’ll be happy…”’
After a moment his wife touched his arm.
‘I think you’d better go in the water now,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d better do just that.’
White fire showered up when he cut the water.
During the afternoon George Smith came out, and went into the ocean with the vast spilling motions of now warm, now cool people who at last, with the sun’s decline, their bodies all lobster colors and colors of broiled squab and guinea hen, trudged for their wedding-cake hotels.
The beach lay deserted for endless mile on mile save for two people. One was George Smith, towel over shoulder, out for a last devotional.
Far along the shore another shorter, square-cut man walked alone in the tranquil weather. He was deeper-tanned, his close-shaven head dyed almost mahogany by the sun, and his eyes were clear and bright as water in his face.
So the shore-line stage was set, and in a few minutes the two men would meet. And once again Fate fixed the scales for shocks and surprises, arrivals and departures. And all the while these two solitary strollers did not for a moment think on coincidence, that unswum stream which lingers at man’s elbow with every crowd in every town. Nor did they ponder the fact that if man dares dip into that stream he grabs a wonder in each hand. Like most, they shrugged at such folly and stayed well up the bank lest Fate should shove them in.
The stranger stood alone. Glancing about, he saw his aloneness, saw the waters of the lovely bay, saw the sun sliding down the late colors of the day, and then, half turning, spied a small wooden object on the sand. It was no more than the slender stick from a lime ice cream delicacy long since melted away. Smiling, he picked the stick up. With another glance around to reinsure his solitude, the man stooped again and, holding the stick gently, with light sweeps of his hand began to do the one thing in all the world he knew best how to do.
He began to draw incredible figures along the sand.
He sketched one figure and then moved over and, still looking down, completely focused on his work now, drew a second and a third figure, and after that a fourth and a fifth and a sixth.
Geo
rge Smith, printing the shoreline with his feet, gazed here, gazed there, and then saw the man ahead. George Smith, drawing nearer, saw that the man, deeply tanned, was bending down. Nearer yet, and it was obvious what the man was up to. George Smith chuckled. Of course, of course…Alone on the beach this man—how old? sixty-five? seventy?—was scribbling and doodling away. How the sand flew! How the wild portraits flung themselves out there on the shore! How…
George Smith took one more step and stopped, very still.
The stranger was drawing and drawing and did not seem to sense that anyone stood immediately behind him and the world of his drawings in the sand. By now he was so deeply enchanted with his solitudinous creation that depth bombs set off in the bay might not have stopped his flying hand nor turned him round.
George Smith looked down at the sand. And after a long while, looking, he began to tremble.
For there on the flat shore were pictures of Grecian lions and Mediterranean goats and maidens with flesh of sand like powdered gold and satyrs piping on hand-carved horns and children dancing, strewing flowers along and along the beach with lambs gamboling after, and musicians skipping to their harps and lyres and unicorns racing youths toward distant meadows, woodlands, ruined temples, and volcanoes. Along the shore in a never-broken line, the hand, the wooden stylus of this man, bent down in fever and raining perspiration, scribbled, ribboned, looped around over and up, across, in, out, stitched, whispered, stayed, then hurried on as if this traveling bacchanal must flourish to its end before the sun was put out by the sea. Twenty, thirty yards or more the nymphs and dryads and summer founts sprang up in unraveled hieroglyphs. And the sand in the dying light was the color of molten copper on which was now slashed a message that any man in any time might read and savor down the years. Everything whirled and poised in its own wind and gravity. Now wine was being crushed from under the grape-blooded feet of dancing vintners’ daughters, now steaming seas gave birth to coin-sheathed monsters while flowered kites strewed scent on blowing clouds…now…now…now…
The artist stopped.
George Smith drew back and stood away.
The artist glanced up, surprised to find someone so near. Then he simply stood there, looking from George Smith to his own creations flung like idle footprints down the way. He smiled at last and shrugged as if to say, Look what I’ve done; see what a child? You will forgive me, won’t you? One day or another we are all fools…You too, perhaps? So allow an old fool this, eh? Good! Good!
But George Smith could only look at the little man with the sun-dark skin and the clear sharp eyes and say the man’s name once, in a whisper, to himself.
They stood thus for perhaps another five seconds. George Smith staring at the sand-frieze, and the artist watching George Smith with amused curiosity. George Smith opened his mouth, closed it, put out his hand, took it back. He stepped toward the pictures, stepped away. Then he moved along the line of figures, like a man viewing a precious series of marbles cast up from some ancient ruin on the shore. His eyes did not blink, his hand wanted to touch but did not dare to touch. He wanted to run but did not run.
He looked suddenly at the hotel. Run, yes! Run! What? Grab a shovel, dig, excavate, save a chunk of this all-too-crumbling sand? Find a repairman, race him back here with plaster of Paris to cast a mold of some small fragile part of these? No, no. Silly, silly. Or…? His eyes flicked to his hotel window. The camera! Run, get it, get back, and hurry along the shore, clicking, changing film, clicking, until…
George Smith whirled to face the sun. It burned faintly on his face; his eyes were two small fires from it. The sun was half underwater, and as he watched it sank the rest of the way in a matter of seconds.
The artist had drawn nearer and now was gazing into George Smith’s face with great friendliness, as if he were guessing every thought. Now he was nodding his head in a little bow. Now the ice cream stick had fallen casually from his fingers. Now he was saying good night, good night. Now he was gone, walking back down the beach toward the south.
George Smith stood looking after him. After a full minute he did the only thing he could possibly do. He started at the beginning of the fantastic frieze of satyrs and fauns and wine-dipped maidens and prancing unicorns and piping youths and he walked slowly along the shore. He walked a long way, looking down at the free-running bacchanal. And when he came to the end of the animals and men he turned around and started back in the other direction, just staring down as if he had lost something and did not quite know where to find it. He kept on doing this until there was no more light in the sky or on the sand to see by.
He sat down at the supper table.
‘You’re late,’ said his wife. ‘I just had to come down alone. I’m ravenous.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said.
‘Anything interesting happen on your walk?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said.
‘You look funny; George, you didn’t swim out too far, did you, and almost drown? I can tell by your face. You did swim out too far, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Well,’ she said, watching him closely. ‘Don’t ever do that again. Now—what’ll you have?’
He picked up the menu and started to read it and stopped suddenly.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked his wife.
He turned his head and shut his eyes for a moment.
‘Listen.’
She listened.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ she said.
‘Don’t you?’
‘No. What is it?’
‘Just the tide,’ he said after a while, sitting there, his eyes still shut. ‘Just the tide coming in.’
The Day It Rained Forever
The hotel stood like a hollowed dry bone under the very center of the desert sky where the sun burned the roof all day. All night, the memory of the sun stirred in every room like the ghost of an old forest fire. Long after dusk, since light meant heat, the hotel lights stayed off. The inhabitants of the hotel preferred to feel their way blind through the halls in their never-ending search for cool air.
This one particular evening Mr Terle, the proprietor, and his only boarders, Mr Smith and Mr Fremley, who looked and smelled like two ancient rags of cured tobacco, stayed late on the long veranda. In their creaking glockenspiel rockers they gasped back and forth in the dark, trying to rock up a wind.
‘Mr Terle…? Wouldn’t it be really nice…someday…if you could buy…air conditioning…?’
Mr Terle coasted awhile, eyes shut.
‘Got no money for such things, Mr Smith.’
The two old boarders flushed; they hadn’t paid a bill now in twentyone years.
Much later Mr Fremley sighed a grievous sigh. ‘Why, why don’t we all just quit, pick up, get outa here, move to a decent city? Stop this swelterin’ and fryin’ and sweatin’.’
‘Who’d buy a dead hotel in a ghost town?’ said Mr Terle quietly. ‘No. No, we’ll just set here and wait, wait for that great day, January 29.’
Slowly, all three men stopped rocking.
January 29.
The one day in all the year when it really let go and rained.
‘Won’t wait long.’ Mr Smith tilted his gold railroad watch like the warm summer moon in his palm. ‘Two hours and nine minutes from now it’ll be January 29. But I don’t see nary a cloud in ten thousand miles.’
‘It’s rained every January 29 since I was born!’ Mr Terle stopped, surprised at his own loud voice. ‘If it’s a day late this year, I won’t pull God’s shirttail.’
Mr Fremley swallowed hard and looked from east to west across the desert toward the hills. ‘I wonder…will there ever be a gold rush hereabouts again?’
‘No gold,’ said Mr Smith. ‘And what’s more, I’ll make you a bet—no rain. No rain tomorrow or the day after the day after tomorrow. No rain all the rest of this year.’
The three old men sat staring at the big sun-yellowed moon that burned a hole in the high stilln
ess.
After a long while, painfully, they began to rock again.
The first hot morning breezes curled the calendar pages like a dried snake skin against the flaking hotel front.
The three men, thumbing their suspenders up over their hat-rack shoulders, came barefoot downstairs to blink out at that idiot sky.
‘January 29…’
‘Not a drop of mercy there.’
‘Day’s young.’
‘I’m not.’ Mr Fremley turned and went away.
It took him five minutes to find his way up through the delirious hallways to his hot, freshly baked bed.
At noon, Mr Terle peered in.
‘Mr Fremley…?’
‘Damn desert cactus, that’s us!’ gasped Mr Fremley, lying there, his face looking as if at any moment it might fall away in a blazing dust on the raw plank floor. ‘But even the best damn cactus got to have just a sip of water before it goes back to another year of the same damn furnace. I tell you I won’t move again, I’ll lie here and die if I don’t hear more than birds pattin’ around up on that roof!’
‘Keep your prayers simple and your umbrella handy,’ said Mr Terle and tiptoed away.
At dusk, on the hollow roof a faint pattering sounded.
Mr Fremley’s voice sang out mournfully from his bed.
‘Mr Terle, that ain’t rain! That’s you with the garden hose sprinklin’ well water on the roof! Thanks for tryin’, but cut it out, now.’
The pattering sound stopped. There was a sigh from the yard below.
Coming around the side of the hotel a moment later, Mr Terle saw the calendar fly out and down in the dust.
‘Damn January 29!’ cried a voice. ‘Twelve more months! Have to wait twelve more months, now!’