“How?” she whispered.
“We’ll give you a love potion.”
“Oh, but...”
“A love potion, child, to take with you.”
“I can’t afford...”
“No money, child.”
“I don’t believe...”
“You will, child, you’ll believe, when it works.”
“I don’t want to...”
“Bother us? No bother. It’s right inside, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“I must be going.”
“Stay just a moment.” The sisters had stopped rocking altogether and were putting their hands out, like hypnotists or tight rope walkers, at her.
“It’s late.”
“You want to win him, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“All right then. Directions on the bottle. Get it, sister.” And a moment later, in and out of the house like a huge dream, the sister had gone and fetched the green bottle and it rested, glittering, on the porch railing. Alice reached up her hand in the moonlight. “I don’t know.”
“Try it,” whispered Nancy Jillet. “Try it once, is all we ask. It’s the answer to everything when you’re 18. Go on.”
“But, what’s in it...”
“Nothing, nothing at all. We’ll show you.” And from herself, as if she were bringing forth part of her bosom, Nancy Jillet drew forth a wrapped kerchief. Opening this she spread it on the rail in the moonlight, where a smell of fields and meadows arose instantly from the herbs contained therein.
“White flowers for the moon, summer-myrtle for the stars, lilacs for the rain, a red rose for the heart, a walnut for the mind, for a walnut is cased in itself like a brain, isn’t it, do you see? Some clear water from the spring well to make all run well, and a sprig of pepper-leaf to warm his blood. Alum to make his fear grow small. And a drop of white cream so that he sees your skin like a moonstone. Here they all are, in this kerchief, and here is the potion in the bottle.”
“Will it work?”
“Will it work!” cried Nancy Jillet. “What else could it do but make him follow you like a puppy all the years of your life? Who else would know better how to make a love potion than us? We’ve had since 1910, Alice Ferguson, to think back and mull over and figure out why we were never courted and never married. And it all boils down to this here, in this kerchief, a few bits and pieces, and if it’s too late for us to help ourselves, why then we’ll help you. There you are, take it.”
“Has anyone ever tried it before?”
“Oh, no child. It’s not just something you give to everyone or make and bottle all the time. We’ve done a lot of things in our life, the house is full of antimacassars we’ve knitted, framed mottos, bedspreads, stamp collections, coins, we’ve done everything, we’ve painted and sculpted and gardened by night so no one would bother us. You’ve seen our garden?”
“Yes, it’s lovely.”
“But it was only last week, one night, on my seventieth birthday, I was in the garden with Julia, and we saw you go by late, looking sad. And I turned to Julia and said, because of a man. And Julia said, if only we could help her in her love. And I was fingering a rose bush at the time and I picked a rose and said, Let’s try. So we went all around the garden picking the freshest flowers and feeling young and happy again. So there it is, Alice, rose-water to whirl his senses and mint-leaves to freshen his interest and rain-water to soften his tongue and a dash of tarragon to melt his heart. One, two, three drops and he’s yours, in soda pop, lemonade or iced-tea.”
“I DO LOVE you,” he said.
“Now I won’t need this,” she said, taking out the bottle.
“Pour a little out,” he said, “before you take it back, so it won’t hurt their feelings.”
She poured a little out.
She returned the bottle.
“DID YOU give him some?”
“Yes.”
“Good, good, just wait and see.”
“And now we’ll take some.”
“Will you? I thought it was only for men?”
“It is, dear. But just this once, tonight, we’ll take some, too. And we’ll have beautiful dreams and dream we’re young again.”
They drank from it.
In the very early morning, she awakened to the sound of a siren in the streets of the green town. Running to the window, she looked out and saw what everyone had seen a few minutes before and would remember for years afterward. Miss Nancy and Miss Julia Jillet sitting on their front porch, not moving, in the broad daylight, a thing they had never done before, their eyes closed, their hands dangling at their sides, their mouths agape strangely.
There was something about them, something that suggested sheaths from which the iron blade is gone. This, Alice Ferguson saw, and the crowd moving in, and the police, and the coroner, putting his hand up for the green bottle that glittered brightly in the sunlight, sitting on the rail.
NIGHT MEETING
IT WAS AN evening unlike any he could remember in all of his life. Very early, after the sun went down, and the air was incredibly fresh, he began to tremble, an inner, hidden trembling, of excitement, almost of waiting. He arrived at the depot amid the dispersal of buses, the routine, the pattern, the gas, acceleration, the brakes, and then he was out, in his own bus, the tremor still in him. There were no accidents, it was a clear night, little traffic, few passengers. He drove through the ocean-quiet streets, smelling the salt air and feeling that certain thing in the wind that spelled spring no matter where you were, no matter what you were doing.
He was thirty-eight or thirty-nine, the first faint recession of hair beginning on his brow, the first quilled pricklings of silver touching his temples, the first criss-crossed leather creases starting to fold the back of his neck. He rotated the driver’s wheel now this way, now that, automatically, and it was eleven at night, a sultry hour, warm, a spring night, and the trembling all through his body. He found himself looking and searching everything with his eyes, taking a special pleasure in the lemon ice neon signs and the green mint neon signs, glad to be out of his small apartment, glad of this night routine.
At the end of his first run he walked down to the edge of the sea for a cigarette and a nervous moment of looking at the phosphorescence in the water.
Looking at the ocean, he remembered a night long ago when someone explained the phosphorescence to him; millions upon billions of tiny animal lives were boiling there, seething, reproducing, bringing others like themselves into myriad life, and dying. And the glow of this love in spring caused the shoreline to burn green, and in places like red coals, along the beach as far north as San Francisco, they said, as far south as Acapulco, or Peru, who could say, who could tell?
With his cigarette finished he stood a moment more by the sea wall feeling the wind blow the smell of the old apartment house off his clothes. His hands, though he had washed them, still felt greasy from the deck of solitaire cards he had used most of the afternoon in his room.
He went back to his bus, started the motor and let it idle, humming to himself. The bus was empty, this run was an empty run through sleeping avenues. He talked and sang to himself, to spin out the hours, alone, passing through shadowed moon streets toward the hour when he could go home, fall into a lonely bed, sleep late, and start all over again tomorrow afternoon at four.
At the fourth stop he paused long enough to open all the windows on the empty bus and turn out all but a few lights. Then he let the night wind run like a summer river, sluicing through every lifted pane, making the bus roar like a blown sea-shell. And there was only moonlight to ride on, silver asphalt to float over on boulevards of milk and black-velvet shadow.
He almost went past the young woman at the seventeenth stop.
She was standing in the open, but he was so preoccupied with breathing and smiling to himself, that he ran the bus a good twenty yards beyond her and she had to run quietly to get on when he opened the door. He apologized, she dropped her
money in the silver-sounding box and sat in the seat across from him where he could see her from the corner of his eyes, and in the overhead mirror. She sat quietly, in the dim light, her hands folded upon her lap, her knees and feet together, her head up, her hair blowing.
And he was in love with her.
It was as immensely simple as that. He fell in love with this woman, very young, sitting in the seat across from him, her face pale as a milk-flower, everything about her folded and pressed and cleanly neat. Her hair was dark and blew like smoke in the wind and she sat so calmly and complacently there, not knowing she was beautiful or very young. She had used some light perfume early in the evening and the night had blown a good deal of it away, but some still remained faintly on the air. She looked very happy, as if some great news had come into her life tonight, her face shone, her eyes sparkled, and she rode, swaying gently, occasionally putting out her hand to hold when he slowed for a corner.
“I love her,” he thought, and was surprised. “It’s ridiculous, but I love her.”
He knew how her voice must be, very gentle and kind, and how she would be and act, anywhere, at any time. It was in her dark eyes and in the way her hands touched everything, with a careful consideration. And then the pale light in her face glowed out upon things, it did not burn in upon herself and feed upon herself. It nourished others. It illumined the bus. It reflected the world and himself.
“Do you know?” he thought to her image in the mirror. “I love you? Do you suspect?”
They rode in the summer streets, toward midnight.
AND THEN he knew. Inside each man, though he did not know it, nor ever considered it, was the image of the woman he someday must love. Whether she was composed of all the music he had ever heard or all the trees he had ever seen or all the friends of his childhood, certainly no one could tell. Whether the eyes were his mother’s, and the chin that of a girl cousin swimming in a summer lake twenty-five years ago, this was unknowable also. But most men carried this image, like a locket, like a pearl-cameo, in their head a lifetime, taking it out only rarely, taking it out never, after marriage, afraid then to compare it to the reality. And most men never saw the woman they would love anywhere, in the dark theatre, in a book, or passing on the street. They saw her only after midnight when the city was asleep and the pillow was cool under their heads. And she was a composite of all dreams and all women and every moonlit night since the calendar began.
“SHALL I tell you now?” he thought. “Do I dare?”
Now she had closed her eyes and leaned back to think of how this evening had been to her.
“If only you knew,” he thought, and then the panic grew in him. There were only nine more stops. Somewhere along the way she would ring the buzzer and step out into the night and be gone. Somewhere ahead he would have to cry out suddenly, or be silent,
“My name is William Becket, what’s yours? Where do you live? Can I see you again?”
Eight stops. She was shifting in her seat and watching the streets. “My name is William Becket, and I love you,” he thought.
She raised her hand to the cord.
“No,” he thought.
THE BUZZER rang. She arose as he slowed the bus toward its stop. He could come back in the morning, of course, to this stop. He could stand here and wait for her to come by, and say to her...and say to her...
His face was jerking now, a bit, up toward the mirror, down toward the avenue and the moon was very lovely in the trees. He knew he could not come here in the morning.
He stopped the bus and she was waiting at the door. Waiting for him to open it. He paused a moment and said, “I—”
She half-turned and looked at him with her beautiful face, the face that was everything he had ever thought about at night walking by the sea, in his free time.
He pressed the air-release, the door hissed open, she stepped out and was walking in the leafy moonlight.
I don’t even know her name, he thought, I never even heard her voice. He kept the door open and watched her move off down the dark street. I didn’t even see if she was married, he thought.
He closed the door and started the bus off and away, very cold now, his hands trembling on the wheel, not quite able to see where he was driving. After a moment he had to stop again and put down all the windows, there was too much draught. Half an hour later, coming back along this same street, he was rushing his bus too fast, for the avenues were empty and there was only the moon and the empty bus behind his back, and he was hurrying, hurrying, thinking to himself, if I hurry I’ll reach the sea and if I’m lucky, it all depends, there may be some phosphorescence left, and there’ll be time for a smoke and a walk before I turn the bus around and come back empty through the empty town.
THE DEATH OF SO-AND-SO
IN THE ROOM, the deaths came and went. They were on all lips, and in every eye. Coffee cake went in and down to feed the stomach that kept the lungs busy with the talk of death. Coffee was creamed in cups and sugar sweetened the spell of old mortality in the parlor room. The four people faced each other, eager with stories of who and how and why, with names, dates and figures, with conditions and fortitudes, with descriptions of agonies and midnight sweats, of sutures and fractures, of comas and trachomas.
Mrs. Hette lifted her fat well-fed hand with the coffee cake in it like the contents of a steam-shovel. She paused in the death agony of Mr. Joseph Lantry, her best friend. She widened her mouth, showed the gray gums of her false teeth, faintly rimed with a froth, and bit into that cake. Chewing, swallowing, her eyes ugly bright, she continued with each detail of Mr. Lantry’s death. He had spat blood upon the ground. He had coughed, making the noise of a chimney flue during a winter storm, vacuous and empty and horrible. He had had the red leaf of mortality across his cheeks. Her voice went up, up. Then, with his death, she fell back in her chair, shaking her head, closing her eyes, not understanding life with her usual I-don’t-understand-life voice. Raising her food to her mouth she rained clods and crumbs of earth and coffee cake down upon Mr. Lantry’s coffin.
“Poor Mr. Lantry,” said Mrs. Spaulding, across the dim room.
“Yes,” said Mr. Spaulding.
“That’s how it goes,” said Mr. Hette, stirring his black coffee.
They all waited the proper interval. A little watch ticked inside Mrs. Hette; somehow she always knew the right interval before going on with something else. You had to lay the dead out properly, with words and silences, before you went on to the next, alphabetical or not. With a shuttering of eyes and a resting of hands about your coffee plate you showed that it was a subject of much solemnity and worry to you.
Mrs. Spaulding took advantage of the pause to offer more cake to everyone.
Mr. Hette sucked his pipe. “Do you know how long since we last seen you people? Twenty years. Traveling and all. When we hit town today we didn’t think we’d find you robbers alive!” Everybody laughed; it was nice to frost death up a bit. “What’s happened in town since we left?”
“Remember Bill Samuelson? He died.”
“What of?”
“Pneumonia,” said Mr. Spaulding.
“Diphtheria,” said Mrs. Spaulding.
Mr. Spaulding looked at Mr. Hette. “Helen Ferry, Tom Foley, Henry Masterson, all them died.”
“What ever happened to—ah—Alaine Phillips?” Mr. Hette looked cautiously from the corners of his eyes, at his wife. His wife’s eyes snapped.
“Alaine Phillips?” said Mr. Spaulding. “Why, didn’t you hear? She was divorced the spring after you married Lita here, and went away to Ohio.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Hette.
Mr. Hette’s wife glared at him.
“Alaine died the next year, however,” added Mr. Spaulding.
“What!” cried Mr. Hette.
Mrs. Hette smiled over at the wall briefly, taking out her hankie to tap her nose. The hankie made it hard for Mr. Hette to see her mouth now. He sat looking at the carpet.
Now the two women took
up the brisk routine of names.
Gussie Soderstrom? Alive. Well! Berenice Holdridd? Dead. Well! Talita Martin? Dead! Really? There were gasps where ever someone had fallen away; little laughs and wonders where ever a tree still stood, leafed and healthy. Mildred Partridge! Lily Johnson? Elna Sundquist? Dead, dead, dead.
Mrs. Hette, in the person of one Sylvia Gamwell, wandered into a chain drug store, lifted pieces of poison cream pie to her mouth, went out to wait for a bus and dropped dead, necessitating an autopsy attended by Mr. Hette, and Mr. and Mrs. Spaulding. All organs were minutely examined and found to be so heavily tainted with that kind of poison from cream pies left long in the sun, that the organs gave off a phosphorescent aura, like the breath of a dragon. Mrs. Hette’s simulation of Miss Gamwell’s death agony was something that brought everybody out to the edge of the sofa.
“It sure don’t pay to eat in them chain drugs,” snapped Mrs. Hette.
“I bake my own pies,” said Mrs. Spaulding. “I’d rather die at home and take the blame!”
“Oh-ho.” Mrs. Hette put coffee in on top of her laugh. “My friend Elma made up some pickle relish at home. One day she was happy about her Wedding on Saturday, ten days later her fiancé was courting a new girl and sending flowers out to Green Lawn Interment Park.”
One of the men said, “How’s business with you, Will?”
“Good even in bad years,” said the other. “People got to smoke.”
“Why, I got sick once just from drinking water,” said Mrs. Hette. “Did you ever peek in a school microscope? In one water drop there’s a million things. Every time you turn the kitchen faucet ten billion of them things drop out in your glass.”
Now they were done with the actual deaths. The time of measurement was at hand. All of the live people in town would be weighed and found wanting. Estimates would be given as to how long before Mr. Talmadge died, Nancy Gillette died, or Eleanor Swift passed on? Those three were all so much bone dry kindling, their mouths askew with palsy, their hands cool if they touched you. They held Mr. Talmadge up, like the weight-guessing men at the carnival. “I’d say he’ll live to be—ah—live to be—well... seventy, no! seventy-five years old!” Mrs. Hette closed her eyes disdainfully. “My dear, he’ll fall downstairs one day and it’ll be like when you fling a light bulb against a wall. That’s him; brittle as that! He won’t live another six months. Neither will Nancy Gillette, I saw her today, too!”