That was the photograph; that was the way he knew her. Now he was talking again, after the remembering and the thinking over and the holding of the picture in his mind. “When I first saw that picture—it was a simple, straightforward picture with a simple hairdo—I didn’t know it had been taken that long ago.
The item in the paper said something about Helen Loomis marshaling the Town Ball that night. I tore the picture from the paper. I carried it with me all that day. I intended going to the ball. Then, late in the afternoon, someone saw me looking at the picture, and told me about it. How the picture of the beautiful girl had been taken so long ago and used every year since by the paper. And they said I shouldn’t go to the Town Ball that night, carrying that picture and looking for you.”
They sat in the garden for a long minute. He glanced over at her face. She was looking at the farthest garden wall and the pink roses climbing there. There was no way to tell what she was thinking. Her face showed nothing. She rocked for a little while in her chair and then said softly, “Shall we have some more tea? There you are.”
They sat sipping the tea. Then she reached over and patted his arm. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For wanting to come to find me at the dance, for clipping out my picture, for everything. Thank you so very much.”
They walked about the garden on the paths.
“And now,” she said, “it’s my turn. Do you remember, I mentioned a certain young man who once attended me, seventy years ago? Oh, he’s been dead fifty years now, at least, but when he was very young and very handsome he rode a fast horse off for days, or on summer nights over the meadows around town. He had a healthy, wild face, always sunburned, his hands were always cut and he fumed like a stovepipe and walked as if he were going to fly apart; wouldn’t keep a job, quit those he had when he felt like it, and one day he sort of rode off away from me because I was even wilder than he and wouldn’t settle down, and that was that.
I never thought the day would come when I would see him alive again. But you’re pretty much alive, you spill ashes around like he did, you’re clumsy and graceful combined, I know everything you’re going to do before you do it, but after you’ve done it I’m always surprised. Reincarnation’s a lot of milk-mush to me, but the other day I felt, What if I called Robert, Robert, to you on the street, would William Forrester turn around?”
“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
