“Suppose she’ll ever come out?”
“When you’re seventy? All I do every year is wait for the first of May. If she don’t come out on the porch that day and set up her chair, I’ll know for sure she’s dead. Then I’ll ’phone the police.”
“Good night,” said everyone, and left Mr. Widmer alone in the gray light of his grocery shop.
Mr. Widmer put on his coat and listened to the whining of the wind grow stronger. Yes, every year. And every year at this time he’d watched the old woman become more of an old woman. She was as remote as one of those barometers where the woman comes out for fair weather and the man appears for bad. But what a broken instrument, with only the woman coming out and coming out alone, and never a man at all, for bad or for better. How many thousands of July and August nights had he seen her there, beyond her moat of green grass which was as impassable as a crocodile stream? Forty years of small-town nights. How much might they weigh if put to the scale? A feather to himself, but how much to her?
Mr. Widmer was putting on his hat when he saw the man.
The man came along the street, on the other side: an old man, dim in the light of the single corner street lamp. He was looking at all the house numbers, and when he came to the corner house, number 11, he stopped and looked at the lightless windows.
“It couldn’t be,” said Mr. Widmer. He turned out the light and stood in the warm grocery smell of his shop, watching the old man through the plate glass. “Not after this much time.” He shook his head. It was much more than ridiculous, for hadn’t he felt his heart quicken at least once a day, every day, for four decades whenever he saw a man pass or pause by Miss Bidwell’s? Every man in the history of the town who so much as tied a shoelace in front of her locked house had been a source of wonder to Mr. Widmer.
“Are you the young man who ran off and left our Miss Bidwell?” he cried to himself.
Once, thirty years ago, white apron flapping, he had run across the brick street to confront a young man. “Well, so you came back!”
“What?” the young man said.
“Aren’t you Mr. Robert Farr, the one who brought her red carnations and played the guitar and sang?”
“The name’s Corley,” and the young man drew forth silk samples to display and sell.
As the years passed, Mr. Widmer had become frightened about one thing: Suppose Mr. Farr did come back some day, how was he to be recognized? In his mind, Mr. Widmer remembered the man as striding and young and very clean-faced. But forty years could peel a man away and dry his bones and tighten his flesh into a fine, acid etching. Perhaps some day Mr. Farr might return, like a hound to old trials, and, because of Mr. Widmer’s negligence, think the house locked and buried deep in another century, and go away, never the wiser. Perhaps it had happened already!
There stood the man, the old man, the unbelievable man, at nine-fifteen in the evening of the day after Labor Day in September. There was a slight bend to his knees and his back, and his face was turned to the Bidwell house.
“One last try,” said Mr. Widmer. “Sticking my nose in.”
He stepped lightly over the cool brick street and reached the farther curb. The old man turned toward him.
“’Evening,” said Mr. Widmer.
“I wonder if you could help me?” said the old man. “Is this the old Bidwell house?”
“Yes.”
“Does anyone live there?”
“Miss Ann Bidwell, she’s still there.”
“Thank you.”
“Good night.” And Mr. Widmer walked off, his heart pounding, cursing himself. Why didn’t you ask him, you idiot! Why didn’t you say, Mr. Farr? Is that you, Mr. Farr?
But he knew the answer. This time, he wanted it to be Mr. Farr. And the only way to insure that it was Mr. Farr was not to shatter the thin bubble of reality. Asking outright might have evoked an answer which would have crushed him all over again.
No, I’m not Mr. Farr; no, I’m not him. But this way, by not asking, Mr. Widmer could go to his home tonight, could lie in his upstairs bed, and, for an hour or so, could imagine, with an ancient and implausible tinge of romanticism, that at last the wandering man had come home from long trackways of traveling and long years of other cities and other worlds.
This sort of lie was the most pleasant in which to indulge. You don’t ask a dream if it is real, or you wake up. All right then, let that man—bill collector, dust-man, or whatever—for this night, at least, assume the identity of a lost person.
Mr. Widmer walked back across the street, around the side of his shop, and up the narrow, dark stairs to where his wife was already in bed, asleep.
“Suppose it is him,” he thought, in bed. “And he’s knocking on the house sides, knocking on the back door with a broom handle, tapping at the windows, calling her on the ’phone, leaving his card poked under the doors, suppose?”
He turned on his side.
“Will she answer?” he wondered. “Will she pay attention, will she do anything? Or will she just sit in her house with the fenced-in porch and no steps going up or down to the door, and let him knock and call her name?”
He turned on his other side.
“Will we see her again next May first, and not until then? And will he wait until then . . . six months of knocking and calling her name and waiting?”
He got up and went to the window. There, far away over the green lawns, at the base of the huge, black house, by the porch which had no steps, stood the old man. And was it imagination or was his voice calling, calling there under the autumn trees, at the lightless windows?
The next morning, very early, Mr. Widmer looked down at Miss Bidwell’s lawn.
It was empty. “I doubt if he was even there,” said Mr. Widmer. “I doubt I even talked to anyone but a lamp post. That apple was half cider; it turned my head.”
It was seven o’clock; Mrs. Terle and Mrs. Adams came into the cold shop for bacon and eggs and milk. Mr. Widmer edged round the subject. “Say, you didn’t see no prowlers near Miss Bidwell’s last night, did you?”
“Were there some?” cried the ladies.
“Thought I saw some.”
“I didn’t see no one,” they said.
“It was the apple,” murmured Mr. Widmer. “Pure cider.”
The door slammed, and Mr. Widmer felt his spirits slump. Only he had seen, and the seeing must have been the rusted product of too many years of trying to live out another person’s life.
The streets were empty, but the town was slowly arising to life. The sun was a reddish ball over the courthouse clock. Dew still lay on everything in a cool blanket. Dew stood in bubbles on every grass blade, on every silent red brick; dripped from the elms and the maples and the empty apple trees.
He walked slowly and carefully across the empty street and stood on Miss Bidwell’s sidewalk. Her lawns, a vast green sea of dew that had fallen in the night, lay before him. Mr. Widmer felt again the warm pounding of his heart. For there, in the dew, circling and circling the house, where they had left fine, clear impressions, was a series of endless footprints, round and round, under the windows, near the bushes, at the doors. Footprints in the crystal grass, footprints that melted as the sun rose.
The day was a slow day. Mr. Widmer kept near the front of his shop, but saw nothing. At sunset, he sat smoking under the awning. “Maybe he’s gone, maybe he’ll never come back. She didn’t answer. I know her. She’s proud and old. The older the prouder, that’s what they say. Maybe he’s gone off on the train again. Why didn’t I ask him his name? Why didn’t I pound on the doors with him!”
But the fact remained that he hadn’t asked and he hadn’t pounded, and he felt himself the nucleus of a tragedy that was beginning to grow far beyond him.
“He won’t come back. Not after all night walking round. He must have left just before dawn. Footsteps still fresh.”
Eight o’clock. Eight-thirty. Nothing. Nine o’clock. Nine-thirty. Nothing. Mr. Widmer stayed open until quite late, even though there were no customers.
It was after eleven when he sat by the upstairs window of his home, not watching exactly, but not going to bed either.
At eleven-thirty, the clock struck softly, and the old man came along the street and stood before the house.
“Of course!” said Mr. Widmer to himself. “He’s afraid someone will see him. He slept all day somewhere and waited. Afraid of what people might say. Look at him there, going round and round.”
He listened. There was the calling again. Like the last cricket of the year, like the last rustle of the last oak leaf of the season. At the front door, at the back, at the bay windows. Oh, there would be a million slow footprints in the meadow lawn tomorrow when the sun rose.
Was she listening?
“Ann, Ann, oh, Ann!” was that what he called? “Ann, can you hear me, Ann?”—was that what you called when you came back very late in the day?
And then,
