Some Live Like Lazarus, Ray Bradbury

Some Live Like Lazarus

You won’t believe it when I tell you I waited more than sixty years for a murder, hoped as only a woman can hope that it might happen, and didn’t move a finger to stop it when it finally drew near. Anna Marie, I thought, you can’t stand guard forever. Murder, when ten thousand days have passed, is more than a surprise, it is a miracle.

“Hold on!” Don’t let me fall!”

Mrs. Harrison’s voice.

Did I ever, in half a century, hear it whisper? Was it always screaming, shrieking, demanding, threatening?

Yes, always.

“Come along, Mother. There you are, Mother.” Her son Roger’s voice. Did I ever in all the years hear it rise above a murmur, protest, or, even faintly birdlike, argue?

No. Always the loving monotone.

This morning, no different than any other of their first mornings, they arrived in their great black hearse for their annual Green Bay summer. There he was, thrusting his hand in to hoist the window dummy after him, an ancient sachet of bones and talcum dust that was named, surely for some terrible practical joke, Mother.

“Easy does it, Mother.”

“You’re bruising my arm!”

“Sorry, Mother.”

I watched from a window of the lake pavilion as he trundled her off down the path in her wheel chair, she pushing her cane like a musket ahead to blast any Fates or Furies they might meet out of the way.

“Careful, don’t run me into the flowers, thank God we’d sense not to go to Paris after all. You’d’ve had me in that nasty traffic. You’re not disappointed?”

“No, Mother.”

“We’ll see Paris next year.”

Next year . . .next year . . . no year at all, I heard someone murmur.

Myself, gripping the window sill. For almost seventy years I had heard her promise this to the boy, boy-man, man, man-grasshopper and the now livid male praying mantis that he was, pushing his eternally cold and fur-wrapped woman past the hotel verandas where, in another age, paper fans had Buttered like Oriental butterflies in the hands of basking ladies.

“There, Mother, inside the cottage..” His faint voice fading still more, forever young when he was old, forever old when he was very young.

How old is she now? I wondered. Ninety eight, yes, ninety eight wicked years old. She seemed like a horror film repeated each year bemuse the hotel entertainment fund could not afford to buy a new one to run in the moth-flaked evenings.

So, through all the repetitions of arrivals and departures, my mind ran back to when the foundations of the Green Bay Hotel were freshly poured and the parasols were new leaf green and lemon Sold, that summer of 1890 when I first saw Roger, who was five, but whose eyes already were old and wise and tired.

He stood on the pavilion grass looking at the sun and the bright pennants as I came up to him.

“Hello,” I said.

He simply looked at me.

I hesitated, tagged him and ran.

He did not move. I came back and tagged him again.

He looked at the place where I had touched him, on the shoulder, and was about to run after me when her voice came from a distance.

“Roger, don’t dirty your clothes!”

And he walked slowly away toward his cottage, not looking back.

That was the day I started to hate him.

Parasols have come and gone in a thousand summer colors, whole flights of butterfly fans have blown away on August winds, the pavilion has burned and been built again in the selfsame size and shape, the lake has dried like a plum in its basin, and my hatred, like these things, came and went, grew very large, stopped still for love, returned, then diminished with the years.

I remember when he was seven, them driving by in their horse carriage, his hair long, brushing his loutish shoulders. They were holding hands and she was saying, “If you’re very good this summer, next year we’ll go to London. Or the year after that, at the latest.”

And my watching their faces, comparing their eyes, their ears, their mouths, so when he came in for a soda pop one noon that summer I walked straight up to him and cried, “She’s not your mother!”

“What!” He looked around in panic, as if she might be near.

“She’s not your aunt or your grandma, either!” I cried. “She’s a witch that stole you when you were a baby. You don’t know who your mama is or your pa. You don’t look anything like her. She’s holding you for a million ransom which comes due when you’re twenty-one from some duke or king!”

“Don’t say that!” he shouted, jumping up.

“Why not?” I said angrily. “Why do you come around here? You can’t play this, can’t play that, can’t do nothing, what good are you? She says, she does. I know her! She hangs upside down from the ceiling in her black clothes in her bedroom at midnight!”

“Don’t say that!” His face was frightened and pale.

“Why not say it?”

“Because,” he bleated, “it’s true.”

And he was out the door and running.

I didn’t see him again until the next summer. And then only once, briefly, when I took some clean linen down to their cottage.

The summer when we were both twelve was the summer that for a time I didn’t hate him.

He called my name outside the pavilion screen door and when I looked out he said, very quietly, “Anna Marie, when I am twenty and you are twenty, I’m going to marry you.”

“Who’s going to let you?” I asked.

“I’m going to let you,” he said. “You just remember, Ann-Marie. You wait for me. Promise?”

I could only nod.

“But what about–“

“She’ll be dead by then,” he said, very gravely. “She’s old. She’s old.”

And then he turned and went away.

The next summer they did not come to the resort at all. I heard she was sick. I prayed every night that she would die.

But two years later they were back, and the year after the year after that until Roger was nineteen and I was nineteen, and then at last we had reached and touched twenty, and for one of the few times in all the years, they came into the pavilion together, she in her wheel chair now, deeper in her furs than ever before, her face a gathering of white dust and folded parchment.

She eyed me as I set her ice-cream sundae down before her, and eyed Roger as he said, “Mother, I want you to meet-“

“I do not meet girls who wait on public tables,” she said. “I acknowledge they exist, work, and are paid. I immediately forget their names.”

She touched and nibbled her ice cream, touched and nibbled her ice cream, while Roger sat not touching his at all.

They left a day earlier than usual that year. I saw Roger as he paid the bill, in the hotel lobby. He shook my hand to say goodbye and I could not help but say, “You’ve forgotten.”

He took a half step back, then turned around, patting his coat pockets.

“Luggage, bills paid, wallet, no, I seem to have everything,” he said.

“A long time ago,” I said, “you made a promise.”

He was silent.

“Roger,” I said, “I’m twenty now. And so are you.”

He seized my hand again, swiftly, as if he were falling over the side of a ship and it was me going away, leaving him to drown forever beyond help.

“One more year, Anna! Two, three, at the most”

“Oh, no,” I said, forlornly.

“Four years at the outside! The doctors say—–“

“The doctors don’t know what I know, Roger. She’ll live forever. She’ll bury you and me and drink wine at our funeral.”

“She’s a sick woman, Anna! My God, she can’t survive!”

“She will, because we give her strength. She knows we want her dead. That really gives her the power to go on.”

“I can’t talk this way, I can’t!” Seizing his luggage, he started down the hall.

“I won’t wait, Roger,” I said.

He turned at the door and looked at me so helplessly, so palely, like a moth pinned to the wall, that I could not say it again.

The door slammed shut.

The summer was over.

The next year Roger came directly to the soda fountain, where he said, “Is it true? Who is
he?”

“Paul,” I said. “You know Paul. He’ll manage the hotel someday. We’ll marry this fall.”

“That doesn’t give me much time,” said Roger.

“It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve already promised.”

“Promised, hell! You don’t love him!”

“I think I do.”

“Think, hell! Thinking’s one thing, knowing’s another. You know you love me!”

“Do I, Roger?”

“Stop relishing the damn business so much! You know you do!” Oh, Anna, you’ll be miserable!”

“I’m miserable now,” I said.

“Oh, Anna, Anna, wait!”

“I have waited, most of my life. But I know what will happen.”

“Anna!” He blurted it out as if it had come to him suddenly. “What if-what if she died this summer?”

“She won’t.”

“But if she did, if she took a turn for the worse, I mean, in the next two months–” He searched my face. He shortened it. “The next month, Anna, two weeks, listen, if she died in two short weeks, would you wait that long, would you marry me then?”

I began to cry. “Oh, Roger, we’ve never even kissed. This is ridiculous.”

“Answer me, if she died one week, seven days from now…” He grabbed my arms.

“But how can you be sure?”

“I’ll make myself sure! I swear she’ll be dead a week from now, or I’ll never bother you again with this!”

And he flung the screen doors wide, hurrying off into the day that was suddenly too bright.

“Roger, don’t—“, I cried.

But my mind thought, Roger, do, do something, anything, to