He took out his wallet, slowly, and peered at the money. He sighed, gazed for a long time at that flat marble-top, that unfamiliar enemy, that new bed. Then, shoulders sagging, he walked into the store, his money held loosely in his hand.
‘Maria!’ He ran up the steps two at a time. It was nine o’clock at night and he had managed to beg off in the middle of his overtime at the lumber-yard to rush home. He rushed through the open doorway smiling.
The apartment was empty.
‘Ah,’ he said disappointedly. He laid the receipt for the new bed on top of the bureau where Maria might see it when she entered. On those few evenings when he worked late she visited with any one of several neighbours downstairs.
I’ll go find her, he thought, and stopped. No. I want to tell her alone, I’ll wait. He sat on the bed. ‘Old bed,’ he said, ‘goodbye to you. I am very sorry.’ He patted the brass lions nervously. He paced the floor. Come on, Maria. He imagined her smile.
He listened for her quick running on the stair, but he heard only a slow, measured tread. He thought: That’s not my Maria, slow like that, no.
The doorknob turned.
‘Maria!’
‘You’re early!’ She smiled happily at him. Did she guess? Was it written on his face? ‘I’ve been downstairs,’ she cried, ‘telling everyone!’
‘Telling everyone?’
‘The doctor! I saw the doctor!’
‘The doctor?’ He looked bewildered. ‘And?’
‘And, Papa, and –’
‘Do you mean – Papa?’
‘Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa!’
‘Oh,’ he said, gently, ‘you walked so carefully on the stairs.’
He took hold of her, but not too tight, and he kissed her cheeks, and he shut his eyes and he yelled. Then he had to wake a few neighbours and tell them, shake them, tell them again. There had to be a little wine and a careful waltz around, an embracing, a trembling, a kissing of brow, eyelids, nose, lips, temples, ears, hair, chin – and then it was past midnight.
‘A miracle,’ he sighed.
They were alone in their room again, the air warm from the people who had been there a minute before, laughing, talking. But now they were alone again.
Turning out the light, he saw the receipt on the bureau. Stunned, he tried to decide in what subtle and delicious way to break this additional news to her.
Maria sat upon her side of the bed in the dark, hypnotized with wonder. She moved her hands as if her body was a strange doll, taken apart, and now to be put back together again, limb by limb, her motions as slow as if she lived beneath a warm sea at midnight. Now, at last, careful not to break herself, she lay back, upon the pillow.
‘Maria, I have something to tell you.’
‘Yes?’ she said faintly.
‘Now that you are as you are,’ he squeezed her hand, ‘you deserve the comfort, the rest, the beauty of a new bed.’
She did not cry out happily or turn to him or seize him. Her silence was a thinking silence.
He was forced to continue. ‘This bed is nothing but a pipe organ, a calliope.’
‘It is a bed,’ she said.
‘A herd of camels sleep under it.’
‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘from it will come precincts of honest voters, captains enough for three armies, two ballerinas, a famous lawyer, a very tall policeman, and seven basso profundos, altos, and sopranos.’
He squinted across the dimly lighted room at the receipt upon the bureau. He touched the worn mattress under him. The springs moved softly to recognize each limb, each tired muscle, each aching bone.
He sighed. ‘I never argue with you, little one.’
‘Mama,’ she said.
‘Mama,’ he said.
And then as he closed his eyes and drew the covers to his chest and lay in the darkness by the great fountain, in the sight of a jury of fierce metal lions and amber goats and smiling gargoyles, he listened. And he heard it. It was very far away at first, very tentative, but it came clearer as he listened.
Softly, her arm back over her head, Maria’s finger-tips began to tap a little dance on the gleaming harp strings, on the shimmering brass pipes of the ancient bed. The music was – yes, of course: Santa Lucia! His lips moved to it in a warm whisper. Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia!
It was very beautiful.
The Town Where No One Got Off
CROSSING the continental United States by night, by day, on the train, you flash past town after wilderness town where nobody ever gets off. Or rather, no person who doesn’t belong, no person who hasn’t roots in these country graveyards ever bothers to visit their lonely stations or attend their lonely views.
I spoke of this to a fellow-passenger, another salesman like myself, on the Chicago-Los Angeles train as we crossed Iowa.
‘True,’ he said. ‘People get off in Chicago, everyone gets off there. People get off in New York, get off in Boston, get off in L.A. People who don’t live there go there to see and come back to tell.
But what tourist ever just got off at Fox Hill, Nebraska, to look at it? You? Me? No! I don’t know anyone, got no business there, it’s no health resort, so why bother?’
‘Wouldn’t it be a fascinating change,’ I said, ‘some year to plan a really different vacation? Pick some village lost on the plains where you don’t know a soul and go there for the hell of it?’
‘You’d be bored stiff.’
‘I’m not bored, thinking of it!’ I peered out of the window. ‘What’s the next town coming up on this line?’
‘Rampart Junction.’
I smiled. ‘Sounds good. I might get off there.’
‘You’re a liar and a fool. What you want? Adventure? Romance? Go ahead, jump off the train. Ten seconds later you’ll call yourself an idiot, grab a taxi and race us to the next town.’
‘Maybe.’
I watched telephone poles flick by, flick by, flick by. Far ahead I could see the first faint outlines of a town.
‘But I don’t think so,’ I heard myself say.
The salesman across from me looked faintly surprised.
For slowly, very slowly, I was rising to stand. I reached for my hat. I saw my hand fumble for my one suitcase. I was surprised, myself.
‘Hold on!’ said the salesman. ‘What’re you doing?’
The train rounded a curve suddenly. I swayed. Far ahead, I saw one church spire, a deep forest, a field of summer wheat.
‘It looks like I’m getting off the train,’ I said.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s a something about that town up ahead. I’ve got to go see. I’ve got the time. I don’t have to be in L.A., really, until next Monday. If I don’t get off the train now, I’ll always wonder what I missed, what I let slip by when I had the chance to see it.’
‘We were just talking. There’s nothing there.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘There is.’
I put my hat on my head and lifted the suitcase in my hand.
‘By God,’ said the salesman, ‘I think you’re really going to do it.’
My heart beat quickly. My face was flushed.
The train whistled. The train rushed down the track. The town was near!
‘Wish me luck,’ I said.
‘Luck!’ he cried.
I ran for the porter, yelling.
There was an ancient flake-painted chair tilted back against the station platform wall. In this chair, completely relaxed so he sank into his clothes, was a man of some seventy years whose timbers looked as if he’d been nailed there since the station was built.
The sun had burned his face dark and tracked his cheek with lizard folds and stitches that held his eyes in a perpetual squint. His hair smoked ash-white in the summer wind. His blue shirt, open at the neck to show white clocksprings, was bleached like the staring late afternoon sky. His shoes were blistered as if he had held them, uncaring, in the mouth of a stove, motionless, for ever. His shadow under him was stencilled a permanent black.
As I stepped down, the old man’s eyes flicked every door on the train and stopped, surprised, at me.
I thought he might wave.
But there was only a sudden colouring of his secret eyes; a chemical change that was recognition. Yet he had not twitched so much as his mouth, an eyelid, a finger. An invisible bulk had shifted inside him.
The moving train gave me an excuse to follow it with my eyes. There was no one else on the platform. No autos waited by the cobwebbed, nail-shut office. I alone had departed the iron thunder to set foot on the choppy waves of platform timber.
The train whistled over the hill.
Fool! I thought. My fellow-passenger had been right. I would panic at the boredom I already sensed in this place. All right, I thought, fool, yes, but run, no!
I walked my suitcase down the platform, not looking at the old man. As I passed, I heard his thin bulk shift again, this time so I could hear it. His feet were coming down to touch and tap the mushy boards.
I kept walking.
‘Afternoon,’ a voice said, faintly.
I knew he did not look at me but only at that great cloudless spread of shimmering sky.
‘Afternoon,’ I said.
I started up the dirt road towards the town. One hundred yards away, I glanced back.
The old man, still seated there, stared at the sun, as
