He nodded slowly, saying nothing.
Then the food was on the table, warm and tremorous, and there was a moment of silence after she sat down and looked at him. She shook her head. She looked at him. Then she shook her head again silently.
‘Do you want to ask the blessing?’ she said.
‘You,’ he said.
They sat there in the warm room by the bright fire and bowed their heads and closed their eyes. She smiled and began.
‘Thank you, Lord …’
The Gift
TOMORROW would be Christmas and even while the three of them rode to the rocket port, the mother and father were worried. It was the boy’s first flight into space, his very first time in a rocket, and they wanted everything to be perfect.
So when, at the customs table, they were forced to leave behind his gift which exceeded the weight limit by no more than a few ounces and the little tree with the lovely white candles, they felt themselves deprived of the season and their love.
The boy was waiting for them in the Terminal room. Walking towards him, after their unsuccessful clash with the Interplanetary officials, the mother and father whispered to each other.
‘What shall we do?’
‘Nothing, nothing. What can we do?’
‘Silly rules!’
‘And he so wanted the tree!’
The siren gave a great howl and people pressed forward into the Mars Rocket. The mother and father walked at the very last, their small pale son between them, silent.
‘I’ll think of something,’ said the father.
‘What …?’ asked the boy.
And the rocket took off and they were flung headlong into dark space.
The rocket moved and left fire behind and left Earth behind on which the date was 24 December 2052, heading out into a place where there was no time at all, no month, no year, no hour. They slept away the rest of the first ‘day’. Near midnight, by their Earth-time New York watches, the boy awoke and said, ‘I want to go look out the porthole.’
There was only one port, a ‘window’ of immensely thick glass, of some size, up on the next deck.
‘Not quite yet,’ said the father. ‘I’ll take you up later.’
‘I want to see where we are and where we’re going.’
‘I want you to wait, for a reason,’ said the father.
He had been lying awake, turning this way and that, thinking of the abandoned gift, the problem of the season, the lost tree and the white candles. And at last, sitting up, no more than five minutes ago, he believed he had found a plan. He need only carry it out and this journey would be fine and joyous indeed.
‘Son,’ he said, ‘in exactly one half-hour it will be Christmas.’
‘Oh,’ said the mother, dismayed that he had mentioned it. Somehow she had rather hoped the boy would forget.
The boy’s face grew feverish and his lips trembled. ‘I know, I know. Will I get a present, will I? Will I have a tree? You promised –’
‘Yes, yes, all that, and more,’ said the father.
The mother started. ‘But –’
‘I mean it,’ said the father. ‘I really mean it. All and more, much more. Excuse me, now. I’ll be back.”
He left them for about twenty minutes. When he came back he was smiling. ‘Almost time.’
‘Can I hold your watch?’ asked the boy, and the watch was handed over and he held it ticking in his fingers as the rest of the hour drifted by in fire and silence and unfelt motion.
‘It’s Christmas now ! Christmas! Where’s my present?’
‘Here we go,’ said the father, and took his boy by the shoulder and led him from the room, down the hall, up a ramp-way, his wife following.
‘I don’t understand,’ she kept saying.
‘You will. Here we are,’ said the father.
They had stopped at the closed door of a large cabin. The father tapped three times and then twice, in a code. The door opened and the light in the cabin went out and there was a whisper of voices.
‘Go on in, son,’ said the father.
‘It’s dark.’
‘I’ll hold your hand. Come on, mama.’
They stepped into the room and the door shut, and the room was very dark indeed. And before them loomed a great glass eye, the porthole, a window four feet high and six feet wide, from which they could look out into space.
The boy gasped.
Behind him, the father and the mother gasped with him, and then in the dark room some people began to sing.
‘Merry Christmas, son,’ said the father.
And the voices in the room sang the old, the familiar carols, and the boy moved forward slowly until his face was pressed against the cool glass of the port. And he stood there for a long long time, just looking and looking out into space and the deep night at the burning and the burning of ten billion billion white and lovely candles….
The Little Mice
‘THEY’RE very odd,’ I said. ‘The little Mexican couple.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked my wife.
“Never a sound,’ I said. ‘Listen.’
Ours was a house deep back in among tenements, to which another half-house had been added. When my wife and I purchased the house, we rented the additional quarter which lay walled up against one side of our parlour. Now, listening at this particular wall, we heard our hearts beat.
‘I know they’re home,’ I whispered. ‘But in the three years they’ve lived here I’ve never heard a dropped pan, a spoken word, or the sound of a light switch. Good God, what are they doing in there?’
‘I’d never thought,’ said my wife. ‘It is peculiar.’
‘Only one light on, that same dim little blue 25-watt bulb they burn in the parlour. If you walk by and peer in their front door, there he is, sitting in his armchair, not saying a word, his hands in his lap. There she is, sitting in the other armchair, looking at him, saying nothing. They don’t move.’
‘At first glance I always think they’re not home,’ said my wife. ‘Their parlour’s so dark. But if you stare long enough, your eyes get used to it and you can make them out, sitting there.’
‘Some day,’ I said, ‘I’m going to run in, turn on their lights, and yell! My God, if I can’t stand their silence, how can they? They can talk, can’t they?’
‘When he pays the rent each month, he says hello.’
‘What else?’
‘Good-bye.’
I shook my head. ‘When we meet in the alley he smiles and runs.’
My wife and I sat down for an evening of reading, the radio, and talk. ‘Do they have a radio?’
‘No radio, television, telephone. Not a book, magazine, or paper in their house.’
‘Ridiculous!’
‘Don’t get so excited.’
‘I know, but you can’t sit in a dark room two or three years and not speak, not listen to a radio, not read or even eat, can you? I’ve never smelled a steak, or an egg frying. Damn it, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard them go to bed!’
‘They’re doing it to mystify us, dear.’
‘They’re succeeding!’
I went for a walk around the block. It was a nice summer evening. Returning I glanced idly in their front door. The dark silence was there, and the heavy shapes, sitting, and the little blue light burning. I stood a long time, finishing my cigarette. It was only in turning to go that I saw him in the doorway, looking out with his bland, plump face. He didn’t move. He just stood there, watching me.
‘Evening,’ I said.
Silence. After a moment, he turned, moving away into the dark room.
In the morning, the little Mexican left the house at seven o’clock alone, hurrying down the alley, observing the same silence he kept in his rooms. She followed at eight o’clock, walking carefully, all lumpy under her dark coat, a black hat balanced on her frizzy, beauty parlour hair. They had gone to work this way, remote and silent, for years.
‘Where do they work?’ I asked, at breakfast.
‘He’s a blast furnaceman at U.S. Steel here. She sews in a dress loft somewhere.’
‘That’s hard work.’
I typed a few pages of my novel, read, idled, typed some more. At five in the afternoon I saw the little Mexican woman come home, unlock her door, hurry inside, hook the screen, and lock the door tight.
He arrived at six sharp, in a rush. Once on their back porch, however, he became infinitely patient. Quietly, raking his hand over the screen, lightly, like a fat mouse scrabbling, he waited. At last she let him in. I did not see their mouths move.
Not a sound during supper time. No frying. No rattle of dishes. Nothing.
I saw the small blue lamp go on.
‘That’s how he is,’ said my wife, ‘when he pays the rent. Raps so quietly I don’t hear. I just happen to glance out of the window and there he is. God knows how long he’s waited, standing, sort of “nibbling” at the door.’
Two nights later, on a beautiful July evening the little Mexican man came out on the back porch and looked at me, working in the garden and said, ‘You’re crazy!’ He turned to my wife. ‘You’re crazy, too!’ He waved his plump hand, quietly. ‘I don’t like you. Too much noise. I don’t like you. You’re crazy.’
He went back into his little house.
August, September, October, November. The ‘mice’, as we now referred to them, lay quietly in their dark nest. Once, my wife gave him some old magazines with his rent receipt. He accepted these politely, with a smile and a bow, but no word. An hour later she saw him put the magazines in the yard incinerator and strike a match.
The next day he paid the rent three months in advance,
