Very late in the day all the books, dishes, clothes, linens had been stacked one here, one there, four here, four there, ten here, ten there. Lena Auffmann, dizzy with counting, had to sit down. ‘All right,’ she gasped. ‘Before I go, Leo, prove you don’t give nightmares to innocent sons!’
Silently Leo Auffmann led his wife into the twilight. She stood before the eight-foot-tall, orange-colored box.
‘That’s happiness?’ she said. ‘Which button do I press to be overjoyed, grateful, contented, and much obliged?’
The children had gathered now.
‘Mama,’ said Saul, ‘don’t!’
‘I got to know what I’m yelling about, Saul.’ She got in the machine, sat down, and looked out at her husband, shaking her head. ‘It’s not me needs this, it’s you, a nervous wreck, shouting.’
‘Please,’ he said, ‘you’ll see!’
He shut the door.
‘Press the button!’ he shouted in at his unseen wife.
There was a click. The machine shivered quietly, like a huge dog dreaming in its sleep.
‘Papa!’ said Saul, worried.
‘Listen!’ said Leo Auffmann.
At first there was nothing but the tremor of the machine’s own secretly moving cogs and wheels.
‘Is Mama all right?’ asked Naomi.
‘All right? She’s fine! There, now…there!’
And inside the machine Lena Auffmann could be heard saying, ‘Oh!’ and then again, ‘Ah!’ in a startled voice. ‘Look at that!’ said his hidden wife. ‘Paris!’ and later, ‘London! There goes Rome! The Pyramids! The Sphinx!’
‘The Sphinx, you hear, children?’ Leo Auffmann whispered and laughed.
‘Perfume!’ cried Lena Auffmann, surprised.
Somewhere a phonograph played ‘The Blue Danube’ faintly.
‘Music! I’m dancing!’
‘Only thinks she’s dancing,’ the father confided to the world.
‘Amazing!’ said the unseen woman.
Leo Auffmann blushed. ‘What an understanding wife.’
And then inside the Happiness Machine, Lena Auffmann began to weep.
The inventor’s smile faded.
‘She’s crying,’ said Naomi.
‘She can’t be!’
‘She is,’ said Saul.
‘She simply can’t be crying!’ Leo Auffmann, blinking, pressed his ear to the machine. ‘But…yes…like a baby…’
He could only open the door.
‘Wait.’ There his wife sat, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘Let me finish.’ She cried some more.
Leo Auffmann turned off the machine, stunned.
‘Oh, it’s the saddest thing in the world!’ she wailed. ‘I feel awful, terrible.’ She climbed out through the door. ‘First, there was Paris…’
‘What’s wrong with Paris?’
‘I never even thought of being in Paris in my life. But now you got me thinking: Paris! So suddenly I want to be in Paris and I know I’m not!’
‘It’s almost as good, this machine.’
‘No. Sitting in there, I knew. I thought, It’s not real!’
‘Stop crying, Mama.’
She looked at him with great dark wet eyes. ‘You had me dancing. We haven’t danced in twenty years.’
‘I’ll take you dancing tomorrow night!’
‘No, no! It’s not important, it shouldn’t be important. But your machine says it’s important! So I believe! It’ll be all right, Leo, after I cry some more.’
‘What else?’
‘What else? The machine says, “You’re young.” I’m not. It lies, that Sadness Machine!’
‘Sad in what way?’
His wife was quieter now. ‘Leo, the mistake you made is you forgot some hour, some day, we all got to climb out of that thing and go back to dirty dishes and the beds not made. While you’re in that thing, sure, a sunset lasts forever almost, the air smells good, the temperature is fine.
All the things you want to last, last. But outside, the children wait on lunch, the clothes need buttons. And then let’s be frank, Leo, how long can you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last?
Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after a while, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, let’s have something else. People are like that, Leo. How could you forget?’
‘Did I?’
‘Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away.’
‘But Lena, that’s sad.’
‘No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness. So two things you did you should never have. You made quick things go slow and stay around. You brought things faraway to our back yard where they don’t belong, where they just tell you, “No, you’ll never travel, Lena Auffmann, Paris you’ll never see!
Rome you’ll never visit.” But I always knew that, so why tell me? Better to forget and make do, Leo, make do, eh?’
Leo Auffmann leaned against the machine for support. He snatched his burned hand away, surprised.
‘So now what, Lena?’ he said.
‘It’s not for me to say. I know only so long as this thing is here I’ll want to come out, or Saul will want to come out like he did last night, and against our judgment sit in it and look at all those places so faraway and every time we will cry and be no fit family for you.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘how I could be so wrong. Just let me check to see what you say is true.’ He sat down inside the machine. ‘You won’t go away?’
His wife nodded. ‘We’ll wait, Leo.’
He shut the door. In the warm darkness he hesitated, pressed the button, and was just relaxing back in color and music, when he heard someone screaming.
‘Fire, Papa! The machine’s on fire!’
Someone hammered the door. He leaped up, bumped his head, and fell as the door gave way and the boys dragged him out. Behind him he heard a muffled explosion. The entire family was running now. Leo Auffmann turned and gasped, ‘Saul, call the fire department!’
Lena Auffmann caught Saul as he ran, ‘Saul,’ she said. ‘Wait.’
There was a gush of flame, another muffled explosion. When the machine was burning very well indeed, Lena Auffmann nodded.
‘All right, Saul,’ she said. ‘Run call the fire department.’
Everybody who was anybody came to the fire. There was Grandpa Spaulding and Douglas and Tom and most of the boarders and some of the old men from across the ravine and all the children from six blocks around. And Leo Auffmann’s children stood out front, proud of how fine the flames looked jumping from the garage roof.
Grandfather Spaulding studied the smoke ball in the sky and said, quietly, ‘Leo, was that it? Your Happiness Machine?’
‘Some year,’ said Leo Auffmann, ‘I’ll figure it and tell you.’
Lena Auffmann, standing in the dark now, watched as the firemen ran in and out of the yard; the garage, roaring, settled upon itself.
‘Leo,’ she said, ‘it won’t take a year to figure. Look around. Think. Keep quiet a little bit. Then come tell me. I’ll be in the house, putting books back on shelves, and clothes back in closets, fixing supper, supper’s late, look how dark. Come, children, help Mama.’
When the firemen and the neighbors were gone, Leo Auffmann was left with Grandfather Spaulding and Douglas and Tom, brooding over the smoldering ruin. He stirred his foot in the wet ashes and slowly said what he had to say.
‘The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool. In one hour, I’ve done a lot of thinking. I thought, Leo Auffmann is blind!
…You want to see the real Happiness Machine? The one they patented a couple thousand years ago, it still runs, not good all the time, no! but it runs. It’s been here all along.’
‘But the fire—’ said Douglas.
‘Sure, the fire, the garage! But like Lena said, it don’t take a year to figure; what hurned in the garage don’t count!’
They followed him up the front-porch steps.
‘Here,’ whispered Leo Auffmann, ‘the front window. Quiet, and you’ll see it.’
Hesitantly, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom peered through the large windowpane.
And there, in small warm pools of lamplight, you could see what Leo Auffmann wanted you to see. There sat Saul and Marshall, playing chess at the coffee table. In the dining room Rebecca was laying out the silver. Naomi was cutting paper-doll dresses. Ruth was painting water colors.
Joseph was running his electric train. Through the kitchen door, Lena Auffmann was sliding a pot roast from the steaming oven. Every hand, every head, every mouth made a big or little motion. You could hear their faraway voices under glass.
You could hear someone singing in a high sweet voice. You could smell bread baking, too, and you knew it was real bread that would soon be covered with real butter. Everything was there and it was working.
Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom turned to look at Leo Auffmann, who gazed serenely through the window, the pink light on his cheeks.
‘Sure,’ he murmured. ‘There it is.’ And he watched with now-gentle sorrow and now-quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance, as all the bits and pieces of this house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily again. ‘The Happiness Machine,’ he said. ‘The Happiness Machine.’
A moment later he was gone.
Inside, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom saw him tinkering, make a minor adjustment here, eliminate friction there, busy among all those warm, wonderful, infinitely delicate, forever mysterious, and ever-moving parts.
Then smiling, they went down the steps into the fresh summer night.
The end
