A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

The girl smiled again, a white smile, in her sleep.

“A medicine,” she murmured, “for melancholy.”

She opened her eyes.

“Oh, Mother, Father!”

“Daughter! Child! Come upstairs!”

“No.” She took their hands, tenderly. “Mother? Father?”

“Yes?”

“No one will see. The sun but rises. Please. Dance with me.”

They did not want to dance.

But, celebrating they knew not what, they did.

The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit

It was summer twilight in the city, and out front of the quiet-clicking pool hall three young Mexican-American men breathed the warm air and looked around at the world. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they said nothing at all but watched the cars glide by like black panthers on the hot asphalt or saw trolleys loom up like thunderstorms, scatter lightning, and rumble away into silence.

“Hey,” sighed Martínez at last. He was the youngest, the most sweetly sad of the three. “It’s a swell night, huh? Swell.”

As he observed the world it moved very close and then drifted away and then came close again. People, brushing by, were suddenly across the street. Buildings five miles away suddenly leaned over him. But most of the time everything—people, cars, and buildings—stayed way out on the edge of the world and could not be touched. On this quiet warm summer evening Martínez’s face was cold.

“Nights like this you wish … lots of things.”

“Wishing,” said the second man, Villanazul, a man who shouted books out loud in his room but spoke only in whispers on the street. “Wishing is the useless pastime of the unemployed.”

“Unemployed?” cried Vamenos, the unshaven. “Listen to him! We got no jobs, no money!”

“So,” said Martínez, “we got no friends.”

“True.” Villanazul gazed off toward the green plaza where the palm trees swayed in the soft night wind. “Do you know what I wish? I wish to go into that plaza and speak among the businessmen who gather there nights to talk big talk. But dressed as I am, poor as I am, who would listen? So, Martínez, we have each other. The friendship of the poor is real friendship. We—”

But now a handsome young Mexican with a fine thin mustache strolled by. And on each of his careless arms hung a laughing woman.

“Madre mía!” Martínez slapped his own brow. “How does that one rate two friends?”

“It’s his nice new white summer suit.” Vamenos chewed a black thumbnail. “He looks sharp.”

Martínez leaned out to watch the three people moving away, and then at the tenement across the street, in one fourth-floor window of which, far above, a beautiful girl leaned out, her dark hair faintly stirred by the wind. She had been there forever, which was to say for six weeks. He had nodded, he had raised a hand, he had smiled, he had blinked rapidly, he had even bowed to h

er, on the street, in the hall when visiting friends, in the park, downtown. Even now, he put his hand up from his waist and moved his fingers. But all the lovely girl did was let the summer wind stir her dark hair. He did not exist. He was nothing.

“Madre mía!” He looked away and down the street where the man walked his two friends around a corner. “Oh, if I had just one suit, one! I wouldn’t need money if I looked okay.”

“I hesitate to suggest,” said Villanazul, “that you see Gómez. But he’s been talking some crazy talk for a month now about clothes. I keep on saying I’ll be in on it to make him go away. That Gómez.”

“Friend,” said a quiet voice.

“Gómez!” Everyone turned to stare.

Smiling strangely, Gómez pulled forth an endless thin yellow ribbon which fluttered and swirled on the summer air.

“Gómez,” said Martínez, “what you doing with that tape measure?”