Summer Morning, Summer Night (Green Town 4)

They flew apart, rid of each other at last.

NOT HALF a block away, passing a dress shop, Mr. Alexander saw a mannequin in a window, and froze. There, ah, there! The sunlight warmed her pink cheeks, her berry-stained lips, her blue-lacquer eyes, her yellow-yarn hair. He stood at the window for an entire minute, until a live woman appeared suddenly, arranging the displays. When she glanced up, there was Mr. Alexander, smiling like a youthful idiot. She smiled back.

What a day! he thought. I could punch a hole in a plank door. I could throw a cat over the court house! Get out of the way, old man! Wait! Was that a mirror? Never mind. Good God! I’m really alive!

Mr. Alexander was inside the shop.

“I want to buy something!” he said.

“What?” asked the beautiful saleslady.

He glanced foolishly about. “Why, let me have a scarf. That’s it, a scarf.”

> He blinked at the numerous scarves she brought, smiling at him so his heart roared and tilted like a gyroscope, throwing the world out of balance. “Pick the scarf you’d wear, yourself. That’s the scarf for me.”

She chose a scarf the color of her eyes.

“Is it for your wife?”

He handed her a five dollar bill. “Put the scarf on.” She obeyed. He tried to imagine Elma’s head sticking out above it; failed. “Keep it,” he said, “it’s yours.” He drifted out the sunlit door, his veins singing.

“Sir,” she called, but he was gone.

WHAT MRS. Alexander wanted most was shoes, and after leaving her husband she entered the very first shoe-shop. But not, however, before she dropped a penny in a perfume machine and pumped great vaporous founts of verbena upon her sparrow chest. Then, with the spray clinging round her like morning mist, she plunged into the shoe store, where a fine young man with doe-brown eyes and black-arched brows and hair the sheen of patent leather pinched her ankles, feathered her in-step, caressed her toes and so entertained her feet that they blushed a soft warm pink.

“Madame has the smallest foot I’ve fitted this year. Extraordinarily small.”

Mrs. Alexander was a great heart seated there, beating so loudly that the salesman had to shout over the sound:

“If madam will push down!”

“Would the lady like another color?”

He shook her left hand as she departed with three pairs of shoes, giving her fingers what seemed to be a meaningful appraisal. She laughed a strange laugh, forgetting to say she had not worn her wedding band, her fingers had puffed with illness so many years that the ring now lay in dust. On the street, she confronted the verbena squirting machine, another copper penny in her hand.

MR. ALEXANDER strode with great bouncing strides up and down streets, doing a little jig of delight on meeting certain people, stopping at last, faintly tired, but not admitting it to anyone, before the United Cigar store. There, as if seven hundred odd noons had not vanished, stood Mr. Bleak, Mr. Grey, Samuel Spaulding and the Wooden Indian. They seized and punched Mr. Alexander in disbelief.

“Alex, you’re back from the dead!”

“Coming to the Lodge tonight?”

“Sure!”

“Oddfellows meet tomorrow night?”

“I’ll be there!” Invitations blew about him in a warm wind. “Old friends, I’ve missed you!” He wanted to grab everyone, even the Indian. They lit his free cigar and bought him foamy beers next door in the jungle color of green-felt pool tables.

“One week from tonight,” cried Mr. Alexander, “open house. My wife and I invite you all, good friends. Barbeque! Drinks and fun!”

Spaulding crushed his hand. “Will your wife mind about tonight?”

“Not Elma.”

“Fine!”

And Mr. Alexander was off like a ball of Spanish moss blown on the wind.

AFTER SHE left the store Mrs. Alexander was discovered in the streets of the town by a sea of women. She was the center of a bargain sale, ladies clustering in twos and threes, everyone talking, laughing, offering, accepting, at once.