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, making 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.
Twice a year they brought the big flapping rugs out into the yard and laid them where they looked out of place and uninhabited, on the lawn. Then Grandma and Mother came from the house with what looked to be the back rungs of those beautiful looped wire chairs downtown in the soda-fountain place. These great wire wands were handed around so they stood, Douglas, Tom, Grandma, Great-grandma, and Mother poised like a collection of witches and familiars over the duty patterns of old Armenia. Then at a signal from Great-grandma, a blink of the eyes or a gumming of the lips, the flails were raised, the harping wires banged down again and again upon the rugs.
"Take that! And that!" said Great-grandma. "Get the flies, boys, kill the cooties!"
"Oh, you!" said Grandma to her mother.
They all laughed. The dust storm puffed up about them. Their laughing became choked.
Showers of lint, tides of sand, golden
flakes of pipe tobacco fluttered, shivered on the exploded and re-exploded air. Pausing, the boys saw the tread of their shoes and the older people's shoes pressed a billion times in the warp and woof of this rug, now to be smoothed clean as the tide of their beating swept again and again along the oriental shore.
"There's where your husband spilled that coffee!" Grandma gave the rug a blow.
"Here's where you dropped the cream!" Great-grandma whacked up a great twister of dust.
"Look at the scuff marks. Boys, boys!"
"Double-Grandma, here's the ink from your pen!"
"Pshaw! Mine was purple ink. That's common blue!"
Bang!
"Look at the path worn from the hall door here to the kitchen door. Food. That's what brings the lions to the water hole. Let's shift it, put it back the other way around."
"Better yet, lock the men out of the house."
"Make them leave their shoes outside the door."
Bang, bang!
They hung the rugs on the wash line now, to finish the job. Tom looked at the intricate scrolls and loops, the flowers, the mysterious figures, the shuttling patterns.
"Tom, don't stand there. Strike, boy!"
"It's fun, seeing things," said Tom.
Douglas glanced up suspiciously. "What do you see?"
"The whole darn town, people, houses, here's our house!" Bang! "Our street!" Bang! "That black part there's the ravine!" Bang! "There's school!" Bang! "This funny cartoon here's you, Doug!" Bang! "Here's Great-grandma, Grandma, Mom." Bang! "How many years this rug been down?"
"Fifteen."
"Fifteen years of people stomping across it; I see every shoe print," gasped Tom.
"Land, boy, you got a tongue," said Great-grandma.