‘And, Papa, and –’
‘Do you mean – Papa?’
‘Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa!’
‘Oh,’ he said, gently, ‘you walked so carefully on the stairs.’
He took hold of her, but not too tight, and he kissed her cheeks, and he shut his eyes and he yelled. Then he had to wake a few neighbours and tell them, shake them, tell them again. There had to be a little wine and a careful waltz around, an embracing, a trembling, a kissing of brow, eyelids, nose, lips, temples, ears, hair, chin – and then it was past midnight.
‘A miracle,’ he sighed.
They were alone in their room again, the air warm from the people who had been there a minute before, laughing, talking. But now they were alone again.
Turning out the light, he saw the receipt on the bureau. Stunned, he tried to decide in what subtle and delicious way to break this additional news to her.
Maria sat upon her side of the bed in the dark, hypnotized with wonder. She moved her hands as if her body was a strange doll, taken apart, and now to be put back together again, limb by limb, her motions as slow as if she lived beneath a warm sea at midnight. Now, at last, careful not to break herself, she lay back, upon the pillow.
‘Maria, I have something to tell you.’
‘Yes?’ she said faintly.
‘Now that you are as you are,’ he squeezed her hand, ‘you deserve the comfort, the rest, the beauty of a new bed.’
She did not cry out happily or turn to him or seize him. Her silence was a thinking silence.
He was forced to continue. ‘This bed is nothing but a pipe organ, a calliope.’
‘It is a bed,’ she said.
‘A herd of camels sleep under it.’
‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘from it will come precincts of honest voters, captains enough for three armies, two ballerinas, a famous lawyer, a very tall policeman, and seven basso profundos, altos, and sopranos.’
He squinted across the dimly lighted room at the receipt upon the bureau. He touched the worn mattress under him. The springs moved softly to recognize each limb, each tired muscle, each aching bone.
He sighed. ‘I never argue with you, little one.’
‘Mama,’ she said.
‘Mama,’ he said.
And then as he closed his eyes and drew the covers to his chest and lay in the darkness by the great fountain, in the sight of a jury of fierce metal lions and amber goats and smiling gargoyles, he listened. And he heard it. It was very far away at first, very tentative, but it came clearer as he listened.
Softly, her arm back over her head, Maria’s finger-tips began to tap a little dance on the gleaming harp strings, on the shimmering brass pipes of the ancient bed. The music was – yes, of course: Santa Lucia! His lips moved to it in a warm whisper. Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia!
It was very beautiful.
The Town Where No
One Got Off
CROSSING the continental United States by night, by day, on the train, you flash past town after wilderness town where nobody ever gets off. Or rather, no person who doesn’t belong, no person who hasn’t roots in these country graveyards ever bothers to visit their lonely stations or attend their lonely views.
I spoke of this to a fellow-passenger, another salesman like myself, on the Chicago-Los Angeles train as we crossed Iowa.
‘True,’ he said. ‘People get off in Chicago, everyone gets off there. People get off in New York, get off in Boston, get off in L.A. People who don’t live there go there to see and come back to tell. But what tourist ever just got off at Fox Hill, Nebraska, to look at it? You? Me? No! I don’t know anyone, got no business there, it’s no health resort, so why bother?’
‘Wouldn’t it be a fascinating change,’ I said, ‘some year to plan a really different vacation? Pick some village lost on the plains where you don’t know a soul and go there for the hell of it?’