The attic was quiet as a thundercloud before a storm. On occasion, Cora Finch heard her husband murmuring, murmuring, high up there.
At five in the afternoon, singing My Isle of Golden Dreams, Mr Finch flipped a crisp new straw hat in the kitchen door. ‘Boo!’
‘Did you sleep all afternoon?’ snapped his wife. ‘I called up at you four times and no answer.’
‘Sleep?’ He considered this and laughed, then put his hand quickly over his mouth. ‘Well, I guess I did.’
Suddenly she saw him. ‘My God!’ she cried, ‘where’d you get that coat?’
He wore a red candy-striped coat, a high white, choking collar, and ice-cream pants. You could smell the straw hat like a handful of fresh hay fanned in the air.
‘Found ’em in an old trunk.’
She sniffed. ‘Don’t smell of mothballs. Look brand-new.’
‘Oh, no!’ he said hastily. He looked stiff and uncomfortable as she eyed his costume.
‘This isn’t a summer stock company,’ she said.
‘Can’t a fellow have a little fun?’
‘That’s all you’ve ever had,’ she slammed the oven door. ‘While I’ve stayed home and knitted, Lord knows, you’ve been down at the store helping ladies’ elbows in and out doors.’
He refused to be bothered. ‘Cora.’ He looked deep into the crackling straw hat. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress whishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlour and smell the drug store the way they used to smell? Why don’t drug stores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan’s Pier for a box-supper and listen to the brass band. How about it?’
‘Supper’s ready. Take that dreadful uniform off.’
‘If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-laned country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?’ he insisted, watching her.
‘Those old roads were dirty. We came home looking like Africans. Anyway,’ she picked up a sugar-jar and shook it, ‘this morning I had forty dollars here. Now it’s gone! Don’t tell me you ordered those clothes from a costume house. They’re brand-new, they didn’t come from any trunk!’
‘I’m –’ he said.
She raved for half an hour, but he could not bring himself to say anything. The November wind shook the house and as she talked, the snows of winter began to fall again in the cold steel sky.
‘Answer me!’ she cried. ‘Are you crazy, spending our money that way, on clothes you can’t wear?’
‘The attic,’ he started to say.
She walked off and sat in the living-room.
The snow was falling fast now and it was a cold dark November evening. She heard him climb up the step ladder, slowly, into the attic, into that dusty place of other years, into that black place of costumes and props and Time, into a world separate from this world below.
He closed the trap door down. The flashlight, snapped on, was company enough. Yes, here was all of Time compressed in a Japanese paper flower. At the touch of memory, everything would unfold into the clear water of the mind, in beautiful blooms, in spring breezes, larger than life. Each of the bureau drawers, slid forth, might contain aunts and cousins and grand-mamas, ermined in dust. Yes, Time was here. You could feel it breathing, an atmospheric instead of a mechanical clock.
Now the house below was as remote as another day in the past. He half-shut his eyes and looked and looked on every side of the waiting attic.
Here, in prismed chandelier, were rainbows and mornings and noons as bright as new rivers flowing endlessly back through time. His flashlight caught and flickered them alive, the rainbows leapt up to curve the shadows back with colours, with colours like plums and raspberries and concord grapes, with colours like cut lemons and the sky where the clouds drew off after storming and the blue was there. And the dust of the attic was incense burning and all of time burning, and all you need do was peer into the flames. It was indeed a great machine of Time, this attic, he knew, he felt, he was sure, and if you touched prisms here, doorknobs there, plucked tassels, chimed crystals, swirled dust, punched trunk-hasps, and gusted the vox-humana of the old hearth-bellows until it puffed the soot of a thousand ancient fires into your eyes, if, indeed, you played this instrument, this warm machine of parts, if you fondled all of its bits and pieces, its levers and changers and movers, then, then, then !
He thrust out his hands to orchestrate, to conduct, to flourish. There was music in his head, in his mouth shut tight, and he played the great machine, the thunderously silent organ, bass, tenor, soprano, low, high, and at last, at last, a chord that shuddered him so that he had to shut his eyes.
About nine o’clock that night she heard him calling, ‘Cora!’ She went upstairs. His head peered down at her from above, smiling at her. He waved his hat. ‘Good-bye, Cora.’
‘What do you mean?’ she cried.
‘I’ve thought it over for three days and I’m saying good-bye.’
‘Come down out of there, you fool!’