Aunt Rose’s jaw had clamped at that. “After all these years for us to be bodily thrown out, why I—”
“You won’t be thrown out, don’t be idiotic,” said Greppin, furiously.
“Now, Rose—” said Uncle Dimity in a pale tone.
Aunt Rose dropped her hands. “After all I’ve done—”
In that instant Greppin had known they would have to go, all of them. First he would make them silent, then he would make them smile, then, later, he would move them out like luggage. He couldn’t bring Alice Jane into a house full of grims such as these, where Aunt Rose followed you wherever you went even when she wasn’t following you, and the children performed indignities upon you at a glance from their maternal parent, and the father, no better than a third child, carefully rearranged his advice to you on being a bachelor. Greppin stared at them. It was their fault that his loving and living was all wrong. If he did something about them—then his warm bright dreams of soft bodies glowing with an anxious perspiration of love might become tangible and near. Then he would have the house all to himself and—and Alice Jane. Yes, Alice Jane.
They would have to go. Quickly. If he told them to go, as he had often done, twenty years might pass as Aunt Rose gathered sunbleached sachets and Edison phonographs. Long before then Alice Jane herself would be moved and gone.
Greppin looked at them as he picked up the carving knife.
* * *
Greppin’s head snapped with tiredness.
He flicked his eyes open. Eh? Oh, he had been drowsing, thinking.
All that had occurred two weeks ago. Two weeks ago this very night that conversation about marriage, moving, Alice Jane, had come about. Two weeks ago it had been. Two weeks ago he had made them smile.
Now, recovering from his reverie, he smiled around at the silent and motionless figures. They smiled back in peculiarly pleasing fashion.
“I hate you, old woman,” he said to Aunt Rose, directly. “Two weeks ago I wouldn’t have dared say that. Tonight, ah, well—” he lazed his voice, turning. “Uncle Dimity, let me give you a little advice, old man—”
He talked small talk, picked up a spoon, pretended to eat peaches from an empty dish. He had already eaten downtown in a tray cafeteria; pork, potatoes, apple pie, string beans, beets, potato salad. But now he made dessert-eating motions because he enjoyed this little act. He made as if he were chewing.
“So—tonight you are finally, once and for all, moving out. I’ve waited two weeks, thinking it all over. In a way I guess I’ve kept you here this long because I wanted to keep an eye on you. Once you’re gone, I can’t be sure—” And here his eyes gleamed with fear. “You might come prowling around, making noises at night, and I couldn’t stand that. I can’t ever have noises in this house, not even when Alice moves in.…”
The double carpet was thick and soundless underfoot, reassuring.
“Alice wants to move in day after tomorrow. We’re getting married.”
Aunt Rose winked evilly, doubtfully at him.
“Ah!” he cried, leaping up, then, staring, he sank down, mouth convulsing. He released the tension in him, laughing. “Oh, I see. It was a fly.” He watched the fly crawl with slow precision on the ivory cheek of Aunt Rose and dart away. Why did it have to pick that instant to make her eye appear to blink, to doubt. “Do you doubt I ever will marry, Aunt Rose? Do you think me incapable of marriage, of love and love’s duties? Do you think me immature, unable to cope with a woman and her ways of living? Do you think me a child, only daydreaming? Well!” He calmed himself with an effort, shaking his head. “Man, man,” he argued to himself. “It was only a fly, and does a fly make doubt of love, or did you make it into a fly and a wink? Damn it!” He pointed at the four of them.
“I’m going to fix the furnace hotter. In an hour I’ll be moving you out of the house once and for all. You comprehend? Good. I see you do.”
Outside, it was beginning to rain, a cold drizzling downpour that drenched the house. A look of irritation came to Greppin’s face. The sound of the rain was the one thing he couldn’t stop, couldn’t be helped. No way to buy new hinges or lubricants or hooks for that. You might tent the house-top with lengths of cloth to soften the sound, mightn’t you? That’s going a bit far. No. No way of preventing the rain sounds.
He wanted silence now, where he had never wanted it before in his life so much. Each sound was a fear. So each sound had to be muffled, gotten to and eliminated.
The drum of rain was like the knuckles of an impatient man on a surface. He lapsed again into remembering.
He remembered the rest of it. The rest of that hour on that day two weeks ago when he had made them smile.…
He had taken up the carving knife and prepared to cut the bird upon the table. As usual the family had been gathered, all wearing their solemn, puritanical masks. If the children smiled the smiles were stepped on like nasty bugs by Aunt Rose.
/> Aunt Rose criticized the angle of Greppin’s elbows as he cut the bird. The knife, she made him understand also, was not sharp enough. Oh, yes, the sharpness of the knife. At this point in his memory he stopped, rolled-tilted his eyes, and laughed. Dutifully, then, he had crisped the knife on the sharpening rod and again set upon the fowl.
He had severed away much of it in some minutes before he slowly looked up at their solemn, critical faces, like puddings with agate eyes, and after staring at them a moment, as if discovered with a naked woman instead of a naked-limbed partridge, he lifted the knife and cried hoarsely, “Why in God’s name can’t you, any of you, ever smile? I’ll make you smile!”
He raised the knife a number of times like a magician’s wand.
And, in a short interval—behold! they were all of them smiling!
* * *