“Wasn’t.”
“What I mean is this,” he said, whispering excitedly, bending forward to see the image he was tracing on the blank dining-room wall. “If you rode your unicycle carefully between the years, balancing, hands out, careful, careful, if you rode from year to year, spent a week in 1909, a day in 1900, a month or a fortnight somewhere else, 1905, 1898, you could stay with summer the rest of your life.”
“Unicycle?”
“You know, one of those tall chromium one-wheeled bikes, single-seater, the performers ride in vaudeville shows, juggling. Balance, true balance, it takes, not to fall off, to keep the bright objects flying in the air, beautiful, up and up, a light, a flash, a sparkle, a bomb of brilliant colors, red, yellow, blue, green, white, gold; all the Junes and Julys and Augusts that ever were, in the air, about you, at once, hardly touching your hands, flying, suspended, and you, smiling, among them. Balance, Cora, balance.”
“Blah,” she said, “blah, blah.” And added, “blah!”
He climbed the long cold stairs to the attic, shivering.
There were nights in winter when he woke with porcelain in his bones, with cool chimes blowing in his ears, with frost piercing his nerves in a raw illumination like white-cold fireworks exploding and showering down in flaming snows upon a silent land deep in his subconscious. He was cold, cold, cold, and it would take a score of endless summers, with their green torches and bronze suns to thaw him free of his wintry sheath. He was a great tasteless chunk of brittle ice, a snowman put to bed each night, full of confetti dreams, tumbles of crystal and flurry. And there lay winter outside forever, a great leaden wine press smashing down its colorless lid of sky, squashing them all like so many grapes, mashing color and sense and being from everyone, save the children who fled on skis and toboggans down mirrored hills which reflected the crushing iron shield that hung lower above town each day and every eternal night.
Mr. Finch lifted the attic trap door. But here, here. A dust of summer sprang up about him. The attic dust simmered with heat left over from other seasons. Quietly, he shut the trap door down.
He began to smile.
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 moth balls. Looks 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 parlor and smell the drugstore the way they used to smell? Why don’t drugstores 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.