Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (26 page)

 
          
 
"So many days in a row," said
Mother. "A girl doesn't go with a nice young man that many tunes unless
he's serious."

 
          
 
"Maybe he'll propose tonight!" was
Father's happy thought.

 
          
 
"Hardly so soon. And she is so
young."

 
          
 
"Still," he ruminated, "it
might happen. It's got to happen, by the Lord Harry."

 
          
 
Grandma chuckled from her comer easy chair. It
sounded like someone turning the pages of an ancient book.

 
          
 
"What's so funny?" said Father.

 
          
 
"Wait and see," said Grandma.
"Tomorrow."

 
          
 
Father stared at the dark, but Grandma would
say no more,

 
          
 
"Well, well," said Father at
breakfast. He surveyed his eggs with a kindly, paternal eye. "Well, well,
by gosh, last night, on the porch, there was more whispering. What's his name?
Isak? Well, now, if I'm any judge at all, I think he proposed to Marianne last
night; yes, I'm positive of it!"

 
          
 
"It would be nice," said Mother.
"A spring marriage. But it's so soon."

 
          
 
"Look," said Father with
full-mouthed logic. "Marianne's the kind of girl who marries quick and
young. We can't stand in her way, can we?"

 
          
 
"For once I think you're right,"
said Mother. "A marriage would be fine. Spring flowers, and Marianne
looking nice in that gown I saw at Haydecker's last week."

 
          
 
They all peered anxiously at the stairs, waiting
for Marianne to appear.

 
          
 
"Pardon me," rasped Grandma,
sighting up from her morning toast. "But I wouldn't talk of getting rid of
Marianne just yet if I were you."

 
          
 
"And why not?"

 
          
 
"Because."

 
          
 
"Because why?"

 
          
 
"I hate to spoil your plans," rustled
Grandma, chuckling. She gestured with her little vinegary head. "But while
you people were worrying about getting Marianne married, I've been keeping tab
on her. Seven days now I've been watching this young fellow each day he came in
his car and honked his horn outside. He must be an actor or a quick-change
artist or something."

 
          
 
"What?" asked Father.

 
          
 
"Yep," said Grandma. "Because
one day he was a young blond fellow, and next day he was a tall dark fellow,
and Wednesday he was a chap with a brown mustache, and Thursday he had wavy red
hair, and Friday he was shorter, with a Chevrolet stripped down instead of a
Ford."

 
          
 
Mother and Father sat for a minute as if hit
with hammers right behind the left ear.

 
          
 
At last Father, his face exploding with color,
shouted, "Do you mean to say! You sat there, woman, you say; all those
men, and you—"

 
          
 
"You were always hiding," snapped
Grandma. "So you wouldn't spoil things. If you'd come out in the open
you'd have seen the same as I. I never said a word. She'll simmer down. It's
just her time of life. Every woman goes through it. It's hard, but they can
survive. A new man every day does wonders for a girl's ego!"

 
          
 
"You, you, you, you, you!" Father
choked on it, eyes wild, throat gorged too big for his collar. He fell back in
his chair, exhausted. Mother sat, stunned.

 
          
 
"Good morning, everyone!" Marianne
raced downstairs and popped into a chair. Father stared at her.

 
          
 
"You, you, you, you, you," he
accused Grandma.

 
          
 
I shall run down the street shouting, thought
Father wildly, and break the fire-alarm window and pull the lever and bring the
fire engines and the hoses. Or perhaps there will be a late snowstorm and I
shall set Marianne out in it to cool.

 
          
 
He did neither. The heat in the room being
excessive, according to the wall calendar, everyone moved out onto the cool
porch while Marianne sat looking at her orange juice.

 
          
 
But of course he was going away, there was
nothing else to do, the time was up, the clock had run out, and he was going
very far away indeed. His suitcase was packed, his shoes were shined, his hair
was brushed, he had expressly washed behind his ears, and it remained only for
him to %o down the stairs, out the front door, and up the street to the small-town
station where the train would make a stop for him alone. Then Fox Hill,
Illinois, would be left far off in his past. And he would go on. perhaps to
Iowa, perhaps to Kansas, perhaps even to California; a small boy, twelve years
old, with a birth certificate in his valise to show he had been born
forty-three years ago.

 
          
 
"Willie!" called a voice
belowstairs.

 
          
 
"Yes!" He hoisted his suitcase. In
his bureau mirror he saw a face made of June dandelions and July apples and
warm summer-morning milk. There, as always, was his look of the angel and the
innocent, which might never, in the years of his life, change.

 
          
 
"Almost time." called the woman's
voice.

 
          
 
"All right!" And he went down the stairs,
grunting and smiling. In the living room sat Anna and Steve, their clothes
painfully neat.

 
          
 
"Here I am!" cried Willie in the
parlor door.

 
          
 
Anna looked like she was going to cry.
"Oh, good Lord, you can't really be leaving us, can you, Willie?"

 
          
 
"People are beginning to talk," said
Willie quietly. "I've been here three years now. But when people begin to
talk, I know it's time to put on my shoes and buy a railway ticket."

 
          
 
"It's all so strange. I don't understand.
It's so sudden," Anna said. "Willie, we'll miss you."

 
          
 
"I'll write you every Christmas, so help
me. Don't you write me.

 
          
 
"It's been a great pleasure and
satisfaction," said Steve, sitting there, his words the wrong size in his
mouth. "It's a shame it had to stop. It's a shame you had to tell us about
yourself. It's an awful shame you can't stay on."

 
          
 
"You're the nicest folks I ever
had," said Willie, four feet high, in no need of a shave, the sunlight on
his face.

 
          
 
And then Anna did cry. "Willie,
Willie." And she sat down and looked as if she wanted to hold him but was
afraid to hold him now; she looked at him with shock and amazement and her
hands empty, not knowing what to do with him now.

 
          
 
"It's not easy to go," said Willie.
"You get used to things. You want to stay. But it doesn't work. I tried to
stay on once after people began to suspect. 'How horrible!' people said. 'All
these years, playing with our innocent children,' they said, 'and us not
guessing! Awful!' they said. And finally I had to just leave town one night. It's
not easy. You know darned well how much I love both of you. Thanks for three
swell years."

 
          
 
They all went to the front door. "Willie,
where're you going?"

 
          
 
"I don't know. I just start traveling.
When I see a town that looks green and nice, I settle in."

 
          
 
"Will you ever come back?"

 
          
 
"Yes," he said earnestly with his
high voice. "In about twenty years it should begin to show in my face.
When it does, I'm going to make a grand tour of all the mothers and fathers
I've ever had."

 
          
 
They stood on the cool summer porch, reluctant
to say the last words. Steve was looking steadily at an elm tree. "How
many other folks've you stayed with, Willie? How many adoptions?"

 
          
 
Willie figured it, pleasantly enough. "I
guess it's about five towns and five couples and over twenty years gone by
since I started my tour."

 
          
 
"Well, we can't holler," said Steve.
"Better to've had a son thirty-six months than none whatever."

 
          
 
"Well," said Willie, and kissed Anna
quickly, seized at his luggage, and was gone up the street in the green noon
fight, under the trees, a very young boy indeed, not looking back, running
steadily.

 
          
 
The boys were playing on the green park
diamond when he came by. He stood a little while among the oak-tree shadows,
watching them hurl the white, snowy baseball into the warm summer air, saw the
baseball shadow fly like a dark bird over the grass, saw their hands open in
mouths to catch this swift piece of summer that now seemed most especially
important to hold onto. The boys' voices yelled. The ball lit on the grass near
Willie.

 
          
 
Carrying the ball forward from under the shade
trees, he thought of the last three years now spent to the penny, and the five
years before that, and so on down the fine to the year when he was really
eleven and twelve and fourteen and the voices say-mg: "What's wrong with
Willie, missus?" "Mrs. B., is Willie late a-growin'?"
"Willie, you smokin' cigars lately?" The echoes died in summer light
and color. His mother's voice: "Willie's twenty-one today!" And a
thousand voices saying: "Come back, son, when you're fifteen; then maybe
we'll give you a job."

 
          
 
He stared at the baseball in his trembling
hand, as if it were his life, an interminable ball of years strung around and
around and around, but always leading back to his twelfth birthday. He heard
the kids walking toward him; he felt them blot out the sun, and they were
older, standing around him.

 
          
 
"Willie! Where you goin'?" They
kicked his suitcase.

 
          
 
How tall they stood to the sun. In the last
few months it

 
          
 
seemed the sun had passed a hand above their
heads, beckoned, and they were warm metal drawn melting upward; they were
golden taffy pulled by an immense gravity to the sky, thirteen, fourteen years
old, looking down upon Willie, smiling, but already beginning to neglect him.
It had started four months ago: "Choose up sides! Who wants Willie?"
"Aw, Willie's too little; we don't play with 'kids.'" And they raced
ahead of him, drawn by the moon and the sun and the turning seasons of leaf and
wind, and he was twelve years old and not of them any more. And the other
voices beginning again on the old, the dreadfully familiar, the cool refrain:
"Better feed that boy vitamins, Steve." "Anna, does shortness
run in your family?" And the cold fist kneading at your heart again and
knowing that the roots would have to be pulled up again after so many good
years with the "folks." "Willie, where you goin'?"

 
          
 
He jerked his head. He was back among the
towering, shadowing boys who milled around him like giants at a drinking
fountain bending down.

 
          
 
"Goin' a few days visitin' a cousin of
mine." "Oh." There was a day, a year ago, when they would have
cared very much indeed. But now there was only curiosity for his luggage, their
enchantment with trains and trips and far places.

 
          
 
"How about a coupla fast ones?" said
Willie. They looked doubtful, but, considering the circumstances, nodded. He
dropped his bag and ran out; the white baseball was up in the sun, away to
their burning white figures in the far meadow, up in the sun again, rushing,
life coming and going in a pattern. Here, there! Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hanlon,
Creek Bend, Wisconsin, 1932, the first couple, the first year! Here, there!
Henry and Alice Boltz, Limeville, Iowa, 1935!
The baseball
flying.
The Smiths, the Batons, the Robinsons! 1939! 1945! Husband and
wife, husband and wife, husband and wife, no children, no children, no
children! A knock on this door, a knock on that

 
          
 
"Pardon me. My name is William. I wonder
if—"

 
          
 
"A sandwich? Come in, sit down. Where you
from, son?"

 
          
 
The sandwich, a tall glass of cold milk, the
smiUng, the nodding, the comfortable, leisurely talking.

 
          
 
"Son, you look like you been traveling.
You run off from somewhere?"

 
          
 
"No."

 
          
 
"Boy, are you an orphan?"

 
          
 
Another glass of milk.

 
          
 
"We always wanted kids. It never worked
out. Never knew why. One of those things. Well, well. It's getting late, son.
Don't you think you better hit for home?"

 
          
 
"Got no home."

 
          
 
"A boy like you? Not dry behind the ears?
Your mother'll be worried."

 
          
 
"Got no home and no folks anywhere in the
world. I wonder if—I wonder—could I sleep here tonight?"

 
          
 
"Well, now, son, I don't just know. We
never considered taking in—" said the husband.

 
          
 
"We got chicken for supper tonight,"
said the wife, "enough for extras, enough for company. ..."

 
          
 
And the years turning and flying away, the
voices, and the faces, and the people, and always the same first conversations.
The voice of Emily Robinson, in her rocking chair, in summer-night darkness,
the last night he stayed with her, the night she discovered his secret, her
voice saying:

 
          
 
"I look at all the little children's
faces going by. And I sometimes think. What a shame, what a shame, that all
these flowers have to be cut, all these bright fires have to be put out. What a
shame these, all of these you see in schools or running by, have to get tall
and unsightly and wrinkle and turn gray or get bald, and finally, all bone and
wheeze, be dead and buried off away. When I hear them laugh I can't believe
they'll ever go the road I'm going. Yet here they come! I still remember
Wordsworth's poem: 'When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees. Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.'
That's how I think of children, cruel as they sometimes are, mean as I know
they can be, but not yet showing the meanness around their eyes or in their
eyes, not yet full of tiredness. They're so eager for everything! I guess
that's what I miss most in older folks, the eagerness gone nine times out of
ten, the freshness gone, so much of the drive and life down the drain. I like
to watch school let out each day. It's like someone threw a bunch of flowers
out the school front doors. How does it feel, Willie? How does it feel to be
young forever? To look like a silver dime new from the mint? Are you happy? Are
you as fine as you seem?"

 
          
 
The baseball whizzed from the blue sky, stung
his hand like a great pale insect. Nursing it, he hears his memory say:

 
          
 
"I worked with what I had. After my folks
died, after I found I couldn't get man's work anywhere, I tried carnivals, but
they only laughed. ‘Son,' they said, 'you're not a midget, and even if you are,
you look like a boy! We want midgets with midgets' faces! Sorry, son, sorry.'
So I left home, started out, thinking: What was I? A boy. I looked like a boy,
sounded like a boy, so I might as well go on being a boy. No use fighting it.
No use screaming. So what could I do? What job was handy? And then one day I
saw this man in a restaurant looking at another man's pictures of his children.
'Sure wish I had kids,' he said. 'Sure wish I had kids.' He kept shaking his
head. And me sitting a few seats away from him, a hamburger in my hands. I sat
there, frozen! At that very instant I knew what my job would be for all of the
rest of my life. There was work for me, after all. Making lonely people happy.
Keeping myself busy. Playing forever. I knew I had to play forever. Deliver a
few papers, run a few errands, mow a few lawns, maybe. But hard work? No. All I
had to do was be a mother's son and a father's pride. I turned to the man down
the counter from me. 'I beg your pardon,' I said. I smiled at him. ..."