Dandelion Wine (8 page)

O
n Sunday morning Leo Auffmann moved slowly through his garage, expecting some wood, a curl of wire, a hammer or wrench to leap up crying, “Start here!” But nothing leaped, nothing cried for a beginning.

Should a Happiness Machine, he wondered, be something you can carry in your pocket?

Or, he went on, should it be something that carries you in its pocket?

“One thing I absolutely
know,
” he said aloud. “It should be
bright!
”

He set a can of orange paint in the center of the work-bench, picked up a dictionary, and wandered into the house.

“Lena?” He glanced at the dictionary. “Are you ‘pleased, contented, joyful, delighted'? Do you feel ‘Lucky, fortunate'? Are things ‘clever and fitting,' ‘successful and suitable' for you?”

Lena stopped slicing vegetables and closed her eyes. “Read me the list again, please,” she said.

He shut the book.

“What have I done, you got to stop and think an hour before you can tell me. All I ask is a simple yes or no! You're
not
contented, delighted, joyful?”

“Cows are contented, babies and old people in second childhood are delighted, God help them,” she said. “As for ‘joyful,' Leo? Look how I laugh scrubbing out the sink....”

He peered closely at her and his face relaxed. “Lena, it's true. A man doesn't appreciate. Next month, maybe, we'll get away.”

“
I'm
not complaining!” she cried. “
I'm
not the one comes in with a list saying, ‘Stick out your tongue.' Leo, do you ask what makes your heart beat all night? No! Next will you ask, What's marriage? Who knows, Leo? Don't ask. A man who thinks like that, how it runs, how things work, falls off the trapeze in the circus, chokes wondering how the muscles work in the throat. Eat, sleep, breathe, Leo, and stop staring at me like I'm something new in the house!”

Lena Auffmann froze. She sniffed the air.

“Oh, my God, look what you done!”

She yanked the oven door open. A great cloud of smoke poured through the kitchen.

“Happiness!” she wailed. “And for the first time in six months we have a fight! Happiness, and for the first time in twenty years it's not bread, it's charcoal for supper!”

When the smoke cleared, Leo Auffmann was gone.

 

T
he fearful clangor, the collision of man and inspiration, the flinging about of metal, lumber, hammer, nails, Ô square, screwdriver, continued for many days. On occasion, defeated, Leo Auffmann loitered out through the streets, nervous, apprehensive, jerking his head at the slightest sound of distant laughter, listened to children's jokes, watching what made them smile. At night he sat on neighbors' crowded porches, listening to the old folks weigh and balance life, and at each explosion of merriment Leo Auffmann quickened like a general who has seen the forces of darkness routed and whose strategy has been reaffirmed. On his way home he felt triumphant until he was in his garage with the dead tools and the inanimate lumber. Then his bright face fell away in a pale funk, and to cover his sense of failure he banged and crashed the parts of his machine about as if they really did make sense. At last it began to shape itself and at the end of the ten days and nights, trembling with fatigue, self-dedicated, half starved, fumbling and looking as if he had been riven by lightning, Leo Auffmann wandered into his house.

The children, who had been screaming horribly at each other, fell silent, as if the Red Death had entered at the chiming of the clock.

“The Happiness Machine,” husked Leo Auffmann, “is ready.”

“Leo Auffmann,” said his wife, “has lost fifteen pounds. He hasn't talked to his children in two weeks, they are nervous, they fight, listen! His wife is nervous, she's gained ten pounds, she'll need new clothes, look! Sure—the machine is ready. But happy? Who can say? Leo, leave off with the clock you're building. You'll never find a cuckoo big enough to go in it! Man was not made to tamper with such things. It's not against God, no, but it sure looks like it's against Leo Auffmann. Another week of this and we'll bury him in his machine!”

But Leo Auffmann was too busy noticing that the room was falling swiftly up.

How interesting, he thought, lying on the floor.

Darkness closed in a great wink on him as someone screamed something about that Happiness Machine, three times.

 

T
he first thing he noticed the next morning was dozens of birds fluttering around in the air stirring up ripples like colored stones thrown into an incredibly clear stream, gonging the tin roof of the garage softly.

A pack of multibred dogs pawfooted one by one into the yard to peer and whine gently through the garage door; four boys, two girls, and some men hesitated in the driveway and then edged along under the cherry trees.

Leo Auffmann, listening, knew what it was that had reached out and called them all into the yard.

The sound of the Happiness Machine.

It was the sort of sound that might be heard coming from a giant's kitchen on a summer day. There were all kinds of hummings, low and high, steady and then changing. Incredible foods were being baked there by a host of whirring golden bees as big as teacups. The giantess herself, humming contentedly under her breath, might glide to the door, as vast as all summer, her face a huge peach-colored moon gazing calmly out upon smiling dogs, corn-haired boys and flour-haired old men.

“Wait,” said Leo Auffmann out loud. “I didn't turn the machine on this morning! Saul!”

Saul, standing in the yard below, looked up.

“Saul, did you turn it on?”

“You told me to warm it up half an hour ago!”

“All right, Saul, I forgot. I'm not awake.” He fell back in bed.

His wife, bringing his breakfast up, paused by the window, looking down at the garage.

“Tell me,” she said quietly. “I f that machine is like you say, has it got an answer to making babies in it somewhere? Can that machine make seventy-year-old people twenty? Also, how does death look when you hide in there with all that happiness?”

“Hide!”

“If you died from overwork, what should I do today, climb in that big box down there and be happy? Also tell me, Leo, how is our life? You know how our house is. Seven in the morning, breakfast, the kids; all of you gone by eight-thirty and it's just me and washing and me and cooking and socks to be darned, weeds to be dug, or I run to the store or polish silver. Who's complaining? I'm just reminding you how the house is put together, Leo, what's in it! So now answer: How do you get all those things I said in one machine?”

“That's not how it's built!”

“I'm sorry. I got no time to look, then.”

And she kissed his cheek and went from the room and he lay smelling the wind that blew from the hidden machine below, rich with the odor of those roasted chestnuts that sold in the autumn streets of a Paris he had never known....

A cat moved unseen among the hypnotized dogs and boys to purr against the garage door, in the sound of snow-waves crumbling down a faraway and rhythmically breathing shore.

Tomorrow, thought Leo Auffmann, we'll try the machine, all of us, together.

 

L
ate that night he awoke and knew something had wakened him. Far away in another room he heard someone crying.

“Saul?” he whispered, getting out of bed.

In his room Saul wept, his head buried in his pillow. “No … no …” he sobbed. “Over … over....”

“Saul, you had a nightmare? Tell me about it, son.”

But the boy only wept.

And sitting there on the boy's bed, Leo Auffmann suddenly thought to look out the window. Below, the garage doors stood open.

He felt the hairs rise along the back of his neck.

When Saul slept again, uneasily, whimpering, his father went downstairs and out to the garage where, not breathing, he put his hand out.

In the cool night the Happiness Machine's metal was too hot to touch.

So, he thought, Saul was here tonight.

Why? Was Saul unhappy, in need of the machine? No, happy, but wanting to hold onto happiness always. Could you blame a boy wise enough to know his position who tried to keep it that way? No! And yet …

Above, quite suddenly, something white was exhaled from Saul's window. Leo Auffmann's heart thundered. Then he realized the window curtain had blown out into the open night. But it had seemed as intimate and shimmering a thing as a boy's soul escaping his room. And Leo Auffmann had flung up his hands as if to thwart it, push it back into the sleeping house.

Cold, shivering, he moved back into the house and up to Saul's room where he seized the blowing curtain in and locked the window tight so the pale thing could not escape again. Then he sat on the bed and put his hand on Saul's back.

 

“A
Tale of Two Cities?
Mine.
The Old Curiosity Shop?
Ha, that's Leo Auffmann's all right!
Great Expectations?
That
used
to be mine. But let
Great Expectations
be his, now!”

“What's this?” asked Leo Auffmann, entering.

“This,” said his wife, “is sorting out the community property! When a father scares his son at night it's time to chop everything in half! Out of the way, Mr. Bleak House, Old Curiosity Shop. In all these books, no mad scientist lives like Leo Auffmann, none!”

“You're leaving, and you haven't even tried the machine!” he protested. “Try it once, you'll unpack, you'll stay!”

“
Tom Swift and His Electric Annihilator
—whose is that?” she asked. “Must I
guess?
”

Snorting, she gave
Tom Swift
to Leo Auffmann.

 

V
ery late in the day all the books, dishes, clothes, linens had been stacked one here, one there, four here, four there, ten here, ten there. Lena Auffmann, dizzy with counting, had to sit down. “All right,” she gasped. “Before I go, Leo, prove you don't give nightmares to innocent sons!”

Silently Leo Auffmann led his wife into the twilight. She stood before the eight-foot-tall, orange-colored box.

“That's
happiness?
” she said. “Which button do I press to be overjoyed, grateful, contented, and much-obliged?”

The children had gathered now.

“Mama,” said Saul, “don't!”

“I got to know what I'm yelling about, Saul.” She got in the machine, sat down, and looked out at her husband, shaking her head. “It's not me needs this, it's you, a nervous wreck, shouting.”

“Please,” he said, “you'll see!”

He shut the door.

“Press the button!” he shouted in at his unseen wife.

There was a click. The machine shivered quietly, like a huge dog dreaming in its sleep.

“Papa!” said Saul, worried.

“Listen!” said Leo Auffmann.

At first there was nothing but the tremor of the machine's own secretly moving cogs and wheels.

“Is Mama all right?” asked Naomi.

“All right, she's fine! There, now … there!”

And inside the machine Lena Auffmann could be heard saying, “Oh!” and then again, “Ah!” in a startled voice. “Look at that!” said his hidden wife. “Paris!” and later, “London! There goes Rome! The Pyramids! The Sphinx!”

“The Sphinx, you hear, children?” Leo Auffmann whispered and laughed.

“Perfume!” cried Lena Auffmann, surprised.

Somewhere a phonograph played “The Blue Danube” faintly.

“Music! I'm dancing!”

“Only
thinks
she's dancing,” the father confided to the world.

“Amazing!” said the unseen woman.

Leo Auffmann blushed. “What an understanding wife.”

And then inside the Happiness Machine, Lena Auffmann began to weep.

The inventor's smile faded.

“She's crying,” said Naomi.

“She can't be!”

“She is,” said Saul.

“She simply can't be crying!” Leo Auffmann, blinking, pressed his ear to the machine. “But … yes … like a baby …”

He could only open the door.

“Wait.” There his wife sat, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Let me finish.” She cried some more.

Leo Auffmann turned off the machine, stunned.

“Oh, it's the saddest thing in the world!” she wailed. “I feel awful, terrible.” She climbed out through the door. “First, there was Paris …”

“What's wrong with Paris?”

“I never even
thought
of being in Paris in my life. But now you got me thinking: Paris! So suddenly I want to be in Paris and I know I'm not!”