Dandelion Wine (9 page)

“It's almost as good, this machine.”

“No. Sitting in there, I knew. I thought, it's not real!”

“Stop crying, Mama.”

She looked at him with great dark wet eyes. “You had me dancing. We haven't danced in twenty years.”

“I'll take you dancing tomorrow night!”

“No, no! It's not important, it
shouldn't
be important. But your machine says it's important! So I believe! It'll be all right, Leo, after I cry some more.”

“What else?”

“What else? The machine says, ‘You're young.' I'm not. It lies, that Sadness Machine!”

“Sad in what way?”

His wife was quieter now. “Leo, the mistake you made is you forgot some hour, some day, we all got to climb out of that thing and go back to dirty dishes and the beds not made. While you're in that thing, sure, a sunset lasts forever almost, the air smells good, the temperature is fine. All the things you want to last, last. But outside, the children wait on lunch, the clothes need buttons. And then let's be frank, Leo, how long can you
look
at a sunset? Who
wants
a sunset to last? Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after awhile, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, let's have something else. People are like that, Leo. How could you forget?”

“Did I? ”

“Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away.”

“But Lena, that's sad.”

“No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness. So two things you did you should never have. You made quick things go slow and stay around. You brought things faraway to our backyard where they don't belong, where they just tell you, ‘No, you'll never travel, Lena Auffmann, Paris you'll never see! Rome you'll
never
visit.' But I
always
knew that, so why tell me? Better to forget and make do, Leo, make do, eh?”

Leo Auffmann leaned against the machine for support. He snatched his burned hand away, surprised.

“So now what, Lena?” he said.

“It's not for me to say. I know only so long as this thing is here I'll want to come out, or Saul will want to come out like he did last night, and against our judgment sit in it and look at all those places so far away and every time we will cry and be no fit family for you.”

“I don't understand,” he said, “how I could be so wrong. Just let me check to see what you say is true.” He sat down inside the machine. “You won't go away?”

His wife nodded. “We'll wait, Leo.”

He shut the door. In the warm darkness he hesitated, pressed the button, and was just relaxing back in color and music, when he heard someone screaming.

“Fire, Papa! The machine's on fire!”

Someone hammered the door. He leaped up, bumped his head, and fell as the door gave way and the boys dragged him out. Behind him he heard a muffled explosion. The entire family was running now. Leo Auffmann turned and gasped, “Saul, call the fire department!”

Lena Auffmann caught Saul as he ran. “Saul,” she said. “Wait.”

There was a gush of flame, another muffled explosion. When the machine was burning very well indeed, Lena Auffmann nodded.

“All right, Saul,” she said. “Run call the fire department.”

 

E
verybody who was anybody came to the fire. There was Grandpa Spaulding and Douglas and Tom and most of the boarders and some of the old men from across the ravine and all the children from six blocks around. And Leo Auffmann's children stood out front, proud of how fine the flames looked jumping from the garage roof.

Grandfather Spaulding studied the smoke ball in the sky and said, quietly, “Leo, was that it? Your Happiness Machine?”

“Some year,” said Leo Auffmann, “I'll figure it and tell you.”

Lena Auffmann, standing in the dark now, watched as the firemen ran in and out of the yard; the garage, roaring, settled upon itself.

“Leo,” she said, “it won't take a year to figure. Look around. Think. Keep quiet a little bit. Then come tell me. I'll be in the house, putting books back on shelves, and clothes back in closets, fixing supper, supper's late, look how dark. Come, children, help Mama.”

 

W
hen the firemen and the neighbors were gone, Leo Auffmann was left with grandfather spaulding and Douglas and Tom, brooding over the smoldering ruin. He stirred his foot in the wet ashes and slowly said what he had to say.

“The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool. In one hour, I've done a lot of thinking. I thought, Leo Auffmann is blind! … You want to see the
real
Happiness Machine? The one they patented a couple thousand years ago, it still runs, not good all the time, no! but it runs. It's been here all along.”

“But the fire—” said Douglas.

“Sure, the fire, the garage! But like Lena said, it don't take a year to figure; what burned in the garage don't count!”

They followed him up the front-porch steps.

“Here,” whispered Leo Auffmann, “the front window. Quiet, and you'll see it.”

Hesitantly, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom peered through the large windowpane.

And there, in small warm pools of lamplight, you could see what Leo Auffmann wanted you to see. There sat Saul and Marshall, playing chess at the coffee table. In the dining room Rebecca was laying out the silver. Naomi was cutting paper-doll dresses. Ruth was painting water colors. Joseph was running his electric train. Through the kitchen door, Lena Auffmann was sliding a pot roast from the steaming oven. Every hand, every head, every mouth made a big or little motion. You could hear their faraway voices under glass. You could hear someone singing in a high sweet voice. You could smell bread baking, too, and you knew it was real bread that would soon be covered with real butter. Everything was there and it was working.

Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom turned to look at Leo Auffmann, who gazed serenely through the window, the pink light on his cheeks.

“Sure,” he murmured. “There it is.” And he watched with now-gentle sorrow and now-quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance as all the bits and pieces of this house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily again. “The Happiness Machine,” he said. “The Happiness Machine.”

A moment later he was gone.

Inside, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom saw him tinkering, making a minor adjustment here, eliminate friction there, busy among all those warm, wonderful, infinitely delicate, forever mysterious, and ever-moving parts.

Then smiling, they went down the steps into the fresh summer night.

T
wice a year they brought the big flapping rugs out into the yard and laid them where they looked out of place and uninhabited, on the lawn. Then Grandma and Mother came from the house with what looked to be the back rungs of those beautiful looped wire chairs downtown in the soda-fountain place. These great wire wands were handed around so they stood, Douglas, Tom, Grandma, Great-grandma, and Mother poised like a collection of witches and familiars over the duty patterns of old Armenia. Then at a signal from Great-grandma, a blink of the eyes or a gumming of the lips, the flails were raised, the harping wires banged down again and again upon the rugs.

“Take that! And that!” said Great-grandma. “Get the flies, boys, kill the cooties!”

“Oh, you!” said Grandma to her mother.

They all laughed. The dust storm puffed up about them. Their laughing became choked.

Showers of lint, tides of sand, golden flakes of pipe tobacco fluttered, shivered on the exploded and re-exploded air. Pausing, the boys saw the tread of their shoes and the older people's shoes pressed a billion times in the warp and woof of this rug, now to be smoothed clean as the tide of their beating swept again and again along the oriental shore.

“There's where your husband spilled that coffee!” Grandma gave the rug a blow.

“Here's where you dropped the cream!” Great-grandma whacked up a great twister of dust.

“Look at the scuff marks. Boys, boys!”

“Double-Grandma, here's the ink from your pen!”

“Pshaw! Mine was purple ink. That's common blue!”

Bang!

“Look at the path worn from the hall door here to the kitchen door. Food. That's what brings the lions to the water hole. Let's shift it, put it back the other way around.”

“Better yet, lock the men out of the house.”

“Make them leave their shoes outside the door.”

Bang, bang!

They hung the rugs on the wash line now, to finish the job. Tom looked at the intricate scrolls and loops, the flowers, the mysterious figures, the shuttling patterns.

“Tom, don't stand there. Strike, boy!”

“It's fun, seeing things,” said Tom.

Douglas glanced up suspiciously. “What do you see?”

“The whole darn town, people, houses, here's our house!” Bang! “Our street!” Bang! “That black part there's the ravine!” Bang! “There's school!” Bang! “This funny cartoon here's you, Doug!” Bang! “Here's Great-grandma, Grandma, Mom.” Bang! “How many years this rug been down?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen years of people stomping across it; I see every shoe print,” gasped Tom.

“Land, boy, you got a tongue,” said Great-grandma.

“I see all the things happened in that house in all those years right here!” Bang! “All the past, sure, but I can see the future, too. Just squinch up my eyes and peek around at the patterns, there, to see where we'll be walking, running around, tomorrow.”

Douglas stopped swinging the beater. “What else you see in the rug?”

“Threads mostly,” said Great-grandma. “Not much left but the underskin. See how the manufacturer wove the thing.”

“Right!” said Tom mysteriously. “Threads one way, threads another. I see it all. Dire fiends. Deadly sinners. There's bad weather, there's good. Picnics. Banquets. Strawberry festivals.” He tapped the beater from place to place portentously.

“That's some boardinghouse you got me running,” said Grandma, glowing with exertion.

“It's all there, fuzzylike. Hold your head on one side, Doug, get one eye almost shut. It's better at night, of course, inside, the rug on the floor, lamplight and all. Then you get shadows all shapes, light and dark, and watch the threads running off, feel the nap, run your hand around on the fur. Smells just like a desert, I bet. All hot and sandy, like inside a mummy case, maybe. Look, that red spot, that's the Happiness Machine burning up!”

“Catsup from somebody's sandwich, no doubt,” said Mom.

“No, Happiness Machine,” said Douglas, and was sad to see it burning there. He had been counting on Leo Auffmann to keep things in order, keep everybody smiling, keep the small gyroscope he often felt inside himself tilting toward the sun every time the earth tilted toward outer space and darkness. But no, there was Auffmann's folly, ashes and cinders. Bang! Bang! Douglas struck.

“Look, there's the green electric runabout! Miss Fern! Miss Roberta!” said Tom. “Honk, Honk!” Bang!

They all laughed.

“There's your life-strings, Doug, running along in knots. Too many sour apples. Pickles at bedtime!”

“Which one, where?” cried Douglas, peering.

“This one, one year from now, this one, two years from now, and this one, three, four, five years from now!”

Bang! The wire beater hissed like a snake in the blind sky.

“And one to grow on!” said Tom.

He hit the rug so hard all the dust of five thousand centuries jumped from the shocked texture, paused on the air a terrible moment, and even as Douglas stood, eyes squinted to see the warp, the woof, the shivering pattern, the Armenian avalanche of dust roared soundless upon, over, down and around, burying him forever before their eyes....

H
ow it began with the children, old Mrs. Bentley never knew. She often saw them, like moths and monkeys, at the grocer's, among the cabbages and hung bananas, and she smiled at them and they smiled back. Mrs. Bentley watched them making footprints in winter snow, filling their lungs with autumn smoke, shaking down blizzards of spring apple-blossoms, but felt no fear of them. As for herself, her house was in extreme good order, everything set to its station, the floors briskly swept, the foods neatly tinned, the hatpins thrust through cushions, and the drawers of her bedroom bureaus crisply filled with the paraphernalia of years.

Mrs. Bentley was a saver. She saved tickets, old theater programs, bits of lace, scarves, rail transfers; all the tags and tokens of existence.

“I've a stack of records,” she often said. “Here's Caruso. That was in 1916, in New York; I was sixty and John was still alive. Here's June Moon, 1924, I think, right after John died.”