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Kitabı oku: «Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2», sayfa 9
The day after his funeral the Oscar arrived, carried by his wife, to place on my mantel, with a single red rose beside it, and the picture of von Richthofen, and the other picture of the gang lined up in the summer of ’18 and the wind blowing out of the picture and the buzz of planes. And the sound of young men laughing as if they might go on forever.
Sometimes I come down at three in the morning when I can’t sleep and I stand looking at Bill and his friends. And sentimental sap that I am, I wave a glass of sherry at them.
‘Farewell, Lafayette,’ I say. ‘Lafayette, farewell.’
And they all laugh as if it were the grandest joke that they ever heard.
Remember Sascha?
Remember? Why, how could they forget? Although they knew him for only a little while, years later his name would arise and they would smile or even laugh and reach out to hold hands, remembering.
Sascha. What a tender, witty comrade, what a sly, hidden individual, what a child of talent; teller of tales, bon vivant, late-night companion, ever-present illumination on foggy noons.
Sascha!
He, whom they had never seen, to whom they spoke often at three A.M. in their small bedroom, away from friends who might roll their eyeballs under their lids, doubting their sanity, hearing his name.
Well, then, who and what was Sascha, and where did they meet or perhaps only dream him, and who were they?
Quickly: they were Maggie and Douglas Spaulding and they lived by the loud sea and the warm sand and the rickety bridges over the almost dead canals of Venice, California. Though lacking money in the bank or Goodwill furniture in their tiny two-room apartment, they were incredibly happy. He was a writer, and she worked to support him while he finished the great American novel.
Their routine was: she would arrive home each night from downtown Los Angeles and he would have hamburgers waiting or they would walk down the beach to eat hot dogs, spend ten or twenty cents in the Penny Arcade, go home, make love, go to sleep, and repeat the whole wondrous routine the next night: hot dogs, Penny Arcade, love, sleep, work, etc. It was all glorious in that year of being very young and in love; therefore it would go on forever …
Until he appeared.
The nameless one. For then he had no name. He had threatened to arrive a few months after their marriage to destroy their economy and scare off the novel, but then he had melted away, leaving only his echo of a threat.
But now the true collision loomed.
One night over a ham omelet with a bottle of cheap red and the conversation loping quietly, leaning on the card table and promising each other grander and more ebullient futures, Maggie suddenly said, ‘I feel faint.’
‘What?’ said Douglas Spaulding.
‘I’ve felt funny all day. And I was sick, a little bit, this morning.’
‘Oh, my God.’ He rose and came around the card table and took her head in his hands and pressed her brow against his side, and looked down at the beautiful part in her hair, suddenly smiling.
‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘don’t tell me that Sascha is back?’
‘Sascha! Who’s that?’
‘When he arrives, he’ll tell us.’
‘Where did that name come from?’
‘Don’t know. It’s been in my mind all year.’
‘Sascha?’ She pressed his hands to her cheeks, laughing.
‘Sascha!’
‘Call the doctor tomorrow,’ he said.
‘The doctor says Sascha has moved in for light housekeeping,’ she said over the phone the next day.
‘Great!’ He stopped. ‘I guess.’ He considered their bank deposits. ‘No. First thoughts count. Great! When do we meet the Martian invader?’
‘October. He’s infinitesimal now, tiny, I can barely hear his voice. But now that he has a name, I hear it. He promises to grow, if we take care.’
‘The Fabulous Invalid! Shall I stock up on carrots, spinach, broccoli for what date?’
‘Halloween.’
‘Impossible!’
‘True!’
‘People will claim we planned him and my vampire book to arrive that week, things that go bump and cry in the night.’
‘Oh, Sascha will surely do that! Happy?’
‘Frightened, yes, but happy, Lord, yes. Come home, Mrs Rabbit, and bring him along!’
It must be explained that Maggie and Douglas Spaulding were best described as crazed romantics. Long before the interior christening of Sascha, they, loving Laurel and Hardy, had called each other Stan and Ollie. The machines, the dustbusters and can openers around the apartment, had names, as did various parts of their anatomy, revealed to no one.
So Sascha, as an entity, a presence growing toward friendship, was not unusual. And when he actually began to speak up, they were not surprised. The gentle demands of their marriage, with love as currency instead of cash, made it inevitable.
Someday, they said, if they owned a car, it too would be named.
They spoke on that and a dozen score of things late at night. When hyperventilating about life, they propped themselves up on their pillows as if the future might happen right now. They waited, anticipating, in séance, for the silent small offspring to speak his first words before dawn.
‘I love our lives,’ said Maggie, lying there, ‘all the games. I hope it never stops. You’re not like other men, who drink beer and talk poker. Dear God, I wonder, how many other marriages play like us?’
‘No one, nowhere. Remember?’
‘What?’
He lay back to trace his memory on the ceiling.
‘The day we were married—’
‘Yes!’
‘Our friends driving and dropping us off here and we walked down to the drugstore by the pier and bought a tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes, big bucks, for our honeymoon …? One red toothbrush, one green, to decorate our empty bathroom. And on the way back along the beach, holding hands, suddenly, behind us, two little girls and a boy followed us and sang:
‘Happy marriage day to you,Happy marriage day to you.Happy marriage day, happy marriage day,Happy marriage day to you …’
She sang it now, quietly. He chimed in, remembering how they had blushed with pleasure at the children’s voices, but walked on, feeling ridiculous but happy and wonderful.
‘How did they guess? Did we look married?’
‘It wasn’t our clothes! Our faces, don’t you think? Smiles that made our jaws ache. We were exploding. They got the concussion.’
‘Those dear children. I can still hear their voices.’
‘And so here we are, seventeen months later.’ He put his arm around her and gazed at their future on the dark ceiling.
‘And here I am,’ a voice murmured.
‘Who?’ Douglas said.
‘Me,’ the voice whispered. ‘Sascha.’
Douglas looked down at his wife’s mouth, which had barely trembled.
‘So, at last, you’ve decided to speak?’ said Douglas.
‘Yes,’ came the whisper.
‘We wondered,’ said Douglas, ‘when we would hear from you.’ He squeezed his wife gently.
‘It’s time,’ the voice murmured. ‘So here I am.’
‘Welcome, Sascha,’ both said.
‘Why didn’t you talk sooner?’ asked Douglas Spaulding.
‘I wasn’t sure that you liked me,’ the voice whispered.
‘Why would you think that?’
‘First I was, then I wasn’t. Once I was only a name. Remember, last year, I was ready to come and stay. Scared you.’
‘We were broke,’ said Douglas quietly. ‘And nervous.’
‘What’s so scary about life?’ said Sascha. Maggie’s lips twitched. ‘It’s that other thing. Not being, ever. Not being wanted.’
‘On the contrary.’ Douglas Spaulding moved down on his pillow so he could watch his wife’s profile, her eyes shut, but her mouth breathing softly. ‘We love you. But last year it was bad timing. Understand?’
‘No,’ whispered Sascha. ‘I only understand you didn’t want me. And now you do. I should leave.’
‘But you just got here!’
‘Here I go, anyway.’
‘Don’t, Sascha! Stay!’
‘Good-bye.’ The small voice faded. ‘Oh, good-bye.’
And then silence.
Maggie opened her eyes with quiet panic.
‘Sascha’s gone,’ she said.
‘He can’t be!’
The room was still.
‘Can’t be,’ he said. ‘It’s only a game.’
‘More than a game. Oh, God, I feel cold. Hold me.’
He moved to hug her.
‘It’s okay.’
‘No. I had the funniest feeling just now, as if he were real.’
‘He is. He’s not gone.’
‘Unless we do something. Help me.’
‘Help?’ He held her even tighter, then shut his eyes, and at last called:
‘Sascha?’
Silence.
‘I know you’re there. You can’t hide.’
His hand moved to where Sascha might be.
‘Listen. Say something. Don’t scare us, Sascha. We don’t want to be scared or scare you. We need each other. We three against the world. Sascha?’
Silence.
‘Well?’ whispered Douglas.
Maggie breathed in and out.
They waited.
‘Yes?’
There was a soft flutter, the merest exhalation on the night air.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re back!’ both cried.
Another silence.
‘Welcome?’ asked Sascha.
‘Welcome!’ both said.
And that night passed and the next day and the night and day after that, until there were many days, but especially midnights when he dared to declare himself, pipe opinions, grow stronger and firmer and longer in half-heard declarations, as they lay in anticipatory awareness, now she moving her lips, now he taking over, both open as warm, live ventriloquists’ mouthpieces. The small voice shifted from one tongue to the other, with soft bouts of laughter at how ridiculous but loving it all seemed, never knowing what Sascha might say next, but letting him speak on until dawn and a smiling sleep.
‘What’s this about Halloween?’ he asked, somewhere in the sixth month.
‘Halloween?’ both wondered.
‘Isn’t that a death holiday?’ Sascha murmured.
‘Well, yes …’
‘I’m not sure I want to be born on a night like that.’
‘Well, what night would you like to be born on?’
Silence as Sascha floated a while.
‘Guy Fawkes,’ he finally whispered.
‘Guy Fawkes??!!’
‘That’s mainly fireworks, gunpowder plots, Houses of Parliament, yes? Please to remember the fifth of November?’
‘Do you think you could wait until then?’
‘I could try. I don’t think I want to start out with skulls and bones. Gunpowder’s more like it. I could write about that.’
‘Will you be a writer, then?’
‘Get me a typewriter and a ream of paper.’
‘And keep us awake with the typing?’
‘Pen, pencil, and pad, then?’
‘Done!’
So it was agreed and the nights passed into weeks and the weeks leaned from summer into the first days of autumn and his voice grew stronger, as did the sound of his heart and the small commotions of his limbs. Sometimes as Maggie slept, his voice would stir her awake and she would reach up to touch her mouth, where the surprise of his dreaming came forth.
‘There, there, Sascha. Rest now. Sleep.’
‘Sleep,’ he whispered drowsily, ‘sleep.’ And faded away.
‘Pork chops, please, for supper.’
‘No pickles with ice cream?’ both said, almost at once.
‘Pork chops,’ he said, and more days passed and more dawns arose and he said: ‘Hamburgers!’
‘For breakfast?’
‘With onions,’ he said.
October stood still for one day and then …
Halloween departed.
‘Thanks,’ said Sascha, ‘for helping me past that. What’s up ahead in five nights?’
‘Guy Fawkes!’
‘Ah, yes!’ he cried.
And at one minute after midnight five days later, Maggie got up, wandered to the bathroom, and wandered back, stunned.
‘Dear,’ she said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
Douglas Spaulding turned over, half awake. ‘Yes?’
‘What day is it?’ whispered Sascha.
‘Guy Fawkes, at last. So?’
‘I don’t feel well,’ said Sascha. ‘Or, no, I feel fine. Full of pep. Ready to go. It’s time to say good-bye. Or is it hello? What do I mean?’
‘Spit it out.’
‘Are there neighbors who said, no matter when, they’d take us to the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘Call the neighbors,’ said Sascha.
They called the neighbors.
At the hospital, Douglas kissed his wife’s brow and listened.
‘It’s been nice,’ said Sascha.
‘Only the best.’
‘We won’t talk again. Good-bye,’ said Sascha.
‘Good-bye,’ both said.
At dawn there was a small clear cry somewhere.
Not long after, Douglas entered his wife’s hospital room. She looked at him and said, ‘Sascha’s gone.’
‘I know,’ he said quietly.
‘But he left word and someone else is here. Look.’
He approached the bed as she pulled back a coverlet.
‘Well, I’ll be damned.’
He looked down at a small pink face and eyes that for a brief moment flickered bright blue and then shut.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
‘Your daughter. Meet Alexandra.’
‘Hello, Alexandra,’ he said.
‘And do you know what the nickname for Alexandra is?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Sascha,’ she said.
He touched the small cheek very gently.
‘Hello, Sascha,’ he said.
Junior
It was on the morning of October 1 that Albert Beam, aged eighty-two, woke to find an incredible thing had happened, if not in the night, miraculously at dawn.
He witnessed a warm and peculiar rise two-thirds of the way down the bed, under the covers. At first he thought he had drawn up one knee to ease a cramp, but then, blinking, he realized—
It was his old friend, Albert, Junior.
Or just Junior, as some frolicsome girl had dubbed it, how long, oh God … some sixty years ago!
And Junior was alive, well, and freshly alert.
Hallo, thought Albert Beam, Senior, to the scene, that’s the first time he’s waked before me since July 1970.
July 1970!
He stared. And the more he stared and mused, the more Junior blushed unseen; all resolute, a true beauty.
Well, thought Albert Beam, I’ll just wait for him to go away.
He shut his eyes and waited, but nothing happened. Or rather, it continued to happen. Junior did not go away. He lingered, hopeful for some new life.
Hold on! thought Albert Beam. It can’t be.
He sat bolt upright, his eyes popped wide, his breath like a fever in his mouth.
‘Are you going to stay?’ he cried down at his old and now bravely obedient friend.
Yes! he thought he heard a small voice say.
For as a young man, he and his trampoline companions had often enjoyed Charlie McCarthy talks with Junior, who was garrulous and piped up with outrageously witty things. Ventriloquism, amidst Phys. Ed. II, was one of Albert Beam’s most engaging talents.
Which meant that Junior was talented, too.
Yes! the small voice seemed to whisper. Yes!
Albert Beam bolted from bed. He was halfway through his personal phonebook when he realized all the old numbers still drifted behind his left ear. He dialed three of them, furiously, voice cracking.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello!’
‘Hello!’
From this island of old age now he called across a cold sea toward a summer shore. There, three women answered. Still reasonably young, trapped between fifty and sixty, they gasped, crowed and hooted when Albert Beam stunned them with the news:
‘Emily, you won’t believe—’
‘Cora, a miracle!’
‘Elizabeth, Junior’s back.’
‘Lazarus has returned!’
‘Drop everything!’
‘Hurry over!’
‘Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye!’
He dropped the phone, suddenly fearful that after all the alarums and excursions, this Most Precious Member of the Hot-Dog Midnight Dancing-Under-the-Table Club might dismantle. He shuddered to think that Cape Canaveral’s rockets would fall apart before the admiring crowd could arrive to gape in awe.
Such was not the case.
Junior, steadfast, stayed on, frightful in demeanor, a wonder to behold.
Albert Beam, ninety-five percent mummy, five percent jaunty peacock lad, raced about his mansion in his starkers, drinking coffee to give Junior courage and shock himself awake, and when he heard the various cars careen up the drive, threw on a hasty robe. With hair in wild disarray he rushed to let in three girls who were not girls, nor maids, and almost ladies.
But before he could throw the door wide, they were storming it with jackhammers, or so it seemed, their enthusiasm was so manic.
They burst through, almost heaving him to the floor, and waltzed him backward into the parlor.
One had once been a redhead, the next a blond, the third a brunette. Now, with various rinses and tints obscuring past colors false and real, each a bit more out of breath than the next, they laughed and giggled as they carried Albert Beam along through his house. And whether they were flushed with merriment or blushed at the thought of the antique miracle they were about to witness, who could say? They were scarcely dressed, themselves, having hurled themselves into dressing-gowns in order to race here and confront Lazarus triumphant in the tomb!
‘Albert, is it true?’
‘No joke?’
‘You once pinched our legs, now are you pulling them?!’
‘Chums!’
Albert Beam shook his head and smiled a great warm smile, sensing a similar smile on the hidden countenance of his Pet, his Pal, his Buddy, his Friend. Lazarus, impatient, jogged in place.
‘No jokes. No lies. Ladies, sit!’
The women rushed to collapse in chairs and turn their rosy faces and July Fourth eyes full on the old moon rocket expert, waiting for countdown.
Albert Beam took hold of the edges of his now purposely elusive bathrobe, while his eyes moved tenderly from face to face.
‘Emily, Cora, Elizabeth,’ he said, gently, ‘how special you were, are, and will always be.’
‘Albert, dear Albert, we’re dying with curiosity!’
‘A moment, please,’ he murmured. ‘I need to – remember.’
And in the quiet moment, each gazed at the other, and suddenly saw the obvious; something never spoken of in their early afternoon lives, but which now loomed with the passing years.
The simple fact was that none of them had ever grown up.
They had used each other to stay in kindergarten, or at the most, fourth grade, forever.
Which meant endless champagne noon lunches, and prolonged late night foxtrot/waltzes that sank down in nibblings of ears and founderings in grass.
None had ever married, none had ever conceived of the notion of children, much less conceived them, so none had raised any family save the one gathered here, and they had not so much raised each other as prolonged an infancy and lingered an adolescence. They had responded only to the jolly or wild weathers of their souls and their genetic dispositions.
‘Listen, dear, dear, ladies,’ whispered Albert Beam.
They continued to stare at each other’s masks with a sort of fevered benevolence. For it had suddenly struck them that while they had been busy making each other happy they had made no one else unhappy!
It was something to sense that by some miracle they’d given each other only minor wounds and those long since healed, for here they were, forty years on, still friends in remembrance of three loves.
‘Friends,’ thought Albert Beam aloud. ‘That’s what we are. Friends!’
Because, many years ago, as each beauty departed his life on good terms, another had arrived on better. It was the exquisite precision with which he had clocked them through his existence that made them aware of their specialness as women unafraid and so never jealous.
They beamed at one another.
What a thoughtful and ingenious man, to have made them absolutely and completely happy before he sailed on to founder in old age.
‘Come, Albert, my dear,’ said Cora.
‘The matinée crowd’s here,’ said Emily.
‘Where’s Hamlet?’
‘Ready?’ said Albert Beam. ‘Get set?’
He hesitated in the final moment, since it was to be his last annunciation or manifestation or whatever before he vanished into the halls of history.
With trembling fingers that tried to remember the difference between zippers and buttons, he took hold of the bathrobe curtains on the theater, as ’twere.
At which instant a most peculiar loud hum bumbled beneath his pressed lips.
The ladies popped their eyes and smartened up, leaning forward.
For it was that grand moment when the Warner Brothers logo vanished from the screen and the names and titles flashed forth in a fountain of brass and strings by Steiner or Korngold.
Was it a symphonic surge from Dark Victory or The Adventures of Robin Hood that trembled the old man’s lips?
Was it the score from Elizabeth and Essex, Now, Voyager or The Petrified Forest?
Petrified forest!? Albert Beam’s lips cracked with the joke of it. How fitting for him, for Junior!
The music rose high, higher, highest, and exploded from his mouth.
‘Ta-tah!’ sang Albert Beam.
He flung wide the curtain.
The ladies cried out in sweet alarms.
For there, starring in the last act of Revelations, was Albert Beam the Second.
Or perhaps, justifiably proud, Junior!
Unseen in years, he was an orchard of beauty and sweet Eden’s Garden, all to himself.
Was he both Apple and Snake?
He was!
Scenes from Krakatoa, the Explosion that Rocked the World teemed through the ladies’ sugar-plum minds. Lines like ‘Only God Can Make a Tree’ leaped forth from old poems. Cora seemed to recall the score from Last Days of Pompeii, Elizabeth the music from Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Emily, suddenly shocked back into 1927, babbled the inane words to ‘Lucky Lindy … Spirit of St. Louis, high, stay aloft … we’re with you …!’
The musical trio quieted into a sort of twilight-in-mid-morning-holy-hour, a time for veneration and loving regard. It almost seemed that a wondrous illumination sprang forth from the Source, the Shrine at which they gathered as motionless worshippers, praying that the moment would be prolonged by their silent alleluias.
And it was prolonged.
Albert Beam and Junior stood as one before the throng, a large smile on the old man’s face, a smaller one on Junior’s.
Time-travel shadowed the ladies’ faces.
Each remembered Monte Carlo or Paris or Rome or splash-dancing the Plaza Hotel fount that night centuries ago with Scott and Zelda. Suns and moons rose and set in their eyes and there was no jealousy, only lives long lost but brought back and encircled in this moment.
‘Well,’ everyone whispered, at last.
One by one, each of the three pal-friends stepped forward to kiss Albert Beam lightly on the cheek and smile up at him and then down at the Royal Son, that most Precious Member who deserved to be patted, but was not, in this moment, touched.
The three Grecian maids, the retired Furies, the ancient vest porch goddesses, stepped back a way to line up for a final view-halloo.
And the weeping began.
First Emily, then Cora, then Elizabeth, as all summoned back some midnight collision of young fools who somehow survived the crash.
Albert Beam stood amidst the rising salt sea, until the tears also ran free from his eyes.
And whether they were tears of somber remembrance for a past that was not a golden pavane, or celebratory wails for a present most salubrious and enchanting, none could say. They wept and stood about, not knowing what to do with their hands.
Until at last, like small children peering in mirrors to catch the strangeness and mystery of weeping, they ducked under to look at each other’s sobs.
They saw each other’s eyeglasses spattered with wet salt stars from the tips of their eyelashes.
‘Oh, hah!’
And the whole damned popcorn machine exploded into wild laughter.
‘Oh, heee!’
They turned in circles with the bends. They stomped their feet to get the barks and hoots of hilarity out. They became weak as children at four o’clock tea, that silly hour when anything said is the funniest crack in all the world and the bones collapse and you wander in dazed circles to fall and writhe in ecstasies of mirth on the floor.
Which is what now happened. The ladies let gravity yank them down to flag their hair on the parquetry, their last tears flung like bright comets from their eyes as they rolled and gasped, stranded on a morning beach.
‘Gods! Oh! Ah!’ The old man could not stand it. Their earthquake shook and broke him. He saw, in this final moment, that his pal, his dear and precious Junior, had at last in all the shouts and snorts and happy cries melted away like a snow memory and was now a ghost.
And Albert Beam grabbed his knees, sneezed out a great laugh of recognition at the general shape, size and ridiculousness of birthday-suit humans on an indecipherable earth, and fell.
He squirmed amidst the ladies, chuckling, flailing for air. They dared not look at each other for fear of merciless heart attacks from the seal barks and elephant trumpetings that echoed from their lips.
Waiting for their mirth to let go, they at last sat up to rearrange their hair, their smiles, their breathing and their glances.
‘Dear me, oh, dear, dear,’ moaned the old man, with a last gasp of relief. ‘Wasn’t that the best ever, the finest, the loveliest time we have ever had anytime, anywhere, in all the great years?’
All nodded ‘yes.’
‘But,’ said practical Emily, straightening her face, ‘drama’s done. Tea’s cold. Time to go.’
And they gathered to lift the old tentbones of the ancient warrior, and he stood among his dear ones in a glorious warm silence as they clothed him in his robe and guided him to the front door.
‘Why?’ wondered the old man. ‘Why? Why did Junior return on this day?’
‘Silly!’ cried Emily. ‘It’s your birthday!’
‘Well, happy me! Yes, yes.’ He mused. ‘Well, do you imagine, maybe, next year, and the next, will I be gifted the same?’
‘Well,’ said Cora.
‘We—’
‘Not in this lifetime,’ said Emily, tenderly.
‘Good-bye, dear Albert, fine Junior,’ said each.
‘Thanks for all of my life,’ said the old man.
He waved and they were gone, down the drive and off into the fine fair morning.
He waited for a long while and then addressed himself to his old pal, his good friend, his now sleeping forever companion.
‘Come on, Fido, here, boy, time for our pre-lunch nap. And, who knows, with luck we may dream wild dreams until tea!’
And, my God, he thought he heard the small voice cry, then won’t we be famished!?
‘We will!’
And the old man, half-asleep on his feet, and Junior already dreaming, fell flat forward into a bed with three warm and laughing ghosts …
And so slept.
