Collected Short Fiction, page 185
“That was an old electric!” John said. “I didn’t know they were making them again.”
From the back seat Johnny said, “When are we going to get to Grammy’s?”
“Soon,” his mother said. “If you’re going to ask the way to Buffalo Street, you’d better ask,” she said to John. “It’s too hot to sit here in the car.”
John opened the door and extracted himself from the damp socket of the bucket seat. He stood for a moment beside the baked metal of the car and looked up each side of the street. The oomp-pah-pah of the band was louder now and the yeasty smell of baking bread dilated his nostrils, but the whole scene struck him as unreal somehow, as if this all were a stage setting and a man could walk behind the buildings and find that the backs were unpainted canvas and raw wood.
“Well?” Sally said.
John shook his head and walked around the front of the car. The first store sold hardware. In the small front window were crowbars and wooden-handled claw hammers and three kegs of blue nails; one of the kegs had a metal scoop stuck into the nails at the top. In one corner of the window was a hand mower, its handle varnished wood, its metal wheels and reel blue, except where the spokes had been touched with red and yellow paint and the curved reel had been sharpened to a silver line.
The interior of the store was dark; John could not tell whether anyone was inside.
Next to it was “Tyler’s General Store,” and John stepped inside onto sawdust. Before his eyes adjusted from the Sunshine State’s proudest asset, he smelled the pungent sawdust. The odor was mingled with others—the vinegar and spice of pickles and the ripeness of cheese and a sweet-sour smell that he could not identify.
Into his returning vision the faces swam first—the pale faces of the old people, framed in white hair, relieved from the anonymity of age only by the way in which bushy eyebrows sprouted or a mustache was trimmed or wrinkles carved the face. Then he saw the rest of the store and the old people. Some of them were sitting in scarred oak chairs with rounded backs near a black, potbellied stove. The room was cool; after a moment John realized that the stove was producing a cold breeze.
One old man with a drooping white mustache was leaning over from the barrel he sat on to cut a slice of cheese from the big wheel on the counter. A tall man with an apron over his shirt and trousers and his shirt sleeves hitched up with rubber bands came from behind the counter, moving his bald head with practiced ease among the dangling sausages.
“Son,” he said, “I reckon you lost your way. Made the wrong turn off the highway, I warrant. Heading for Winter Hope or beyond and mistook yourself. You just head back out how you come in and——”
“Is this Sunset Acres?” John said.
The old man with the yellow slice of cheese in his hand said in a thin voice, “Yep. No use thinking you can stay, though. Thirty-five or forty years too soon. That’s what!” His sudden laughter came out in a cackle.
The others joined in, like a superannuated Greek chorus, “Can’t stay!”
“I’m looking for Buffalo Street,” John said. “We’re going to visit the Plummers.” He paused and then added, “They’re my wife’s parents.”
The storekeeper tucked his thumbs into the straps of his apron. “That’s different. Everybody knows the Plummers. Three blocks north of the square. Can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” John said, nodding, and backed into the sunshine.
The interrupted murmur of conversation began again, broken briefly by laughter.
“Three blocks north of the square,” he said as he inserted himself back in the car.
He started the motor, shifted into first, and turned the corner. As he passed the general store he thought he saw white faces peering out of the darkness, but they might have been feather pillows hanging in the window.
In front of the town hall an old man jerked in his sleep as the car passed. Another opened his eyes and frowned. A third shook his cane in their general direction. Beyond, a thin woman in a lavender shawl was holding an old man by the shoulder as if to tell him that she was done with the shopping and it was time to go home.
“John, look!” Sally said, pointing out the window beside her.
To their right was an ice-cream parlor. Metal chairs and round tables with thin, wire legs were set in front of the store under a yellow awning. At one of the tables sat an elderly couple. The man sat straight in his chair like an army officer, his hair iron-gray and neatly parted, his eyebrows thick. He was keeping time to the music of the band with the cane in his right hand. His left hand held the hand of a little old woman in a black dress, who gazed at him as she sipped from the soda in front of her.
The music was louder here. Just to the north of the town hall, they could see now, was a bandstand with a conical roof. On the bandstand sat half a dozen old men in uniforms, playing instruments. Another man in uniform stood in front of them, waving a baton. It was a moment before John realized what was wrong with the scene. The music was louder and richer than the half-dozen musicians could have produced.
But it was Johnny who pointed out the tape recorder beside the bandstand, “Just like Daddy’s.”
It turned out that Buffalo Street was not three blocks north of the square but three blocks south.
The aging process had been kind to Mrs. Henry Plummer. She was a small woman, and the retreating years had left their detritus of fat, but the extra weight seemed no burden on her small bones and the cushioning beneath the skin kept it plump and unwrinkled. Her youthful complexion seemed strangely at odds with her blue-white curls. Her eyes, though, were unmistakably old. They were faded like a blue gingham dress.
They looked at Sally now, John thought, as if to say, “What I have seen you through, my dear, the colic and the boys, the measles and the mumps and the chickenpox and the boys, the frozen fingers and the skinned knees and the boys, the parties and the late hours and the boys . . . And now you come again to me, bringing this larger, distant boy that I do not like very much, who has taken you from me and treated you with crude familiarity, and you ask me to call him by his first name and consider him one of the family. It’s too much.” When she spoke her voice was surprisingly small. “Henry,” she said, a little girl in an old body, “don’t stand there talking all day. Take in the bags! These children must be starved to death!”
Henry Plummer had grown thinner as his wife had filled out, as if she had grown fat at his expense. Plummer had been a junior executive, long after he had passed in age most of the senior executives, in a firm that manufactured games and toys, but a small inheritance and cautious investments in municipal bonds and life insurance had made possible his comfortable retirement.
He could not shake the habits of a lifetime; his face bore the wry expression of a man who expects the worst and receives it. He said little, and when he spoke it was usually to protest. “Well, I guess I’m not the one holding them up,” he said, but he stooped for the bags.
John moved quickly to reach the bags first. “I’ll get them, Dad,” he said. The word “Dad” came out as if it were fitted with rusty hooks. He had never known what to call Henry Plummer. His own father had died when he was a small child, and his mother had died when he was in college; but he could not find in himself any filial affection for Plummer. He disliked the coyness of “Dad,” but it was better than the stiffness of “Mr. Plummer” or the false camaraderie of “Henry.” With Mrs. Plummer the problem had not been so great. John recalled a joke from the book he had edited recently for the paperback publishing firm that employed him. “For the first year I said, ‘Hey, you!’ and then I called her ‘Grandma.’ ”
He straightened with the scuffed suitcases, looking helplessly at Sally for a moment and then apologetically at Plummer. “I guess you’ve carried your share of luggage already.”
“He’s perfectly fit,” Mrs. Plummer said.
Sally looked only at Johnny. Sally was small and dark-haired and pretty, and John loved her and her whims—“a whim of iron,” they called her firm conviction that she knew the right thing to do at any time, in any situation—but when she was around her mother John saw reflected in her behavior all the traits that he found irritating in the old woman. Sometime, perhaps, she would even be plump like her mother, but now it did not seem likely. She ran after Johnny fourteen hours a day.
She held the hand of her four-year-old, her face flushed, her eyes bright with pride. “I guess you see how he’s grown, Mother. Ten pounds since you saw him last Christmas. And three inches taller. Give your grandmother a kiss, Johnny. A big kiss for Grammy. He’s been talking all the way from New York about coming to visit Grammy—and Granddad, too, of course. I can’t imagine what makes him act so shy now. Usually he isn’t. Not even with strangers. Give Grammy a great big kiss.”
“Well,” Mrs. Plummer said, “you must be starved. Come on in. I’ve got a ham on the stove, and we’ll have sandwiches and coffee. And, Johnny, I’ve got something for you. A box of chocolates, all your own.”
“Oh, Mother!” Sally said. “Not just before lunch. He won’t eat a bite.”
Johnny jumped up and down. He pulled his hand free from his mother’s and ran to Mrs. Plummer. “Candy! Candy!” he shouted. He gave Mrs. Plummer a big, wet kiss.
John stood at the living room window listening to the whisper of the air conditioning and looking out at the Florida evening. He could see Johnny playing in the pile of sand his thoughtful grandparents had had dumped in the back yard. It had been a relief to be alone with his wife, but now the heavy silence of disagreement hung in the air between them. He had wanted to leave, to return to New York, and she would not even consider the possibility.
He had massed all his arguments, all his uneasiness, about this strange, nightmarish town, about how he felt unwanted, about how it disliked them, and Sally had found his words first amusing and then disagreeable. For her Sunset Acres was an arcadia for the aged. Her reaction was strongly influenced by that glimpse of the old couple at the ice cream parlor.
John had always found in her a kind of Walt Disney sentimentality, but it had never disturbed him before. He turned and made one last effort, “Besides, your parents don’t even want us here. We’ve been here only a couple of hours and already they’ve left us to go to some meeting.
“It’s their monthly town hall meeting,” Sally said. “They have an obligation to attend. It’s part of their self-government or something.”
“Oh, hell,” John said, turning back to the window. He looked from left to right and back again. “Johnny’s gone.”
He ran to the back door and fumbled with it for a moment. Then it opened, and he was in the back yard. After the sterile chill of the house, the air outside seemed ripe with warm black earth and green things springing through the soil. The sandpile was empty; there was no place for the boy to hide among the colorful Florida shrubs which hid the back yard of the house behind and had colorful names he could never remember.
John ran around the corner of the house. He reached the porch just as Sally came through the front door.
“There he is,” Sally cried out.
“Johnny!” John shouted.
The four-year-old had started across the street. He turned and looked back at them. “Grammy,” he said.
John heard him clearly.
The car slipped into the scene like a shadow, silent, unsuspected. John saw it out of the corner of his eye. Later he thought that it must have turned the nearby corner, or perhaps it came out of a driveway. In the moment before the accident, he saw that the old woman in the wide-brimmed hat was driving the car herself. He saw her head turn toward Johnny, and he saw the upright electric turn sharply toward the child.
The front fender hit Johnny and threw him toward the sidewalk. John looked incredulously at the old woman. She smiled at him, and then the car was gone down the street.
“Johnny!” Sally screamed. Already she was in the street, the boy’s head cradled in her lap. She hugged him and then pushed him away to look blindly into his face and then hugged him again, rocking him in her arms, crying.
John found himself beside her, kneeling. He pried the boy away from her. Johnny’s eyes were closed. His face was pale, but John couldn’t find any blood. He lifted the boy’s eyelids. The pupils seemed dilated. Johnny did not stir.
“What’s the matter with him?” Sally screamed at John. “He’s going to die, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know. Let me think! Let’s get him into the house.”
“You aren’t supposed to move people who’ve been in an accident!”
“We can’t leave him here to be run over by someone else.”
John picked up his son gently and walked to the house. He lowered the boy onto the quilt in the front bedroom and looked down at him for a moment. The boy was breathing raggedly. He moaned. His hand twitched. “I’ve got to get a doctor,” John said. “Where’s the telephone?”
Sally stared at him as if she hadn’t heard. John turned away and looked in the living room. An antique apparatus on a wooden frame was attached to one wall. He picked up the receiver and cranked the handle vigorously. “Hello!” he said. “Hello!” No answer.
He returned to the bedroom. Sally was still standing beside the bed. “What a lousy town!” he said. “No telephone service!” Sally looked at him. She blinked.
“I’ll have to go to town,” John said. “You stay with Johnny. Keep him warm. Put cold compresses on his head.” They might not help Johnny, he thought, but they would keep Sally quiet.
She nodded and headed toward the bathroom.
When he got to the car, it refused to start. After a few futile attempts, he gave up, knowing he had flooded the motor. He ran back to the house. Sally looked up at him, calmer now that her hands were busy.
“I’m going to run,” he told her. “I might see that woman and be unable to resist the impulse to smash into her.”
“Don’t talk crazy,” Sally said. “It was just an accident.”
“It was no accident,” John said. “I’ll be back with a doctor as soon as I can find one.”
John ran down the brick sidewalks until his throat burned and then walked for a few steps before breaking once more into a run. By then the square was in sight. The sun had plunged into the Gulf of Mexico, and the town was filled with silence and shadows. The storefronts were dark. There was no light anywhere in the square.
The first store was a butcher shop. Hams hung in the windows, and plucked chickens, naked and scrawny, dangled by cords around their yellow feet. John thought he smelled sawdust and blood. He remembered Johnny and felt sick.
Next was a clothing store with two wide windows under the name “Emporium.” In the windows were stiff, waxen dummies in black suits and high, starched collars; in lace and parasol. Then came a narrow door; on its window were printed the words, “Saunders and Jones, Attorneys at Law.” The window framed dark steps.
Beside it was a print shop—piles of paper pads in the window, white, yellow, pink, blue; reams of paper in dusty wrappers; faded invitations and personal cards; and behind them the lurking shapes of printing presses and racks of type.
John passed a narrow bookstore with books stacked high in the window and ranged in ranks into the darkness. Then came a restaurant; a light in the back revealed scattered tables with checkered cloths. He pounded at the door, making a shocking racket in the silence of the square, but no one came.
Kitty-corner across the street, he saw the place and recognized it by the tall, intricately shaped bottles of colored water in the window and the fancy jar hanging from chains. He ran across the brick street and beat on the door with his fist. There was no response. He kicked it, but the drug store remained silent and dark. Only the echoes answered his summons, and they soon died away.
Next to the drug store was another dark door. The words printed across the window in it said, “Joseph M. Bronson, M.D.” And underneath, “Geriatrics Only.”
John knocked, sure it was useless, wondering, “Why is the town locked up? Where is everybody?” And then he remembered the meeting. That’s where everyone was, at the meeting the Plummers couldn’t miss. No one could miss the meeting. Everyone had to be there, apparently, even the telephone operator. But where was it being held?
Of course. Where else would a town meeting be held? In the town hall.
He ran across the street once more and up the wide steps. He pulled open one of the heavy doors and stepped into a hall with tall ceilings. Stairways led up on either side, but light came through a pair of doors ahead. He heard a babble of voices. John walked towards the doors, feeling the slick oak floors under his feet, smelling the public toilet odors of old urine and disinfectant.
He stopped for a moment at the doors to peer between them, hoping to see the Plummers, hoping they were close enough to signal without disturbing the others. The old people would be startled if he burst in among them. There would be confusion and explanations, accusations perhaps. He needed a doctor, not an argument.
The room was filled with wooden folding chairs placed neatly in rows, with a wide aisle in the middle and a narrower one on either side. From the backs of the chairs hung shawls and canes. The room had for John the unreal quality of an etching, perhaps because all the backs of the heads that he saw were silver and gray, here and there accented with tints of blue or green.
At the front of the room was a walnut rostrum on a broad platform. Behind the rostrum stood the old man Sally had pointed out in the ice cream parlor. He stood as straight as he had sat.
The room buzzed as if it had a voice of its own, and the voice rose and fell, faded and returned, the way it does in a dream. One should be able to understand it, one had to understand it, but one couldn’t quite make out the words.
