Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (17 page)

 
          
 
But she was out the door, in the reception
room, babbling, whispering, "Willy, Willy!" and bending to her
husband, hissing in his tiny ear until his eyes flexed wide, and his mouth firm
and passionate dropped open and he cried aloud and clapped his hands with
elation.

 
          
 
"Doctor, Doctor, thank you, thank
you!"

 
          
 
He darted forward and seized the doctor's hand
and shook it, hard. The doctor was surprised at the fire and rock hardness of
that grip. It was the hand of a dedicated artist, as were the eyes burning up
at him darkly from the wildly illuminated face.

 
          
 
"Everything's going to be fine!"
cried Willy.

 
          
 
The doctor hesitated, glancing from Willy to
the great shadowing balloon that tugged at him wanting to fly off away.

 
          
 
"We won't have to come back again,
ever?"

 
          
 
Good Lord, the doctor thought, does he think
that he has illustrated her from stem to stem, and does she humor him about it?
Is he mad?

 
          
 
Or does she imagine that he has tattooed her
from neck to toebone, and does he humor her? Is she mad?

 
          
 
Or, most strange of all, do they both believe
that he has swarmed as across the Sistine Chapel ceiling, covering her with
rare and significant beauties? Do they both believe, know, humor each other in
their specially dimensioned world?

 
          
 
"Will we have to come back again?"
asked Willy Fleet a second time.

 
          
 
"No." The doctor breathed a prayer.
"I think not."

 
          
 
Why? Because, by some idiot grace, he had done
the right thing, hadn't he? By prescribing for a half-seen cause he had made a
full cure, yes? Regardless if she believed or he believed or both believed in
the Masterpiece, by suggesting the pictures be erased, destroyed, the doctor
had made her a clean, lovely and inviting canvas again, if she needed to be.
And if he, on the other hand, wished a new woman to scribble, scrawl and
pretend to tattoo on, well, that worked, too. For new and untouched she would
be.

 
          
 
"Thank you. Doctor, oh thank you, thank
you!"

 
          
 
"Don't thank me," said the doctor.
"I've done nothing." He almost said. It was all a fluke, a joke, a
surprise! I fell downstairs and landed on my feet!

 
          
 
"Goodbye, goodbye!"

 
          
 
And the elevator slid down, the big woman and
the little man sinking from sight into the now suddenly not-too-solid earth,
where the atoms opened to let them pass.

 
          
 
"Goodbye, thanks, thanks . . . thanks . .
."

 
          
 
Their voices faded, calling his name and
praising his intellect long after they had passed the fourth floor.

 
          
 
The doctor looked around and moved unsteadily
back into his office. He shut the door and leaned against it.

 
          
 
"Doctor," he murmured, "heal
thyself."

 
          
 
He stepped forward. He did not feel real. He
must lie down, if but for a moment.

 
          
 
Where?

 
          
 
On the couch, of course, on the couch.

 
          
 
You won't believe it when I tell you I waited more
than sixty years for a murder, hoped as only a woman can hope that it might
happen, and didn't move a finger to stop it when it finally drew near. Anna
Marie, I thought, you can't stand guard forever. Mvirder, when ten thousand
days have passed, is more than a surprise, it is a miracle.

 
          
 
"Hold on! Don't let me fall!"

 
          
 
Mrs. Harrison's voice.

 
          
 
Did I ever, in half a century, hear it
whisper? Was it always screaming, shrieking, demanding, threatening?

 
          
 
Yes, always.

 
          
 
"Come along. Mother. There you are.
Mother."

 
          
 
Her son Roger's voice.

 
          
 
Did I ever in all the years hear it rise above
a murmur, protest, or, even faintly birdlike, argue?

 
          
 
No. Always the loving monotone.

 
          
 
This morning, no different than any other of
their first mornings, they arrived in their great black hearse for their annual
Green Bay summer. There he was, thrusting his hand in to hoist the window dummy
after him, an ancient sachet of bones and talcum dust that was named, surely
for some terrible practical joke. Mother.

 
          
 
"Easy does it. Mother."

 
          
 
"You're bruising my arm!”

 
          
 
"Sorry, Mother."

 
          
 
I watched from a window of the lake pavilion
as he trundled her off down the path in her wheel chair, she pushing her cane
like a musket ahead to blast any Fates or Furies they might meet out of the
way.

 
          
 
"Careful, don't run me into the flowers,
thank God we'd sense not to go to Paris after all. You'd've had me in that
nasty traflfic. You're not disappointed?"

           
 
"No, Mother."

 
          
 
"We'll see Paris next year.”

 
          
 
Next year . . . next year ... no year at all,
I heard someone murmur. Myself, gripping the window sill. For almost seventy
years I had heard her promise this to the boy, boy-man, man, man-grasshopper
and the now livid male praying mantis that he was, pushing his eternally cold and
fur-wrapped woman past the hotel verandas where, in another age, paper fans had
fluttered like Oriental butterflies in the hands of basking ladies.

 
          
 
"There, Mother, inside the cottage . .
." his faint voice fading still more, forever young when he was old,
forever old when he was very young.

 
          
 
How old is she now? I wondered. Ninety-eight,
yes, ninety-nine wicked years old. She seemed like a horror film repeated each
year because the hotel entertainment fund could not afford to buy a new one to
run in the moth-flaked evenings.

 
          
 
So, through all the repetitions of arrivals
and departures, my mind ran back to when the foundations of the Green Bay Hotel
were freshly poured and the parasols were new leaf green and lemon gold, that
summer of 1890 when I first saw Roger, who was five, but whose eyes already
were old and wise and tired.

 
          
 
He stood on the pavilion grass looking at the
sun and the bright pennants as I came up to him.

 
          
 
"Hello," I said.

 
          
 
He simply looked at me.

 
          
 
I hesitated, tagged him and ran.

 
          
 
He did not move.

 
          
 
I came back and tagged him again.

 
          
 
He looked at the place where I had touched
him, on the shoulder, and was about to run after me when her voice came from a
distance.

 
          
 
"Roger, don't dirty your clothes!"

 
          
 
And he walked slowly away toward his cottage,
not looking back.

 
          
 
That was the day I started to hate him.

 
          
 
Parasols have come and gone in a thousand
summer colors, whole flights of butterfly fans have blown away on August winds,
the pavilion has burned and been built again in the selfsame size and shape,
the lake has dried like a plum in its basin, and my hatred, like these things,
came and went, grew very large, stopped still for love, returned, then
diminished with the years.

 
          
 
I remember when he was seven, them driving by
in their horse carriage, his hair long, brushing his poutish, shrugging
shoulders. They were holding hands and she was saying, "If you're very
good this summer, next year we'll go to London. Or the year after that, at the
latest."

 
          
 
And my watching their faces, comparing their
eyes, their ears, their mouths, so when he came in for a soda .pop one noon
that summer I walked straight up to him and cried, "She's not your
mother!"

 
          
 
"What!" He looked around in panic,
as if she might be near.

 
          
 
"She's not your aunt or your grandma,
either!" I cried. "She's a witch that stole you when you were a baby.
You don't know who your mama is or your pa. You don't look anything like her.
She's holding you for a million ransom which comes due when you're twenty-one
from some duke or king!"

 
          
 
"Don't say that!" he shouted,
jumping up.

 
          
 
"Why not?" I said angrily. "Why
do you come around here? You can't play this, can't play that, can't do
nothing, what good are you? She says, she does. I know her! She hangs upside
down from the ceiling in her black clothes in her bedroom at midnight!"

 
          
 
"Don't say that!" His face was
frightened and pale.

 
          
 
"Why not say it?”

 
          
 
"Because," he bleated, "it's
true."

 
          
 
And he was out the door and running.

 
          
 
I didn't see him again until the next summer.
And then only once, briefly, when I took some clean linen down to their
cottage.

 
          
 
The summer when we were both twelve was the
summer that for a time I didn't hate him.

 
          
 
He called my name outside the pavilion screen
door and when I looked out he said, very quietly, "Anna Marie, when I am
twenty and you are twenty, I'm going to marry you.'*

 
          
 
"Who's going to let you?" I asked.

 
          
 
"I'm going to let you," he said.
"You just remember, Anna Marie. You wait for me. Promise?"

 
          
 
I could only nod. "But what about—"

 
          
 
"She'll be dead by then," he said,
very gravely. "She's old. She's old!”

           
 
And then he turned and went away.

 
          
 
The next summer they did not come to the
resort at all. I heard she was sick. I prayed every night that she would die.

 
          
 
But two years later they were back, and the
year after the year after that until Roger was nineteen and I was nineteen, and
then at last we had reached and touched twenty, and for one of the few times in
all the years, they came into the pavilion together, she in her wheel chair
now, deeper in her furs than ever before, her face a gathering of white dust
and folded parchment.

 
          
 
She eyed me as I set her ice-cream sundae down
before her, and eyed Roger as he said, "Mother, I want you to meet—"

 
          
 
"I do not meet girls who wait on public
tables," she said. "I acknowledge they exist, work, and are paid. I
immediately forget their names."

 
          
 
She touched and nibbled her ice cream, touched
and nibbled her ice cream, while Roger sat not touching his at all.

 
          
 
They left a day earlier than usual that year.
I saw Roger as he paid the bill, in the hotel lobby. He shook my hand to say
goodbye and I could not help but say, "You've forgotten."

 
          
 
He took a half step back, then turned around, patting
his coat pockets.

 
          
 
"Luggage, bills paid, wallet, no, I seem
to have everything," he said.

 
          
 
"A long time ago," I said, “you made
a promise.”

 
          
 
He was silent.

 
          
 
"Roger," I said, "I'm twenty
now. And so are you.”

 
          
 
He seized my hand again, swiftly, as if he
were falling over the side of a ship and it was me going away, leaving him to
drown forever beyond help.

 
          
 
"One more year, Anna! Two, three, at the
most!"

 
          
 
•*Oh, no," I said, forlornly.

 
          
 
"Four years at the outside I The doctors
say—"

 
          
 
**The doctors don't know what I know, Roger.
She'll live forever. She'll bury you and me and drink wine at our
funerals."

 
          
 
"She's a sick woman, Anna! My God, she
can't survive!"

 
          
 
"She will, because we give her strength.
She knows we want her dead. That really gives her the power to go on."

           
 
"I can't talk this way, I can't!"
Seizing his luggage, he started down the hall.

 
          
 
"I won't wait, Roger," I said.

 
          
 
He turned at the door and looked at me so
helplessly, so palely, like a moth pinned to the wall, that I could not say it
again.

 
          
 
The door slammed shut

 
          
 
The summer was over.

 
          
 
The next year Roger came directly to the soda
fountain, where he said, "Is it true? Who is he?"

 
          
 
"Paul," I said. "You know Paul.
He’ll manage the hotel someday. We'll marry this fall."

 
          
 
"That doesn't give me much time,"
said Roger.

 
          
 
"It's too late," I said. "I've
already promised."

 
          
 
"Promised, hell! You don't love
him!"

 
          
 
"I think I do."

 
          
 
"Think, hell! Thinking's one thing,
knowing's another. You know you love me!"

 
          
 
"Do I, Roger?"

 
          
 
"Stop relishing the damn business so
much! You know you do! Oh, Anna, you'll be miserable!”

 
          
 
"I'm miserable now," I said.

 
          
 
"Oh, Anna, Anna, wait!"