I Sing the Body Electric (42 page)

Why, I thought, how wise the old woman is.

Tread lightly
to the music.

And I'd almost squashed her with praise.

So bruise not any lover
.

And she was covered with bruises from my kind thoughtlessness.

But now with a song that taught more than I could say, she was soothing herself.

I waited until she was well into the third chorus before I walked by again, tipping my hat.

But her eyes were shut and she was listening to what her hands were up to, moving in the strings like the fresh hands of a very young girl who has first known rain and washes her palms in its clear waterfalls.

She had gone through caring not at all, and then caring too much, and was now busy caring just the right way.

The corners of her mouth were pinned up, gently.

A close call, I thought. Very close.

I left them like two friends met in the street, the harp and herself.

I ran for the hotel to thank her the only way I knew how: to do my own work and do it well.

But on the way I stopped at Dooley's.

The music was still being treaded lightly and the clover was still being treaded softly, and no lover at all was being bruised as I let the pub door hush and looked all around for the man whose hand I most wanted to shake.

I
t was one of those nights that are so damned hot you lie flat out lost until 2:00
A.M.
, then sway upright, baste yourself with your own sour brine, and stagger down into the great bake-oven subway where the lost trains shriek in.

“Hell,” whispered Will Morgan.

And hell it was, with a lost army of beast people wandering the night from the Bronx on out to Coney and back, hour on hour, searching for sudden inhalations of salt ocean wind that might make you gasp with Thanksgiving.

Somewhere, God, somewhere in Manhattan or beyond was a cool wind. By dawn, it
must
be found....

“Damn!”

Stunned, he saw maniac tides of advertisements squirt by with toothpaste smiles, his own advertising ideas pursuing him the whole length of the hot night island.

The train groaned and stopped.

Another train stood on the opposite track.

Incredible. There in the open train window across the way sat Old Ned Amminger. Old? They were the same age, forty, but…

Will Morgan threw his window up.

“Ned, you son of a bitch!”

“Will, you bastard. You ride late like this often?”

“Every damn hot night since 1946!”

“Me, too! Glad to see you!”

“Liar!”

Each vanished in a shriek of steel.

God, thought Will Morgan, two men who hate each other, who work not ten feet apart grinding their teeth over the next step up the ladder, knock together in Dante's Inferno here under a melting city at 3:00
A.M.
Hear our voices echo, fading:

“Liar…!”

Half an hour later, in Washington Square, a cool wind touched his brow. He followed it into an alley where…

The temperature dropped ten degrees.

“Hold on,” he whispered.

The wind smelled of the Ice House when he was a boy and stole cold crystals to rub on his cheeks and stab inside his shirt with shrieks to kill the heat.

The cool wind led him down the alley to a small shop where a sign read:

MELISSA TOAD, WITCH
LAUNDRY SERVICE:
CHECK YOUR PROBLEMS HERE BY NINE A.M.
PICK THEM UP, FRESH-CLEANED, AT DUSK

There was a smaller sign:

SPELLS, PHILTRES AGAINST DREAD CLIMATES, HOT OR COLD. POTIONS TO INSPIRE EMPLOYERS AND ASSURE PROMOTIONS, SALVES, UNGUENTS & MUMMY-DUSTS RENDERED DOWN FROM ANCIENT CORPORATION HEADS. REMEDIES FOR NOISE. EMOLLIENTS FOR GASEOUS OR POLLUTED AIRS. LOTIONS FOR PARANOID TRUCK DRIVERS. MEDICINES TO BE TAKEN BEFORE TRYING TO SWIM OFF THE NEW YORK DOCKS
.

A few bottles were strewn in the display window, labeled:

PERFECT MEMORY.
BREATH OF SWEET APRIL WIND.
SILENCE AND THE TREMOR OF FINE BIRDSONG
.

He laughed and stopped.

For the wind blew cool and creaked a door. And again there was the memory of frost from the white Ice House grottoes of childhood, a world cut from winter dreams and saved on into August.

“Come in,” a voice whispered.

The door glided back.

Inside, a cold funeral awaited him.

A six-foot-long block of clear dripping ice rested like a giant February remembrance upon three sawhorses.

“Yes,” he murmured. In his hometown-hardware-store window, a magician's wife,
MISS I. SICKLE
, had been stashed in an immense rectangle of ice melted to fit her calligraphy. There she slept the nights away, a
Princess of Snow. Midnights, he and other boys snuck out to see her smile in her cold crystal sleep. They stood half the summer nights staring, four or five fiery-furnace boys of some fourteen years, hoping their red-hot gaze might melt the ice....

The ice had never melted.

“Wait,” he whispered. “Look…”

He took one more step within this dark night shop.

Lord, yes. There, in
this
ice! Weren't those the outlines where, only moments ago, a woman of snow napped away in cool night dreams? Yes. The ice was hollow and curved and lovely. But … the woman was gone. Where?

“Here,” whispered the voice.

Beyond the bright cold funeral, shadows moved in a far corner.

“Welcome. Shut the door.”

He sensed that she stood not far away in shadows. Her flesh, if you could touch it, would be cool, still fresh from her time within the dripping tomb of snow. If he just reached out his hand—

“What are you doing here?” her voice asked, gently.

“Hot night. Walking. Riding. Looking for a cool wind. I think I need help.”

“You've come to the right place.”

“But this is
mad!
I don't believe in psychiatrists. My friends hate me because I say Tinkerbell
and
Freud died twenty years back, with the circus. I don't believe in astrologers, numerologists, or palmistry quacks—”

“I don't read palms. But … give me your hand.”

He put his hand out into the soft darkness.

Her fingers tapped his. It felt like the hand of a small girl who had just rummaged an icebox. He said:

“Your sign reads
MELISSA TOAD, WITCH
. What would a Witch be doing in New York in the summer of 1974?”

“You ever know a city needed a Witch more than New York does this year?”

“Yes. We've gone mad. But,
you?
”

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. Now you come, not knowing, to find me. Give me your other hand.”

Though her face was only a ghost of cool flesh in the shadows, he felt her eyes move over his trembling palm.

“Oh, why did you wait so
long?
” she mourned. “It's almost too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“To be saved. To take the gift that I can give.”

His heart pounded. “
What
can you give me?”

“Peace,” she said. “Serenity. Quietness in the midst of bedlam. I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the East River on an oil-slick, garbage-infested midnight. I turn about on my own parentage. I inoculate against those very biles that brought me to light. I am a serum born of venoms. I am the antibody of all Time. I am the Cure. You die of the City, do you not? Manhattan is your punisher. Let me be your shield.”

“How?”

“You would be my pupil. My protection could encircle you, like an invisible pack of hounds. The subway train would never violate your ear. Smog would never blight your lung or nostril or fever your vision. I could teach your tongue, at lunch, to taste the rich fields of Eden in the merest cut-rate too-ripe frankfurter. Water, sipped from your office cooler, would be a rare wine of a fine family. Cops, when you called, would answer. Taxis, off-duty rushing nowhere, would stop if you so much as blinked one eye. Theater tickets would appear if you stepped to a theater window. Traffic signals would change, at high noon, mind you! if you dared to drive your car from fifty-eighth down to the Square, and not one light red. Green all the way, if you go with me.

“If you go with me, our apartment will be a shadowed jungle glade full of bird cries and love calls from the first hot sour day of June till the last hour after Labor Day when the living dead, heat-beat, go mad on stopped trains coming back from the sea. Our rooms will be filled with crystal chimes. Our kitchen an Eskimo hut in July where we might share out a provender of Popsicles made of Mumm's and Château Lafite Rothschild. Our larder?—fresh apricots in August or February. Fresh orange juice each morning, cold milk at breakfast, cool kisses at four in the afternoon, my mouth always the flavor of chilled peaches, my body the taste of rimed plums. The flavor begins at the elbow, as Edith Wharton said.

“Any time you want to come home from the office the middle of a dreadful day, I will call your boss and it will be so. Soon after, you will be the boss and come home, anyway, for cold chicken, fruit wine punch, and me. Summer in the Virgin Isles. Autumns so ripe with promise you will indeed go lunatic in the right way. Winters, of course, will be the reverse. I will be your hearth. Sweet dog, lie there. I will fall upon you like snowflakes.

“In sum, everything will be given you. I ask little in return. Only your soul.”

He stiffened and almost let go of her hand.

“Well, isn't that what you
expected
me to demand?” She laughed.
“But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again. Shall I tell you what I really want from you?”

“Tell.”

“Marry me,” she said.

Sell me your soul, he thought, and did not say it.

But she read his eyes. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Is that so much to ask? For all I give?”

“I've got to think it over!”

Without noticing, he had moved back one step.

Her voice was very sad. “If you have to think a thing over, it will never be. When you finish a book you know if you like it, yes? At the end of a play you are awake or asleep, yes? Well, a beautiful woman is a beautiful woman, isn't she, and a good life a good life?”

“Why won't you come out in the light? How do I know you're beautiful?”

“You can't know unless you step into the dark. Can't you tell by my voice? No? Poor man. If you don't trust me now, you can't have me, ever.”

“I need time to think. I'll come back tomorrow night! What can twenty-four hours mean?”

“To someone your age, everything.”

“I'm only forty!”

“I speak of your soul, and
that
is late.”

“Give me one more night!”

“You'll take it, anyway, at your own risk.”

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, God,” he said, shutting his eyes.

“I wish He could help you right now. You'd better go. You're an ancient child. Pity. Pity. Is your mother alive?”

“Dead ten years.”

“No, alive,” she said.

He backed off toward the door and stopped, trying to still his confused heart, trying to move his leaden tongue:

“How long have you been in this place?”

She laughed, with the faintest touch of bitterness.

“Three summers now. And, in those three years, only six men have come into my shop. Two ran immediately. Two stayed awhile but left. One came back a second time, and vanished. The sixth man finally had to admit, after three visits, he didn't Believe. You see, no one Believes a really all-encompassing and protective love when they see it clear. A farmboy might have stayed forever, in his simplicity, which is rain and wind and seed. A New Yorker? Suspects everything.

“Whoever, whatever, you are, O good sir, stay and milk the cow and put the fresh milk in the dim cooling shed under the shade of the oak tree which grows in my attic. Stay and pick the watercress to clean your
teeth. Stay in the North Pantry with the scent of persimmons and kumquats and grapes. Stay and stop my tongue so I can cease talking this way. Stay and stop my mouth so I can't breathe. Stay, for I am weary of speech and must need love. Stay. Stay.”

So ardent was her voice, so tremulous, so gentle, so sweet, that he knew he was lost if he did not run.

“Tomorrow night!” he cried.

His shoe struck something. There on the floor lay a sharp icicle fallen from the long block of ice.

He bent, seized the icicle, and ran.

The door
slammed
. The lights blinked out. Rushing, he could not see the sign:
MELISSA TOAD, WITCH
.

Ugly, he thought, running. A beast, he thought, she
must
be a beast and ugly. Yes, that's it! Lies! All of it, lies! She—

He collided with someone.

In the midst of the street, they gripped, they held, they stared.

Ned Amminger! My God, it was Old Ned!

It was four in the morning, the air still white-hot. And here was Ned Amminger sleepwalking after cool winds, his clothes scrolled on his hot flesh in rosettes, his face dripping sweat, his eyes dead, his feet creaking in their hot baked leather shoes.

They swayed in the moment of collision.

A spasm of malice shook Will Morgan. He seized Old Ned Amminger, spun him about, and pointed him into the dark alley. Far off deep in there, had that shop-window light blinked
on
again? Yes!

“Ned!
That way!
Go
there!
”

Heat-blinded, dead-weary Old Ned Amminger stumbled off down the alley.

“Wait!” cried Will Morgan, regretting his malice.

But Amminger was gone.

In the subway, Will Morgan tasted the icicle.

It was Love. It was Delight. It was Woman.

By the time his train roared in, his hands were empty, his body rusted with perspiration. And the sweet taste in his mouth? Dust.

Seven
A.M.
and no sleep.

Somewhere a huge blast furnace opened its door and burned New York to ruins.

Get up, thought Will Morgan. Quick! Run to the Village!

For he remembered that sign:

LAUNDRY SERVICE: CHECK YOUR PROBLEMS
HERE BY NINE A.M.
PICK THEM UP, FRESH-CLEANED, AT NIGHT
.

He did not go to the Village. He rose, showered, and went off into the furnace to lose his job forever.

He knew this as he rode up in the raving-hot elevator with Mr. Binns, the sunburned and furious personnel manager. Binns's eyebrows were jumping, his mouth worked over his teeth with unspoken curses. Beneath his suit, you could feel porcupines of boiled hair needling to the surface. By the time they reached the fortieth floor, Binns was anthropoid.

Around them, employees wandered like an Italian army coming to attend a lost war.

“Where's Old Amminger?” asked Will Morgan, staring at an empty desk.

“Called in sick. Heat prostration. Be here at noon,” someone said.

Long before noon the water cooler was empty, and the air-conditioning system?—committed suicide at 11:32. Two hundred people became raw beasts chained to desks by windows which had been invented not to open.