The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (33 page)

Mom didn’t have the TV on. She did have the
hat on that Sueann had given her. “Don’t you think it’s adorable?” she said.

“I brought cheesecake,” I said. “Have you heard from Allison
and Mitch? How’s Dakota?”

“Worse,” she said. “She has these swellings on her knees and ankles. The doctors don’t know what’s causing them.” She took the cheesecake into the kitchen, limping slightly. “I’m so worried.”

I turned up the thermostats in the living room and the bedroom and was plugging the space heater in when she brought in the soup. “I got chilled on the way over,” I said, turning
the space heater up to high. “It’s freezing out. I think it’s going to snow.”

We ate our soup, and Mom told me about Sueann’s wedding. “She wants you to be her maid of honor,” she said, fanning herself. “Aren’t you warm yet?”

“No,” I said, rubbing my arms.

“I’ll get you a sweater,” she said, and went into the bedroom, turning the space heater off as she went.

I turned it back on and went into
the living room to build a fire in the fireplace.

“Have you met anyone at work lately?” she called in from the bedroom.

“What?” I said, sitting back on my knees.

She came back in without the sweater. Her hat was gone, and her hair was mussed up, as if something had thrashed around in it. “I hope you’re not still refusing to write a Christmas newsletter,” she said, going into the kitchen and
coming out again with two plates of cheesecake. “Come sit down and eat your dessert,” she said.

I did, still watching her warily.

“Making up things!” she said. “What an idea! Aunt Margaret wrote me just the other day to tell me how much she loves hearing from you girls and how interesting your newsletters always are.” She cleared the table. “You can stay for a while, can’t you? I hate waiting
here alone for news about Dakota.”

“No, I’ve got to go,” I said, and stood up. “I’ve got to…”

I’ve got to…what? I thought, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Fly to Spokane? And then, as soon as Dakota was okay, fly back and run wildly around town turning up thermostats until I fell over from exhaustion? And then what? It was when people fell asleep in the movies that the aliens took them over. And
there was no way I could stay awake until every parasite was exposed to the light, even if they didn’t catch me and turn me into one of them. Even if I didn’t turn my ankle.

The phone rang.

“Tell them I’m not here,” I said.

“Who?” Mom asked, picking
it up. “Oh, dear, I hope it’s not Mitch with bad news. Hello?” Pause. “It’s Sueann,” she said, putting her hand over the receiver, and listened
for a long interval. “She broke up with her boyfriend.”

“With David?” I said. “Give me the phone.”

“I thought you said you weren’t here,” she said, handing the phone over.

“Sueann?” I said. “Why did you break up with David?”

“Because he’s so deadly dull,” she said. “He’s always calling me and sending me flowers and being nice. He even wants to get married. And tonight at dinner, I just thought,
‘
Why
am I dating him?’ and we broke up.”

Mom went over and turned on the TV. “In local news,” the CNN guy said, “special-interest groups banded together to donate fifteen thousand dollars to City Hall’s Christmas display.”

“Where were you having dinner?” I asked Sueann. “At McDonald’s?”

“No, at this pizza place, which is another thing. All he ever wants is to go to dinner or the movies. We
never do anything
interesting.”

“Did you go to a movie tonight?” She might have been in the multiplex at the mall.

“No. I
told
you, I broke up with him.”

This made no sense. I hadn’t hit any pizza places.

“Weather is next,” the guy on CNN said.

“Mom, can you turn that down?” I said. “Sueann, this is important. Tell me what you’re wearing.”

“Jeans and my blue top and my zodiac necklace. What
does that have to do with my breaking up with David?”

“Are you wearing a hat?”

“In our forecast just ahead,” the CNN guy said, “great weather for all you people trying to get your Christmas shopping d—”

Mom turned the TV down.

“Mom, turn it back up,” I said, motioning wildly

“No, I’m not wearing a hat,” Sueann said. “What does that have to do with whether I broke up with David or not?”

The weather map behind the CNN guy was covered with 62, 65, 70, 68.
“Mom,”
I said.

She fumbled with the remote.

“You won’t believe what he did the
other day,” Sueann said, outraged. “Gave me an engagement ring! Can you imag—”

“—unseasonably warm temperatures and
lots
of sunshine,” the weather guy blared out. “Continuing right through Christmas.”

“I mean, what was I thinking?” Sueann said.

“Shh,” I said. “I’m trying to listen to the weather.”

“It’s supposed to be nice all next week,” Mom said.

It was nice all the next week. Allison called to tell me Dakota was back home. “The doctors don’t know what it was, some kind of bug or something, but whatever it was, it’s completely gone. She’s back taking ice skating and tap-dancing lessons, and next week I’m signing both girls up for
junior Band.”

“You did the right thing,” Gary said grudgingly. “Marcie told me her knee was really hurting. When she was still talking to me, that is.”

“The reconciliation’s off, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but I haven’t given up. The way she acted proves to me that her love for me is still there, if I can only reach it.”

All it proved to me was that it took an invasion from outer space to make
her seem even marginally human, but I didn’t say so.

“I’ve talked her into going into marriage counseling with me,” he said. “You were right not to trust me either. That’s the mistake they always make in those body-snatcher movies, trusting people.”

Well, yes and no. If I’d trusted Jim Bridgeman, I wouldn’t have had to do all those thermostats alone.

“You were the one who turned the heat up
at the pizza place where Sueann and her fiancé were having dinner,” I said after Jim told me he’d figured out what the aliens’ weakness was after seeing me turn up the thermostat on fifth. “You were the one who’d checked out
Attack of the Soul Killers.”

“I tried to talk to you,” he said. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I should have taken my hat off, but I didn’t want you to see my bald
spot.”

“You can’t go by appearances,” I said.

By December fifteenth, hat sales were
down, the mall was jammed with ill-tempered shoppers, at City Hall an animal-rights group was protesting Santa Claus’s wearing fur, and Gary’s wife had skipped their first marriage-counseling session and then blamed it on him.

It’s now four days till Christmas, and things are completely back to normal. Nobody
at work’s wearing a hat except Jim, Solveig’s naming her baby Durango, Hunziger’s suing management for firing him, antidepressant sales are up, and my mother called just now to tell me Sueann has a new boyfriend who’s a terrorist, and to ask me if I’d sent out my Christmas newsletters yet. And had I met anyone lately at work.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m bringing him to Christmas dinner.”

Yesterday Betty
Holland filed a sexual harassment suit against Nathan Steinberg for kissing her under the mistletoe, and I was nearly run over on my way home from work. But the world has been made safe from cankers, leaf wilt, and galls.

And it makes an interesting Christmas Newsletter.

Whether it’s true or not.

Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,

Nan Johnson

September 20—Of course the first thing
I looked for was the fire watch stone. And of course it wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t dedicated until 1951, accompanying speech by the Very Reverend Dean Walter Matthews, and this is only 1940. I knew that. I went to see the fire watch
stone only yesterday, with some kind of misplaced notion that seeing the scene of the crime would somehow
help. It didn’t.

The only things that would have
helped were a crash course in London during the Blitz and a little more time. I had not gotten either.

“Traveling in time is not like taking
the tube, Mr. Bartholomew,” the esteemed Dunworthy had said, blinking at me through those antique
spectacles of his. “Either you report on the twentieth or you don’t go at all.”

“But I’m not ready,” I’d said. “Look, it took me four years to get ready to travel with St. Paul.
St. Paul.
Not St. Paul’s. You can’t expect me to get ready for London in the Blitz in two days.”

“Yes,” Dunworthy had said. “We can.” End of conversation.

“Two days!” I had shouted at my roommate Kivrin. “All because
some computer adds an
’s.
And the esteemed Dunworthy doesn’t even bat an eye when I tell him. ‘Time travel is not like taking the tube, young man,’ he says. ‘I’d suggest you get ready. You’re leaving day after tomorrow.’ The man’s a total incompetent.”

“No,” she said. “He isn’t. He’s the best there is. He wrote the book on St. Paul’s. Perhaps you should listen to what he says.”

I had expected
Kivrin to be at least
a little sympathetic. She had been practically hysterical when she got her practicum changed from fifteenth-to fourteenth-century England, and how did either century qualify as a practicum? Even counting infectious diseases they couldn’t have been more than a five. The Blitz is an eight, and St. Paul’s itself is, with my luck, a ten.

“You think I should go see Dunworthy
again?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And then what? I’ve got two days. I don’t know the money, the language, the history. Nothing.”

“He’s a good man,” Kivrin said. “I think you’d better listen to him while you can.” Good old Kivrin. Always the sympathetic ear.

The good man was responsible for my standing just inside the propped-open west doors, gawking like the country boy I was supposed to be, looking
for a stone that wasn’t there. Thanks to the good man, I was about as unprepared for my practicum as it was possible for him to make me.

I couldn’t see more than a few feet into the church. I could see a candle gleaming feebly a long way off and a closer blur of white moving toward me. A verger, or possibly the Very Reverend Dean himself. I pulled out the letter from my clergyman uncle in Wales
that was supposed to gain me access to the dean, and patted my back pocket to make sure I hadn’t lost the microfiche
Oxford English Dictionary, Revised, with Historical Supplements
, I’d smuggled out of the Bodleian. I couldn’t pull it out in the middle of the conversation, but with luck I could muddle through the first encounter by context and look up the words I didn’t know later.

“Are you from
the ayarpee?” he said. He was no older than I am, a head shorter and much thinner. Almost ascetic looking. He reminded me of Kivrin. He was not wearing white, but clutching it to his chest. In other circumstances I would have thought it was a pillow. In other circumstances I would know what was being said to me, but there had been no time to unlearn sub-Mediterranean Latin and Jewish law and learn
Cockney and air raid procedures. Two days, and the esteemed Dunworthy, who wanted to talk about the sacred burdens of the historian instead of telling me what the ayarpee was.

“Are you?” he demanded again

I considered whipping out the OED after all on the grounds that Wales was a foreign country, but I didn’t think they had microfilm in 1940. Ayarpee. It could be anything, including a nickname
for the fire watch, in which case the impulse to say no was not safe at all. “No,” I said.

He lunged suddenly toward and
past me and peered out the open doors. “Damn,” he said, coming back to me. “Where are they then? Bunch of lazy bourgeois tarts!” And so much for getting by on context.

He looked at me closely, suspiciously, as if he thought I was only pretending not to be with the ayarpee.
“The church is closed,” he said finally.

I held up the envelope and said, “My name’s Bartholomew. Is Dean Matthews in?”

He looked out the door a moment longer as if he expected the lazy bourgeois tarts at any moment and intended to attack them with the white bundle; then he turned and said, as if he were guiding a tour, “This way, please,” and took off into the gloom.

He led me to the right
and down the south aisle of the nave. Thank God I had memorized the floor plan or at that moment, heading into total darkness, led by a raving verger, the whole bizarre metaphor of my situation would have been enough to send me out the west doors and back to St. John’s Wood. It helped a little to know where I was. We should have been passing number twenty-six: Hunt’s painting of “The Light of the
World”—Jesus with his lantern—but it was too dark to see it. We could have used the lantern ourselves.

He stopped abruptly ahead of me, still raving. “We weren’t asking for the bloody savoy, just a few cots. Nelson’s better off than we are—at least he’s got a pillow provided.” He brandished the white bundle like a torch in the darkness. It was a pillow after all. “We asked for them over a fortnight
ago, and here we still are, sleeping on the bleeding generals from Trafalgar because those bitches want to play tea and crumpets with the tommies at Victoria and the hell with us!”

He didn’t seem to expect me to answer his outburst, which was good, because I had understood perhaps one key word in three. He stomped on ahead, moving out of sight of the one pathetic altar candle and stopping again
at a black hole. Number twenty-five: stairs to the Whispering Gallery, the Dome, the library (not open to the public). Up the stairs, down a hall, stop again at a medieval door and knock.

“I’ve got to go wait for them,” he said. “If I’m not there they’ll likely take them over to the Abbey. Tell the Dean to ring them up again, will you?” and he took off down the stone steps, still holding his
pillow like a shield against him.