Summer Morning, Summer Night Read online

  “Can I have August?” Tom stood holding the torn month in his hands.

  “I don’t know what you’ll do with it,” said Grandma.

  “It isn’t really over, it’ll never be.” Tom held the paper up. “I know what happened on every day of it.”

  “It was over before it began.” Grandma’s eyes grew remote. “I don’t remember a thing that happened.”

  “On Monday I roller-skated at Chessman Park; on Tuesday I had chocolate cake at home; on Wednesday I fell in the crick.” Tom put the calendar in his blouse. “That was this week. Last week I caught crayfish, swung on a vine, hurt my hand on a nail, and fell off a fence. That takes me up until last Friday.”

  “Well, it’s good somebody’s doing some thing,” said Grandma.

  “And, I’ll remember today,” said Tom, “because the oak leaves turned all red and yellow and fell down and I made a big fire out of them. And this afternoon I’m going to Colonel Quartermain’s for a big birthday party.”

  “You just run and play,” said Grandma. “I’ve got this job in the attic.”

  She was breathing hard when she climbed into the musty garret. “Meant to do this last spring,” she murmured. “Here it is coming on winter and I don’t want to go all through the snow, thinking about this stuff up here.” She peered about in the attic gloom, saw the huge trunks, the spider webs, the stacked newspapers. There was a smell of ancient wooden beams.

  She opened a dirty window that looked out on the apple trees far below. The smell of autumn came in, cool and sharp.

  “Look out below!” cried Grandma, and began heaving old magazines and yellow trash down into the yard. “Better than carrying it downstairs.”

  Old wire frame dressmaker’s dummies went careening down, followed by silent parrot cages and riffling encyclopaedias. A faint dust rose in the air and her heart was giddy in a few minutes. She had to pick her way over to sit down on a trunk, laughing breathlessly at her own inadequacy.

  “More stuff, more junk!” she cried. “How it does pile up. What’s this now?”

  She picked up a box of clippings and cut-outs and buttons. She dumped them out on the trunk top beside her and pawed through them. There were three neat small bundles of old calendar pages clipped together.

  “Some more of Tom’s nonsense,” she sniffed. “Honestly, that child! Calendars, calendars, saving calendars.”

  She picked up one of the calendars and it said OCTOBER, 1887. And on the front of it were exclamation marks and red lines under certain days, and childish scribbles: “This was a special day!” or “A wonderful day!”

  She turned the calendar over with suddenly stiffening fingers. In the dim light her head bent down and her quiet eyes squinted to read what was written on the back:

  “Elizabeth Simmons, aged 10, low fifth in school.”

  She held the faded calendars in her cold hands and looked at them. She looked at the dates and the year and the exclamation marks and red circles around each special day. Slowly her brows drew together. Then her eyes became quite blank. Silently she lay back where she sat on the trunk, her eyes looking out at the autumn sky. Her hands dropped away, leaving the calendars yellow and faded on her lap. July 8th, 1889 with a red circle scribbled round it! What had happened on that day? August 28th, 1892; a blue exclamation point! Why? Days and months and years of marks and red circles, and that was all.

  She closed her eyes and her breathing came swiftly in and out of her mouth.

  Below, on the brown lawn, Tom ran, yelling.

  Miss Elizabeth Simmons aroused herself after a time, and got herself over the window. For a long moment she looked down at Tom tumbling in the red leaves. Then she cleared her throat and called out, “Tom!”

  “Grandma! You look so funny in the attic!”

  “Tom, I want you to do me a favor!”

  “What is it?”

  “Tom, I want you to do me the favor of throwing away that nasty old piece of calendar you’re saving.”

  “Why?” Tom looked up at her.

  “Well, because. I don’t want you saving them any more,” said the old woman. “It’ll only make you feel bad later.”

  “When, Grandma? How? I don’t understand!” cried Tom back up at her, hurt. “I’ve just got to keep every week, every month. There’s so much happening, I never want to forget!”

  Grandma looked down and the small round face looked up through the empty apple tree branches. Finally Grandma sighed, “All right.” She looked off. She threw the box away through the autumn air to thump upon the ground. “I guess I can’t make you stop collecting if you really want to.”

  “Thanks, Grandma!” Tom put his hand to his breast pocket where the month of August was tucked. “I’ll never forget today, I’ll always remember, I know!”

  Grandma looked down through the empty autumn branches stirring in the cold wind. “Of course you will, child, of course you will,” she said.

  ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE

  NO DAY IN all of time began with nobler heart or fresher spirit. No morn had ever chanced upon its greener self as did this morn discover spring in every aspect and every breath. Birds flew about, intoxicated, and moles and all things holed up in earth and stone, ventured forth, forgetting that life itself might be forfeit. The sky was a Pacific, a Caribbean, an Indian Sea, hung in a tidal outpouring over a town that now exhaled the dust of winter from a thousand windows. Doors slammed wide. Like a tide moving into a shore, wave after wave of laundered curtains broke over the piano-wire lines behind the houses.

  And at last the wild sweetness of this particular day summoned forth two souls, like wintry figures from a Swiss clock, hypnotized, upon their porch. Mr. and Mrs. Alexander, twenty-four months locked deep in their rusty house, felt long-forgotten wings stir in their shoulder-blades as the sun rekindled their bones.

  “Smell that!”

  Mrs. Alexander took a drink of air and spun to accuse the house. “Two years! One hundred sixty-five bottles of throat molasses! Ten pounds of sulphur! Twelve boxes of sleeping pills! Five yards of flannel for our chests! How much mustard-grease? Get away!” She pushed at the house. She turned to the spring day, opened her arms. The sun made teardrops jump from her eyes.

  They waited, not yet ready to descend away from two years of nursing one another, falling ill time and again, accepting but never quite enjoying the prospect of another evening together after six hundred of seeing no other human face.

  “Why, we’re strangers here.” The husband nodded to the shady streets.

  And they remembered how they had stopped answering the door and kept the shades down, afraid that some abrupt encounter, some flash of bright sun might shatter them to dusty ghosts.

  But now, on this fountain-sparkling day, their health at last miraculously returned, old Mr. and Mrs. Alexander edged down the steps and into the town, like tourists from a land beneath the earth.

  Reaching the main street, Mr. Alexander said, “We’re not so old; we just felt old. Why, I’m seventy-two, you’re only seventy. I’m out for some special shopping, Elma. Meet you here in two hours!”

  They flew apart, rid of each other at last.

  NOT HALF a block away, passing a dress shop, Mr. Alexander saw a mannequin in a window, and froze. There, ah, there! The sunlight warmed her pink cheeks, her berry-stained lips, her blue-lacquer eyes, her yellow-yarn hair. He stood at the window for an entire minute, until a live woman appeared suddenly, arranging the displays. When she glanced up, there was Mr. Alexander, smiling like a youthful idiot. She smiled back.

  What a day! he thought. I could punch a hole in a plank door. I could throw a cat over the court house! Get out of the way, old man! Wait! Was that a mirror? Never mind. Good God! I’m really alive!

  Mr. Alexander was inside the shop.

  “I want to buy something!” he said.

  “What?” asked the beautiful saleslady.

  He glanced foolishly about. “Why, let me have a scarf. That’s it, a scarf.”

>   He blinked at the numerous scarves she brought, smiling at him so his heart roared and tilted like a gyroscope, throwing the world out of balance. “Pick the scarf you’d wear, yourself. That’s the scarf for me.”

  She chose a scarf the color of her eyes.

  “Is it for your wife?”

  He handed her a five dollar bill. “Put the scarf on.” She obeyed. He tried to imagine Elma’s head sticking out above it; failed. “Keep it,” he said, “it’s yours.” He drifted out the sunlit door, his veins singing.

  “Sir,” she called, but he was gone.

  WHAT MRS. Alexander wanted most was shoes, and after leaving her husband she entered the very first shoe-shop. But not, however, before she dropped a penny in a perfume machine and pumped great vaporous founts of verbena upon her sparrow chest. Then, with the spray clinging round her like morning mist, she plunged into the shoe store, where a fine young man with doe-brown eyes and black-arched brows and hair the sheen of patent leather pinched her ankles, feathered her in-step, caressed her toes and so entertained her feet that they blushed a soft warm pink.

  “Madame has the smallest foot I’ve fitted this year. Extraordinarily small.”

  Mrs. Alexander was a great heart seated there, beating so loudly that the salesman had to shout over the sound:

  “If madam will push down!”

  “Would the lady like another color?”

  He shook her left hand as she departed with three pairs of shoes, giving her fingers what seemed to be a meaningful appraisal. She laughed a strange laugh, forgetting to say she had not worn her wedding band, her fingers had puffed with illness so many years that the ring now lay in dust. On the street, she confronted the verbena squirting machine, another copper penny in her hand.

  MR. ALEXANDER strode with great bouncing strides up and down streets, doing a little jig of delight on meeting certain people, stopping at last, faintly tired, but not admitting it to anyone, before the United Cigar store. There, as if seven hundred odd noons had not vanished, stood Mr. Bleak, Mr. Grey, Samuel Spaulding and the Wooden Indian. They seized and punched Mr. Alexander in disbelief.

  “Alex, you’re back from the dead!”

  “Coming to the Lodge tonight?”

  “Sure!”

  “Oddfellows meet tomorrow night?”

  “I’ll be there!” Invitations blew about him in a warm wind. “Old friends, I’ve missed you!” He wanted to grab everyone, even the Indian. They lit his free cigar and bought him foamy beers next door in the jungle color of green-felt pool tables.

  “One week from tonight,” cried Mr. Alexander, “open house. My wife and I invite you all, good friends. Barbeque! Drinks and fun!”

  Spaulding crushed his hand. “Will your wife mind about tonight?”

  “Not Elma.”

  “Fine!”

  And Mr. Alexander was off like a ball of Spanish moss blown on the wind.

  AFTER SHE left the store Mrs. Alexander was discovered in the streets of the town by a sea of women. She was the center of a bargain sale, ladies clustering in twos and threes, everyone talking, laughing, offering, accepting, at once.

  “Tonight, Elma. The Thimble Club.”

  “Come pick me up!”

  Breathless and flushed, she pushed through, made it to a far curb, looked back as one looks at the ocean for a last time before going inland, and hustled, laughing to herself, down the avenue, counting on her fingers the appointments she had in the next week at the Elm Street Society, the Women’s Patriotic League, the Sewing Basket, and the Elite Theatre Club.

  The hours blazed to their finish. The court house clock rang once.

  Mr. Alexander stood on the street corner, glancing at his watch doubtfully and shaking it, muttering under his breath. A woman was standing on the opposite corner, and after ten minutes of waiting, Mr. Alexander crossed over. “I beg your pardon, but I think my watch is wrong,” he called, approaching. “Could you give me the correct time?”

  “John!” she cried.

  “Elma!” he cried.

  “I was standing here all the time,” she said.

  “And I was standing over there!”

  “You’ve got a new suit!”

  “That’s a new dress!”

  “New hat.”

  “So is yours.”

  “New shoes.”

  “How do yours fit?”

  “Mine hurt.”

  “So do mine.”

  “I bought tickets for a play Saturday night for us, Elma! And reservations for the Green Town picnic next month! What’s that perfume you’re wearing?”

  “What’s that cologne you’ve got on?”

  “No wonder we didn’t recognize each other!”

  They looked at one another for a long time.

  “Well, let’s get home. Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

  They squeaked along in their new shoes. “Yes, beautiful!” they both agreed, smiling. But then they glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes and suddenly looked away, nervously.

  Their house was blue-dark; it was like entering a cave after the fresh green spring afternoon.

  “How about a little lunch?”

  “Not hungry. You?”

  “Me neither.”

  “I sure like my new shoes.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Well, what’ll we do the rest of the day?”

  “Oh, go to a show maybe.”

  “After we rest awhile.”

  “You’re not tired!”

  “No, no, no,” she cried, hastily. “You?”

  “No, no!” he said, quickly.

  They sat down and felt the comfortable darkness and coolness of the room after the bright, glaring warm day.

  “I think I’ll just loosen my shoelaces a bit,” he said. “Just untie the knots a moment.”

  “I think I’ll do the same.”

  They loosened the knots and the laces in their shoes.

  “Might as well get our hats off!”

  Sitting there, they removed their hats.

  He looked over at her and thought: forty-five years. Married to her forty-five years. Why, I can remember...and that time in Mills Valley...and then there was that other day...forty years ago we drove to...yes...yes. His head shook. A long time.

  “Why don’t you take off your tie?” she suggested.

  “Think I should, if we’re going right out again?” he said.

  “Just for a moment.”

  She watched him take off his tie and she thought: it’s been a good marriage. We’ve helped each other; he’s spoon-fed, washed and dressed me when I was sick, taken good care...Forty-five years now, and the honeymoon in Mills Valley—seems only the day before the day before yesterday.

  “Why don’t you get rid of your ear-rings?” he suggested. “New, aren’t they? They look heavy.”

  “They are a bit.” She laid them aside.

  They sat in their comfortable soft chairs by the green baize tables where stood arnica bottles, pellet and tablet boxes, serums, cough remedies, pads, braces and foot-rubs, greases, salves, lotions, inhalants, aspirin, quinine, powders, decks of worn playing cards from a million slow games of blackjack, and books they had murmured to each other across the dark small room in the single faint bulb light, their voices like the motion of dim moths through the shadows.

  “Perhaps I can slip my shoes off,” he said. “For one hundred and twenty seconds, before we run out again.”

  “Isn’t right to keep your feet boxed up all the time.”

  They slipped off their shoes.

  “Elma?”

  “Yes?” She looked up.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  They heard the mantel clock ticking. They caught each other peering at the clock. Two in the afternoon. Only six hours until eight tonight.

  “John?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind,” she said.

  They sat.

  “Why don’t we put on our woolly sli
ppers?” he wondered.

  “I’ll get them.”

  She fetched the slippers.

  They put them on, exhaling at the cool feel of the material.

  “Ahhhhh!”

  “Why are you still wearing your coat and vest?”

  “You know, new clothes are like a suit of armor.”

  He worked out of the coat and, a minute later, the vest.

  The chairs creaked.

  “Why, it’s four o’clock,” she said, later.

  “Time flies. Too late to go out now, isn’t it?”

  “Much too late. We’ll just rest awhile. We can call a taxi to take us to supper.”

  “Elma.” He licked his lips.

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, I forgot.” He glanced away at the wall.

  “Why don’t I just get out of my clothes into my bathrobe?” he suggested, five minutes later. “I can dress in a rush when we stroll off for a big filet supper on the town.”

  “Now, you’re being sensible,” she agreed. “John?”

  “Something you want to tell me?”

  She gazed at the new shoes lying on the floor. She remembered the friendly tweak on her instep, the slow caress on her toes.

  “No,” she said.

  They listened for each other’s hearts beating in the room. Clothed in their bathrobes, they sat sighing.

  “I’m just the least bit tired. Not too much, understand,” she said, “just a little bit.”

  “Naturally. It’s been quite a day, quite a day.”

  “You can’t just rush out, can you?”

  “Got to take it easy. We’re not young any more.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m slightly exhausted, too,” he admitted, casually.

  “Maybe,” she glanced at the clock, “maybe we should have a bite here tonight. We can always dine out tomorrow evening.”

  “A really smart suggestion,” he said. “I’m not ravenous, anyway.”

  “Strange, neither am I.”

  “But, we’ll go to a picture later tonight?”