Chorus of Night Voices
This is the night of the smell of spruces. This is the night of the handsome one bursting through the high hedge. This is the night of the princess waking in the thornwood. O you who wait: this is the night of the opening of the heart.
Coop Alone
Coop, weary, walks home alone along the railroad tracks. His head is clear now, pretty clear, not too clear but a little clearer. He remembers the change in her, the tilt of her head different, as if she were listening to something far away. Hurried leavetaking. Did she touch his face, under the streetlight? He wishes he’d gone after her, instead of standing there like a lunkhead watching her walk away, a bright lady fading into shadow on the dark side of the alley. It’s all fading into shadow now. He’s no longer sure whether he kissed her under the streetlight, though he remembers the sharp reflection of the light in each lens of her sunglasses and the shimmer of yellow light on her throat. In the morning it will be something else, Coop’s dream of a summer night. But now as he heads for home along the tracks he believes in this clear summer night, when the lady of his desire came down to him from her high window, and took his hand and walked with him along the railway embankment, like a visitor from some unknown place—deeper than dream, more dangerous than desire—sent to soothe him on his way.
The Woman Who Lives Alone Shows a Touch of Cunning
The girls have melted into the night, and the woman who lives alone is standing at the sink in her moonlit kitchen, washing the lemonade glasses. When she leans forward against the sink, she can see a piece of moon through the upper left pane of the dark window. She is remembering their names: Summer Storm, Black Star, Night Rider, Paper Doll, Fast Lane. The names thrill her, like secrets whispered in her ear. She has the sense, when she recites the names, that she is tearing off the black masks. Out of the night they came to her, the five dearies. Ah, but she was cunning: she pretended not to know who they were. And yet she has read about them in the paper, the girls who roam through the night, breaking into houses. She has thought about them. She has imagined them. No one has ever seen them before. But now she has seen them, in their black masks, the dear ones, the daughters. She has learned their names: Summer Storm, Black Star, Night Rider, Paper Doll, Fast Lane. She will never reveal their secret. She feels they feel she understands them, and she does: they cannot stay in their rooms alone, they cannot, cannot, they must go out into the night and never be known. Because when you are known, then you lose yourself, but when you are hidden, then you are free. Summer Storm, Black Star, Night Rider, Paper Doll, Fast Lane. As the woman who lives alone dries a glass, dark-shining in the light of the night sky, she has an inspiration: she will take a name for herself. And the name comes, as if it has always been waiting to be summoned: she will call herself SISTER OF THE SUMMER MOON. For the moon has been good to her, the moon has brought her visitors, on this lovely summer night. She begins to hum to herself, as she dries a glass in the dark kitchen glimmering with moonlight.
Haverstraw Walking Home
Haverstraw, walking home, feels refreshed after his little adventure. He worries about the girl, he’d have liked to soothe her, calm her down, but her gift reassures him: she understands that the night has rewarded her with rescue, not harm. She had taken off her clothes and fallen asleep in the clearing, in the light of the moon. Diana the huntress: chaste and fair. Protectress: guardian of virgins. He then was the emissary of the moon. Haverstraw, punisher of spies. He casts a sidelong glance at the moon, surprised to find her lower in the sky. Moonrise and moonset, east to west. It never feels that way: she seems to sit there, never moving. He winces, remembering how he irritated Mrs. Kasco. Ad for eternity. Wise guy. Well, he takes it back. Goddess, forgive me. Mercy on us poor clowns. Under this shiteating grease-paint grin is a mouth of sorrow. Haverstraw thinks of the girl’s moonlit white body and quickly averts his inward gaze. He reaches up to his shirt pocket, pats the Life Savers to make sure they’re still there. The man probably wouldn’t have done anything, his pleasures were more private than that, but you never could tell. Jennie Gerhardt would have laid him out cold. Good heft, hard binding: a brick of a book. Jennie to the rescue. Social value of art. Mrs. K will enjoy the story. He’s glad the goddess chose him to play his part, on this adventurous night. Now he wants to get to bed. There’s work to be done tomorrow. He’s a thirty-nine-year-old failure with a skewed life, a clown and a wise guy and a born loser, a flabbellied bachelor with no prospects, but if he can just get to his desk then somehow it will be all right, he asks no more. Oh, he asks more, much more, but on this night, night of the almost full moon, night of Diana the huntress, he asks only for a little light along the way. The night sky clear, a touch of gray in the east.
Columbine
Fresh from her flirtation with the soldier, who already bores her to death, Columbine walks with a swish of skirts and a flutter of her fan past old trunks, a tripod without a camera, a dusty baseball glove holding a grass-stained baseball, into an unknown part of the attic. Here great barrels loom. She does not know what she is looking for. She wishes to be alone, everything bores her to distraction, but at the same time she wishes to be pursued, if only for the pleasure of scorning the pursuer. As she rounds a barrel she sees something on the floor: it is a figure sprawled on the ground, disgustingly drunk no doubt. But at once she recognizes the loose blouse and the balloon sleeves. He is lying on his back, his head turned to one side, one arm outstretched and the other crossed over his chest. A line of moonlight lies across his throat like a bright scar. Beside the fingers of the outstretched hand lies a gun. Columbine hesitates. She does not like difficulties. Can the imbecile finally have done what he has always threatened to do? Irritably she prods the figure with her foot. It is like pushing against a sack of flour. Pierrot’s attentions irk her, his very existence puts her nerves on edge, but she is used to him and does not relish the absence of opportunities for disdain. She bends over, shakes his shoulder harshly, lifts and lowers the limp hand on his chest. She kneels beside him, touches his cheek. Limp, dead: in death he is almost beautiful. Something stirs in her, deep down. “Please,” she whispers, stroking his face. Pierrot’s eyes spring open, he stares at her mournfully. “Idiot!” she cries. She leaps to her feet, looks furiously down at him, and strides off into the dark, though not before glancing at him over her shoulder. Pierrot, his cheek warm from her touch, watches her swish around a corner, then rises nimbly to his feet and sets off in doleful pursuit.
Dawn
Now the dawn goddess in the palace of the East rises wearily from her couch, rubs her eyes, and puts on her saffron robe. She hurries to the courtyard, where she mounts her silver-wheeled chariot. Swiftly the two horses rise into the air, scattering darkness. At the first glimmer of gray in the sky, the piper in the woods looks up, bends and spins once more, and breaks off abruptly. In the shocking silence he beckons toward the sky, then turns and vanishes into the woods. The children, waking from their long dream, look around tiredly and head for home. The outlaws in their black masks have already slipped back into their own houses, hidden their masks in closets or bureau drawers, and pulled the covers over their shoulders. Janet looks down once more into the yard where her lover waves one more time before disappearing through the hedge. Now the dolls are growing sluggish, their limbs are stiffening. Pierrot cannot lower the white arm that reaches toward Columbine, whose lovely body, straining away from him, can no longer flee. The one-eyed cuddly bear sits motionless against a nearby trunk. Haverstraw’s mother wakes for a moment as the front door clicks shut, then falls deeply asleep as she hears his footsteps climbing the stairs. Laura, closing the door to her room, hopes the man understood that she has thanked him. On a moonlit rug with a pattern of peacocks lies a yellow zinnia. Danny is fast asleep despite the noise of trucks coming through the screen of the open window. The guys in the library have left long ago. Coop lies dreaming and waking, tossing in his sheets, while in the window of the department store the mannequin st
ands stiffly in her straw hat and sandals, gazing out at the stoplight changing from red to green. In her bedroom on the second floor, Mrs. Kasco lies fast asleep, though the insects are loud through her open window. The lovers and loners have left the beach, over the dark water a thin band of sky has grown pale, gulls walk in the seaweed and straw of the tideline, the moon, nearly full, shines in the part of the sky where it is still a summer night.
Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauser is the author of numerous works of fiction, including Martin Dressler, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, and, most recently, We Others: New and Selected Stories, winner of the Story Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His work has been translated into seventeen languages, and his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist. He teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
ALSO BY Steven Millhauser
Edwin Mullhouse
Portrait of a Romantic
In the Penny Arcade
From the Realm of Morpheus
The Barnum Museum
Little Kingdoms
Martin Dressler
The Knife Thrower and Other Stories
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2000
Copyright © 1999 by Steven Millhauser
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and
colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Crown edition as follows:
Millhauser, Steven.
Enchanted night / by Steven Millhauser.—1st ed.
1. Title.
PS3563.I422E53 1999
813’.54—dc21 99-25517
CIP
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42575-1
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