Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

by Ray Bradbury

  Next night he was his old precious self. Dale Carnegie? Splendid religious leader! Hart Schaffner & Marx? Better than Bond Street! Member of the After-Shave Club? That was Garvey! Latest Book-of-the-Month? Here on the table! Had they ever tried Elinor Glyn?

  The Cellar Septet was horrified, delighted. They let themselves be bludgeoned into watching Milton Berle. Garvey laughed at everything Berle said. It was arranged for neighbors to tape-record various daytime soap operas which Garvey replayed evenings with religious awe, while the Cellar Septet analyzed his face and his complete devotion to Ma Perkins and John’s Other Wife.

  Oh, Garvey was getting sly. His inner self observed: You’re on top. Stay there! Please your public! Tomorrow, play the Two Black Crows records! Mind your step! Bonnie Baker, now … that’s it! They’ll shudder, incredulous that you really like her singing. What about Guy Lombardo? That’s the ticket!

  The mob-mind, said his subconscious. You’re symbolic of the crowd. They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they’re fascinated with the snake-pit.

  Guessing his thought, his wife objected. ‘They like you.’

  ‘In a frightening sort of way,’ he said. ‘I’ve lain awake figuring why they should come see me! Always hated and bored myself. Stupid, tattletale-gray man. Not an original thought in my mind. All I know now is: I love company. I’ve always wanted to be gregarious, never had the chance. It’s been a ball these last months! But their interest is dying. I want company forever! What shall I do?’

  His subconscious provided shopping lists.

  Beer. It’s unimaginative.

  Pretzels. Delightfully ‘passé.’

  Stop by Mother’s. Pick up Maxfield Parrish painting, the flyspecked, sunburned one. Lecture on same tonight.

  By December Mr Garvey was really frightened.

  The Cellar Septet was now quite accustomed to Milton Berle and Guy Lombardo. In fact, they had rationalized themselves into a position where they acclaimed Berle as really too rare for the American public, and Lombardo was twenty years ahead of his time; the nastiest people liked him for the commonest reasons.

  Garvey’s empire trembled.

  Suddenly he was just another person, no longer diverting the tastes of friends, but frantically pursuing them as they seized at Nora Bayes, the 1917 Knickerbocker Quartette, Al Jolson singing ‘Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night,’ and Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm. Maxfield Parrish’s rediscovery left Mr Garvey in the north pasture. Overnight, everyone agreed, ‘Beer’s intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.’

  In short, his friends vanished. Alexander Pape, it was rumored, for a lark, was even considering hot water for his cold-water flat. This ugly canard was quashed, but not before Alexander Pape suffered a comedown among the cognoscenti.

  Garvey sweated to anticipate the shifting taste! He increased the free food output, foresaw the swing back to the Roaring Twenties by wearing hairy knickers and displaying his wife in a tube dress and boyish bob long before anyone else.

  But, the vultures came, ate, and ran. Now that this frightful Giant, TV, strode the world, they were busily re-embracing radio. Bootlegged 1935 transcriptions of Vic and Sade and Pepper Young’s Family were fought over at intellectual galas.

  At long last, Garvey was forced to turn to a series of miraculous tours de force, conceived and carried out by his panic-stricken inner-self.

  The first accident was a slammed car door.

  Mr Garvey’s little fingertip was neatly cut off!

  In the resultant chaos, hopping about, Garvey stepped on, then kicked the fingertip into a street drain. By the time they fished it out, no doctor would bother sewing it back on.

  A happy accident! Next day, strolling by an oriental shop, Garvey spied a beautiful objet d’art. His peppy old subconscious, considering his steadily declining box office and his poor audience-rating among the avant-garde, forced him into the shop and dragged out his wallet.

  ‘Have you seen Garvey lately!’ screamed Alexander Pape on the phone. ‘My God, go see!’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Everyone stared.

  ‘Mandarin’s finger-guard.’ Garvey waved his hand casually. ‘Oriental antique. Mandarins used them to protect the five-inch nails they cultivated.’ He drank his beer, the gold-thimbled little finger cocked. ‘Everyone hates cripples, the sight of things missing. It was sad losing my finger. But I’m happier with this gold thing-amajig.’

  ‘It’s a much nicer finger now that any of us can ever have.’ His wife dished them all a little green salad. ‘And George has the right to use it.’

  Garvey was shocked and charmed as his dwindling popularity returned. Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic. The clever man could sense intellectual perihelions, and prepare for the violent new orbits. Garvey’s subconscious brilliance sat up, began to eat a bit, and some days dared to walk about, trying its unused limbs. It caught fire!

  ‘How unimaginative the world is,’ his long-neglected other self said, using his tongue. ‘If somehow my leg were severed accidentally I wouldn’t wear a wooden leg, no! I’d have a gold leg crusted with precious stones made, and part of the leg would be a golden cage in which a bluebird would sing as I walked or sat talking to friends. And if my arm were cut off I’d have a new arm made of copper and jade, all hollow inside, a section for dry ice in it. And five other compartments, one for each finger. Drink, anyone? I’d cry. Sherry? Brandy? Dubonnet? Then I’d twist each finger calmly over the glasses. From five fingers, five cool streams, five liqueurs or wines. I’d tap the golden faucets shut. “Bottoms up!” I’d cry.

  ‘But, most of all, one almost wishes that one’s eye would offend one. Pluck it out, the Bible says. It was the Bible, wasn’t it? If that happened to me, I’d use no grisly glass eyes, by God. None of those black, pirate’s patches. Know what I’d do? I’d mail a poker chip to your friend in France, what’s his name? Matisse! I’d say, “Enclosed find poker chip, and personal check. Please paint on this chip one beautiful blue human eye. Yrs., sincerely. G. Garvey!”’

  Well, Garvey had always abhorred his body, found his eyes pale, weak, lacking character. So he was not surprised a month later (when his Gallup ran low again) to see his right eye water, fester, and then pull a complete blank!

  Garvey was absolutely bombed!

  But – equally – secretly pleased.

  With the Cellar Septet smiling like a jury of gargoyles at his elbow, he airmailed the poker chip to France with a check for fifty dollars.

  The check returned, uncashed, a week later.

  In the next mail came the poker chip.

  H. Matisse had painted a rare, beautiful blue eye on it, delicately lashed and browed. H. Matisse had tucked this chip in a green-plush jeweler’s box, quite obviously as delighted as was Garvey with the entire enterprise.

  Harper’s Bazaar published a picture of Garvey, wearing the Matisse pokerchip eye, and yet another of Matisse, himself, painting the monocle after considerable experimentation with three dozen chips!

  H. Matisse had had the uncommon good sense to summon a photographer to Leica the affair for posterity. He was quoted. ‘After I had thrown away twenty-seven eyes, I finally got the very one I wanted. It flies posthaste to Monsieur Garvey!’

  Reproduced in six colors, the eye rested balefully in its green-plush box. Duplicates were struck off for sales by the Museum of Modern Art. The Friends of the Cellar Septet played poker, using red chips with blue eyes, white chips with red eyes, and blue chips with white eyes.

  But there was only one man in New York who wore the original Matisse monocle and that was Mr Garvey.

  ‘I’m still a nerve-racking bore,’ he told his wife, ‘but now they’ll never know what a dreadful ox I am underneath the monocle and the Mandarin’s finger. And if their interest should happen to dwindle again,
one can always arrange to lose an arm or leg. No doubt of it. I’ve thrown up a wondrous facade; no one will ever find the ancient boor again.’

  And as his wife put it only the other afternoon:’I hardly think of him as the old George Garvey anymore. He’s changed his name. Giulio, he wants to be called. Sometimes, at night, I look over at him and call, “George,” but there’s no answer. There he is, that mandarin’s thimble on his little finger, the white and blue Matisse Poker-Chip monocle in his eye. I wake up and look at him often. And do you know? Sometimes that incredible Matisse Poker Chip seems to give out with a monstrous wink.’

  All on a Summer’s Night

  ‘You’re getting too big for this!’ Grandpa gave Doug a toss toward the blazing chandelier. The boarders sat laughing, with knives and forks at hand. Then Doug, ten years old, was caught and popped in his chair and Grandma tapped his bowl with a steaming spoonful of soup. The crackers crunched like snow when he bit them. The cracker salt glittered like tiny diamonds. And there, at the far end of the table, with her gray eyes always down to watch her hand stir her coffee with a spoon or break her gingerbread and lay on the butter, was Miss Leonora Welkes, with whom men never sat on backyard swings or walked through the town ravine on summer nights. There was Miss Leonora whose eyes watched out the window as summer couples drifted by on the darkening sidewalks night after night, and Douglas felt his heart squeeze tight.

  ‘Evening, Miss Leonora,’ he called.

  ‘Evening, Douglas.’ She looked up past the steaming mounds of food, and the boarders turned their heads a moment before bowing again to their rituals.

  Oh, Miss Welkes, he thought, Miss Welkes! And he wanted to stab every man at the table with a silver fork for not blinking their eyes at Miss Welkes when she asked for the butter. They always handed her things to their right, while still conversing with people on their left. The chandelier drew more attention than Miss Welkes. Isn’t it pretty? they said. Look at it sparkle! they cried.

  But they did not know Miss Welkes as he knew her. There were as many facets to her as any chandelier, and if you went about it right she could be set laughing, and it was like stirring the Chinese hanging crystals in the wind on the summer night porch, all tinkling and melody. No, Miss Welkes was cobweb and dust to them, and Douglas almost died in his chair, fastening his eyes upon her all through the soup and salad.

  Now the three young ladies came laughing down the stairs, late, like a troupe of orioles. They always came last to the table, as if they were actresses making entrance through the frayed blue-velvet portieres. They would hold each other by the shoulders, looking into each other’s faces, telling themselves if their cheeks were pink enough or their hair ringed up tight, or their eyelashes dyed with spit-and-color enough; then they would pause, straighten their hems, and enter to something like applause from the male boarders.

  ‘Evening, Tom, Jim, Bill. Evening, John, Peter!’

  The five would tongue their food over into their cheeks, leap up, and draw out chairs for the young belles, everyone laughed until the chandelier cried with pain.

  ‘Look what I got!’

  ‘Look what I got!’

  ‘Look at mine!’

  The three ladies held up gifts which they had saved to open at table. It was the Fourth of July, and on any day of the year that was in any way special they pulled the ribbons off gifts and cried, Oh, you shouldn’t have done it! They even got gifts on Memorial Day, that was how it was. Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Columbus Day, Friday the Thirteenth. It was quite a joke. Once they got gifts on a day that wasn’t any kind of day at all, with notes printed on them saying: JUST BECAUSE IT’S MONDAY! They talked about that particular incident for six months after.

  Now there was a crisp rattling as they cut the ribbons with their fingernails which flashed red, and far away at the end of the tunnel of people sat Miss Leonora Welkes, still inching at her food, but slowing down until at last her fork came to rest and she watched the gifts exposed to the crystalline light.

  ‘Perfume! With Old Glory on the box!’

  ‘Bath powder, in the shape of a pinwheel!’

  ‘Candy, done up in ten-inch salutes!’

  Everyone said how nice it was.

  Miss Leonora Welkes said, ‘Oh, how nice that is.’

  A moment later, Miss Welkes said, ‘I’m all done. It was a fine meal.’

  ‘Don’t you want any dessert?’ asked Grandma.

  ‘I’m choke-full.’ And Miss Welkes, smiling, glided from the room.

  ‘Smell!’ cried one young lady, waving the opened perfume under the men’s noses.

  ‘Ah!’ said everyone.

  Douglas hit the screen door like a bullet to a target, and before it slammed he had taken sixty-eight steps across the cool green lawn in his bare feet. Money jingled in his pocket, the remains of his firecracker savings; and quite a remains, too. Now he thudded his bare feet on the warm summer twilight cement, across the street to press his nose on Mrs Singer’s store window, to see the devils laid in red round rows, the torpedoes in sawdust, the ten-inch salutes that could toss your head in the trees like a football, the nine inchers that could bang a can to the sun, and the Fire Balloons, so rare and beautiful, like withered red, white and blue butterflies, their delicate silk wings folded, ready to be lit and gassed with warm air later and sent up into the summer night among the stars. There were so many things to pack your pockets with, and yet as he stood there, counting the money, ten, twenty, forty, a dollar and seventy cents, precariously saved during a long year of mowing lawns and clipping hedges, he turned and looked back at Grandma’s house, at the highest room of all, up in the little green cupola, where the window was shut in the hottest weather, and the shades half drawn. Miss Welkes’ room.

  In half an hour the kids would come like a summer shower, their feet raining on the pavement, their hands full of explosions, little adhesive turbans on their burned thumbs, smelling of brimstone and punk, to run him off in fairy circles where they waved the magical sparklers, tracing their names and their destinies in luminous firefly paths on the sultry evening air, making great white symbols that lingered in phosphorous afterimage even if you looked down from your night bed at three in the morning, remembering what a day and what an evening it had been. In half an hour he would be fat with treasure, breast pockets bulging with torpedoes, his money gone. But – now. He looked back and forth between the high room in Grandma’s house, and this store window full of dynamite wonders.

  How many nights in winter had he gone down to the stone public library and seen Miss Welkes there with the stamp pad at her elbow and the purple ink rubber stamper in her hand, and the great book sections behind her?

  ‘Good evening, Douglas.’

  ‘Evening, Miss Welkes.’

  ‘Can I help you meet some new friends, tonight?’

  ‘Yes’m.’

  ‘I know a man named Longfellow,’ she said. Or, ‘I know a man named Whittier.’

  And that was it. It wasn’t so much Miss Welkes herself, it was the people she knew. On autumn nights when, for no reason, the library might be empty for hours on end, she would say, ‘Let me bring out Mr Whittier.’ And she went back among the warm stacks of books, and returned to sit under the green glass shade, opening the book to meet the season, while Douglas sat on a stool looking up as her lips moved and, half of the time, she didn’t even glance at the words but could look away or close her eyes while she recited the poem about the pumpkin:

  Oh – fruit loved of childhood – the old days recalling,

  When wood grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!

  When wild ugly faces we carved in its skin,

  Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!

  And Douglas would walk home, tall and enchanted.

  Or on silver winter evenings when he and the wind blew wide the library door and dust stirred on the farthest counters and magazines turned their pages unaided in the vast empty rooms, then what
more particularly apt than a good friend of Miss Welkes? Mr Robert Frost, what a name for winter! His poem about stopping by the woods on a winter evening to watch the woods fill up with snow ..…

  And in the summer, only last night, Mr Whittier again, on a hot night in July that kept the people at home lying on their porches, the library like a great bread oven; there, under the green grass lamp:

  Blessings on thee, little man,

  Barefoot boy with cheeks of tan …

  Every morn shall lead thee through,

  Fresh baptisms of the dew!

  And Miss Welkes’ face there, an oval, with her cobweb graying hair and her plainness, would be enchanted, color risen to her cheeks, and wetness to her lips, and the light from the reflection on the book pages shining her eyes and coloring her hair to a brightness!

  In winter, he trudged home through icelands of magic, in summer through bakery winds of sorcery; the seasons given substance by the readings of Miss Welkes who knew so many people and introduced them, in due time to Douglas. Mr Poe and Mr Sandburg and Miss Amy Lowell and Mr Shakespeare.

  The screen door opened under his hand.

  ‘Mrs Singer,’ he said, ‘have you got any perfume?’

  The gift lay at the top of the stairs, tilted against her door. Supper had been early, over at six o’clock. There was the warm lull now before the extravagant evening. Downstairs, you could hear the tinkling of plates lifted to their kitchen wall racks. Douglas, at the furthest bend of the stairs, half hid in the attic door shadows, waited for Miss Welkes to twist her brass doorknob, waited to see the gift drop at her feet, unsigned, anonymous, sparkling with tape and gold stars.

  At last, the door opened. The gift fell.

  Miss Welkes looked down at it as if she was standing on the edge of a cliff she had never guessed was there before. She looked in all directions, slowly, and bent to pick it up. She didn’t open it, but stood in the doorway, holding the gift in her hands, for a long time. He heard her move inside and set the gift on a table. But there was no rattle of paper. She was looking at the gift, the wrapping, the tape, the stars, and not touching it.