A moment later he was gone.
Inside, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom saw him tinkering, making a minor adjustment here, eliminate friction there, busy among all those warm, wonderful, infinitely delicate, forever mysterious, and ever-moving parts.
Then smiling, they went down the steps into the fresh summer night.
Twice a year they brought the big flapping rugs oui into the yard and laid them where they looked out of place and uninhabited, on the lawn. Then Grandma and Mother came from the house with what looked to be the back rungs of those beautiful looped wire chairs downtown in the soda-fountain place. These great wire wands were handed around so they stood, Douglas, Tom, Grandma, Great-grandma, and Mother poised like a collection of witches and familiars over the duty pattens of old Armenia. Then at a signal from Great-grandma, a blink of the eyes or a gumming of the lips, the flails were raised, the harping wires banged down again and again upon the rugs.
“Take that! And that!” said Great-grandma. “Get the flies, boys, kill the cooties!”
“Oh, you!” said Grandma to her mother.
They all laughed. The dust storm puffed up about them. Their laughing became choked.
Showers of lint, tides of sand, golden flakes of pipe tobacco fluttered, shivered on the exploded and re-exploded air. Pausing, the boys saw the tread of their shoes and the older people’s shoes pressed a billion times in the warp and woof of this rug, now to be smoothed clean as the tide of their beating swept again and again along the oriental shore.
“There’s where your husband spilled that coffee!” Grandma gave the rug a blow.
“Here’s where you dropped the cream!” Great-grandma whacked up a great twister of dust.
“Look at the scuff marks. Boys, boys!”
“Double-Grandma, here’s the ink from your pen!”
“Pshaw! Mine was purple ink. That’s common blue!”
Bang!
“Look at the path worn from the hall door here to the kitchen door. Food. That’s what brings the lions to the water hole. Let’s shift it, put it back the other way around.”
“Better yet, lock the men out of the house.”
“Make them leave their shoes outside the door.”
Bang, bang!
They hung the rugs on the wash line now, to finish the job. Tom looked at the intricate scrolls and loops, the flowers, the mysterious figures, the shuttling patterns.
“Tom, don’t stand there. Strike, boy!”
“It’s fun, seeing things,” said Tom.
Douglas glanced up suspiciously. “What do you see?” “The whole dam town, people, houses, here’s our house!” Bang! “Our street!” Bang! “That black part there’s the ravine!” Bang! “There’s school!” Bang! “This funny cartoon here’s you, Doug!” Bang! “Here’s Great-grandma, Grandma, Mom.” Bang! “How many years this rug been down?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen years of people stomping across it; I see every shoe print,” gasped Tom.
“Land, boy, you got a tongue,” said Great-grandma.
“I see all the things happened in that house in all those years right here!” Bang! “All the past, sure, but I can see the future, too. Just squinch up my eyes and peek around at the patterns, there, to see where we’ll be walking, running around, tomorrow.”
Douglas stopped swinging the beater. “What else you see in the rug?”
“Threads mostly,” said Great-grandma. “Not much left but the underskin. See how the manufacturer wove the thing.”
“Right!” said Tom mysteriously. “Threads one way, threads another. I see it all. Dire fiends. Deadly sinners. There’s bad weather, there’s good. Picnics. Banquets. Strawberry festivals.” He tapped the beater from place to place portentously.
“That’s some boardinghouse you got me running,” said Grandma, glowing with exertion.
“It’s all there, fuzzylike. Hold your head on one side, Doug, get one eye almost shut. It’s better at night, of course, inside, the rug on the floor, lamplight and all. Then you get shadows all shapes, light and dark, and watch the threads running off, feel the nap, run your hand around on the fur. Smells just like a desert, I bet. All hot and sandy, like inside a mummy case, maybe. Look, that red spot, that’s the Happiness Machine burning up!”
“Catsup from somebody’s sandwich, no doubt,” said Mom.
“No, Happiness Machine,” said Douglas, and was sad to see it burning there. He had been counting on Leo Auffmann to keep things in order, keep everybody smiling, keep the small gyroscope he often felt inside himself tilting toward the sun every time the earth tilted toward outer space and darkness. But no, there was Auffmann’s folly, ashes and cinders. Bang! Bang! Douglas struck.
“Look, there’s the green electric runabout! Miss Fern! Miss Roberta!” said Tom. “Honk, Honk!” Bang!
They all laughed.
“There’s your life-strings, Doug, running along in knots. Too many sour apples. Pickles at bedtime!”
“Which one, where?” cried Douglas, peering.
“This one, one year from now, this one, two years from now, and this one, three, four, five years from now!”
Bang! The wire beater hissed like a snake in the blind sky.
“And one to grow on!” said Tom.
He hit the rug so hard all the dust of five thousand centuries jumped from the shocked texture, paused on the air a terrible moment, and even as Douglas stood, eyes squinted to see the warp, the woof, the shivering pattern, the Armenian avalanche of dust roared soundless upon, over, down and around, burying him forever before their eyes . . .
How it began with the children, old Mrs. Bentley never knew. She often saw them, like moths and monkeys, at the grocer’s, among the cabbages and hung bananas, and she smiled at them and they smiled back. Mrs. Bentley watched them making footprints in winter snow, filling their lungs with autumn smoke, shaking down blizzards of spring apple-blossoms, but felt no fear of them. As for herself, her house was in extreme good order, everything set to its station, the floors briskly swept, the foods neatly tinned, the hatpins thrust through cushions, and the drawers of her bedroom bureaus crisply filled with the paraphernalia of years.
Mrs. Bentley was a saver. She saved tickets, old theater programs, bits of lace, scarves, rail transfers; all the tags and tokens of existence.
“I’ve a stack of records,” she often said. “Here’s Caruso. That was in 1916, in New York; I was sixty and John was still alive. Here’s Tune Moon, 1924, I think, right after John died.”
That was the huge regret of her life, in a way. The one thing she had most enjoyed touching and listening to and looking at she hadn’t saved. John was far out in the meadow country, dated and boxed and hidden under grasses, and nothing remained of him but his high silk hat and his cane and his good suit in the closet. So much of the rest of him had been devoured by moths.
But what she could keep she had kept. Her pink-flowered dresses crushed among moth balls in vast black trunks, and cut-glass dishes from her childhood—she had brought them all when she moved to this town five years ago. Her husband had owned rental property in a number of towns, and, like a yellow ivory chess piece, she had moved and sold one after another, until now she was here in a strange town, left with only the trunks and furniture, dark and ugly, crouched about her like the creatures of a primordial zoo.
The thing about the children happened in the middle of summer. Mrs. Bentley, coming out to water the ivy upon her front porch, saw two cool-colored sprawling girls and a small boy lying on her lawn, enjoying the immense prickling of the grass.
At the very moment Mrs. Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wineglasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun.
Mrs. Bentley called, “Would you like some? Here!” The ice-cream wagon stopped and she exchanged mo
ney for pieces of the original Ice Age. The children thanked her with snow in their mouths, their eyes darting from her buttoned-up shoes to her white hair.
“Don’t you want a bite?” said the boy.
“No, child. I’m old enough and cold enough; the hottest day won’t thaw me,” laughed Mrs. Bentley.
They carried the miniature glaciers up and sat, three in a row, on the shady porch glider.
“I’m Alice, she’s Jane, and that’s Tom Spaulding.”
“How nice. And I’m Mrs. Bentley. They called me Helen.”
They stared at her.
“Don’t you believe they called me Helen?” said the old lady.
“I didn’t know old ladies had first names,” said Tom, blinking.
Mrs. Bentley laughed dryly.
“You never hear them used, he means,” said Jane.
“My dear, when you are as old as I, they won’t call you Jane, either. Old age is dreadfully formal. It’s always ‘Mrs. ’ Young People don’t like to call you ‘Helen. ’ It seems much too flip.” “How old are you?” asked Alice.
“I remember the pterodactyl.” Mrs. Bentley smiled.
“No, but how old?”
“Seventy-two.”
They gave their cold sweets an extra long suck, deliberating.
“That’s old,” said Tom.
“I don’t feel any different now than when I was your age,” said the old lady.
“Our age?”
“Yes. Once I was a pretty little girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice.”
They did not speak. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” Jane got up.
“Oh, you don’t have to go so soon, I hope. You haven’t finished eating . . . Is something the matter?”
“My mother says it isn’t nice to fib,” said Jane.
“Of course it isn’t. It’s very bad,” agreed Mrs. Bentley.
“And not to listen to fibs.”
“Who was fibbing to you, Jane?”
Jane looked at her and then glanced nervously away. “You were.”
“I?” Mrs. Bentley laughed and put her withered claw to her small bosom. “About what?” “About your age. About being a little girl.”
Mrs. Bentley stiffened. “But I was, many years ago, a little girl just like you.”
“Come on, Alice, Tom.”
“Just a moment,” said Mrs. Bentley. “Don’t you believe me?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane. “No.”
“But how ridiculous! It’s perfectly obvious. Everyone was young once!”
“Not you,” whispered Jane, eyes down, almost to herself. Her empty ice stick had fallen in a vanilla puddle on the porch floor.
“But of course I was eight, nine, ten years old, like all of you.”
The two girls gave a short, quickly-sealed-up laugh.
Mrs. Bentley’s eyes glittered. “Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year-olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.”
The two girls laughed. Tom looked uneasy.
“You’re joking with us,” giggled Jane. “You weren’t really ten ever, were you, Mrs. Bentley?”
“You run on home!” the woman cried suddenly, for she could not stand their eyes. “I won’t have you laughing.”
“And your name’s not really Helen?”
“Of course it’s Helen!”
“Good-bye,” said the two girls, giggling away across the lawn under the seas of shade, Tom followed them slowly.
“Thanks for the ice cream!”
“Once I played hopscotch!” Mrs. Bentley cried after them, but they were gone.
Mrs Bentley spent the rest of the day slamming teakettles about, loudly preparing a meager lunch, and from time to time going to the front door, hoping to catch those insolent fiends on their laughing excursions through the late day. But if they had appeared, what could she say to them, why should she worry about them?
“The idea!” said Mrs. Bentley to her dainty, rose-clustered teacup. “No one ever doubted I was a girl before. What a silly, horrible thing to do. I don’t mind being old—not really—but I do resent having my childhood taken away from me.”
She could see the children racing off under the cavernous trees with her youth in their frosty fingers, invisible as air.
After supper, for no reason at all, with a senseless certainty of motion, she watched her own hands, like a pair of ghostly gloves at a seance, gather together certain items in a perfumed kerchief. Then she went to her front porch and stood there stiffly for half an hour.
As suddenly as night birds the children flew by, and Mrs. Bentley’s voice brought them to a fluttering rest.
“Yes, Mrs. Bentley?”
“Come up on this porch!” she commanded them, and the girls climbed the steps, Tom trailing after.
“Yes, Mrs. Bentley?” They thumped the “Mrs.” like a bass piano chord, extra heavily, as if that were her first name.
“I’ve some treasures to show you.” She opened the perfumed kerchief and peered into it as if she herself might be surprised. She drew forth a hair comb, very small and delicate, its rim twinkling with rhinestones.
“I wore this when I was nine,” she said.
Jane turned it in her hand and said, “How nice.”
“Let’s see!” cried Alice.
“And here is a tiny ring I wore when I was eight,” said Mrs. Bentley. “It doesn’t fit my finger now. You look through it and see the Tower of Pisa ready to fall.”
“Let’s see it lean!” The girls passed it back and forth between them until Tome fitted it to her hand. “Why, it’s just my size!” she exclaimed.
“And the comb fits my head!” gasped Alice.
Mrs. Bentley produced some jackstones. “Here,” she said. “I once played with these.”
She threw them. They made a constellation on the porch.
“And here!” In triumph she flashed her trump card, a postal picture of herself when she was seven years old, in a dress like a yellow butterfly, with her golden curls and blown blue-glass eyes and angelic pouting lips.
“Who’s this little girl?” asked Jane.
“It’s me!”
The two girls held onto it.
“But it doesn’t look like you,” said Jane simply. “Anybody could get a picture like this, somewhere.”
They looked at her for a long moment.
“Any more pictures, Mrs. Bentley?” asked Alice. “Of you, later? You got a picture of you at fifteen, and one at twenty, and one at forty and fifty?”
The girls chortled.
“I don’t have to show you anything!” said Mrs. Bentley. “Then we don’t have to believe you,” replied Jane.
“But this picture proves I was young!”
“That’s some other little girl, like us. You borrowed it.”
“I was married!”
“Where’s Mr. Bentley?”
“He’s been gone a long time. If he were here, he’d tell you how young and pretty I was when I was twenty-two.”
“But he’s not here and he can’t tell, so what does that prove?”
“I have a marriage certificate.”
“You could have borrowed that, too. Only way I’ll believe you were ever young”-Jane shut her eyes to emphasize how sure she was of herself—“is if you have someone say they saw you when you were ten.”
“Thousands of people saw me but they’re dead, you little fool—or ill, in other towns. I don’t know a soul here, just moved here a few years ago, so no one saw me young.”
“Well, there you are!” Jane blinked at her companions. “Nobody saw her!”
“Listen!” Mrs. Bentley seized the girl’s wrist. “You must take these things on faith. Someday you’ll be as old as I. People will say the same. ‘Oh no,’ they’ll say, ‘those vultures were never hummingbirds, those owls were never orioles, those parrots were never bluebirds!’ One day you’ll be like me!”
“No, we won’t!” said
the girls. “Will we?” they asked one another.
“Wait and see!” said Mrs. Bentley.
And to herself she thought, Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.
“Your mother,” she said to Jane. “Haven’t you noticed, over the years, the change?”
“No,” said Jane. “She’s always the same.
And that was true. You lived with people every day and they never altered a degree. It was only when people had been off on a long trip, for years, that they shocked you. And she felt like a woman who has been on a roaring black train for seventy-two years, landing at last upon the rail platform and everyone crying: “Helen Bentley, is that you?”
“I guess we better go home,” said Jane. “Thanks for the ring. It just fits me.”
“Thanks for the comb. It’s fine.”
“Thanks for the picture of the little girl.”
“Come back—you can’t have those!” Mrs. Bentley shouted as they raced down the steps. “They’re mine!”
“Don’t!” said Tom, following the girls. “Give them back!”
“No, she stole them! They belonged to some other little girl. She stole them. Thanks!” cried Alice.
So no matter how she called after them, the girls were gone, like moths through darkness.
“I’m sorry,” said Tom, on the lawn, looking up at Mrs. Bentley. He went away.
They took my ring and my comb and my picture, thought Mrs. Bentley, trembling there on the steps. Oh, I’m empty, empty; it’s part of my life.
She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, “Does it really belong to me?”
Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.
A night wind blew in the room. The white curtain fluttered against a dark cane, which had leaned against the wall near the other bric-a-brac for many years. The cane trembled and fell out into a patch of moonlight, with a soft thud. Its gold ferule glittered. It was her husband’s opera cane. It seemed as if he were pointing it at her, as he often had, using his soft, sad, reasonable voice when they, upon rare occasions, disagreed.
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