Текст книги "Summer Morning, Summer Night"

Автор книги: Raymond Douglas Bradbury

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RAY BRADBURY
SUMMER MORNING, SUMMER NIGHT

Edited by Donn Albright, Pratt Institute and Jon Eller, Indiana University

A Note on the Text

The text for “End of Summer” is based on the version collected by Bradbury in Driving Blind (1997). The texts of all other previously published stories in this collection are based on the earliest published versions. I am grateful to David Spiech, my colleague at Indiana University’s Institute for American Thought, for copy editing this volume.

To Jon Eller with love.

Ray

END OF SUMMER

ONE. TWO. HATTIE’S lips counted the long, slow strokes of the high town clock as she lay quietly on her bed. The streets were asleep under the courthouse clock, which seemed like a white moon rising, round and full, the light from it freezing all of the town in late summer time. Her heart raced.

She rose swiftly to look down on the empty avenues, the dark and silent lawns. Below, the porch swing creaked ever so little in the wind.

She saw the long, dark rush of her hair in the mirror as she unknotted the tight schoolteacher’s bun and let it fall loose to her shoulders. Wouldn’t her pupils be surprised, she thought; so long, so black, so glossy. Not too bad for a woman of thirty-five. From the closet, her hands trembling, she dug out hidden parcels. Lipstick, rouge, eyebrow pencil, nail polish. A pale blue negligee, like a breath of vapor. Pulling off her cotton nightgown, she stepped on it, hard, even while she drew the negligee over her head.

She touched her ears with perfume, used the lipstick on her nervous mouth, penciled her eyebrows, and hurriedly painted her nails.

She was ready.

She let herself out into the hall of the sleeping house. She glanced fearfully at three white doors. If they sprang open now, then what? She balanced between the walls, waiting.

The doors stayed shut.

She stuck her tongue out at one door, then at the other two.

She drifted down the noiseless stairs onto the moonlit porch and then into the quiet street.

The smell of a September night was everywhere. Underfoot, the concrete breathed warmth up along her thin white legs.

“I’ve always wanted to do this.” She plucked a blood rose for her black hair and stood a moment smiling at the shaded windows of her house. “You don’t know what I’m doing,” she whispered. She swirled her negligee.

Down the aisle of trees, past glowing street lamps, her bare feet were soundless. She saw every bush and fence and wondered, “Why didn’t I think of this a long time ago?” She paused in the wet grass just to feel how it was, cool and prickly.

The patrolman, Mr. Waltzer, was wandering down Glen Bay Street, singing in a low, sad tenor. As he passed, Hattie circled a tree and stood staring at his broad back as he walked on, still singing.

When she reached the courthouse, the only noise was the sound of her bare toes on the rusty fire escape. At the top of the flight, on a ledge under the shining silver clock face, she held out her hands.

There lay the sleeping town!

A thousand roofs glittered with snow that had fallen from the moon.

She shook her fists and made faces at the town. She flicked her negligee skirt contemptuously at the far houses. She danced and laughed silently, then stopped to snap her fingers in all four directions.

A minute later, eyes bright, she was racing on the soft lawns of the town.

She came to the house of whispers.

She paused by a certain window and heard a man’s voice and a woman’s voice in the secret room.

Hattie leaned against the house and listened to whispering, whispering. It was like hearing two tiny moths fluttering gently inside on the window screen. There was a soft, remote laughter.

Hattie put her hand to the screen above, her face the face of one at a shrine. Perspiration shone on her lips.

“What was that?” cried a voice inside.

Like mist, Hattie whirled and vanished.

When she stopped running she was by another house window.

A man stood in the brightly lighted bathroom, perhaps the only lighted room in the town, shaving carefully around his yawning mouth. He had black hair and blue eyes and was twenty-seven years old and every morning carried to his job in the railyards a lunch bucket packed with ham sandwiches. He wiped his face with a towel and the light went out.

Hattie waited behind the great oak in the yard, all film, all spiderweb. She heard the front door click, his footsteps down the walk, the clank of his lunch pail. From the odors of tobacco and fresh soap, she knew, without looking, that he was passing.

Whistling between his teeth, he walked down the street toward the ravine. She followed from tree to tree, a white veil behind an elm, a moon shadow behind an oak. Once, he whirled about. Just in time she hid from sight. She waited, heart pounding. Silence. Then, his footsteps walking on.

He was whistling the song “June Night.”

The high arc light on the edge of the ravine cast his shadow directly beneath him. She was not two yards away, behind an ancient chestnut tree.

He stopped but did not turn. He sniffed the air.

The night wind blew her perfume over the ravine, as she had planned it.

She did not move. It was not her turn to act now. She simply stood pressing against the tree, exhausted with the shaking of her heart.

It seemed an hour before he moved. She could hear the dew breaking gently under the pressure of his shoes. The warm odor of tobacco and fresh soap came nearer.

He touched one of her wrists. She did not open her eyes. He did not speak.

Somewhere, the courthouse clock sounded the time as three in the morning.

His mouth fitted over hers very gently and easily.

Then his mouth was at her ear and she was held to the tree by him. He whispered. So she was the one who’d looked in his windows the last three nights! He kissed her neck. She, she had followed him, unseen, last night! He stared at her. The shadows of the trees fell soft and numerous all about, on her lips, on her cheeks, on her brow, and only her eyes were visible, gleaming and alive. She was lovely, did she know that? He had thought he was being haunted. His laughter was no more than a faint whisper in his mouth. He looked at her and made a move of his hand to his pocket. He drew forth a match, to strike, to hold by her face, to see, but she took his hand and held it and the unlit match. After a moment, he let the matchstick drop into the wet grass. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

She did not look up at him. Silently he took her arm and began to walk.

Looking at her pale feet, she went with him to the edge of the cool ravine and down to the silent flow of the stream, to the moss banks and the willows.

He hesitated. She almost looked up to see if he was still there. They had come into the light, and she kept her head turned away so that he saw only the blowing darkness of her hair and the whiteness of her arms.

He said, “You don’t have to come any further, you know. Which house did you come from? You can run back to wherever it is. But if you run, don’t ever come back; I won’t want to see you again. I couldn’t take any more of this, night after night. Now’s your chance. Run, if you want!”

Summer night breathed off her, warm and quiet.

Her answer was to lift her hand to him.

NEXT MORNING, as Hattie walked downstairs, she found Grandma, Aunt Maude, and Cousin Jacob with cold cereal in their tight mouths, not liking it when Hattie pulled up her chair. Hattie wore a grim, highnecked dress, with a long skirt. Her hair was a knotted, hard bun behind her ears, her face was scrubbed pale, lean of color in the cheeks and lips. Her painted eyebrows and eyelashes were gone. Her fingernails were plain.

“You’re late, Hattie,” they all said, as if an agreement had been made to say it when she sat down.

“I know.” She did not move in her chair.

“Better not eat much,” said Aunt Maude. “It’s eight-thirty. You should’ve been at school. What’ll the superintendent say? Fine example for a teacher to set her pupils.”

The three stared at her.

Hattie was smiling.

“You haven’t been late in twelve years, Hattie,” said Aunt Maude.

Hattie did not move, but continued smiling.

“You’d better go,” they said.

Hattie walked to the hall to take down her green umbrella and pinned on her ribboned flat straw hat. They watched her. She opened the front door and looked back at them for a long moment, as if about to speak, her cheeks flushed. They leaned toward her. She smiled and ran out, slamming the door.

THE GREAT FIRE

THE MORNING THE great fire started, nobody in the house could put it out. It was mother’s niece, Marianne, living with us while her parents were in Europe, who was all aflame. So nobody could smash the little window in the red box at the corner and pull the trigger to bring the gushing hoses and the hatted firemen. Blazing like so much ignited cellophane, Marianne came downstairs, plumped herself with a loud cry or moan at the breakfast table and refused to eat enough to fill a tooth cavity.

Mother and father moved away, the warmth in the room being excessive.

“Good morning, Marianne.”

“What?" Marianne looked beyond people and spoke vaguely. “Oh, good morning.”

“Did you sleep well last night, Marianne?”

But they knew she hadn’t slept. Mother gave Marianne a glass of water to drink and everyone wondered if it would evaporate in her hand. Grandma, from her table chair, surveyed Marianne’s fevered eyes. “You’re sick, but it’s no microbe,” she said. “They couldn’t find it under a microscope.”

“What?” said Marianne.

“Love is godmother to stupidity,” said father, detachedly.

“She’ll be all right,” mother said to father. “Girls only seem stupid because when they’re in love they can’t hear.”

“It affects the semicircular canals,” said father. “Making many girls fall right into a fellow’s arms. I know. I was almost crushed to death once by a falling woman and let me tell you—”

“Hush.” Mother frowned, looking at Marianne.

“She can’t hear what we’re saying; she’s cataleptic right now.”

“He’s coming to pick her up this morning,” whispered mother to father, as if Marianne wasn’t even in the room. “They’re going riding in his jalopy.”

Father patted his mouth with a napkin. “Was our daughter like this, Mama?” he wanted to know. “She’s been married and gone so long, I’ve forgotten. I don’t recall she was so foolish. One would never know a girl had an ounce of sense at a time like this. That’s what fools a man. He says, Oh what a lovely brainless girl, she loves me, I think I’ll marry her. He marries her and wakes up one morning and all the dreaminess is gone out of her and her intellect has returned, unpacked, and is hanging up undies all about the house. The man begins running into ropes and lines. He finds himself on a little desert isle, a little living room alone in the midst of a universe, with a honeycomb that has turned into a bear trap, with a butterfly metamorphosed into a wasp. He then immediately takes up a hobby: stamp collecting, lodge-meetings or—”

“How you do run on,” cried mother. “Marianne, tell us about this young man. What was his name again? Was it Isak Van Pelt?”

“What? Oh—Isak, yes.” Marianne had been roving about her bed all night, sometimes flipping poetry books and reading incredible lines, sometimes lying flat on her back, sometimes on her tummy looking out at dreaming moonlit country. The smell of jasmine had touched the room all night and the excessive warmth of early spring (the thermometer read 55 degrees) had kept her awake. She looked like a dying moth, if anyone had peeked through the keyhole.

This morning she had clapped her hands over her head in the mirror and come to breakfast, remembering just in time to put on a dress.

Grandma laughed quietly all during breakfast. Finally she said, “You must eat, child, you must.” So Marianne played with her toast and got half a piece down. Just then there was a loud honk outside. That was Isak! In his jalopy!

“Whoop!” cried Marianne and ran upstairs quickly.

The young Isak Van Pelt was brought in and introduced around.

When Marianne was finally gone, father sat down, wiping his forehead. “I don’t know. This is too much.”

“You were the one who suggested she start going out,” said mother.

“And I’m sorry I suggested it,” he said. “But she’s been visiting us for six months now, and six more months to go. I thought if she met some nice young man—”

“And they were married,” husked grandma darkly, “why, Marianne might move out almost immediately—is that it?”

“Well,” said father.

“Well,” said grandma.

“But now it’s worse than before,” said father. “She floats around singing with her eyes shut, playing those infernal love records and talking to herself. A man can stand so much. She’s getting so she laughs all the time, too. Do eighteen-year-old girls often wind up in the booby hatch?”

“He seems a nice young man,” said mother.

“Yes, we can always pray for that,” said father, taking out a little shot glass. “Here’s to an early marriage.”

The second morning Marianne was out of the house like a fireball when first she heard the jalopy horn. There was not time for the young man even to come to the door. Only grandma saw them roar off together, from the parlor window.

“She almost knocked me down.” Father brushed his mustache. “What’s that? Brained eggs? Well.”

In the afternoon, Marianne, home again, drifted about the living room to the phonograph records. The needle hiss filled the house. She played That Old Black Magic twenty-one times, going “la la la” as she swam with her eyes closed, in the room.

“I’m afraid to go in my own parlor,” said father. “I retired from business to smoke cigars and enjoy living, not to have a limp relative humming about under the parlor chandelier.”

“Hush,” said mother.

“This is a crisis,” announced father, “in my life. After all, she’s just visiting.”

“You know how visiting girls are. Away from home they think they’re in Paris, France. She’ll be gone in October. It’s not so dreadful.”

“Let’s see,” figured father, slowly. “I’ll have been buried just about one hundred and thirty days out at Green Lawn Cemetery by then.” He got up and threw his paper down into a little white tent on the floor. “By George, Mother, I’m talking to her right now!”

He went and stood in the parlor door, peering through it at the waltzing Marianne. “La,” she sang to the music.

Clearing his throat, he stepped through.

“Marianne,” he said.

“That old black magic...” sang Marianne. “Yes?”

He watched her hands swinging in the air. She gave him a sudden fiery look as she danced by.

“I want to talk to you.” He straightened his tie.

“Dah dum dee dum dum dee dum dee dum dum,” she sang.

“Did you hear me?” he demanded.

“He’s so nice,” she said.

“Evidently.”

“Do you know, he bows and opens doors like a doorman and plays a trumpet like Harry James and brought me daisies this morning?”

“I wouldn’t doubt.”

“His eyes are blue.” She looked at the ceiling.

He could find nothing at all on the ceiling to look at.

She kept looking, as she danced, at the ceiling as he came over and stood near her, looking up, but there wasn’t a rain spot or a settling crack there, and he sighed, “Marianne.”

“And we ate lobster at that river café.”

“Lobster. I know, but we don’t want you breaking down, getting weak. One day, tomorrow, you must stay home and help your Aunt Math make her doilies—”

“Yes, sir.” She dreamed around the room with her wings out.

“Did you hear me?” he demanded.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes,” her eyes shut. “Oh, yes, yes.” Her skirts whished around. “Uncle,” she said, her head back, lolling.

“You’ll help your aunt with her doilies?” he cried.

“—with her doilies,” she murmured.

“There!” He sat down in the kitchen, plucking up the paper. “I guess I told her!”

BUT, NEXT morning, he was on the edge of his bed when he heard the hot-rod’s thunderous muffler and heard Marianne fall downstairs, linger two seconds in the dining room for breakfast, hesitate by the bathroom long enough to consider whether she should be sick, and then the slam of the front door, the sound of the jalopy banging down the street, two people singing off-key in it.

Father put his head in his hands. “Doilies,” he said.

“What?” said mother.

“Dooley’s,” said father. “I’m going down to Dooley’s for a morning visit.”

“But Dooley’s isn’t open until ten.”

“I’ll wait,” decided father, eyes shut.

That night and seven other wild nights the porch swing sang a little creaking song, back and forth, back and forth. Father, hiding in the living room, could be seen in fierce relief whenever he drafted his ten-cent cigar and the cherry light illumined his immensely tragic face. The porch swing creaked. He waited for another creak. He heard little butterfly-soft sounds from outside, little palpitations of laughter and sweet nothings in small ears. “My porch,” said father. “My swing,” he whispered to his cigar looking at it. “My house.” He listened for another creak. My lord,” he said.

He went to the tool shed and appeared on the dark porch with a shiny oil-can. “No, don’t get up. Don’t bother. There and there.” He oiled the swing joints. It was dark. He couldn’t see Marianne, he could smell her. The perfume almost knocked him off into the rosebush. He couldn’t see her gentleman friend either. “Good night,” he said. He went in and sat down and there was no more creaking. Now all he could hear was something that sounded like the moth-like flutter of Marianne’s heart.

“He must be very nice,” said mother, in the kitchen door, wiping a dinner dish.

“That’s what I’m hoping,” whispered father. “That’s why I let them have the porch every night!”

“So many days in a row,” said mother. “A girl doesn’t go with a nice young man that many times unless it’s serious.”

“Maybe he’ll propose tonight!” was father’s happy thought.

“Hardly so soon. And she is so young.”

“Still,” he ruminated. “It might happen. It’s got to happen, by the Lord Harry.”

Grandma chuckled from her corner easy chair. It sounded like someone turning the pages of an ancient book.

“What’s so funny?” said father.

“Wait and see,” said grandma. “Tomorrow.”

Father stared at the dark, but grandma would say no more.

“WELL, WELL,” said father at breakfast. He surveyed his eggs with a kindly, paternal eye. “Well, well, by gosh, last night, on the porch, there was more whispering. What’s his name? Isak? Well, now if I’m any judge at all, I think he proposed to Marianne last night; yes, I’m positive of it!”

“It would be nice,” said mother. “A spring marriage. But it’s so soon.”

“Look,” said father, with full-mouthed logic. “Marianne’s the kind of girl who marries quick and young. We can’t stand in her way, can we?”

“For once, I think you’re right,” said mother. “A marriage would be fine. Spring flowers, and Marianne looking nice in that gown I saw at Haydecker’s last week.”

They all peered anxiously at the stairs, waiting for Marianne to appear.

“Pardon me,” rasped grandma, sighting up from her morning toast. “But I wouldn’t talk of getting rid of Marianne just yet if I were you.”

“And why not?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“I hate to spoil your plans,” rustled grandma, chuckling. She gestured with her little vinegary head. “But while you people were worrying about getting Marianne married, I’ve been keeping tab on her. Seven days now I’ve been watching this young fellow, each day he came in his car and honked his horn outside. He must be an actor or a quick change artist or something.”

“What?” asked father.

“Yep,” said grandma. “Because one day he was a young blond fellow and next day he was a tall dark fellow, and Wednesday he was a chap with a brown mustache, and Thursday he had wavy red hair, and Friday he was shorter, with a Chevrolet stripped down instead of a Ford.”

Mother and father sat for a minute as if hit with hammers right behind the left ear.

At last father, his face exploding with color, shouted, “Do you mean to say! You sat there, woman, you say; all those men, and you—”

“You were always hiding.” snapped grandma. “So you wouldn’t spoil things. If you’d come out in the open you’d have seen the same as I. I never said a word. She’ll simmer down. It’s just her time of life. Every woman goes through it. It’s hard, but they can survive. A new man every day does wonders for a girl’s ego!”

“You, you, you, you, you!" Father choked on it, eyes wild, throat gorged too big for his collar. He fell back in his chair exhausted. Mother sat, stunned.

"Good morning, everyone!” Marianne raced downstairs and popped into a chair. Father stared at her.

“You, you, you, you, you,” he accused grandma.

I shall run down the street shouting, thought father wildly, and break the fire alarm window and pull the lever and bring the fire engines and the hoses. Or perhaps there will be a late snowstorm and I shall set Marianne out in it to cool.

He did neither. The heat in the room being excessive, according to the wall calendar, everyone moved out onto the cool porch while Marianne sat looking at her orange juice.