Summer Morning, Summer Night

His face was jerking now, a bit, up toward the mirror, down toward the avenue and the moon was very lovely in the trees. He knew he could not come here in the morning.

He stopped the bus and she was waiting at the door. Waiting for him to open it. He paused a moment and said, “I—”

She half-turned and looked at him with her beautiful face, the face that was everything he had ever thought about at night walking by the sea, in his free time.

He pressed the air-release, the door hissed open, she stepped out and was walking in the leafy moonlight.

I don’t even know her name, he thought, I never even heard her voice. He kept the door open and watched her move off down the dark street. I didn’t even see if she was married, he thought.

He closed the door and started the bus off and away, very cold now, his hands trembling on the wheel, not quite able to see where he was driving. After a moment he had to stop again and put down all the windows, there was too much draught. Half an hour later, coming back along this same street, he was rushing his bus too fast, for the avenues were empty and there was only the moon and the empty bus behind his back, and he was hurrying, hurrying, thinking to himself, if I hurry I’ll reach the sea and if I’m lucky, it all depends, there may be some phosphorescence left, and there’ll be time for a smoke and a walk before I turn the bus around and come back empty through the empty town.

THE DEATH OF SO-AND-SO

IN THE ROOM, the deaths came and went. They were on all lips, and in every eye. Coffee cake went in and down to feed the stomach that kept the lungs busy with the talk of death. Coffee was creamed in cups and sugar sweetened the spell of old mortality in the parlor room. The four people faced each other, eager with stories of who and how and why, with names, dates and figures, with conditions and fortitudes, with descriptions of agonies and midnight sweats, of sutures and fractures, of comas and trachomas.

Mrs. Hette lifted her fat well-fed hand with the coffee cake in it like the contents of a steam-shovel. She paused in the death agony of Mr. Joseph Lantry, her best friend. She widened her mouth, showed the gray gums of her false teeth, faintly rimed with a froth, and bit into that cake. Chewing, swallowing, her eyes ugly bright, she continued with each detail of Mr. Lantry’s death. He had spat blood upon the ground. He had coughed, making the noise of a chimney flue during a winter storm, vacuous and empty and horrible. He had had the red leaf of mortality across his cheeks. Her voice went up, up. Then, with his death, she fell back in her chair, shaking her head, closing her eyes, not understanding life with her usual I-don’t-understand-life voice. Raising her food to her mouth she rained clods and crumbs of earth and coffee cake down upon Mr. Lantry’s coffin.

“Poor Mr. Lantry,” said Mrs. Spaulding, across the dim room.

“Yes,” said Mr. Spaulding.

“That’s how it goes,” said Mr. Hette, stirring his black coffee.

They all waited the proper interval. A little watch ticked inside Mrs. Hette; somehow she always knew the right interval before going on with something else. You had to lay the dead out properly, with words and silences, before you went on to the next, alphabetical or not. With a shuttering of eyes and a resting of hands about your coffee plate you showed that it was a subject of much solemnity and worry to you.

Mrs. Spaulding took advantage of the pause to offer more cake to everyone.

Mr. Hette sucked his pipe. “Do you know how long since we last seen you people? Twenty years. Traveling and all. When we hit town today we didn’t think we’d find you robbers alive!” Everybody laughed; it was nice to frost death up a bit. “What’s happened in town since we left?”

“Remember Bill Samuelson? He died.”

“What of?”

“Pneumonia,” said Mr. Spaulding.

“Diphtheria,” said Mrs. Spaulding.

Mr. Spaulding looked at Mr. Hette. “Helen Ferry, Tom Foley, Henry Masterson, all them died.”

“What ever happened to—ah—Alaine Phillips?” Mr. Hette looked cautiously from the corners of his eyes, at his wife. His wife’s eyes snapped.

“Alaine Phillips?” said Mr. Spaulding. “Why, didn’t you hear? She was divorced the spring after you married Lita here, and went away to Ohio.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Hette.

Mr. Hette’s wife glared at him.

“Alaine died the next year, however,” added Mr. Spaulding.

“What!” cried Mr. Hette.

Mrs. Hette smiled over at the wall briefly, taking out her hankie to tap her nose. The hankie made it hard for Mr. Hette to see her mouth now. He sat looking at the carpet.

Now the two women took up the brisk routine of names.

Gussie Soderstrom? Alive. Well! Berenice Holdridd? Dead. Well! Talita Martin? Dead! Really? There were gasps where ever someone had fallen away; little laughs and wonders where ever a tree still stood, leafed and healthy. Mildred Partridge! Lily Johnson? Elna Sundquist? Dead, dead, dead.

Mrs. Hette, in the person of one Sylvia Gamwell, wandered into a chain drug store, lifted pieces of poison cream pie to her mouth, went out to wait for a bus and dropped dead, necessitating an autopsy attended by Mr. Hette, and Mr. and Mrs. Spaulding. All organs were minutely examined and found to be so heavily tainted with that kind of poison from cream pies left long in the sun, that the organs gave off a phosphorescent aura, like the breath of a dragon. Mrs. Hette’s simulation of Miss Gamwell’s death agony was something that brought everybody out to the edge of the sofa.

“It sure don’t pay to eat in them chain drugs,” snapped Mrs. Hette.

“I bake my own pies,” said Mrs. Spaulding. “I’d rather die at home and take the blame!”

“Oh-ho.” Mrs. Hette put coffee in on top of her laugh. “My friend Elma made up some pickle relish at home. One day she was happy about her Wedding on Saturday, ten days later her fiance was courting a new girl and sending flowers out to Green Lawn Interment Park.”

One of the men said, “How’s business with you, Will?”

“Good even in bad years,” said the other. “People got to smoke.”

“Why, I got sick once just from drinking water,” said Mrs. Hette. “Did you ever peek in a school microscope? In one water drop there’s a million things. Every time you turn the kitchen faucet ten billion of them things drop out in your glass.”

Now they were done with the actual deaths. The time of measurement was at hand. All of the live people in town would be weighed and found wanting. Estimates would be given as to how long before Mr. Talmadge died, Nancy Gillette died, or Eleanor Swift passed on? Those three were all so much bone dry kindling, their mouths askew with palsy, their hands cool if they touched you. They held Mr. Talmadge up, like the weight-guessing men at the carnival. “I’d say he’ll live to be—ah—live to be—well... seventy, no! seventy-five years old!” Mrs. Hette closed her eyes disdainfully. “My dear, he’ll fall downstairs one day and it’ll be like when you fling a light bulb against a wall. That’s him; brittle as that! He won’t live another six months. Neither will Nancy Gillette, I saw her today, too!”

They rushed on to the anonymous dead. Finishing estimates as to the death time of their own living friends, they hurried on to people who were dying all across the land.

Planes crashed in the parlor. Trains toppled like timbers aflame. There were silent screams and tortures as the men sat idle-smoking their fresh-unwrapped cigars. Never ducking, the men sat flat-flanked in their chairs as cars splintered at their elbows and passengers were flung to hit the walls with soft, swift impact.

“Charred beyond recognition—”

“Crossing the tracks and she fell—Train ran over her—Picked her up in a basket—”