Summer Morning, Summer Night

“Tonight,” he said, “there’s a swell show at the Elite Theater. Harold Lloyd in WELCOME, DANGER. The show starts at eight o’clock, and afterward we’ll have a chocolate sundae at the Midnight Drug Store, open until eleven forty-five. I’ll go change clothes.”

She looked down at him and didn’t speak. Then she opened the door and went up the stairs.

“Miss Welkes!” he cried.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Run and put your shoes on!”

IT WAS seven thirty, the porch filling with people, when Douglas emerged, in his dark suit, with a blue tie, his hair wet with water, and his feet in the hot tight shoes.

“Why, Douglas!” the aunts and uncles and Grandma and Grandpa cried, “Aren’t you staying for the fireworks?”

“No.” And he looked at the fireworks laid out so beautifully crisp and smelling of powder, the pinwheels and sky bombs, and the Fire Balloons, three of them, folded like moths in their tissue wings, those balloons he loved most dearly of all, for they were like a summer night dream going up quietly, breathlessly on the still high air, away and away to far lands, glowing and breathing light as long as you could see them. Yes, the Fire Balloons, those especially would he miss, while seated in the Elite Theater tonight.

There was a whisper, the screen door stood wide, and there was Miss Welkes.

“Good evening, Mr. Spaulding,” she said to Douglas.

“Good evening, Miss Welkes,” he said.

She was dressed in a gray suit no one had seen ever before, neat and fresh, with her hair up under a summer straw hat, and standing there in the dim porch light she was like the carved goddess on the great marble library clock come to life.

“Shall we go, Mr. Spaulding?” and Douglas walked her down the steps.

“Have a good time!” said everyone.

“Douglas!” called Grandfather.

“Yes, sir?”

“Douglas,” said Grandfather, after a pause, holding his cigar in his hand, “I’m saving one of the Fire Balloons. I’ll be up when you come home. We’ll light her together and send her up. How’s that sound, eh?”

“Swell!” said Douglas.

“Good night, boy.” Grandpa waved him quietly on.

“Good night, sir.”

He took Miss Eleanora Welkes down the street, over the sidewalks of the summer evening, and they talked about Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Whittier and Mr. Poe all the way to the Elite Theater....

MISS BIDWELL

OLD MISS BIDWELL used to sit with a lemonade glass in her hand in her squeaking rocker on the porch of her house on Saint James Street every summer night from seven until nine. At nine, you could hear the front door tap shut, the brass key turn in the lock, the shades rustle down, and the lights click out.

Her routine varied in no detail. She lived alone with a house full of rococo pictures, a dusty library, a yellow-mouthed piano, and a music box which, when she ratcheted it up and set it going, prickled the air like the bubbles from lemon soda pop. Miss Bidwell had a nod for everyone walking by, and it was interesting that her house had no front steps leading up to its wooden porch. No front steps, and no back steps, for Miss Bidwell hadn’t left her house in forty years. In the year 1909, she had had the back and the front steps completely torn down and the porches railed in.

In the autumn—the closing-up, the nailing-in, the hiding-away time—she would have one last lemonade on her cooling, bleak porch; then she would carry her wicker chair inside, and no one would see her again until the next spring.

“There she goes,” said Mr. Widmer, the grocer, pointing with the red apple in his hand. “Take a good look at her.” He tapped the wall calendar. “Nine o’clock of an evening in the month of September, the day after Labor Day.”

Several customers squinted over at Miss Bidwell’s house. There was the old lady, looking around for a final time; then she went inside.

“Won’t see her again until May first,” said Mr. Widmer. “There’s a trap door in her kitchen wall. I unlock that trap door and shove the groceries in. There’s an envelope there, with money in it and a list of the things she wants. I never see her.”

“What does she do all winter?”

“Only the Lord knows. She’s had a phone for forty years and never used it.”

Miss Bidwell’s house was dark.

Mr. Widmer bit into his apple, enjoying its crisp succulence. “Forty years ago, she had the front steps taken away.”

“Why? Folks die?”

“They died before that.”

“Husband or children die?”

“Never had no husband nor children. She held hands with a young man who had all kinds of notions about travelling. They were going to be married. He used to sit and play the guitar and sing to her on that porch. One day he just went to the rail station and bought one ticket for Arizona, California, and China.”

“That’s a long time for a woman to carry a torch.”

They laughed quietly and solemnly, for it was a sad admission they had made.

“Suppose she’ll ever come out?”

“When you’re seventy? All I do every year is wait for the first of May. If she don’t come out on the porch that day and set up her chair, I’ll know for sure she’s dead. Then I’ll phone the police.

“Goodnight,” said everyone, and left Mr. Widmer alone in the gray light of his grocery shop.

Mr. Widmer put on his coat and listened to the whining of the wind grow stronger. Yes, every year. And every year at this time he’d watched the old woman become more of an old woman. She was as remote as one of those barometers where the woman comes out for fair weather, the man appears for bad. But what a broken instrument, with only the woman coming out and coming out alone, and never a man at all, for bad or for better. How many thousands of July and August nights had he seen her there, beyond her moat of green grass, which was as impassable as a crocodile stream? Forty years of small-town nights. How much might they weigh if put to the scale? A feather to himself, but how much to her?

Mr. Widmer was putting on his hat when he saw the man.

The man came along the street, on the other side; an old man, dim in the light of the single corner street lamp. He was looking at all the house numbers, and when he came to the corner house, Number 11, he stopped and looked at the lightless windows.

“It couldn’t be,” said Mr. Widmer. He turned out the light and stood in the warm grocery smell of his store, watching the old man through the plate glass. “Not after this much time.” He shook his head. It was much more than ridiculous, for hadn’t he felt his heart quicken at least once a day, every day, for four decades whenever he saw a man pass or pause by Miss Bidwell’s? Every man in the history of the town who had so much as tied a shoelace in front of her locked house had been a source of wonder to Mr. Widmer.

“Are you the young man who ran off and left our Miss Bidwell?” he cried aloud, to himself.

Once, thirty years ago, white apron flapping, he had run across the brick street to confront a young man. “Well, so you came back!”

“What?” the young man said.

“Aren’t you Mr. Robert Farr, the one who brought her red carnations and played the guitar, and sang?”