“Never mind,” she said. “He is gone already.”
She lifted her eyes to the moonlit pane. Between her cold hands, the warm hand stirred. She was silent. Having come to terms with an intimate and terrible world for two, she had nothing left to say.
ONE ENCHANTED EVENING
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1965.
It was almost five o’clock when Ella came out of the theater. Because it was the kind of evening that it was, and because there was no hurry, and because Luke had the car, as usual, she decided to walk the sixteen blocks home. It was such a perfectly natural decision, made with hardly a second thought, that she didn’t for an instant suspect its momentous character or anticipate its consequences. To be exact, it was not really the decision to walk home that could be blamed, if any blame could be attached, for what later happened. It was the decision, impetuous and extravagant, to buy the little music box.
The music box was in the window of a sad and dusty shop of odds and ends, that was tucked tightly between two domineering buildings on the last block of the business district, just before the beginning of homes and grass and trees. She stopped in front of the window and stared at the music box. She had the strangest and most intense desire to possess it. It was a cheap little box, really, but it seemed to have, somehow, a quality of endearing pathos that may have been an effect of the evening, or her response to the evening’s spell. The lid was open and a tiny ballerina had risen from within, and now stood poised on the toes of one foot, on the point of a slender pin. The box was unwound, of course, but it was apparent that it would begin to play, when wound up, just as soon as the lid was opened, and the tiny ballerina would begin to pirouette in time with the tune.
What tune would the box play? The moment she began to wonder, as if the question had been whispered into her ear, Ella understood that it was imperative to know, that the whole evening would be spoiled if she did not. After the briefest hesitation, she entered the shop under a tinkling bell and stood near the window. An elderly man, almost elfin in his diminutive frailty, emerged from the shadows at the rear. His skin seemed translucent, glowing with an inner light, and his hands made a silken sound when he rubbed them together.
“Good evening,” he said. “May I help you?”
“I was attracted by the little music box in the window,” Ella replied.
“Yes.” The man reached into the window and lifted the box tenderly in his thin hands. “A charming thing, isn’t it? It’s designed to hold costume jewelry. The ballerina dances to the music.”
He held the box out, tendering it to her, and she, in the act of reaching for it, held her hands suspended, not touching it, fixed by the sudden fear that it would, if touched, disintegrate into smoke or crumble into dust. It was absurd, of course, another strange effect of the evening, or the promise of the evening, and she felt a spasm of laughter stirring silently in her throat, which she quelled.
“What music does it play?” she asked.
“You shall hear for yourself.” He closed the lid slowly, the tiny ballerina folding back rigidly below it to lie captive in the darkness. A key on the back of the box, turning between the thumb and index finger of the elfin man, made a small, rachet-like sound. “Listen.”
The lid was raised, the ballerina ascended from her dark captivity, and all at once in the shadowed shop, in a rare instance of perfect harmony with the kind of evening it had begun to be, Ella was listening to “Some Enchanted Evening.” The music was made, it seemed, by tiny bells, so fragile and pure and entirely right that she unconsciously clasped her hands together in a gesture of delight and sweet pain. Where laughter had stirred before, a sob stirred now, and she knew certainly, although she could not afford it and had not intended it, that she would buy the music box and take it home with her.
“How much is it?” she asked.
“The price is ten-fifty,” the man said. “For you, because you find it charming, ten dollars even.”
The price itself was a kind of determinant, everything working out perfectly for the purchase, for she had in her purse, besides a few coins, one ten-dollar bill. It was the last of her household money, all there would be until the end of the week, and she dug it out of the purse quickly, refusing with deliberate perversity to think of die skimpy meals and rationed cigarettes that its spending entailed.
“You needn’t wrap it,” she said. “I’ll carry it as it is.”
The bill and the box exchanged hands, and she left the shop and continued on her way home. She should, she supposed, feel guilty for her extravagance, but the extraordinary perversity that had supported the purchase of the box was still working to support her quiet happiness. It was, altogether, the most remarkable evening. Even the light was like a soft blush, as if it had filtered, somewhere up and beyond vision, through stained glass. In the trees along the street she walked, the cicadas were beginning to rouse and sing. Walking, she opened the lid of the music box and listened, head inclined, to the tiny tinkling sounds. Out in the open between the houses, the sounds were almost lost, and she had to listen intently in order to hear them, carrying in her hands her personal secret serenade.
When she reached home, it was time to begin hurrying a little. Luke would be coming soon, wanting his dinner, and as the years passed, depriving Luke of more and more of his pride, the more adamant he became in his insistence upon minor
