He remembered the raven, clacking his beak and saying, "I'm stupid. I don't know how to help anybody. I was lost too."
I believe myself to be good, he thought, and so I can afford to titillate myself by considering evil, like a child frightening himself with horror stories. I am not a bad man. But I am not a wise one, either, nor understanding. And yet, if I lose this rumpled and comfortable skin that I wear, how will I ever find anything to replace it? I wish I were younger and could grow skin easily.
Then Mrs. Klapper called, "Hey, Rebeck!" and he scrambled hastily up from the cellar of his mind, jumped to his feet, and started down the path to meet the woman, who waved as she came toward him. He felt his loose shirt flapping around his waist, and he stuffed it into his trousers as he walked. He buttoned it all the way up to the top and then opened the collar button.
Mrs. Klapper was wearing a blue dress that he had liked on her before, and an irrational crescent moon of a hat that she loved and defended violently. He had become fond of it himself, but that was one of the things he refused to admit to her. Now he prowled around her, hands clasped behind his back and head thrust forward, staring at the hat. She twisted her neck to follow him.
"All right, already," she said. She put one hand up to her head as if to protect the hat from any onslaught he might be contemplating. "I'm wearing it, I'm wearing it. You want I should wear a helmet like Doctor Livingstone? Leave the hat alone, Rebeck."
"It fascinates me," Mr. Rebeck said. He stood with one hand in a hip pocket and the other scratching the back of his head. "I can't take my eyes off it. Do you pin it on?"
"No, I had this jar of library paste, it seemed a shame to waste it. Rebeck, leave me the hat. The hat never hurt you." She was breathing hard and fanning herself ineffectually with her hand. "Hoo, it's hot. Ninety degrees, it says on the radio. Let's go somewhere we could sit down."
"All right," he said. He noticed that she was carrying a light raincoat over her arm. This did not surprise him too much, even in the hot weather. He knew that Mrs. Klapper regarded the weather as about as dependable as bus schedules. Had she lived during an earlier time, she would have propitiated a weather god possessed of a vindictive intelligence and a squad of little helpers that rushed to inform him whenever Mrs. Klapper decided to go somewhere.
As they walked back toward the mausoleum, Mr. Rebeck said, "I thought you weren't coming." He said it as casually as he could, not being by nature a casual man.
"The subway got tied up in a knot," Mrs. Klapper said very quickly. "There was a train in front of us and a train behind us and we were in the middle and nobody was moving and there was a big tsimmis with the whistle and the buzzing and the fans didn't work right in the middle. Half an hour we lost, maybe more. So excuse my being late, please."
"I waited all afternoon," Mr. Rebeck said. It was a straight statement of fact, but Mrs. Klapper took it as a mild reproach and an expression of self-pity.
"It's good for you to worry a little. That way you never get fat." She walked as if all roads were sidewalks and every one of them ran uphill. "Anyway, I hurried. Look how I'm panting, like a dog. I run any faster, I'll have a stroke. Then you'll be happy?"
"I'll dance in the streets," Mr. Rebeck said. They had reached the mausoleum, and Mrs. Klapper brushed off the top step as she always did and sat down with a large sigh of contentment. She took off one shoe and began to massage her toes, occasionally wriggling them to see if they were responding to treatment.
"Completely numb," she said, looking up at Mr. Rebeck. "My toes got no more feeling than a salted herring. Also I think I busted an arch. Call the ambulance, Rebeck. Get a stretcher, carry me out of here, what are you standing around for?" She gripped her tortured toes in one hand and crackled them like peanut shells.
Mr. Rebeck stood awkwardly in the presence of the unpretentious femininity involved even in the massaging of toes. Mrs. Klapper's foot, he noticed, was small and clean, marred only by the calluses on the ball and heel that a foot develops if its owner is in the habit of roaming around the house barefooted. An attractive foot, judged simply as a foot. He felt better when she slipped her shoe back on. "Would you like some water?" he asked. Mrs. Klapper nodded eagerly. "You got some? Bring it on." She frowned then. "Wait a minute. You got to go all the way back to the gate to get it, forget the whole thing. That thirsty I'm not. Forget it."
Mr. Rebeck smiled and patted her shoulder. "Fear nothing," he said. "I'll be back in a minute."
He left her, ran up the steps of the mausoleum, and emerged a moment later with a little plastic cup. Then he went around the building and walked twenty yards to where a rusty water faucet was set into the lawn near a bank of flowers. He filled the cup there and walked back to the mausoleum, where he presented the cup to Mrs. Klapper with a certain flourish. "I forgot your bouquet," he announced, "but you can take this home with you and raise your own."
Mrs. Klapper wasted no time in badinage. She emptied the cup in three uninhibited gulps, tilted it again to get the last few drops, and said, "Thank you. I didn't know how thirsty I was." Then her face clouded and she looked guiltily at the empty cup.
"Vey, Rebeck, I'm such a pig," she mourned. "I was so thirsty I didn't leave you any. Such a pig, Klapper."
"It's all right," Mr. Rebeck said. He sat down beside her. "I didn't want any."
"I tell you what," Mrs. Klapper said. "Tell me where's the water fountain and I'll get you some. Where is it, out back?" She started to get up.
"Don't bother," Mr. Rebeck told her. "Really, I'm not thirsty."
"In weather like this you're not thirsty? Don't be so noble, you'll live longer. I was so thirsty my mouth felt like a double boiler. Don't tell me you're not thirsty, just tell me where's the water fountain."
"Look," Mr. Rebeck said, unconsciously adopting something of her tone of voice, as he always did if she was with him for any length of time. "I live here. The faucet is out back. I can get a drink whenever I want one, whenever I'm thirsty. I was thirsty a few minutes before you came, so I went and got a drink. Now I'm not thirsty. Sit down and stop running back and forth."
"So who was running?" Mrs. Klapper asked, but she sat down again. She sighed. "Rebeck, you're a hard man to do a favor for. You're always one favor ahead. This is no way to keep your friends."
Mr. Rebeck grinned. He felt very relaxed and unworried. "Fortunately—" he began, but Mrs. Klapper cut him off with a sudden yelp of remembrance. "Dope! Idiot! I knew I brought you something. What a dope! Here, for you, a big gift, compliments of the Salvation Army."
Before he could speak, she had dropped her raincoat across his lap. "Here. You catch double pneumonia now, don't come blaming me. I did my best."
Mr. Rebeck blinked down at the coat on his knees. He touched the smooth gray fabric. "This is for me?"
"No, for President Eisenhower. Oh, is that a brain? Sure, for you. I'd bring it all the way out here for me? It's a raincoat, so you shouldn't get wet someday, catch a cold." She laughed, reaching over to turn down the collar of the coat.
"It's a very nice coat," Mr. Rebeck said. He held it up off his lap to look at it. "Only I don't know—"