“Yes, Charles?”
“Can I go to school now?” asked Charles.
“Tomorrow will be time enough. You sound positively eager.”
“I am. I like school. All the kids. I want to play with them and wrestle with them, and spit on them and play with the girls’ pigtails and shake the teacher’s hand, and rub my hands on all the cloaks in the cloakroom, and I want to grow up and travel and shake hands with people all over the world, and be married and have lots of children, and go to libraries and handle books and—all of that I want to!” said the boy, looking off into the September morning. “What’s the name you called me?”
“What?” The doctor puzzled. “I called you nothing but Charles.”
“It’s better than no name at all, I guess.” The boy shrugged.
“I’m glad you want to go back to school,” said the doctor.
“I really anticipate it,” smiled the boy. “Thank you for your help, Doctor. Shake hands.”
“Glad to.”
They shook hands gravely, and the clear wind blew through the open window. They shook hands for almost a minute, the boy smiling up at the old man and thanking him.
Then, laughing, the boy raced the doctor downstairs and out to his car. His mother and father followed for the happy farewell.
“Fit as a fiddle!” said the doctor. “Incredible!”
“And strong,” said the father. “He got out of his straps himself during the night. Didn’t you, Charles?”
“Did I?” said the boy.
“You did! How?”
“Oh,” the boy said, “that was a long time ago.”
“A long time ago!”
They all laughed, and while they were laughing, the quiet boy moved his bare foot on the sidewalk and merely touched, brushed against a number of red ants that was scurrying about on the sidewalk. Secretly, his eyes shining, while his parents chatted with the old man, he saw the ants hesitate, quiver, and lie still on the cement. He sensed they were cold now.
“Good-by!”
The doctor drove away, waving.
The boy walked ahead of his parents. As he walked he looked away toward the town and began to hum “School Days” under his breath.
“It’s good to have him well again,” said the father.
“Listen to him. He’s so looking forward to school!”
The boy turned quietly. He gave each of his parents a crushing hug. He kissed them both several times.
Then without a word he bounded up the steps into the house.
In the parlor, before the others entered, he quickly opened the bird cage, thrust his hand in, and petted the yellow canary, once.
Then he shut the cage door, stood back, and waited.
The Marriage Mender
In the sun the headboard was like a fountain, tossing up plumes of clear light. It was carved with lions and gargoyles and bearded goats. It was an awe-inspiring object even at midnight, as Antonio sat on the bed and unlaced his shoes and put his large calloused hand out to touch its shimmering harp. Then he rolled over into this fabulous machine for dreaming, and he lay breathing heavily, his eyes beginning to close.
“Every night,” his wife’s voice said, “we sleep in the mouth of a calliope.”
Her complaint shocked him. He lay a long while before daring to reach up his hard-tipped fingers to stroke the cold metal of the intricate headboard, the threads of this lyre that had sung many wild and beautiful songs down the years.
“This is no calliope,” he said.
“It cries like one,” Maria said. “A billion people on this world tonight have beds. Why, I ask the saints, not us?”
“This,” said Antonio gently, “is a bed.” He plucked a little tune on the imitation brass harp behind his head. To his ears it was “Santa Lucia.”
“This bed has humps like a herd of camels was under it.”
“Now, Mama,” Antonio said. He called her Mama when she was mad, though they had no children. “You were never this way,” he went on, “until five months ago when Mrs. Brancozzi downstairs bought her new bed.”
Maria said wistfully, “Mrs. Brancozzi’s bed. It’s like snow. It’s all flat and white and smooth.”
“I don’t want any damn snow, all flat and white and smooth! These springs—feel them!” he cried angrily. “They know me. They recognize that this hour of night I lie thus, at two o’clock, so! Three o’clock this way, four o’clock that. We are like a tumbling act, we’ve worked together for years and know all the holds and falls.”
Maria sighed, and said, “Sometimes I dream we’re in the taffy machine at Bartole’s candy store.”
“This bed,” he announced to the darkness, “served our family before Garibaldi! From this wellspring alone came precincts of honest voters, a squad of clean-saluting Army men, two confectioners, a barber, four second leads for Il Trovatore and Rigoletto, and two geniuses so complex they never could decide what to do in their lifetime! Not to forget enough beautiful women to provide ballrooms with their finest decoration. A cornucopia of plenty, this bed! A veritable harvesting machine!”
“We have been married two years,” she said with dreadful control over her voice. “Where are our second leads for Rigoletto, our geniuses, our ballroom decorations?”
“Patience, Mama.”
“Don’t call me Mama! While this bed is busy favoring you all night, never once has it done for me. Not even so much as a baby girl!”
He sat up. “You’ve let these women in this tenement ruin you with their dollar-down, dollar-a-week talk. Has Mrs. Brancozzi children? Her and her new bed that she’s had for five months?”
“No! But soon! Mrs. Brancozzi says … and her bed, so beautiful.”
He slammed himself down and yanked the covers over him. The bed screamed like all the Furies rushing through the night sky, fading away toward the dawn.
The moon changed the shape of the window pattern on the floor. Antonio awoke. Maria was not beside him.
He got up and went to peer through the half-open door of the bathroom. His wife stood at the mirror looking at her tired face.
“I don’t feel well,” she said.
“We argued.” He put out his hand to pat her. “I’m sorry. We’ll think it over. About the bed, I mean. We’ll see how the money goes. And if you’re not well tomorrow, see the doctor, eh? Now, come back to bed.”
At noon the next day, Antonio walked from the lumberyard to a window where stood fine new beds with their covers invitingly turned back.
“I,” he whispered to himself, “am a beast.”
He checked his watch. Maria, at this time, would be going to the doctor’s. She had been like cold milk this morning; he had told her to go. He walked on to the candy-store window and watched the taffy machine folding and threading and pulling. Does taffy scream? he wondered. Perhaps, but so high we cannot hear it. He laughed. Then, in the stretched taffy, he saw Maria. Frowning, he turned and walked back to the furniture store. No. Yes. No. Yes! He pressed his nose to the icy window. Bed, he thought, you in there, new bed, do you know me? Will you be kind to my back, nights?”
He took out his wallet slowly, and peered at the money. He sighed, gazed for a long time at that flat marbletop, that unfamiliar enemy, that new bed. Then, shoulders sagging, he walked into the store, his money held loosely in his hand.
“Maria!” He ran up the steps two at a time. It was nine o’clock at night and he had managed to beg off in the middle of his overtime at the lumberyard to rush home. He rushed through the open doorway, smiling.
The apartment was empty.
“Ah,” he said disappointedly. He laid the receipt for the new bed on top of the bureau where Maria might see it when she entered. On those few evenings when he worked late she visited with any one of several neighbors downstairs.