“Have you seen my children?” she said, or at least that’s the way I heard it. “They’re right here most of the time and now they’re not. No, they’re not. They’re usually playing right here in front of me and I’m so frightened now. I haven’t seen them all day. I’m so frightened, so frightened now.”
She was an old woman. She wore a decent gray wool dress with thin red lines in squares. Her face and hair and fingers were all finely kept, very clean. The house in whose doorway she stood wasn’t nearly as cheerless and dilapidated as some of these places. The paint was recent, the front step intact. But she had awfully thin arms and legs, where they showed, where the gray dress stopped. I guessed she felt the cold more than most. It was too warm out for wool otherwise. I asked how old her children were.
“They aren’t my children. Oh. I didn’t mean to give you that impression. I apologize if that’s what you thought.”
She spoke without smiling, her head planted on her neck and her entire thin body still. One hand was on the door jamb, the other on the inside knob of the open door. Only her eyes moved, constantly scanning the street, meeting mine on every fifth word, or possibly every sixth.
“They are little children who play here right in front and over on the other side of the street. All day long they play. I’m an old woman and I live alone and I’m so frightened. I’m so frightened all the time.”
I can’t say just when I began to get my idea. As I mentioned before, you get accustomed to this sort of thing. But you never get so accustomed you lose all sympathy, certainly not. In any event I spoke up. I concentrated on sounding formal, because of the strength in sounding formal. The woman needed a friendly touch but also she needed the boost of real muscle. I tried to catch those wandering eyes.
“Ma’am,” I said, and maybe it was with this one unlikely word, a word I never used, that my idea began to come—“Ma’am, it’s a beautiful day out today. Don’t tell me you’re so frightened you haven’t noticed that. Why it’s only, it’s only 8:45, give or take a minute, and already it’s a lovely day. I hope you’re not so frightened you haven’t noticed.”
She didn’t respond, but her eyes seemed to change their path. They crossed mine more often.
“On a morning like this, Ma’am, those children might be anywhere. They might be up the street buying candy, or visiting the zoo. Or they might not even be out yet. It could be they‘re all still indoors. Now, I don’t mean to sound presumptuous, Ma’am, but I can’t help wondering if you’ve got any good reason to be so frightened. Why, I wonder? Think of all the places those children might be on a morning like this. Is that so frightening?”
I paused and waited till her eyes came round to mine again. And by then there had arrived my idea, my crazy idea, something that bore down on me more and more wildly during these few moments of silence, so wildly at last that it couldn’t be denied. I deepened my voice.
“You know, actually, I’m not a stranger, Ma’am, not to you or to anyone else. No, I’m no stranger. You know who I am. I’ve come here from a far distant place, far distant, on a special mission. I’ve come just for a short while, and just especially for you, Ma‘am. To help you in your old age.”
Suddenly she gasped, cutting me off: “You’ve come, you, you’ve, you you.”
And then, though she still couldn’t stop her glancing across the street, her face changed shape and took on a terrific smile.
I thought, well. That was easy. Success came into my chest with a sensation that made me think of a well-kept pocket watch opening and showing its face.
“That’s right, it’s me, I’ve come. Just for now, and just for you. I can see there’s no need to tell you my name, and actually I prefer not to speak my name if it’s not absolutely necessary. But I’ve come a long way, just to help you and to tell you that your life isn’t so bleak and frightening as you think, living alone as you do. I want you to remember that. Goodbye now. Goodbye, but remember what I said. You won’t be seeing me after this.”
“Oh,” she was repeating happily, “oh, oh.”
I headed away and turned the first corner. Very easy, I thought.
I remained pleased for the rest of the day.
When I was sixteen, I escaped the required football program at my high school by convincing two teachers I had extra-sensory perception. An experiment was run with a deck of cards. I had stayed up the night before and marked the deck with a pin. Instead of football, I spent my fall afternoons (and most of my winter ones as well, since the teachers’ faith in me was strong) pretending to read minds, predicting the directions a man in another room would walk, and picking out the letters on flash cards held up behind a screen. My senior year they dropped the required football program. And at accounting school, of course, there was never any need to try something so strange. But now, after the conversation with the old woman, I felt as happy as I had when I saw those two teachers begin to shuffle my marked deck of cards. What others had to endure, I was exempt from.
Priss often showed up at my office. She came at lunch, or at 3:30 when she got off from the plant store, or even at both times. I realize this business with Priss isn’t in the main line of my story, but I feel compelled to talk about it anyway. Things didn’t work out between Priss and me. Not that the incident with the old woman had a direct bearing on our breakup, either. Priss’s reaction to that story was less than I’d hoped for, but she didn’t condemn me for what I’d done. There wasn’t a scene.
Priss…into the office she’d stride, all body, wearing her plant store outfit. It’s a small office to begin with, and it contains, besides my desk, the desks of two of my associates. Then how did Priss ever fit in? She told me, “People like you marry people like me.” Marry? Thank God I never married Priss. I gave it considerable thought. I did propose once.
It was during winter, a freezing day we’d spent out at a beach north of here. This was Priss’s idea; it was entirely too cold for the beach. We got behind an enormous rock, bigger than my office, big as a sailor’s chapel I visited once, south of here, and Priss and I built a fire. We had a meal beneath two blankets, one of which was electric, as it turned out. We made a great deal out of plugging it into the sand. We snuggled until it seemed we had between us not four arms but two. During the drive home I was quieter even than usual, giving as my excuse the Sunday-rush traffic. One sensation stayed with me throughout the ride: our warmth in contrast to the purple cold. It was as if a buffer zone of magic feeling had got fastened irremovably to my skin. I felt it even though I could see my hands on the steering wheel, ordinary hands with ordinary skin, badly dried and chapped by the day’s rough weather. When we got home I rubbed them with lotion but the impossible zone remained. Then late in the evening I got out an old bottle of Cointreau (the stuff’s too rich for me, under most circumstances) and proposed. Priss had been coming on so amorously before that, all hands and shiftings of position, even though it was night now, not morning. But after my question, no. She got up from the sofa and began moving around the room, barefoot, wondering about “the noises outside.” But these were only the usual. These were no more than the babies and dogs, the teenagers belligerently calling attention to themselves, the sirens veering loud and soft between the high yelp of brakes, the deeper uproar of public transportation, and the firecrackers that blasted no matter what the weather, and the shapeless blurt of harmonica and drums whenever the door opened on the dive down the street — the ordinary rumble, here or in any other city. I didn’t repeat my question.