For two hours they sat in a booth and cared for the child, fed him Campbell’s chicken-and-rice soup and spoke to him. He was not hurt but he was round-eyed and bemused and had nothing to say. It became a matter of figuring out what to do with him. The phone was dead and there was no policeman or anyone at all except the counterman, who brought a candle and joined them. The wind shrieked and the streetcar swayed and thrummed as if its old motors had started up. A window broke. They helped the counterman board it up with Coca-Cola crates. Midge and the counterman, he noticed, were very happy. The hurricane blew away the sad, noxious particles which befoul the sorrowful old Eastern sky and Midge no longer felt obliged to keep her face stiff. They were able to talk. It was best of all when the hurricane’s eye came with its so-called ominous stillness. It was not ominous. Everything was yellow and still and charged up with value. The table was worth $200. The unexpected euphoria went to the counterman’s head and he bored them with long stories about his experiences as a bus boy in a camp for adults (the Southerner had never heard of such a thing) somewhere in the Catskills.
Even the problem of the lost child turned into a pleasure instead of a chore, so purgative was the action of the hurricane. “Where in the world do you come from?” Midge asked him. The child did not answer and the counterman did not know him. At last Midge turned up a clue. “What a curious-looking ring,” she said, taking the child’s hand.
“That’s not a ring, that’s a chickenband,” said the counterman.
“Is there a chicken farm near here?” the engineer asked him.
There was, and it was the right place. When they delivered the babe an hour later, wonder of wonders, he had not even been missed. Ten children were underfoot and Dad and Mom were still out in the chickenhouses, and sister, a twelve-year-old who was also round-eyed and silent, received the prodigal as if it were nothing out of the way. This was the best of all, of course, returning the child before it was missed, him not merely delivered from danger but the danger itself cancelled, like Mr. Magoo going his way through the perilous world, stepping off the Empire State building onto a girder and never seeing the abyss.
Breakfast in the diner and back to the turnpike and on their way again. Down and out of the storm and into the pearly light of morning, another beautiful day and augh there it was again: the Bronx all solid and sullen from being the same today as yesterday, full of itself with lumpish Yankee fullness, the bricks coinciding with themselves and braced against all comers. Gravity increased.
Down into the booming violet air of Park Avenue they crept, under the selfsame canopy and into the selfsame lobby and over the sleeping Irishman and into the elevator where they strove against each other like wrestlers, each refusing to yield an inch.
One day the next week, a rainy Thursday afternoon, he stood in a large room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Somewhere in the heights a workman was rattling the chain of a skylight. Happy people were worse off in their happiness in museums than anywhere else, he had noticed sometime ago. In here the air was thick as mustard gas with ravenous particles which were stealing the substance from painting and viewer alike. Though the light was technically good, illuminating the paintings in an unexceptionable manner, it nevertheless gave the effect of descending in a dismal twilight from a vast upper region which roared like a conch shell. Here in the roaring twilight the engineer stationed himself and watched people watch the paintings. Sometime ago he had discovered that it is impossible to look at a painting simply so: man-looking-at-a-painting, voilà!—no, it is necessary to play a trick such as watching a man who is watching, standing on his shoulders, so to speak. There are several ways of getting around the ravenous particles.
Today the paintings were there, yes, in the usual way of being there but worse off than ever. It was all but impossible to see them, even when one used all the tricks. The particles were turning the air blue with their singing and ravening. Let everything be done properly: let one stand at the correct distance from a Velázquez, let the Velázquez be correctly lighted, set the painting and viewer down in a warm dry museum. Now here comes a citizen who has the good fortune to be able to enjoy a cultural facility. There is the painting which has been bought at great expense and exhibited in the museum so that millions can see it. What is wrong with that? Something, said the engineer, shivering and sweating behind a pillar. For the paintings were encrusted with a public secretion. The harder one looked, the more invisible the paintings became. Once again the force of gravity increased so that it was all he could do to keep from sinking to all fours.
Yet the young man, who was scientifically minded, held himself sufficiently detached to observe the behavior of other visitors. From his vantage point behind the pillar he noticed that the people who came in were both happy and afflicted. They were afflicted in their happiness. They were serene, but their serenity was a perilous thing to see. In they came, smiling, and out they went, their eyes glazed over. The paintings smoked and shriveled in their frames.
Here came a whole family weaving along, sunk in their happiness, man, woman, teen daughter and son, and child, all handsome as could be. But they were bogging down. When all at once: KeeeeeeeeeeeeeeRASH, first a rusty clank from above like a castle drawbridge, then a cataclysm (it got on the front page of The Times the next morning). As the dust cleared, he made out that it was not so serious, though serious enough. The skylight had fallen down at his feet, frame, glass, wheel, chain, worker, and all. For there he was, the worker, laid out and powdered head to toelike a baker. Some seconds passed before the engineer realized that it was glass that turned him white, glass powdered to sugar. It covered the family too. They stood for an age gazing at each other, turned into pillars of salt; then, when they saw that no one was hurt, they fell into one another’s arms, weeping and laughing. Suddenly everyone remembered the worker. They knelt beside him and bore him up like the mourners of Count Orgaz.The workman, an Italian youth with sloe-black eyes and black mustache who was as slight as Charlie Chaplin in his coveralls, opened his eyes and began stretching up his eyebrows as if he were trying to stay awake. Others came running up. The workman was not bleeding but he could not get his breath. As they held him and he gazed up at them, it was as if he were telling them that he could not remember how to breathe. Then he pulled himself up on the engineer’s arm and air came sucking into his throat, the throat just grudgingly permitting, it.