“Who’s nice?” Grace said.
“I mean the people around me, the other roomers.”
“You get to know them?” She leaned forward with an interest that seemed quite false.
“Well, you know — they come and go, I guess. But there’s two or three who’ve been there as long as I have. We say hello, we sit in the foyer down there and talk sometimes.” This was a lie.
“You should get to know your neighbors,” Grace said. She was about to wipe her hands on her apron, and then, apparently just realizing that she was wearing it, she pushed her chair back, stood up, and reached around behind her back to untie it, clawing upward at the bow behind her neck with some small alarm. On the front of her apron was the slogan When It’s Smokin’ It’s Cookin’ and When It’s Black It’s Done.
Ray Sands dabbed at his lips with his napkin and then said, “Grace. Here. Here.” He stood up and loosened the bow for her. They both sat back down. Grace was still wearing her apron, and now she wiped her hands across the breast of it.
English said, “This is—wonderful stuff, Grace. Really. I didn’t expect to get a home-cooked meal any time soon.”
“Thank you very, very much,” she said.
“We knew you’d been on your own all month, so we thought we’d better have you over,” Sands told him. “I realize your schedule doesn’t give you much chance to get acquainted around town.”
“Well, I just have to thank you,” English said, suddenly actually feeling grateful. “It’s a really nice gesture.”
“Doesn’t Polly — what’s her name, now?”
“Polly — I can’t remember her last name,” English said. Polly was one of the receptionists at WPRD.
“Right, yes. Doesn’t she live in the same rooming house?”
“I’ve never seen her around there.”
“Maybe it’s another one,” Sands decided. He seemed unaware that his wife had stopped eating anything and was now staring at English with a kind of sinister, amused recognition — one thief to another.
“A nice lady,” Grace said. “I like to know her.”
“She’s really a very nice person,” Ray Sands agreed.
“Right,” English said. “I’m sure she’s a very nice person.”
“I mean take the time.” Grace was still looking at him with a smoky knowledge in her eyes. “I mean really know her,” she said. “Really.”
“Well,” Ray Sands said. “And isn’t there some dessert?”
This question pulled the rug right out from under her. “Dessert?” she said.
“I believe you’ve got some dessert for us?”
“Dessert.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I do,” she said. She seemed to be travelling through a long tunnel to reach this dinner conversation. “And I got something else!” She stood up and took off her apron without any trouble and went, taking the tiny steps of a bulky old woman, through the living room and out through the sliding doors. Her dress was gay and printed with flowers, like the upholstery she passed. English saw that she wore knee stockings rolled down to her ankles and huge black shoes that tied with laces. He heard her going up the stairs: clump, clump; clump, clump, getting both feet firmly on each stair step before trying the next one.
Outdoors, the sunlight was leaving the world. Ray Sands walked through the living room and dining room, turning on the lamps.
Now English had no more polite remarks to deliver. He watched the dregs of dinner grow cold while Sands went into the kitchen and came out with some ice cream in three tapered sundae dishes, and three long spoons, keeping pretty quiet himself.
By the clumping of Grace’s big black shoes, she was just overhead; now she was coming down the stairs again, and now she was back in the living room, carrying a green gift-wrapped package just about the right size — English was trying to guess — for a truly massive cigar, and in her other hand a color photograph in a gold frame. Grace set the picture on the table, right in front of a chair, as if its subject were joining them for dessert: a young man with a fat face, a mustache, and clear blue eyes. He wore a hunter’s red cap.
She put the gift before her husband.
“How wonderful!” Sands said. “And I’ve got something for you, Grace.”
Hidden behind the couch he had a fair-sized package wrapped in alabaster gift paper with shiny red stripes on it and a green bow tied by a professional. He set it before her and they both opened these gifts with a thunderstorm of paper and appropriate small cries of thanks. Grace’s was an espresso coffeepot. Mr. Sands got an engine for an electric train.
Now English was afraid he’d overlooked some custom of exchange. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring any presents for you guys. In Kansas we don’t give presents for New Year’s, not that I know of.”
“It’s not a Massachusetts custom, either. But it happens to be our forty-second anniversary.”
“Our son,” Grace said, pointing at the picture sitting across the table from English.
“We give thanks to God,” Sands said, “by giving gifts to each other.”
English couldn’t believe his ears.
“We can’t give anything to God,” Grace explained, “so we give gifts to each other.”
“That’s — really great,” he told them both, not sure to what the hell he himself was referring.
“Bud got a personal friendship with Bishop Andrew.” It seemed she was talking to the photograph. “The Bishop!”
“We’re not going to help you with the dishes,” Sands let her know. “I’m going to show Lenny my trains.”
Grace said, “He gonna show you the trains.”
“Oh, good. Good,” English said.
“We’ll be back down in a minute.”
“Oh,” Grace said, “good.”
Sands didn’t give him a tour of the upstairs, which English didn’t want to see anyway. Instead, he took English directly to a tiny room filled with his electric train set and switched on a hooded lamp hanging, somewhat like an oppressive sun, over a landscape set on plywood and held up by sawhorses, with a little margin of space to walk around it in. The room smelled like wood.
As Sands put his new engine on the track and sent it whirling around the circuit, a figure eight with an S in the middle of each circle, English got the notion that WPRD was really just an extension of his employer’s zeal for such contraptions. Sands didn’t treat his train set like a toy. He was calm and scientific, making sure everything worked, track switches and so forth, before he hooked a few other cars to the engine.
“I’ve had this setup for twenty-five years,” Sands said.
Now Sands let him turn the dial up and down on the transformer, making the train go fast and slow.
“We’ve been in this house, I guess, oh, seven years,” Sands estimated for him.
Rather than feeling the mild interest or mild boredom he usually experienced when faced with other people’s stupid passions, English felt his heart rising in his throat. Now that they were alone, he wanted to ask Sands what he thought they were doing, spying on innocent citizens.
The only light in the room shone down on the train. The train hissed and clicked over the track past minuscule barnyards and brief main streets — church, post office, general store — bounded at either end by nothing. It went over a bridge where it was summer and through a blue-and-white mountain where it was winter. English found that if he kept his vision narrowed to clock nothing but this journey alongside little cows and tiny sheep and miniature frozen townspeople and farmers, it was almost as much fun as a ride on an actual train. The disappointing part was coming around again to find the figures always in the middle of the same drama, over and over. On the other hand, he saw how that might sometimes be a comfort to a person’s mind.