Thirteen

Winter took the city by surprise. It arrived suddenly one November afternoon, following a spell of fine weather.

It had been an average day for Tattersall, with its spot of color here and there such as sometimes made his daily rounds mildly memorable. A jolly woman weighing at least three hundred pounds had once bought everything he had in his suitcase to distribute as favors for a party she was throwing. That morning, an old woman so gnarled with rheumatism she could hardly get to the door had listened to his sales spiel, then, holding a can doubtfully in her bony fingers, had hesitated a moment. “How do I know the air in here is fresh?” she said. “I’ll stake my professional reputation on it,” Tattersall said. She finally bought one, creaking off and returning with a bag from which she dug a fifty-cent piece. Pocketing the coin, Tatersall shook his head at the awfulness of life as he descended the stairs. Pity was important to him now. He had wanted to knock the old lady down as a means of eliciting it. A stray mutt had next followed him for several blocks, perhaps with a view to adopting him. As he often had with his own dog, Tattersall rambled reminiscently on to it as it traipsed at his heels, recalling the days of his greatness and the feats that had checkered them. “… so I says to de Pope, listen, wise ass. …” At length the dog left him, turning up a side street. Tattersall was reduced to talking to himself, a thing which he did not mind except that, in the role of listener, his attention often wandered. There were times when he didn’t hear a word he said.

The gray of the sky abruptly darkened, and then it began to snow. Thick wet flakes silently, dreamily descended upon boughs that had not quite yet shed the gold of their leaves. By evening the world was white. As he always did with the first snowfall, he remembered the poem of that name from everyone’s childhood. “The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night …”

Each of us has a single, special memory, cherished as our most beautiful, the key to our past; or if not that, at least the embodiment of all we yearn to unlock. Not the earliest recollection soiled with explanation by the psychologists, but the memory of some particular bliss heartbreaking to recall, safe from contradiction, which is perhaps the memory of purity itself. This is no doubt why snow is always evocative of childhood. Tattersall’s great sweet memory was not an event, it was this poem. He remembered having to recite it before the class, and of doing so, but what he treasured was not the recollection of success, but the verses themselves and what they communicated. The fluttering flakes seemed like an enormous shuttling loom from which the whole tapestry of childhood was rewoven: the hope and fear of school, the poetry of the hours, the secrecy of dreams, all suspended in some eternal playtime. The silence deep and white, the rails softened to swansdown, the sheds new-roofed with Carrara, from which came chanticleer’s muffled crow, all this was once again evoked by the magical product of skies that would seem incapable of shedding anything but soot.

After dinner he drew on his overshoes, bundled himself into a sweater, and went for a walk. He made the dog come along. He thought the invigorating air as well as the exercise would do him good. Indeed the dog did find it exhilarating at first, frisking about in the snow, but soon the excitement wore off, and he trotted reluctantly at Tattersall’s heels the rest of the hike. Tattersall was surprised to see how much more thickly the snow was falling than when he had come in out of it, and how much colder it was. After half a mile or so he began to think about the warm house himself, and he turned back, to find how biting the wind was now that he had it in his face instead of at his back. It stung his cheeks and eyes, and blew in sharp gusts around his feet and even up his trouser legs. He held a corner of his muffler to his mouth, and puffed along. Nearly four inches had fallen by now. It was turning into a blizzard. There was nobody else abroad. Most of the few cars out were foundering or stalled. He glanced enviously at house windows, their golden glow veiled in swirling white. He was glad to get home.

When he did, it was to find the front door locked. He had forgotten to take a key, or had assumed Raymond would let him in. There was no response, however, to the bell, or when he banged on the door. “He’s watching television,” Tattersall said to the dog. “Let’s go around the back way.”

That locked door was thumped with no better luck. He pounded it with both fists, calling the boy’s name. Nothing happened. He peered into the kitchen window. The house was fully lighted, but there was no sign of activity. He could hear nothing. Not that the television would be audible there, since the set was upstairs.

He went down the stairs into the yard. There was a light on in the room where the television set was, and Tattersall made some snowballs and threw them at the window. They brought no face to it. “Damn,” he said, and tramped back up the stairs to the porch again. The kitchen window was latched, and he was about to break it and climb in when he thought of something else. He thought of the dog door, and it gave him an inspiration.

“You go in and bark at him,” he said to the dog, who for some reason had not yet taken advantage of the access available to him, preferring to follow Tattersall on his mysterious activities. “You know—like Lassie. Woof, woof! Wrrroof! Upstairs. Tell him something is wrong, wroof, wroof! Then down again. Bring him here. Show them how smart you are. Get Raymond.” He supplemented these instructions with a vigorous illustrative pantomime. “Go!” he concluded, and started the dog through the door with a push.

Nothing happened after that either. Tattersall could hear its claws on the kitchen linoleum as it trotted toward its food pan. After snuffling at that for a few moments it went to its accustomed warm corner and flopped down to sleep. Angry, out there in the cold, Tattersall said, “God damn it all!” and, getting down on all fours himself, he unwound his bulky muffler and thrust his head through the aperture to have a look.

He had a clear view of the kitchen, the lower half at any rate, and could satisfy himself that things were precisely as he suspected. The animal was sprawled out in his cozy corner, already fast asleep.

“You’re a great help. Raymond! Raymond!”

Here Tattersall could resume his shouts to better advantage. His head at least was in the house. So he bellowed at the top of his voice. There was still no response. The house was silent. That meant Raymond wasn’t looking at the television. He was asleep. And he slept the sleep of the dead. Only the most prolonged and violent shaking could possibly awaken him. Shouts, never. Certainly not from this distance. All these thoughts ran through Tattersall’s mind while a far more chilling realization came over him. He couldn’t get his head out again.

The dog door was in a sense a kind of circular shutter. The triangular wedges converging, sliced-pie-wise, at the center were of a brown plastic, similar to artificial leather, their wide ends attachéd to the circumference of the aperture on hinges which permitted them to swing in or out with equal ease. But the whole was so constructed that it had to be pushed all the way before it could be reversed. Tattersall naturally could not complete the process. It stopped where his shoulders met the frame. His head could only thrust the door in halfway, where it locked in an inconclusive position around his neck.

He wished now that he had not removed his muffler, though it would probably have done him no good in the long run. Already the wedges, which were reenforced with steel ribs, were beginning to cut his neck, so that he had not only to remain still for fear of garroting himself, but even to stop shouting. Therefore his calls for help were infrequent. Little confidence was to be put in them in any case since they went unheard here and in the houses next door, and, certainly, in the streets. Once he dimly heard somebody putting a car in a garage, and he set up a last tumult, fading at last into silence.

That was nearly an hour later. The snow had been falling steadily, and the wind rising. Cold gusts were blowing up the stairs and even around the porch. He could sense the snow drifting behind him. By morning it would certainly have covered him over, wrapping him close in its woolen coat.

He was soon no longer cold, then actually rather warm, pleasantly numbed. A giddy feeling came over him, and he began to laugh, as he had the time he’d gotten high on marijuana. He imagined the spectacle he would offer those fortunate enough to be chosen by fate to come upon him. The sight would be unique in human annals, that much was sure. There would never have been anything quite like it. There never would be again.

He began to imagine that he heard voices. Was he growing delirious? The fear crossed his mind that help might come in time. Then he laughed again. Of course, he might have known—it was the Doppelgänger. Come one last time, come for a parting shot.

“Well, your end is in sight, Tattersall,” he said. “I think we can safely say that.”

“And so, thank God, is yours,” Tattersall answered with a gentle, grateful sigh, and remembering, as he did so, that death by freezing was not by any means the worst of fates.

He had only one regret. It was too bad Lucy Stiles had not meant any more to him than she did. She had never meant anything at all to him. Nothing, really, at all.