SHE WOKE UP SUDDENLY, with the feeling that she had overslept an exam. Someone was throwing stones at her window. She peered at the luminous dials of the clock; the hands said four. If I can get outside without turning on the lights, she thought, I won’t wake anybody up.
But there was her mother, standing at the foot of the stairs.
“It’s a mighty funny time to be going out with him,” she observed. “Did you sleep in those clothes?”
“I just lay down in them. I didn’t want to miss him.”
“Sit down and eat. I got oatmeal made and everything. You want to ask Theo to come in?”
She couldn’t get up earlier than her mother, try as she might. There was always that oatmeal waiting for you, no matter how quiet you were.
“I don’t have time. He’ll be late.”
Her mother made a motion as if to throw it all in the sink, and Erica repented.
“Save it for me,” she said. “Save it till we get back.”
Theo was in the truck, drumming his fingers on the side-view mirror, and she squeezed in beside him. The back, empty now—its double doors clearly visible—resembled a sepulcher.
“Did you wake your mother?”
“Nope. She’s still in bed.”
“She didn’t think it was funny? Like we were eloping?”
“No. She knows I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
It sounded hollow, it hung in the air like a defeat. She should have been capable of it. As they drove out of the city and turned onto the superhighway, Theo stretched in his seat and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the wheel.
“Well, this is another job I’m going to lose. I’ve been late the last three times. It takes an hour to get to Detroit, another hour to bring the bagels back, and there’s a line of people outside Sol’s store by eight.”
“You overslept.”
“Clock didn’t go off. The cat slept on the plunger.”
They rumbled along quietly; she was falling asleep.
“Hey, wake up! Did I tell you about my new job?”
“Another job?”
“Yeah. At the undertaker’s. There’s a German family in town, wants me to make a death mask of the uncle.”
“Aren’t you studying for your exams at all?”
He gave a grand wave of his hand.
“I got all my sculpture projects in. All I have is French.”
She leaned her head against the window, trying to keep awake. For days she had imagined the two of them, rolling softly, secretly, into the morning, and here she was, hardly able to realize it. The broad backs of the Ford factories glittered past, the river and the island flashed at them once and disappeared. When she opened her eyes, the heat of the city laid its weight on her, and the bakers were already running back and forth, red-faced, stuffing the last bags of bagels into the back of the truck.
“You goon! Some company you were!” laughed Theo.
But it was the trip home she loved best anyway, she decided, when the bagels filled the whole cab with a smell of onions and fresh dough. Theo reached behind and feeling the top of the bags, helped himself to a bagel, broke it, and handed her half. In silence they watched the sky lighten and the trees grow friendly again as the dark lumps of leaves opened to lacy green. The truck turned into her street; no one was stirring.
“I’ll pick you up later if you want to come with me.”
“Where?”
“To the undertaker’s.”
She lingered outside, one foot propped in the open door.
“If you want me to, I will. My Aunt Minnie’s supposed to come today.”
“She’s still working to get you baptized, huh?”
“No.”
“You know, if you let her do that to you, we’re through.”
“I know,” said Erica.
“Well, what for, then?”
She had half a mind not to tell him, but she was no good at keeping secrets.
“She’s taking us to Hannah’s. Now can’t you guess?”
“Say it.”
“A wedding dress. Hannah’s making it.”
“Jesus!” He shook his head and smiled broadly. “You really mean it, don’t you?”
She nodded seriously.
“I’ll wear my Croix de guerre that I won in France.”
“You’ve never been to France,” said Erica.
Theo pulled a look of broad astonishment.
“Would I lie to you?”
“Mother says you’ve never been there or won any cross.”
“My blue heron,” said Theo, reaching over to stroke the hair which swung over her face when she put her head down. “If I can just get you out of here before you start listening to your mother.”
Her mother was waiting in the doorway, holding her pink wrapper closed, watching them with that wistful smile she got sometimes.
“I kept it warm for you.”
There were moments when Erica wanted to kiss her mother, like just then, but she would have felt funny doing it. Neither of them was very demonstrative. They went into the kitchen, and Erica got herself a dish and skimmed the crust off the oatmeal. Her mother beamed.
“You used to do that when you were a little girl.”
She walked around the kitchen, talking, while her mother handed her things: orange juice, prunes, toast, always enough for a battalion. It was a mutual nervous mannerism, her mother handing her things, Erica taking them, putting them down here and there, talking while her mother beamed.
Far overhead, a cracked voice burst into “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
“I forgot to tell you—Minnie came in last night,” said her mother.
Every weekend she came, ostensibly to get her new Ford fixed. There seemed to be no Ford repairman in Detroit. On Sundays she drove back to attend church. When the semester ended, she would move into Kirsten’s old room for long periods altogether. Kirsten rarely came home to visit since she’d married and moved to San Francisco.
“Minnie’s taking us to Hannah’s. But she’s got to study.”
“Study?”
“They’re doing the new math in the fourth grade, and she says it’s difficult. You got to learn it to teach it. She’s got a new electric organ, she says. And a scalp vibrator.”
Instead of a husband, said Theo somewhere in the back of her mind, and she shuddered. But Minnie had had husbands enough. Four. Two insurance men, a floor walker, and—the first one—an engineer. Erica could not imagine what it felt like to have run through so many. A different life with each one—did they fall away like so many winters? But when you repent of your sins, all that is changed and forgiven, said Minnie. Changed and forgiven. You are a new person in Christ. A new person.
And the husbands, thought Erica. Had they been baptized away, the hurts and losses drowned somewhere forever?
“I ate almost all the oatmeal,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. I can make some more.”
Thump, thump. She picked up her orange juice and wandered into the living room. Her father peered up from the floor where he lay on his back, slowly raising his legs and letting them down again. Usually he was up before any of them. Once, on a dark winter morning, she had thought it was a burglar.
“We had a good time, Daddy.”
“Eh?” His legs paused in mid-air, and he lifted his head. His gray hair snapped with electricity from the rug.
“I said, we had fun.”
“Where were you?”
“Theo took me to pick up the bagels.”
“To pick up what?” He had probably never seen a bagel, let alone eaten one. “He still got that old car of his?”
“No,” said Erica. “It quit running. He abandoned it.”
“Lord,” said her father. He lowered his head and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again suddenly, as if something had bitten him.
“Minnie driving you to Hannah’s?”
“Yes.”
They never spoke much. It wasn’t just the gap of generations, though; she didn’t know what it was. Now that he was retired she felt she ought to speak to him more, but she didn’t know what to say. All he could remember about Theo was that he had a broken car. Sometimes he asked if Theo had gotten the left headlight fixed yet, so it didn’t shine into second-story windows when he drove at night.
The voice upstairs gave way to a chorus. Erica heard hymns jogging closer, as from a wayward procession; then they clicked into silence. She went into the dining room and Minnie looked up brightly. Her hair, newly tinted auburn, had an odd shiny look, as if it were cased in plastic.
“If I can just hear a good sermon,” she observed, “it makes my day. It’s such a blessing to me, this program. I’ll be ready to go as soon as I find my teeth. I always throw them out, in the night. It’s my bridge, with the two front ones on it.”
And then, as she pierced her grapefruit into sections with the wrong end of her spoon: “Why do old people look so bad without them? I look at my kids in school; they lose them and they look cute.”
In their identical pink wrappers, her mother and Minnie really did look like sisters, though Minnie was thinner and better preserved. Except she always looks preserved, thought Erica, and she felt herself getting depressed, as if some blight had touched her. She let her mother bring her a cup of coffee and tried to be cheerful.
“How old is Hannah now?” she asked.
Her mother considered.
“She must be in her eighties. Imagine, living all alone on that farm, with nothing but sewing to support herself!”
“She has a brother, though,” remarked Minnie.
“Divorced.”
“No, that was the other brother,” Minnie corrected her. “Jonathan went into a bakery and made real good. And when he started, he drove the wagon for twenty dollars a month.”
“She’s got a half-sister who lives in town.”
“She must have married well.”
“No, she didn’t. She taught piano all her life. I got a letter from her husband after she died, so I wouldn’t send any more Christmas cards.”
There was a long silence, during which they all avoided looking at one another. Then Minnie said slyly, humming under her breath,
“Is this your wedding dress Hannah is making?”
Erica had her mouth open to speak, but her mother got there first.
“It’s just some white sewing. It could be a very nice graduation dress.”
“I thought you told me it was satin.”
“Lots of dresses are made out of satin these days.”
“White satin?”
“Someday I could get married,” said Erica in a small voice.
“If she decides to get married,” added her mother. “There’s lots of other things she could do. Paint, for example.”
“You have to be terribly careful when you marry. They say you never know anyone till you’re married to them,” said Minnie. “Oh, I turned down some good ones, all right.”
“Remember Irving Tubbs? I’d say you’d have made it best with him.”
“Too late now,” shrugged Minnie, without bitterness.
But already Erica had that sinking feeling again. They always seemed to be picking on her—not directly, of course, but in conversations she felt were performed for her benefit. My blue heron, I’m not your father, Theo would say. You don’t want a father, you want a husband.
She thought of his little room over the laundromat; she had painted mermaids in the shower for him and had lettered his favorite epigram on a sign which he kept over his desk: ENERGY IS ETERNAL DELIGHT.
Sometimes they would lie down on the bed together and listen to the flute player in the coffeeshop next door one floor down, he wholly relaxed, she with one foot on the floor. For running.
That’s how it is with you, he’d say angrily. Always one foot on the floor. Who do you think is going to come in, anyway? Your mother?
Did you lock the door? she’d whisper, agonized.
I locked the door, yes. Maybe your mother can go through locked doors?
“Immersion,” Minnie was saying. “What have you got to lose? If the Bible says that you shall be saved through water and the spirit, why take the risk?”
“I’d feel a little odd about it,” her mother answered. “If it’s so good, why don’t the Lutherans have it?”
Minnie shook her head. “Billy Graham preaches it. I’d arrange for a very private service.”
“And you wouldn’t tell anybody?”
“Not a soul.”
Still her mother hesitated.
“Could I wear a bathing cap?”
“Did Christ wear a bathing cap?” asked Minnie severely.
Suddenly Erica felt ill. Why don’t you say it, she thought angrily; he’s an atheist, a confirmed atheist. It never bothered her until they talked about immersion, and then only in a sort of superstitious way because she felt she might be missing out on something—a heavenly reward she wasn’t sure she deserved but might, by some fluke, get anyhow. It was that feeling of something left undone that bothered her most. Prudence—the seventh deadly virtue, Theo called it—and sometimes she felt that Theo was more religious than all of them put together. But art is not a religion, said Minnie. All the painting and sculpture in the world won’t gain you the kingdom.
Erica had, somewhere, a paper napkin on which he had written, “Someday I will show you all the kingdoms of my world.” They were sitting in the German restaurant downtown, which was always so full at noon that they could hardly hear one another.
What kingdoms? she asked him then.
My blue heron, he said. My little Eurydike.
And a few days later he took her to see his city, which he was starting to build on the empty lot behind the laundromat.
It was a city to be made entirely of junk, he told her. Already she could see it rising into shape as they walked between the walls made of washing machines, fire hydrants, clocks, mirrors, and fenders; between the towers made of wagons and marbles, bicycles and animal skulls, wired and cemented together: all the paraphernalia of human life.
And it shall be fifty cubits long to the east, Theo intoned, and fifty cubits to the west. And there shall be a hundred furnaces beneath the foundations and a hundred mirrors to catch the sun. And over the flagpole, a garbage can.
Where did you get the parking meter?
I took it from my room, said Theo. Didn’t you see it in my room? I used to time my eggs by it, when I had a hotplate.
He sat down on a large bed, painted silver. He had stuck paper flowers in the springs. Around it the walls glittered with bedpans, coffeepots, and false teeth.
I have a hundred and five sets of false teeth, he declared solemnly. And a medallion of William Blake. You’ve got to learn how much is worth saving in this world.
Later they were crossing the alley behind Woolworth’s on the way home from the nine o’clock show, and they both saw it: a pair of legs sticking out of a trash can.
Jesus! Somebody’s fallen in!
The feet were hollow, the legs straight. Pushing aside broken boxes and excelsior, they set them upright.
Too bad it’s only the bottom half, said Theo. Who’d throw out a thing like that?
Are you going to keep it? asked Erica.
Put it in the city, he answered. Grow beans on it, or roses. All my life I had to look at saints and flamingoes in my mother’s garden. Nobody ever had a pair of legs like these. You take his feet.
As they emerged from the alley, a black car pulled up across the street.
Just keep walking, said Theo. And follow me.
He was humming happily to himself. He turned the corner with easy nonchalance and broke into a gallop. Erica, holding the feet, felt herself pelting after him.
You want to rest? he said at last.
They had stopped in front of the drugstore; a balding man in a pharmacist’s white jacket was rolling up the awnings. The neon lights in the window winked out, leaving them in the blue mercurial haze of the street lamps. The streets were empty. They set the legs down on the pavement and seated themselves on the curb. In spite of the warm air of summer almost here, Erica felt a great weariness flood her like a chill. Theo reached over to touch her hair when she lowered her head.
Will you come and live in my city?
They arrived at Hannah’s early in the afternoon. Hannah, on hearing the car, had come out to meet them and was standing by the pump in her long blue print dress. Behind her, the house, low-slung and weathered nearly black, crouched in the shadow of several freshly painted barns. She seemed to have been born ancient; Erica could not remember a time when her thin hair, tucked under the green eyeshade, was not already white.
“Afternoon,” said Hannah, shyly.
As they stepped up to her, she kissed them one by one, a dry musty kiss on the cheek. The pincushion she wore at her lapel pricked Erica’s face.
Hannah led the way through the kitchen. The low ceiling made Erica want to stoop. There was a wooden sink, deeply stained, and an enamel bucket with a chipped rim beside it. On a pedestal near the front door, a large Christmas cactus trailed its branches in all directions.
“A hundred years old,” said Hannah proudly, “and it bloomed this year. I called the paper about it, but Mrs. Schultz had already called them about her cactus, and they wasn’t interested in two of ’em.”
“But you aren’t a hundred years old,” exclaimed Erica.
“It come with the house, I think. Oh, I could have had a sign out in front about the house, but Jonathan was never much on publicity.”
They went into the living room for the fittings. Boxes of cards and buttons spilled over the wicker sofa onto a piano, which served as a shelf for photographs and birthday cards and was by this time nearly inaccessible; the keyboard looked permanently shut. On the sewing machine, with its faint traces of elegant scrolls, a cat lifted its head and blinked at them, then stretched itself back to sleep again.
For some reason the signs of faith were less depressing here than they might have been at home, thought Erica, forgiving Hannah the ceramic plaque, JESUS NEVER FAILS and the sign lettered in silver paint, GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE. On the walls, the sepia faces of an earlier generation looked out from absurd gilt frames. They were always stiff, her father told her, because the pictures were time-exposures and you had to wear a clamp on your neck inside the collar, that kept you from moving.
Suddenly she saw it, hanging on a coat-rack shining out over the faded coats brought in for mending and the shapeless dresses of old women.
“You want to try on the white sewing first?” asked Hannah, noticing her gaze. “It’s just basted.”
Her mother started to hum.
“I got some stuff for you to do, when you’re done with that,” she said. And Erica saw her studying the pictures on the wall, pausing before a confirmation certificate, lettered in German, showing in faded tints the parables and deeds of Christ. Stuck on the frame was a tiny star-shaped pin, from which several bars fell in ladder-fashion: five years, ten years, fifteen years.
“You never miss a day of church, do you, Hannah?” said her mother. “I’ll bet nobody’s got a record like you do.”
“Raise your arms,” said Hannah, and Erica felt the sudden cool weight of satin falling over her body. “Only one man had a better record than mine; he got the twenty-five-year bar, but the last year they had to bring him in on a stretcher.”
She stood with her arms out while Hannah pinned and clucked to herself. Her hands were warm and light, almost like mice walking on her flesh, thought Erica. Minnie cleared a place for herself on the sofa and stretched out, running her eye over the dresses on the coat-rack.
“That’s a handsome black one,” she said. “Who’s that for?”
“Me,” said Hannah, “to be buried in. Thought I might as well get some wear out of it.”
“Remember how Grandma had a dress she kept in her drawer to be buried in? White wool, it was.”
“Fits pretty good,” said Hannah. “Now, try on this overslip.”
She shook it over Erica’s head—light, vaporous stuff, embroidered with flowers. Full-skirted like a child’s dress. Theo hated full skirts. Minnie bent forward to examine it.
“Imagine,” she said, “a machine to put in all those flowers.”
“How does it fit around the arms?”
Erica nodded.
“Good. ’Course it’ll take a little time—”
“No hurry,” snapped her mother.
“—since I lost my ripper. I told Mrs. Mahoney to pick me up one somewhere.”
“Mahoney?” mused Minnie. “Not Jack Mahoney?”
“He’s dead now, just tipped over quick,” said Hannah.
“Seems like all the people I went with are dead now,” said Minnie softly.
Erica edged herself carefully out of the white dress, trying not to prick herself with pins. Her mother had already put on a lace one. Hannah and Minnie eyed her critically.
“Lace,” observed Hannah. “Looks like you’re going to a wedding.”
“No wedding,” said her mother. “Make it an inch shorter, don’t you think, in the front? I haven’t got a bosom like this—”
She pulled the front out like a tent.
“’Course, skirts is shorter now,” said Hannah reluctantly. “Even the choir wears ’em shorter. ’Course a thing goes across the front so it don’t show their knees. I could put some darts in the front.”
“The lace is torn, too. Do you mend lace?”
“Lace isn’t good except for weddings,” said Hannah, shaking her head.
He wouldn’t like the dress, thought Erica. She scowled at it, hanging on the coat-rack. He wouldn’t like it because her mother had picked the design, not for his marriage, but for marriage in general. Somehow the dress looked like her mother. She did not know why.
Late in the afternoon, Theo appeared at her house, dressed in a black suit with a bag of tools at his side.
“You coming with me to the undertaker’s?”
She had not told her mother about this job. They took her bicycle, she sitting on the seat, he pumping in front, his haunches striking her in the stomach as they pitched uphill, past the park.
“I can get off, if you want to walk.”
“No, you’re light enough.”
When they arrived at the funeral parlor, they were both damp with effort. They reached for the knocker, but a man in a moth-gray suit had already opened the door. Over his shoulder, Erica saw the rooms, with their high ceilings and French doors, opening into infinity, multiplying like a house of mirrors. She remembered this house from her grandmother’s funeral: the parlors where the dead awaited visitors and the carpets that flowed from one room to another, gathering up all human sounds. Was it in this large room that they had laid her out and Erica had cried, not for grief, but because her mother was crying?
The man led them over to a small group of people huddled together on a sofa at the other end of the room: two men and two women, all middle-aged, with pointed sallow faces. The women had covered their heads with black lace mantillas.
“This is the young student.”
They rose and looked at him rather severely, then turned to Erica.
“My wife,” said Theo. “She assists me.”
The women removed their gloves and extended their hands to her. Then the taller of the two men inquired in an accent so pronounced that Erica wondered if it were real, “You have done this before? You know—”
“Of course,” said Theo. “I have studied the trade in Germany.”
“Well, then!”
They all looked immensely relieved. With a polite nod, the undertaker indicated that they might sit down and motioned Theo to follow him.
The body had been laid out, fully dressed, on a table and wheeled into a private room, empty save for a sink at one end. For a moment Erica caught her breath, but Theo gave her a look, and she said nothing. The undertaker lingered a bit.
“Won’t take you very long, I suppose.”
“No, not very long. You will excuse me—I prefer to do this work alone.”
Blushing deeply, the other man muttered a little and bowed into the doorway.
“His face has already been shaved.”
Pause.
“The family will be down in—say—half an hour?”
Theo nodded and waved him away. The door slammed, and his composure vanished.
“Open the tool case quick,” he said. “Twenty minutes. Get out the plaster of Paris. Can you mix plaster of Paris?”
“I think so.”
She rummaged through the little bag, pulled out a chisel and a towel, then a tin bowl and the bag of plaster, carefully averting her eyes from the body. Thinking only of what she must do with her hands, she carried everything to the sink, filled the bowl, turned on the water, and began to stir.
“Stir faster,” cried Theo.
“You never really were in Germany, were you?”
“Christ, no. Give me the plaster—quick, before it dries.”
Now she stepped forward and watched, fascinated, breathing very lightly to avoid the real or imagined smell of formaldehyde in the room. Theo had spread the towel over the body, tucking it in at the collar like a napkin. The face looked much like those she had seen upstairs; about thirty, she thought, maybe older. It neither grieved nor frightened her, this thing. Theo loaded his trowel and spread plaster over the chin and nose, then lathered it over the eyes and stood up straight.
“Now we wait for it to dry.” He was looking cheerful again. “Who knows, maybe he’ll come out looking like William Blake.”
A kind of chill touched her at that moment.
“Where do you think he is—really?”
“Right here, all there is of him.” Theo was washing his hands at the sink. “Your aunt been working on you again? Listen”—he looked very fierce—“if you let her baptize you, it’s all over between us. Christ, you’re not marrying me, you’re marrying your mother!”
“They can hear you upstairs,” she hissed.
“Listen,” he said, in a gentler voice, pointing to the body. “This isn’t anything to be afraid of. I’ve got to get you out of that house of old women.”
“I think it’s dry.”
He tested the mask with his finger.
“Not yet. We’ll wait a few more minutes.”
They slid down on the floor, leaning against the wall in ominous silence. Presently Theo got up, bent over the body and took the edges of the mask in both hands.
“A little cool, but it’s dry enough.”
He tugged, carefully at first, then more roughly.
“Give me a hand,” he said.
She stumbled to her feet and, suddenly nauseous, swallowed hard and touched the rough plaster edge over the ear.
“Push your fingers under it. You need leverage. Pull!”
“It’s stuck!” she cried in terror. “Why is it stuck?”
“I think,” said Theo, in an odd voice, “that I forgot to grease the face.”
He had climbed up on the table by this time and was straddling the dead man’s chest, clawing furiously at the mask.
“Chip it! Get the chisel! We’ll chip it away!”
There was a muffled cry behind them, and turning, Erica saw that someone had opened the door. In the doorway stood the bereaved, their sallow faces livid with rage.
The tallest man made a leap for Theo but missed. Theo was already on the ground, and he plunged like a wild horse through the door. Erica followed him, running as if the dead man himself were after them.
They sat, shaking, in a cranny of rubber tires, at one end of Theo’s city. The sun beat down on them, the hundred mirrors turned on their hooks and wires, and the springs, sleds, motors, rowboats, saws, clocks, flowerpots, and bedpans of humanity twirled past them. They sat in the shadow of a hundred furnaces.
“Best thing to do,” said Theo at last, “is to forget the whole thing. A death mask, for Christ’s sake!”
“If we were married and you died first, would you want to be buried?” she asked timidly, and realized, as she said it, that she was really asking something else.
“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. No coffin for me. I want to go back to the earth.”
A loneliness foamed up in her mouth when he said that. She had always assumed she would lie down with the rest of the family in one of the plots her father had bought years ago. Enough for the generations, he said. It wasn’t a thing to take lightly. For when the trumpet sounded and everyone stood up in their graves, it was important, said her mother, to be among people you knew.
But by this time, lots of bodies must have scattered to dust.
The Lord knows his own, said her mother stoutly.
Erica saw them all very clearly, standing up in the graves and rubbing their eyes as after a long sleep, Hannah in the black dress she’d made for her funeral, her mother in the lace, Minnie, singing along with the heavenly host because she alone knew the words to the hymns, and herself in the white dress which would be her best dress forever.
“I took my French this morning,” said Theo.
“You didn’t tell me. How was it?”
“Awful. I flunked. I’m ready to pull out of this place.” He touched her hair lightly. “And I want to take you with me. You got to trust me more, Erica. I’m not like your dad, but I’m all right.”
“What are you going to do now?”
He shrugged.
“Go to some city, I guess. You can always find people in a city.” Suddenly restless, he jerked himself up. “It’s hot here. You want to rent a boat and go the island for a swim?”
“I have to go home and get my suit.”
“Jesus! Whoever swims near the island? Go in your underwear.”
“A nice day,” said the old man, sitting on a kitchen stool in front of the canoe shed. He looked past the open door toward the river, as if expecting someone to appear there. “Don’t know why there aren’t more folks out on the water.”
The three of them went inside. Erica had yet to see a canoe in the canoe shed. Instead, it was full of nickelodeons, scrolled and flowered to resemble circus wagons, with the works decorously exposed. Behind little windows, the captive performers slept: drumsticks and cymbals, gears and piano rolls, perforated for the syntax of dead voices.
“Sign the book,” said the old man, slipping behind a counter and handing Theo a pen. “You get number twenty-five. That really plays, Miss.”
Erica was staring at the silver anatomy of a violin, spread open and joined to a hundreds of tiny threads and wheels, as if awaiting a surgeon. She had not noticed it the last time. On the glass was a neatly typed label: JUDGED THE EIGHTH GREATEST INVENTION IN THE WORLD. CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR. 1933.
“It sounds just like a real violin. Listen.”
The old man took a nickel from his pocket and dropped it into the back of the machine. From deep inside she heard a sputter and a whirr. Theo bent closer to look; then all at once they heard a nervous spidery response, ping! ping! Wheels spun, silver pistons scraped the strings. The whole effect was oddly touching, as if they were watching a fading performer’s comeback from senility. When its shrill and complicated heart fell silent, they all three burst into applause.
“You don’t know that tune, I bet,” said the old man, pleased and shy. “Go out that door to the docks and take the first boat on the end. The paddles are inside.”
The island looked small, the way places always looked to Erica when she had known them as a child and then revisited them as an adult. Rocks scratched against the bottom of the boat, and she climbed out, bunching her skirt in her arm. Theo lifted the prow, and together they pulled the boat over the thin strip of beach toward the trees.
“Come on,” said Theo. “I’m going in.”
He vanished into a bush. Erica waded along the edge of the water. The white skeleton of a crayfish surfaced as she dug her toes into the sand.
“Are you going swimming in your dress?”
She could not look at him.
“Somebody might come.” But she knew there was nobody here but themselves.
“Good Christ,” shouted the bush. “Since when is your own flesh a thing to be ashamed of?”
And when the voice spoke again, it was softer and more winning.
“Here I am.”
Drawn by its strangeness, she turned. There he stood, very white and thin-legged, and oddly exotic in his nakedness, like a unicorn.
“Well, I’m going into the water.”
He plunged forward with studied casualness, but his whole body grimaced when the water touched his waist. Then he stopped and carefully splashed his ribs and arms, humming quietly to himself. In the sunlight, his back was as round and white as a loaf of dough. Dazzled by the brightness of things, gazing about him at the mainland some distance away, he seemed to have sprung from the dark flesh of the water itself. Suddenly a whistle bleated so close to them that Erica started.
“Are you coming in?”
He was looking at her, over his shoulder, which prickled into gooseflesh as she watched him.
The whistle hooted again, louder this time, and they both turned in alarm. A steamer, covered with tiers and tiers of children, was chugging toward them, under the green banner of the Huron Park Day Line. As the whole side of the boat broke into shouting and waving, she opened her mouth to speak, but Theo was already lumbering toward the woods, the water weighing him down like a heavy garment.
“Jesus!”
Now it was passing them, slowly and steadily, but she could see the children jumping up and down, and she could hear the way they called her, Hey lady, hey lady! not because they knew her but because they did not know her. She shaded her eyes and waved, like one who has been working and glances up to see something amazing, a unicorn in the bush, a caravan of pilgrims on the road, a shipload of souls, rollicking and rolling into the new world.