The Long Twilight (48 page)

"Come on, really," she said. "How much did it cost?"

"I got it free. I have a pal in the business. It's a demonstrator."

She took it off and threw it on the inch-thick rug. "I've got this terrible headache," she whined. "Call me a cab."

"That shows what you really think of the kind of girls who go with penthouses and hi-fi," I told myself, dismissing her with a wave of my hand. "What you really want is a home girl, sweet and innocent and unassuming."

I came up the steps of the little white cottage with the candle in the window and she met me at the door with a plate of cookies. She chattered about her garden and her sewing and her cooking as we dined on corn bread and black-eyed peas with lumps of country ham in it. Afterward she washed and I dried. Then she tatted while I sat by the fire and oiled harness or something of the sort. After a while she said, "Well, good night," and left the room quietly. I waited five minutes and followed. She was just turning back the patchwork quilt; she was wearing a thick woolen nightgown, and her hair was in braids.

"Take it off," I said. She did. I looked at her. She looked like a woman.

"Uh, let's go to bed," I said. We did.

"Don't you have anything to say?" I wanted to know.

"What shall I say?"

"What's your name?"

"You didn't give me one."

"You're Charity. Where are you from, Charity?"

"You didn't say."

"You're from near Dotham. How old are you?"

"Forty-one minutes."

"Nonsense! You're at least, ah, twenty-three. You've lived a fully, happy life, and now you're here with me, the culmination of all your dreams."

"Yes."

"Is that all you have to say? Aren't you happy? Or sad? Don't you have any ideas of your own?"

"Of course. My name is Charity, and I'm twenty-three, and I'm here with you—"

"What would you do if I hit you? Suppose I set the house on fire? What if I said I was going to cut your throat?"

"Whatever you say."

I got a good grip on my head and suppressed a yell of fury.

"Wait a minute, Charity—this is all wrong. I didn't mean you to be an automaton, just mouthing what I put in your head. Be a real, live woman. React to me—"

She grabbed the covers up to her chin and screamed.

I sat in the kitchen alone and drank a glass of cold milk and sighed a lot.

"Let's think this thing through," I suggested. "You can make it any way you want it. But you're trying to do it too fast; you're taking too many shortcuts. The trick is to start slowly, build up the details, make it real."

So I thought up a small Midwestern city, with wide brick streets of roomy old frame houses under big trees with shady yards and gardens that weren't showplaces, just the comfortable kind where you can swing in a hammock and walk on the grass and pick the flowers without feeling like you're vandalizing a set piece.

I walked along the street, taking it all in, getting the feel of it. It was autumn, and someone was burning leaves somewhere. I climbed the hill, breathing the tangy evening air, being alive. The sound of a piano softly played floated down across the lawn of the big brick house at the top of the hill. Purity Atwater lived there. She was only seventeen, and the prettiest girl in town. I had an impulse to turn in right then, but I kept going.

"You're a stranger in town," I said. "You have to establish yourself, not just barge in. You have to meet her in the socially accepted way, impress her folks, buy her a soda, take her to the movies. Give her time. Make it real."

A room at the Y costs fifty cents. I slept well. The next morning I applied for work at only three places before I landed a job at two dollars a day at Siegal's Hardware and Feed. Mr. Siegal was favorably impressed with my frank, open countenance, polite and respectful manner, and apparent eagerness for hard work.

After three months, I was raised to $2.25 per day, and took over the bookkeeping. In my room at the boardinghouse I kept a canary and a shelf of inspirational volumes. I attended divine service regularly, and contributed one dime per week to the collection plate. I took a night class in advanced accountancy, sent away for Charles Atlas' course, and allowed my muscles to grow no more than could be accounted for by dynamic tension.

In December I met Purity. I was shoveling snow from her father's walk when she emerged from the big house looking charming in furs. She gave me a smile. I treasured it for a week, and schemed to be present at a party attended by her. I dipped punch for the guests. She smiled at me again. She approved of my bronzed good looks, my curly hair, my engaging grin, my puppylike clumsiness. I asked her to the movies. She accepted. On the third date I held her hand briefly. On the tenth I kissed her cheek. Eighteen months later, while I was still kissing her cheek, she left town with the trumpeter from a jazz band I had taken her to hear.

Nothing daunted, I tried again. Hope Berman was the second prettiest girl in town. I wooed her via the same route, jumped ahead to kisses on the lips after only twenty-one dates, and was promptly called to an interview with Mr. Berman. He inquired as to my intentions. Her brothers, large men all, also seemed interested. A position with Berman and Sons, Clothiers, was hinted at. Hope giggled. I fled.

Later in my room I criticized myself sternly. I was ruined in Pottsville: word was all over town that I was a trifler. I took my back wages, minus some vague deductions and with a resentful speech from Mr. Siegal about ingrates and grasshoppers, and traveled by train to St. Louis. There I met and paid court to Faith, a winsome lass who worked as a secretary in the office of a lawyer whose name was painted on a second-story window on a side street a few blocks from the more affluent business section. We went to the movies, took long streetcar rides, visited museums, had picnics. I noticed that she perspired moderately in warm weather, had several expensive cavities, was ignorant of many matters, and was a very ordinary lay. And afterward she cried and chattered of marriage.

Omaha was a nicer town. I holed up at the Railroad Men's Y there for a week and thought it through. It was apparent I was still acting too hastily. I wasn't employing my powers correctly. I had exchanged the loneliness of God for the loneliness of Man, a pettier loneliness but no less poignant. The trick was, I saw, to combine the highest skills of each status, to live a human life, nudged here and there in the desired direction.

Inspired, I repaired at once to the maternity ward of the nearest hospital, and was born at 3:27 A.M. on a Friday, a healthy, seven-pound boy whom my parents named Melvin. I ate over four hundred pounds of Pablum before my first taste of meat and potatoes. Afterward I had a stomach-ache. In due course I learned to say bye-bye, walk, and pull tablecloths off tables in order to hear the crash of crockery. I entered kindergarten, and played sand blocks in the band, sometimes doubling in a triangle, which was chrome-plated and had a red string. I mastered shoetying, pants-buttoning, and eventually rollerskating and falling off my bike. In Junior High I used my twenty cents lunch money for a mayonnaise sandwich, an RC Cola half of which I squirted at the ceiling and my classmates, and an O Henry. I read many dull books by Louisa May Alcott and G. A. Henty, and picked out Patience Froomwall as my intended.

She was a charming redhead with freckles. I took her to proms, picking her up in my first car, one of the early Fords, with a body handbuilt from planks. After graduation, I went away to college, maintaining our relationship via mail. In the summers we saw a lot of each other in a nonanatomical sense.

I received my degree in business administration, secured a post with the power company, married Patience, and fathered two nippers. They grew up, following much the same pattern I had, which occasioned some speculation on my part as to how much divine intervention had had to do with my remarkable success. Patience grew less and less like her name, gained weight, developed an interest in church work and gardens and a profound antipathy for everyone else doing church work and gardening.

I worked very hard at all this, never yielding to the temptation to take shortcuts, or to improve my lot by turning Patience into a movie starlet or converting our modest six-roomer into a palatial estate in Devon. The hardest part was sweating through a full sixty seconds of subjective time in every minute, sixty minutes every hour . . .

After fifty years of conscientious effort I ended up with a workbench in the garage.

At the local tavern, I drank four Scotches and pondered my dilemma. After five Scotches I became melancholy. After six I became defiant. After seven, angry. At this point the landlord was so injudicious as to suggest that I had had enough. I left in high dudgeon, pausing only long enough to throw a fire bomb through the front window. It made a lovely blaze. I went along the street firebombing the beauty parlor, the Christian Science Reading Room, the optometrist, the drugstore, the auto parts house, the Income Tax Prepared Here place.

"You're all phonies," I yelled. "All liars, cheats, fakes!"

The crowd which had gathered labored and brought forth a policeman, who shot me and three innocent bystanders. This annoyed me even in my exhilarated mood. I tarred and feathered the officious fellow, then proceeded to blow up the courthouse, the bank, the various churches, the supermarket, and the automobile agency. They burned splendidly.

I rejoiced to see the false temples going up in smoke, and toyed briefly with the idea of setting up my own religion, but at once found myself perplexed with questions of dogma, miracles, fund drives, canonicals, tax-free real estate, nunneries, and inquisitions, and shelved the idea.

All Omaha was blazing nicely now; I moved on other cities, eliminating the dross that had clogged our lives. Pausing to chat with a few survivors in the expectation of overhearing expressions of joy and relief at the lifting of the burden of civilization, and praise of the newfound freedom to rebuild a sensible world, I was dismayed to see they seemed more intent on tending their wounds, competing in the pursuit of small game, and looting TV sets and cash than in philosophy.

By now the glow of the Scotch was fading. I saw I had been hasty. I quickly re-established order, placing needful authority in the hands of outstanding Liberals. Since there was still a vociferous body of reactionaries creating unrest and interfering with the establishment of total social justice, it was necessary to designate certain personnel to keep order, dressing them in uniform garments, for ease of identification.

Alas, mild policies failed to convince the wreckers that the People meant business and were not to be robbed of the fruits of their hard-won victory over the bloodsuckers. Sterner measures were of necessity resorted to. Still the stubborn Fascists took advantage of their freedom to agitate, make inflammatory speeches, print disloyal books, and in other ways interfere with their comrades' fight for peace and plenty. Temporary controls were accordingly placed on treasonous talk, and exemplary executions were carried out. The burden of these duties proving onerous, the leaders found it necessary to retire to the more spacious estates surviving the holocaust, and to limit their diets to caviar, champagne, breast of chicken and other therapeutic items in order to keep up their strength for the battle against reaction. Malcontents naturally attributed the leaders' monopoly on limousines, palaces, custom tailoring and the company of trained nurses of appearance calculated to soothe the weary executive eye as evidence of decadence. Picture the fury and frustration when the State, refusing to tolerate sedition, hustled them off to remote areas where by performing useful labor under simple conditions, they received an opportunity to correct their thinking.

I called on the Prime Leader—affectionately known as the Dictator—and queried him as to his intentions, now that he had consolidated the economy, rooted out traitors, and established domestic tranquility.

"I'm thinking about taking over the adjacent continent," he confided.

"Are they bothering us?" I inquired.

"You bet. Every time I see a good-looking broad on their side of the line and realize she's out of reach . . ." He ground his teeth.

"Joking aside," I persisted. "Now that we have peace—"

"Next thing you know the mob will be getting restless," he said. "Wanting TV sets, cars, iceboxes—even refrigerators! Just because I and my boys have a few little amenities to help us over the intolerable burdens of leadership, they want to get into the act! What do those bums know about the problems we got? Did they ever have to mobilize along a frontier? Did they ever have to make up their minds: 'tanks or tractors'? Do they have to worry about the old international prestige? Not those bums! All they got to worry about is getting through enough groceries to stay alive long enough to have enough brats so there'll be somebody around to bury 'em— as if that was important."

I thought about it. I sighed. "I can't quite put my finger on it," I told the Dictator, "but somehow there's something lacking. It isn't exactly the Utopia I had in mind." I wiped him out and all his works and contemplated the desolation sadly. "Maybe the trouble was I let too many cooks into the broth," I reflected. "Next time I'll set the whole thing up, complete, just the way I like it—and then turn everybody loose in it."

It was a jolly thought. I did it. I turned the wilderness into a parkland, drained the bogs, planted flowers. I set up towns at wide intervals, each a jewel of design, with cozy dwellings and graceful trees and curving paths and fountains and reflecting pools and open-air theaters that fit into the landscape as if a part of it. I set up clean, well-lighted schools and swimming pools and dredged the rivers and stocked them with fish and provided abundant raw materials and a few discreet, well-concealed, nonpolluting factories to turn out the myriad simple, durable, miraculous devices that took all the drudgery out of my life, leaving humans free for the activities that only humans can perform, such as original research, art, massage, and prostitution, plus waiting on tables. Then I popped the population into the prepared setting and awaited the glad cries that would greet the realization that everything was perfect.