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“Evening, Tom, Jim, Bill. Evening, John, Peter!”
The five would tongue their food over into their cheeks, leap up, and draw out chairs for the young belles, everyone laughed until the chandelier cried with pain.
“Look what I got!”
“Look what I got!”
“Look at mine!”
The three ladies held up gifts which they had saved to open at table. It was the Fourth of July, and on any day of the year that was in any way special they pulled the ribbons off gifts and cried, Oh, you shouldn’t have done it! They even got gifts on Memorial Day, that was how it was. Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Columbus Day, Friday the Thirteenth. It was quite a joke. Once they got gifts on a day that wasn’t any kind of day at all, with notes printed on them saying: JUST BECAUSE IT’S MONDAY! They talked about that particular incident for six months after.
Now there was a crisp rattling as they cut the ribbons with their fingernails which flashed red, and far away at the end of the tu
“Perfume! With Old Glory on the box!”
“Bath powder, in the shape of a pinwheel!”
“Candy, done up in ten-inch salutes!”
Everyone said how nice it was.
Miss Leonora Welkes said, “Oh, how nice that is.”
A moment later, Miss Welkes said, “I’m all done. It was a fine meal.”
“Don’t you want any dessert?” asked Grandma.
“I’m choke-full.” And Miss Welkes, smiling, glided from the room.
“Smell!” cried one young lady, waving the opened perfume under the men’s noses.
“Ah!” Said everyone.
Douglas hit the screen door like a bullet to a target, and before it slammed he had taken sixty-eight steps across the cool green lawn in his bare feet. Money jingled in his pocket, the remains of his firecracker savings; and quite a remains, too. Now he thudded his bare feet on the warm summer twilight cement, across the street to press his nose on Mrs.Singer’s store window, to see the devils laid in red round rows, the torpedoes in sawdust, the ten-inch salutes that could toss your head in the trees like a football, the nine inchers that could bang a can to the sun, and the fire balloons, so rare and beautiful, like withered red, white and blue butterflies, their delicate silk wings folded, ready to be lit and gassed with warm air later and sent up into the summer night among the stars. There were so many things to pack your pocket with, and yet as he stood there, counting the money, ten, twenty, forty, a dollar and seventy cents, precariously saved during a long year of mowing lawns and clipping hedges, he turned and looked back at Grandma’s house, at the highest room of all, up in the little green cupola, where the window was shut in the hottest weather, and the shades half drawn. Miss Welkes’ room.
In half an hour the kids would come like a summer shower, their feet raining on the pavement, their hands full of explosions, little adhesive turbans on their burned thumbs, smelling of brimstone and punk, to run him off in fairy circles where they waved the magical sparklers, tracing their names and their destinies in luminous firefly paths on the sultry evening air, making great white symbols that lingered in phosphorous after-image even if you looked down from your night bed at three in the morning, remembering what a day and what an evening it had been. In half an hour he would be fat with treasure, breast pockets bulging with torpedoes, his money gone. But—now. He looked back and forth between the high room in Grandma’s house, and this store window full of dynamite wonders.
How many nights in winter had he gone down to the stone public library and seen Miss Welkes there with the stamp pad at her elbow and the purple ink rubber stamper in her hand, and the great book sections behind her?
“Good evening, Douglas.”
“Evening, Miss Welkes.”
“Can I help you meet some new friend, tonight?”
“Yes’m.”
“I know a man named Longfellow,” she said. Or, “I know a man named Whittier.”
And that was it. It wasn’t so much Miss Welkes herself, it was the people she knew. On autumn nights when, for no reason, the library might be empty for hours on end, she would say, “Let me bring out Mr. Whittier.” And she went back among the warm stacks of books, and returned to sit under the green glass shade, opening the book to meet the season, while Douglas sat on a stool looking up as her lips moved and, half of the time, she didn’t even glance at the words but could look away or close her eyes while she recited the poem about the pumpkin:
And Douglas would walk home, tall and enchanted.
Or on silver winter evenings when he and the wind blew wide the library door and dust stirred on the farthest counters and magazines turned their pages unaided in the vast empty rooms, then what more particularly apt than a good friend of Miss Welkes? Mr. Robert Frost, what a name for winter! His poem about stopping by the woods on a winter evening to watch the woods fill up with snow....
And in the summer, only last night, Mr. Whittier again, on a hot night in July that kept the people at home lying on their porches, the library like a great bread oven; there, under the green grass lamp:
And Miss Welkes’ face there, an oval with her cobweb graying hair and her plai
In winter, he trudged home through icelands of magic, in summer through bakery winds of sorcery; the seasons given substance by the readings of Miss Welkes who knew so many people and introduced them, in due time, to Douglas. Mr. Poe and Mr. Sandburg and Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Shakespeare.
The screen door opened under his hand.
“Mrs. Singer,” he said, “have you got any perfume?”
THE GIFT lay at the top of the stairs, tilted against her door. Supper had been early, over at six o’clock. There was the warm lull now before the extravagant evening. Downstairs, you could hear the tinkling of plates lifted to their kitchen wall racks. Douglas, at the furthest bend of the stairs, half hid in the attic door shadows, waited for Miss Welkes to twist her brass doorknob, waited to see the gift drop at her feet, unsigned, anonymous, sparkling with tape and gold stars.
At last, the door opened. The gift fell.
Miss Welkes looked down at it as if she was standing on the edge of a cliff she had never guessed was there before. She looked in all directions, slowly, and bent to pick it up. She didn’t open it, but stood in the doorway, holding the gift in her hands, for a long time. He heard her move inside and set the gift on a table. But there was no rattle of paper. She was looking at the gift, the wrapping, the tape, the stars, and not touching it.
“Oh, Miss Welkes, Miss Welkes!” he wanted to cry.
Half an hour later, there she was, on the front porch, seated with her neat hands folded, and watching the door. It was the summer evening ritual, the people on the porches, in the swings, on the figured pillows, the women talking and sewing, the men smoking, the children in idle groupings on the steps. But this was early, the town porches still simmering from the day, the echoes only temporarily allayed, the civil war of Independence Afternoon muffled for an hour in the sounds of poured lemonade and scraped dishes. But here, the only person on the street porches, alone, was Miss Eleanora Welkes, her face pink instead of gray, flushed, her eyes watching the door, her body tensed forward. Douglas saw her from the tree where he hung in silent vigilance. He did not say hello, she did not see him there, and the hour passed into deeper twilight. Within the house the sounds of preparation grew intense and furious. Phones rang, feet ran up and down the avalanche of stairs, the three belles giggled, bath doors slammed, and then out and down the front steps went the three young ladies, one at a time, a man on her arm. Each time the door swung, Miss Welkes would lean forward, smiling wildly. And each time she sank back as the girls appeared in floaty green dresses and blew away like thistle down the darkening avenues, laughing up at the men.