Dandelion Wine Read online

  That was the photograph; that was the way he knew her. Now he was talking again, after the remembering and the thinking over and the holding of the picture in his mind. "When I first saw that picture--it was a simple, straightforward picture with a simple hairdo--I didn't know it had been taken that long ago. The item in the paper said something about Helen Loomis marshaling the Town Ball that night. I tore the picture from the paper. I carried it with me all that day. I intended going to the ball. Then, late in the afternoon, someone saw me looking at the picture, and told me about it. How the picture of the beautiful girl had been taken so long ago and used every year since by the paper. And they said I shouldn't go to the Town Ball that night, carrying that picture and looking for you."

  They sat in the garden for a long minute. He glanced over at her face. She was looking at the farthest garden wall and the pink roses climbing there. There was no way to tell what she was thinking. Her face showed nothing. She rocked for a little while in her chair and then said softly, "Shall we have some more tea? There you are."

  They sat sipping the tea. Then she reached over and patted his arm. "Thank you."

  "For what?"

  "For wanting to come to find me at the dance, for clipping out my picture, for everything. Thank you so very much."

  They walked about the garden on the paths.

  "And now," she said, "it's my turn. Do you remember, I mentioned a certain young man who once attended me, seventy years ago? Oh, he's been dead fifty years now, at least, but when he was very young and very handsome he rode a fast horse off for days, or on summer nights over the meadows around town. He had a healthy, wild face, always sunburned, his hands were always cut and he fumed like a stovepipe and walked as if he were going to fly apart; wouldn't keep a job, quit those he had when he felt like it, and one day he sort of rode off away from me because I was even wilder than he and wouldn't settle down, and that was that. I never thought the day would come when I would see him alive again. But you're pretty much alive, you spill ashes around like he did, you're clumsy and graceful combined, I know everything you're going to do before you do it, but after you've done it I'm always surprised. Reincarnation's a lot of milk-mush to me, but the other day I felt, What if I called Robert, Robert, to you on the street, would William Forrester turn around?"

  "I don't know," he said.

  "Neither do I. That's what makes life interesting."

  August was almost over. The first cool touch of autumn moved slowly through the town and there was a softening and the first gradual burning fever of color in every tree, a faint flush and coloring in the hills, and the color of lions in the wheat fields. Now the pattern of days was familiar and repeated like a penman beautifully inscribing again and again, in practice, a series of l's and w's and m's, day after day the line repeated in delicate rills.

  William Forrester walked across the garden one early August afternoon to find Helen Loomis writing with great care at the tea table.

  She put aside her pen and ink.

  "I've been writing you a letter," she said.

  "Well, my being here saves you the trouble."

  "No, this is a special letter. Look at it." She showed him the blue envelope, which she now sealed and pressed flat. "Remember how it looks. When you receive this in the mail, you'll know I'm dead."

  "That's no way to talk, is it?"

  "Sit down and listen to me."

  He sat.

  "My dear William," she said, under the parasol shade. "In a few days I will be dead. No." She put up her hand. "I don't want you to say a thing. I'm not afraid. When you live as long as I've lived you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I'd never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can't say I'm greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don't fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it." She motioned with her hands. "But enough of that. The important thing is that I shan't be seeing you again. There will be no services. I believe that a woman who has passed through that particular door has as much right to privacy as a woman who has retired for the night."

  "You can't predict death," he said at last.

  "For fifty years I've watched the grandfather clock in the hall, William. After it is wound I can predict to the hour when it will stop. Old people are no different. They can feel the machinery slow down and the last weights shift. Oh, please don't look that way--please don't."

  "I can't help it," he said.

  "We've had a nice time, haven't we? It has been very special here, talking every day. It was that much-overburdened and worn phrase referred to as a 'meeting of the minds.'" She turned the blue envelope in her hands. "I've always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It's essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don't know. I only know there has been your mind here and my mind here, and the afternoons have been like none I can remember. There is still so much to talk about, but we must save it for another time."

  "We don't seem to have much time now."

  "No, but perhaps there will be another time. Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. The cogs miss, the wheels turn, and lives interlace too early or too late. I lived too long, that much is certain. And you were born either too early or too late. It was a terrible bit of timing. But perhaps I am being punished for being a silly girl. Anyway, the next spin around, wheels might function right again. Meantime you must find a nice girl and be married and be happy. But you must promise me one thing."

  "Anything."

  "You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. If it is at all convenient, die before you're fifty. It may take a bit of doing. But I advise this simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very, very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main Street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again? I don't think we could go through any more afternoons like these we've had, no matter how pleasant, do you? A thousand gallons of tea and five hundred biscuits is enough for one friendship. So you must have an attack of pneumonia some time in about twenty years. For I don't know how long they let you linger on the other side. Perhaps they send you back immediately. But I shall do my best, William, really I shall. And everything put right and in balance, do you know what might happen?"

  "You tell me."

  "Some afternoon in 1985 or 1990 a young man named Tom Smith or John Green or a name like that, will be walking downtown and will stop in the drugstore and order, appropriately, a dish of some unusual ice cream. A young girl the same age will be sitting there and when she hears the name of that ice cream, something will happen. I can't say what or how. She won't know why or how, assuredly. Nor will the young man. It will simply be that the name of that ice cream will be a very good thing to both of them. They'll talk. And later, when they know each other's names, they'll walk from the drugstore together."

  She smiled at him.

  "This is all very neat, but forgive an old lady for tying things in neat packets. It's a silly trifle to leave you. Now let's talk of something else. What shall we talk about? Is there any place in the world we haven't traveled to yet? Have we been to Stockholm?"

  "Yes, it's a fine town."

  "Glasgow? Yes? Where then?"

  "Why not Green Town, Illinois?" he said. "Here. We haven't really visited our own town together at all."

  She settled back, as did he, and she said, "I'll tell you how it was, then, when I was only nineteen, in this town, a long time ago...."

  It was a night in winter and she was skating lightly over a pond of white moon ice, her imag
e gliding and whispering under her. It was a night in summer in this town of fire in the air, in the cheeks, in the heart, your eyes full of the glowing and shutting-off color of fireflies. It was a rustling night in October, and there she stood, pulling taffy from a hook in the kitchen, singing, and there she was, running on the moss by the river, and swimming in the granite pit beyond town on a spring night, in the soft deep warm waters, and now it was the Fourth of July with rockets slamming the sky and every porch full of now red-fire, now blue-fire, now white-fire faces, hers dazzling bright among them as the last rocket died.

  "Can you see all these things?" asked Helen Loomis. "Can you see me doing them and being with them?"

  "Yes," said William Forrester, eyes closed. "I can see you."

  "And then," she said, "and then ..."

  Her voice moved on and on as the afternoon grew late and the twilight deepened quickly, but her voice moved in the garden and anyone passing on the road, at a far distance, could have heard its moth sound, faintly, faintly....

  Two days later William Forrester was at his desk in his room when the letter came. Douglas brought it upstairs and handed it to Bill and looked as if he knew what was in it.

  William Forrester recognized the blue envelope, but did not open it. He simply put it in his shirt pocket, looked at the boy for a moment, and said, "Come on, Doug; my treat."

  They walked downtown, saying very little, Douglas preserving the silence he sensed was necessary. Autumn, which had threatened for a time, was gone. Summer was back full, boiling the clouds and scouring the metal sky. They turned in at the drugstore and sat at the marble fountain. William Forrester took the letter out and laid it before him and still did not open it.

  He looked out at the yellow sunlight on the concrete and on the green awnings and shining on the gold letters of the window signs across the street, and he looked at the calendar on the wall. August 27, 1928. He looked at his wrist watch and felt his heart beat slowly, saw the second hand of the watch moving moving with no speed at all, saw the calendar frozen there with its one day seeming forever, the sun nailed to the sky with no motion toward sunset whatever. The warm air spread under the sighing fans over his head. A number of women laughed by the open door and were gone through his vision, which was focused beyond them at the town itself and the high courthouse clock. He opened the letter and began to read.

  He turned slowly on the revolving chair. He tried the words again and again, silently, on his tongue, and at last spoke them aloud and repeated them.

  "A dish of lime-vanilla ice," he said. "A dish of lime-vanilla ice."

  Douglas and Tom and Charlie came panting along the unshaded street.

  "Tom, answer me true, now."

  "Answer what true?"

  "What ever happened to happy endings?"

  "They got them on shows at Saturday matinees."

  "Sure, but what about life?"

  "All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That's a happy ending once a day. Next morning I'm up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I'm going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay."

  "I'm talking about Mr. Forrester and old Miss Loomis."

  "Nothing we can do; she's dead."

  "I know! But don't you figure someone slipped up there?"

  "You mean about him thinking she was the same age as her picture and her a trillion years old all the time? No, sir, I think it's swell!"

  "Swell, for gosh sakes?"

  "The last few days when Mr. Forrester told me a little here or a little there and I finally put it all together--boy, did I bawl my head off. I don't even know why. I wouldn't change one bit of it. If you changed it, what would we have to talk about? Nothing! And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over."

  "I heard everything now."

  "You just won't admit you like crying, too. You cry just so long and everything's fine. And there's your happy ending. And you're ready to go back out and walk around with folks again. And it's the start of gosh-knows-what-all! Any time now, Mr. Forrester will think it over and see it's just the only way and have a good cry and then look around and see it's morning again, even though it's five in the afternoon."

  "That don't sound like no happy ending to me."

  "A good night's sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug. You listen to Tom Spaulding, M.D."

  "Shut up, you guys," said Charlie. "We're almost there!"

  They turned a corner.

  Deep in winter they had looked for bits and pieces of summer and found it in furnace cellars or in bonfires on the edge of frozen skating ponds at night. Now, in summer, they went searching for some little bit, some piece of the forgotten winter.

  Rounding the corner, they felt a continual light rain spray down from a vast brick building to refresh them as they read the sign they knew by heart, the sign which showed them what they'd come searching for:

  SUMMER'S ICE HOUSE.

  Summer's Ice House on a summer day! They said the words, laughing, and moved to peer into that tremendous cavern where in fifty, one-hundred, and two-hundred-pound chunks, the glaciers, the icebergs, the fallen but not forgotten snows of January slept in ammoniac steams and crystal drippings.

  "Feel that," sighed Charlie Woodman. "What more could you ask?"

  For the winter breath was exhaled again and again about them as they stood in the glary day, smelling the wet wood platform with the perpetual mist shimmering in rainbows down from the ice machinery above.

  They chewed icicles that froze their fingers so they had to grip the ice in handkerchiefs and suck the linen.

  "All that steam, all that fog," whispered Tom. "The Snow Queen. Remember that story? Nobody believes in that stuff, Snow Queens, now. So don't be surprised if this is where she came to hide out because nobody believes in her anymore."

  They looked and saw the vapors rise and drift in long swathes of cool smoke.

  "No," said Charlie. "You know who lives here? Only one guy. A guy who gives you goose-pimples just to think of him." Charlie dropped his voice very low. "The Lonely One."

  "The Lonely One?"

  "Born, raised and lives here! All that winter, Tom, all that cold, Doug! Where else would he come from to make us shiver the hottest nights of the year? Don't it smell like him? You know darn well it does. The Lonely One ... the Lonely One ..."

  The mists and vapors curled in darkness.

  Tom screamed.

  "It's okay, Doug." Charlie grinned. "I just dropped a little bitty hunk of ice down Tom's back, is all."

  The courthouse clock chimed seven times. The echoes of the chimes faded.

  Warm summer twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. The stores closing and the streets shadowed. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.

  In the drugstore fans whispered in the high ceiling. In the rococo shade of porches, a few invisible people sat. Cigars glowed pink, on occasion. Screen doors whined their springs and slammed. On the purple bricks of the summer-night streets, Douglas Spaulding ran; dogs and boys followed after.

  "Hi, Miss Lavinia!"

  The boys loped away. Waving after them quietly, Lavinia Nebbs sat all alone with a tall cool lemonade in her white fingers, tapping it to her lips, sipping, waiting.

  "Here I am, Lavinia."

  She turned and there was Francine, all in snow white, at the bottom steps of the porch, in the smell of zinnias and hibiscus.

  Lavinia Nebbs locked her front door and, leaving her lemonade glass half empty on the porch, said, "It's a fine night for the movie."

  They walked down the street.

  "Where you goi
ng, girls?" cried Miss Fern and Miss Roberta from their porch over the way.

  Lavinia called back through the soft ocean of darkness: "To the Elite Theater to see CHARLIE CHAPLIN!"

  "Won't catch us out on no night like this," wailed Miss Fern. "Not with the Lonely One strangling women. Lock ourselves up in our closet with a gun."

  "Oh, bosh!" Lavinia heard the old women's door bang and lock, and she drifted on, feeling the warm breath of summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalks. It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not unpleasant sense of invasion.

  "Lavinia, you don't believe all that about the Lonely One, do you?"

  "Those women like to see their tongues dance."

  "Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsell's disappeared...."

  "Hattie McDollis was a silly girl, walked off with a traveling man, I bet."

  "But the others, all of them, strangled, their tongues sticking out their mouths, they say."

  They stood upon the edge of the ravine that cut the town half in two. Behind them were the lit houses and music, ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies and dark.

  "Maybe we shouldn't go to the show tonight," said Francine. "The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don't like that ravine. Look at it, will you!"

  Lavinia looked and the ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day; there was a great moving hum, a bumbling and murmuring of creature, insect, or plant life. It smelled like a greenhouse, of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quicksands. And always the black dynamo humming, with sparkles like great electricity where fireflies moved on the air.

  "It won't be me coming back through this old ravine tonight late, so darned late; it'll be you, Lavinia, you down the steps and over the bridge and maybe the Lonely One there."