A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories Read online

  On the porch Mr. Smith murmured, “Strange. It’s not a storm. And I’m not disappointed. How come?”

  But Mr. Terle was down the path and to the car.

  “We thought you were … that is …” He trailed off. “Terle’s my name, Joe Terle.”

  She took his hand and looked at him with absolutely clear and unclouded light blue eyes like water that has melted from snow a thousand miles off and come a long way, purified by wind and sun.

  “Miss Blanche Hillgood,” she said, quietly. “Graduate of the Grinnell College, unmarried teacher of music, thirty years high-school glee club and student orchestra conductor, Green City, Iowa, twenty years private teacher of piano, harp, and voice, one month retired and living on a pension and now, taking my roots with me, on my way to California.”

  “Miss Hillgood, you don’t look to be going anywhere from here.”

  “I had a feeling about that.” She watched the two men circle the car cautiously. She sat like a child on the lap of a rheumatic grandfather, undecided. “Is there nothing we can do?”

  “Make a fence of the wheels, dinner gong of the brake drums, the rest’ll make a fine rock garden.”

  Mr. Fremley shouted from the sky. “Dead? I say, is the car dead? I can feel it from here! Well—it’s way past time for supper!”

  Mr. Terle put out his hand. “Miss Hillgood, that there is Joe Terle’s Desert Hotel, open twenty-six hours a day. Gila monsters and road runners please register before going upstairs. Get you a night’s sleep, free, we’ll knock our Ford off its blocks and drive you to the city come morning.”

  She let herself be helped from the car. The machine groaned as if in protest at her going. She shut the door carefully with a soft click.

  “One friend gone, but the other still with me. Mr. Terle, could you please bring her in out of the weather?”

  “Her, ma’am?”

  “Forgive me, I never think of things but what they’re people. The car was a man, I suppose, because it took me places. But a harp, now, don’t you agree, is female?”

  She nodded to the rear seat of the car. There, tilted against the sky like an ancient scrolled leather ship prow cleaving the wind, stood a case which towered above any driver who might sit up in front and sail the desert calms or the city traffics.

  “Mr. Smith,” said Mr. Terle, “lend a hand.”

  They untied the huge case and hoisted it gingerly out between them.

  “What you got there?” cried Mr. Fremley from above.

  Mr. Smith stumbled. Miss Hillgood gasped. The case shifted in the two men’s arms.

  From within the case came a faint musical humming.

  Mr. Fremley, above, heard. It was all the answer he needed. Mouth open, he watched the lady and the two men and their boxed friend sway and vanish in the cavernous porch below.

  “Watch out!” said Mr. Smith. “Some damn fool left his luggage here—” He stopped. “Some damn fool? Me!”

  The two men looked at each other. They were not perspiring any more. A wind had come up from somewhere, a gentle wind that fanned their shirt collars and flapped the strewn calendar gently in the dust.

  “My luggage …” said Mr. Smith.

  Then they all went inside.

  “More wine, Miss Hillgood? Ain’t had wine on the table in years.”

  “Just a touch, if you please.”

  They sat by the light of a single candle which made the room an oven and struck fire from the good silverware and the un-cracked plates as they talked and drank warm wine and ate.

  “Miss Hillgood, get on with your life.”

  “All my life,” she said, “I’ve been so busy running from Beethoven to Bach to Brahms, I never noticed I was twenty-nine. Next time I looked up I was forty. Yesterday, seventy-one. Oh, there were men; but they’d given up singing at ten and given up flying when they were twelve. I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn’t stand most men shuffling along with all the iron of the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. In their black business suits, you could hear them roll by like funeral wagons.”

  “So you flew away?”

  “Just in my mind, Mr. Terle. It’s taken sixty years to make the final break. All that time I grabbed onto piccolos and flutes and violins because they make streams in the air, you know, like streams and rivers on the ground. I rode every tributary and tried every freshwater wind from Handel on down to a whole slew of Strausses. It’s been the far way around that’s brought me here.”

  “How’d you finally make up your mind to leave?” asked Mr. Smith.

  “I looked around last week and said, ‘Why, look, you’ve been flying alone! No one in all Green City really cares if you fly or how high you go. It’s always, ‘Fine, Blanche,’ or ‘thanks for the recital at the PTA tea, Miss H.’ But no one really listening. And when I talked a long time ago about Chicago or New York, folks swatted me and laughed. ‘Why be a little frog in a big pond when you can be the biggest frog in all Green City!’ So I stayed on, while the folks who gave me advice moved away or died or both. The rest had wax in their ears. Just last week I shook myself and said, ‘Hold on! Since when do frogs have wings?’”

  “So now you’re headin’ west?” said Mr. Terle.

  “Maybe to play in pictures or in that orchestra under the stars. But somewhere I just must play at last for someone who’ll hear and really listen....”

  They sat there in the warm dark. She was finished, she had said it all now, foolish or not—and she moved back quietly in her chair.

  Upstairs someone coughed.

  Miss Hillgood heard, and rose.

  It took Mr. Fremley a moment to ungum his eyelids and make out the shape of the woman bending down to place the tray by his rumpled bed.

  “What you all talking about down there just now?”

  “I’ll come back later and tell you word for word,” said Miss Hillgood. “Eat now. The salad’s fine.” She moved to leave the room.

  He said, quickly, “You goin’ to stay?”

  She stopped half out the door and tried to trace the expression on his sweating face in the dark. He, in turn, could not see her mouth or eyes. She stood a moment longer, silently, then went on down the stairs.

  “She must not’ve heard me,” said Mr. Fremley.

  But he knew she had heard.

  Miss Hillgood crossed the downstairs lobby to fumble with the locks on the upright leather case.

  “I must pay you for my supper.”

  “On the house,” said Mr. Terle.

  “I must pay,” she said, and opened the case.

  There was a sudden flash of gold.

  The two men quickened in their chairs. They squinted at the little old woman standing beside the tremendous heart-shaped object which towered above her with its shining columbined pedestal atop which a calm Grecian face with antelope eyes looked serenely at them even as Miss Hillgood looked now.

  The two men shot each other the quickest and most startled of glances, as if each had guessed what might happen next. They hurried across the lobby, breathing hard, to sit on the very edge of the hot velvet lounge, wiping their faces with damp handkerchiefs.

  Miss Hillgood drew a chair under her, rested the golden harp gently back on her shoulder, and put her hands to the strings.

  Mr. Terle took a breath of fiery air and waited.

  A desert wind came suddenly along the porch outside, tilting the chairs so they rocked this way and that like boats on a pond at night.

  Mr. Fremley’s voice protested from above. “What’s goin’ on down there?”

  And then Miss Hillgood moved her hands.

  Starting at the arch near her shoulder, she played her fingers out along the simple tapestry of wires toward the blind and beautiful stare of the Greek goddess on her column, and then back. Then for a moment she paused and let the sounds drift up through the baked lobby air and into all the empty rooms.

  If Mr. Fremley shouted
, above, no one heard. For Mr. Terle and Mr. Smith were so busy jumping up to stand riven in the shadows, they heard nothing save the storming of their own hearts and the shocked rush of all the air in their lungs. Eyes wide, mouths dropped, in a kind of pure insanity, they stared at the two women there, the blind Muse proud on her golden pillar, and the seated one, gentle eyes closed, her small hands stretched forth on the air.

  Like a girl, they both thought wildly, like a little girl putting her hands out a window to feel what? Why, of course, of course!

  To feel the rain.

  The echo of the first shower vanished down remote causeways and roof drains, away.

  Mr. Fremley, above, rose from his bed as if pulled round by his ears.

  Miss Hillgood played.

  She played and it wasn’t a tune they knew at all, but it was a tune they had heard a thousand times in their long lives, words or not, melody or not. She played and each time her fingers moved, the rain fell pattering through the dark hotel. The rain fell cool at the open windows and the rain rinsed down the baked floor boards of the porch. The rain fell on the roof top and fell on hissing sand, it fell on rusted car and empty stable and dead cactus in the yard. It washed the windows and laid the dust and filled the rain barrels and curtained the doors with beaded threads that might part and whisper as you walked through. But more than anything the soft touch and coolness of it fell on Mr. Smith and Mr. Terle. Its gentle weight and pressure moved them down and down until it had seated them again. By its continuous budding and prickling on their faces it made them shut up their eyes and mouths and raise their hands to shield it away. Seated there, they felt their heads tilt slowly back to let the rain fall where it would.

  The flash flood lasted a minute, then faded away as the fingers trailed down the loom, let drop a few last bursts and squalls and then stopped.

  The last chord hung in the air like a picture taken when lightning strikes and freezes a billion drops of water on their downward flight. Then the lightning went out. The last drops fell through darkness in silence.

  Miss Hillgood took her hands from the strings, her eyes still shut.

  Mr. Terle and Mr. Smith opened their eyes to see those two miraculous women way over there across the lobby somehow come through the storm untouched and dry.

  They trembled. They leaned forward as if they wished to speak. They looked helpless, not knowing what to do.

  And then a single sound from high above in the hotel corridors drew their attention and told them what to do.

  The sound came floating down feebly, fluttering like a tired bird beating its ancient wings.

  The two men looked up and listened.

  It was the sound of Mr. Fremley.

  Mr. Fremley, in his room, applauding.

  It took five seconds for Mr. Terle to figure out what it was, then he nudged Mr. Smith and began, himself, to beat his palms together. Then two men struck their hands in mighty explosions. The echoes ricocheted around about in the hotel caverns above and below, striking walls, mirrors, windows, trying to fight free of the rooms.

  Miss Hillgood opened her eyes now, as if this new storm had come on her in the open, unprepared.

  The men gave their own recital. They smashed their hands together so fervently it seemed they had fistfuls of firecrackers to set off, one on another. Mr. Fremley shouted. Nobody heard. Hands winged out, banged shut again and again until fingers puffed up and the old men’s breath came short and they put their hands at last on their knees, a heart pounding inside each one.

  Then, very slowly, Mr. Smith got up and still looking at the harp, went outside and carried in the suitcases. He stood at the foot of the lobby stairs looking for a long while at Miss Hillgood. He glanced down at her single piece of luggage resting there by the first tread. He looked from her suitcase to her and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  Miss Hillgood looked at her harp, at her suitcase, at Mr. Terle, and at last back to Mr. Smith.

  She nodded once.

  Mr. Smith bent down and with his own luggage under one arm and her suitcase in the other, he started the long slow climb up the stairs in the gentle dark. As he moved, Miss Hillgood put the harp back on her shoulder and either played in time to his moving or he moved in time to her playing, neither of them knew which.

  Half up the flight, Mr. Smith met Mr. Fremley who, in a faded robe, was testing his slow way down.

  Both stood there, looking deep into the lobby at the one man on the far side in the shadows, and the two women further over, no more than a motion and a gleam. Both thought the same thoughts.

  The sound of the harp playing, the sound of the cool water falling every night and every night of their lives, after this. No spraying the roof with the garden hose now any more. Only sit on the porch or lie in your night bed and hear the falling … the falling … the falling…

  Mr. Smith moved on up the stair; Mr. Fremley moved down.

  The harp, the harp. Listen, listen!

  The fifty years of drought were over.

  The time of the long rains had come.

  Chrysalis

  Rockwell didn’t like the room’s smell. Not so much McGuire’s odor of beer, or Hartley’s unwashed, tired smell—but the sharp insect tang rising from Smith’s cold green-skinned body lying stiffly naked on the table. There was also a smell of oil and grease from the nameless machinery gleaming in one corner of the small room.

  The man Smith was a corpse. Irritated, Rockwell rose from his chair and packed his stethoscope. “I must get back to the hospital. War rush. You understand, Hartley. Smith’s been dead eight hours. If you want further information call a post-mortem—”

  He stopped as Hartley raised a trembling, bony hand. Hartley gestured at the corpse—this corpse with brittle hard green shell grown solid over every inch of flesh. “Use your stethoscope again, Rockwell. Just once more. Please.”

  Rockwell wanted to complain, but instead he sighed, sat down, and used the stethoscope. You have to treat fellow doctors politely. You press your stethoscope into cold green flesh, pretending to listen—

  The small, dimly lit room exploded around him. Exploded in one green cold pulsing. It hit Rockwell’s ears like fists. It hit him. He saw his own fingers jerk over the recumbent corpse.

  He heard a pulse.

  Deep in the dark body the heart beat once. It sounded like an echo in fathoms of sea water.

  Smith was dead, unbreathing, mummified. But at the core of that deadness—his heart lived. Lived, stirring like a small unborn baby!

  Rockwell’s crisp surgeon’s fingers darted rapidly. He bent his head. In the light it was dark-haired, with flecks of gray in it. He had an even, level, nice-looking face. About thirty-five. He listened again and again, with sweat coming cold on his smooth cheeks. The pulse was not to be believed.

  One heartbeat every thirty-five seconds.

  Smith’s respiration—how could you believe that, too, one breath of air every four minutes. Lungcase movement imperceptible. Body temperature?

  Sixty degrees.

  Hartley laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. More like an echo that had gotten lost. “He’s alive,” he said tiredly. “Yes, he is. He almost fooled me many times. I injected adrenaline to speed that pulse, but it was no use. He’s been this way for twelve weeks. And I couldn’t stand keeping him a secret any longer. That’s why I phoned you, Rockwell. He’s—unnatural.”

  The impossibility of it overwhelmed Rockwell with an inexplicable excitement. He tried to lift Smith’s eyelids. He couldn’t. They were webbed with epidermis. So were the lips. So were the nostrils. There was no way for Smith to breathe—

  “Yet, he’s breathing.” Rockwell’s voice was numb. He dropped his stethoscope blankly, picked it up, and saw his fingers shaking.

  Hartley grew tall, emaciated, nervous over the table. “Smith didn’t like my calling you. I called anyway. Smith warned me not to. Just an hour ago.”

  Rockell’s eyes dilated into hot black circles. “How coul
d he warn you? He can’t move.”

  Hartley’s face, all razor-sharp bone, hard jaw, tight squinting gray eyes, twitched nervously. “Smith—thinks. I know his thoughts. He’s afraid you’ll expose him to the world. He hates me. Why? I want to kill him, that’s why. Here.” Hartley fumbled blindly for a blue-steel revolver in his rumpled, stained coat. “Murphy. Take this. Take it before I use it on Smith’s foul body!”

  Murphy pulled back, his thick red face afraid. “Don’t like guns. You take it, Rockwell.”

  Like a scalpel, Rockwell made his voice slash. “Put the gun away, Hartley. After three months tending one patient you’ve got a psychological blemish. Sleep’ll help that.” He licked his lips. “What sort of disease has Smith got?”

  Hartley swayed. His mouth moved words out slowly. Falling asleep on his feet, Rockwell realized. “Not diseased,” Hartley managed to say. “Don’t know what. But I resent him, like a kid resents the birth of a new brother or sister. He’s wrong. Help me. Help me, will you?”

  “Of course.” Rockwell smiled. “My desert sanitarium’s the place to check him over, good. Why—why Smith’s the most incredible medical phenomenon in history. Bodies just don’t act this way!”

  He got no further. Hartley had his gun pointed right at Rockwell’s stomach. “Wait. Wait. You—you’re not going to bury Smith! I thought you’d help me. Smith’s not healthy. I want him killed! He’s dangerous! I know he is!”

  Rockwell blinked. Hartley was obviously psychoneurotic. Didn’t know what he was saying. Rockwell straightened his shoulders, feeling cool and calm inside. “Shoot Smith and I’ll turn you in for murder. You’re overworked mentally and physically. Put the gun away.”

  They stared at one another.

  Rockwell walked forward quietly and took the gun, patted Hartley understandingly on the shoulder, and gave the weapon to Murphy, who looked at it as if it would bite him. “Call the hospital, Murphy. I’m taking a week off. Maybe longer. Tell them I’m doing research at the sanitarium.”

  A scowl formed in the red fat flesh of Murphy’s face. “What do I do with this gun?”