The Toynbee Convector Page 7

  Took a lot of time and sweat and trouble, and now we’ve got it all one brick on another and what happens? BANG!”

  “It won’t happen to us, I bet,” I said.

  “No?” Father snorted. “Why not?”

  “It just couldn’t” I said.

  “You two leave oft” Mom nodded at me. “You’re too young to understand.” She nodded at Pop. “You’re old enough to know better.” We ate in silence. Then I said to Pop, “What was it like before this town was here?”

  “Nothing at all. Just the lake and the hills is all.”

  “Indians?”

  “Not many around here. Just empty woods and hills is all.”

  “Pass the syrup,” said Mom.

  * * *

  “Whambo!” cried RT “I’m an atom bomb! Boom!”

  We were waiting in line at the Elite theater. It was the biggest day of the year. We had lugged pop all morning at the circus to earn show tickets. Now, in the afternoon, we were seeing cowboys and Indians on the movie screen, and, this evening, the circus itself! We felt rich and we laughed all the time. RT kept squinting through his atomic ring, yelling, “Whoom! You’re dis integrated!”

  Cowboys chased Indians across the screen. Half an hour later the Indians chased the cowboys back the other way. After everybody was tired of stomping, the cartoon came on, and then a newsreel.

  “Look, the atom bomb!” RT settled down for the first time. The big gray cloud lifted on the screen, blew apart, battleships and cruisers burst open and rain fell.

  RT held my arm tight, staring up at the burning whiteness. “Ain’t that something, Doug, ain’t it?” He jabbed my ribs.

  “It’s a whooperdoo, all right,” I said, jabbing him back, giggling. “Wish I had an atom bomb! Blooie, there goes the school!”

  “Bam! Goodbye Clara Holmquist!”

  “Bang! There goes Officer O’Rourkel”

  * * *

  For supper there were Swedish meatballs* hot buns, Boston beans and green salad. Father looked very serious and strange and tried to bring up some important scientific facts he had read in a magazine, but Mom shook her head.

  I watched Fop. “You feeling okay, Pop?”

  “I’m going to cancel our paper subscription,” said Mom. “You’re worrying yourself right into ulcers. You hear me, Dad?”

  “Boy,” I said, “did I see film! The atom bomb blew up a whole battleship down at the Elite.”

  Father dropped his fork and stared at me. “Sometimes, Douglas, you have the uncanny ability to say just the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

  I saw Mother squinting at me to catch my eye. “It’s late,” she said. “You’d better run on to the circus.”

  As I was getting my hat and coat I heard Father say in a low and thoughtful voice, “How would it be to sell the business? You know, we’ve always wanted to travel; go to Mexico maybe. A small town. Settle down.”

  “You’re talking like a child,” whispered Mother. “I won’t hear you carry on this way.”

  “I know it’s foolish. Don’t mind me. But you’re right; better cancel the paper.”

  A wind was blowing the trees half over and the stars were all out and the circus lay in the country hills, in the meadow, like a big toadstool. Red Tongue and I had popcorn in one hand, taffy in the other, and cotton candy on our chins. “Lookit my beard!” Red Tongue shouted. Everybody was talking and pushing under the bright light bulbs and a man smacked a canvas with a bamboo cane and shouted about The Skeleton, The Blubber Lady, The Illustrated Man, The Seal Boy, while RT and I jostled through to the lady who tore our tickets in half.

  We balanced our way up to sit on the slat seats just when the bass drums exploded and the jeweled elephants lumbered out, and from then on there were hot searchlights, men shooting from fiery howitzers, ladies hung by their white teeth imitating butterflies high up in the clouds of cigarette smoke while trapeze men rode back and forth among the ropes and poles, and lions trotted softly around the sawdust-floored cage while the trainer in white pants shot smoke and flame at them from a silver pistol. “Look!” RT and I cried, blinking here, gaping there, chuckling, oohing, aahing, amazed, incredulous, surprised, and entertained, out of breath, eyes wide, mouths open. Chariots roared around the track, clowns jumped from burning hotels, grew hair, changed from giants to midgets in a steam box. The band crashed and tooted and hooted and everywhere was color and warmth and sequins shining and the crowd thundering.

  But along about the end of the show I looked up. And there, behind me, was a little hole in the canvas. And through that hole I could see the old meadowland, the wind blowing over it and the stars shining alone out there. The cold wind tugged at the tent very gently. And all of a sudden, turning back to the warm riot all around me, I was cold too. I heard Red Tongue laughing beside me and I half-saw some men riding a silver bike on a high, far-away, thin thread, the snare drum going tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat, everyone quiet. And when that was over, there were two hundred clowns whacking each other’s heads with bats and Red Tongue almost fell from his seat, screaming with it. I sat there and didn’t move and at last Red Tongue turned and looked at me and said, “Hey, what’s wrong, Doug?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I shook myself. I looked up at the red circus poles and the rope lines and the flaring lights. I looked at the zinc-oxide clowns and made myself laugh. “Lookit there, RT, that fat one over there!”

  The band played “The Old Gray Mare She Ain’t What She Used to Be.”

  “It’s all over,” said Red Tongue, breathlessly.

  We sat while the thousands of stunned people walked away mumbling and laughing and pressing at each other. The tent was thick with cigar smoke and the musical instruments lay curled up and abandoned for a moment on the wooden dock where the band had shocked us with wave after wave of brass.

  We didn’t move because neither of us wanted it to be over.

  “Guess we better go/’ said RT, not stirring.

  “Let’s wait,” I said, tonelessly, not looking at anything. I felt the wood slat aching under my bottom after the long strange hours of music and color. Men were moving and slapping the collapsing chairs down into themselves to be toted away. The canvas strippings were being unhooked. Everywhere was the jingle and the snap and clatter of the circus felling apart

  The tent was empty.

  We stood on the midway, the wind blowing dust in our eyes, leaves whipping off the trees. And the wind carried away all the dead leaves and all the restless people. The sideshow bulbs blinked off. We walked to the top of a nearby hill and stood there in the windy dark, our teeth chattering, watching the blue lights drift in the blackness, the white shapes of elephants floating, the sounds of men cursing and stakes being pried up. And then, like an immense sighing bellows, the main tent settling to earth.

  An hour later the gravel road was amove with cars and trucks and golden cages. The pale meadow lay empty. The moon was rising and rime formed over every wet thing. RT and I walked slowly down across the meadow, smelling the sawdust “That’s all that’s left,” said Red Tongue. “Sawdust.”

  “Here’s a stake hole,” I said. I pointed. “There’s another.”

  “You’d never know they were ever here,” said RT. “It’s Wee making it up in your mind.” The wind blew across the empty meadow and we stood watching the black trees shake. There was not a light or a sound; even all of the circus smell had finally blown away.

  “Welp,” said RT, scuffing his shoes. “Well get the tar beat out of us if we ain’t home an hour ago!” He smiled.

  We walked back together down the lonely country road, the wind at our backs, our hands deep in our pockets, our heads down. We walked past the deep silent ravine and then we walked through the little streets of the town, past sleeping houses, where here and there a radio quietly played, and there was the sound of a last cricket, and our heels thumping on the rough bricks in the middle of the long street, under the swaying, dim arc lamps at each corner.

 
I looked at all the houses and all the picket fences and all the slanting roofs and lighted windows and I looked at every tree and at all the bricks under my feet. I looked at my shoes and I looked over at RT trudging beside me, his teeth chattering. And I saw the courthouse clock a mile away, lifting up its moist white face in the moonlight, all the municipal buildings black and big. “G’night, Doug.” I didn’t answer as RT walked slowly on down the street between the houses at midnight and turned a far corner.

  I crept upstairs and was in bed in a minute, looking out through my window at the town.

  My brother Skip must have heard me crying for a long time before he put his hand over to feel my arm. “What’s wrong, Doug?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I sobbed quietly, eyes closed. “Just the circus.” Skip waited. The wind blew around the house. “What about it?” he asked.

  “Nothing—except it won’t come again.”

  “Sure it will,” he said.

  “No, it’s gone. And it won’t come back again. It’s all gone where it was, nothing of it left.”

  “Try to get some sleep.” Skip turned over. I stopped crying. Somewhere, across town, a few windows were still glowing. Down at the rail station, an engine hooted and started and went rushing off between the hills.

  I waited in the dark room, holding my breath, while one by silent one, the small, far-away windows of the little houses went dark.

  The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair

  He called her Stanley, she called him Ollie.

  That was the beginning, that was the end, of what we will call the Laurel and Hardy love affair.

  She was twenty-five, he was thirty-two when they met at one of those dumb cocktail parties where everyone wonders what they are doing there. But no one goes home, so everyone drinks too much and lies about how grand a late afternoon it all was.

  They did not, as often happens, see each other across a crowded room, and if there was romantic music to background their collision, it couldn’t be heard. For everyone was talking at one person and staring at someone else.

  They were, in feet, ricocheting through a forest of people, but finding no shade trees. He was on his way for a needed drink, she was eluding a love-sick stranger, when they locked paths in the exact center of the fruitless mob. They dodged left and right a few times, then laughed and he, on impulse, seized his tie and twiddled it at her, wiggling his fingers. Instantly, smiling, she lifted her hand to pull the top of her hair into a frouzy tassel, blinking and looking as if she had been struck on the head.

  “Stan!” he cried, in recognition.

  “Ollie!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been?”

  “Why don’t you do something to help me!” he exclaimed, making wide fat gestures.

  They grabbed each other’s arms, laughing again.

  “I—” she said, and her face brightened even more.

  “I—I know the exact place, not two miles from here, where Laurel and Hardy, in nineteen thirty, carried that piano crate up and down one hundred and fifty steps!”

  “Well,” he cried, “let’s get out of here!”

  His car door slammed, his car engine roared.

  Los Angeles raced by in late afternoon sunlight.

  He braked the car where she told him to park. “Here!”

  “I can’t believe it,” he murmured, not moving. He peered around at the sunset sky. Lights were coming on all across Los Angeles, down the hill. He nodded. “Are those the steps?”

  “All one hundred and fifty of them.” She climbed out of the open-topped car. “Come on, Ollie.”

  “Very well,” he said, “Stan.”

  They walked over to the bottom of yet another hill and gazed up along the steep incline of concrete steps toward the sky. The faintest touch of wetness rimmed his eyes. She was quick to pretend not to notice, but she took his elbow. Her voice was wonderfully quiet:

  “Go on up,” she said, “Go on. Go.”

  She gave him a tender push.

  He started up the steps, counting, and with each half-whispered count, his voice took on an extra decibel of joy. By the time he reached fifty-seven he was a boy playing a wondrous old-new game, and he was lost in time, and whether he was carrying the piano up the hill or whether it was chasing him down, he could not say.

  “Hold it!” he heard her call, far away, “right there!”

  He held still, swaying on step fifty-eight, smiling wildly, as if accompanied by proper ghosts, and turned. “Okay,” she called, “now come back down.” He started down, color in his cheeks and a peculiar suffering of happiness in his chest. He could hear the piano following now.

  “Hold it right there!”

  She had a camera in her hands. Seeing it, his right hand flew instinctively to his tie to flutter it on the evening air.

  “Now, me!” she shouted, and raced up to hand him the camera. And he marched down and looked up and there she was, doing the thin shrug and the puzzled and hopeless face of Stan baffled by life but loving it all. He dieted the shutter, wanting to stay here forever.

  She came slowly down the steps and peered into his face.

  “Why,” she said, “you’re crying.”

  She placed her thumbs under his eyes to press the tears away. She tasted the result. “Yep,” she said. “Real tears.”

  He looked at her eyes which were almost as wet as his.

  “Another fine mess you’ve got us in,” he said.

  “Oh, Ollie,” she said.

  “Oh, Stan,” he said.

  He kissed her, gently.

  And then he said:

  “Are we going to know each other forever?”

  “Forever,” she said.

  And that was how the long love affair began.

  They had real names, of course, but those don’t matter, for Laurel and Hardy always seemed the best thing to call themselves.

  For the simple feet was that she was fifteen pounds underweight and he was always trying to get her to add a few pounds. And he was twenty pounds overweight and she was always trying to get him to take off more than his shoes. But it never worked and was finally a joke, the best land, which wound up being:

  “You’re Stan, no two ways about it, and I’m Ollie, let’s face it. And, oh God, dear young woman, let’s enjoy the mess, the wonderful mess, all the while we’re in!”

  It was, then, while it lasted, and it lasted some while, a French parfait, an American perfection, a wildness from which they would never recover to the end of their lives.

  From that twilight hour on the piano stairs on their days were long, heedless, and full of that amazing laughter that paces the beginning and the run-along rush of any great love affair. They only stopped laughing long enough to kiss and only stopped kissing long enough to laugh at how odd and miraculous it was to find themselves with no clothes to wear in the middle of a bed as vast as life and as beautiful as morning.

  And sitting there in the middle of warm whiteness, he shut his eyes and shook his head and declared, pompously:

  “I have nothing to say!”

  “Yes, you do!” she cried. “Say it!”

  And he said it and they fell off the edge of the earth.

  Their first year was pure myth and fable, which would grow outsize when remembered thirty years on. They went to see new films and old films, but mainly Stan and Ollie. They memorized all the best scenes and shouted them back and forth as they drove around midnight Los Angeles. He spoiled her by treating her childhood growing up in Hollywood as very special, and she spoiled him by pretending that his yesterday on roller skates out front of the studios was not in the past but right now.

  She proved it one night On a whim she asked him where he had roller-skated as a boy and collided with W. C. Fields. Where had he asked Fields for his autograph, and where was it that Fields signed the book, handed it back, and cried, “There you are, you little son-of-a-bitch!”

  “Drive me there,” she said.

  And at ten o’clock that night they got
out of the car in front of Paramount Studio and he pointed to the pavement near the gate and said, “He stood there,” and she gathered him in her arms and kissed him and said, gentry, “Now where was it you had your picture taken with Marlene Dietrich?”

  He walked her fifty feet across the street from the studio. “In the late afternoon sun,” he said, “Marlene stood here.” And she kissed him again, longer this time, and the moon rising like an obvious magic trick, filling the street in front of the empty studio. She let her soul flow over into him like a tipped fountain, and he received it and gave it back and was glad.

  “Now,” she said, quietly, “where was it you saw Fred Astaire in nineteen thirty-five and Ronald Colman in nine teen thirty-seven and Jean Harlow in nineteen thirty-six?”

  And he drove her to those three different places all around Hollywood until midnight and they stood and she kissed him as if it would never end.

  And that was the first year. And during that year they went up and down those long piano steps at least once a month and had champagne picnics halfway up, and discovered an incredible thing:

  “I think it’s our mouths,” he said. “Until I met you, I never knew I had a mouth. Yours is the most amazing in the world, and it makes me feel as if mine were amazing, too. Were you ever really kissed before I kissed you?”

  “Never!”

  “Nor was I. To have lived this long and not known mouths.”

  “Dear mouth,” she said, “shut up and kiss.” But then at the end of the first year they discovered an even more incredible thing. He worked at an advertising agency and was nailed in one place. She worked at a travel agency and would soon be flying everywhere. Both were astonished they had never noticed before. But now that Vesuvius had erupted and the fiery dust was beginning to settle, they sat and looked at each other one night and she said, faintly:

  “Goodbye….”

  “What?” he asked.

  “I can see goodbye coming,” she said.