Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Ray Bradbury
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forest!? Albert Beam’s lips cracked with the joke of it. How fitting for him, for Junior!
The music rose high, higher, highest, and exploded from his mouth.
‘Ta-tah!’ sang Albert Beam.
He flung wide the curtain.
The ladies cried out in sweet alarms.
For there, starring in the last act of Revelations, was Albert Beam the Second.
Or perhaps, justifiably proud, Junior!
Unseen in years, he was an orchard of beauty and sweet Eden’s Garden, all to himself.
Was he both Apple and Snake?
He was!
Scenes from Krakatoa, the Explosion that Rocked the World teemed through the ladies’ sugar-plum minds. Lines like ‘Only God Can Make a Tree’ leaped forth from old poems. Cora seemed to recall the score from Last Days of Pompeii, Elizabeth the music from Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Emily, suddenly shocked back into 1927, babbled the inane words to ‘Lucky Lindy … Spirit of St. Louis, high, stay aloft … we’re with you …!’
The musical trio quieted into a sort of twilight-in-mid-morning-holy-hour, a time for veneration and loving regard. It almost seemed that a wondrous illumination sprang forth from the Source, the Shrine at which they gathered as motionless worshippers, praying that the moment would be prolonged by their silent alleluias.
And it was prolonged.
Albert Beam and Junior stood as one before the throng, a large smile on the old man’s face, a smaller one on Junior’s.
Time-travel shadowed the ladies’ faces.
Each remembered Monte Carlo or Paris or Rome or splash-dancing the Plaza Hotel fount that night centuries ago with Scott and Zelda. Suns and moons rose and set in their eyes and there was no jealousy, only lives long lost but brought back and encircled in this moment.
‘Well,’ everyone whispered, at last.
One by one, each of the three pal-friends stepped forward to kiss Albert Beam lightly on the cheek and smile up at him and then down at the Royal Son, that most Precious Member who deserved to be patted, but was not, in this moment, touched.
The three Grecian maids, the retired Furies, the ancient vest porch goddesses, stepped back a way to line up for a final view-halloo.
And the weeping began.
First Emily, then Cora, then Elizabeth, as all summoned back some midnight collision of young fools who somehow survived the crash.
Albert Beam stood amidst the rising salt sea, until the tears also ran free from his eyes.
And whether they were tears of somber remembrance for a past that was not a golden pavane, or celebratory wails for a present most salubrious and enchanting, none could say. They wept and stood about, not knowing what to do with their hands.
Until at last, like small children peering in mirrors to catch the strangeness and mystery of weeping, they ducked under to look at each other’s sobs.
They saw each other’s eyeglasses spattered with wet salt stars from the tips of their eyelashes.
‘Oh, hah!’
And the whole damned popcorn machine exploded into wild laughter.
‘Oh, heee!’
They turned in circles with the bends. They stomped their feet to get the barks and hoots of hilarity out. They became weak as children at four o’clock tea, that silly hour when anything said is the funniest crack in all the world and the bones collapse and you wander in dazed circles to fall and writhe in ecstasies of mirth on the floor.
Which is what now happened. The ladies let gravity yank them down to flag their hair on the parquetry, their last tears flung like bright comets from their eyes as they rolled and gasped, stranded on a morning beach.
‘Gods! Oh! Ah!’ The old man could not stand it. Their earthquake shook and broke him. He saw, in this final moment, that his pal, his dear and precious Junior, had at last in all the shouts and snorts and happy cries melted away like a snow memory and was now a ghost.
And Albert Beam grabbed his knees, sneezed out a great laugh of recognition at the general shape, size and ridiculousness of birthday-suit humans on an indecipherable earth, and fell.
He squirmed amidst the ladies, chuckling, flailing for air. They dared not look at each other for fear of merciless heart attacks from the seal barks and elephant trumpetings that echoed from their lips.
Waiting for their mirth to let go, they at last sat up to rearrange their hair, their smiles, their breathing and their glances.
‘Dear me, oh, dear, dear,’ moaned the old man, with a last gasp of relief. ‘Wasn’t that the best ever, the finest, the loveliest time we have ever had anytime, anywhere, in all the great years?’
All nodded ‘yes.’
‘But,’ said practical Emily, straightening her face, ‘drama’s done. Tea’s cold. Time to go.’
And they gathered to lift the old tentbones of the ancient warrior, and he stood among his dear ones in a glorious warm silence as they clothed him in his robe and guided him to the front door.
‘Why?’ wondered the old man. ‘Why? Why did Junior return on this day?’
‘Silly!’ cried Emily. ‘It’s your birthday!’
‘Well, happy me! Yes, yes.’ He mused. ‘Well, do you imagine, maybe, next year, and the next, will I be gifted the same?’
‘Well,’ said Cora.
‘We—’
‘Not in this lifetime,’ said Emily, tenderly.
‘Good-bye, dear Albert, fine Junior,’ said each.
‘Thanks for all of my life,’ said the old man.
He waved and they were gone, down the drive and off into the fine fair morning.
He waited for a long while and then addressed himself to his old pal, his good friend, his now sleeping forever companion.
‘Come on, Fido, here, boy, time for our pre-lunch nap. And, who knows, with luck we may dream wild dreams until tea!’
And, my God, he thought he heard the small voice cry, then won’t we be famished!?
‘We will!’
And the old man, half-asleep on his feet, and Junior already dreaming, fell flat forward into a bed with three warm and laughing ghosts …
And so slept.
Very late at night he heard the weeping on the lawn in front of his house. It was the sound of a woman crying. By its sound he knew it was not a girl or a mature woman, but the crying of someone eighteen or nineteen years old. It went on, then faded and stopped, and again started up, now moving this way or that on the late-summer wind.
He lay in bed listening to it until it made his eyes fill with tears. He turned over, shut his eyes, let the tears fall, but could not stop the sound. Why should a young woman be weeping long after midnight out there?
He sat up and the weeping stopped.
At the window, he looked down. The lawn was empty but covered with dew. There was a trail of footsteps across the lawn to the middle where someone had stood turning, and another trail going off toward the garden around the house.
The moon stood full in the sky and filled the lawn with its light, but there