The Toynbee Convector Part 7

"Here comes a pretty girl, built one brick atop another! Quick!" Grandpa tightened his lids. "Most beautiful girl in the world!" Grandpa couldn't help but open one eye. "Ah!" said everyone. "Right, Grandpa?"

"Nope!"

The young Woman curved this way and that, leaning as the train pushed or pulled her; as pretty as something you might win at a carnival by knocking the milk bottles down.

"Bos.h.!.+" Grandpa slammed his windows shut.

"Open, Sesame!"

Instantly, within, he felt his eyeb.a.l.l.s redirected.

"Let go!" shouted Grandpa. "Grandma'll kill me!"

"She'll never know know!"

The young woman turned as if called. She lurched back as if she might fell on all all of them. "Stop!" cried Grandpa. "Cecy's with us! She's innocent and-" of them. "Stop!" cried Grandpa. "Cecy's with us! She's innocent and-"

"Innocent!" The great attic rocked with laughter.

"Grandfather," said Cecy, very softly. "With all the night excursions I have made, all the traveling I have done, I am not-"

"Innocent," said the four cousins.

"Look here!" protested Grandpa.

"No, you look," whispered Cecy. "I have sewn my way through bedroom windows on a thousand summer nights. I have lain in cool s...o...b..ds of white pillows and sheets, and I have swum unclothed in rivers on August noons and lain on riverbanks for birds to see-"

"I-" Grandpa screwed his fists into his ears-"will not listen!"

"Yes." Cecy's voice wandered in cool meadows remembering. "I have been in a girl's warm summer face and looked out at a young man, and I have been in that same young man, the same instant, breathing out fiery breaths, gazing at that forever summer girl. I have lived in mating mice or circling lovebirds or bleeding-heart doves. I have hidden in two b.u.t.terflies fused on a blossom of clover-"

"d.a.m.n!" Grandpa winced.

"I've been in sleighs on December midnights when snow fell and smoke plumed out the horses' pink nostrils and there were fur blankets piled high with six young people hidden warm and delving and wis.h.i.+ng and finding and-"

"Stop! I'm sunk!" said Grandpa.

"Bravo!" said the cousins. "More!"

"-and I have been inside a grand castle of bone and flesh-the most beautiful woman in the world...!"

Grandpa was amazed and held still.

For now it was as if snow fell upon and quieted him. He felt a stir of flowers about his brow, and a blowing of July morning wind about his ears, and all through his limbs a burgeoning of warmth, a growth of bosom about his ancient flat chest, a fire struck to bloom in the pit of his stomach. Now, as she talked, his lips softened and colored and knew poetry and might have let it pour forth in incredible rains, and his worn and iron-rusty fingers tum bled in his lap and changed to cream and milk and melting apple-snow. He looked down at them, stunned, clenched his fists to stop this womanish thing!

"No! Give me back my hands! Wash my mouth out with soap!"

"Enough talk," said an inner voice, Philip.

"We're wasting time," said Tom.

"Let's go say h.e.l.lo to that young lady across the aisle," said John. "All those in favor?"

"Aye!" said the Salt Lake Tabernacle choir from one single throat. Grandpa was yanked to his feet by unseen wires.

"Any dissenters?"

"Me!" thundered Grandpa.

Grandpa squeezed his eyes, squeezed his head, squeezed his ribs. His entire body was that incredibly strange bed that sank to smother its terrified victims. "Gotcha!"

The cousins ricocheted about in the dark.

"Help! Cecy! Light! Give us light! Cecy!"

"I'm here!" said Cecy.

The old man felt himself touched, twitched, tickled, now behind the ears, now the spine. Now his knees knocked, now his ankles cracked. Now his lungs filled with feathers, his nose sneezed soot.

"Will, his left leg, move! Tom, the right leg, hup hup! Philip, right arm, John, the left! Fling! Me for his flimsy turkey-bone body! Ready? Set!"

"Heave!"

"Double-time. Run!"

Grandpa ran.

But he didn't run across the aisle, he ran down it, gasping, eyes bright. "Wait!" cried the Greek chorus. "The lady's back there! Someone trip him! Who's got his legs? Will? Tom!"

Grandpa flung the vestibule door wide, leaped out on the windy platform and was about to hurl himself out into a meadow of swiftly flas.h.i.+ng sunflowers when: "Freeze! Statues!" said the chorus stuffed in his mouth. And statue he became on the backside of the swiftly vanis.h.i.+ng train.

A moment later, spun about, Grandpa found himself back inside. As the train rocketed around a curve, he sat on the young lady's hands.

"Excuse," Grandpa leaped up, "me-"

"Excused." The lady rearranged her sat-on hands.

"No trouble, please, no, no!" Grandpa collapsed on the seat across from her, eyes clammed shut. "d.a.m.n! h.e.l.l! Statues, everyone! Bats, back in the belfry! d.a.m.n!"

The cousins grinned and melted the wax in his ears.

"Remember," hissed Grandpa behind his teeth, "you're young in there, I'm a mummy out here!"

"But-" sighed the chamber quartet fiddling behind his lids-"well act to make you young!" He felt them light a fuse in his stomach, a bomb in his chest.

"No!"

Grandpa yanked a cord in the dark. A trapdoor popped wide. The cousins fell down into a rich and endless maze of color and remembrance. Three-dimensional shapes as rich and almost as warm as the girl across the aisle. The cousins fell, shouting.

"Watch it!"

"I'm lost!"

"Tom?"

"I'm somewhere in Wisconsin! How'd I get here here?"

"I'm on a Hudson River boat. William?"

Far off, William called: "London. My G.o.d! Newspapers say the date's August twenty-second, nineteen hundred!"

"Can't be! Cecy?!"

"Not Cecy! Me!" said Grandpa, everywhere at once. "You're still between my ears, dammit, and using my other times and places as guest towels. Mind your head, the ceilings are low!"

"Ah ha," said William. "And is this the Grand Canyon I gaze upon, or a wrinkle in your nut?"

"Grand Canyon," said Grandpa. "Nineteen twenty-one."

"A woman!" cried Tom, "stands before me!"

And indeed the woman was beautiful in the spring, two hundred years ago. Grandpa recalled no name. She had only been someone pa.s.sing as he hunted wild straw berries on a summer noon.

Tom reached out toward the beautiful memory.

"Get away!" shouted Grandpa.

And the girl's face, in the light summer air, flew apart She drifted away, away, vanis.h.i.+ng down the road, and at last gone.

"d.a.m.n and blast!" cried Tom.

The other cousins were in a rampage, opening doors, running paths, raising windows. "Look! Oh, my gos.h.!.+ Look!" they all shouted. The memories lay side by side, neat as sardines a million deep, a million wide. Put by in seconds, minutes, hours. Here a dark girl brus.h.i.+ng her hair. Here the same girl walking, running, or asleep. All her actions kept in honey-combs the color of her summer cheeks. The bright flash of her smile. You could pick her up, turn her round, send her away, call her back. All you had to say was Italy, 1797, and she danced through a warm pavilion, or swam in moonlit waters.

"Grandfatherl Does Grandma know about her?"

"There must must be other women!" be other women!"

"Thousands!" cried Grandpa.

Grandpa flung back a lid. "Here!"

A thousand women wandered through a department store.

"Well done, Grandpa!"

From ear to ear, Grandpa felt the rummaging and racing over mountains, scoured deserts, down alleys, through cities.

Until John seized one lone and lovely lady by the arm.

He caught a woman by the hand.

"Stop!" Grandpa rose up with a roar. The people on the train stared at him.

"Got you!" said John.

The beautiful woman turned.

"Fool!" snarled Grandpa.

The lovely woman's flesh burned away. The upraised chin grew gaunt, the cheeks hollow, the eyes sank in wrinkles.

John drew back. "Grandmother, it's you you!"

"Cecy!" Grandpa was trembling violently. "Stash John in a bird, a stone, a well! Anywhere, but not in my d.a.m.n fool head! Now!"

"Out you go, John!" said Cecy.

And John vanished.

Into a robin singing on a pole that flashed by the train window.

Grandmother stood withered in darkness. Grandpa's gentle inward gaze touched her again, to reclothe her younger flesh. New color poured into her eyes, cheeks, and hair. He hid her safely away in a nameless and far-off orchard.

Grandpa opened his eyes.

Sunlight sprang in on the last three cousins.

The young woman still sat across the aisle.

Grandfather shut his eyes again but it was too late. The cousins rose up behind his gaze. "We're fools!" said Tom. "Why bother with old times! New is right there there! That girl! Yes?"

"Yes!" whispered Cecy. "Listen! I'll put Grandpa's mind over in her her body. Then bring her mind over to hide in Grandpa's head! Grandpa's body will sit here straight as a ramrod, and inside it well all be acrobats, gymnasts! fiends! The conductor will pa.s.s, never guessing! Grandpa will sit here. His head full of wild laughter, unclothed mobs while his real mind will be trapped over there in that fine girl's head! What fun in the middle of a train coach on a hot afternoon, with n.o.body knowing." body. Then bring her mind over to hide in Grandpa's head! Grandpa's body will sit here straight as a ramrod, and inside it well all be acrobats, gymnasts! fiends! The conductor will pa.s.s, never guessing! Grandpa will sit here. His head full of wild laughter, unclothed mobs while his real mind will be trapped over there in that fine girl's head! What fun in the middle of a train coach on a hot afternoon, with n.o.body knowing."

"Yes!" said everyone at once.

"No," said Grandpa, and pulled forth two white tab lets from his pocket and swallowed them.

"Stop him!" shouted William.

"Drat!" said Cecy. "It was such a fine, lovely, wicked plan."

"Good night, everybody," said Grandpa. The medicine was working. "And you-" he said, looking with gentle sleepiness at the young lady across the aisle. "You have just been rescued from a fete, young lady, worse than ten thousand deaths."