"Goodbye, Helen."

He drove out of town. He was supposed to be in New York in five days to talk over the play he didn't want to write for Broadway, in order to rush back to Hollywood in time to not enjoy finishing a screenplay, so that he could rush to Mexico City for a quick vacation next December. Sometimes, he mused, I resemble those Mexican rockets dashing between the town buildings on a hot wire, bashing my head on one wall, turning, and zooming back to crash against another.

He found himself going seventy miles an hour suddenly, and cautioned it down to thirty-five, through rolling green noon country.

He took deep breaths of the clear air and pulled over to the side of the road. Far away, between immense trees, on the top of a meadow hill, he thought he saw, walking but motionless in the strange heat, a young woman, and then she was gone, and he wasn't certain she had been there at all.

It was one o'clock and the land was full of a great powerhouse humming. Darning needles flashed by the car windows, like p.r.i.c.kles of heat before his eyes. Bees swarmed and the gra.s.s bent under a tender wind. He opened the car door and stepped out into the straight heat.

Here was a lonely path that sang beetle sounds at late noon to itself, and there was a cool, shadowed forest waiting fifty yards from the road, from which blew a good, tunnel-moist air. On all sides were rolling clover hills and an open sky. Standing there, he could feel the stone dissolve in his arms and his neck, and the iron go out of his cold stomach, and the tremor cease in his fingers.

And then, suddenly, still further away, going over a forest hill, through a small rift in the brush, he saw the young woman again, walking and walking into the warm distances, gone.

He locked the car door slowly. He struck off into the forest, idly, drawn steadily by a sound that was large enough to fill the universe, the sound of a river going somewhere and not caring; the most beautiful sound of all.

When he found the river it was dark and light and dark and light, flowing, and he undressed and swam in it and then lay out on the pebbled bank drying, feeling relaxed. He put his clothes back on, leisurely, and then it came to him, the old desire, the old dream, when he was seventeen years old. He had often confided and repeated it to a friend: "I'd like to go walking some spring night-you know, one of those nights that are warm all night long. I'd like to walk. With a girl. Walk for an hour, to a place where you can barely hear or see anything. Climb a hill and sit Look at the stars. I'd like to hold the girl's hand. I'd like to smell the gra.s.s and the wheat growing in the fields, and know I was in the center of the entire country, in the very center of the United States, and towns all around and highways away off, but n.o.body knowing we're right there on top of that hill, in the gra.s.s, watching the night.

"And just holding her hand would be good. Can you understand that? Do you know that holding someone's hand can be the thing? Such a thing that your hands move while not moving. You can remember a thing like that, rather than any other thing about a night, all your life. Just holding hands can mean more. I believe it. When everything is repeated, and over, and familiar, it's the first things rather than the last that count.

"So, for a long time," he had continued, "I'd like to just sit there, not saying a word. There aren't any words for a night like that. We wouldn't even look at each other. We'd see the lights of the town far off and know that other people had climbed other hills before us and that there was nothing better in the world. Nothing could be made better; all of the houses and ceremonies and guarantees in the world are nothing compared to a night like this. The cities and the people in the rooms in the houses in those cities at night are one thing; the hills and the open air and the stars and holding hands are something else.

"And then, finally, without speaking, the two of you will turn your heads in the moonlight and look at each other.

"And so you're on the hill all night long. Is there anything really wrong with this, can you honestly say there is anything wrong?"

"No," said a voice, "the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it."

That was his friend, Joseph, speaking, fifteen years ago. Dear Joseph, with whom he had talked so many days through; their adolescent philosophizings, their problems of great import. Now Joseph was married and swallowed by the black streets of Chicago, and himself taken West by time, and all of their philosophy for nothing.

He remembered the month after he had married Helen. They had driven across country, the first and last time she had consented to the "brutal," as she called it, journey by automobile. In the moonlit evenings they had gone through the wheat country and the corn country of the Middle West and once, at twilight, looking straight ahead, Thomas had said, "What do you say, would you like to spend the night out?''

"Out?" Helen said.

"Here," he said, with a great appearance of casualness. He motioned his hand to the side of the road. "Look at all that land, the hills. It's a warm night. It'd be nice to sleep out."

"My G.o.d!" Helen had cried. "You're not serious?"

"I just thought."

"The d.a.m.n country's running with snakes and bugs.

What a way to spend the night, getting burrs in my stockings, tramping around some fanner's property."

"No one would ever know."

"But I'd know, my dear," said Helen.

"It was just a suggestion."

"Dear Tom, you were only joking, weren't you?"

"Forget I ever said anything," he said.

They had driven on in the moonlight to a boiling little night motel where moths fluttered about the raw electric lights. There had been an iron bed in a paint-smelling tiny room where you could hear the beer tunes from the roadhouse all night and hear the continental vans pounding by late, late toward dawn....

He walked through the green forest and listened to the various silences there. Not one silence, but several; the silence that the moss made underfoot, the silence the shadows made depending from the trees, the silence of small streams exploring tiny countries on all sides as he came into a clearing.

He found some wild strawberries and ate them. To h.e.l.l with the car, he thought. I don't care if someone takes it apart wheel by wheel, and carries it off. I don't care if the sun melts it into slag on the spot.

He lay down and cradled his head on his arms and went to sleep.

The first thing he saw when he wakened was his wrist.w.a.tch. Six forty-five. He had slept most of the day away. Cool shadows had crept up all about him. He shivered and moved to sit up and then did not move again, but lay there with his face upon his arm, looking ahead.

The girl who sat a few yards away from him, with her hands in her lap, smiled. "I didn't hear you come up," he said.

She had been very quiet.

For no reason at all in the world, except a secret reason, Thomas felt his heart pounding silently and swiftly.

She remained silent. He rolled over on his back and closed his eyes.

"Do you live near here?"

She lived not far away.

"Born and raised here?"

She had never been anywhere else.

"It's a beautiful country," he said.

A bird flew into a tree.

"Aren't you afraid?"

He waited but there was no answer.

"You don't know me," he said.

But on the other hand, neither did he know her.

"That's different," he said.

Why was it different?

"Oh, you know, it just is."

After what seemed half an hour of waiting, he opened his eyes and looked at her for a long while. "You are real, aren't you? I'm not dreaming this?"

She wanted to know where he was going.

"Somewhere I don't want to go."

Yes, that was what so many people said. So many pa.s.sed through on their way to somewhere they didn't like.

"That's me," he said. He raised himself slowly. "Do you know, I've just realized, I haven't eaten since early today."

She offered him the bread and cheese and cookies she was carrying from town. They didn't speak while he ate, and he ate very slowly, afraid that some motion, some gesture, some word, might make her run away. The sun was down the sky and the air was even fresher now, and he examined everything very carefully.

He looked at her and she was beautiful, twenty-one, fair, healthy, pink cheeked, and self-contained. The sun was gone. The sky lingered its colors for a time, while they sat in the clearing. At last he heard a whispering. She was getting up. She put out her hand to take his. He stood beside her and they looked at the woods around them and the distant hills.

They began to walk away from the path and the car, away from the highway and the town. A spring moon rose over the land while they were walking.

The breath of nightfall was rising up out of the separate blades of gra.s.s, a warm sighing of air, quiet and endless. They reached the top of the hill and without a word sat there watching the sky. He thought to himself that this was impossible, that such things did not happen; he wondered who she was, and what she was doing here.

Ten miles away, a train whistled in the spring night and went on its way over the dark evening earth, flashing a brief fire.

And then, again, he remembered the old story, the old dream, the thing he and his friend had discussed so many years ago. There must be one night in your life that you will remember forever. There must be one night for everyone. And if you know that the night is coming on and that this night will be that particular night, then take it and don't question it and don't talk about it to anyone ever after that. For if you let it pa.s.s it might not come again. Many have let it pa.s.s, many have seen it go by and have never seen another like it, when all the circ.u.mstances of weather, light, moon and time, of night hill and warm gra.s.s and train and town and distance were balanced upon the trembling of a finger.

He thought of Helen and he thought of Joseph. Joseph. Did it ever work out for you, Joseph; were you ever at the right place at the right time, and did all go well with you? There was no way of knowing; the brick city had taken Joseph and lost him in the tile subways and black elevaters and noise.

As for Helen, not only had she never known a night like this, but she had never dreamed of such a thing, there was no place in her mind for this.

So here I am, he thought quietly, thousands of miles from everything and everyone.

Across the soft black country now came the sound of a courthouse clock ringing the hour. One. Two. Three. One of those great stone courthouses that stood in the green square of every small American town at the turn of the century, cool stone in the summertime, high in the night sky, with round dial faces glowing in four directions. Five, six. He counted the bronze announcements of the hour, stopping at nine. Nine o'clock on a late spring night on a breathing, warm, moonlit hill in the interior of a great continent, his hand touching another hand, thinking, this year I'll be thirty-three. But it didn't come too late and I didn't let it pa.s.s, and this is the night.

Slowly now, carefully, like a statue coming to the, turning and turning still more, he saw her head move about so her eyes could look upon him. He felt his own head turning, also, as it had done so many times in his imagination. They gazed at each other for a long time.

He woke during the night. She was awake, near him.

"Who are you?" he whispered.

She said nothing.

"I could stay another night," he said.

But he knew that one can never stay another night. One night is the night and only one. After that, the G.o.ds turn their backs.

"I could come back in a year or so."

Her eyes were closed but she was awake.

"But I don't know who you are," he said.

"You could come with me," he said, "to New York."

But he knew she could never be there or anywhere but here, on this night. "And I can't stay here," he said, knowing that this was the truest and most empty part of all. He waited for a time and then said again, "Are you real? Are you really real?" They slept. The moon went down the sky toward morning.

He walked out of the hills and the forest at dawn, to find the car covered with dew. He unlocked it and climbed in behind the wheel, and sat for a moment, looking back at the path he had made in the wet gra.s.s. He moved over, preparatory to getting out of the car again. He put his hand on the inside of the door and gazed steadily out.

The forest was empty and still, the path was deserted, the highway was motionless and serene. There was no movement anywhere in a thousand miles.

He started the car motor and let it idle. The car was pointed east where the orange sun was now rising slowly.

"All right," he said, quietly. "Everyone, here I come. What a shame you're all still alive. What a shame the world isn't just hills and hills and nothing else to drive over but hills and never coming to a town."

He drove away east without looking back.

West of October

The four cousins, Tom, William, Philip, and John, had come to visit the Family at the end of summer. There was no room in the big old house, so they were stashed out on little cots in the barn, which shortly thereafter burned.

Now the Family was no ordinary family. Each member of it was more extraordinary than the last. To say that most of them slept days and worked at odd jobs nights, would fell short of commencement.

To remark that some of them could read minds, and some fly with lightnings to land with leaves, would be an understatement.

To add that some could not be seen in mirrors while others could be found in mult.i.tudinous shapes, sizes, and textures in the same gla.s.s, would merely repeat gossip that veered into truth.

There were uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents by the toadstool score and the mushroom dozen. They were just about every color you could mix in one restless night. Some were young and others had been around since the Sphinx first sank its stone paws deep in tidal sands.

In all, in numbers, background, inclination, and talent, a most incredible and miraculous mob. And the most incredible of them all was: Cecy.

Cecy. She was the reason, the real reason, the central reason for any of the Family to come visit, and not only to visit but to circle her and stay. For she was as mult.i.tudinous as a pomegranate. Her talent was single but kaleidoscopic. She was all the senses of all the creatures in the world. She was all the motion picture houses and stage play theaters and all the art galleries of time. You could ask almost anything of her and she would gift you with it.

Ask her to yank your soul like an aching tooth and drift it in clouds to cool your spirit, and yanked you were, drawn high to drift in such clouds as sowed rain to grow gra.s.s and seed-sprout flowers.

Ask her to seize that same soul and bind it in the flesh of a tree, and you awoke next morning with apples pop ping out of your branches and birds singing in your green-leafed head.

Ask to live in a frog, and you spent days afloat and nights croaking strange songs.

Ask to be pure rain and you fell on everything. Ask to be the moon and suddenly you looked down and saw your pale illumination bleaching lost towns to the color of tombstones and tuberoses and spectral ghosts.

Cecy. Who extracted your soul and pulled forth your impacted wisdom, and could transfer it to animal, vegetable, or mineral; name your poison.

No wonder the Family came. No wonder they stayed long past ranch, way beyond dinner, far into midnights the week after next!

And here were the four cousins, come to visit And along about sunset of the first day, each of them said, in effect: "Well?"

They were lined up by Cecy's bed in the great house, where she lay for long hours, both night and noon, because her talents were in such demand by both family and friends.