he called.
‘Ready!’ all replied.
‘Blast-off!’ He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming. ‘We’re moving! We’re off! Look!’
‘Here comes the Moon!’
The moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports. ‘There’s Earth!’ ‘There’s Mars!’
The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their cocoon hammocks.
‘Good,’ whispered Bodoni, alone.
He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.
He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into the inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?
No. Bodoni smiled.
All about the quivering rocket lay the junkyard.
Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junkyard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junkyard, manufacturing a magic dream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.
Maria stood in the kitchen window.
He waved to her and smiled.
He could not see if she waved or not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.
The sun was rising.
Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Silence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed, Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion in the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars come up under our ship, and the moons of Mars, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimensions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mirrors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.
He awoke.
Red Mars floated near the rocket.
‘Papa!’ The children thrashed to be free.
Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.
At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.
‘We are home,’ said Bodoni.
They walked across the junkyard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing. Perhaps they knew what he had done. Perhaps they guessed his wonderful magic trick. But if they knew, if they guessed, they never said. Now they only laughed and ran.
‘I have ham and eggs for all of you,’ said Maria, at the kitchen door.
‘Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!’
‘Yes,’ she said.
At bedtime the children gathered before Bodoni. ‘We want to thank you, Papa.’
‘It was nothing.’
‘We will remember it for always, Papa. We will never forget.’
Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. ‘What’s this?’ he cried.
‘You’re the best father in the world,’ she whispered.
‘Why?’
‘Now I see,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. ‘Is it a very lovely journey?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?’
‘Just a little one, perhaps,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Good night.’
‘Good night,’ said Fiorello Bodoni.
How it began with the children, old Mrs Bentley never knew. She often saw them, like moths and monkeys, at the grocer’s, among the cabbages and hung bananas, and she smiled at them and they smiled back. Mrs Bentley watched them making footprints in winter snow, filling their lungs with autumn smoke, shaking down blizzards of spring apple-blossoms, but felt no fear of them. As for herself, her house was in extreme good order, everything set to its station, the floors briskly swept, the foods neatly tinned, the hatpins thrust through cushions, and the drawers of her bedroom bureaus crisply filled with the paraphernalia of years.
Mrs Bentley was a saver. She saved tickets, old theater programs, bits of lace, scarves, rail transfers; all the tags and tokens of existence.
‘I’ve a stack of records,’ she often said. ‘Here’s Caruso. That was in 1916, in New York; I was sixty and John was still alive. Here’s June Moon, 1924, I think, right after John died.’
That was the huge regret of her life, in a way. The one thing she had most enjoyed touching and listening to and looking at she hadn’t saved. John was far out in the meadow country, dated and boxed and hidden under grasses, and nothing remained of him but his high silk hat and his cane and his good suit in the closet. So much of the rest of him had been devoured by moths.
But what she could keep she had kept. Her pink-flowered dresses crushed among moth balls in vast black trunks, and cut-glass dishes from her childhood – she had brought them all when she moved to this town five years ago. Her husband had owned rental property in a number of towns, and, like a yellow ivory chess piece, she had moved and sold one after another, until now she was here in a strange town, left with only the trunks and furniture, dark and ugly, crouched about her like the creatures of a primordial zoo.
The thing about the children happened in the middle of summer. Mrs Bentley, coming out to water the ivy upon her front porch, saw two cool-colored sprawling girls and a small boy lying on her lawn, enjoying the immense prickling of the grass.
At the very moment Mrs Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wineglasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun.
Mrs Bentley called, ‘Would you like some? Here!’ The ice-cream wagon stopped and she exchanged money for pieces of the original Ice Age. The children thanked her with snow in their mouths, their eyes darting from her buttoned-up shoes to her white hair.
‘Don’t you want a bite?’ said the boy.
‘No, child. I’m old enough and cold enough; the hottest day won’t thaw me,’ laughed Mrs Bentley.
They carried the miniature glaciers up and sat, three in a row, on the shady porch glider.
‘I’m Alice, she’s Jane, and that’s Tom Spaulding.’
‘How nice. And I’m Mrs Bentley. They called me Helen.’
They stared at her.
‘Don’t you believe they called me Helen?’ said the old lady.
‘I didn’t know old ladies had first names,’ said Tom, blinking.
Mrs Bentley laughed dryly.
‘You