porch, Mr Smith murmured, ‘Strange. It’s not a storm. And I’m not disappointed. How come?’
But Mr Terle was down the path and to the car.
‘We thought you were … that is …’ He trailed off. ‘Terle’s my name, Joe Terle.’
She took his hand and looked at him with absolutely clear and unclouded light-blue eyes like water that has melted from snow a thousand miles off and come a long way, purified by wind and sun.
‘Miss Blanche Hillgood,’ she said, quietly. ‘Graduate of the Grinnell College, unmarried teacher of music, thirty years high-school glee club and student orchestra conductor, Green City, Iowa, twenty years private teacher of piano, harp, and voice, one month retired and living on a pension and now, taking my roots with me, on my way to California.’
‘Miss Hillgood, you don’t look to be going anywhere from here.’
‘I had a feeling about that.’ She watched the two men circle the car, cautiously. She sat like a child on the lap of a rheumatic grandfather, undecided. ‘Is there nothing we can do?’
‘Make a fence of the wheels, dinner-gong of the brake drums, the rest’ll make a fine rock garden.’
Mr Fremley shouted from the sky. ‘Dead? I say, is the car dead? I can feel it from here! Well – it’s way past time for supper!’
Mr Terle put out his hand. ‘Miss Hillgood, that there is Joe Terle’s Desert Hotel, open twenty-six hours a day. Gila monsters and road runners please register before going upstairs. Get you a night’s sleep, free, we’ll knock our Ford off its blocks and drive you to the city come morning.’
She let herself be helped from the car. The machine groaned as if in protest at her going. She shut the door carefully, with a soft click.
‘One friend gone, but the other still with me. Mr Terle, could you please bring her in out of the weather?’
‘Her, ma’am?’
‘Forgive me, I never think of things but what they’re people. The car was a man, I suppose, because it took me places. But a harp, now, don’t you agree, is female?’
She nodded to the rear seat of the car. There, tilted against the sky like an ancient scrolled leather ship-prow cleaving the wind, stood a case which towered above any driver who might sit up in front and sail the desert calms or the city traffics.
‘Mr Smith,’ said Mr Terle, ‘lend a hand.’
They untied the huge case and hoisted it gingerly out between them.
‘What you got there?’ cried Mr Fremley from above.
Mr Smith stumbled. Miss Hillgood gasped. The case shifted in the two men’s arms.
From within the case came a faint musical humming.
Mr Fremley, above, heard. It was all the answer he needed. Mouth open, he watched the lady and the two men and their boxed friend sway and vanish in the cavernous porch below.
‘Watch out!’ said Mr Smith. ‘Some damn fool left his luggage here –’ He stopped. ‘Some damn fool? Me!’
The two men looked at each other. They were not perspiring any more. A wind had come up from somewhere, a gentle wind that fanned their shirt collars and flapped the strewn calendar gently in the dust.
‘My luggage …’ said Mr Smith.
Then they all went inside.
‘More wine, Miss Hillgood? Ain’t had wine on the table in years.’
‘Just a touch, if you please.’
They sat by the light of a single candle which made the room an oven and struck fire from the good silverware and the un-cracked plates as they talked and drank warm wine and ate.
‘Miss Hillgood, get on with your life.’
‘All my life,’ she said, ‘I’ve been so busy running from Beethoven to Bach to Brahms, I never noticed I was twenty-nine. Next time I looked up I was forty. Yesterday, seventy-one. Oh, there were men; but they’d given up singing at ten and given up flying when they were twelve. I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn’t stand most men shuffling along with all the iron in the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. In their black business suits, you could hear them roll by like funeral wagons.’
‘So you flew away?’
‘Just in my mind, Mr Terle. It’s taken sixty years to make the final break. All that time I grabbed on to piccolos and flutes and violins because they make streams in the air, you know, like streams and rivers on the ground. I rode every tributary and tried every fresh-water wind from Handel on down to a whole slew of Strausses. It’s been the far way around that’s brought me here.’
‘How’d you finally make up your mind to leave?’ asked Mr Smith.
‘I looked around last week and said, “Why, look, you’ve been flying alone ! No one in all Green City really cares if you fly or how high you go. It’s always, ‘Fine, Blanche,’ or ‘Thanks for the recital at the PTA tea, Miss H.’ But no one really listening.” And when I talked a long time ago about Chicago or New York, folks swatted me and laughed. “Why be a little frog in a big pond when you can be the biggest frog in all Green City!” So I stayed on, while the folks who gave me advice moved away or died or both. The rest had wax in their ears. Just last week I shook myself and said, “Hold on! Since when do frogs have wings?”’
‘So now you’re headin’ west?’ said Mr Terle.
‘Maybe to play in pictures or in that orchestra under the stars. But somewhere I just must play at last for someone who’ll hear and really listen …’
They sat there in the warm dark. She was finished, she had said it all now, foolish or not – and she moved back quietly in her chair.
Upstairs someone coughed.
Miss Hillgood heard, and rose.
It took Mr Fremley a moment to ungum his eyelids and make out the shape of the woman bending down to place the tray by his rumpled bed.
‘What you all talking about down there just now?’
‘I’ll come back later and tell you word for word,’ said Miss Hillgood. ‘Eat now. The salad’s fine.’ She moved to leave the room.
He said, quickly, ‘You goin’ to stay?’
She stopped half out of the door and tried to trace the expression on his sweating face in the dark. He, in turn, could not see her mouth or eyes. She stood a moment longer, silently, then went on down the stairs.
‘She must not’ve heard me,’ said Mr Fremley.
But he knew she had heard.
Miss Hillgood crossed the downstairs lobby to fumble with the locks on the upright leather case.
‘I must pay you for my supper.’
‘On the house,’ said Mr Terle.
‘I must pay,’ she said, and opened the case.
There was a sudden flash of gold.
The two men quickened in their chairs. They squinted at the little old woman standing beside the tremendous heart-shaped object which towered above her with its shining columbined pedestal atop which a calm Grecian face with antelope eyes looked serenely at them even as Miss Hillgood looked now.
The two men shot each other the quickest and most startled of glances, as if each had guessed what might happen next. They hurried across the lobby, breathing hard, to sit on the very edge of the hot velvet lounge, wiping their faces with damp handkerchiefs.
Miss Hillgood drew a chair under her, rested the golden harp gently back on her shoulder, and put her hands to the strings.