Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings Read online

  ‘Well,’ Mama breathed, ‘we can at least be glad he went so quick and easy. I only hope I go like that when my time comes.’

  Then the streets were crowding up together all of a sudden, and there we were by old Devonshire Terrace and Mama was pulling the buzzer. The bus dived to a stop, and I grabbed hold of the chipped chromium pole behind the driver just before I would have shot out the front window. ‘Thanks, mister,’ I said in my best icy tone, and minced down from the bus.

  ‘Remember,’ Mama said as we walked down the sidewalk, going single file where there was a hydrant, it was so narrow, ‘remember, we stay as long as they need us. And no complaining. Just wash dishes, or talk to Liz, or whatever.’

  ‘But Mama,’ I complained, ‘how can I say I’m sorry about Mr Prescott when I’m really not sorry at all? When I really think it’s a good thing?’

  ‘You can say it is the mercy of the Lord he went so peaceful,’ Mama said sternly. ‘Then you will be telling the honest truth.’

  I got nervous only when we turned up the little gravel drive by the old yellow house the Prescotts owned on Devonshire Terrace. I didn’t feel even the least bit sad. The orange-and-green awning was out over the porch, just like I remembered, and after ten years it didn’t look any different, only smaller. And the two poplar trees on each side of the door had shrunk, but that was all.

  As I helped Mama up the stone steps onto the porch, I could hear a creaking and sure enough, there was Ben Prescott sitting and swinging on the porch hammock like it was any other day in the world but the one his Pop died. He just sat there, lanky and tall as life. What really surprised me was he had his favorite guitar in the hammock beside him. Like he’d just finished playing ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’, or something.

  ‘Hello Ben,’ Mama said mournfully. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Ben looked embarrassed. ‘Heck, that’s all right,’ he said. ‘The folks are all in the living-room.’

  I followed Mama in through the screen door, giving Ben a little smile. I didn’t know whether it was all right to smile because Ben was a nice guy, or whether I shouldn’t, out of respect for his Pop.

  Inside the house, it was like I remembered too, very dark so you could hardly see, and the green window blinds didn’t help. They were all pulled down. Because of the heat or the funeral, I couldn’t tell. Mama felt her way to the livingroom and drew back the portieres. ‘Lydia?’ she called.

  ‘Agnes?’ There was this little stir in the dark of the livingroom and Mrs Prescott came out to meet us. I had never seen her looking so well, even though the powder on her face was all streaked from crying.

  I only stood there while the two of them hugged and kissed and made sympathetic little noises to each other. Then Mrs Prescott turned to me and gave me her cheek to kiss. I tried to look sad again but it just wouldn’t come, so I said, ‘You don’t know how surprised we were to hear about Mr Prescott.’ Really, though, nobody was at all surprised, because the old man only needed one more heart attack and that would be that. But it was the right thing to say.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Mrs Prescott sighed. ‘I hadn’t thought to see this day for many a long year yet.’ And she led us into the living-room.

  After I got used to the dim light, I could make out the people sitting around. There was Mrs Mayfair, who was Mrs Prescott’s sister-in-law and the most enormous woman I’ve ever seen. She was in the corner by the piano. Then there was Liz, who barely said hello to me. She was in shorts and an old shirt, smoking one drag after the other. For a girl who had seen her father die that morning, she was real casual, only a little pale is all.

  Well, when we were all settled, no one said anything for a minute, as if waiting for a cue, like before a show begins. Only Mrs Mayfair, sitting there in her layers of fat, was wiping away her eyes with a handkerchief, and I was reasonably sure it was sweat running down and not tears by a long shot.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Mama began then, very low, ‘It’s a shame, Lydia, that it had to happen like this. I was so quick in coming I didn’t hear tell who found him even.’

  Mama pronounced ‘him’ like it should have a capital H, but I guessed it was safe now that old Mr Prescott wouldn’t be bothering anybody again, with that mean temper and those raspy hands. Anyhow, it was just the lead that Mrs Prescott was waiting for.

  ‘Oh, Agnes,’ she began, with a peculiar shining light to her face, ‘I wasn’t even here. It was Liz found him, poor child.’

  ‘Poor child,’ sniffed Mrs Mayfair into her handkerchief. Her huge red face wrinkled up like a cracked watermelon. ‘He dropped dead right in her arms, he did.’

  Liz didn’t say anything, but just ground out one cigarette only half smoked and lit another. Her hands weren’t even shaking. And believe me, I looked real carefully.

  ‘I was at the rabbi’s,’ Mrs Prescott took up. She is a great one for these new religions. All the time it is some new minister or preacher having dinner at her house. So now it’s a rabbi, yet. ‘I was at the rabbi’s, and Liz was home getting dinner when Pop came home from swimming. You know the way he always loved to swim, Agnes.’

  Mama said yes, she knew the way Mr Prescott always loved to swim.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Prescott went on, calm as this guy on the Dragnet program, ‘it wasn’t more than eleven-thirty. Pop always liked a morning dip, even when the water was like ice, and he came up and was in the yard drying off, talking to our next door neighbor over the hollyhock fence.’

  ‘He just put up that very fence a year ago,’ Mrs Mayfair interrupted, like it was an important clue.

  ‘And Mr Gove, this nice man next door, thought Pop looked funny, blue, he said, and Pop all at once didn’t answer him but just stood there staring with a silly smile on his face.’

  Liz was looking out of the front window where there was still the sound of the hammock creaking on the front porch. She was blowing smoke rings. Not a word the whole time. Smoke rings only.

  ‘So Mr Gove yells to Liz and she comes running out, and Pop falls like a tree right to the ground, and Mr Gove runs to get some brandy in the house while Liz holds Pop in her arms…’

  ‘What happened then?’ I couldn’t help asking, just the way I used to when I was a kid and Mama was telling burglar stories.

  ‘Then,’ Mrs Prescott told us, ‘Pop just … passed away, right there in Liz’s arms. Before he could even finish the brandy.’

  ‘Oh, Lydia,’ Mama cried. ‘What you have been through!’

  Mrs Prescott didn’t look as if she had been through much of anything. Mrs Mayfair began sobbing in her handkerchief and invoking the name of the Lord. She must have had it in for the old guy, because she kept praying, ‘Oh, forgive us our sins,’ like she had up and killed him herself.

  ‘We will go on,’ Mrs Prescott said, smiling bravely. ‘Pop would have wanted us to go on.’

  ‘That is all the best of us can do,’ Mama sighed.

  ‘I only hope I go as peacefully,’ Mrs Prescott said.

  ‘Forgive us our sins,’ Mrs Mayfair sobbed to no one in particular.

  At this point, the creaking of the hammock stopped outside and Ben Prescott stood in the doorway, blinking his eyes behind the thick glasses and trying to see where we all were in the dark. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

  ‘I think we should all eat now,’ Mrs Prescott smiled on us. ‘The neighbors have brought over enough to last a week.’

  ‘Turkey and ham, soup and salad,’ Liz remarked in a bored tone, like she was a waitress reading off a menu. ‘I just didn’t know where to put it all.’

  ‘Oh, Lydia,’ Mama exclaimed, ‘Let us get it ready. Let us help. I hope it isn’t too much trouble….’

  ‘Trouble, no,’ Mrs Prescott smiled her new radiant smile. ‘We’ll let the young folks get it.’

  Mama turned to me with one of her purposeful nods and I jumped up like I had an electric shock. ‘Show me where the things are, Liz,’ I said, ‘and we’ll get this set up in no time.’

  Ben tailed us out to
the kitchen, where the black old gas stove was, and the sink, full of dirty dishes. First thing I did was pick up a big heavy glass soaking in the sink and run myself a long drink of water.

  ‘My, I’m thirsty,’ I said and gulped it down. Liz and Ben were staring at me like they were hypnotized. Then I noticed the water had a funny taste, as if I hadn’t washed out the glass well enough and there were drops of some strong drink left in the bottom to mix with the water.

  ‘That,’ said Liz after a drag on her cigarette, ‘is the last glass Pop drank out of. But never mind.’

  ‘Oh Lordy, I’m sorry,’ I said, putting it down fast. All at once I felt very much like being sick because I had a picture of old Mr Prescott, drinking his last from the glass and turning blue. ‘I really am sorry.’

  Ben grinned ‘Somebody’s got to drink out of it someday.’ I liked Ben. He was always a practical guy when he wanted to be.

  Liz went upstairs to change then, after showing me what to get ready for supper.

  ‘Mind if I bring in my guitar?’ Ben asked, while I was starting to fix up the potato salad.

  ‘Sure, it’s okay by me,’ I said. ‘Only won’t folks talk? Guitars being mostly for parties and all?’

  ‘So let them talk. I’ve got a yen to strum.’

  I made tracks around the kitchen and Ben didn’t say much, only sat and played these hillbilly songs very soft, that made you want to laugh and sometimes cry.

  ‘You know, Ben,’ I said, cutting up a plate of cold turkey, ‘I wonder, are you really sorry.’

  Ben grinned, that way he has. ‘Not really sorry, now, but I could have been nicer. Could have been nicer, that’s all.’

  I thought of Mama, and suddenly all the sad part I hadn’t been able to find during the day came up in my throat. ‘We’ll go on better than before,’ I said. And then I quoted Mama like I never thought I would: ‘It’s all the best of us can do.’ And I went to take the hot pea soup off the stove.

  ‘Queer, isn’t it,’ Ben said. ‘How you think something is dead and you’re free, and then you find it sitting in your own guts laughing at you. Like I don’t feel Pop has really died. He’s down there somewhere inside of me, looking at what’s going on. And grinning away.’

  ‘That can be the good part,’ I said, suddenly knowing that it really could. ‘The part you don’t have to run from. You know you take it with you, and then when you go any place, it’s not running away. It’s just growing up.’

  Ben smiled at me, and I went to call the folks in. Supper was kind of a quiet meal, with lots of good cold ham and turkey. We talked about my job at the insurance office, and I even made Mrs Mayfair laugh, telling about my boss Mr Murray and his trick cigars. Liz was almost engaged, Mrs Prescott said, and she wasn’t half herself unless Barry was around. Not a mention of old Mr Prescott.

  Mrs Mayfair gorged herself on three desserts and kept saying, ‘Just a sliver, that’s all. Just a sliver!’ when the chocolate cake went round.

  ‘Poor Henrietta,’ Mrs Prescott said, watching her enormous sister-in-law spooning down ice cream. ‘It’s that psychosomatic hunger they’re always talking about. Makes her eat so.’

  After coffee which Liz made on the grinder, so you could smell how good it was, there was an awkward little silence. Mama kept picking up her cup and sipping from it, although I could tell she was really all through. Liz was smoking again, so there was a small cloud of haze around her. Ben was making an airplane glider out of his paper napkin.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Prescott cleared her throat, ‘I guess I’ll go over to the parlor now with Henrietta. Understand, Agnes, I’m not old-fashioned about this. It said definitely no flowers and no one needs to come. It’s only a few of Pop’s business associates kind of expect it.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ said Mama staunchly.

  ‘The children aren’t going,’ Mrs Prescott said. ‘They’ve had enough already.’

  ‘Barry’s coming over later,’ Liz said. ‘I have to wash up.’

  ‘I will do the dishes,’ I volunteered, not looking at Mama. ‘Ben will help me.’

  ‘Well, that takes care of everybody, I guess.’ Mrs Prescott helped Mrs Mayfair to her feet, and Mama took her other arm. The last I saw of them, they were holding Mrs Mayfair while she backed down the front steps, huffing and puffing. It was the only way she could go down safe, without falling, she said.

  The Wishing Box

  Agnes Higgins realized only too well the cause of her husband Harold’s beatific, absent-minded expression over his morning orange juice and scrambled eggs.

  ‘Well,’ Agnes sniffed, smearing beach-plum jelly on her toast with vindictive strokes of the butter-knife, ‘what did you dream last night?’

  ‘I was just remembering’, Harold said, still staring with a blissful, blurred look right through the very attractive and tangible form of his wife (pink-cheeked and fluffily blond as always that early September morning, in her rose-sprigged peignoir), ‘those manuscripts I was discussing with William Blake.’

  ‘But,’ Agnes objected, trying with difficulty to conceal her irritation, ‘how did you know it was William Blake?’

  Harold seemed surprised. ‘Why, from his pictures, of course.’

  And what could Agnes say to that? She smoldered in silence over her coffee, wrestling with the strange jealousy which had been growing on her like some dark, malignant cancer ever since their wedding night only three months before when she had discovered about Harold’s dreams. On that first night of their honeymoon, in the small hours of the morning, Harold startled Agnes out of a sound, dreamless sleep by a violent, convulsive twitch of his whole right arm. Momentarily frightened, Agnes had shaken Harold awake to ask in tender, maternal tones what the matter was; she thought he might be struggling in the throes of a nightmare. Not Harold.

  ‘I was just beginning to play the Emperor Concerto,’ he explained sleepily. ‘I must have been lifting my arm for the first chord when you woke me up.’

  Now at the outset of their marriage, Harold’s vivid dreams amused Agnes. Every morning she asked Harold what he had dreamed during the night, and he told her in as rich detail as if he were describing some significant, actual event.

  ‘I was being introduced to a gathering of American poets in the Library of Congress,’ he would report with relish. ‘William Carlos Williams was there in a great, rough coat, and that one who writes about Nantucket, and Robinson Jeffers looking like an American Indian, the way he does in the anthology photograph; and then Robert Frost came driving up in a saloon car and said something witty that made me laugh.’ Or, ‘I saw a beautiful desert, all reds and purples, with each grain of sand like a ruby or sapphire shooting light. A white leopard with gold spots was standing over this bright blue stream, its hind legs on one bank, its forelegs on the other, and a little trail of red ants was crossing the stream over the leopard, up its tail, along its back, between its eyes, and down on the other side.’

  Harold’s dreams were nothing if not meticulous works of art. Undeniably, for a certified accountant with pronounced literary leanings (he reads E. T. A. Hoffman, Kafka, and the astrological monthlies instead of the daily paper on the commuters’ special), Harold possessed an astonishingly quick, colorful imagination. But, gradually, Harold’s peculiar habit of accepting his dreams as if they were really an integral part of his waking experience began to infuriate Agnes. She felt left out. It was as if Harold were spending one third of his life among celebrities and fabulous legendary creatures in an exhilarating world from which Agnes found herself perpetually exiled, except by hearsay.

  As the weeks passed, Agnes began to brood. Although she refused to mention it to Harold, her own dreams, when she had them (and that, alas, was infrequently enough), appalled her: dark, glowering landscapes peopled with ominous unrecognizable figures. She never could remember these nightmares in detail, but lost their shapes even as she struggled to awaken, retaining only the keen sense of their stifling, storm-charged atmosphere which, oppressive, would haun
t her throughout the following day. Agnes felt ashamed to mention these fragmentary scenes of horror to Harold for fear they reflected too unflatteringly upon her own powers of imagination. Her dreams—few and far between as they were—sounded so prosaic, so tedious, in comparison with the royal baroque splendour of Harold’s. How could she tell him simply, for example: ‘I was falling’: or, ‘Mother died and I was so sad’: or, ‘Something was chasing me and I couldn’t run’? The plain truth was, Agnes realized, with a pang of envy, that her dream-life would cause the most assiduous psychoanalyst to repress a yawn.

  Where, Agnes mused wistfully, were those fertile childhood days when she believed in fairies? Then, at least, her sleep had never been dreamless nor her dreams dull and ugly. She had in her seventh year, she recalled wistfully, dreamed of a wishing box land above the clouds where wishing boxes grew on trees, looking very much like coffee-grinders; you picked a box, turned the handle around nine times while whispering your wish in this little hole in the side, and the wish came true. Another time, she had dreamed of finding three magic grass-blades growing by the mailbox at the end of her street: the grass-blades shone like tinsel Christmas ribbon, one red, one blue, and one silver. In yet another dream, she and her young brother Michael stood in front of Dody Nelson’s white-shingled house in snowsuits, knotty maple tree roots snaked across the hard, brown ground; she was wearing red-and-white striped wool mittens; and, all at once, as she held out one cupped hand, it began to snow turquoise-blue sulfa gum. But that was just about the extent of the dreams Agnes remembered from her infinitely more creative childhood days. At what age had those benevolent painted dream worlds ousted her? And for what cause?

  *

  Meanwhile, indefatigably, Harold continued to recount his dreams over breakfast. Once, at a depressing and badly-aspected time of Harold’s life before he met Agnes, Harold dreamed that a red fox ran through his kitchen, grievously burnt, its fur charred black, bleeding from several wounds. Later, Harold confided, at a more auspicious time shortly after his marriage to Agnes, the red fox had appeared again, miraculously healed, with flourishing fur, to present Harold with a bottle of permanent black Quink. Harold was particularly fond of his fox dreams; they recurred often. So, notably, did his dream of the giant pike. ‘There was this pond,’ Harold informed Agnes one sultry August morning, ‘where my cousin Albert and I used to fish; it was chock full of pike. Well, last night I was fishing there, and I caught the most enormous pike you could imagine—it must have been the great-great-grandfather of all the rest; I pulled and pulled and pulled, and still he kept coming out of that pond.’