Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories (12 page)

(The pain gathered in his heart, punched, and subsided.)
"If you found it on me, dammit, then I figure it's mine!"
And all the while, the children screeching, "Please tell us! How'd you do that one, Dr. Silk? Did it really come out of nowhere? Show us how! Please!"
Finally, it was time for the last magic. Perspiring, Dr. Silk told them about the years he had spent in Ethiopia, and how the maharaja had refused absolutely and how he'd had to creep into the palace in the dead of night, at great risk to his life, in order to steal the enchanted basket.
"Is it empty, sir?"
"Empty as it can be!"
"Nothing whatever inside? Hold it up for everybody to see, please. Nothing there?"
"Nope."
"I'd like a strong man, please. A man with muscles, who knows how to throw."
"Go on, Doody! Go on."
"Ah, thank you. Now then, I want you to take this empty basket and throw it straight up into the air, as high as you can. Is that clear?"
"Just toss it up in the air, you mean?"
"That's right. Ready? One… two… three… Throw it, sir!"
The man threw the basket: it sailed upward. All eyes held it. Then there was an explosion, and eyes jerked back to Dr. Silk, who stood on the stage with the smoking pistol in his hand. The basket fell back to the stage, rolled, was still.
"Mr. Doody, would you care to remove the lid?"
The man poked tentatively at the basket's woven teapot lid. It fell aside.
"The Lord!"
And out of the basket shot a hundred snakes! Red ones, green ones, yellow ones-jerking, twitching serpentines, like a rainbow come suddenly apart.
Dr. Silk looked over at Obadiah, who grinned and winked and immediately hauled out the boxes of Wonderol.
The people stood smiling out as far as you could see. Bowing, Dr. Silk listened to their applause; he listened and felt the love as it cascaded over the oil lamps. And he knew it was the sweetest, most marvelous feeling that could be: he wished he could do more-something to repay them for this love which, if they knew it, kept him alive, nourished him, let the heart of Micah Jackson beat on. If he could make them see the magic around them, that would be a repayment-but how many ever saw this magic? No, he couldn't do that for the people. Yet-.
"How'd you do it?" The high-voiced softly shrill question had become a chant. The children were ecstatic: "Tell us, tell us, please!"
Begging, imploring. Would he do this for them, would he, please?
Dr. Silk felt the applejack-"Mr. Jackson, if you don't cut it out, you'll be dead in a year, I promise you"-and his head seemed to dance with the children's question.
Then, all at once, he knew. He knew what he could give the people. He knew how he could say thank you and say good-by, gracefully, forever.
"All right," he called. "Gather round, now!"
"What are you gonna do? You gonna… show us how the magic's done? Are you?"
Dr. Silk looked at them. You know better than this, he thought, and he thought: It is because you're going to have the big tricks explained to you in a little while and you know how you'll feel and you want them to feel the same? No. It isn't. And it isn't a test, either. Or anything. Just a way to repay them.
"Yes," Dr. Silk said, "I am."
Obadiah's jaw fell. He walked over quickly. "You ain't really?" he said.
"I am. The children want it, Obadiah. I'll never be able to do anything else for them-you know that. And just look at their eyes."
"I wouldn't Doctor, swear to the Lord."
"He's gonna show us!"
The clapping began again. Everyone pressed close, expectant, waiting.
"Don't do it," Obadiah said. "Let's just sell us some medicine like we always do and scat."
But Dr. Silk was already reaching into the black box.
He removed the enchanted hoops. "Now I want you to pay close attention," he declared.
"We will." "Shhh!"
Carefully, then, with exaggerated simplicity, he showed how there were actually three hoops, how two of them fit together and where the third one came from.
"See?"
The children squealed incredulously and clapped their hands. Someone said, "I'll be damned, I will be damned."
"Show us more!"
Dr. Silk felt the pain again. "You want to see more?" he asked. "You really and truly do?"
"Yes!"
Obadiah grunted and sat down.
"Very well." And Dr. Silk went on to show them the magic cane, and how it wasn't magic at all. "See," he smiled, "the flowers, which ain't real, they fold up, like this, inside the head. They're there all the time. Then I just press this here spring and it releases them. I bought it in Chicago at a warehouse…"
One by one, carefully, Dr. Silk explained his miracles. The deck of cards that contained nothing but aces of spades; the eggs that really weren't eggs at all; the coffin that had no bottom…
"Just lift it off, you see, and put it back. Just like that!"
Gradually the squealings died. The audience thinned. But the Magic Man did not notice: he could think of nothing but the love the people had given him and how he must repay them. So he did not feel the wrinkles jumping back into his face, or the dust of far-off places falling from his suit, or hear the way the crowd was turning quiet; or see the children's faces, with their hundred dimming lights.
When at last he had come to the enchanted basket-snakes coiled neatly in the flase bottom-Dr. Silk stopped, and blinked away the wetness. "We're all magicians now," he said, his smile poised, waiting.
There were murmurs beyond the flickering of the lamps, and shufflings.
The people were silent. They looked at one another furtively, and a few giggled, while a few wore angry expressions.
Slowly, they began to disperse.
The people began to go away.
Dr. Silk felt the pain another time, more strongly than ever before: almost a new kind of pain, wrenching at his heart. He saw the boy with the freckles who had been with him this afternoon. The boy's eyes were moist. He paused, staring, then he wheeled and tore away into the shadows.
"But, I thought you wanted-" Dr. Silk saw the dark night faces clearly. No one looked back.
The bartender from the Wild Silver Saloon seemed about to say something-his face was red and embarrassed, not angry-but then he turned and walked off too.
In moments the tiny stage, the wagon, stood alone. Dr. Silk did not move. He kept staring over the lights, just standing there, staring.
"Boss, let's go. Let's us go."
"Obadiah-" Dr. Silk took a hold of the Negro's thin shoulders. "They didn't actually believe in me, did they? Did they honestly believe I could-"
Obadiah shrugged. "Let's us get on out of here," he said. Then he began to pick up the tarnished wonders, quickly, and hurl them into the box.
"All right." Dr. Silk looked down at his hands, at the lint-flecked, worn black suit, at the cracking patent-leather shoes. "All right." He thought of the children and all their dying faces, of the men and their faces-hard and astonished and dumbfounded as if they'd heard God snore, and watched Him get drunk, and found that He was no different from them, and so, once more, they were left with nothing to believe in.
He felt the pain come rushing.
"Why? Lord, tell me that."
Dr. Silk went through the curtained tunnel back into the wagon and sat down on the straw pallet and sat there, quietly, and did not move even when the wagon lurched and began to sway.
After a long time, he took off the black suit, the green vest, the white shirt. He got the wax out of his mustaches.
Then he went to the window and stood there, looking out over the prairie, the moon-drenched, cool eternal prairie, moving past him. For hours, for miles.
And while he stood there, the hurting grew; it came back into his body, piercing, hard, familiar hurting.
"Why?"
The wagon stopped.
"You feel all right now, Doctor?" Obadiah held onto the door. He looked frightened and lost.
The Magic Man studied his friend; then he snorted and leaned back and closed his eyes. He tried not to think of the people. He tried not to think of Micah Jackson asking How's it done? and then learning as he would, so soon now, so very soon.
"It reminds me of the time," he said softly, "in Calcutta, when I went six months without hearing the sound of a human voice…"
Obadiah walked over to the pallet and sat down, smiling. "I don't recall you ever mentioned that experience to me, Dr. Silk," he said. "Tell me about it, would you, please?"

Introduction to

FAIR LADY
by George Clayton Johnson

When I was offered an opportunity to select a story of Charles Beaumont's for this collection, I immediately thought of "Fair Lady."
It may seem an odd choice.
As many of you know it is a slight story that takes up only 5 pages in Beaumont's 183 page THE HUNGER And Other Stories, his first story collection. Before being published in THE HUNGER, "Fair Lady" had never been printed before, written while Beaumont was still an unknown young man striving to become a published writer.
A mainstream story like "Fair Lady" has a tough time of it in the marketplace, even though it may have great merit, simply because it doesn't fit into a convenient genre. Its very ordinariness and simplicity works against it. And yet, there is a lot of fragile magic packed in these few plain pages. The story's tone perfectly matches its subject matter, and one feels as he reads it that each word has been chosen with special precision to carry a freightload of delicate associations. Its pace is slow and yet the story is a model of terseness and suspense containing that quality which people call "classic" when they encounter it.
"Fair Lady" is Charles Beaumont's tenderest short story.
It is about the joys and perils of living in a dreamworld and deals in what Beaumont called "The Greater Truth."
Cold facts never had much appeal to Beaumont. He was aware of them, but would search around and over and behind them looking for something better. It was one of his greatest talents as a storymaker, what William F. Nolan called "thinking sideways"-a way of deliberately ignoring obvious connections to look for the unlikely and to be able to make an emotion-laden case for it-to discover the warm facts that often made the cold ones irrelevant. "If you want your castles to last forever, make them out of sand," he Once told me.
I know from my own experience that many of a beginning writer's first stories are written blindly, on speculation, often at night on the kitchen table and submitted, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to addresses culled from the back pages of popular magazines. When the story comes back more frayed than before with a printed rejection form that gives no reason for the rejection the writer will re-examine the manuscript again seeking the flaw that has betrayed him, trying to see with fresh eyes and, having decided to alter it he must retype it again before submitting it to a new potential market to have it returned again and again.
A would-be writer must be very devoted to his goal of publication and be prepared for a lot of emotional punishment along the way.
If he perseveres he will learn to rewrite, which is the art of it.
As anyone will tell you who has never written a story, it is a simple thing to do. You just put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and let the words flow. The result is a story that reads as though it wrote itself.
As anyone will tell you who has written a story, it is not quite that simple. There are usually many revisions, editings, and re-writings necessary in order to make a story appear as though there were little effort involved in its creation.
"Fair Lady" gives evidence of such close rewriting and, oddly for a story with so few events or characters, is very strongly plotted in that the reader quickly senses that the writer knows his destination exactly although it may be an unexpected one, and, although he may take a deceptive path to get there, and further, that one will learn something important if he reads to the end.
Rereading this story in order to write an introduction to it I was struck by how much of the story I remembered from my first reading of it almost 30 years ago-how much detail, how many dazzling lines and flashes of insight were etched into my mind-to me the sign of a first-rate work.
The ingredients are simple:
Elouise Baker, an elderly schoolteacher ('. . . unbeautiful and old. And what is a thing after all, when it is no longer young, if it is not old?'), and Oliver O'Shaugnessy, a genial bus driver ('. . - a broad burly man behind the wheel who smiled at her with his eyes.), and an early morning bus ride, but from these familiar elements Beaumont has fashioned a deeply felt excursion into the human heart, reaching out to touch your emotions at will ('. . . and who could speak with her about love and be on safe ground?).
And, as sweetly sad and starkly tragic as it is, who can deny that it is a love story with a happy ending?
This introduction to Charles Beaumont's story "Fair Lady" is intended as a tribute to young, unpublished, unknown Charles LeRoy Nutt who became Charles Beaumont.

FAIR LADY

by Charles Beaumont

"Go to Mexico, Elouise," they had told her. "You'll find him there." So she had gone to Mexico and searched the little dry villages and the big dry cities, searched carefully; but she did not find him. So she left Mexico and came home.
Then they said, "Paris! That's the place he'll be. Only, hurry, Elouise! It's getting late." But Paris was across an ocean: it didn't exist, except in young girls' hearts and old women's minds, and if she were to see him there, a boulevardier, a gay charmer with a wine bottle-no, they were wrong. He wasn't in Paris.
In fact-it came to her one day in class, when the sun was not bright and autumn was a dead cold thing outside-Duane wasn't anywhere. She knew this to be true because a young man with golden hair and smooth cheeks was standing up reading Agamemnon, and she listened and did not dream.
She did not even think of Duane-or, as it may have been, Michael or William or Gregory.
She went home after grading the papers and thought and tried to recall his features. Then she looked about her room, almost, it seemed, for the first time: at the faded orange wallpaper, the darkwood chiffonier, the thin rows of books turned gray and worn by gentle handling over the years. The years .
She discovered her wrists and the trailing spongy blue veins, the tiny wrinkled skin that was no longer taut about the hands; and her face, she studied it, too, in the mirror, and saw the face the mirror gave back to her. Not ugly, not hard, but . unbeautiful, and old. And what is a thing, after all, when it is no longer young, if it is not old?
She searched, pulled out memories from the cedar chest, and listened in the quiet room to her heart. But he was not there, the tall stranger who waited to love her, only her, Miss Elouise Baker, and she knew now that he never would be. Because he never was.
It was on that night that Miss Elouise wept softly for death to come and take her away.
And it was on the next morning that she met, and fell in love with, Mr. Oliver O'Shaugnessy.
It happened this way. Miss Elouise was seated at the bus stop waiting for the 7:2 5, seated there as on years of other mornings; only now she thought of death whereas before she'd thought of life, full and abundant. She was an elderly schoolteacher now, dried-up and desiccated, like Mrs. Ritter or Miss Ackwright; cold in the morning air, unwarmed by dreams, cold and heavy-lidded from a night of staring, frightened, into darkness. She sat alone, waiting for the 7:25.
It came out of the mist with ponderous grace, its old motor loud with the cold. It rumbled down the street, then swerved and groaned to a stop before the triangular yellow sign. The doors hissed open and it paused, breathing heavily.
But Miss Elouise stared right into the red paint, sat and stared in the noise and the smoke and didn't move at all or even blink.
The voice came to her soft and unalarmed, almost soothing: "You wouldn't be sitting there thinking up ways to keep the kiddies after school, would you?"
She looked up and saw the driver.
"I'm sorry. I… must have dozed off."
She got inside and began to walk to her seat, the one she'd occupied every morning for a million years.
Then it happened. A rushing into existence, a running, a being. Later she tried to remember her impressions of the surrounding few seconds. She recalled that the bus was empty of passengers. That the advertising signs up above had been changed. That the floor had not been properly swept out. Willed or unwilled, it happened then, at the moment she reached her seat and the doors hissed closed. With these words it happened:
Fair Lady.
"What did you say?"
"Unless you're under twelve years of age, which you'd have a hard time persuading me of, miss, I'll have to ask the company's rightful fare." Then gently, softly, like the laughter of elves: "It's a wicked, money-minded world, and me probably the worst of all, but that's what makes it spin."
Miss Elouise looked at the large red-faced man in the early-morning fresh uniform creased from the iron and crisp. The cap, tilted back over the gray locks of hair; the chunks of flesh straining the clothes tight and rolling out over the belt; at the big, broad, burly man behind the wheel who smiled at her with his eyes. She looked at Oliver O'Shaugnessy, whom she'd seen before and before and never seen before this moment.
Then she dropped a dime into the old-fashioned black coin box and sat down.
But not in her usual seat. She sat down in the seat first back from the man who'd said Fair Lady when it took just those words out of a fat dictionary of words to bring her to life.
That's how it happened. As mysteriously, as unreasonably as any great love has ever happened. And Miss Elouise, from that time on, didn't question or doubt or, for that matter, even think about it much. She just accepted.
And it made the old dream an embarrassed little thing. A pale, dated matinee illusion-she couldn't even bear to think of it, now, with its randy smell of shieks on horseback and dark strangers from a cardboard nowhere. Duane… what an effete ass he turned out to be, and to think: she might actually have met him and been crushed and forsaken and forever lost…
Now, she could once again take up her interest in books and art and music, and, in a little while, it all came-she was loving her job-loving it. And before, she hated it with her soul. Since falling in love with Oliver O'Shaugnessy, these things were hers. She grew young and healthy and wore a secret smile wherever she went.
Every morning, then, Miss Elouise would hurry to the bus stop and wait while her heart rattled fast. And, sure enough, the bus would come and it would be empty-most of the time, anyway: when it was not empty, she felt that intruders or in-laws had moved in for a visit. But, mostly it was empty.
For thirty minutes every morning, she would live years of life. And slowly, deliciously, she came to know Oliver as well as to love him. He grew dearer to her as she found, each day, new sides to him, new facets of his great personality. For example, his moods became more readily apparent, though hidden behind the smile he always wore for her: she came to know his moods. On some days he felt perfectly wretched; on others, tired and vaguely disturbed; still other days found him bursting with spring cheer, happy as a fed child. Once, even, Oliver was deeply introspective and his smile was weary and forced as he revolved the large wedding ring on this third finger left hand. Through all, he changed and broadened and grew tall, and she loved him with all her heart.
Of course she never spoke of these things. Ever. In fact, they conversed practically not at all. He had no way of guessing the truth, though at times Miss Elouise thought perhaps he did.
Together, it was perfect. And what more can be said?
For three years Miss Elouise rode with Oliver O'Shaugnessy, her lover, every morning, every morning without fail. Except for that awful day each week when he did not work-and these were dark, empty days, full of longing. But they passed. And it gave such wings to her spirit that she felt truly no one in the world could be quite so happy. Fulfillment there was, and quiet contentment. No wife in bed with her husband had even known one tenth this intimacy; no youngsters in the country under August stars had ever come near to the romance that was hers; nor had ever a woman known such felicity, unspoken, undemanded, but so richly there.
For three magic years. And who could speak with her about love and be on fair ground?
Then, there came a morning. A morning cold as the one of years before, when she had thought of death, and Miss Elouise felt a chill enter her heart and lodge there. She glanced at her watch and looked at the street, misted and empty and wet gray. It was not late, it was not Oliver's day off, nothing had happened-therefore, why should she be afraid? Nevertheless, she was afraid.
The bus came. It swung around the corner far ahead and rolled toward her and came to its stop and, without thinking or looking, she got on.
And saw.
Oliver O'Shaugnessy was not there.
A strange young man with blond hair and thick glasses sat at the wheel. Miss Elouise felt everything loosen and break apart and start to drift off. She was terrified, suddenly, frozen like a china figurine, and she did not even try to move or understand.
It was not merely that something had been taken-as her father had been taken, her father whom she loved so very much. Not merely that. It was knowing, all at once, that she herself was being taken, pushed out of a world she'd believed in and told to stay away.
Once she'd known a woman who was insane. They would say to this woman, "You were walking through the house last night, and laughing," and the woman, who never laughed, she wouldn't remember and her eyes would widen in fear and she would say, later, in a lost voice: "I wonder what I could have been laughing at…"
There was a throaty noise, a loud cough.
"Who are you?" Miss Elouise said.
"Beg pardon?" the young man said.
"Where is Oliver?"
"O'Shaugnessy? Got transferred. Takes the Randolphe route now."
Transferred…
Miss Elouise felt that a cageful of little black ugly birds had suddenly been released and that they beat their wings against her heart. She remembered the loneliness and how the loneliness had died and been replaced with something good and clean and fine and built of every lovely dream in all the world.
She got off the bus at the next stop and went home and thought all that day and into the night. Very late into the night…
Then, the birds went away.
She smiled, as she had been smiling for these years, and, when the morning came again, she made a telephone call. Retirement-for Miss Elouise? Why certainly she was due it, but-.
She worked busily as a housewife, packing, moving, setting straight the vacant room, telling her goodbyes.
It took time. But not much, really, and she worked so fast and so hard she had little time to think. The days flew.
And then it was done.
And, smiling, she sat one morning in new air, on a new corner two blocks from her new home, and she waited for the bus.
And presently, as lovers will, her lover came to her.