THE MORNING THE great fire started, nobody in the house could put it out. It was mother’s niece, Marianne, living with us while her parents were in Europe, who was all aflame. So nobody could smash the little window in the red box at the corner and pull the trigger to bring the gushing hoses and the hatted firemen. Blazing like so much ignited cellophane, Marianne came downstairs, plumped herself with a loud cry or moan at the breakfast table and refused to eat enough to fill a tooth cavity.
Mother and father moved away, the warmth in the room being excessive.
“Good morning, Marianne.”
“What?” Marianne looked beyond people and spoke vaguely. “Oh, good morning.”
“Did you sleep well last night, Marianne?”
But they knew she hadn’t slept. Mother gave Marianne a glass of water to drink and everyone wondered if it would evaporate in her hand. Grandma, from her table chair, surveyed Marianne’s fevered eyes. “You’re sick, but it’s no microbe,” she said. “They couldn’t find it under a microscope.”
“What?” said Marianne.
“Love is godmother to stupidity,” said father, detachedly.
“She’ll be all right,” mother said to father. “Girls only seem stupid because when they’re in love they can’t hear.”
“It affects the semicircular canals,” said father. “Making many girls fall right into a fellow’s arms. I know. I was almost crushed to death once by a falling woman and let me tell you—”
“Hush.” Mother frowned, looking at Marianne.
“She can’t hear what we’re saying; she’s cataleptic right now.”
“He’s coming to pick her up this morning,” whispered mother to father, as if Marianne wasn’t even in the room. “They’re going riding in his jalopy.”
Father patted his mouth with a napkin. “Was our daughter like this, Mama?” he wanted to know. “She’s been married and gone so long, I’ve forgotten. I don’t recall she was so foolish. One would never know a girl had an ounce of sense at a time like this. That’s what fools a man. He says, Oh what a lovely brainless girl, she loves me, I think I’ll marry her. He marries her and wakes up one morning and all the dreaminess is gone out of her and her intellect has returned, unpacked, and is hanging up undies all about the house. The man begins running into ropes and lines. He finds himself on a little desert isle, a little living room alone in the midst of a universe, with a honeycomb that has turned into a bear trap, with a butterfly metamorphosed into a wasp. He then immediately takes up a hobby: stamp collecting, lodge-meetings or—”
“How you do run on,” cried mother. “Marianne, tell us about this young man. What was his name again? Was it Isak Van Pelt?”
“What? Oh—Isak, yes.” Marianne had been roving about her bed all night, sometimes flipping poetry books and reading incredible lines, sometimes lying flat on her back, sometimes on her tummy looking out at dreaming moonlit country. The smell of jasmine had touched the room all night and the excessive warmth of early spring (the thermometer read 55 degrees) had kept her awake. She looked like a dying moth, if anyone had peeked through the keyhole.
This morning she had clapped her hands over her head in the mirror and come to breakfast, remembering just in time to put on a dress.
Grandma laughed quietly all during breakfast. Finally she said “You must eat, child, you must.” So Marianne played with her toast and got half a piece down. Just then there was a loud honk outside. That was Isak! In his jalopy!
“Whoop!” cried Marianne and ran upstairs quickly.
The young Isak Van Pelt was brought in and introduced around.
When Marianne was finally gone, father sat down, wiping his forehead. “I don’t know. This is too much.”
“You were the one who suggested she start going out,” said mother.
“And I’m sorry I suggested it,” he said. “But she’s been visiting us for six months now, and six more months to go. I thought if she met some nice young man—”
“And they were married,” husked grandma darkly, “why, Marianne might move out almost immediately—is that it?”
“Well,” said father.
“Well,” said grandma.
“But now it’s worse than before,” said father. “She floats around singing with her eyes shut, playing those infernal love records and talking to herself. A man can stand so much. She’s getting so she laughs all the time, too. Do eighteen-year-old girls often wind up in the booby hatch?”
“He seems a nice young man,” said mother.
“Yes, we can always pray for that,” said father, taking out a little shot glass. “Here’s to an early marriage.”
The second morning Marianne was out of the house like a fireball when first she heard the jalopy horn. There was not time for the young man even to come to the door. Only grandma saw them roar off together, from the parlor window.
“She almost knocked me down.” Father brushed his mustache. “What’s that? Brained eggs? Well.”
In the afternoon, Marianne, home again, drifted about the living room to the phonograph records. The needle hiss filled the house. She played That Old Black Magic twenty-one times, going “la la la” as she swam with her eyes closed, in the room.
“I’m afraid to go in my own parlor,” said father. “I retired from business to smoke cigars and enjoy living, not to have a limp relative humming about under the parlor chandelier.”
“Hush,” said mother.
“This is a crisis,” announced father, “in my life. After all, she’s just visiting.”
“You know how visiting girls are. Away from home they think they’re in Paris, France. She’ll be gone in October. It’s not so dreadful.”
“Let’s see,” figured father, slowly. “I’ll have been buried just about one hundred and thirty days out at Green Lawn Cemetery by then.” He got up and threw his paper down into a little white tent on the floor. “By George, Mother, I’m talking to her right now!”
He went and stood in the parlor door, peering through it at the waltzing Marianne. “La,” she sang to the music.
Clearing his throat, he stepped through.
“Marianne,” he said.
“That old black magic …” sang Marianne. “Yes?”
He watched her hands swinging in the air. She gave him a sudden fiery look as she danced by.
“I want to talk to you.” He straightened his tie.
“Dah dum dee dum dum dee dum dee dum dum,” she sang.
“Did you hear me?” he demanded.
“He’s so nice,” she said.
“Evidently.”
“Do you know, he bows and opens doors like a doorman and plays a trumpet like Harry James and brought me daisies this morning?”
“I wouldn’t doubt.”
“His eyes are blue.” She looked at the ceiling.
He could find nothing at all on the ceiling to look at.
She kept looking, as she danced, at the ceiling as he came over and stood near her, looking up, but there wasn’t