At last, Grandma, Great-grandma, and Mother would appear, and the men would move, and offer seats. The women carried folded newspapers, bamboo whisks, or perfumed kerchiefs, to fan their faces with, as they talked.
Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring. These were rituals that were right and lasting; the lighting of pipes, the pale hands that moved knitting needles in the dimness, the eating of ice cream, the coming and going of all the people. For at some time or other during the evening, everyone visited here: the neighbors down the street or across the street; Miss Fern and Miss Roberta would drive by in their electric green machine, give Tom or Douglas a ride around the block and then come up and sit down and fan away the fever in their cheeks; or Mr. Jonas, the junkman, would leave his horse and wagon in the alley and come up the steps looking as fresh as if his talk had never been said before, and somehow it never had. And last of all, the children, who had been off playing a last hide-and-seek or kick-the-can, breathing hard, glowing, would sickle quietly back like boomerangs along the soundless lawn, to sink beneath the talking talking talking of the porch voices which would weigh and gentle them down…
Douglas loved to lie there quietly, listening to those voices weaving the dark together. The grown-ups had forgotten he was there, so still, so quietly he lay, noting the plans they were making for his and their own futures. And the voices drifted in moonlit clouds of cigarette smoke while the moths, like late apple-blossoms came alive, tapped lightly about the far street lights, and the voices moved on into the coming years…
In front of the United Cigar Store this evening the men gathered and talked about the destruction that threatened human kind through all modern machines and inventions.Their sepulchral speeches distressed Leo Auffmann, the town jeweler, who, widening his large liquid-dark eyes, at last threw up his childlike hands and cried out in dismay.
“Stop! In God’s name, stop this funereal talk!”
“Lee, how right you are,” said Grandfather Spaulding, passing on his nightly stroll with his grandsons Douglas and Tom. “But, Lee, only you can shut these doom-talkers up. Invent something that will make the future brighter, more comforting and joyful. You’ve invented bicycles, repaired the penny slot-machines in the playing arcade, been our town movie projectionist, haven’t you?”
“Sure,” said Douglas. “Invent us a happiness machine!”
The men laughed.
“Don’t laugh,” said Leo Auffmann. “How have we used machines so far? To make people cry! Yes! Every time man and the machine look like they will get on all right – boom! Someone adds a cog, and airplanes drop bombs on us, cars run us off cliffs. So is the boy wrong to ask? No! No…”
He went to the curb to his bicycle and touched it as if it were an animal.
“What can I lose?” he murmured. “A little skin off my fingers, a few pounds of metal, some sleep? I’ll do it!”
“Lee,” said Grandfather, “we didn’t mean —”
But Leo Auffmann was gone, pedaling off through the warm summer evening, his voice drifting back. “…I’ll do it…”
“You know,” said Tom, in awe, “I bet he will.”
When seeing him riding along the brick streets of evening, you understood that Leo Auffmann enjoyed everything around him: the rustle of the hot grass when the wind blew like a furnace, or the singing of the electric power lines in the wind.
Now, pedaling along, he thought about the shocks of life – what were they? Getting born, growing up, growing old, dying. Not much to do about the first. But – the other three?
In his head now, golden spokes of the spinning wheels of his Happiness Machine sparkled. A machine, now, to help boys grow brave and strong, girls change from an ugly duckling to a white swan. And in the late years of your life, as you lie abed at nights, and your heartbeat is increasing to a billion, his invention must let a man take the autumn of his life easy.
When he arrived home, his six children, Saul, Marshall, Joseph, Rebecca, Ruth, Naomi, all ages from five to fifteen, rushed across the lawn to take his bike. They hugged him all at once.
“We waited. We got ice cream!”
Moving toward the porch, he could feel his wife’s smile there in the dark.
Five minutes the family ate ice cream in comfortable silence, then he said, “Lena? What would you think if I tried to invent a Happiness Machine?”
“Is something wrong?” she asked quickly.
Before Grandfather and the boys could reach home, Charlie Woodman and John Huff and some other boys rushed by like meteors. Their gravity was so huge they pulled Douglas away from Grandfather and Tom and took him off toward the ravine.
“Don’t get lost, son!”
“I won’t… I won’t…”
The boys disappeared into darkness.
Tom and Grandfather walked the rest of the way in silence, except when they turned in at home and Tom said, “boy, a Happiness Machine – wow!”
The courthouse clock struck eight.
The courthouse clock struck nine and it was really night on this small street in a small town in a big state on a large continent on a planet earth hurtling down the pit of space toward nowhere or somewhere, and Tom was feeling every mile of the long drop. He sat by the front-door screen looking out at that rushing blackness that looked very innocent as if it was holding still. Only when you closed your eyes and lay down could you feel the world spinning under your bed.
There was a smell of rain. Mother was ironing and sprinkling water from a corked ketchup bottle over the crackling dry clothes behind Tom.
One store was still open about a block away – Mrs. Singer’s.
Finally, just before it was time for Mrs. Singer to close her store, Mother relented and told Tom to run to Mrs. Singer’s and buy a pint of ice cream.
He took the money and ran barefooted over the warm evening pavement. He crossed the street and found Mrs. Singer moving about her store, singing Yiddish melodies.
“Pint ice cream?” she said. “Chocolate on top? Yes!”
He gave the money, received the chill, icy pack, and rubbing it across his brow and cheek, laughing, rushed homeward. Behind him the lights of the lonely little store went out and there was only a street light on the corner, and the whole city seemed to be going to sleep.
Mother was still ironing when he opened the screen door. She looked hot and irritated but she smiled just the same.
“When will Dad be home from his meeting?” he asked.
“About eleven or eleven-thirty,” Mother said. She took the ice cream to the kitchen and put two portions away, for Douglas and Father when they come.
They sat enjoying the ice cream. The deep quiet summer night was around them, all around their small house on the small street. Mother sat in the armchair by the phonograph, eating her dessert and saying, “It was a hot day. Earth soaks up all the heat and lets it out at night. It’ll be soggy sleeping.”
They both sat listening to the night. The silence was complete because the radio needed a new battery, and they had played all the records on the phonograph to exhaustion. So Tom just sat on the floor