Steven Millhauser - Edwin Mullhouse - The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954

She behaved so badly that she spent most of the day in the principal’s office.

The next morning I was relieved to find Rose Dorn’s seat empty after the second bell. It was a bright morning, with a touch of spring in the air, and her absence seemed in keeping with the blue mildness of the day. We all stood up, bowed our heads, and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer, as if in thanks for the empty seat. During the words “on earth as it is in heaven” I became aware of footsteps running along the hall; seven words later, at “bread,” there was the sound of a loudly turning doorknob; and at “as we” my eyes tore open to see Rose Dorn standing in the room by the front door, panting loudly but frozen in an attitude of motion. Most of us had stopped and were looking at her with a kind of horror; a few girls grimly went on reciting the prayer with their eyes squeezed shut. Mrs. Cadwallader was saying the words louder and louder and at the same time glaring ferociously at Rose Dorn, as if the words were a curse or lash. Everyone knew that this interruption of the Lord’s Prayer was sinful, hideous, and exciting, and that Mrs. Cadwallader would rise to the occasion; and indeed after the final words she stormed over to Rose Dorn and began to shout at her for not waiting outside until we were done, and then she shook her by the shoulder and dragged her by the upper arm out of the room into the hall, where she had to stay until we finished the Pledge Allegiance; but what had upset me more than all this was the look on Rose Dorn’s face. For after her first look of confusion and uncertainty, her face had gradually filled with the knowledge of her trespass, and had taken on a look not of repentance but of sly pleasure. Her eyes had roamed over the class and had stopped at Edwin, who was looking at her with his mouth partly open; and as she awaited the onslaught of Mrs. Cadwallader her face seemed to be smiling, though her lips did not move. Later she returned to her seat. She was in one of her dreamy moods, gazing off with a strange light in her eyes.

The next morning she burst in upon our prayer from the rear door. Mrs. Cadwallader instantly stopped the prayer and marched toward Rose Dorn, who awaited her calmly, almost happily it seemed to me, at the back of the room.

I have always enjoyed riding my bicycle. Last Saturday, when for some reason all my sentences were stupid and ugly, and nothing made any sense at all, and mama was humming a lullaby although Edwin was dead, I took a long ride over white sidewalks under orange trees. Men in short jackets stood beside piles of burning leaves, resting their hands on rakes and watching the lines of dark smoke rise into the brilliant blue air. I crossed at the stoplight in front of the church and rode toward Franklin Pierce. At Rapolski’s I turned right and rode along the side-street beside the high playground. Under the tall trees on both sides of the street lay long wavering lines of fading fallen leaves, and I was careful to ride through the snap and crackle. It was a quiet, peaceful street; a small child was throwing leaves up in the air and letting them fall all over him; in one driveway a man was squirting a hose at a shiny black Ford. After several blocks I turned to the right and began pedaling uphill between gray two-story houses. At the top of the hill stood a bright red drugstore. I turned left, raised my feet to the handlebars, and flew downhill between yellow and white ranch-houses. Between my toes I saw, across the street at the bottom of the hill, a line of small colorful houses that stretched to the left and right, blocked only by the cliff on which a silver watertower sat. I applied my excellent brakes in time to stop at the street below, crossed carefully, and turning right, rode along the sidewalk that bordered the green lawns with their thin new maples. At Sunnyholm Drive I turned left, riding past rows of identical small houses where small children in red and blue jackets played on small back lawns. At last I came to the circular end of the street where, behind a high wire fence, black trees rose up. Then I turned around and rode back.

She died two days after the death of her hair. Probably it was the worst thing left for her to do. She was absent that morning, though Mrs. Cadwallader prayed with her eyes wide open; she seemed indeed to be enlisting the Lord in her struggle against Rose Dorn. It was shortly after play period that we heard the fire engines. At first invisible, they came wailing out of the morning like an agony of the sky, and suddenly appeared through our windows on the street by the sidewalk. Redly they rushed away, with black firemen stuck all over their backs like clinging cats. Mrs. Cadwallader let us stand at the windows; I counted three trucks and two red cars. Later another truck streaked by. At 11:15 a thin haze of smoke was visible on the horizon, far beyond the wire fence. At the 11:30 lunch bell Edwin and I hurried down the side-street, turning at the hill between the rows of gray two-story houses. People were running from all directions. At the green drugstore we looked down past the grassy lots at a long sheet of fire, shooting black smoke into the blue March sky. The policeman would not let us past the bottom of the hill. We climbed the ridge and stood in the shadow of the vast iron spider, watching the loud flames, which seemed at times to roll slowly and heavily, like honey. The ridge was crowded with spectators. Through the flaming trees we could see red fire engines on the nameless dirt road, and long pale curves of water from the hoses. “Look!” some idiot cried as the high hexagonal tower burst into sudden flame. Edwin watched without a word, sitting on the ground with his arms hugging his legs and his chin resting on his raised knees. He did not even flinch as the tower separated from the house and plunged, a fiery ball, down to the flames below. After a while Edwin stood up and we walked home without a word.

Mrs. Mullhouse, who had been following the story since eleven o’clock, was listening to the radio. Edwin had muttered something about watching a fire when we arrived, answering her flurry of questions with mumbles, and now he sat at the table picking at his napkin as the radio voice shouted quietly. They were pronounced dead on arrival. The fire was not yet under control. Mrs. Mullhouse stood with her back to us, making sandwiches and shaking her head. When she turned, with a plate in each hand, she made a curious sound, as if she were inhaling hard on a cigarette. Edwin sat with his hands pressed over his ears. His eyes were squeezed shut. His face was twisted.

RAIN WASHED ANOTHER WINTER AWAY, and warm winds came, like a blossoming of the air, carrying with them an odor of voyages. Again the maples put out their dark red flowers. In the Late Years, shut up in his room behind the closed Venetian blinds, Edwin cursed the spring outright as the year’s smiling devil, for it created in him a fever of restlessness that tempted him away from his cool, cool sentences; but in the Middle Years he still left himself open to the full influence of the season, to its languor and its fever, to the violence of its mild afternoons. There was always a suddenness about the first real day of spring: Edwin once compared it to the movie version of the Wizard of Oz, which begins in brown and white and bursts suddenly into color. I prefer to compare it to a game we used to play at the end of Saturday matinees in summer. For hours we would sit in darkness, watching cartoons and pirates, and then the lights would go on, dimming the luminous red EXIT signs. The yellow overhead lights of the vast emptying theater filled us with a sense of lamplight and evening, and as we made our way slowly up the slope of the side aisle in an air-conditioned chill, we encouraged the illusion, thinking how cool it was, how tired we felt, how late it must be, imagining as vividly as possible the cool darkness outside, the headlights, the glowing blue BAR & GRILL sign across the street, the shadows of passing people growing longer and shorter in the light of streetlamps, and in a black satin sky, just over the horizon, a luminous orange moon — and suddenly we had passed through the door and were standing on a crimson rug in a flood of sunlight, beyond the glass doors the white sidewalk glittered under a blue sky, on all sides of us we felt the harsh hot gleam of glass and silver, and though we had known it would be exactly like that, still the delightful illusion of evening that we had created kept its force, so that for a moment we felt, in the heat and light of a radiant afternoon, a distinct sense of confusion, of loss, of bitter disappointment.