The Barnum Museum: Stories

THE SEPIA POSTCARD

I was tense, irritable, overworked; the city stifling, my nerves stretched taut; life was a foul farce with predictable punchlines; things were not going well between Claudia and me; one morning in early September I threw a suitcase in the back of the car, and toward dusk I came to the village of Broome. A single street wound down to the darkening cove. The brochure had shown sunny red-and-white buoys lying against piles of slatted lobster pots, with brilliant blue water beyond, but tomorrow would be time enough for that. I expected no miracles; I wasn’t young enough for dreams; I knew in my bones that I couldn’t escape my troubles by changing the view from my window. But I hoped for a little respite, do you know, a little forgetfulness, and perhaps a freshness of spirit, too. Was it asking so much? At the bottom of the street I rolled down my window and breathed the sharp chill air, drew it deep into my lungs. The brochure had shown a girl in a white bathing suit lying on a golden beach, but if the season was over, what was that to me? I needed the cleansing air, the purifying otherness, of Broome. The inn was a rambling many-gabled Victorian with a broad front porch and paired brackets under the eaves. It stood near the top of the hill, on a lane off the winding street of shops. And if the lamplit sign on the sloping lawn said OCEAN GABLES, what was that to me? Claudia would have found the perfect words for the sign, with its black iron lighthouse screwed into the wood. Claudia would have had something to say about the rockers on the porch, the old brass chandelier over the mahogany dining table, the square stairpost with its dark globe, the carpeted creaking stairs, the framed engraving on the landing (a little girl in a bonnet embracing a Saint Bernard), the ruffled pink bedspread, but Claudia hadn’t smiled at me in a month. I was here alone.

I slept well enough, not well, but well enough, and woke almost refreshed to a gray morning. Downstairs a brisk woman in a half apron was clearing the table in a small room off the main dining room. Her apron had a design of purple plums, red apples, and yellow pears, all with stems and little leaves. A white-haired couple sat at one table, sipping heavy-looking cups of coffee. “Am I late for breakfast?” I asked in surprise; it was 8:45. The brisk woman hesitated and glanced sharply at a blue wooden clock shaped like a teapot. “I can fix you up something,” she said, banging a knife onto a saucer. I sat down at a table covered with a clean white tablecloth with crisp fold-lines. Despite the slightly unpleasant note, the breakfast when it came proved generous — a tall, fluted glass of orange juice, two eggs with bacon, two slices of toast with blackberry jam, a yellow porcelain pot of superb coffee — and I rose in a buoyant mood, determined to make the best of the gray day.

Outside it was drizzling lightly, barely more than a mist. I turned up the collar of my trench coat and walked along the lane to the steep street that curved down to the water. Most of the shops had the look of houses, with curtained windows above the converted main floors. Between the shops on the shore side of the street I caught glimpses of grass, cove, and stormy sky. Once, through a large window containing giraffes and trains, I saw an open doorway, and through the doorway another window, with a view of rushing clouds. It was as if the shop were flying through the sky, like Dorothy’s house in the tornado. On the other side of the street I passed winding roads of white clapboard houses with bracketed porch posts, bay windows, and gingerbread along the gables. It was a village meant for brilliant sun and hard-edged shadow, for sharp rectangles of blue between the shingled shops. But what was it to me that the sun didn’t shine, that a cold drizzle matted my lashes and trickled down my neck? I wasn’t out for sun. I was here because it was not there, I was here because it was anywhere else, because Broome was — well, Broome; and I was set on taking it as it was, in dazzle or drizzle.

I stopped at every shop window, every one. I studied the realtor’s corkboard display of slightly blurred black-and-white photographs of houses in sun-dappled woods, I browsed in the window of the garden shop with its baked-earth flowerpots and shiny green hoses and country-humor lawn ornaments, including a pink wooden piglet and a fat woman bending over and showing her polka-dot underpants, I paused under the awning of the stationer’s to examine a table that offered half-price notepads stamped with treble clefs and called Musical Notes, gigantic pencils as thick as towel bars, and pencil sharpeners shaped like typewriters, mice, and black shoes. I admired the striped pole turning in a misted tube of glass and the melancholy barber with heavy-lidded eyes who stared out the window at the rain and me. I studied the ice cream parlor, the grocery store, the drugstore with its display of rubber-tipped crutches and back-to-school specials. I passed two gift shops and entered a third. I like gift shops; I like the variety of invention within a convention of rigorous triteness. I looked at the flashlight pens that said BROOME; the little straw brooms with wooden handles that said BROOME; erasers shaped like chipmunks, rabbits, and skunks; little slatted lobster pots containing miniature red plastic lobsters; tiny white-and-gray seagulls perched on wooden piles the size of cigarettes; porcelain thimbles painted with lighthouses; little wind-up kangaroos that flipped over once and landed on their feet; foot-high porcelain fishermen with pipes and yellow slickers; red wax apples with wicks for stems; a rack of comic postcards, one of which bore the legend LOBSTER DINNER FOR TWO and showed two lobsters in bibs seated at a table before plates of shrimp; black mailboxes with brass lobsters on them; sets of plastic teeth that clacked noisily when you wound them up; a bin of porcelain coin banks shaped like lobster pots, Victorian houses with turrets, and mustard-covered hot dogs in buns; and a basket of red, blue, and green brachiosauruses. When I stepped out of the gift shop I saw that the sky had darkened. I was more than halfway down the main street of Broome and it was not yet eleven in the morning. I didn’t know what to do. I passed a window filled with watches, two of which formed the eyes of a cardboard mouse. I passed a window with a white crib in which slept a red cotton lobster and a polar bear. The rain began to fall harder. The steep sidewalk turned sharply, and at the end of the street I saw wet grass, a stretch of slick dirt with pools of trembling rainwater, a gray pier leading into gray water.

The shops were more thickly clustered here, as if backing away from the muddy bottom of the street. They seemed darker and shabbier than the shops above, and the steepness of the descent gave everything a tilted and precarious look. I passed a red-lit window crowded with the glimmering lower halves of sawed-off women in panty hose; some appeared to be dancing wildly, some were lounging about, and some were upside down, their legs straining desperately upward, as if at any moment they would be pulled underground. There was a window with a handwritten sign that said BOOTS BAIT TACKLE. There was an empty dark window with a telephone number written across it in white soap, and another dark window that said PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS. A dim light burned inside. Here the sidewalk was so steep that the left edge of the windowsill began at my knees, the right edge at my stomach. I felt oddly unbalanced, but something about the place drew me, and I lingered uncertainly under the narrow green awning.

It was a crowded, scattered sort of display, with here an open children’s book showing a boy trundling a hoop, there a set of twelve cracked leather volumes called Barnsworth’s Geographic Cyclopaedia. In one corner a doll dressed like Little Boy Blue was leaning with his eyes closed against a globe on a dusty stand, not far from a large atlas open to a faded map of the Roman Empire in 200 A.D. It was difficult to know what to make of this shop, where a Victorian toy theater with a red paper curtain sat next to a book of fairy tales open to a color print of a princess drawing a bucket out of a well, where a stereoscope mounted on a wooden bar lay aslant on its wooden handle in front of a glass-covered engraving of the Place de la Concorde, and thirteen volumes of a sixteen-volume set of Hawthorne rose like a crooked red chimney behind an old top hat and a pair of opera glasses. Plumshaw’s taste was odd and eccentric, but I seemed to detect in the display a secret harmony. The rain had begun to fall in earnest. I stepped inside.

A bell tinkled faintly over the door. The room was small and gloomy, lit by a single bare bulb at the bottom of a green-stained brass ceiling fixture shaped like flower petals. A dark passage led to a room beyond. On the counter stood an old black cash register and a small wire rack hung with cellophane bags of butterscotch squares, jelly beans, and gumdrops. Behind the counter was a tall woman with high hair who looked at me without smiling. Plumshaw, I decided. Her voluminous gray hair was pulled tightly upward and piled on top of her head in masses of sharp-looking little curls. She wore a high-necked black dress with long sleeves ending in stiff bursts of faded lace. A pearl circle pin was fastened at her throat, and on one wrist she wore a yellowed ivory bracelet composed of a ring of little elephants each holding in its trunk the tail of the elephant in front. Plumshaw, without a doubt. Oh, maybe some other Plumshaw had started the shop, maybe she was the unmarried daughter of Plumshaw the First, but she had taken it over and had stood motionless and unsmiling behind that cash register for forty years. The dark walls were lined with books, but here and there stood knickknacks of brass or ivory and boxes of stereoscopic views, and in one corner stood an umbrella stand containing three walking sticks with ivory handles, one of which was shaped like a hand curved over a ball. Evidently PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS had fallen on hard days and was forced to drum up extra trade in antiques. Or perhaps — the thought struck me — perhaps these odds and ends were Plumshaw’s own possessions, brought down one by one from the backs of closets and the depths of attic trunks to be offered for sale. The books themselves, arranged carefully by category, were the mediocre used books of any second-rate bookshop (sets of Emerson, sets of Poe), and among them were library discards, with the Dewey Decimal number printed in white ink on the spine and the melancholy DISCARDED stamped across the card pocket in back. I lingered politely under Plumshaw’s severe gaze for as long as I could stand it and then escaped through the dark passage into the next room.

I saw at once that there were other rooms; PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS was a warren of small rooms connected by short dark passages lined with books. The invasion of alien objects was more noticeable as I moved deeper into the back, where entire shelves had been cleared to make way for stacks of maroon record albums containing heavy, brittle 78’s as thick as roof slates, boxes of old postcards, empty cardboard cylinders the size of soup cans each bearing the words EDISON GOLD MOULDED RECORD and an oval photograph of Thomas A. Edison, daguerreotypes, tintypes, stacks of pen-and-ink illustrations torn from old books, a moldering gray Remington typewriter with dark green keys, a faded wooden horse with red wheels, little porcelain cats, a riding crop, old photograph albums containing labeled black-and-white photographs (Green Point, 1926) with upcurled corners showing traces of rubber cement, a cribbage board with ivory pegs, a pair of high cracked black lace-up shoes. Here and there I saw brass standing lamps with cloth shades and yellowed ivory finials, and armchairs with faded doilies; I wondered whether they were for sale. All the rooms were gloomily lit by dim yellow bulbs with tarnished brass chains.

I had slipped into one room to examine a little music box with a red-jacketed monkey on top, who turned slowly round and round and raised and lowered his cup as the melody played, when I happened to look up to see a figure standing in the doorway. At first she said nothing, but only looked at me from the shadows. I placed the music box back on the shelf — the tinkling music was playing, the monkey was turning and raising its cup. “May I be of help?” Plumshaw said at last, decisively. “I was just browsing — a nice little fellow!” I answered, wanting to strangle the little monster. I turned to push it deeper into the shelf, as if to conceal a crime; when I looked up, Plumshaw was gone. I cursed her suspicions — did she think I’d pocket him? — but felt obscurely obliged to purchase some trifle, as if my visit to the shop were an intrusion that required apology. With this in mind I began looking at engravings, stereoscopic views, a box of black-and-white photographic portraits on glass. It seemed there was nothing here for me, nothing in all of Broome for me, or in all the gray universe, and with a dull sort of curiosity I came to a table on which stood a black wire rack filled with old postcards.

They were black-and-white and sepia and tinted postcards, showing topiary gardens, and Scottish castles, and boats on the Rhine, and public buildings in Philadelphia. Some bore stamps and postmarks and messages in ink: Dear Robert, I cannot tell you how lovely our rooms are—but then, I’ve never been interested in other people’s mail. The pictures had a faded and melancholy air that pleased me; there is a poetry of old postcards, which belong in the same realm as hurdy-gurdy tunes, merry-go-round horses, circus sideshows, silent black-and-white cartoons, tissue-paper-covered illustrations, old movie theaters, kaleidoscopes, and storm-faded figureheads of women with their wooden hair blown back. I examined the postcards one by one, turning now and then to look at the doorway, which remained ominously empty, and after a while I found myself lingering over a sepia postcard. The back was clean; it had never been sent. The melancholy brown photograph showed a rocky point extending into a lake or river; on the other side of the water was a brown forest of pines, and above the trees were long thin brown clouds and a setting brown sun. In the upper left-hand corner of the sky, in small brown capital letters, was the single word INNISCARA. On the farthest rock two small figures were seated, a man and a woman, looking out at the water. Beside the man I could make out a straw hat and a walking stick. The woman was bareheaded, her hair full and tumbling. The details were difficult to distinguish in the dim light, but the very uncertainty seemed part of the romantic melancholy of the brown scene. I decided to purchase it. Perhaps I would send it to Claudia, with a terse, ambiguous message.

There was no price on the rack of cards, no price penciled on the backs. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a price anywhere in PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS. I wandered back through the jumble of ill-lit rooms and when I reached the cash register I presented my postcard with a flourish to Plumshaw. Majestically, with her torso flung back, she took it from me. She looked at the picture, turned the card over and studied the blank side, and gave me a sharp glance, as if estimating my bank account. She held the card up and appeared to examine one corner. At last she lowered the postcard to the counter, where she rested it on its edge and supported it lightly with both hands. She drew her shoulders back and looked directly at me.

“That will be three dollars,” she said.

“Three dollars! For a postcard!” I couldn’t stop myself.

She hesitated; looked at the card again; reached her decision. “Some postcards are two dollars, some are three, and some are five. It depends on the condition. This is in very good condition, as you can see — no postmark, no stains, no creases. Only here, at the corner”—she held the card toward me—“it is bent a little. It hardly touches the picture itself, but the card is not in mint condition. I can let you have it for two dollars and fifty cents, but I cannot possibly—”

“Please,” I said, holding up my hand. “I’ll take it for three. I was just curious.”

“My customers never complain. If you think three is too high—”

“I think three is perfect — perfect.” Quickly, one after the other, I placed three dollar bills on the counter. She slipped them one by one into her hand and rang open the cash register.

“If you would care to see other cards, I have a number of unopened boxes—”

I assured her that I wanted only the one card. She picked it up, glanced at it once more, and slipped it into a small flat paper bag. She folded the top over once and flattened the fold with a single slow stroke of her long thumb. She held it out to me and said, “A very nice postcard.”

“Thank you,” I replied; it seemed the only thing to say. She banged the drawer of the cash register shut. No smile from Plumshaw — no flicker of friendliness — only, for a moment, she turned to look at the streaming window, as if imagining my misfortune.

Through cold, gusting rain I trudged uphill, keeping under the occasional awnings. Rain coursed down my face and neck and trickled onto my collarbone; the bottoms of my pants darkened. I walked with bent head, my hands thrust deep in my trench coat pockets. Between the shops the gray of the water met the darker gray of the sky. Somewhere on the water a bell clanged, and I heard ropes creaking and a faint tinkling sound. It struck me that Columbus had been wrong. The earth was flat, and ended right here, at Broome — you could fall over the edge into grayness, and be lost forever.

In my room I rubbed my hair with a towel and changed into dry clothes and slippers. Despite the chill the radiator was cold, and I put on my summer bathrobe, wishing I had brought my winter one. I had placed the paper bag on the night table and I now drew out the postcard and propped it up against the white porcelain base of the lamp. I had chosen well. The sepia sun, the sepia lovers on their rock, the gloomy reflections in the lake, all these pleased me. In the light of the lamp I saw details I had failed to notice in Plumshaw’s cavern: the tips of grasses rising through the shallow water in front of the pines, a pine root twisting through the bank and hanging over the water, a ribbon in her hair; and it was now plain that the figures were not looking out over the water, but were turned slightly toward each other. I could make out part of his face, and she was turned almost in profile. Her miniature features were sharply caught by the camera: I could see her eyelashes, her slightly open lips, a brown shadow of cheekbone. She was beautiful, but it was difficult to read her expression; I seemed to detect something questioning or uncertain in her face.

Lunch was served in the chilly room of small tables. There were seven other guests at OCEAN GABLES, all of them elderly except for a thin, fragile-looking, thirtyish woman with eyeglasses and sharp elbows, who sat hugging herself as she leaned over a book held open by a saucer at one edge and the top of a sugar bowl at the other and who looked up now and then with large, startled eyes. Even among the three couples there was no conversation, as if the presence of others compelled secrecy. After a hefty lunch I sought out the manager, John Kearns. I found him sitting in the living room reading a newspaper: a boyish gray-haired man with round, clear-rimmed eyeglasses and shiny cheeks, wearing a corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches over a buttoned sweater that revealed at the throat a red-and-black lumberjack shirt. He continued to hold open the paper while looking up with a big, hearty smile. “A cold snack,” he said, and shook his paper sharply once. I realized that I must have heard incorrectly: a cold snap. “We never turn the heat on before the first of October. By law I can wait till the fifteenth.” He paused and lowered his voice. “There’s a man coming to look at the furnace next week. Unusual weather for this time of year. Bracing. You’ll see: in two, three days people will be complaining about the heat and humidity. Never fails, does it.” The last sentence seemed not quite to fit, but I was certain there would be no heat at OCEAN GABLES.

I sat for a while in a small room off the living room, in a plump, flowered armchair beside a bay window dripping with rain. The room contained a small bookcase filled with faded forty-year-old best-sellers and back issues of an architectural journal. I felt myself falling into a black mood and I suddenly sprang up and went upstairs for my coat and umbrella. Outside the rain ran in black rivulets along the sides of the lane. When I reached the main street I walked down the other side, stopping in a warm store to look at bamboo napkin holders, lacquered wicker picnic baskets lined with red-and-white-checked cloth, and white wicker wine carriers each with an empty green wine bottle, and then stopping in an even warmer store to examine a perforated wall hung with big shiny brass numerals, brass knockers, barrel bolts, cabinet catches, and double-pronged door hooks. Toward the bottom of the hill I looked across the street for PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS, but it had disappeared. I imagined Plumshaw folding it all up like a cardboard box and walking away with it under a black umbrella. A moment later I caught sight of a white telephone number in a dark window; beside it Plumshaw’s dripping black window reflected a white storefront, through which a dim book was visible. At the bottom of the street I walked through the muddy field past a gray rowboat half-filled with water. On the slippery pier I stood looking at a lobster boat with its piles of wet buoys, its slick tarpaulin spread over something with sharp edges, and its dark crate with a slightly open lid from which emerged a single brown-green pincer.

Back in my chilly room I wrapped myself in my bathrobe and walked back and forth rubbing my arms. The windows rattled. I began turning the sash locks, and discovered that one was missing — there were four little holes for screws. Still in my bathrobe I got into bed and lay reading one page in turn of the three impossible books I had brought with me: a history of the United States beginning with the Bronze Age, a complete Shakespeare in double columns, and a novel set in ancient Rome. I tossed the books aside and tried to sleep, but I was too bored for sleep. Rain lashed the windows — hammer-blows of rain. At any moment the panes were going to crack like eggshells. Then the rain would fall on the cold radiator, on the bedspread, on the open suitcase sitting on the wooden chair. Slowly the room would fill with water, slowly my bed would rise — and turning and turning, I would float out through the window into the angry sky. In the lamplit dusk of midafternoon I reached for my postcard. Despite a first, general impression of brown softness, I was struck again by the sharpness of the image as I drew the card close. I could distinguish the woman’s brown iris from her darker brown pupil, and I could see her individual eyelashes. With surprise I now saw that the man faced her directly: his forehead, the straight line of his nose, even his lips, were distinctly visible. I detected a harshness about his expression; she for her part appeared sorrowful, the set of her lips mournful. On the rock beside him I could see the interwoven pattern of straw on his boater and the tiny ivory monkey, his hands pressed over his eyes, on top of the walking stick.

I replaced the card against the lamp and tried to nap, but the rain splattering against the windows, and the rattling sashes with the missing lock, and the rattling gray universe, all banished sleep, and I lay with my arm over my eyes waiting for dinner in my darkening room.

Dinner at OCEAN GABLES was served from six to eight. At one minute past six I stepped into the room of small tables covered with fresh white tablecloths and lit by fat candles in colorless glass globes. A small electric heater with a black rubber cord rattled in the center of the room. I wondered what occasion called forth the use of the main dining room and chose a corner table beside a curtained window. As I sat down the woman with sharp elbows appeared in the doorway, wearing a heavy baggy sweater that came down to her thighs and clutching her book against her stomach. She cast an alarmed look in my direction and chose a table in a far corner, where she sat down with awkward suddenness and bent her head over her book. Slowly the other couples came in and took their silent places. “Still raining,” one man said, perhaps to his wife, perhaps to no one in particular, and “Yes,” a woman from another table answered, “it certainly is coming down,” before we subsided into silence. Dinner dazzled us: duck à l’orange with wild rice, hot homemade bread, hot apple crisp for dessert. I lingered over a superb cup of coffee and wondered how on earth I would pass the time till bed. The expression struck me: how on earth. Was it possible I needed some other place? Slowly the room emptied, leaving only me and my destined companion. She had the look of a librarian or a third-grade teacher. We would be married in a white church on a green hill and open a gift shop in Broome. I stared at the bowed top of her head and began counting slowly, but at two hundred thirty she had not looked up. I finished a second cup of coffee and rose, but my fading bride remained rigidly bent over her book. In the living room a number of guests and John Kearns sat on flowered armchairs and couches and watched television. The screen showed rolls of smiling antacid tablets, dancing. Kearns wore a heavy, ribbed sweater and thick shoes with spongy soles; he looked like a happy bear. At the reception desk in the front hall I found a boy of ten reading a toy catalogue open to a page of robots. When I asked about movie theaters he said there was one over in Rock Ridge, at which moment a door opened and Mrs. Kearns came out, holding a tissue to her reddish nostrils and suddenly turning her face away to give a delicate, suppressed sneeze. Rock Ridge was twenty-five miles away through heavy rain. There was a drive-in theater ten miles away but sometimes the bridge was washed out and you had to go through Ashville. I recommended tea with lemon juice and three thousand milligrams of Vitamin C and returned upstairs, where I took a hot bath in a claw-foot tub. In my room I sat in pajamas, shirt, and bathrobe on a hard wooden chair at a small writing table and held my ballpoint poised above the back of a postcard I had found in the drawer, showing on the front a pen-and-ink sketch of OCEAN GABLES. I wrote the C of Claudia, brooded for ten minutes, and went to bed.

Before turning off the lamp I took my sepia postcard from the table and lay holding it upright on my chest. With surprise I realized that I had been looking forward impatiently to this moment, as if in the brown rectangle of the postcard I could forget for a while the rain and the room and the town and my restless, oddly askew life. In the light of the close-pulled lamp the sharpness of the image was almost startling. I could see the needles in the pine trees and the wingtip of a bird on a branch; in a tiny opening in the pines the spotted back of a fawn was visible. I could see the knot in the ribbon in the woman’s hair and the minuscule lines streaming outward from the knot. The hardness of the man’s expression was unmistakable, the tension in lip and nostril sharp and clear. For the first time I noticed that his face was tilted toward hers, which was pulled back slightly, as if from a fire. A long brown cloud was reflected with a single ripple beneath the reflected pines. Uncomfortably I returned the postcard to the base of the lamp and turned out the light.

Perhaps it was the unnatural earliness, perhaps it was the second cup of coffee, perhaps it was only my life, my life, but I could not fall asleep. I listened to the rain, the dark rain of Broome, to the heavy creak and crack of footsteps on the stairs, to the always opening and closing bathroom door — and long after the floor had grown quiet, and I was drifting off to sleep, again I heard the creaking of the stairs as someone climbed slowly, very slowly, pausing as if abashed at each loud crack of wood, until I wanted to shout into the night: and still the steps ascended, timidly, crashingly, and suddenly stopped forever. I fell into a restless sort of half-waking sleep and dreamed that I was wandering ankle-deep in water in a dark tangle of decaying rooms. I came to a massive door with a handle so high I could not reach it. The wood of the door was slippery and covered with greenish slime, and when the door sprang open I saw Plumshaw before me, but she was grinning wildly and her hair was blowing in the wind. I turned over and Plumshaw vanished but the rooms remained, filled now with small tables heaped with bowls of soup. Claudia was complaining about the soup, knocking one bowl after another from the tables, and when I crouched down to pick up a bowl I saw a woman seated on the floor with her head bowed, who looked up with startled eyes as I woke in the dark. My windows were rattling. I turned on the lamp. It was 11:46. Grimly I threw off the covers and marched to the writing table, where I folded the OCEAN GABLES postcard in half and in half again before thrusting it between the clattering pair of unlocked sashes. Back in my bed I lay in lamplight listening to the rain. As I turned on my side and reached up to turn off the lamp I glanced at the postcard.

There was no possibility of misreading their expressions: she was in anguish, his face was twisted in anger. The dark sun seemed to have slipped lower, it was barely visible above the pines. His body leaned harshly toward her and she was straining away. The dark brown sun half-sunk behind the trees, the unpeaceful lovers, the sharp rocks, the brown clouds, all were burdened with sorrow, and with a sense of oppression I thrust the picture back against the lamp.

I must have fallen into a light, uneasy sleep, for I was wakened by what sounded like a faint gasp or cry. I lay listening, but heard only the harsh rain. In that black room my chest felt heavy, my lungs labored, I could barely breathe. With a feeling of anxiety I sat up and switched on the lamp, which instantly sprang up in a black window. I snatched the postcard and looked in anguish at her face stricken with terror, his face taut with fury. A tendon stood out sharply on his neck and I saw that his slightly raised right hand grasped a small sharp rock. I could see the tense knuckles and the tiny, carefully manicured nails.

I tore my eyes away and saw on the lamp table the small, flat paper bag. Quickly I thrust the postcard into the bag.

I turned off the lamp and could not sleep. The oppressive postcard, the clattering rain, the labyrinth of tangled bedclothes, my racing mind, all lashed me into heavy wakefulness. Sometime in that hellish night I heard a dim cry, a thud, a splash, but I was sick to death of Broome, I was sick to death of it all, and lay with clenched fists in the streaming dark, imagining the bloody stone, the circle of spreading ripples, the floating hair. Toward dawn I slept, and was wakened not long after by the banging of the bathroom door.

I was the first one down for breakfast, and I rose wiping my lips as two silent couples were studying the menu. Through the cold morning rain I made my way down the steep street, leaning forward in the wind and holding my umbrella with two hands, one on the curving handle and one under the spokes. Though it was ten of eight, Plumshaw was there. I had known she would be. The look she gave me, when I entered under the tinkling bell, seemed to say: no returns accepted. I balanced my dripping umbrella carefully against the counter and strode toward the passage as the handle began to slide in a dream-slow arc. In the warren of rooms and passages I lost my way and came to a room filled with old furniture: a flattish rolled-up carpet lay bent across an armchair, and a dressmaker’s dummy, wearing nothing but a wide-brimmed black hat, rose up from behind an upside-down bicycle. After that I found myself in a room with a boarded-up window, and then I stepped through a narrow passage into the room with the rack of postcards. At the table I kept looking at the entrance, but Plumshaw didn’t appear. Furtively I pulled the paper bag from my pocket and slipped out the postcard, pausing for an instant before thrusting it into the middle of a cluster of cards. In that pause I glanced at it, but in the poor light I saw only a vague brown scene, with something dim, perhaps a figure, at the end of the rocky point. Wildly I spun the teetering rack and turned away. At that moment I was seized by a violent curiosity, like a hand gripping my throat, and stepping back to the rack I began searching desperately through postcards of baroque fountains and Alpine huts and old railroad trains. It was Plumshaw who saved me: she walked into the room and I whirled around. She was carrying a shoebox under one arm.

“I thought you might like to see these,” she said, taking off the lid and holding out a box tightly stuffed with postcards. “There are some very nice views.”

“Not today, no, not right now. Here, allow me.” I took the box from her, tucked it under my arm, and followed her to the front of the shop. My umbrella hung by its handle from the side of the counter. I set down the box next to the cash register and pulled from the candy rack a cellophane bag of gumdrops. “One of these instead.” There was no price on any of the candy; I looked forward to being amazed. Plumshaw disappointed me by ringing up seventy-five cents. “More rain,” I said, gesturing vaguely toward the window.

“It rains often, here in Broome.” She paused a moment, drew herself up, and added, “The jellybeans are also very good.”

In my room I ate two gumdrops and packed my bag, which seemed to contain nothing but damp clothes. As I swung across the landing I nearly knocked into the woman with the book, who looked at me in alarm and stepped back against a wall. “Wonderful weather!” I said. She blinked at me through her glasses and said quietly, as if reproachfully, “I love it when it rains.” She looked disapprovingly at my suitcase. I reached into my pocket and held out the open bag of gumdrops. She shook her head quickly. I imagined staying at Broome, taking her out to dinner, marrying her. “I don’t like gumdrops,” she said. “Goodbye,” I said, and bounded down the stairs. At the desk in the front hall Mrs. Kearns looked at my suitcase with red, rheum-glittering eyes. I had paid for three nights; she said nothing at all as I nodded at her and stepped onto the front porch.

Rain splashed on the flagstone path and ran from the roof gutters. I turned up the collar of my trench coat and made my way through cuff-high wet grass to the gravel parking lot pooled with rain. My windshield was covered with large wet leaves. I threw my dripping suitcase in the car and backed out onto the muddy lane, remembering suddenly the black-and-silver ballpoint I had left on the writing table, and making a mental gift of it to John Kearns. It would look good in the pocket of his corduroy jacket. As I turned onto the steep street, in the uphill direction, I saw the shops plunging downhill in the rearview mirror, and I was seized by the certain feeling that the moment the street vanished from view, suddenly the clouds above the shops would part, a big yellow sun would burst forth, the sky would turn bright, dazzling blue.