Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

‘No jokes. No lies. Ladies, sit!’

The women rushed to collapse in chairs and turn their rosy faces and July Fourth eyes full on the old moon rocket expert, waiting for countdown.

Albert Beam took hold of the edges of his now purposely elusive bathrobe, while his eyes moved tenderly from face to face.

‘Emily, Cora, Elizabeth,’ he said, gently, ‘how special you were, are, and will always be.’

‘Albert, dear Albert, we’re dying with curiosity!’

‘A moment, please,’ he murmured. ‘I need to – remember.’

And in the quiet moment, each gazed at the other, and suddenly saw the obvious; something never spoken of in their early afternoon lives, but which now loomed with the passing years.

The simple fact was that none of them had ever grown up.

They had used each other to stay in kindergarten, or at the most, fourth grade, forever.

Which meant endless champagne noon lunches, and prolonged late night foxtrot/waltzes that sank down in nibblings of ears and founderings in grass.

None had ever married, none had ever conceived of the notion of children, much less conceived them, so none had raised any family save the one gathered here, and they had not so much raised each other as prolonged an infancy and lingered an adolescence. They had responded only to the jolly or wild weathers of their souls and their genetic dispositions.

‘Listen, dear, dear, ladies,’ whispered Albert Beam.

They continued to stare at each other’s masks with a sort of fevered benevolence. For it had suddenly struck them that while they had been busy making each other happy they had made no one else unhappy!

It was something to sense that by some miracle they’d given each other only minor wounds and those long since healed, for here they were, forty years on, still friends in remembrance of three loves.

‘Friends,’ thought Albert Beam aloud. ‘That’s what we are. Friends!’

Because, many years ago, as each beauty departed his life on good terms, another had arrived on better. It was the exquisite precision with which he had clocked them through his existence that made them aware of their specialness as women unafraid and so never jealous.

They beamed at one another.

What a thoughtful and ingenious man, to have made them absolutely and completely happy before he sailed on to founder in old age.

‘Come, Albert, my dear,’ said Cora.

‘The matinée crowd’s here,’ said Emily.

‘Where’s Hamlet?’

‘Ready?’ said Albert Beam. ‘Get set?’

He hesitated in the final moment, since it was to be his last annunciation or manifestation or whatever before he vanished into the halls of history.

With trembling fingers that tried to remember the difference between zippers and buttons, he took hold of the bathrobe curtains on the theater, as ’twere.

At which instant a most peculiar loud hum bumbled beneath his pressed lips.

The ladies popped their eyes and smartened up, leaning forward.

For it was that grand moment when the Warner Brothers logo vanished from the screen and the names and titles flashed forth in a fountain of brass and strings by Steiner or Korngold.

Was it a symphonic surge from Dark Victory or The Adventures of Robin Hood that trembled the old man’s lips?

Was it the score from Elizabeth and Essex, Now, Voyager or The Petrified Forest?

Petrified forest!? Albert Beam’s lips cracked with the joke of it. How fitting for him, for Junior!

The music rose high, higher, highest, and exploded from his mouth.

‘Ta-tah!’ sang Albert Beam.

He flung wide the curtain.

The ladies cried out in sweet alarms.

For there, starring in the last act of Revelations, was Albert Beam the Second.

Or perhaps, justifiably proud, Junior!

Unseen in years, he was an orchard of beauty and sweet Eden’s Garden, all to himself.

Was he both Apple and Snake?

He was!

Scenes from Krakatoa, the Explosion that Rocked the World teemed through the ladies’ sugar-plum minds. Lines like ‘Only God Can Make a Tree’ leaped forth from old poems. Cora seemed to recall the score from Last Days of Pompeii, Elizabeth the music from Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Emily, suddenly shocked back into 1927, babbled the inane words to ‘Lucky Lindy … Spirit of St. Louis, high, stay aloft … we’re with you …!’

The musical trio quieted into a sort of twilight-in-mid-morning-holy-hour, a time for veneration and loving regard. It almost seemed that a wondrous illumination sprang forth from the Source, the Shrine at which they gathered as motionless worshippers, praying that the moment would be prolonged by their silent alleluias.

And it was prolonged.

Albert Beam and Junior stood as one before the throng, a large smile on the old man’s face, a smaller one on Junior’s.

Time-travel shadowed the ladies’ faces.

Each remembered Monte Carlo or Paris or Rome or splash-dancing the Plaza Hotel fount that night centuries ago with Scott and Zelda. Suns and moons rose and set in their eyes and there was no jealousy, only lives long lost but brought back and encircled in this moment.

‘Well,’ everyone whispered, at last.

One by one, each of the three pal-friends stepped forward to kiss Albert Beam lightly on the cheek and smile up at him and then down at the Royal Son, that most Precious Member who deserved to be patted, but was not, in this moment, touched.

The three Grecian maids, the retired Furies, the ancient vest porch goddesses, stepped back a way to line up for a final view-halloo.

And the weeping began.

First Emily, then Cora, then Elizabeth, as all summoned back some midnight collision of young fools who somehow survived the crash.