home reading

Far off in the dim moonlit country, over a viaduct and down a valley, a train rushed along whistling like a lost metal thing, nameless and running. Tom went to bed shivering, beside his brother, listening to that train whistle, and thinking of a cousin who lived way out in the country where that train ran now; a cousin who died of pneumonia late at night years and years ago— He smelled the sweat of Doug beside him. It was magic. Tom stopped trembling. “Only two things I know for sure, Doug,” he whispered. “What?” “Nighttime’s awful dark—is one.” “What’s the other?” “The ravine at night don’t belong in Mr. Auffmann’s Happiness Machine, if he ever builds it.” Douglas considered this awhile. “You can say that again.” They stopped talking. Listening, suddenly they heard footsteps coming down the street, under the trees, outside the house now, on the sidewalk. From her bed Mother called quietly, “That’s your father.” It was.

Late at night on the bent parch Leo Auffmann wrote a list he could not see in the dark, exclaiming, “Ah!” or, “That’s another!” when he hit upon a fine component. Then the front-door screen made a moth sound, tapping. “Lena?” he whispered. She sat down next to him on the swing, in her nightgown, not slim the way girls get when they are not loved at seventeen, not fat the way women get when they are not loved at fifty, but absolutely right, a roundness, a firmness, the way women are at any age, he thought, when there is no question. She was miraculous. Her body, like his, was always thinking for her, but in a different way, shaping the children, or moving ahead of him into any room to change the atmosphere there to fit any particular mood he was in. There seemed no long periods of thought for her; thinking and doing moved from her head to her hand and back in a natural and gentle circuiting he could not and cared not to blueprint. “That machine,” she