Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Ray Bradbury

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      From this island of old age now he called across a cold sea toward a summer shore. There, three women answered. Still reasonably young, trapped between fifty and sixty, they gasped, crowed and hooted when Albert Beam stunned them with the news:

      ‘Emily, you won’t believe—’

      ‘Cora, a miracle!’

      ‘Elizabeth, Junior’s back.’

      ‘Lazarus has returned!’

      ‘Drop everything!’

      ‘Hurry over!’

      ‘Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye!’

      He dropped the phone, suddenly fearful that after all the alarums and excursions, this Most Precious Member of the Hot-Dog Midnight Dancing-Under-the-Table Club might dismantle. He shuddered to think that Cape Canaveral’s rockets would fall apart before the admiring crowd could arrive to gape in awe.

      Such was not the case.

      Junior, steadfast, stayed on, frightful in demeanor, a wonder to behold.

      Albert Beam, ninety-five percent mummy, five percent jaunty peacock lad, raced about his mansion in his starkers, drinking coffee to give Junior courage and shock himself awake, and when he heard the various cars careen up the drive, threw on a hasty robe. With hair in wild disarray he rushed to let in three girls who were not girls, nor maids, and almost ladies.

      But before he could throw the door wide, they were storming it with jackhammers, or so it seemed, their enthusiasm was so manic.

      They burst through, almost heaving him to the floor, and waltzed him backward into the parlor.

      One had once been a redhead, the next a blond, the third a brunette. Now, with various rinses and tints obscuring past colors false and real, each a bit more out of breath than the next, they laughed and giggled as they carried Albert Beam along through his house. And whether they were flushed with merriment or blushed at the thought of the antique miracle they were about to witness, who could say? They were scarcely dressed, themselves, having hurled themselves into dressing-gowns in order to race here and confront Lazarus triumphant in the tomb!

      ‘Albert, is it true?’

      ‘No joke?’

      ‘You once pinched our legs, now are you pulling them?!’

      ‘Chums!’

      Albert Beam shook his head and smiled a great warm smile, sensing a similar smile on the hidden countenance of his Pet, his Pal, his Buddy, his Friend. Lazarus, impatient, jogged in place.

      ‘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.

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