Deadeye Dick Page 0,15
even in 1943. Felix had put the top down. There was a separate windshield for the back seat. The engine had sixteen cylinders, and the two spare tires were mounted in shallow wells in the front fenders. The tires looked like the necks of plunging horses.
So Felix burbled off toward the black part of town in that flabbergasting apparatus. He was wearing a rented tuxedo, with a gardenia in his lapel. There was a corsage of two orchids for Celia on the seat beside him.
Father stripped down to his underwear, and Mother brought him the uniform. She was in on this double cross of Felix. She thought everything Father did was wonderful. And while Father was getting dressed again, she went around turning off electric lights and lighting candles. She and Father, without anybody’s much noticing it, had earlier in the day put candles everywhere. There must have been a hundred of them.
Mother got them all lit, just about the time Father topped off his scarlet-and-silver uniform with the busby.
And I myself, standing on the balcony outside my bedroom on the loft, was as enchanted as Mother and Father expected Celia Hildreth to be. I was inside a great beehive filled with fireflies. And below me was the beautiful King of the Early Evening.
My mind had been trained by heirloom books of fairy tales, and by the myths and legends which animated my father’s conversation, to think that way. It was second nature for me, and for Felix, too, and for no other children in Midland City, I am sure, to see candle flames as fireflies—and to invent a King of the Early Evening.
And now the King of the Early Evening, with a purple plume in his busby, gave this order: “Ope, ope the portals!”
• • •
What portals were there to open? There were only two, I thought. There was the front door on the south, and there was the kitchen door on the northeast. But Father seemed to be calling for something far more majestic than opening both of those.
And then he advanced on the two huge carriage-house doors, in one of which our front door was set. I had never thought of them as doors. They were a wall of my home which was made of wood rather than stone. Now Father took hold of the mighty bolt which had held them shut for thirty years. It resisted him for only a moment, and then slid back, as it had been born to do.
Until that moment, I had seen that bolt as just another dead piece of medieval iron on the wall. In the proper hands, perhaps it could have killed an enemy.
I had felt the same way about the ornate hinges. But they weren’t more junk from Europe. They were real Midland City, Ohio, hinges, ready to work at any time.
I had stolen downstairs now, awe in every step I took.
The King of the Early Evening put his shoulder to one carriage-house door and then the other. A wall of my home vanished. There were stars and a rising moon where it had been.
8
AND MOTHER and Father and I all hid as Felix arrived with Celia Hildreth in the Keedsler touring car. Felix, too, was dazed by the lovely transformation of our home. When he switched off the Keedsler’s idling engine, it was as though it went on idling anyway. In a voice just like the engine’s, he was reassuring Celia that she needn’t be afraid, even though she had never seen anything like this house before.
I heard her say this: “I’m sorry. I can’t help being scared. I want to get out of here.” I was just inside the great new doorway.
That should have been enough for Felix. He should have gotten her out of there. As she would say in a few minutes, she hadn’t even wanted to go to the prom, but her parents had told her she had to, and she hated her dress and was ashamed to have anybody see her in it, and she didn’t understand rich people, and didn’t want to, and she was happiest when she was all alone and nobody could stare at her, and nobody could say things to her that she was supposed to reply to in some fancy, ladylike way—and so on.
Felix used to say that he didn’t get her out of there because he wanted to show Father that he could keep a promise, even if Father couldn’t. He admits now, though, that he