He moved it down the length of his brother’s body and over the wooden footboard of his bed, past the dresser they shared, out the door. Leaning out over his own mattress, he saw the light catch the doorknob of the linen closet, the door to his sisters’ room. He willed the light to push the door open a bit more. He could then move the beam over Annie’s face, play it across her eyelids.
“Michael,” he heard his mother say from his parents’ room. She was trying to keep her voice low, but not whispering. “Go to sleep,” she said. She sounded not exactly far away but heading there, as if she had stopped in the middle of her leaving. “Do you hear me?” she said. He imagined she was speaking to him from over her shoulder, just as she was stepping out, maybe through one of her bedroom windows, maybe following his father, her hands on the window frame, her foot on the sill, their father already gone before her (when we’re gone, he had said) into the night. “Put out that light,” she said, over her shoulder, as he imagined it. And he did. In the darkness, he felt more certain of their absence. His parents had left the house and if he called out “Mom?” only Jacob and the girls would hear him. If there were a knock at the door tonight, it would be left to him to answer. He would take Jacob’s flashlight. He imagined Pauline, scratching at the glass, wanting to get in. Lying alone in the darkness, he formed the words in his mind, willed them across the room, but did not speak them out loud. “Sorry, Jacob.”
Instead, he whispered, “Mr. MacLeod is tinkling on his piano again.”
And then they were both laughing in the dark.
They should have come earlier in the day, but it was a World’s Fair, after all, and there had been much to distract them. Now the sun was low and orange, radiating heat like a glowing coal. The asphalt that had been wet and clean this morning-hosed down by jumpsuited workers intent, it seemed, on lending the paved-over park a hint of morning dew-was now gummy and pliant underfoot. Now heat waves rose from it, smeared the air and made a mirage of the shoes and the ankles and the pink knees of the passing crowds. The painted benches had grown too hot to sit on. The shrubs and sparse trees were limp. Now the jumpsuited men walked listlessly, clicking their long-handled brooms against the opened and closed mouths of their long-handled dustbins. The passengers in the sleek Glide-a-Rides, erect and smiling earlier in the day as they tested a bit of space-age transportation, now slumped in the molded plastic seats or gazed out from behind their sunglasses, unimpressed even with the future. It was the end of the day.
In another hour, the sun would dip into the Hudson and the humidity would begin to give way. In another hour-by the time they got through the exhibit-the lights in the trees and on the pavilions and under the fountain that surrounded the Unisphere would draw the eye up, to the spires and the arches and the silvery searchlights of the fair, to the stars themselves. But not now. Now every head was bent under the day’s accumulated heat, every grimy collar and darkened arm ring exposed, every stranger’s arm or bare shoulder-as they joined the line outside the exhibit-was sticky, unpleasantly cool.
“We should have come earlier,” Mary Keane said, although, she supposed, earlier the line might have been longer still.
Beside her, Annie stood on her toes to glimpse the distance to the entrance and then leaned out to see how many more had joined the line behind them. There was solace in the seven or eight-and now another four-who would have to wait longer still. She stepped back into place. There was a tall, older couple ahead of them, the woman fat, the man slightly stooped. Behind them, a younger couple, but not so young that the woman didn’t look a little foolish, hanging-in this heat-on the man’s hairy arm.
They had already missed the exhibit twice. Once, the first time they had come to the fair, when they had Clare and the two boys, who had balked at waiting an hour and a half to see a statue. Once again when their father was also along. After only ten minutes on the long line, he had shown them his wrist and declared that if they were not all in the car in the next half hour it would be a nightmare on the Grand Central.
(Because he was a man who always knew precisely when they must all be in the car, knew precisely the minute after which the trip would be in vain, impossible, a nightmare. “Look at the time,” turning furiously on his wife as if she were both the single force delaying them and the single reason in all the world that he sought to wage this battle. It made little difference if their arrival or departure was meant to be precise or merely eventual, he held his wrist in the air, his fist clenched as if he would bring it down on their heads if they failed to understand-tapping the face of his watch-that time was against them.)
But now they were just the two-mother and daughter-and while Mary Keane, in deference to her husband’s habit of mind rather than out of any impatience of her own, reprimanded herself for not getting here earlier, she also made calm accommodation for what would clearly be a long wait: a later bus home, was all, she told herself. A phone call to the boys to tell them to fix some spaghetti. Another to Pauline, who had Clare for the day. Nothing else to stop them, really, from finally seeing this through.
“Probably,” she said to her daughter, “it’s best to have left this for last. Probably after you see this you won’t want to see anything else.”
Together, months ago, they had watched on TV as the statue arrived. Or at least they had seen the crate that contained it as it was lowered from a ship. One of the world’s most profound and precious works of art, taken from Rome for the first time in history. The television showed men reaching up to touch the wooden crate as it slowly descended. Carved by the artist in his youth, nearly five hundred years ago.
And the line was moving. Shuffling, really, as if the hot asphalt pulled at their feet, and with so little distance between them all that each step brought the bump or brush of another body, a bare forearm, a soft hip. The touch of a toe against your heel. Among the fair’s sweet, pervasive smell of Belgian waffles, there was a stirring of human odors, perfume and aftershave and sweat and hair warmed by the sun. The odor of breath as they all turned to one another to say, “At least it’s moving.”
The tall old man in front of them wore a yellow plaid shirt, short-sleeved. Although his arms were tanned, his puckered elbows were chalky. He had missed a belt loop in back. Beside him, his wife was fanning herself with a map of the fair. Despite the heat, there was a white pillbox hat pinned to the back of her head. She wore a floral shirtwaist dress and the flesh beneath her arm moved like a pink hammock filled with something heavy. She turned to the mother and daughter to say that the lines had been terrible all day long. They’d waited forty-five minutes to see It’s a Small World. More than an hour and a half at the Bell Pavilion. There was an orange plastic dolphin on her dress, a gift from the Florida exhibit. She said they’d brought their son along, who was on leave, but he’d already gone back to the hotel to cool off. He told them he did enough standing in line in the army.
For Annie, the lines, the crowds, the restricted view while she waited, were all part of the fair’s adventure, like being led, blindfolded. At the end of every wait-it had been happening all day-wonders were revealed.
(She and her mother, who did not drive, had steered a green convertible into the dark, past dinosaurs and the invention of the wheel and into a shimmering city of tall white towers, the threshold of tomorrow. They had sat-after the hour wait-in a moving theater as a mechanical family, as real as her own, lived through the 1800s and the 1900s and into the next century, only their faces unchanging. They’d watched gray dolphins leap out of a blue pool and hang suspended above the ordinary Queens skyline. They’d walked quietly through the spiced air of Asia, where tiny chimes sounded softly and incense was burned, and through a chilly Alpine village that actually smelled of snow. They’d sat side by side in a moving chair that took them past lunar bases and underwater farms and along a glittering continental highway while a voice like God’s told them, whispering softly into their ears, that the present was just an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.)