Dark Benediction

A great shudder seemed to pass through the thin elderly man. He sighed resignedly and turned to look down at D’Uccia with weary gray eyes.

“Do I get the afternoon off, or don’t I?” he asked hopelessly, knowing the answer in advance.

But D’Uccia was not content with a mere refusal. He began to pace. He was obviously deeply moved. He defended the system of free enterprise and the cherished traditions of the theater. He spoke eloquently of the golden virtues of industriousness and dedication to duty.

He bounced about like a furious Pekingese yapping happily at a scarecrow. Thornier’s neck reddened, his mouth went tight.

“Can I go now?”

“When you waxa da floor? Palisha da seats, fixa da lights? When you clean op the dressing room, hah?” He stared up at Thornier for a moment, then turned on his heel and charged to the window. He thrust his thumb into the black dirt of the window box, where several prize lilies were already beginning to bloom. “Ha!” he snorted. “Dry, like I thought! You think the bulbs a don’t need a drink, hah?”

“But I watered them this morning. The sun—”

“Hah! You letsa little fiori wilt and die, hah? And you wanna the day off?”

It was hopeless. When D’Uccia drew his defensive mantle of calculated deafness or stupidity about himself, he became impenetrable to any request or honest explanation. Thornier sucked in a slow breath between his teeth, stared angrily at his employer for a moment, and seemed briefly ready to unleash an angry blast. Thinking better of it, he bit his lip, turned, and stalked wordlessly out of the office. D’Uccia followed him trimphantly to e door. “Don’ you go sneak off, now!” he called ominously, and stood smiling down the corridor until the janitor vanished at the head of the stairs. Then he sighed and went back to get his hat and coat. He was just preparing to leave when Thornier came back upstairs with a load of buckets, mops, and swabs.

The janitor stopped when he noticed the hat and coat, and his seamed face went curiously blank. “Going home, Mr. D’Uccia?” he asked icily.

“Yeh! I’ma works too hard, the doctor say. I’ma need the sunshine. More frash air. I’ma go relax on the beach a while.”

Thornier leaned on the mop handle and smiled nastily. “Sure,” he said. “Letsa machines do da work.”

The comment was lost on D’Uccia. He waved airily, strode off toward the stairway, and called an airy “A rivederci!” over his shoulder.

“A rivederci, padrone,” Thornier muttered softly, his pale eyes glittering from their crow’s-feet wrappings. For a moment his face seemed to change—and once again he was Chaubrec’s Adolfo, at the exit of the Comman-Jant, Act II, scene iv, from “A Canticle for the Marsman.”

Somewhere downstairs, a door slammed behind D’Uccia.

“Into death!” hissed Adolfo-Thornier, throwing back his head to laugh Adolfo’s laugh. It rattled the walls. When its reverberations had died away, he felt a little better. He picked up his buckets and brooms and walked on down the corridor to the door of D’Uccia’s office.

Unless “Judas-Judas” hung on through the weekend, he wouldn’t get to see it, since he could not afford a ticket to the evening performance, and there was no use asking D’Uccia for favors. While he waxed the hall, he burned. He waxed as far as D’Uccia’s doorway, then stood staring into the office for several vacant minutes.

“I’m fed up,” he said at last.

The office remained silent. The window-box lilies bowed to the breeze.

“You little creep!” he growled. “I’m through!”

The office was speechless. Thornier straightened and tapped his chest.

“I, Ryan Thornier, am walking out, you hear? The show is finished!”

When the office failed to respond, he turned on his heel and stalked downstairs. Minutes later, he came back with a small can of gold paint and a pair of artists’ brushes from the storeroom. Again he paused in the doorway.

“Anything else I can do, Mr. D’Uccia?” he purred. Traffic murmured in the street; the breeze rustled the lilies; the building creaked.

“Oh? You want me to wax in the wall-cracks, too? How could I have forgotten!”

He clucked his tongue and went over to the window. Such lovely lilies. He opened the paint can, set it on the window ledge, and then very carefully he glided each of the prize lilies, petals, leaves, and stalks, until the flowers glistened like the work of Midas’ hands in the sun-light. When he finished, he stepped back to smile at them in admiration for a moment, then went to finish waxing the hall.

He waxed it with particular care in front of D’Uccia’s office. He waxed under the throw rug that covered the worn spot on the floor where D’Uccia had made a sharp left turn into his sanctum every morning for fifteen years, and then he turned the rug over and dusted dry wax powder into the pile. He replaced it carefully and pushed at it a few times with his foot to make certain the lubrication was adequate. The rug slid about as if it rode on a bed of bird-shot.