Mystery

Tom continued to melt back into the scene before him, wondering if this experience, still present as a kind of weightlessness about his heart, was what had been impending all during the day. He had been pushed—pushed right out of his frame. For an elastically long second or two—for as long as the world had trembled and overflowed with being—he had been in the other world, the one beneath.

Now he smiled, distracted by this notion from Jules Verne or Robert Heinlein. He stepped back on the sidewalk and looked east. Both sides of the wide avenue were filled with horses and vehicles, at least half of which were bicycles. This varied crowd moved through the haze of light and dust and extended as far as Tom could see.

It seemed to Tom that he had never really known what the phrase “rush hour” meant. On Eastern Shore Road, rush hour consisted of a car or two honking at children to get out of the street. Once Tom had seen a servant ride a bicycle straight into the bicycle of another servant, spilling clean white laundry all over the warm red brick of the road—that was rush hour. Of course Tom had been in his father’s office in the business district; he had seen the midday traffic on Calle Hoffmann; and he had gone to the harbor, Mill Key, with his parents and passed beneath rows of palms in the company of jitneys and cabs and broughams; and at Mill Key he had seen the conveyances drawn up to take the new arrivals downtown to their hotels, the Pforzheimer or the St. Alwyn. (Strictly speaking, Mill Walk had no tourist hotels. The Pforzheimer took in bankers and moneymen, and the St. Alwyn catered to drummers, traveling musicians like Glenroy Breakstone and the wondrous Targets, gamblers, that class of person.) He had never been in the business district at the close of a workday, and he had never seen anything like the sweep and the variety of the traffic moving east and west, primarily west, toward Shurz Bay and Elm Cove, on Calle Burleigh. It looked as though everyone on the island had simultaneously decided to dash off to the island’s other side. For a moment of panic that seemed oddly connected to the wonderful experience he had just undergone, Tom wondered if he would ever be able to find his way back again.

But he did not want to go home, not until he had found a certain house, and he imagined that when the time came he would find someone as accommodating as the milk driver, who in spite of the NO PASSENGERS ALLOWED sign at the front of the cart had invited him to hop on board and then quizzed him about girlfriends all during the long trip west—Tom was big for his age, and with his blond hair and dark eyes and eyebrows he looked more like thirteen than ten. This thing had been nagging at him all day, making it impossible to read more than a page or two at a time, driving him from his bedroom to the living room to the white wicker furniture on the porch, until at last he had resorted to walking back and forth on the big front lawn, wondering vaguely if Mrs. Thielman’s Sam might run into Mrs. Langenheim’s Jenny again, or if a crazy drunk might wander into the street and start yelling and throwing rocks, as had happened two days before.

The funny thing was that though the feeling of glory, overflowing being, had passed, the other feeling did not fade with it but lingered, as powerful as ever.

He was being pushed, being moved.

Tom turned around to get a better fix on this strange area, and found himself looking between two sturdy wooden houses, each placed atop its own narrow slanting lawn like a nut on a cupcake, at another row of houses set behind them on the next street. Tall elms arched over this second street, which seemed as quiet as Eastern Shore Road. The houses beneath the elms were one notch less impressive than those on Calle Burleigh. Tom instantly understood that this second street was forbidden territory. This information was not ambiguous. The little street might as well have had a chain-link fence around it and a sign commanding him to KEEP OUT: a spear of lightning would sizzle right down out of the sky and impale him if he entered that street.

The imaginary light that shone on his face became stronger and hotter. He had been right to come all this way. He stepped sideways, and a little two-story wooden house painted a very dark brown on the top story and a bright buttery yellow on the bottom came into view on the forbidden street.