Tales Out of School
Chapter Nine, pages 150—154

"But for how long, Etta?"

"For the duration." Meaning: this was an old man, a conspicuously old man.

Miss Truley gave, after hemming and hawing, her customary one-shouldered shrug — of assent. You might as well argue with a switch engine as Etta Murph once her mind was settled. Back out front they came now. Felix and the stranger had seated themselves in the front yard under a spreading box elder, beautiful in this season with its yellow keys shagging the limbs. Shadows played checkerwise on the faces of the boy and old man. And what was that held between them in the stranger's open palm? It might have been a miniature person, a homunculus. But in the stranger's open palm was no homunculus. Here was instead a finger puppet — of heartstopping verisimilitude, dressed in manikin finery and placing now an arm at his waist, bowing deep to greet the ladies. His lips were bloody red over random teeth, his tongue slewed out to one side. The mouth of a debauchee. He had a tallow complexion and scooped cheeks. But the eyes, two little furnace doors flung open, bade defiance. The ladies passed each other looks. "Is that thing alive?" whispered Truley. The finger puppet beckoned them down the front steps and across the lawn, spreading bedizened hands to indicate that Murph and Truley should come and have a seat, come and join them.

Bob, who had watched all this from under the house, scrambled forth to complete the circle.

Then, very calmly, the puppet took off his face — took it right off, as if it were his hat, and revealed the plaster blank, the nothing underneath. He briefly roackabyed the tallow-colored visage in his arms, then with sudden unconcern handed it to Murph. From the black velvet folds of his robe he now produced a new face and tried it on.

Truley shook her spellbound head. "Felix, honey, that's you. Isn't it, Etta, isn't it just Felix all over?"

It was Felix, to the life. The puppet busily removed the miniscule rings one by one from his fingers, letting them drop into the grass, not caring where they fell.

Felix had thought his gooseflesh could get no higher. But then the finger puppet proceeded to remove his second face, the face of Felix, too, and handed it to Truley. So there again to behold — did you dare — was the featureless blank head, flayed to nullity. It twitched a moment this way and that, like a body when the soul flees, and was still. Schmulowicz withdrew his hand from inside the puppet, put the body without a soul back inside the lining of his overcoat. And thus, without warning, the spectacle was over...

Confoundest thing I ever saw," Truley turns to Murph that evening and says. It is late, close on ten. They have put out the light. Time for talking now, Truley propped on one elbow, Murph flat on her back.

"Explain it to me, Etta."

But what to say? On a certain afternoon of July, at the tawniest hour, in Galvez Island, the earth — the tilting spinning earth — was unearthly. There is no accounting for this adequacy, this splendor that overtakes you. You lack neither flour nor oil while the famine lasts. On a certain afternoon, at a certain hour, the earth is no longer, but a fragment of eternity. And you, greenhorn jest of time, are a fragment of eternity too.

Murph says: "Let's get up early tomorrow and go right out to Offats. Let's bring him some good things to eat. Oranges. I will bet you a dollar he's never tasted an orange."

In sleep and dreams the ladies lie spoonwise, then back to back. On their bureau, for hard evidence that they have not spent the afternoon, also, in dreams, two little masks, of age and youth. The cast-off meretricious gems remain in the grass for Bob to nose a while, then lose interest in. He will bark and bark, skeptical, at a just-risen harvest moon-immense, dim, three-quarters, a crumbled loaf of gold at the foot of Winnie Street.