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[after Chekhov]

The snow was getting worse. All the flights out had been delayed or canceled. Manfred, of gloomy aspect, imagined his own aircraft circling above or in the thickening clouds. The Chicago-bound passengers pressed to their lit windows. The fuel gauges running low. Banking. Buckling. The pilot and co-pilot glancing at each other. What else? The windshield wipers laboring to clear the triple layers of glass. Could they make it to Milwaukee? To Saint Louis? But the whole of middle America had vanished beneath the magician’s cloak of the storm. Blinking, Manfred waved a hand in front of him, as if he meant to wipe this dark vision from the irises of his eyes.

The whole of the concourse had cleared. O’Hare, a great metropolis, was depopulated. Somewhere, it seemed a continent away, some cheap song was playing. Christmas music, though Christmas itself was three days in the past. The lights, on a dimmer, had faded to gray. A black man was pushing a mop across the linoleum of the corridor. Gloomy aspect: it was as if a bomb, or neutron particles, had destroyed the fantastic busyness of the place. He understood that his fellow passengers had departed: back to their homes, off to a hotel, or where the hell was an open bar? He checked the red lettering on the message board for flight 982: Delayed. Not Canceled. God gives humans a grain a crumb a ray of hope. He thought once again of the aluminum airplane meant to take him to the sunshine of California. Come on, you suckers, he thought. Go for it. Come in on instruments. All the seats filled with doomed souls.

Again, the gesture with the flat of his hand: to whisk the clouds away. Across the lounge was a bank of tilted black windows and beyond them the night. Down came the whirling discs of the snow, like the beads on a swaying curtain. There, as if she had stepped through them, sat a straw-haired woman, with a sleeping child curled up on her furs.  Because of the holiday lyrics, stale as they were, he thought of the virgin Mary and her swaddled babe.

God rest ye merry gentlemen

Let nothing you dismay…

But this was no infant, this was no boy. Manfred guessed that the dreaming girl was six or seven or eight. Even though she had her thumb in her mouth. Her mother was reading a book, thick as an atlas or War and Peace. She, too, put her thumb to her mouth, like a rube, but only to help her turn a page. They might, the two of them–he corrected himself: the three of them–be the only people left in the world. Along with the black custodian, of course. She looked up. She caught his eye. At one corner of her mouth, a smile. He inclined his head microscopically. All in the same boat was the signal between them. A lifeboat, perhaps.

Manfred the spider began to spin a fantasy. He was too far off to see the handful of freckles tossed over the woman’s cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Too far off to note the blue, like the cobalt blue on a teacup, of her eyes. But because such things went with being a strawberry blonde he fixed them in his imagination. Of course he undressed her, the green and white dress with the 1940’s shoulders, the slip, the bra, until her pink body, legs crossed, sat exposed. A faint furry line from her navel to the jungle at her crotch.

O tidings of comfort and joy!

He crossed his own legs. He leaned forward. “Do you think there’s any chance we’ll get out tonight?” he inquired.

Across the lounge, beneath the black, blank windows, the woman looked up once more. Then she put one finger down on the page of her book, so that she would not lose her place in the text. That small gesture touched him more than the breasts he had carved out for himself: small, upturned, the patch of the areola a shade darker than the pert nipple. It meant she was a reader: intelligent, determined, not to be deterred. A college professor? A scientist? She could be a seamstress for all he cared: he liked women who read books. He grinned. Then she put her other finger to her lips and turned her head toward the child, sleeping with a ribbon in her hair. Next–and this was not in his imagination–she slightly crooked that finger toward him. Instantly, as in a film running backward, all her clothing flew back onto her body.

He rose at the invitation and walked toward her. “I’m sorry,” he said, careful to keep his voice down. “I didn’t mean to wake her.”

“You didn’t,” she replied. “And to answer your question, God only knows. At least they haven’t canceled our flight.”

“Well, we’re the diehards, it seems. Everyone else has given up.”

“Including the airline staff. That can’t be a good sign.”

“True. But once they get a plane down, it can take off. The landing is the tricky part.”

“I’m fearless, believe me. I figured Poppy might as well sleep here as in a hotel. Actually, we have no choice: if there is a flight, we’ve got to be on it.”

Manfred stopped himself from asking why. It could be an emergency. It could be a missed restaurant reservation. He remained standing, awkwardly. Then he said, “Would you like a cup of coffee? There has to be something open in this place.”

“No, no,” she replied. “If you sit down, we’ll wait it out together.”

He hesitated. “I saw you. I know you want to get back to your reading.”

“Oh, you’re the living proof of my theory. The longer the book, the more certain someone will interrupt you on the last page.”

He did sit, not next to her but on a seat catercorner, not far away. He didn’t tell her that she had proven his theory: the freckles, the blue eyes, cobalt on porcelain, turned out at this distance to be true. He proposed a different hypothesis: “I’ve got my own philosophy. That whenever I’m in a movie theater, the tallest guy there will sit in front of me.”

She laughed. “Greetings, fellow-sufferer!”

“And they never remove their hats!”

She laughed again, throwing her head back a little. She looked at him through lidded eyes, the way, minutes before, he had been appraising her. “You’re no midget yourself. Did you ever think of the person behind you? He might have a theory of his own.”

“Touché,” he said, and raised an imaginary coffee cup, or a shot glass, in her direction.

She didn’t return the toast. Her eyes dropped back to the open book. He felt a slight flutter of panic as he realized he was about to lose her. As a signal of earnestness, he leaned forward, his elbows near his knees. “I’m sorry,” he began. “I trust you to tell me if I’m being forward or out of line. But you said you had to make the next flight. I hope it’s not some kind of emergency. I wonder if there’s anything I can–“

She cut him off by closing her book. He was almost right. Not War and Peace. Something by Dostoevsky. Immediately the very air about them seemed overcast with Russian torments.

The woman glanced at what was surely her daughter. “You, see,” she began–then halted with second thoughts. Through loudspeakers the jaunty chorus was grinding through stanzas he’d never heard before:

—-a pure virgin bright

To free all those who trust in Him

From Satan’s power and might

“Poppy doesn’t know it, we haven’t told her. Her grandmother is dying. This is her last chance to see her. I don’t know if we’re going to make it. This damned storm! We should have left the minute school let out. School! Math problems. Drawing with crayon. As if that matters. I’ll tell you this, fellow-sufferer: she loves her grandmother more than anyone else in the world. And vice versa. But my husband made a fuss. Not about school. About Christmas. It means something in his life, I guess. I married a believer, much to my own surprise. Listen, as you see I’m a bit distraught. You should go back to where you were sitting. Forgive me, this isn’t what you asked for.”

“No, no, no. It’s all right,” Manfred replied. Though, in truth, half of him did want to scurry away.  The other half, however, came up with something, from some part of himself that it might have taken Dostoevsky to explain: “You know that Poppy–that’s a pretty name, like from an old book: you know that she’s going to have to endure a lot. There’s nothing worse than that. I’m not much of a believer myself. I don’t pray or anything. But I know what Jesus said about suffering children.”

The woman drew her straw-colored hair over her face, then shook it loose. He saw the glistening tear. “My name is Portia. Also old-fashioned. Out of Shakespeare. A pleasure to meet you.”

“Manfred,” he said. “Out of Byron, I think. And a long string of Germans.”

Again, one corner of her mouth made a try at a smile. “Are you the kind of Manfred that makes the girls cry?”

“No. I mean, I hope not. I understand why you are upset. Isn’t she your mother, too?”

“Oh, as far as that goes, the affection, all the electricity, skipped a generation. It’s Poppy we’re going for. Her first flight into the blue.”

“I hope you make it in time, Portia.” He was an actor. He half remembered her famous lines: The quality of mercy is not something something. The gentle rain from heaven. “It’s important. She’ll remember everything from this trip. I wish, silly as it sounds, that I could stand up like a superhero and blow these clouds away.”

“It’s not silly. It’s a bit sweet. Considering that I wouldn’t even let you get a cup of coffee. I’ll make a wish, too: that you are traveling for a more pleasant reason.”

He paused. He looked at Poppy, who seemed lost in some sort of sugar plum dream. Expressions of pleasure passed over her face. “I’m embarrassed to tell you. It’s trivial by comparison. I’ve got a college friend. Conrad. We go way back. We did fraternity skits and now he’s a big success. So he keeps getting me bit parts. He writes me into his work. It’s sort of a prank between us. No matter what, in a comedy or a big melodrama, I always say, Can I help you, Doctor? Or I think we’d better call a doctor. I suppose when they catch on, they’ll fire the two of us. Is there a doctor in the house? Meanwhile, it’s a living.”

“Oh, you’re going to be in a play. That’s wonderful. Maybe I’ll see you on Broadway.”

“A p-p play? B-B-Broadway?” For a moment he stuttered in confusion. It was a childhood habit that he’d broken by uttering other people’s lines. “Connie doesn’t write plays. But he did direct them at Penn State. Hey, come to think of it–Jesus, Portia, you’re taking me back twenty years. Yes, that’s where the gag began. I was sort of a big shot, then. I played Macbeth. I had all sorts of ambitions. Anyhow, my line was:

How does your patient, doctor?”

Portia gave a tinkling laugh. To him it sounded like the glass pieces on a chandelier. “And you’ve been stuck ever since!”

The words, unaccountably, stung. “Yes, stuck. The truth of the matter is that we put on that show twenty-six years ago. Because the actor’s ego, in front of a pretty girl, shaved off half a dozen years.”

“Oh, Manfred, I–“

“Listen, okay? Connie doesn’t write plays. He writes screenplays. For the movies. I’ve been calling for the doctor in maybe ten of them. And not only won’t you see me on Broadway, you won’t see me in any theaters, either. These things go right to television and DVDs for the Asian market or get screened on airplanes. Actually it’s not a living. Forget about SAG. We get minimum wage. For maybe two days. The living comes from sitting in a cubicle among a hundred other cubicles like in a cartoon. I get paid for shuffling papers. It’s the insurance game. While I am having this fit of candor I might just add that my marriage to Judy, a timeless name, ended in a childless divorce, and if you can’t think of a way of stopping me I am afraid I am going to spill more beans and it wont be pretty. I’m like one of those characters in your Russian novel. Who go around saying, I am a pitiful creature. It must come from living on the Steppes.”

“Well as a matter of fact,” Portia said, holding up her hand as if that were the thing that could bring him to a halt. “I did have a kind of fantasy. It came to me while you were talking. That by a stroke of luck one of your films would be on our plane and that–I hope I am not blushing when I say this: we were sitting by even more luck in adjoining seats and that together we could hear you say, The doctor will see you now or Doctor Livingstone, I presume or–“

Just what the doctor ordered! they said this together and broke into laughter.

Bad luck: Poppy stirred, sat up, and rubbed her eyes. Good luck: it lay beyond the windows, where Manfred extended his arm to point it out. Portia swiveled to see. “Oh,” she exclaimed. “An answered prayer.”

Manfred rose, peering through the darkened glass. “The snow, it’s stopped. Maybe for just a minute. But maybe a minute will be enough.

I have to wee,” said Poppy.

“Oh, dear,” said Portia. She half-rose from the hem of her fox-fur or mink, but sank down again. “What do you think, Poppy? What if this nice man took you? Would you like that?”

Manfred also started to his feet, but with effort. It was as if the bones in his body had turned to sand. Was she really entrusting her daughter to this unknown man? He doesn’t have children of his own: that was the sentence that he half-expected to hear next. Instead, fighting his stutter, he spoke instead: “I-I’d be happy to.”

Poppy, a broad-faced girl, with blond eyebrows and her mother’s blue eyes, swung her feet down and stood. “Okay,” she said. Manfred put out his hand. She didn’t take it; but she did pull on the herringboned cuff of his jacket. A certain urgency then. “I guess we’re off,” he said to Portia.

“Bon voyage,” she replied, but, he noted, she had already re-opened her Russian novel. She had kept, all this time, a finger between the pages.

They started off, these two strangers, down the half-lit corridors. The black man was no longer pushing his mop. Nor were the merry gentleman being repeatedly blessed. Their own footsteps, or the girl’s at any rate, were the only sound they heard. He looked down: she was wearing clogs or crocs or whatever they called them. She was like a little Dutch girl. They came to a set of restrooms, women on the left, men on the right. Manfred did not have to make a decision. She darted into the door marked by a silhouette of a frock. “Don’t worry,” she called back over her shoulder. “I know what to do!”

He stood watch, ramrod stiff, like a guard at Buckingham Palace. He took this seriously. He vaguely remembered–more Christmas thoughts–those words of Jesus: Better a millstone around the neck and be cast into the sea than offend–what was the phrase? A child? A babe? One of these little ones! But no tourists, or passengers, or any other threat came by. Her suffering, poor thing, would come soon enough.

In time Poppy emerged, though that was the wrong word for it. She burst out of the door, red-cheeked, her fat shoes clattering. “An apple a day!” she shouted, the words audible throughout all of derelict O’Hare. “Keeps the doctor away!” She clutched her belly, doubled with laughter. Then she addressed him: “You see? I fooled you! I was awake the whole time!”

Now she took his hand and started to pull him back the way they had come. He resisted. “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s look for a place where we can buy you a hot chocolate. Would you like that? I know I would.”

“Okay. If they have whipped cream.”

They started off in the opposite direction. He didn’t explain to her, because he barely understood his own motive: that he had transgressed at the wrong time. He had kept the freckled woman from finishing the long campaign through the pages of her book.

They went past one deserted gate after another. Canceled. Canceled. Canceled. Delayed. A policeman sat slumped on a stool. The large black dog at his feet raised its head as they went by. Poppy skipped forward, onto a moving sidewalk; she let it carry her away, then ran back to where he trudged along. He didn’t want hot chocolate. What he wanted was a manhattan. Stirred. He’d give the girl the cherry.

They turned a corner. Surprise: a Starbucks, all lit up, with at least twenty people standing on line. However, no one was behind the counter. No baristas, no gurgling espresso machines, absolutely no manhattans. He’d been–talk about pitiful characters–an art history major at Penn State. Was this a Hopper, lonely figures on a barstool, the night around them? No, closer to Magritte, the line of motionless figures, their souls sucked out of them, with or without their bowler hats. What did they know? That the snow had stopped. That they, and the entire airport, would soon return to life. He put his hands on Poppy’s shoulders. “Do you see, dear? It’s closed.”

“Why?”

“Why? Well, if you listen you’ll know why.”

“I’m listening.”

“Do you hear? The screaming? Oh, it’s terrible.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Hey, squirt: listen harder.”

Her thick eyebrows drew together in concentration. “Now I hear it. What does it mean?”

“Well, I believe it means they haven’t finished whipping the cream.”

Saucer-eyed. Frozen faced. Then a skeptical tongue pushed down her lower lip. “Did you make a joke?”

“Apparently not.”

“Yes, you did. But, Manfred. I heard it.”

Heard what? His name, from when she was pretending to sleep? Or a howl from the bowels of the unhappy earth; or from these lined up zombies; or in the anticipation of what she would soon encounter on a death bed? The beloved old woman. The electricity gone. “Listen, would you like a ride? Back to Mommy? On my shoulders?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He swept her up, limber and willing, and hung on to her kneecaps while he made his way back to Portia, still sitting cross-legged beneath the blank windows.

“Hello,” he said by way of announcement. “The travelers are back.”

Her hair had once again fallen across her features. Her head was bowed. The book, he saw, was closed. “I finished it,” she announced, and pulled the straw curtain away. He was startled to see what looked like the same tear in the same eye. He crouched, so Poppy could scramble down.

“The queen alights,” he said.

“I do!” said the girl. She hopped over to the bench and yanked the tail end of the brown pelt from beneath her mother’s weight. Then she disappeared into the dark, glistening folds of fur. Was it real, that pelt? Who dared to wear animal skins these days? A brave woman, he thought.

“You have to excuse me,” Portia said. “I’m in shock. From the beauty of the book. My God! The paragraph on the last page.”

He had the urge to go to her, to comfort her. He beat it back. “I’m glad you were able to finish,” he said. “I always wanted to read those crazy Russians. I never got around to it. The same with Proust. Though I remember reading Victor Hugo. With my flashlight. In bed. At night.”

“Poor Jean Valjean. For a crust of bread!”

“It’s a rotten world, Portia. I don’t think I have to tell you that.”

“Aren’t things improving? I keep hearing these thinkers, philosophers, saying that people have never been happier. Or anyhow, better off. I’d like to think that. Diseases eliminated–in Africa, in Asia. The Chinese: hundreds of millions, not in poverty any more. Small pox, you know, doesn’t exist.”

“I’d like to punch those philosophers in the nose.”

She gave a laugh. “Careful! They all wear glasses.”

“I’m not kidding. I mean, just the last hundred years–” He broke off. He didn’t know much. The world wars. Back and forth in the trenches. An atom bomb. Famine in China. The Cambodians. Stalin. The Jews.  Those glasses were rose-colored. They didn’t see cruelty. He thought the last century was the worst in the history of the world.

“And whatever happens to us later in life, if we don’t meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones…”

Her head was down. He saw nothing but hair. The book, opened, lay on her thighs. “He was a fine boy, a kindhearted, brave boy, he felt for–” She broke off. She looked up. “Well, that’s how the paragraph begins.”

“Why don’t you read more? I’d like to hear.”

“It won’t make sense. You won’t understand. These boys have just buried their friend. And the speaker, he’s Alyosha, one of the Karamazov brothers, a gentle soul, a spiritual soul. He’s telling his little doves–that’s what he calls these boys, his little doves: I think he’s telling them that whatever happens to them in life, even if they become very unhappy, even if they become criminals and do terrible things, they will now and then think back on this day when they buried their friend and that the memory of being kind and loving and perhaps better than we are will always protect them. So there’s your crazy Russian, Manfred. What do you think? Do you think what he says is true?”

She bent her head once more. She found, with her fingertip, a line: “You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. I suppose it is kind of crazy. You don’t need to go to college. You don’t need a psychiatrist or psychotherapy or shock treatments. You don’t even need to love a man or a woman. Love, it seems, is overrated. All you need–well, here it is: If one has only one good memory in his heart, even that may be the means of saving us.“

There was, of a sudden, a roar. Jet engines. Then bright, blinding lights swept across the window panes. The lit snout of a plane was pulling up to the connector that was stretching toward it.

“Oh,” Portia exclaimed. “That’s our flight!”

Everything at the adjoining gate, flight 422 to New York, had come to life. An attendant stood behind the desk. Men, women, children had materialized, as if shaken out of the looming clouds. They milled, waiting for the arriving passengers to get off, and for their detritus to be cleared from the cushions, the seats, the carpeting of their plane.

Portia stood. He saw that she was quite short. The top of her head, with its thick, reddish-blond hair, might come chest high. He was stunned by a number of things. “Our flight?” he said, echoing her words. “You aren’t going to Los Angeles?”

“And you aren’t going to New York?” She laughed. “We made assumptions.”

“I know I did. Do you feel a pulse, doctor? It would have been fun to watch that together.”

“Well, at least we were able to talk. And you met Poppy.”

“Yes. But—well, like a Russian I can tell you this. I’m wracking my memory, Portia. Thinking and thinking. Those good memories. From childhood and home. My mother. My father. My two brothers. I–“

His voice broke.  He could not bring himself to say that he was unable to think of a single one. What he did remember was the scene in Macbeth. When he had begged the doctor to heal the tortured brain of his wife: Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow. That was the line. He stood swaying. He thought that he might tumble to the ground.

Portia bent to unwind her fur coat from her daughter. “Nonsense!” she declared. “Look at you, down in the mouth. You just have to think a little harder.” Poppy jumped up and moved to where the two of them were standing. But this woman, a stranger, was not done. “For instance, Manfred. Lying in bed with that flashlight. You and Jean Valjean. Running through the sewers of Paris. A lucky boy, you!  To have that adventure.”

The weary passengers–how long had they been circling overhead?–began to trail one behind the other out of the gateway door. Portia extended her hand. He took it in his. He said, “Was that the last page of the book? Were those the last words?” Her hand was warm in his. He asked the question so that he would not have to let go. But she pulled away, once again with her chiming laugh. “Oh, no.” Now she spoke as she walked away, turning back over her shoulder. “They all go off to eat pancakes. And the children more or less throw their hats in the air and cry out, Hurrah for Karamazov!”

A line had formed at the nearby desk. She and her daughter took their places at the end of it. He stared for a moment, then went back to his chair. He glanced at the board that carried the information about his flight to California. Delayed. After a few minutes, Poppy came running over. “I can whistle!” she informed him.

But she couldn’t, not really, She made a high-pitched sound through the gap in her front teeth. He was able to make out, barely, the tune of the carol. Let nothing you dismay.

“Excellent,” he told her.

“I know,” she replied, and went back to her mother.

In another ten minutes they were gone. Not long after that, the bright lights swept once more across the window. He could see that the snow had resumed, dancingly. Then, after a bit more time, he heard the roar of the engines, lifting them into the air. They droned. They coughed alarmingly, then resumed. Seated, Manfred said a prayer.