“Tom,” said Elmira, “show me the way to the ladies’ room.

“Yes ’m.”

They began to walk and then hurry and then run. Elmira ran on ahead, through the crowd, down the aisle . . . She reached the door and started left.

“No, Elmira, right, right!” cried Mrs. Goodwater.

Elmira turned left and vanished.

There was a noise like coal down a chute.

“Elmira!”

The ladies ran around like a girl’s basketball team, colliding with each other.

Only Mrs. Goodwater made a straight line.

She found Tom looking down the stairwell, his hands clenched to the banister.

“Forty steps!” he moaned. “Forty steps to the ground!”

Later on and for months and years after it was told how like an inebriate Elmira Brown negotiated those steps touching every one on her long way down. It was claimed that when she began the fall she was sick to unconsciousness and that this made her skeleton rubber, so she kind of rolled rather than ricocheted. She landed at the bottom, blinking and feeling better, having left whatever it was that had made her uneasy all along the way. True, she was so badly bruised she looked like a tattooed lady. But, no, not a wrist was sprained or an ankle twisted. She held her head funny for three days, kind of peering out of the sides of her eyeballs instead of turning to look. But the important thing was Mrs. Goodwater at the bottom of the steps, pillowing Elmira’s Head on her Lap and dropping tears on her as the ladies gathered Hysterically.

“Elmira, I promise, Elmira, I swear, if you just live, if you don’t die, you hear me, Elmira, listen! I’ll use my magic for nothing but good from now on. No more black, nothing but white magic. The rest of your life, if I have my way, no more falling over iron dogs, tripping on sills, cutting fingers, or dropping downstairs for you! Elysium, Elmira, Elysium, I promise! If you just live! Look, I’m pulling the tacks out of the doll! Elmira, speak to me! Speak now and sit up! And come upstairs for another vote. President, I promise, president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge, by acclamation, won’t we, ladies?”

At this all the ladies cried so hard they had to lean on each other.

Tom, upstairs, thought this meant death down there.

He was halfway down when he met the ladies coming back up, looking like they had just wandered out of a dynamite explosion.

“Get out of the way, boy!”

First came Mrs. Goodwater, laughing and crying.

Next came Mrs. Elmira Brown, doing the same.

And after the two of them came all the one hundred twenty-three members of the lodge, not knowing if they’d just returned from a funeral or were on their way to a ball.

He watched them pass and shook his head.

“Don’t need me no more,” he said. “No more at all.”

So he tiptoed down the stairs before they missed him, holding tight to the rail all the way.

For what it’s worth,” said Tom, “there’s the whole thing in a nutshell. The ladies carrying on like crazy. Everybody standing around blowing their noses. Elmira Brown sitting there at the bottom of the steps, nothing broke, her it bones made out of Jell-O, I suspect, and the witch sobbin’ on her shoulder, and then all of them goin’ upstairs suddenly · laughing. Cry-yi, you figure it out. I got out of there fast!”

Tom loosened his shirt and took off his tie.

“Magic, you say?” asked Douglas.

“Magic six ways from Sunday.”

“You believe it?”

“Yes I do and no I don’t.”

“Boy, this town is full of stuff!” Douglas peered off at the horizon where clouds filled the sky with immense shapes of old gods and warriors. “Spells and wax dolls and needles and elixirs, you said?”

“Wasn’t much as an elixir, but awful fine as an upchuck. Blap! Wowie!” Tom clutched his stomach and stuck out his tongue.

“Witches . . .” said Douglas. He squinted his eyes mysteriously.

And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below. You will fall in darkness . . .

“No!”

Colonel Freeleigh opened his eyes quickly, sat erect in his wheel chair. He jerked his cold hand out to find the telephone. It was still there! He crushed it against his chest for a moment, blinking.

“I don’t like that dream,” he said to his empty room.

At last, his fingers trembling, he lifted the receiver and called the long-distance operator and gave her a number and waited, watching the bedroom door as if at any moment a plague of sons, daughters, grandsons, nurses, doctors, might swarm in to seize away this last vital luxury he permitted his failing senses. Many days, or was it years, ago, when his heart had thrust like a dagger through his ribs and flesh, he had heard the boys below . . .their names what were they? Charles, Charlie, Chuck, yes! And Douglas! And Tom! He remembered! Calling his name far down the hall, but the door being locked in their faces, the boys turned away. You can’t be excited, the doctor said. No visitors, no visitors, no It visitors. And he heard the boys moving across the street, he saw them, he waved. And they waved back. “Colonel . . . Colonel . . .” And now he sat alone with the little gray toad of a heart flopping weakly here or there in his chest from time to time.

“Colonel Freeleigh,” said the operator. “Here’s your call. Mexico City. Erickson 3899.”

And now the far away but infinitely clear voice:

“Bueno.” “Jorge!” cried the old man

“Senor Freeleigh! Again? This costs money.”

“Let it cost! You know what to do.”

“Si. The window?”

“The window, Jorge, if you please.”

“A moment,” said the voice.

And, thousands of miles away, in a southern land, in an office in a building in that land, there was the sound of footsteps retreating from the phone. The old man leaned forward, gripping the receiver tight to his wrinkled ear that ached with waiting for the next sound. The raising of a window.

Ah, sighed the old man.

The sounds of Mexico City on a hot yellow noon through the open window into the waiting phone. He c see Jorge standing there holding the mouthpiece out, out the bright day.

“Senor . . .”

“No, no, please. Let me listen.”

He listened to the hooting of many metal horns, squealing of brakes, the calls of vendors selling red-purple bananas and jungle oranges in their stalls. Colonel Freeleigh’s feet began to move, hanging from the edge of his wheel chair, making the motions of a man walking. His eyes squeezed tight. He gave a series of immense sniffs, as if to gain the odors of meats hung on iron hooks in sunshine, cloaked with flies like a mantle of raisins; the smell of stone alleys wet with morning rain. He could feel the sun bum his spiny-bearded cheek, and he was twenty-five years old again, walking, walking, looking, smiling, happy to be alive, very much alert, drinking in colors and smells.

A rap on the door. Quickly he hid the phone under his lap robe.

The nurse entered. “Hello,” she said. “Have you been good?”

“Yes.” The old man’s voice was mechanical. He could hardly see. The shock of a simple rap on the door was such that part of him was still in another city, far removed. He waited for his mind to rush home—it must be here to answer questions, act sane, be polite.

“I’ve come to check your pulse.”