The young Woman curved this way and that, leaning as the train pushed or pulled her; as pretty as something you might win at a carnival by knocking the milk bottles down.
“Bosh!” Grandpa slammed his windows shut.
“Open, Sesame!”
Instantly, within, he felt his eyeballs redirected.
“Let go!” shouted Grandpa. “Grandma’ll kill me!”
“She’ll never know!”
The young woman turned as if called. She lurched back as if she might fell on all of them. “Stop!” cried Grandpa. “Cecy’s with us! She’s innocent and—”
“Innocent!” The great attic rocked with laughter.
“Grandfather,” said Cecy, very softly. “With all the night excursions I have made, all the traveling I have done, I am not—”
“Innocent,” said the four cousins.
“Look here!” protested Grandpa.
“No, you look,” whispered Cecy. “I have sewn my way through bedroom windows on a thousand summer nights. I have lain in cool snowbeds of white pillows and sheets, and I have swum unclothed in rivers on August noons and lain on riverbanks for birds to see—”
“I—” Grandpa screwed his fists into his ears—”will not listen!”
“Yes.” Cecy’s voice wandered in cool meadows remembering. “I have been in a girl’s warm summer face and looked out at a young man, and I have been in that same young man, the same instant, breathing out fiery breaths, gazing at that forever summer girl. I have lived in mating mice or circling lovebirds or bleeding-heart doves. I have hidden in two butterflies fused on a blossom of clover—”
“Damn!” Grandpa winced.
“I’ve been in sleighs on December midnights when snow fell and smoke plumed out the horses’ pink nostrils and there were fur blankets piled high with six young people hidden warm and delving and wishing and finding and—”
“Stop! I’m sunk!” said Grandpa.
“Bravo!” said the cousins. “More!”
“—and I have been inside a grand castle of bone and flesh—the most beautiful woman in the world...!”
Grandpa was amazed and held still.
For now it was as if snow fell upon and quieted him. He felt a stir of flowers about his brow, and a blowing of July morning wind about his ears, and all through his limbs a burgeoning of warmth, a growth of bosom about his ancient flat chest, a fire struck to bloom in the pit of his stomach. Now, as she talked, his lips softened and colored and knew poetry and might have let it pour forth in incredible rains, and his worn and iron-rusty fingers tum bled in his lap and changed to cream and milk and melting apple-snow. He looked down at them, stunned, clenched his fists to stop this womanish thing!
“No! Give me back my hands! Wash my mouth out with soap!”
“Enough talk,” said an inner voice, Philip.
“We’re wasting time,” said Tom.
“Let’s go say hello to that young lady across the aisle,” said John. “All those in favor?”
“Aye!” said the Salt Lake Tabernacle choir from one single throat. Grandpa was yanked to his feet by unseen wires.
“Any dissenters?”
“Me!” thundered Grandpa.
Grandpa squeezed his eyes, squeezed his head, squeezed his ribs. His entire body was that incredibly strange bed that sank to smother its terrified victims. “Gotcha!”
The cousins ricocheted about in the dark.