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MOTHER TO THE WORLD

Richard Wilson

His name was Martin Rolfe. She called him Mr. Ralph.
She was Cecelia Beamer, called Siss.
He was a vigorous, intelligent, lean and wiry forty-two, a
shade under six feet tall. His hair, black, was thinning but
still covered all of his head; and all his teeth were his own.
His health was excellent. He'd never had a cavity Or an opera-
tion and he fervently hoped he never would.
She was a slender, strong young woman of twenty-eight,
five feet four. Her eyes, nose and mouth were regular and
well-spaced but the combination fell short of beauty. She
wore her hair, which was dark blonde, not quite brown,
straight back and long in two pigtails which she braided
daily, after a ritualistic hundred brushings. Her figure was
better than average for her age and therefore good, but she
did nothing to emphasize it. Her disposition was cheerful
when she was with someone; when alone her tendency was
to work hard at the job at hand, giving it her serious atten-
tion. Whatever she was doing was the most important thing
in the world to her just then and she had a compulsion to do
it absolutely right. She was indefatigable but she liked, almost
demanded, to be praised for what she did well.
Her amusements were simple ones. She liked to talk to
people but most people quickly became bored with what she
had to say she was inclined to be repetitive. Fortunately for
her, she also liked to talk to animals, birds included.
She was a retarded person with the mentality of an eight-
year-old.
Eight can be a delightful age. Rolfe remembered his son at
eight bright, inquiring, beginning to emerge from childhood
but not so fast as to lose any of his innocent charm; a refresh-
ing, uninhibited conversationalist with an original viewpoint
on life. The boy had been a challenge to him and a constant
delight. He held on to that memory, drawing sustenance from
it, for her.
Young Rolfe was dead now, along with his mother and
three billion other people.
Rolfe and Siss were the only ones left in all the world.
It was M.R. that had done it, he told her. Massive Retalia-
tion; from the Other Side.
When American bombs rained down from long-range jets
and rocket carriers, nobody'd known the Chinese had what
they had. Nobody'd suspected it of that relatively backward
country which the United States had believed it was soften-
ing up, in a brushfire war, for enforced diplomacy.
Rolfe hadn't been aware of any speculation that Peking's
scientists were concentrating their research not on weapons
but on biochemistry. Germ warfare, sure. There'd been prop-
aganda from both sides about that, but nothing had been
hinted about a biological agent, as it must have been, that
could break down human cells and release the water.
"M.R.," he told her. "Better than nerve gas or the neutron
bomb." Like those, it left the buildings and equipment intact.
Unlike them, it didn't leave any messy corpses only the
bones, which crumbled and blew away. Except the bone dust
trapped inside the pathetic mounds of clothing that lay every-
where in the city.
"Are they coming over now that they beat us?"
"I'm sure they intended to. But there can't be any of them
left.  They outsmarted themselves,  I guess.  The wind must
have blown it right back at them. I don't really know what
happened, Siss. All I know is that everybody's gone now,
except you and me."
"But the animals"
Rolfe had found it best in trying to explain something to
Siss to keep it simple, especially when he didn't understand
it himself. Just as he had learned long ago that if he didn't
know how to pronounce a word he should say it loud and
confidently.
So all he told Siss was that the bad people had got hold
of 'a terrible weapon called M.R. she'd heard of that and
used it on the good people and that nearly everybody had
died. Not the animals, though, and damned if he knew why.
"Animals don't sin," Siss told him.
"That's as good an explanation as any I can think of," he
said. She was silent for a while. Then she said: "Your name
initials are M.R., aren't they?"
He'd never considered it before, but she was right. Martin
Roife Massive Retaliation. I hope she doesn't blame every-
thing on me, he thought. But then she spoke again. "M.R.
That's short for Mister. What I call you. Your name that I
have for you. Mister Ralph."
"Tell me again how we were saved, Mr. Ralph."
She used the expression in an almost evangelical sense,
making him uncomfortable. Rolfe was a practical man, a
realist and freethinker.
"You know as well as I do, Siss," he said. "It's because
Professor Cantwell was  doing government research  and
because he was having a party. You certainly remember;
Cantwell was your boss."
"I know that. But you tell it so good and I like to hear it."
"All right. Bill Cantwell was an old friend of mine from
the army and when I came to New York I gave him a call at
the University. It was the first time I'd talked to him in years;
I had no idea he'd married again and had set up housekeeping
in Manhattan."
"And had a working girl named Siss," she put in.
"The very same," he agreed. Siss never referred to herself
as a maid, which was what she had been. "And so when I
asked Bill if he could put me up, I thought it would be in his
old bachelor apartment. He said sure, just like that, and I
didn't find out till I got there, late in the evening, that he had
a new wife and was having a house party and had invited two
couples from out of town to stay over."
"I gave my room to Mr. and Mrs. Glena, from Columbus,"
Siss said.
"And the Torquemadas, of Seville, had the regular guest
room." Whoever they were; he didn't remember names the
way she did. "So that left two displaced persons, you and
me."
"Except for the Nassers."
The Nassers, as she pronounced it, were the two self-con-
tained rooms in the Cantwell basement. The NASAs, or the
Nasas, was what Cantwell called them because the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration had given him a con-
tract to study the behavior of human beings in a closed
system.
Actually the money had gone to Columbia University,
where Cantwell was a professor of mechanical and aerospace
engineering.
"A sealed-off environment," Rolfe said. "But because
Columbia didn't have the space just at that time, and because
the work was vital, NASA gave Cantwell permission to build
the rooms in his own home. They were -still are -in his
basement, and that's where you and I slept that fateful night
when the world ended."
"I still don't understand."
"We were completely sealed off in there," Rolfe said. "We
weren't breathing Earth air and we weren't connected in any
way to the rest of the world. We might as well have been out
in space or on the moon. So when it happened to everybody
else to Professor and Mrs. Cantwell, and to the Glenns and
the Torquemadas and to the Nassers in Egypt and the Joneses
in Jones Beach and all the people at Columbia, and in Wash-
ington and Moscow and Pretoria and London and Peoria and
Medicine Hat and La Jolla and all those places all over it
didn't happen to us. That's because Professor Cantwell was a
smart man and his closed systems worked."
"And we were saved."
"That's one way of looking at it."
"What's the other way?"
"We were doomed."
From his notebooks:
Siss asked why I'm so sure there's nobody but us left in
the whole world. A fair question. Of course I'm not abso-
lutely  positively  cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die,  swear-on-a
Bible convinced that there isn't a poor live slob hidden away
in some remote corner. Other people besides Bill must have
been working with closed systems; certainly any country with
a space program would be, and maybe some of their nassers
were inhabited, too. I hadn't heard that any astronauts or
cosmonauts were in orbit that day but if they were, and got
down safely, I guess they could be alive somewhere.
But I've listened to the rest of the world on some of the
finest radio equipment ever put together and there hasn't been
a peep out of it. I've listened and signaled and listened and
signaled and listened. Nothing. Nil. Short wave, long wave,
AM, FM, UHF, marine band, everywhere. Naught. Not a
thing. Lots of automatic signals from unmanned satellites, of
course, and the quasars are still being heard from, but nothing
human.
I've sent out messages on every piece of equipment con-
nected to Con Ed's EE net. RCA, American Cable & Radio,
the Bell System, Western Union, The Associated Press, UPI,
Reuters' world news network. The New York Times' multi-
farious teletypes, even the Hilton Hotels' international reser-
vations system. Nothing. By this time I'd become fairly expert
at communications and I'd found the Pentagon network at
AT&T. Silent. Ditto the hot line to the Kremlin. I read the
monitor teletype and saw the final message from Washington
to Moscow. Strictly routine. No hint that anything was amiss
anywhere. Just as it must have been at the Army message
center at Pearl Harbor on another Sunday morning a genera-
tion ago.
This is for posterity, these facts. My evidence is circum-
stantial. But to Siss I say:  "There's nobody left but us. I
know. You'll have to take my word for it that the rest of
the world is as empty as New York."
Nobody here but us chickens, boss. Us poor flightless birds.
One middle-aged rooster and one sad little hen, somewhat
deficient in the upper story. What do you want us to do, boss?
What's the next step in the great cosmic scheme? Tell us:
where do we go from here?
But don't tell me; tell Siss. I don't expect an answer; she
does. She's the one who went into the first church she found
open that Sunday morning (some of them were locked, you
know) and said all the prayers she knew, and asked for
mercy for her relatives, and her friends, and her employers,
and for me, and for all the dead people who had been alive
only yesterday, and finally for herself; and then she asked
why. She was in there for an hour and when she came out I
don't think she'd had an answer.
Nobody here but us chickens, boss. What do you want us
to do now, fricassee ourselves?
Late on the morning of doomsday they had taken a walk
down Broadway, starting from Cantwell's house near the
Columbia campus.
There were a number of laughs to be had from cars in
comical positions, if anybody was in a laughing mood. Some
were standing obediently behind white lines at intersections,
and obviously their drivers had been overtaken during a red
light. With its driver gone, each such car had simply stood
there, its engine dutifully using up all the gas in its tank and
then coughing to a stop. Others had nosed gently into shop
windows, or less gently into other cars or trucks. One truck,
loaded with New Jersey eggs, had overturned and its cargo
was dripping in a yellowy-white puddle. Rolfe, his nose
twitching as if in anticipation of a warm day next week, made
a mental note never to return to that particular spot.
Several times he found a car which had been run up upon
from behind by another. It was as if, knowing they would
never again be manufactured, they were trying copulation.
While Siss was in church Rolfe found a car that had not
idled away all its gas and he made a dry run through the
streets.  He  discovered  that he  could  navigate  pretty  well
around the stalled or wrecked cars, though occasionally he
had to drive up on the sidewalk or make a three-block detour
to get back to Broadway.
Then he and Siss, subdued after church, went downtown.
"Whose car is this, Mr. Ralph?" she asked him.
"My car, Siss. Would you like one, too?"
"I can't drive."
"I'll teach you. It may come in handy."
"I was the only one in church," she said. It hadn't got
through to her yet, he thought; not completely.
"Who were you expecting?" he asked kindly.
"God, maybe."
She was gazing straight ahead, clutching her purse in her
lap. She had the expression of a person who had been let
down.
At 72nd Street a beer truck had demolished the box office
of the Trans-Lux movie house and foamy liquid was still
trickling out of it, across the sidewalk and along the gutter
and into a sewer. Rolfe stopped the car and got out. An
aluminum barrel had been punctured. The beer leaking from
it was cool. He leaned over and let it run into his mouth for
a while.
The Trans-Lux had been having a Fellini festival; the pic-
ture was 8V2. On impulse he went inside and came back to
the car with the reels of film in a black tin box. He remem-
bered the way the movie had opened, with all the cars stalled
in traffic. Like Broadway, except that the Italian cars had
people in them. He put the box in the rear of the car and
said: "We'll go to the movies sometime." Siss looked at him
blankly.
At Columbus Circle a Broadway bus had locked horns with
a big van carrying furniture from North Carolina. At 50th
Street a Mustang had nosed gently into the front of a steak
house, as if someone had led it to a hitching post.
He made an illegal left turn at 42nd Street, noting what
was playing at the Rialto: two naughty, daring, sexy, nudie
pix, including a re-run of "My Bare Lady." He didn't stop
for that one.
At the old Newsweek Building east of Broadway, an
Impala had butted into the ground-floor liquor store. The
plate glass lay smashed but the bottles in the window were
intact. He made a mental note. Across the street, one flight
up, was the Keppel Folding Boat Company, which had long
intrigued him. Soon it might be useful to unfold one and sail
off to a better place. He marked it in his mind.
Bookstores, 42nd Street style. Dirty books and magazines.
Girly books. Deviant, flagellant, homosexual, Lesbian, sadistic
books. Pornographic classics restored to the common man
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The Kama Sutra, quaint
but lasciviously advertised. Books of nudes for the serious
artist (no retoucher's airbrush here, men!).
Nudie pix in packets, wrapped in pliofilm, at a buck and a
half the set. Large girls in successive states of undress. How
big can a breast be before it disgusts? What is the optimum
bosom size? A cup? D cup? It would depend on the number
to be fed, wouldn't it? And how hungry they were? Or was
that criterion passe?
He looked over at Siss, who wasn't looking at him or the
bookstores or the dirty-movie houses but straight ahead. She
had a nice figure. About a C.
But it was never the body alone; it was the mind that went
with it and the voice with which it spoke.
"What are you thinking, Siss?" he asked.
"Nothing," she said. It was probably true. "What are you
thinking?"
Riposte. How could he tell her?
He improvised. They were passing Bryant Park. "Pigeons
in the park," he said. "I'm thinking of the pigeons. Hungrier
than yesterday because nobody's buying peanuts for them,
bringing slices of bread from home; there's no bread lady
buying bagfuls for them at Horn & Hardart's day-old bakery
shop."
"It's a sad time, isn't it, Mr. Ralph?"
"Yes, Siss; a sad time."
They got to First Avenue and the U.N. There wasn't any-
body there, either.
Notes for a History of the World was what he wrote on
page one of his notebook.
On page two he had alternate titles, some facetious:
The True History of the Martin Rolfe Family on the
Planet Earth; or, Two for Tomorrow.
Recollections of a World Well Lost.
How the Population Crisis Was Solved.
What Next? or, if You Don't Do It, Marty, Who the Hell
Will?
From his notebooks:
Thank God for movies. We'd be outen our minds by now
if I hadn't taught myself to be a projectionist.
Radio City Music Hall apparently's only movie on Con
Ed's EE list. Bit roomy for Siss and me but getting used to it.
Sometimes she sits way down front, I in mezzanine, and we
shout to each other when Gregory Peck does heroic things.
Collected first runs to add to 81/2 from all major Manhat-
tan houses Capitol, Criterion, Cinema I & II, State, etc.so
we have good backlog. Also, if Siss likes, we run it again right
away or next night. I don't mind. Then there are the 42nd St.
houses and the art houses and the nabes & Mod. Museum film
library. Shouldn't run out for a long time.
Days are for exploring and shopping. I go armed because
of the animals. Siss stays home at hotel.
(Why are there animals? Find out. Where find out; how?)
The dogs in packs are worst. So far they haven't attacked
and a shot fired in the air scares them off. So far.
Later they left the city. It had been too great a strain to
live a life half primitive, half luxurious. The contrast was too
much. And the rats were getting bolder. The rats and the
dogs.
They had lived there at first for the convenience. He picked
a hotel on Park Avenue. He put Siss in a single room and
took a suite down the hall for himself.
He guessed correctly that there'd be huge refrigerators and
freezers stocked with food enough for years.
The hotel, with its world-famous name, was one of the
places the Consolidated Edison Company had boasted was
on its Emergency Electricity net, along with City Hall, the
Empire State Building, the tunnels and bridges, Governors
Island and other key installations. The EE net, worked out
for Civil Defense (what had ever become of Civil Defense?),
guaranteed uninterrupted electricity to selected customers
through the use of deep underground grids and conduits,
despite flood, fire, pestilence or war. A promotional piece
claimed that only total annihilation could knock out the
system.
There was a hint of the way it worked in a slogan that Con
Ed considered using before the government censors decided
it would have given too much away:  ". . . as long as the
Hudson flows."
Whatever the secret, he and Siss had electricity, from
which so many blessings flowed, for as long as they stayed in
the city.
From his notebooks:
I've renamed our hotel the Living End. Siss calls it our
house, or maybe Our House.
I won't let her go out by herself but she has the run of the
hotel. She won't use the self-service elevators. Doesn't trust
them. Don't blame her. She cooks in the hotel kitchen and
carries our meals up two flights on a tray.
Garbage disposal no problem. There's an incinerator that
must work by electricity. So far it's taken everything I've
dumped down it. I can't feel any heat but it doesn't stink.
We're getting some outdoor stinks, though. Animal excre-
ment that nobody cleans up (I'd be doing nothing else if I
started). Uncollected garbage. Rotting food in supermarkets
and other places without EE.
There are certain streets I avoid now. Whole sections, when
the wind is wrong.

Bad night at the Living End. Had a nightmare.
I dreamed that Siss and I, home from the Music Hall
(Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in something from the
sixties), were having a fight. I don't know about that but we
were shouting and I was calling her unforgivable names and
she was saying she was going to climb up to the 20th floor
and jump, when the phone rang . . .
I woke up, seeming to hear the echo of the last ring. The
phone was there on the floor, under the night table.
I didn't dare pick it up.
It must have happened just before dawn, when Manhattan
was as deserted as it ever got.
I took a chance on the EE and went up in the elevators to
the top of the Empire State Bidg. First time I'd ever been
up also the last, probably. What a sight. Plenty of cars, cabs,
trucks, buses rammed into each other & sides of bidgs but lots
more just came to natural (!) stop in midstreet or near curb.
Very feasible to drive around and out of town, though probably
not thru tunnels. GW Bridge she'd be okay, with its 8 lanes.
Have to get out of town one day anyhow, so best explore in
advance.
Planes. No sign that any crashed but bet lots did some-
where. Everything looks orderly at NY airports.
Fires. Few black spots signs of recent fires. Nothing
major.
Harbor & rivers. Some ships, lots of boats drifting around
loose. No sign of collisions; nothing big capsized.
Animals. Dog packs here and there. Sound of their barking
rises high. Nasty sound. Birds, all kinds.
Air very dry.
Down in the street again, Rolfe began to think about the
animals other than the dogs that ran in packs. How long
would it be until the bigger ones the wolves and bears and
mountain lions found their way into the city? He decided
to visit Abercrombie & Fitch and arm himself with something
heavier than the pistol he carried. Big-bore stuff, whatever
they called it.
Rolfe was admiring an elephant gun in the fantastic store
(Hemingway had shopped here, and probably Martin and
Osa Johnson and Frank Buck and others from the lost past)
when he remembered another sound he'd heard from the top
of the Empire State Building. It had puzzled him, but now
he could identify it. It had been the trumpeting of an elephant.
An elephant in Manhattan? The circus wasn't in town He
knew then, but for the moment he pushed aside the thought
and its implications.
After he had picked out the guns, and a wicked gas-
operated underwater javelin for good measure, he outfitted
himself in safari clothes. Khaki shorts and high socks, a big-
pocketed bush jacket, a sun helmet. Hurrah for Captain
Spalding! He looked a true Mamnan, he thought, humming
the song Groucho had sung and admiring himself in a full-
length mirror.
He took a cartridge belt and boxes of shells and first-aid
and water-purification kits and a trapper's knife and a light-
weight trail ax and a compass and binoculars and snowshoes
and deerskin gloves and a tough pair of boots. He staggered
out into Madison Avenue and dumped everything into the
back of the cream-colored Lincoln convertible he was driving
that day.
The trumpeting of the elephant had come from the Central
Park Zoo, of course. He drove in from Fifth Avenue and
parked near the restaurant opposite the sea lions' pool. He
could see three of them lying quietly on a stone ledge, just
above the water, watching him. He wondered when they'd
last been fed.
First, though, he went to the administration building and
let himself in with lock-picking tools. He had become adept
at the burglary trade. He found a set of what seemed to be
master keys and tried them first at the aviary. They worked.
The names of the birds, on the faded wooden plaques,
were as colorful as their plumage. There were a Papuan lory,
a sulphur-crested cockatoo, the chiffchaff and kookaburra
bird, laughing jackass and motmot, chachalaca, drongo and
poor old puffin. He opened their cages and watched their
tentative, gaudy passage to freedom.
A pelican waddled out comically, suspicion in its round
eyes. He ducked a hawk and cowered from a swift, fierce
eagle. An owl lingered, blinking, until he shooed it toward
the doors. He left to the last two brooding vultures, hesitating
to free creatures so vile. But there was a role for scavengers,
too. He opened their cage and ran, to get outdoors before
they did.
After the cacophony of the aviary, he was surprised at the
silence as he neared the monkey house. He'd have to be
damned careful about the gorilla, which obviously had to be
shot. The big chimps were nothing to fool around with, either.
But the monkey house was empty. The signs were -there and
the smell remained but the apes, big and little, were not.
Could they have freed themselves? But all the cages were
locked.
Puzzled, he went on to the smaller mammals, freeing the
harmless ones, the raccoons, the mongooses, the deflowered
skunks, the weasels and prairie dogs even the spiny porcu-
pine, which looked over its shoulder at him as it shuffled
toward the doors.
He freed the foxes, too, and they bounded off as if to
complete an interrupted mission. "Go get the rats," Rolfe
yelled after them.
He marked the location of the wolves and the big cats.
He'd come back to them with his guns.
Last of all he freed the lone elephant, scarcely grown,
whose trumpet call had summoned him. The elephantan
unofficial sign said it was a female, Geraldine followed him
at a distance almost to the car, then broke into a clumsy trot
and drank from the sea lions' pool.
As Rolfe was returning to the cages with the guns he knew
why there weren't any monkeys. The big and little apes were
hominids, like man. Their evolutionary climb had doomed
them, too.
He killed the beasts of prey. It was an awful business. He
was not a good shot even at close range and the executions
took many bullets. A sinuous, snarling black panther took six
before he was sure. The caged beasts, refusing to stand still
for the mercy killings, made it hot, bloody, stinking work. He
guessed it was necessary.
Finally he was done. Quivering and sweating, he returned
to the car. The sea lions honked and swam across to his side
of the pool. He could see now that there were three babies
and two adults.
What was he to do with them? He couldn't bring himself to
a final butchery. And what was he to do about all the other
captive animals in the Bronx Zoo uptown, in zoos all over
the world? He couldn't be a one-man Animal Rescue League.
Rolfe had a momentary fantasy in which he enticed the
sea lions into the car (four in the back, one in the front) and
drove them to the East River, where they flopped into the
water and swam toward the sea, honking with gratitude.
But he knew that in his present state of exhaustion he
couldn't lift even the babies, and there was no way for them
to get out of their enclosure unaided. Maybe he could come
back with a truck and plank 'and fish to tempt them with. He
left the problem, and that of the Bronx and Prospect Park
Zoos and the Aquarium (not to get too far a field) and started
the car.
Geraldine looked after him. He would have liked a little
trumpet of farewell but she had found some long grass and
was eating.
As he drove back to the Living End through the wider
streets, weaving carefully around the stalled cars, his mind
was full of other trapped beasts, great and small, starving and
soon to go mad from thirst, as if in punishment for having
outlived man.
Only then did the other thought crash into his conscious-
ness what of the millions of pets, trapped in the houses of
their vanished owners? Dogs and cats, unable to open the
refrigerators or the cans in the pantries. Some would have
the craft to tear open packages of dried food and would learn
to drink from leaking faucets or from toilet bowls. But at
best they could prolong their miserable existence for only a
few more days.
What was he to do about the pets? What could he do? Run
around the city freeing them? Where would he start? Should
he free all those on the north sides of odd-numbered streets?
Or those on the ground floors of houses in named streets
beginning with consonants? What were the rules? How did
you play God?
He resolved not to talk to Siss about it. He wouldn't have
her breaking her heart over a billion doomed animals; she had
enough to mourn.
From his notebooks:
What should I call today? Rolf day? Sissuary the 13th?
Year Zero?
Shd have kept track but don't really know how many days
it's been since I walked out of Bill's storage vault and found
myself V2 the human pop. of the whole furshlugginer world.
Asked Siss. She remembers. It has been exactly II days
since the holocaust. She accounted for every one of them.
Moren I eld do: they started to run together for me after the
first three.
OK, so it's Sissuary the 11th, Year One, Aimo Rolfe. Some-
body's got to keep a record.
How many days in Sissuary? We'll see. Got to name the
second month before closing out the first.
It was difficult for him to look back and remember exactly
when he had first realized with certainty that this was the
woman with whom he was fated to spend the rest of his life,
when it had dawned on him that this. moron was to be his
bosom companion, that he had to take care of her, provide
for her, talk with her (and listen to her), answer her stupid
questions, sleep with her!
The realization must have come about the time he began to
experience his stomach-aches. They weren't pains; they were
more like a gnawing at the vitals of his well-being, a pincers
movement by the enemy that was trapping him where he
didn't want to be, with someone he didn't want to be with,
a leaden weight that was smothering his freedom.
Some of her traits nearly drove him out of his mind. He
was oversensitive, he supposed, but he had to wince and tried
to close his ears every time she converted a sneeze into a
clearly-enunciated "Ah chool" and waited for him to bless
her.
Worse because more frequent was her way of grunting
audibly when she was picking up something, or pushing some-
thing or moving something around. This was to let him know
that she- was hard at work, for him. After a while he forced
himself to praise her while she was at it -her diligence; her
strength, her unselfishness-and she stopped making so much
noise. He hated himself for being a hypocrite and felt sure
she would see through him, but she never did and in the end
his exaggerated praise became a way of life. It stood him in
good stead later, when he had to tell her white lies about the
degree of his affection for her and the great esteem in which
he held her.
From his notebooks:
Asked Siss if she'd ever read a book and she said oh yes
the Good Book. Parts of it. It used to comfort her a lot more
in the old days, apparently. She'd read two books all the way
thru Uncle Wiggily and Japanese Fairy Tales, and parts of
a Tarzan book. She sometimes used to look at the paper
read the comics, the horoscope, picture captions, the TV list-
ings. Lord save us from ever having to hold a literary
conversation.
To be fair I've tried to remember the last 10 books I read
before doom. Probably be a pretty stupid list if I was follow-
ing my usual random reading pattern off on an Erie Stanley
Gardner or James Bond kick and reading everything available
all at once.
Aside from his obligation to humanity to sire a new race,
what was there for him to do? Rolfe considered the possi-
bilities, dividing them into two groups: necessities (duties or
obligations) and pastimes (including frivolities).
Under necessities he put:
Keep a journal for posterity, if any. He was already doing
that.
Give Siss the equivalent of a grammar school education;
more if she could take it.
Try to elevate her taste for the sake of the unborn children
she would one day influence.
Keep his family fed and sheltered. Would it be necessary
to clothe them, except for warmth in the winter? Nudity
might be more practical, as well as healthier.
Then he jotted down on a separate piece of paper "Obliga-
tion to self paramount" and looked at it. He felt that he had
to come first, with his duty to Siss a little lower (on the paper
and in his estimation) because he was smarter than. she was
and therefore more worth saving.
Then he had another look and amended it. Siss was more
worth saving because she was a woman and able to reproduce
her kind.
But not without his help, of course.
Finally he put himself and Siss at the top of the list. No
good saving one without the other.
Pastimes. Take up a sport to keep fit. What one-man sports
were there? Woodchopping? Fat chance. Too blister-prone,
he. Hiking? Maybe he and Siss should hike around the world
to make positively sure there was nobody else. Or around
the eastern United States, anyhow. Or just up and down the
Hudson River Valley? Somehow walking didn't seem to be
his sport, either.
He might take up cooking. Men. had always been the best
chefs and now ingenuity would be needed to make nourishing
and palatable meals from what was available to them. They
couldn't depend on canned and preserved food forever. Okay,
he'd be a cook. Of course that was a sport that tended to put
pounds on, not take them off. He'd better find an antidote,
like swimming or handball.
How about collecting? What money? Diamonds? Great
art? Neither money nor diamonds, obviously; neither had any
intrinsic value in a World of Two and then art was best
left where it was, as well-protected as anything in the poor
old world. If he wanted Siss to see a Rembrandt or an
Andrew Wyeth, he'd take her to it.
From his notebooks:
Collecting old-fashioned windup phonographs against the
day when no elec. Also old-fashioned 78 records. Got to keep
so many things I can't reproduce.
Music. Good; Siss likes. She enjoys Tchaikowsky, Wagner
and Beethoven (what wildness must stir within her poor head
sometimes!) She'll sit still for Bach. I can't complain.
We're both crazy about Cole Porter, she for the music, I
for the words, those great words, so much more ironic now
than he had ever meant them to be.
"It's All Right With Me," for instance.
We've found a place. We -Is that the first time I've used
the word?
It's far enough away from the city to be really country;
beyond the stink and the reminders of dead glory; yet close
enough so I can get in for supplies if I need them. I've stored
up enough good gassed-up cars so that travel is no problem,
but I think I'll try to stay here as much as I can. I used to
be a fair woodsman. Let's see how much I remember.
It's  peaceful  here.  My  stomach-ache  is  better,  all  of  a
sudden.
He insisted on thinking of her as a person who had come
into his custody and for whom he was responsible. For a long
time all he felt toward her was pity; no desire. And for that
reason he also pitied himself.
Because she was what she was, it would be unthinkable for
her to touch him in any but the most innocent of ways, as she
would one of her animal friends.
And when she called him anything but Mr. Ralph, using a
word like honey, he was not flattered because he had heard
her apply it also to a squirrel, a blue jay and a field mouse.
"Mr. Ralph, can I ask you a favor? Would you mind if
you took me for a ride?"
It wasn't that she particularly wanted to go anywhere;
apparently her enjoyment lay in sharing the front seat with
him; he noticed that she sat very close to him, in almost the
exact center of the seat and did not, as he had speculated she
might, sit at the far right, next to the window.
For her ride she chose an ornate costume which included a
hat, a silk scarf, dark glasses, jacket, blouse and skirt, stock-
ings and half-heel shoes.
She picked the costume at what she called the Monkey
Ward store while he shopped down the block for a fairly
clean convertible with sound tires and a fair amount of gas
in the tank.
They rode out past the quarry. Long ago he had stored
away the fact that Quarry Road was the highway probably
least littered with debris.
There was one bad place where he had to get off into a
field to skirt what looked as if it had been a 50-car chain-
reaction smashup. Otherwise, it was good driving all the way
to the lake.
He parked near the old boat-launching site and automati-
cally scanned the watery horizon for any sign of sail or
smoke. He had never entirely abandoned hopes of finding
other people.
He had brought from the liquor store (catty-corner from
Monkey Ward's) a fifth of a high-priced Scotch and as they
sat looking out over the lake he carefully opened it, preserving
the tinfoil for her.
Then he ceremoniously offered her a drink. She declined,
as he knew she would, saying:
"Not now, thanks. Maybe some other time." Apparently a
piece of etiquette she'd learned was that it was bad manners
to refuse anything outright especially something to eat or
drink.
Rolfe said: "I'll have one, though, if you don't mind." And
she replied, in what must have been a half-remembered witti-
cism, "Take two, they're small."
He took two in succession, neither small.
The lake was serene, the sun was warm but not hot, a
breeze blew from the east and the bugs were infrequent.
"Doesn't it bother you that there's nobody else?" he asked
her. "Don't you get lonesome?"
But she said: "I'm always lonesome. I was. Now I'm less
lonesome than I was. Thanks to you, Mr. Ralph." .
Now what could he say to that? So he sat there, touched
but scowling out at the horizon, and then he reached for the
very old Scotch (the world had still lived when it was hot-
tied) and took a very big swallow. Only later did he think
to offer her one.
"Some other time, maybe," she said. "Not right now."
There came a day when her last brassiere lost its hooks and
she obtained his dispensation to stop wearing it. And another
when her blouses lost their buttons and refused to stay closed
by the mere tucking of their tails into her skirts, and he told
her it didn't matter in the least; until finally her last rags fell
from her.
She said to him: "You're my Mr. Ralph, honey, and it's
not wrong to be this way with you, is it, Mr. Ralph?"
This touched him so that he took her naked innocent body
in his arms and kissed the top of her clean, sweet head and
he said:
"You're my big little girl and you couldn't do anything
wrong if you tried."
And only then, for the first time, he felt a desire for this
waif -this innocent in whom the seeds of the whole human
race were locked.
She gave him a quick daring kiss on the cheek and ran off,
saying: "It's time I started supper now. My gosh, we have
to get you fed."
He remembered with shame a pathetic scene early in their
life together. They had gone to Monkey Ward's and dressed
from the skin out in brand-new evening clothes. He'd had to
help her cancel some tasteless combinations but at last she
stood before him like an angel. Or, as he'd said: "Damned if
you don't look like a Madison Avenue model-."
"You shouldn't swear, Mr. Ralph," she'd said. "But thanks
anyhow."
"And you shouldn't talk. You're welcome. Look, we're
going to play a game. We're going to a fancy night club.
We're going to make believe you're a mute -that you can't
talk. No matter what, you must not say a word. Not a word."
"All right, Mr. Ralph."
"Starting right now, damn it! I'm sorry. I mean starting
right now. All you can do is nod or smile. You can touch me
if you want to. But you can't talk at all. That's part of the
game. Do you understand?"
She started to say yes, then caught herself and nodded.
The silent nod from this beautifully gowned woman imme-
diately made her ten times more attractive. Pleased with
himself and with her, he gave her his arm and bowed her
into the front seat of the Bentley he had searched out for
this evening.
The night club had once been a major one, with a resident
big-name band. Changing fashion had turned it into a disco-
theque, so that it had a juke box. He fed it a handful of coins
to pay his way into a night of illusion. But the tables were
bare and therefore wrong. He found a linen closet and set
them with tablecloths and silverware, glasses, candlesticks.
The illusion grew. He found a switch that set in motion a
set of colored lights which played on multi-faceted colored
globes which hung from the ceiling. Another switch set them
spinning slowly.
"What do you do in your spare time?" he asked her, know-
ing she wouldn't reply but wanting to see how she would
react.
She shrugged, smiled a little and shook her head in what
he tried to imagine was an attitude that she had so little spare
time that it was negligible.
She was carrying out her part of the bargain. She did it
extremely well. She listened without a word to his conversa-
tion, looking into his eyes as he pretended they were two
among hundreds of elegant diners. He reconstructed talk from
pre-holocaust nights out. He pretended she was a girl he had
once been engaged to and told her extravagant things. She
looked back at him and smiled, as if mockingly, as the old
girl would have done. He pretended it was a later time, with
the engagement in ruins and him solacing himself with the
wife of his best friend, with the best friend's knowledge and
consent, and the girl across from him gave him silent looks
of profound sympathy. He pretended he had hired a call girl
and spoke foully to her. She smiled bravely, her lips quiver-
ing, saying nothing.
Angered by the illusion which he had created and which
mocked him, he drank too much and continued to abuse her
for herself, now; for doing as he had asked, for remaining
silent.
The juke box was playing "Begin the Beguine" and ghostly
dancers danced inside the circle of tables, under the soft
colored lights. He saw them and cursed them for their non-
existence. He got up, knocking his chair over backwards, and
shouted at her.
"Speak!" he said. "I release you from your muteness."
She shook her head, no longer smiling.
"Speak! You misbegotten halfwit! You monstrous bird-
brained imposter! You scullery maid in a Schiaparelli gown!
Speak, you mental case."
But still she said nothing; merely looked at him with those
deep eyes that seemed to understand and forgive.
Only at the very end of their evening out, when he had
drunk himself into a stupor and stared across the room over
her right shoulder, as if transfixed by his misery, did she
speak. And then she said only:
"We better go home, Mr. Ralph, honey."
Then with a strength greater than his she half carried him
there to the car and drove him home and put him to bed. It
was a good thing he'd taught her to drive.
He woke up contrite, half remembering that he'd behaved
unforgivably.
But she forgave him, as perhaps no one else ever would
have, using these words:
"I forgive you, Mr. Ralph. You knewd not what you
dood."
He was delighted. "Do not what I would," he said. "Had I
but dood what I could, who knew what would have been
dood?"
"I don't think that's very nice, Mr. Ralph. I said I forgive
you. You're supposed to say thank you and say you're sorry,
even if you're not sorry."
He was still laughing at her, even after the realization that
he had a hangover.
"Okay, I'm sorry even if I'm not sorry and it's very good
of you to forgive me for my insufferable behavior, even if
nobody asked you to."
"Thank you for saying that, Mr. Ralph. Now I'll fix you a
hangover remedy."
"Where did you learn to concoct a hangover remedy, for
God's sake?"
"I was a working girl once for a poor man who got intoxi-
cated and his wife. I learned it there."
She gave him no magic potion but an ordinary tomatoey
thing laced with pepper and Worcestershire sauce. He drank
it down but stubbornly declined to feel better for a full hour.
By then he had persuaded Siss he needed a cold beer and
she'd brought him one disapproving but proud of her inge-
nuity in having produced it, since they kept no store of
alcoholic beverages. She must have made an ingenious search
to find a cold beer; he was suddenly proud of her.
But, remembering his performance of the night before, he
hated himself.
From the holding of hands to the kiss is not so far athing
as from the not holding of hands to the holding.
One thinks of the innocence of holding hands (children do
it; men shake hands)  but it is a vast journey from a platonic
handclasp, over which there is no lingering, to the clasp which
is so intense and telegraphic (accompanied, as it may be, by
ardent gazing) that it would be a great surprise if the kiss to
which it soon led were rebuffed.
And a kiss may lead anywhere. This he knew. He wondered
how much she knew, or felt or surmised.
Dared he take her hand to help her across a stream or a
rocky place? So far he had taken her arm, holding her firmly
just above the elbow as if she were an elderly woman and he
a large Boy Scout. He had no wish yet for anything more
intimate.
It was a hesitant, tentative beginning to their romance.
"Do you mind my touching you?" he asked. Lately he had
found that it gave him pleasure to touch her hair or trace the
outline of her ear, or run his finger along her breastbone.
Nothing carnal.
"No; I enjoy it."
And so they married. He arranged a ceremony, not only
for her sense of propriety but to satisfy his demand for a
kind of stability amid chaos.
He made it as elaborate as possible. He found a big flat
rock to be the altar. He picked flowers and garlanded them
into a headpiece for her. Let her head be covered, though her
body was not.
She surprised him with a piece of writing. Crudely written
in pencil on a sheet from a lined pad, it said:
"To my Mr. Ralph
"This is our day to mary to-gether. My day and your day.
I feel real good about it even if nobody else cant come. I'll
try and make you a good wife with all my heart.  .
"I know you do the same thing for me because you are
kind and good dear Mr. Ralph.
"Your freind and wife
"Cecelia Beamer"
It was the first time he knew what Siss was the nickname
for.
Never before a sentimental man, Martin took his wife,
Cecelia Beamer Rolfe, in his arms and kissed her with tender-
ness and affection.
He put her wedding-letter, as he thought of it, away in his
desk, where it would be safe.
He wanted to consummate the marriage outdoors. It was a
perfect June day, the sun warm, the grass soft, a breeze
gentle. Lord knew they could not have asked for greater
privacy than that of their own planet. But he felt Siss would
have been, if not shocked, embarrassed unless four walls
surrounded them.
Therefore he took her indoors, where she removed her
flowery hat and put it in water, in a bowl.
Then she returned to him and said: "Tell me what to do,
Mr. Ralph. I don't know what to do for you."
"For us, child," he said. "What we do whatever we do
from now on, is for us. Together."
"I like you saying that. Tell me what I should do."
"You don't have to do anything except be loved and love
back in whatever way you feel. Anything you feel and do is
right because you're my wife and I'm your husband."
"Would it be wrong for me to want you to hold me here?"
she asked. Eyes cast down, she touched her breasts. "I feel as
if I'm bursting. I'm so full of love for my Mr. Ralph. I never
thought back then, that"
He had to stop her talking and kissed her.
For a ring he had made a circlet of grass. When it broke
apart or fell to pieces he made her another. In a way, he
thought sometimes, it was like renewing the vows.
Once, years later, when he was looking for a pencil he
found in the back of her drawer a collection of hundreds of
wisps of strands of dried grass. She had saved each of the
worn-out rings, obviously. She had kept them in a cheaply-
manufactured container of plastic masquerading as leather
which said in gaudy lettering "My Jewel Box." These were
her gems, her only treasure.
He sometimes asked Siss, suddenly, intently: "Are you my
friend?" And she would reply: "Yes, I am. Didn't you think
so?" And he would be ashamed, but also gratified, and his
heart would swell because she had said more than just Yes.
A woman is a race apart, a friend had told him once.
"But," Rolfe added to himself, "this is ridiculous." He and
Siss could not have been more unlike mentally.
Well, of course. That could have been true even if he'd
had the whole world to choose from. Suppose she had been
a selfish, empty-headed teenager; how long could he have
stood someone like that? Or she could have been a crone, a
hag; work-worn, fat, diseased, crippled. You're a pretty lucky
guy, Martin Rolfe; Mr. Ralph, sir!
Sexually they were complementary, for instance. But was
that enough? Except for little bits of time, no. But those are
very important little bits of time, aren't they, Marty? Precious)
even. Each a potential conception, a possible person.
But aside from that, no; it was not enough.
But because her entire existence was one of trying to please
him, she learned eventually to make acceptable verbal re-
sponses and their mating became more satisfactory to him.
His stomach ached less frequently.
By trial and error and by diligence, as she learned any
task, she learned to speak to him in bed with an approxima-
tion of high intelligence, murmuring words of sympathy,
approval, surprise, delight, playfulness, even shock at appro-
priate times. She learned 'that a few words, sincerely but
carefully expressed, did more for their mutual happiness than
a babble, or an ungrammatical gush.
Her physical responses, as of a slave to a beloved master,
had always been gratifying to him, except for her one un-
breakable habit -her tendency to say "Oh, praise God!"
whenever she achieved orgasm, or whenever she thought
he had.
Once she had asked him to tell her about his life.
"What about it?" he had asked.
"All about it," she'd said.
"That would be a lot to tell."
"As much as you want to, then, Mr. Ralph."
Without a word of introduction he would start: "I was six-
teen when I first kissed a girl. Awfully old . . ."
He'd always thought it shameful that he'd been unkissed
so long and had never confessed it before. It was years later
before Siss got up the courage to say: "Mr. Ralph, you told
me once you didn't get a kiss till you were sixteen and that's
too bad, but do you know how old I was?"
And he had said No, he didn't and she'd said:
"Twenty-eight, Mr. Ralph: that's how old. So don't you
feel so bad."
And he'd asked her, though he was practically certain:
"You mean I was the first one ever to kiss you?"
"The first man, except my father, yes, sir, Mr. Ralph. And
do you know what? I'm awfully glad it was you that was the
first,  and that now nobody else ever will. I'm glad of that."
And so he had to postpone his confession. He had been on
the point of telling Siss about his previous marriage how he
had chosen his wife from those available for matrimony
among the fairly large number of women he had known.
What a fantastically wide choice he had had! The irony
of now, with no choice at all, made him marvel to think that
he could have picked from among millions, had he known
doom was to come and that he and his mate, if she too were
saved, would be parents to the entire human race. With what
care he would have searched, what exacting tests he would
have applied, to screen the mass of womanhood for a fitting
mate for the last man!
But because he had expected all life to continue he had
chosen from an extremely small sample. Nevertheless he had
chosen well.
Later he would tell Siss; not now. He would not hurt her
at this time with talk about what, by hindsight, had been a
perfect marriage; nor did he feel like hurting himself by con-
trusting a happy past marriage to an intelligent woman with
what he had now.
Now he would tell Siss about another time in his adult
past, a sad interlude during which he and his perfect wife
had separated and he was living alone.
How foolish to have had that quarrel with his dead perfect
wife, he thought. How senseless to have lost all the time that
they might have had together.
Yet he had achieved a certain peace in his solitude. And
their marriage had been stronger when he returned to her.
"I'm going to tell you about a time I was living all alone
in a little trailer in the woods," he told Siss.
He had been a free-lance editor in those days, doctoring
doddering magazines, doing articles for his editor friends, and
reading for a publishing house, and so was able to avoid the
frenzied daily commute. He used the mails and phone and
got into, the city a couple of times a month.
He enjoyed an occasional dinner or cocktail party in his
exurb; but he valued his privacy enough to decline many
invitations and to withdraw to his trailer.
Rolfe himself never entertained. His truck-back trailer
home was unsuited for anything but the shortest of visits.
He'd have the mailman in for a drink of bourbon on Christ-
mas Eve, or chat with the man who came around to collect
for the volunteer ambulance corps, or play ten-second-move
chess with the route man who delivered the only food Rolfe
ate at home eggs, and the butter he fried them in.
The truck-back home normally sat in .the middle of Rolfe's
eighteen acres far enough out of town so that there were
woods to surround him and a damned-up stream in which to
swim, but close enough for an electric power line to be run in.
If Rolfe's choice of this way to live during his separation
was an eccentricity, then he was eccentric. One other thing
about him was a little odd. He had nailed a sign to a tree at
the beginning of the track which led off the county road to
his place. It said:
PRIVATE ROAD
MINED
The police came around after he put up the sign, which
he'd burned into the end of an egg crate with an electric
pen. The policemen, a lieutenant and a sergeant, left their car
at the county road and walked carefully along the edge of
Rolfe's track to the pickup truck in the clearing near the
dammed-up stream. A pheasant moved without haste into
some undergrowth as they came up to the door over the
tailgate.
Rolfe invited them in, making room for them to sit down
by lifting a manuscript off the one easy chair and motioning
the sergeant to the camp chair in front of the typewriter on
the bracket that folded down from the wall. Rolfe sat on the
single bunk along the driver's side, having first got- cokes out
of the tiny refrigerator. He knew better than to offer liquor
to policemen on duty. They chatted for a while before the
lieutenant said: "About your sign, Mr. Rolfe; we've had some
complaints."
"Call me Martin. Complaints? I like my privacy, that's all."
"My name's Sol," the lieutenant said, "and this is Eric."
They shook hands all round again, now that the first-name
basis had been established, and Sol said: "About the road
being mined. Sure it's private property and nobody respects
the principle of that more than I do, but somebody might get
hurt. Somebody who couldn't read, maybe, or who wandered
in after dark not really meaning to trespass, you know."
"Sure," Rolfe said. "I can understand that."
"Besides," the sergeant Eric said, "anybody with war
surplus ammunition was supposed to have turned it in years
ago. It's the law."
"I don't know what you mean," Rolfe said. "I haven't
booby-trapped the road. I wouldn't hurt a rabbit, much less
a human being. Why, I'm so soft-hearted I don't even fish the
stream."
Sol said: "I get it. You just put up the sign to keep people
away like 'Beware of the Dog,' even if you don't have a
dog."
"And there really aren't any bouncing Bettys out there
then?" Eric said. "I'm relieved. Believe me, we walked mighty
easy along the edge."
Martin Rolfe  grinned. "Gentlemen, I think I begin to
understand. And it's all my fault because I'm such a poor
speller. What I was trying to do was to call attention to the
fact that it isn't a public road or a hiking trail or a place for
young vandals to go if they have a hankering to break win-
dows or set fires in out-of-the-way places. I believe there've
been a few such incidents around town."
"Too many," Sol said. "But I still don't know what you
mean about being a poor speller."
"What I intended to say on the sign, I guess, was 'Mind
you, this is a private road.' It's a kind of New England
expression."
"I've heard it," Eric said. "They have signs like that in
London, where my wife's from she was a war bride, you
know. Lieutenantthat say 'Mind the step.' "
"That's m-i-n-d,' not m-i-n-e-d," Sol said.
"Is that right?" Rolfe asked with a grin. "I told you I
wasn't much of a speller. I'd better change the sign, then,
hadn't I?"
Instead of replying directly, Sol asked: "Ever have trouble
with kids back in here?"
"Kids and grown-ups both," Rolfe said. "Different kinds of
trouble. Kids broke a window one night. I was asleep and
got a shower of broken glass all over my face. Another time
a big brave man with a gun shot the hell out of a mother
partridge and her brood and left them flopping around. He
wasn't even planning to eat them. Did you ever put a living
thing out of its misery with your bare hands, Sol? That same
day I put up the sign. The partridges and I haven't been
bothered since."
Sol got up and let himself out into the clearing. "I had to
kill a doe once that some mighty hunter put a hole into but
didn't think worth following into the brush." Eric went out
with Martin Rolfe behind him and all three walked along the
middle of the track to the county road. Birds chirped at them
and a leisurely rabbit hopped away.
At the blacktopped road Martin Rolfe went to his sign. He
took a pencil out of his shirt pocket and scratched a vertical
line through the E in mined. Then he joined the N and D
with a copyreader's mark.
The sergeant said, "I don't know that that's too highly
visible. Besides, a couple of rains'll wash it off."
"Oh, come on, Eric," the lieutenant said, getting into the
car. "It's as plain as day."
"Thanks, Lieutenant," Martin said, going over to the police
car to say goodbye. "I never could spell worth a damn."
"Oh, yeah?" Eric said. "I'll bet you can out spell both of us
any day." He was looking back at the sign as he got into the
car and he tripped, so that he had to grab for the door to
steady himself.
"Mind the step," Martin said.
It was achingly poignant for him to leaf through the pages
of a copy he'd saved of The New York Times Magazine.
How lovable and childlike seemed the people doing the
weird things fashion advertising demanded of them! How
earnest were the statements made in the articles and the letter
pages. For example, there was the ironic, the heart-breakingly
laughable article about the population explosion about the
insupportable hundreds of millions there soon would be in
India, or the six billion there'd be on Earth in just a few
more years.
Would that there were only as many people as had read
that particular Sunday issue of the Times. A million and a
half? World enough. Or even if there existed on Earth only
the few hundred people it had taken to write, edit and print
that particular issue of The New York Times Magazine. Even
if there were only one other than Siss and himself. One man
to play chess with, or to philosophize with.
He thrust away from him the thought that the third person
on Earth might be another woman. It was too dangerous, too
explosive a thought. Would he betray Siss for a normal
woman? Certainly he would never abandon her, but betrayal
was certain she would be so easy to fool. What form, other
than an intellectual one, would it take? Would he take the
new woman blatantly as his mate, with a facile explanation.
to Siss? Would the new one try to banish Siss (he'd never
stand for that would he?), or decree a demeaning role for
her in a reorganized household something he might ration-
alize himself into accepting? (He could hear the new one
saying: "You want our children-Earth's only children to
be intelligent, don't you? You don't want the new world
peopled by feeble-minded brats, do you?")
His thoughts went back to the possible consequences if a
third person were male. Suppose the man were not a chess
player? Suppose he were a mere brute, with brutish instincts?
Would Martin have to share Siss with him, Eskimo style? Even
if he could bring himself (or Siss) to accept such an arrange-
ment, how long could it continue without an explosion?
No, as long as he was fantasizing it would be simpler
to dream up two other people, a man and a woman who
had already arranged their own lives, who had made the
adjustment.
Still how long could two couples and only two live
side by side without something boiling over? Wife-swapping
was too prevalent an institution in the bad old days, when
there was all kinds of other entertainment, not to be a daily
temptation in an all-but-depopulated world.
No it would be best to have no third or fourth person
not unless there could be an infinity of others besides . ..
Ah, but he was so lonely!
"I'm going to the city," he told Siss.
They had done without the city for a long time. They had
made do with the things they had, or could make; they'd let
their clothing drop away and hadn't replaced it; they'd grown
their own food; made their country house the center of their
universe. But now he wanted to go back.
She must have seen something in his eyes. "Let me go for
you," she said. "Just tell me what you want."
Sometimes she chose such an ironic way of saying things
that he fleetingly suspected her of having not only intelligence
but wit.
"Just tell you what I want! As if" He stopped. As if he
could tell her. As if he knew.
He knew only that he had to get away for a little while.
He wanted to be alone, with his own memories of a populated
Earth.
He also wanted a drink.
Long ago he had made it a rule never to have liquor in the
house. It would be too great a temptation to have it handy.
He could see himself degenerating into a drunken bum. With
an unlimited supply close at hand and a devoted woman to
do all the work that needed to be done, he could easily slip
into an animalistic role become a creature with a whiskey-
sodden, atrophied brain.
A fitting father and mother to the world such a pair would
be!
And so he had made his rule: drink all you want when you
have to in the city but never bring it home.
And so he had told Siss: "I don't know what I want,
exactly. I just want to go to the city."
And she had said: "All right, Mr. Ralph, if you have to."
There was her perception again, if that's what it was. "If
you have to," she'd said, though he'd talked of want, not
need.
"I do," he said. "But I'll come back. Is there anything I can
bring you?" She looked around the kitchen and began to say
something, then stopped and said instead: "Nothing we really
need. You just go, Mr. Ralph, and take as long as you have
to. It'll give me a chance to go do that berry-picking I been
wanting to."
She was so sweet that he almost decided not to go. But
then he kissed her very thankful, just then, that she was his
Siss and not some too-bright shrew of a problem wife and
went. He drove in, naked in a Cadillac.
He had rolled the swivel chair out of the store onto the
sidewalk and was sitting in it in the afternoon' sunshine.
Beside him on the pavement were half a dozen bottles, each
uncapped. He was talking to himself.
"As the afternoon sun, blood-red through the haze of the
remnants of a once overpopulated world, imperceptibly glides
to its bed, one of the two known survivors becomes quietly
plastered." He had a drink on that, then went on:
"What thoughts pass through the mind of this pitiful
creature, this naked relic of a man left to eke out the rest of
his days on a ruined planet?
"Does he ever recall the glory that once was his and that
of his fellows? Or is he so sunk in misery in the mere
scratching of a bare existence from an arid soil that he has
forgotten the heights to which his kind once had risen?
Subject pauses in thought and reaches for bottle. Drinks
deeply from bottle, but not so deeply as to induce drunken
sickness. Aim of Subject is  quiet plasterization, happy
drunkdom, a nonceness of Nirvana, with harm to none and
bitterness never. Sicken drunkenness?
"A respite of reverie, perhaps, as subject casts mind back
to happy past. Mr. Martin Rolfe in Happier Days."
He picked up his New York Times Magazine and leafed
through it. It was almost as good as having another drink.
There they were they couldn't have been more than 17
leaping in their panty girdles to show the freedom of action
and the elasticity of the crotch. He remembered once having
heard a newsman, waiting in the rain for the arrival of a
President, say: "Being a reporter is essentially an undignified
occupation." So had been being a model, obviously.
Things of the past . . . He thought: "A title for my mem-
oirsThings of the Past." He took up the Times again and
turned to an ad of a debonair young man in a revolving door
holding a copy of the Wall Street Journal. "I dreamt I was
trapped in a revolving door in my Arctieweave tropical
worsted," Rolfe said, summing up the situation. He looked
like the 28-year-old Larchmont type; five years out of college,
with a Master's, two kids, wife beginning to drink a little bit
too much. "If he's trapped there long enough he may read
the paper right through to the shipping pages and ship out to
the islands."
Rolfe looked pityingly at the trapped Larchmont type,
armed against his predicament only with his Arctieweave suit,
his Wall Street Journal and, presumably, a wallet full of wife-
and-baby pictures, credit cards and a commutation ticket
issued by a railroad company petitioning to suspend passenger
service.
"You poor bastard," Rolfe said.
Of course he was saying it to'himself, too. He said it all
the way home: "You poor bastard. You poor bastard."
Siss was waiting for him in. the cool garden. Gently she led
him indoors. She said, with only the slightest hint of reproach
(he could stand that much he deserved more): "You been
drinking too much again, Mr. Ralph. You know it's bad for
you."
"You're right, Siss. Absolutely right."
"You got to take care of yourself. I try to, but you got to
try, too."
Tenderly she put him to bed. He knew then, among other
times, how much he needed her, and he struggled to say
something nice to her before he dropped off to sleep. Finally
he said: "You know, Siss, you're nicer than all those crazy
leaping girls in the York Times." That's what she called it,
the  York Times. "You got a lot more sense, too, than they
look as if they had."
From his notebooks:
Got drunk saft. Downtown. Dangerous. Not fair to Siss.
Liable get et up by dogs while stinko. Bad show.
Can't bring bottle home, tho. Too great a temptation to get
sozzled daily and twice on Sunday.
Why is Sunday worse than other days? I tried to rename
it but Siss  insisted we  keep  it.  She also  demanded it  come
every seven days, just like in good old days. Had to give in.
So much for calendar reform.
He sought other ways of escaping. He hiked and climbed
and explored.
Once he found a spot on the brow of a hill from which one
(that is, he) could see for miles but from which no work of
man was visible except the top of a silo at the top of a
similar hill across a wide valley.
Having found the spot, he cleared wild strawberry plants
from beneath a young maple tree, leaving the ferns and the
cushiony moss, and lay down to rest. It had been a strenuous
climb, and hot, and now the insects were upon him. But
though the flies buzzed they did not often land and the
mosquitoes were torpid and easily slapped. After a while it
was almost noon (as if the hour mattered)he had a couple
of swallows from the flask in his rucksack and ate some
cheese. He thought of the flask as his iron rations.
As he rummaged in the rucksack he found a roll of plastic
tape he'd brought along to help him blaze a trail. He hadn't
needed it; instead he'd marked his way by cutting branches
with a long-bandied pruning tool,
But as he lay in the solitude he had sought out and found
(how odd to seek solitude in an empty world), under one of
a myriad of trees, where the only sounds were of buzzing
insects, chirping birds, the soughing of trees in a soft wind
he knew what to do with the plastic tape. He printed some-
thing on a little square of paper, small but legible, and, with
the tape, attached it to the lowest bough of his young maple.
Now he lay under it, savoring what he had done.
The little sign said: THIS TREE RESERVED.
One June night it rained in great, warm, wind-driven sheets.
He had not experienced such a storm since a visit a decade
earlier to the tropics.
The pleasure he took in the soaking, bath-temperature rain
was enhanced by the danger from the lightning. It stabbed
down from the sky as if seeking him out, destroying and
burning only yards away, as if it would be a great cosmic
joke to strike that one spot on the surface of the Earth and
kill the last man.
He defied it, prancing wildly, then halting deliberately as if
transfixed when it flashed, posing with outthrust or up thrust
arms, yelling, defying the thing or Being that had sent the
storm, loosing his pent-up frustrations, his disappointments
and hates in the elemental power of the storm.
He had trapped the beast in a pit, unfairly. It had nearly
exhausted itself in attempts to leap the sheer walls. At least
he hadn't lined the bottom with spikes.
Rolfe could have killed it from above, poisoned it, let it
starve. Instead he jumped into the pit, armed with two knives,
to risk mauling and death.
He realized his folly instantly. The creature was far from
helpless. Its claws were sharp, though its movements were
clumsy in the cramped pit-bottom, and its fetid breath was as
much a weapon as its fangs.
Only by the sheerest of luck, he felt, did he avoid the claws
and fangs long enough to plunge first one knife then the other
into the beast's heart.
As its death struggles subsided he lay there, his face buried
in the back of its neck, bugging the thing he'd killed, a sad-
ness coming over him as he felt the fading heartbeat.
Later he skinned the beast. He and Siss ate the meat and
slept under the pelt. But first he had buried the head, in
tribute to a worthy antagonist, a kind of salute to another
male.
And unto them was born a son.
Siss seemed to know just what to do, by instinct. Clumsily
he helped. He cut the umbilical with a boiled pair of scissors.
Made a knot. Washed the red little thing.
Eventually Siss lay quiet, dry, serene, holding her swaddled
child. He sat on the floor next to the bed and looked and
looked at the mother and child. A holy picture, he thought.
He sat for hours, staring, wondering. She looked at him,
silent, wondering.
The new human being slept, serene.
It could not have been more perfect.
His son. His boy. His and hers but, he felt it fair enough
to say, mostly his.
His son Adam. What else had there been to name him?
Adam. Trite but noble. He had considered calling him Ralph,
but only briefly. It would be too comical to have his mother
go around introducing him to their near circle of friends
relatives all, come to think of it as Ralph Ralph.
There'd be no need for introductions for many years, of
course, in a closed society such as theirs. The years did pass.
There was his son, tall for his age, straight, brown, good
with his hands . . .
But bright? Intelligent? How was a father to know? A
prejudiced parent sees only the good, ignores what he doesn't
want to accept, can be oblivious to faults obvious to anyone
else.
He talked to him and got gratifying responses. But wouldn't
almost any response be gratifying to a parent? Parents are
easily satisfied. Especially fathers of sons.
Had he conditioned himself to the point where he would
be satisfied if his son showed more than animal intelligence?
The conditioning encompassed an agony of watching as his
son grew watching for signs of mental retardation, of idiocy,
of dullness, of bigheadedness, of torpor.
And then they had a daughter.
From his notebook:
My son. Brown as a penny. Naked as a jaybird. Slender,
muscled, handsome, active, good with his hands.
Bright? Seems so. Obviously too soon to really tell.
Five years old and just made his first kill. Wild dog,
attacking our goat. Got him in the right eye with a .30-30
at_______ yards (measure and fill in).
Strong and brave and skilled and good looking.
Let's hope intelligent, too.
Please, God.
My daughter. My precious, my beauty. What a delight you
are, with your serene smile and your loving way of wrapping
your arms around my leg and looking up at Old Daddy.
You're your mother's child, aren't you? So good, so quiet.
But you're quick on your feet and your reflexes (I've tested
them) are sound. I think we're all right.
The Diary of Siss
(Siss was not very faithful about her diary. The printed
word was not her medium. Although her intentions were
obviously good, there are fewer than a dozen entries in all,
and they are reproduced below. She did not date them. The
handwriting in the last entry is slightly better than that of the
first, but maybe only because she was using a sharper pencil.
A more revealing diary probably would be found in her heart,
if that could be read, or in her children.)
Mr. Ralph told me write things down when they big &
important I will start now. Today Mr. Ralph married me.
Very happy today. Learning to please my husband.
Very very happy. Today moved to our country house. I like
it better than the big city.
Today I had a baby, a boy.
My word for today is contentment. I have to spell it and
tell what it means. Mr. Ralph says I need an education, he
will educate me.

My word for today is education. Mr. Ralph seen what I
wrote in my dairy yestdy.
I have 2 words for today diary & yesterday. Also saw not
seen.

Today I had a baby, a girl. Ralph said now everything is
going to be alright.
And presumably it was. Having doubled the population,
the human race seemed to be on a firm footing. There was
love in the world; a growing, proud family, and a new self-
assurance in Sis note that he was Ralph now, not Mr.
Ralph. We may be sure, though, that the strict if loving
father gave her two words for tomorrow: all right. 'A father,
a mother, a son, a daughter. A little learning, a lot of love.
In the summer of his eighth year Adam and his father
were in the woods back of the pasture, in the little clearing
at the side of the stream that ran pure and sparkling before
it broadened into the shallow muddy pond the livestock used.
Martin and the boy were eating lunch after a morning of
woodcutting and conversation.
Adam, naked like his father, had asked: "Am I going to
grow some more hair, like you?"
And Martin said: "Sure, when you get bigger. When you
begin to be a man."
And Adam had compared his smooth skin with his father's
hard, muscled, hairy body and said: "Morn's got hair in that
place, too, but she's different."
So Martin explained, sweating even though he was sitting
still now, and his son took it all in, nodding, just as if it were
no more important than knowing why the cow had her calf.
It was obvious that until now Adam had not connected the
function of the bull with the dropping of the calf. Martin
explained, in human terms.
"That's pretty neat," Adam said. "When do I get to do it?"
Martin tried to keep his voice matter-of-fact. How do you
instruct your son in incest?
The explanation was completed, finally, and it was Martin's
turn to ask a question. "Think carefully about this, son. If
you could save the life of one person your mother or me
but not the other which would you save?"
Adam answered without hesitation. "I'd save Mother, of
course."
Martin looked hard at his strong, handsome son and asked
the second part of the question. "Why?"
Adam said: "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Dad. I'd
save both of you if I could"
"I know you would. You've been a crack shot since you
were five. But there might be only one chance. Your answer
is the only possible one, but I have to know why you gave it."
The boy frowned as he struggled to reason out the reply he
had made instinctively. "Because it necessary she and I
could" Then it came out in a rush: "Because she could be
the mother to the world and I could be the father."
Martin shuddered as if a long chill had just passed. It was
all  right.  He  embraced his fine, strong, intelligent son  and
wept.
After a little while Sis appeared, walking the path beside
the stream, naked as the two of them but different, as Adam
had said, and riding the naked baby on her hip.
"Thought we'd join the men folks for lunch," she said. "I
picked SOIT15 berries for dessert." She carried the blackberries
in a mesh bag and some had been bruised, staining the
tanned skin a delicate blue just below her slim waist.
Martin sa'd: "You sure make a good-looking picture, you
two. Come here and give me a kiss."
The baby kissed h'm first, then toddled off to smooth up
for Adam, who gave her a dutiful peck.
Their father held open his arms and Siss sat beside him,
putting her berries aside. She rested her head on his shoulder,
serene. Martin folded her to him and kissed her eyes and
cheeks and hair and neck and finally her lips, there in the
sunshine, by the side of the pure stream, in' the presence of
all the world.
"Do you th''nk" she started to say, but Martin said,
"Hush, now. It's all right. Everything's all right, Siss darling."
She sighed and relaxed against him. He had never called her
darling before. He kissed her again for a long time and she
gradually lay back on the soft ground and raised one knee
and bent the o'her to accommodate her husband.
The baby lost interest and went to wade in the stream but
Adam watched, his elbow on his knee, and once he said,
"Don't crush the blackberries," and reached out to get them.
He ate a handful, slowly.
Then he heard his mother gasp, "Oh, praise God!" and
after a moment both his parents became still. And after a
little while longer he looked to see that the baby was okay
and then went to the intertwined, gently-breathing bodies,
which were more beautiful than anything he had ever seen.
Adam knelt beside them and kissed his father's neck and
his mother's lips. Siss opened her arms and enfolded her son,
too.
And Adam asked, with his face against his mother's cheek,
which was wet and warm, "Is this what love is?"
And his mother answered, "Yes, honey," and his father
said, in a muffled kind of way, "It's everything there is, son."
Adam reached out for the berries and put one in his
mother's mouth and one in his father's and one in his. Then
he got up to give one to the baby.