A Touch of Infinity (12 page)

Harvey Kepplemen never knew that he had a talent for anything, until one Sunday morning at breakfast he plucked a crisp water roll right out of the air.

It balanced the universe; it steadied the order of things. Man is man, and particularly in this age of equality, when uniformity has become both a passion and a religion, it would be unconscionable that a decent human being of forty years should have no talent at all. Yet Harvey Kepplemen was so obviously and forthrightly an untalented man—until this morning—that the label was pinned on him descriptively. As one says, He is short, She is fat, He is handsome, so they would say of Harvey: Nothing there. No talent. No verve. Pale. Colorless. No bent. No aptitude. He was a quiet, soft-spoken person of middle height, with middling looks and brown eyes and brown hair that was thinning in a moderately even manner, and he had passable teeth with good fillings and clean fingernails, and he was an accountant with an income of eighteen thousand dollars a year.

Just that. He was not given to anger, moods, or depression, and if any observer had cared to observe him, he would have said that Harvey was a cheerful enough person; except that one never noticed whether he was cheerful or not. Suzie was his wife. Suzie's mother once put the question to her. “Is Harvey always so cheerful?” Suzie's mother wanted to know.

“Cheerful? I never think of Harvey as being cheerful.”

Neither did anyone else, but that was because no one ever gave any serious thought to Harvey. Perhaps if there had been children, they might have had opinions concerning their father; but it was a childless marriage. Not an unhappy one, not a very happy one. Simply childless.

Nevertheless, Suzie was quite content. Small, dark, reasonably attractive, she accepted Harvey. Neither of them was rebellious. Life was just the way it was. Sunday morning was just the way it was. They slept late but not too late. They had brunch at precisely eleven o'clock. Suzie prepared toast, two eggs for each of them, three slices of crisp bacon for each of them, orange juice to begin and coffee to finish. She also set out two jars of jam, imported marmalade, which Harvey liked, and grape jelly, which she liked.

On this Sunday morning, Harvey thought that he would have liked a crisp roll.

“Really?” Suzie said. “I never knew that you liked rolls particularly. You do like toast.”

“Oh, yes,” Harvey agreed. “I do like toast.”

“I mean, we always have toast.”

“I have toast for lunch, too, “Harvey agreed.

“I could have bought rolls.”

“I don't think so, because I guess I was thinking about the kind of rolls we had when I was a kid. They were very light and crisp, and they were two for a nickel. Can you imagine paying only a nickel for two rolls?”

“No. Really, I can't.”

“Well, no more light, crisp water rolls, two for a nickel.” Harvey sighed. “Wouldn't it be nice if I could just reach up like this and pluck one out of the air?”

And then Harvey reached up and plucked a crisp, brown water roll right out of the air, and sat there, arm frozen into position, mouth open, staring at the water roll; then he lowered his arm slowly and placed the roll on the table in front of him and continued to stare at it.

“That's very clever, Harvey,” Suzie said. “Is it a surprise for me? I think you did it perfectly.”

“Did what?”

“You plucked that roll right out of the air.” Suzie picked up the roll. “It's warm—really, you are clever, Harvey.” She broke it open and tasted it. “So good! Where did you buy it, Harvey?”

“What?”

“The roll. I hope you bought another one.”

“What roll?”

“This one.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Harvey, you just plucked it right out of the air. Do you remember the magician who entertained at Lucy Gordon's party? He did it with white doves. But I think you did it just as nicely with the roll, and it's such a surprise, because I can imagine how much you practiced.”

“I didn't practice.”

“Harvey!”

“Did I really take that roll out of the air?”

“You did, Mr. Magician,” Suzie said proudly. She had a delicious feeling of pride, a very new feeling. While she had never been ashamed of Harvey before, she had certainly never been proud of him.

“I don't know how I did it.”

“Oh, Harvey, stop putting me on. I am terribly impressed. Really, I am.”

Harvey reached out, broke off a piece of the roll, and tasted it. It was quite good, fresh, straightforward, honest bread, precisely like the two-for-a-nickel rolls he had eaten as a child.

“Put some butter on it,” Suzie suggested.

Harvey buttered his piece and then topped it with marmalade. He licked his lips with appreciation. Suzie poured him another cup of coffee.

Harvey finished the roll—Suzie refusing any more than a taste—and then he shook his head thoughtfully. “Damned funny,” he said. “I just reached up and took it out of the air.”

“Oh, Harvey.”

“That's what I did. That's exactly what I did.”

“Your eggs are getting cold,” Suzie reminded him.

He shook his head. “No—it couldn't have happened that way. Then where did it come from?”

“Do you want me to put them back in the pan?”

“Listen, Suzie. Now just listen to me. I got to thinking about those rolls I ate when I was a kid, and I said to myself, wouldn't it be nice to have one right now, and wouldn't it be nice just to reach up and pick it out of the air—like this.” And suiting his action to the thought, he plucked another roll out of the air and dropped it on the table like a hot coal.

“See what I mean?”

Suzie clapped her hands. “Wonderful! Beautiful! I was staring right at you and I never saw you do it.”

Harvey picked up the second roll. “I didn't do it,” he said bleaky. “I haven't been practicing sleight of hand. You know me, Suzie. I can't do the simplest card trick.”

“That's what makes it so wonderful—because you had all these hidden qualities and you brought them out.”

“No—no. Remember how it is when we play poker, Suzie, and it's my deal, and it's a great big yak because I can't shuffle the cards, and it's the big laugh of the evening when I try it and the cards are all over the table. You don't unlearn something like that.”

Suzie's eyes widened, and for the first time she realized that her husband was sitting at the table in a T-shirt, with no sleeves and no equipment other than two cold eggs and three strips of bacon.

“Harvey, you mean—”

“I mean,” he said. “Yes.”

“But from where? Gettleson's Bakery is four blocks away.”

“They don't make water rolls at Gettleson's Bakery.”

They sat in silence then and stared at each other.

“Maybe it's something you have a talent for,” Suzie said finally.

More silence.

“Do you suppose it's only rolls?” Suzie said. “I mean just rolls? Suppose you tried a Danish?”

“I don't like Danish,” Harvey answered miserably.

“You like the kind with the prune filling. I mean, when they're crisp and have a lot of prune filling and they're not all that limp, squishy kind of dough.”

“You don't get them like that anymore.”

“Well, you remember when we drove down to Washington, and we stopped at that motel outside of Baltimore, and you remember how they told us they had their own chef who worked in one of the big hotels in Germany, only he wasn't a Nazi or anything like that, and he made the Danish himself and you remember how much you liked it. So you could just think about that kind of Danish, full of prune filling.”

Harvey thought about it. His hand was shaking as he reached out to a spot midway between himself and Suzie, and there it was between his thumb and his forefinger, a piece of Danish so impossibly full of sweet prune filling that it almost came to pieces in Harvey's fingers. He let it plop down on the cold eggs.

“Oh—you've spoiled the eggs,” Suzie said.

“Well, they were cold anyway.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I can make you some fresh eggs.”

Harvey put a finger into the prune filling and then licked it thoughtfully. He broke off a corner of the Danish, ignoring the cold egg yellow that adhered, and munched it.

“There's no use making fresh eggs,” Suzie observed, “because now that sweet stuff will ruin your appetite. Is it good?”

“Delicious.”

Then, in a squeak that was almost a scream, Suzie demanded to know where the Danish came from.

“You saw it. You told me to get a Danish.”

“Oh, my God, Harvey!”

“That's the way I feel about it. It's damn funny, isn't it?”

“You took that Danish right out of the air.”

“That's what I've been trying to tell you.”

“It wasn't a trick,” said Suzie. “I think I am going to be sick, Harvey. I think I am going to throw up.”

She rose and went to the bathroom, and Harvey listened unhappily to the sound of the toilet being flushed. Then she brushed her teeth. They were both of them very clean and neat people. When she returned to the breakfast table, she had gotten a grip on herself, and she told Harvey matter-of-factly that she had read an article in the magazine section of
The New York Times
to the effect that all so-called miracles and religious phenomena of the past were simply glossed-over scientific facts, totally comprehensible in the light of present-day knowledge.

“Would you repeat that please, darling?” Harvey asked her.

“I mean that the Danish must have come from somewhere.”

“Baltimore,” Harvey agreed.

“Do you want to try something else?” she asked tentatively.

“No. I don't think so.”

“Then I think we ought to call my brother, Dave.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Suzie said, “and I don't want to hurt your feelings, Harvey, but simply because Dave knows what to do.”

“About what?”

“I know you don't like Dave—”

Dave was heavy, overbearing, arrogant, insensitive, and contemptuous of Harvey.

“I don't like him very much,” Harvey admitted. Harvey disliked feelings of hostility toward anyone. “I can get along with him,” he added. “I mean, Suzie, you cannot imagine how much I try to like Dave because he is your brother, but whenever I approach him—”

“Harvey,” she interrupted, “I know.” Then she telephoned Dave.

Dave always had three eggs for breakfast. Harvey sat at the table and watched gloomily as Dave stuffed himself and Dave's wife, Ruthie, explained about Dave's digestion. Dave had never taken a laxative. “Dave has a motto,” Ruthie explained. “You are what you eat.”

“The brain needs food, the body needs food,” Dave agreed. “What kind of trouble are you in, Harvey? You're upset. You're down. When I see a man who's down, I know the whole story. Up and down, which is the secret of life, Harvey. It's as simple as that. Up. As simple as that. You got any more bacon, Suzie?”

Suzie brought the bacon to the table, sat down, and carefully explained what had happened that morning. Dave grinned but did not stop eating.

“I don't think you understood me,” Suzie said.

Dave cleared his mouth, chewed firmly, and congratulated the Kepplemens. “Ruthie,” he said, “how many times have I said to you, the trouble with Harvey and Suzie is they got no sense of humor? How many times?”

“Maybe fifty times,” Ruthie replied amiably.

“It's not the biggest shtick in the world,” Dave said charitably. “But it's cute. Harvey takes things out of the air. It's all right.”

“Not things. Water rolls and a piece of Danish.”

“What are water rolls?” Ruthie wanted to know.

“They're a kind of roll,” Harvey explained uncomfortably. “They used to make them when I was a kid. Crisp outside and soft inside.”

“Here is half of the second one,” Suzie said, handing it to Ruthie. Ruthie examined it and nibbled tentatively. “You remember the way Pop used to dip his water rolls into the coffee,” Suzie said to Dave.

“You got to butter it first,” Dave told Ruthie. “Go ahead, try it.”

“You don't believe one word I have said.” Suzie turned to her husband. “Go ahead, Harvey. Show them.”

Harvey shook his head.

“Come on, Harvey—come on,” Dave said. “One lousy roll. What have you got to lose?”

For the first time that morning, Harvey felt good, really good. He reached across the table and from the airspace directly in front of his brother-in-law's nose he extracted a warm, crisp brown roll, held it for a long moment, and then placed it on Dave's plate.

“Oh, my God!” Ruthie cried.

Suzie grinned with delight, and Dave, his mouth open, stared at the roll and said nothing. He just stared and said nothing.

“It's still warm. Eat it,” Harvey said with authority. It was possibly the first thing he had ever said to Dave with any kind of authority.

Dave shook his head.

Harvey broke open the roll and buttered it, the butter melting on the hot white bread. He handed it to Dave, and Dave nibbled at it tentatively. “Not bad, not bad.” Dave took two large bites. He was beginning to be himself again. “You're not crapping around, are you, Harvey?” he asked. “No—no, it's impossible. You're the clumsiest jerk that ever tried to shuffle a deck of cards, so how could it be sleight of hand? Then what is it, Harvey?”

Harvey shook his head hopelessly.

“It's a gift,” Suzie said.

“Did you feel it coming on, Harvey?” Dave wanted to know. “I mean, did it grow on you—or what?”

“Is it only rolls?” Ruthie asked.

“Also Danish,” Suzie said.

“What's Danish?”

“Danish pastry with prune filling.”

“I got to see that,” Dave said, and then Harvey took a Danish out of the air. Dave stared and nodded, and he took a bite of the Danish. “Just rolls and Danish?”