«Yours not to question! When do you go back to school, anyway?»
«Seven weeks.»
«Oh, my land!» said Grandma.
Mr. Koberman worked nights. Each morning at eight he arrived mysteriously home, devoured a very small breakfast, and then slept soundlessly in his room all through the dreaming hot daytime, until the huge supper with all the other boarders at night.
Mr. Koberman's sleeping habits made it necessary for Douglas to be quiet. This was unbearable. So, whenever Grandma visited down the street, Douglas stomped up and down stairs beating a drum, bouncing golf balls, or just screaming for three minutes outside Mr. Koberman's door, or flushing the toilet seven times in succession.
Mr. Koberman never moved. His room was silent, dark. He did not complain. There was no sound. He slept on and on. It was very strange.
Douglas felt a pure white flame of hatred burn inside himself with a steady, unflickering beauty. Now that room was Koberman Land. Once it had been flowery bright when Miss Sadlowe lived there. Now it was stark, bare, cold, clean, everything in its place, alien and brittle.
Douglas climbed upstairs on the fourth morning.
Halfway to the second floor was a large sun-filled window, framed by six-inch panes of orange, purple, blue, red and burgundy glass. In the enchanted early mornings when the sun fell through to strike the landing and slide down the stair banister, Douglas stood entranced at this window peering at the world through the multicolored windows.
Now a blue world, a blue sky, blue people, blue streetcars and blue trotting dogs.
He shifted panes. Now-an amber world! Two lemonish women glided by, resembling the daughters of Fu Manchu! Douglas giggled. This pane made even the sunlight more purely golden.
It was eight A.M. Mr. Koberman strolled by below, on the sidewalk, returning from his night's work, his cane looped over his elbow, straw hat glued to his head with patent oil.
Douglas shifted panes again. Mr. Koberman was a red man walking through a red world with red trees and red flowers and- something else.
Something about-Mr. Koberman.
Douglas squinted.
The red glass _did_ things to Mr. Koberman. His face, his suit, his hands. The clothes seemed to melt away. Douglas almost believed, for one terrible instant, that he could see _inside_ Mr. Koberman. And what he saw made him lean wildly against the small red pane, blinking.
Mr. Koberman glanced up just then, saw Douglas, and raised his cane-umbrella angrily, as if to strike. He ran swiftly across the red lawn to the front door.
«Young man!» he cried, running up the stairs. «What were you doing?»
«Just looking,» said Douglas, numbly.
«That's all, is it?» cried Mr. Koberman.
«Yes, sir. I look through all the glasses. All kinds of worlds. Blue ones, red ones, yellow ones. All different.»
«All kinds of worlds, is it!» Mr. Koberman glanced at the little panes of glass, his face pale. He got hold of himself. He wiped his face with a handkerchief and pretended to laugh. «Yes. All kinds of worlds. All different.» He walked to the door of his room. «Go right ahead; play,» he said.
The door closed. The hall was empty. Mr. Koberman had gone in.
Douglas shrugged and found a new pane.
«Oh, everything's violet!»
Half an hour later, while playing in his sandbox behind the house, Douglas heard the crash and the shattering tinkle. He leaped up.
A moment later, Grandma appeared on the back porch, the old razor strop trembling in her hand.
«Douglas! I told you time and again never fling your basketball against the house! Oh, I could just cry!»
«I been sitting right here,» he protested.
«Come see what you've done, you nasty boy!»
The great colored window panes lay shattered in a rainbow chaos on the upstairs landing. His basketball lay in the ruins.
Before he could even begin telling his innocence, Douglas was struck a dozen stinging blows upon his rump. Wherever he landed, screaming, the razor strop struck again.
Later, hiding his mind in the sandpile like an ostrich, Douglas nursed his dreadful pains. He knew who'd thrown that basketball. A man with a straw hat and a stiff umbrella and a cold, gray room. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He dribbled tears. Just wait. Just _wait_.
He heard Grandma sweeping up the broken glass. She brought it out and threw it in the trash bin. Blue, pink, yellow meteors of glass dropped brightly down.
When she was gone, Douglas dragged himself, whimpering, over to save out three pieces of the incredible glass. Mr. Koberman disliked the colored windows. These-he clinked them in his fingers- would be worth saving.
Grandfather arrived from his newspaper office each night, shortly ahead of the other boarders, at five o'clock. When a slow, heavy tread filled the hall, and a thick, mahogany cane thumped in the cane-rack, Douglas ran to embrace the large stomach and sit on Grandpa's knee while he read the evening paper.
«Hi, Grampa!»
«Hello, down there!»
«Grandma cut chickens again today. It's fun watching,» said Douglas.
Grandpa kept reading. «That's twice this week, chickens. She's the chickenist woman. You like to watch her cut 'em, eh? Coldblooded little pepper! Ha!»
«I'm just curious.»
«You are,» rumbled Grandpa, scowling. «Remember that day when that young lady was killed at the rail station? You just walked over and looked at her, blood and all.» He laughed. «Queer duck. Stay that way. Fear nothing, ever in your life. I guess you get it from your father, him being a military man and all, and you so close to him before you came here to live last year.» Grandpa returned to his paper.
A long pause. «Gramps?»
«Yes?»
«What if a man didn't have a heart or lungs or stomach but still walked around, alive?»
«That,» rumbled Gramps, «would be a miracle.»
«I don't mean a-a miracle. I mean, what if he was all _different_ inside? Not like me.»
«Well, he wouldn't be quite human then, would he, boy?»
«Guess not, Gramps. Gramps, you got a heart and lungs?»