Men knocked ashes from pipes, screen doors creaked, doors clicked. Lights went on in bedroom windows as Sears Roebuck chairs on front porches rocked themselves to sleep. Down the block a lamppost stood sentinel, imprisoned in its own greenish light.
The street was still and waiting. Every night now it waited. It had been like this, the night waiting, for weeks now. Before there had been nothing to wait for except individual waitings for births or deaths. But now it was as if all waiting had been reduced to one agonized thirst of the flesh. Small grey wooden houses stood in the resolute sobriety of a Reform Choir, peaked roofs reaching upward like hands in prayer. A Choir whose members admitted only over back fences in avidly whispered tsk-tskings their gnawing preoccupation, day and night, especially night. The small grey houses had settled into the routine of the street before the first coat of paint had dried; asylums whose swinging screen doors never before had fanned thoughts of escape from imprisonments of the flesh in the order within. Then, suddenly, No. 42, a member of the Choir, was revealed as a Pandora's box from which bloomed a foreign flower, aphrodisiac to the senses of Twelfth Street.
No exotic bloom had place here. Someone once had planted a magnolia brought by a visiting cousin from the South, but even careful wrapping against winter cold could not shield it from shriveling in the flat prairie heat. Inside the small grey wooden houses rubber plants thrived in the jungle green darkness of shade-drawn parlors, as if fertilized by hidden fierce desires. Outside neat flower beds wreathed the feet of the Choir to provide sparse bouquets for Aunt Ilma's birthday or Grandfather's grave.
Only one night-blooming jasmine uneased with thoughts of the flesh the dwellers of Twelfth Street. A haunting scent to stir revolt between pulsations of desire and fright in the hearts of their daughters. But the fright, making them hate their involuntary liberator, and flight to safety behind parental admonition, did not last long. Every night the remembered perfume, the night-blooming jasmine that was Lucy Claudel, made them thirsty for love.
But to one daughter it was as incense to the nostrils of an ardent young nun, inspiring thirst to serve and, in serving, to learn the secret.
Vida Bertrand sat on her home's front steps at No. 40 Twelfth Street. It was ten o'clock but she could not bear to go in without a glimpse of Lucy. Sometimes Lucy came home as early as this, after everybody had gone in. It was getting cool but Vida didn't care.
