The Wishing Box

AGNES HIGGINS realized only too well the cause of her husband Harold’s beatific, absentminded expression over his morning orange juice and scrambled eggs.

“Well,” Agnes sniffed, smearing beach plum jelly on her toast with vindictive strokes of the butter knife, “what did you dream last night?”

“I was just remembering,” Harold said, still staring, with a blissful, blurred look, right through the very attractive and tangible form of his wife (pink-cheeked and fluffily blond as always that early September morning, in her rose-sprigged peignoir), “those manuscripts I was discussing with William Blake.”

“But,” Agnes objected, trying with difficulty to conceal her irritation, “how did you know it was William Blake?”

Harold seemed surprised. “Why, from his pictures, of course.”

And what could Agnes say to that? She smoldered in silence over her coffee, wrestling with the strange jealousy which had been growing on her like some dark, malignant cancer ever since their wedding night only three months before when she had discovered about Harold’s dreams. On that first night of their honeymoon, in the small hours of the morning, Harold startled Agnes out of a sound, dreamless sleep by a violent, convulsive twitch of his whole right arm. Momentarily frightened, Agnes had shaken Harold awake to ask in tender, maternal tones what the matter was; she thought he might be struggling in the throes of a nightmare. Not Harold.

“I was just beginning to play the Emperor Concerto,” he explained sleepily. “I must have been lifting my arm for the first chord when you woke me up.”

Now at the outset of their marriage, Harold’s vivid dreams amused Agnes. Every morning she asked Harold what he had dreamed during the night, and he told her in as rich detail as if he were describing some significant, actual event.

“I was being introduced to a gathering of American poets in the Library of Congress,” he would report with relish. “William Carlos Williams was there in a great, rough coat, and that one who writes about Nantucket, and Robinson Jeffers looking like an American Indian, the way he does in the anthology photograph; and then Robert Frost came driving up in a saloon car and said something witty that made me laugh.” Or, “I saw a beautiful desert, all reds and purples, with each grain of sand like a ruby or sapphire shooting light. A white leopard with gold spots was standing over this bright blue stream, its hind legs on one bank, its forelegs on the other, and a little trail of red ants was crossing the stream over the leopard, up its tail, along its back, between its eyes, and down the other side.”

Harold’s dreams were nothing if not meticulous works of art. Undeniably, for a certified accountant with pronounced literary leanings (he read E. T. A. Hoffmann, Kafka, and the astrological monthlies instead of the daily paper on the commuter’s special), Harold possessed an astonishingly quick, colorful imagination. But, gradually, Harold’s peculiar habit of accepting his dreams as if they were an integral part of his waking experience began to infuriate Agnes. She felt left out. It was as if Harold were spending one third of his life among celebrities and fabulous legendary creatures in an exhilarating world from which Agnes found herself perpetually exiled, except by hearsay.

As the weeks passed, Agnes began to brood. Although she refused to mention it to Harold, her own dreams, when she had them (and that, alas, was infrequently enough), appalled her: dark, glowering landscapes peopled with ominous unrecognizable figures. She never could remember these nightmares in detail, but lost their shapes even as she struggled to awaken, retaining only the keen sense of their stifling, storm-charged atmosphere, which, oppressive, would haunt her throughout the following day. Agnes felt ashamed to mention these fragmentary scenes of horror to Harold for fear they reflected too unflatteringly upon her own powers of imagination. Her dreams - few and far between as they were — sounded so prosaic, so tedious, in comparison with the royal baroque splendor of Harold’s. How could she tell him simply, for example, “I was falling”; or, “Mother died and I was so sad”; or, “Something was chasing me and I couldn’t run”? The plain truth was, Agnes realized, with a pang of envy, that her dream life would cause the most assiduous psychoanalyst to repress a yawn.

Where, Agnes mused wistfully, were those fertile childhood days when she believed in fairies? Then, at least, her sleep had never been dreamless or her dreams chill and ugly. She had in her seventh year, she recalled wistfully, dreamed of a wishingbox land above the clouds where wishing boxes grew on trees, looking very much like coffee grinders; you picked a box, turned the handle around nine times while whispering your wish in this little hole in the side, and the wish came true. Another time, she had dreamed of finding three magic grassblades growing by the mailbox at the end of her street: the grass-blades shone like tinsel Christmas ribbon, one red, one blue, and one silver. In yet another dream, she and her younger brother, Michael, stood in front of Body Nelson’s whiteshingled house in snowsuits; knotty maple-tree roots snaked across the hard brown ground; she was wearing red-and-white-striped wool mittens; all at once, as she held out one cupped hand, it began to snow turquoise-blue sulfa gum. But that was just about the extent of the dreams Agnes remembered from her infinitely more creative childhood days. At what age had those benevolent painted dreamworlds ousted her? And for what cause?

MEANWHILE, indefatigably, Harold continued to recount his dreams over breakfast. Once, at a depressing and badly aspected time of Harold’s life before he met Agnes, Harold dreamed that a red fox ran through his kitchen, grievously burnt, its fur charred black, bleeding from several wounds. Later, Harold confided, at a more auspicious time shortly after his marriage to Agnes, the red fox had appeared again, miraculously healed, with flourishing fur, to present Harold with a bottle of permanent black Quink. Harold was particularly fond of his fox dreams; they recurred often. So, notably, did his dream of the giant pike.

“There was this pond,” Harold informed Agnes one sultry August morning, “where my cousin Albert and I used to fish; it was chock-full of pike. Well, last night I was fishing there, and I caught the most enormous pike you could imagine it must have been the great-great-grandfather of all the rest; I pulled and pulled and pulled, and still he kept coming out of that pond.”

“Once,” Agnes countered, morosely stirring sugar into her black coffee, “when I was little, I had a dream about Superman, all in technicolor. He was dressed in blue, with a red cape and black hair, handsome as a prince, and I went flying right along with him through the air—I could feel the wind whistling and the tears blowing out of my eyes. We flew over Alabama; I could tell it was Alabama because the land looked like a map, with ‘Alabama5 lettered in script across these big green mountains.”

Harold was visibly impressed. “What,” he asked Agnes then, “did you dream last night?” Harold’s tone was almost contrite; to tell the truth, his own dream life preoccupied him so much that he had honestly never thought of playing listener and investigating his wife’s. He looked at her pretty, troubled countenance with new interest; Agnes was, Harold paused to observe for perhaps the first time since their early married days, an extraordinarily attractive sight across the breakfast table.

For the moment, Agnes was confounded by Harold’s well-meant question; she had long ago passed the stage where she seriously considered hiding a copy of Freud’s writings on dreams in her closet and fortifying herself with a vicarious dream tale by which to hold Harold’s interest each morning. Now, throwing reticence to the wind, she decided in desperation to confess her problem.

“I don’t dream anything.” Agnes admitted in low, tragic tones. “Not anymore.”

Harold was obviously concerned. “Perhaps,” he consoled her, “you just don’t use your powers of imagination enough. You should practice. Try shutting your eyes.”

Agnes shut her eyes.

“Now,” Harold asked hopefully, “what do you see?”

Agnes panicked. She saw nothing. “Nothing,” she quavered. “Nothing except a sort of blur.”

“Well,” said Harold briskly, adopting the manner of a doctor dealing with a malady that was, although distressing, not necessarily fatal, “imagine a goblet.”

“What kind of a goblet?” Agnes pleaded.

“That’s up to you” Harold said. “You describe it to me.”

Eyes still shut, Agnes dragged wildly in the depths of her head. She managed with great effort to conjure up a vague, shimrnery silver goblet that hovered somewhere in the nebulous regions of the back of her mind, flickering as if at any moment it might black out like a candle.

“It’s silver,” she said, almost defiantly. “And it’s got two handles.”

“Fine. Now imagine a scene engraved on it.”

Agnes forced a reindeer on the goblet, scrolled about by grape leaves scratched in bare outlines on the silver. “It’s a reindeer in a wreath of grape leaves.”

“What color is the scene?” Harold was, Agnes thought, merciless.

“Green,” Agnes lied, as she hastily enameled the grape leaves. “The grape leaves are green. And the sky is black” — she was almost proud of this original stroke — “and the reindeer’s russet flecked with white.”

“All right. Now polish the goblet all over into a high gloss.”

Agnes polished the imaginary goblet, feeling like a fraud. “But it’s in the back of my head,” she said dubiously, opening her eyes. “I see everything somewhere way in the back of my head. Is that where you see your dreams?”

“Why, no,” Harold said, puzzled. “I see my dreams on the front of my eyelids, like on a movie screen. They just come; I don’t have anything to do with them. Like right now,” he closed his eyes, “I can see these shiny crowns coming and going, hung in this big willow tree.”

Agnes fell grimly silent.

“You’ll be all right,” Harold tried, jocosely, to buck her up. “Every day, just practice imagining different things like I’ve taught you.”

Agnes let the subject drop. While Harold was away at work, she began, suddenly, to read a great deal; reading kept her mind full of pictures. Seized by a kind of ravenous hysteria, she raced through novels, women’s magazines, newspapers, and even the anecdotes in her Joy of Cooking; she read travel brochures, home appliance circulars, the Sears Roebuck catalogue, the instructions on soap-flakes boxes, the blurbs on the backs of record jackets — anything to keep from facing the gaping void in her own head of which Harold had made her so painfully conscious. But as soon as she lifted her eyes from the printed matter at hand, it was as if a protecting world had been extinguished.

The utterly self-sufficient, unchanging reality of the things surrounding her began to depress Agnes. With a jealous awe, her frightened, almost paralyzed stare took in the Oriental rug, the Williamsburg-blue wallpaper, the gilded dragons on the Chinese vase on the mantel, the blue-and-gold medallion design of the upholstered sofa on which she was sitting. She fell choked, smothered by these objects whose bulky pragmatic existence somehow threatened the deepest, most secret roots of her own ephemeral being. Harold, she knew only too well, would tolerate no such vainglorious nonsense from tables and chairs; if he didn’t like the scene at hand, if it bored him, he would change it to suit his fancy. If, Agnes mourned, in some sweet hallucination an octopus came slithering toward her across the floor, paisley-patterned in purple and orange, she would bless it. Anything to prove that her shaping imaginative powers were not irretrievably lost; that her eye was not merely an open camera lens which recorded surrounding phenomena and left it at that. “A rose,” she found herself repeating hollowly, like a funeral dirge, “is a rose is a rose — ”

One morning when Agnes was reading a novel, she suddenly realized to her terror that her eyes had scanned live pages without taking in the meaning of a single word. She tried again, but the letters separated, writhing like malevolent little black snakes across the page in a kind of hissing, untranslatable jargon. It was then that Agnes began attending the movies around the corner regularly each afternoon. It did not matter if she had seen the feature several times previously; the fluid kaleidoscope of forms before her eyes lulled her into a rhythmic trance; the voices, speaking some soothing, unintelligible code, exorcised the dead silence in her head. Eventually, by dint of much cajolery, Agnes persuaded Harold to buy a television set on the installment plan. That was much better than the movies; she could drink sherry while watching TV during the long afternoons. These latter days, when Agnes greeted Harold on his return home each evening, she found, with a certain malicious satisfaction, that his face blurred before her gaze, so that she could change his features at will. Sometimes she gave him a pea-green complexion, sometimes lavender; sometimes a Grecian nose, sometimes an eagle beak.

“But I like sherry,” Agnes told Harold stubbornly when, her afternoons of private drinking becoming apparent even to his indulgent eyes, he begged her to cut down, “It relaxes me.”

The sherry, however, didn’t relax Agnes enough to put her to sleep. Cruelly sober, the visionary sherry-haze worn off, she would lie stiff, twisting her fingers like nervous talons in the sheets, long after Harold was breathing peacefully, evenly, in the midst of some rare, wonderful adventure. With an icy, increasing panic, Agnes lay stark awake night after night. Worse, she didn’t get tired anymore. Finally, a bleak, clear awareness of what was happening broke upon her: the curtains of sleep, of refreshing, forgetful darkness dividing each day from the day before it and the day after it, were lifted for Agnes eternally, irrevocably. She saw an intolerable prospect of wakeful, visionless days and nights stretching unbroken ahead of her, her mind condemned to perfect vacancy, without a single image of its own to ward off the crushing assault of smug, autonomous tables and chairs. She might, Agnes reflected sickly, live to be a hundred: the women in her family were all long-lived.

Dr. Marcus, the Higgins’ family physician, attempted, in his jovial way, to reassure Agnes about her complaints of insomnia: “Just a bit of nervous strain, that’s all. Take one of these capsules at night for a while and see how you sleep.”

Agnes did not ask Dr. Marcus if the pills would give her dreams; she put the box of fifty pills in her handbag and took the bus home.

Two days later, on the last Friday of September, when Harold returned from work (he had shut his eyes all during the hour’s train trip home, counterfeiting sleep but in reality voyaging on a cerisesailed dhow up a luminous river where white elephants bulked and rambled across the crystal surface of the water in the shadow of Moorish turrets fabricated completely of multicolored glass), he found Agnes lying on the sofa in the living room, dressed in her favorite princess-style emerald taffeta evening gown, pale and lovely as a blown lily, eyes shut, an empty pillbox and an overturned water tumbler on the rug at her side. Her tranquil features were set in a slight, secret smile of triumph, as if, in some far country unattainable to mortal men, she were, at last, waltzing with the dark, redcaped prince of her early dreams.