Edna Ferber: Fanny Herself

11. CHAPTER ELEVEN (continued)

At which unpleasant point Nature kindly supplied a diversion. Across the black sky there shot two luminous shafts of lights. Northern lights, pale sisters of the chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still weirdly beautiful. Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned. The ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like celestial searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each shaft, there burst a cluster of slender, pin-point lines, like aigrettes set in a band of silver. Then these slowly wavered, faded, combined to form a third and fourth slender shaft of light. It was like the radiance one sees in the old pictures of the Holy Family. Together Fanny and Heyl watched it in silence until the last pale glimmer faded and was gone, and only the brazen lights of Gary, far, far down the beach, cast a fiery glow against the sky.

They sighed, simultaneously. Then they laughed, each at the other.

"Curtain," said Fanny. They raced for the station, despite the sand. Their car was filled with pudgy babies lying limp in parental arms; with lunch baskets exuding the sickly scent of bananas; with disheveled vandals whose moist palms grasped bunches of wilted wild flowers. Past the belching chimneys of Gary, through South Chicago, the back yard of a metropolis, past Jackson Park that breathed coolly upon them, and so to the city again. They looked at it with the shock that comes to eyes that have rested for hours on long stretches of sand and sky and water. Monday, that had seemed so far away, became an actuality of to-morrow.

Tired as they were, they stopped at one of those frank little restaurants that brighten Chicago's drab side streets. Its windows were full of pans that held baked beans, all crusty and brown, and falsely tempting, and of baked apples swimming in a pool of syrup. These flanked by ketchup bottles and geometrical pyramids of golden grape-fruit.

Coffee and hot roast beef sandwiches, of course, in a place like that. "And," added Fanny, "one of those baked apples. Just to prove they can't be as good as they look."