Baby Is Three

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “I know what’s best,” she said solicitously. She took his hand, spread it, and presented him with his long middle finger, point first, as if it were a clinical thermometer. “Down your throat,” she ordered.

  “No!” he said loudly.

  “Are you going to do as you’re told?”

  He looked at her. “Yes.”

  “I’ll hold your head,” she said. “Go on.”

  She held his head.

  Afterward, in the cab, he asked her timidly if she would take him home now.

  “No,” she said. “You play the piano, don’t you, Henry?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, you’re going to play for me.” She reached forcefully into her reticule again, and his protest died on his trembling lips. “Here,” she said, and handed him an old-fashioned mint.

  Priscilla mounted the stairs. She had a “walking-underwater” feeling, as if she were immersed in her own reluctance. She had trod these stairs many times at night—usually downward after a perplexing, intriguing series of experiments. She did not know why she should be returning to the laboratory now, except that she had been ordered to do so. She freely admitted that if it were not for the thin, straight figure in black who waited downstairs, she would certainly be in bed by now. But there was an air of command, of complete certainty, about the old lady who had saved her that was utterly compelling.

  She walked quietly down the carpeted hall. The outer door of the lab office was ajar. There was no light in the office, but a dim radiance filtered in from the lab itself, through the frosted panel of the inner door. She crossed to it and went in.

  Someone gasped.

  Someone said, “Priscilla!”

  Priscilla said, “Excuse me!” and spun around. She shot through the office and out into the hall, her cheeks burning, her eyes stinging. “He—he—” she sobbed, but could not complete the thought, would not review the picture she had seen.

  At the lower landing she raced to the street door, valiantly holding back the tears and the sobs that would accompany them. Her hand went out to the big brass doorknob, touched it—

  As the cool metal greeted her hand she stopped.

  Outside that door, standing on the walk by the iron railings, radiating strength and rectitude, would be the old lady. She would watch Priscilla come out of the building. She would probably nod her head in knowledgeable disappointment. She would doubtless say, “I told you you would want to leave, and that it would be foolish.”

  “But they were—” said Priscilla in audible protest.

  Then came the thought of trustfulness: “Listen to me. Do you trust me?”

  Priscilla took her hand away from the knob. She thought she heard the murmur of low voices upstairs.

  She remembered the talk about Jon and his meeting with Edie at the party. She remembered herself saying, “I—just didn’t think it through.”

  She turned and faced the stairs. “I can’t, I can’t possibly go back. Not now. Even if … even if it didn’t make any difference to me, they’d … they’d hate me. It would be a terrible thing to do, to go back.”

  She turned until the big brass knob nudged her hip. Its touch projected a vivid picture into her mind—the old lady, straight and waiting in the lamplight.

  She sighed and started slowly up the stairs again.

  When she got to the office this time the light was on. She pushed the door open. Jon was leaning against the desk, watching it open. Edie, his ex-wife, stood by the laboratory door, her wide-spaced eyes soft and bright. For a moment no one moved. Then Edie went to Jon and stood beside him, and together they watched Priscilla with questions on their faces, and something like gentle sympathy. Or was it empathy?

  Priscilla came in slowly. She went up to Edie and stopped. She said, “You’re just what he needed.”

  The wide dark eyes filled with tears. Edie put her arms out and Priscilla was in them without quite knowing which of them had moved. When she could, Edie said, “You are so lovely, Priscilla. You’re so very lovely.” And Priscilla knew she was not talking about her red hair or her face.

  Jon put a hand on each of their shoulders. “I don’t understand what’s happening here,” he said, “but I have the feeling that it’s good. Priscilla, why did you come back?”

  She looked at him and said nothing.

  “What made you come back?”

  She shook her head.

  “You know,” he smiled, “but you’re just not talking. You’ve never done a wiser thing than to come back. If you hadn’t, Edie and I would have been driven apart just as surely as if you’d used a wedge. Am I right, Edie?

  Edie nodded. “You’ve made us very happy.”

  Priscilla felt embarrassed. “You are giving me an awful lot of credit,” she said in a choked voice. “I didn’t really do anything. I wish I had the—the bigness or wisdom you think I have.” She raised her eyes to them. “I’ll try to live up to it, though. I will …”

  The phone rang.

  “Now who could that—” Jon reached for it.

  Priscilla took it out of his hand. “I’ll take it.”

  Edie and Jon looked at each other. Priscilla said into the phone, “Yes … yes, it’s me. How in the world did you … Tonight? But it’s so late! Will you be there? Then so will I. Oh, you’re wonderful … yes, right away.”

  She hung up.

  Jon said, “Who was it?”

  Priscilla laughed. “A friend.”

  Jon touched her jaw. “All right, Miss Mysterious. What’s it all about?”

  “Will you do something if I ask you? You, too, Edie?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Priscilla laughed again. “We do have something to celebrate, don’t we?” When they nodded, she laughed again. Well, come on!”

  It was easier to carry the chopsticks piano-player with Derek to help, Jane concluded. She watched the rapt faces in the club. The house counted good, and it was going great, but she couldn’t help thinking what it would be like if Derek hadn’t been so pigheaded about little Henry. She finished her chorus and the piano took it up metronomically, nudged on the upbeats of the authoritative beat of Derek’s bass. She looked at him. He was playing steadily, almost absently. His face was sullen. When he got absent-minded he wasn’t colossal any more; only terrific.

  The piano moved through an obvious C-sharp seventh chord to change key to F-sharp, her key for the windup. She drifted into the bridge section with a long glissando, and disgust moved into her face and Derek’s in perfect synchronization as they realized that the pianist was blindly going into another 32 bars from the beginning.

  Derek doubled his beat and slapped the strings hard, and the sudden flurry of sound snapped the pianist out of it. Blushing, he recovered the fluff. Jane rolled her eyes up in despair and finished the number. To scattered applause she turned to the piano and said, “Tinkle some. Derek and I are going to take ten. And while you’re tinkling,” she added viciously, “practice, huh?”

  She smiled at the audience, crossed the stand and touched Derek’s elbow. “I’m going behind that potted palm and flip my lid. Come catch it.”

  He put his bass out of harm’s way and followed her into the office. She let him pass her and slump down on the desk. She banged the door.

  “You—”

  He looked at her sullenly. “I know what you’re going to say. I threw out the best ten fingers in the business. I told you I don’t want to talk about it. You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “I believe it,” she said. Her eyes glittered. “Derek Jax, I love you.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “I’m not kidding. I’m not changing the subject, either. I love you this much. I’m going to call your hand, kid. I love you so much that I’m going to make you talk about what’s with this business of Henry, or I’m going to see you walk out of here with, and into, your doghouse.”

  “That don’t make a hell of a lot of sense, Janie,” he said uncomfortably.

  “No,
huh? Listen, the guy I love talks to me. I understand him enough so he can talk to me. If he won’t talk to me, it’s because he thinks I won’t understand. I think you see what I mean. I love the guy I think you are. If you won’t talk about it, you’re just not that guy. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you.”

  “Could be,” he growled. He rose and stretched. “Well, I guess I’ll be going. Nice working with you, Janie.”

  “So long,” she said. She went and opened the door.

  “By God,” he said, “you really mean it.”

  She nodded.

  He licked his lips, then bit them. He sat down. “Shut the door, Janie.”

  She shut the door and put her head against it. He flashed her a look. “What’s the matter?”

  She said hoarsely, “I got something in my eye. Wait.” Presently she swung around and faced him. Her smile was brilliant, her face composed. The vein in the side of her neck was thick and throbbing.

  “Jane …” he said with difficulty, “that Henry—did he ever make a pass at you?”

  “Why, you egghead. No! To him I’m something that makes music, like a saxophone. It’s you he’s interested in. Hell, did you see his face when you came in with your bass this afternoon? He’d rather play to that bass than go over the falls in a barrel with me. If that’s all that was on your mind, forget it.”

  “You make it tough for me,” he said heavily. “I’ll play it through for you a note at a time. Got a stick?”

  She rummaged in the desk drawer and found him a cigarette. He lit it and dragged until he coughed. She had never seen him like this. She said nothing.

  He seemed to appreciate that. He glanced at her and half his mouth flashed part of a smile. Then he said, “Did I ever tell you about Danny?”

  “No.”

  “Kids together. Kids get close. He lived down the pike. I got caught in a root one time, swimming in a rock quarry. Danny seemed to know the instant I got tangled. He couldn’t swim worth a damn, but in he came. Got me out, too.”

  He dragged on his cigarette, still hungry, hot and harsh. The words came out, smoking. “There was a lot of stuff … we played ball, we run away from home, we broke into an ol’ house and pried loose a toilet and threw it out a fourth-floor window onto a concrete walk. We done a lot.

  “We jived a lot. He had natural rhythm. We used to bang away on his ol’ lady’s piano. I played trumpet for a while, but what I wanted to do was play string bass. I wanted that real bad.

  “We grew up and he moved away. Some lousy job trying to learn cabinet-making. Saw him a couple times. Half-starved, but real happy. I was playing bass by then, some. Had to borrow a fiddle. Wanted my own instrument so bad, never had the money. So one day he called me up long distance. Come over. I didn’t have no trainfare, so I hitchhiked. Met him at a barrelhouse joint in town. He was real excited, dragged me out to his place. A shack—practically a shanty. When we got in sight of it he started to run. It was on fire.”

  Derek closed his eyes and went on talking. “We got to it and it was pretty far gone. I got there first. One wall was gone. Inside everything was burning. Danny, he—he screamed like a stung kid. He tried to jump inside. I hung on to him. Was much bigger’n him. Then I saw it—a string bass. A full-size string bass, burning up. I sat on Danny and watched it burn. I knew why he’d moved out of town. I knew why he took up cabinet-making. I knew why he was so hungry an’—an’ so happy. Made the box with his own two hands. We watched it burn and he tried to fight me because I would not let him save it. He cried. Well—we cried. Just two kids.”

  Jane said a single, unprintable word with a bookful of feeling behind it.

  “We got over it. We roomed together after that. We done everything together. Crowd we ran with used to kid us about it, and that just made it better. I guess we were about nineteen then.”

  He squeezed out a long breath and looked up at her with stretched, blind eyes. “We had something, see? Something clean and big that never happened before, and wasn’t nothing wrong with it.

  “Then I come home one night and he’s at the back window staring into the yard. Said he was moving out. Said we weren’t doing each other any good. He was in bad shape. Somebody’d been talking to him, some lousy crumb with a sewer mouth and sewer ideas. I didn’t know what it was all about. We were still just kids, see?

  “Anyway, I couldn’t talk him out of it. He left. He was half-crazy, all eaten up. Like the time we watched the bull-fiddle burn up. He wouldn’t say what was the trouble. So after he went I milled around the joint trying to make sense out of it and I couldn’t. Then I—”

  Derek’s voice seemed to desert him. He coughed hard and got it back. “—Then I went and looked out the window. Somebody’d wrote our names on the fence. Drew a heart around ’em.

  “I never gave a damn what anyone thought, see? But Danny, he did. I guess you can’t know how someone else feels, but you can get a pretty fair idea. First I was just mad, and then I pretended I was Danny looking at a thing like that, and I got an idea how bad it was. I ran out lookin’ for him.

  “Saw him after a time. Up by the highway, staggering a bit like he was half-soused. He wasn’t, though. I ran after him. He was waiting for the light to change. There was a lot of traffic. Tried to get to him. Couldn’t begin to. He sort of pitched off the curb right under oh my God I can still see it the big dual wheel it run right over his head …” he finished in a rapid monotone.

  Jane put her hand on his shoulder. Derek said, “I didn’t know then and I don’t know now and I never will know if he was so tore up and sick he just fell, or if he done it on purpose. All I know is I’ve lived ever since with the idea I killed him just by being around him so much. Don’t try to talk me out of it. I know it don’t make sense. I know all the right answers. But knowing don’t help.

  “That’s the whole story.”

  Jane waited a long time and then said gently, “No, Derek.”

  He started as if he had suddenly found himself in an utterly strange place. Gradually his sense of presence returned to him and he wiped his face.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Your boy Henry. Danny—he played piano, Janie. I started with him. Danny played piano like nothing that ever lived except this Henry. Everything I ever drug out of a string bass was put in there first by the way he played piano. He used to sit and play like that and every once in a while grin at me. Shy.

  “So I walk in here on a guy playing that kind of piano and he grins shy like that when he plays, and besides, here’s that real close stuff around him like a fog. That Henry’s a genius, Janie. And he’s a—he’s the type of guy they ought to use for a mold to make people out of. And he just wants to be near my fiddle. And me. And you want me to keep him around here until he knocks hisself off.

  “Janie,” he said, with agony in his voice, “I’m not goin’ through that again!”

  Jane squeezed his shoulder. She looked back over the afternoon and evening and words flitted through her mind: “You won’t have to lose any sleep over him …” “Looks like you’ve made a conquest …” “Did he ever make a pass at you?” Aloud she told him, “I’ve sure said all the right things … take a swing at me, pudd’nhead.”

  Derek pulled her hand close against his cheek, and pressed it there so hard it hurt her. She let him do it as long as he wanted. “I love you, Janie,” he whispered. “I shoulda told you all that about Danny a long time ago.”

  “How could you tell till you tried?” she asked huskily. “Let’s go on out there before ol’ Kitten on the Keys drives all the customers away.”

  “I can’t go in there,” said Henry Faulkner in genuine panic.

  “You can and you will,” said the old lady firmly.

  “Listen, there’s a man in there who’ll throw me out on sight.”

  “Have I been wrong yet? This is your night to do as you’re told, young man, and that’s the way it is.”

  In spite of himself he grinned. They went in through the herculite doors. Janie
was just finishing a number. The piano fluffed the last chorus badly. Henry and the old lady stood in the back of the club until Derek and Jane walked off the floor.

  “Now,” she said briskly, “go on up there and play for me. Play anything you want to.”

  “But they have a piano player!”

  “He’s in a pet. Just go up there.”

  “Wh-what’ll I say to him?”

  “Don’t say anything, silly! Just stand there. He’ll go away.”

  He hesitated, and the lady gave him a small shove. He shambled around the dance floor and diffidently approached the piano.

  The pianist was playing a dingdong version of Stardust. He saw Henry coming. “You again.”

  Henry said nothing.

  “I suppose you want to take my job again.”

  Henry still said nothing. The man went on playing. Presently, “You can have it. How anyone can work with a couple sourpusses like that …“ He got off the stool in mid-chorus, leaving Stardust’s garden gate musically ajar. Henry’s right hand shot out and, catching the chord as if it had been syncopated instead of shut off, began molding it like a handful of soft clay. He sat down still playing.

  Edie said, “I can’t help feeling a little peculiar. This is wonderful, so wonderful—but there are still two of us and one of you.”

  “Three of us,” corrected Priscilla.

  “In some ways that’s so,” said Jon. He swallowed the rest of his drink and beckoned the waiter. “Pris is the best statistician and psychological steno I’ve ever run across. And you’re a genius with the machines. Why, between us we will do research that’ll make history.”

  “Of course we will. But—isn’t three a crowd?”

  Priscilla said, without malice, “From anyone but you I’d consider that a hint. Don’t worry about me. I have the most wonderful feeling that the miracles aren’t finished.”

  “Pris, are you ever going to tell us about the miracles?”

  “I don’t know, Jon. Perhaps.” Her eyes searched the club. Suddenly they fixed on a distant corner table. “There she is!”