The Protégé

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Come now, this is too bad, she thought. Zan is my darling.

  The mysterious thing was that Polly served her mistress and Simon Warren their evening meal in a state of anxiety that amounted to the jitters. This wasn’t mysterious very long to Mrs. Moffat, who could not help feeling sad. How cruel of Zan, how destructive to Polly—that the old cook should have been warned to watch over her mistress lest the guest begin to be troublesome.

  She did what she could about it, continuing to be kind and easy. It was not until after dinner that she could let down. Into old times, new times, times stolen from the stern sequence of hours, times that would be lost and past, one day, and soon.

  Nicky had chosen a restaurant on the shore. They sat at the window and could see the broad flat tongues of the waves’ tips licking the floodlit sand below. In the semidark beyond, the breakers curled and tossed like the manes of white horses. Sometimes, in the foreground, a bird walked daintily by.

  The food had been so-so. Now Nicky was drawing a ticktacktoe design on the tablecloth with his coffee spoon. He said, “Aren’t you in too much of a flap, Zan? Say this character wants to strangle your grandmother? He’s had six weeks to do it, hasn’t he? Has he?”

  “Well, no,” said Zan, reasonably.

  Nicky liked the way she looked; he liked the way she held her head, the way she used her pretty hands. Her luscious mouth, distinctive, he liked very much. The news that she was moving out here was too interesting to discuss.

  He said, “I’m not crazy about your only solution.”

  “What is that?” she asked, tilting her head, smiling with her eyes, lifting her pretty hands in question. “I wasn’t so sure I had one.”

  “Simple elimination. Can’t say she’s senile and take over yourself?”

  “Not a chance,” she said. “Dr. Sebastian laughed and laughed.”

  “Can’t throw him out for a trespasser either?”

  “Not when he’s a guest.”

  “If he’s got a swindle in mind, you don’t know what it is. Correct?”

  “Nothing showing.”

  “Can’t make your grandmother shiver and shake. She won’t scare, eh?”

  “She’ll never scare,” said Zan, sighing. “She more or less claims to be expendable. That’s how scared she is. I haven’t even tried to tell her the way he talked to me.”

  Nicky thought, Of course not. You don’t want her to know what you do behind her back. Talk to her doctor; beard Simon in his den. Nicky couldn’t blame this.

  “She’d never believe it,” Zan said.

  “So,” Nicky said, “the only way to put the fellow off the property is for you to be such a stinker that he can’t stand to be where you are.”

  “It would seem so,” said Zan calmly. “But what’s to stop him from running back when I’ve gone away, to pack and all?”

  “You say the old lady is having a ball?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Then let her alone, why don’t you?”

  “And when he does get around to strangling her, I can always say, ‘So? That’s the way it goes, sometimes.’” Zan gave an exaggerated shrug.

  “She’s right about one thing. It is her neck.”

  “Damn it,” said Zan. “Don’t you know old people can be as ornery as babies? So you’ll let your kid take poison because it’s his stomach!”

  Nicky scratched his chin. “It’s also her money. You know how this looks, don’t you? Looks like you’re scared she’ll take a notion to change her will and the charming protégé will take it all.”

  “For God’s sake, Nicky,” Zan’s back slapped the bench back, and her palms slapped the tabletop.

  “And you won’t do yourself any good,” he continued, “because if you do act the stinker and chase him off, she’s not going to like that, and you could be out of the money anyhow.”

  “What if I don’t particularly insist I’ve got to be in the money?” she said icily.

  “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “It was her neck, wasn’t it? Not that you wanted to run her life or anything?”

  Zan didn’t take offense. She settled somehow, cocked her head, and spoke quietly. “Nicky, am I one of those obnoxious, aggressive, domineering females? Am I that bad?”

  “Why do you ask?” he evaded.

  “Because I’ve been catching it ever since I came. Gran says I boss people around. You’ve been sending me the same message; so I seem to hear. Even Simple Simon, in his simplicity—”

  “Well,” said Nicky, “after all, there they were, having a happy time, and here comes Zan, and right away she’s bound she’ll bust it up—or know the reason why.”

  “Don’t I have a reason?”

  “Suspicion. Speculation. Probability. I guess they are forms of reason.” Nicky could be icy, too.

  Zan said, clasping her hands under her chin and looking straight at him, “It could be you have a point, Nicky. How can I go about some fact finding? How can I get onto traces of this Simon Warren? If he has been in jail, or if he is wanted, or if he was recently in a mental hospital, then it wouldn’t quite seem a compulsion inherent in my nasty personality, would it? Do you have a way?”

  “No, not especially,” said Nicky. He ran, although he did not own, a research service for motion-picture and TV producers. He had a staff trained to answer millions of questions of fact, and Zan knew it. “For that you’d need a private eye,” he said uneasily.

  “But I had understood,” purred Zan, “that you do hunt down facts for a fee?”

  “Sure, sure. I can find out what an Eskimo has for breakfast. It’ll cost you.” Nicky was accepting the check from the little tray and fishing for his wallet.

  “Gran says he was in the service, but she doesn’t know which branch. Can’t you trace a man through the Red Cross? Do you have to hire a PI?”

  Nicky said, “Tell you what would be a whole lot cheaper. Ask old Simple Simon.”

  “Okay,” said Zan cheerfully. “I’ll ask him whether he intends to strangle my grandmother, and he’ll say, ‘Why, yes, of course.’ And then I’ll know.”

  “Ask him was he in the Army,” said Nicky patiently. “Is that a thing one keeps to oneself?”

  “In the first place, Gran forbids me to ask him.”

  “Oh, well, then—” He grinned at her.

  “In the second place,” she went on, “he doesn’t have to answer me, truthfully or at all, and also it’s possible he can’t answer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he may not know himself.”

  “You mean he’s some kind of kook?”

  “Oh, that he is,” she said. “Some kind.”

  “In your opinion,” said Nicky. “All God’s children got opinions, and one man’s kook is another man’s saintly hero. If you say he is a kook, although no harm’s been done, watch out you don’t promote any, I’d say.”

  “I’d thought of that,” said Zan clearly.

  “I’ve got a little question for you,” he went on silky-voiced. “Are we going to my place?”

  “I had thought so,” she smiled.

  “Are we going to talk about this Simple Simon the whole night?”

  “Are you by any chance or-elsing me, darling?”

  “I’m hinting,” he said gloomily. “I’m hinting.”

  Afterward they sat in Nicky’s huge twin easy chairs and stared out over the twinkling city. Nicky was holding her in the corners of his eyes. He was thinking about marriage, but although he was pretty sure she was thinking about it, too, it seemed too complex and cold-blooded a subject to bring up in the wake of so simple and warm an experience.

  He knew when her thoughts drifted, when she was no longer seeing his fabulous view or holding him in the corners of her eyes or even in the corner of her mind.

  Nicky was suddenly annoyed, as well as stricken, by a sense of omen.

  “I’m taking you home now,” he said abruptly. It was early by both their reckonings.

  She looked up, start
led.

  “‘Where the McGregor sits’ and all that,” he said. “Or if not, what then? I don’t want to discuss it, mind you. I’d rather figure it out by myself.”

  “Me, too,” she said, and rose with grace and smiled at him.

  “We’ll go sailing on Saturday,” he decreed.

  “Like Columbus,” she promised.

  Nicky began to believe that he could teach her, after all, or that a marriage between them might be just enough of a struggle for dominance to stay interesting.

  They drove off toward her grandmother’s house, seeming for some reason closer than before. When they got there, they kissed, and the kissing was sweet.

  Zan got out of the car at last and turned and said, “Nicky, would you please come to supper Sunday night?”

  “Here?” He was startled.

  “For this reason,” she spoke slowly. Her face was smooth and grave in the wan moonlight. “I was thinking, just before you snatched me by the hair of my head, and all, that I might be all wrong about my grandmother’s protégé. He may be just a slightly Simple Simon, perfectly harmless. So—I’d like you to meet him.”

  “For what reason?” said Nicky.

  “Because, since your opinions come in the package, I’d like to explore what they can do for me.”

  “That seems sensible,” said Nicky.

  He kissed her again and drove off, feeling quite pleased with himself. Halfway home it occurred to him that Zan had not (to his knowledge) bothered to ask the old lady whether Nicky could come to Sunday supper, that Nicky had not the slightest desire to take supper with the old lady at all and furthermore would much rather not be put on a spot where he’d have to make any informed recommendations in the matter of the mysterious protégé.

  Well, well, Zan was a sweet young thing in many, many ways, but Nicky guessed she needed watching.

  Zan came into the hall and saw that one lamp burned in the sitting room. Had it been left for her, she wondered, and was she supposed to put it out? She started into the long room, moving quietly, and then because the night was moon-whitened, she was able to see past the open double doors their silhouettes.

  Against the pale light, she saw her grandmother’s outline in the big rocker. Her shoulders muffled in her gray woolen stole, the knot on the top of her head, one hand moving as if she conducted slow music. She saw him in his own chair, round head, features blunted by the beard (Odysseus, come ashore!). He was immobile, either asleep (but she didn’t think so) or intent to listen.

  Zan felt that she had been jumped violently from one world to another. There was Nicky’s high platform, stacked upon nine other apartments of the identical design. Nine layers and a pavement between him and the earth. A perch for bright-plumaged creatures, where they could peck and preen, imprisoned in the glass.

  Then this, no vista at all—hidden low, closed and close-kept, sweet with the scent of living grass.

  She didn’t announce herself or interrupt them. She crept back to the stairs and went up silently. In her room, where the window was open, she could, by leaning on the sill, catch the faintest murmur of voices. She couldn’t distinguish any words. She had a feeling that she couldn’t have understood them anyway. But the rhythms spoke to her of something—illusive as the content of a dream that you wish you could dream again, when only its healing tone remains to haunt you in the morning.

  Chapter 9

  On Thursday Zan asked humbly for the use of the car today, provided that this would inconvenience no one. She then asked if she might give a supper party Sunday evening, a party to which Mrs. Moffat must come. Zan would plan the menu, buy the food, and would her grandmother mind if she invited Nicky Pomerance? And Simon Warren, too?

  “Of course I don’t mind, dear. I can’t speak for Simon.”

  “Then why don’t I ask him?” Zan kicked off her shoes and went marching barefoot across the lawn. Mrs. Moffat was the one, this time, to lurk at a window.

  She saw them speak. Then (to her pleasure) she saw Zan hold out her hand, and (to her surprise) she saw Simon, after rubbing his right hand down his pants leg and inspecting it, suddenly thrust it to the clasping.

  Zan came swinging back. “The party’s on. Now I’ve got to go leap into my career girl costume.”

  She flew upstairs and shortly thereafter came down looking smart and went off in the car, saying she’d be back by dinnertime.

  So the daytime hours fell into their undemanding pace, and Mrs. Moffat knew that she was glad of it.

  As they went their rounds that day, Simon seemed diffident about the proposed new shrubs.

  “Ma’am, you choose the colors,” he said. “I won’t be here when they bloom.”

  “They won’t care,” said Mrs. Moffat.

  He gave her a sharp, quizzical look.

  “They’ll be fighting to thrive like everything else, and most people,” she said. “They’re ingenious, you know. They’ll twist around in the strangest ways to find a place in the sun. Some plants will, that is. Of course, some are as sulky as a spoiled brat, and if everything isn’t just so, they’ll quit on you. They’re difficult, so they’re supposed to be precious. But I say, they’re just in the wrong place. They’d probably be as common as weeds if they were where they ought to be. There’s something to be said for the common weed, don’t you think, Simon? Angels must be extremely common in heaven.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said respectfully.

  Mrs. Moffat felt along the grass with her cane and stepped after it. It was a bit of a shock to realize that she was in the moment perfectly happy. She was walking easily in the sun; the light itself was falling as soft as a mantle of kindly wool around her shoulders. Something was bubbling under her breastbone. It went through to the spine and upward, so that the whole back of her head seemed to have a song in it.

  Why is this? she wondered, toning the lovely feeling down to hang on to it a little longer. Ah, well, she had been playing the wise old woman again. But it was such fun!

  And since all human beings are bound to be wrong to some degree, at all times, why shouldn’t Mrs. Moffat now and then have a little fun? She seemed to see the whole world—here and abroad—abounding with people telling other people in fine didactic sentences what the truth is, and not a one of them getting it exactly right. Not a one. Laughter bubbled along her breastbone.

  They went past the old compost pit, deepened by Simon’s digging, but still veiled by strands of ivy. They rounded the cottage corners. They drew opposite the empty garage. This was the place of parting. From here she would walk on alone to the house and upstairs for her nap.

  “I was delighted, Simon,” said Mrs. Moffat impulsively, “when I saw you and Zan shaking hands this morning.”

  “I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone at all,” he said, startling her. He had turned up his palms and bent his bright head. Mrs. Moffat was sharply reminded of the stained-glass window. “I never want to hurt anybody, anywhere, anytime, ever again,” he said as if he recited vows. “The Penitent,” yes. That would be the name of the work.

  So she said, in the context of her religious impressions, “Then you must pray that you will not.”

  Now she had startled him. “I thought you believed in luck,” he challenged.

  “Ah, well, there may be a connection for all I know,” she said merrily. “Come, Simon, cheer up, my dear.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, so aglow in the sunlight that her injunction seemed to have been instantly and miraculously obeyed.

  On the way back to the house still (again?) with the bubble in her breast and that sense of a benign mantle embracing her, Mrs. Moffat said to herself in so many words, flat out: I love that boy.

  Dinner on the porch for three this Thursday was calm and peaceful. Zan had tales to tell, but she told them objectively with only tentative personal conclusions. She said she thought she had a lot to learn about Los Angeles. Simon said little; he smiled whenever he could. There was a truce on.

  DEAR SMITTY:
>
  Why don’t you start looking around for a car? Probably we can head south early next week. I’ll come there on Monday.

  I’m staying here only over Sunday. It’ll be my last chance to go to a party just as if I …

  Hands tore off the page and crushed it into his pocket.

  DEAR SMITTY:

  I’ll pick up a car Monday morning and come by for you. I’ll have to finish some things I’m doing here for Mrs. Moffat and tell her a decent good-bye.

  You locate where the medicine’s available. Do that!

  AL

  He folded the page and threaded it through the crack at the bottom of the door.

  The next day Zan was off again, meeting business people, all to do with her permanent transfer. It was one of the days that Simon left the place and found his dinner elsewhere.

  At the table this night, Mrs. Moffat realized how deep Zan was in plots and plans designed to wring from this city whatever it was she wanted from it. Wasn’t there something lacking?

  In her bed, Mrs. Moffat remembered Simon’s implication that he had already hurt people. It didn’t really bother her, because who had not? She did believe that he would need a lot of luck—as would anyone else—not to do it again. And he had responded; he had understood; he had “cheered up”; he had accepted. But where had Zan left any room for luck in her scheme of things? She had alternatives at certain crossroads. If yes, then this; if no, then that.

  Mrs. Moffat had a dream vision of a programmed computer. Zan has all the fun too soon, she thought, feeling cross.

  Saturday Zan departed early to go sailing, then take dinner and spend the evening with Nicky Pomerance.

  So Simon and Mrs. Moffat, left with the car, were as busy as mice when the cat’s away. They did all manner of piled-up errands, and solemnly she chose the hibiscus plants. Simon put them in the ground. Nothing as common as pink and red. Pale yellow and bright bronze, she had chosen.

  In the peace of the evening Simon said, “I almost asked you to let me drive this morning, Mrs. Moffat.”

  “Good,” she responded at once. “You are getting used to the traffic then. I know that you are not going to run away from the company tomorrow either.”