The Protégé

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “It appears to me that he’s on the childish side. Been to the wars, has he? Is no longer sustained by the group mystique. Taken temporary refuge from the demands of the economic world—with, forgive me—a mother figure.”

  “That may be very clever of you,” said Mrs. Moffat wearily. She thought it was gibberish, probably. Or perhaps if you let it go around again, it might begin to mean something.

  “You betcha,” said Zan. “So why won’t he tell me anything about Tommy Moffat? What has that got to do with his mother or the demands of the world—which, by the way, this kid is going to satisfy by piddling around in people’s backyards.” Zan burned like a candle in a pumpkin.

  “It’s possible,” said Nicky with soothing calm, “that your—uh—Tommy has been walking on the wild side and this boy doesn’t want to betray him. He may be afraid that Mrs. Moffat would be upset. She has been very good to him, and no doubt he’s grateful.”

  “What a pretty little idea for a story,” said Zan ferociously, “full of the most up-to-date human motivations.”

  “Well, then,” said Nicky, “why don’t you tell your story, with all modern improvements, of course?”

  “Then there was this cat,” said Zan.

  She began to tell Nicky all about the question of the cat’s name. Mrs. Moffat didn’t listen.

  By the time Zan had finished, the old lady had marshaled her arguments.

  “May I ask,” she said cutting in deliberately, “why I must now get rid of him? Because, feeling unable to sit through a church service, he very properly asked to be excused? Or because, after fifteen years, the name of a cat was not on the tip of his tongue? I was in the same case myself. Or is it, because, just now, not knowing what he ought to say, again he asked to be excused? Where, in all this, is the menace, or whatever it is, Zan, that you fear so much?”

  Zan was biting her lower lip. Nicky’s face was super-bland.

  Mrs. Moffat gave him a stern look because it seemed to her that he was enjoying himself and ought not to be. “Simon has never done me any harm,” Mrs. Moffat said, “or threatened to. He has been unfailingly thoughtful and undemanding, and very pleasant company. He has done useful work. He keeps himself immaculate. He is no bother.”

  “He’s too damn good to be true,” said Zan.

  “It is impossible for me to send him away. If you can’t understand why,” said the old lady spunkily, “that doesn’t matter to the decision. It is impossible, I say, and I will not do it. Certainly not on some unfounded suspicion of yours, Zan.”

  “What you mean is you’ll do as you please,” said Zan, “no matter what I suspect.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Moffat. “Exactly.”

  Nicky got up. He said smoothly, “If I may be excused, Mrs. Moffat, I think I will say good night, leave you now, and thank you for the pleasure, and hope you have not been too fatigued.”

  “Good night, Nicholas. Yes, this is tiring me.”

  Zan’s face was studying to be a gargoyle. “I’ll see you off, Nicky,” she said.

  “You betcha,” murmured Nicky.

  Left alone, Mrs. Moffat moved to her own rocking chair. She set it into slow motion, thinking stubbornly, How I got into this entanglement is of no consequence now. I have meant the boy no harm. To cast him out, because I’m afraid of him—that would do him harm, and it isn’t even true. I am not afraid of him. I will not do what I think I ought not to do. I will not be scolded either.

  She had forgotten to snatch up her stole. The air was fresh and growing chilly. The little creatures were still. She could not hear the little voices. She waited, as she was. He would know where to find her.

  As she waited, a tension and an oppression seemed to lift away with a rustling of leaves.

  Out at the front, Zan was blazing. “A fine-feathered friend you turned out to be! What’s the matter with you, Nicky? Couldn’t you darned well see that the poor old darling is head over heels in love with the creature? She’s got some delusion that she’s terribly important to him. Oh, I can be understanding, if that’s what’s wanted. I betcha it is pretty exciting when you are seventy-four years old and all of a sudden here comes a young male who hangs on your every word and butters you up day in and day out. But what’s the end of it, Nicky? Can’t you see she’s heading for some kind of mess? He can’t really be in love with her.”

  “Tell me,” said Nicky coldly, “what’s all this about being in love? For which read sex, eh? You’re being plumb silly, Zan. Or else jealous.”

  Zan had become as stiff as a stick, in the semidarkness.

  “I’d be careful, if I were you,” Nicky said. “I’m not sure it’s your grandmother’s neck that’s reaching for the strangler’s hands. I’d sooner get between a dog and a bone than between a man and his mother figure.”

  “Oh, balderdash!” Zan spit out at his theory.

  “I’m not going to help you force her to kick him out,” said Nicky coolly. “You can’t do it, and it’s stupid to fail. You ought to shut up and behave like a dutiful grandchild and know your place, and that’ll get you farther and protect her better, and I don’t know what’s the matter with you that you can’t see it.”

  He gave her shoulder a small slap, got into his car, and drove away.

  Zan went back into the house. Her grandmother was out there in the rocking chair. Zan bit hard on the insides of her cheeks, until they hurt, and she was in control of any outward signs of her fury and frustration. She went out, took up the soft woolen stole, placed it gently around the old lady’s shoulders. She bent and kissed her grandmother’s hairline, where she always had. She said nothing, turned back, crossed through the sitting room, and trudged upstairs.

  But she did not turn on the light in her bedroom. She settled at the window.

  Gran is a foolish old woman. She has been taken in. She is enchanted; she won’t listen; she won’t see, doesn’t know what it’s all about! She likes him because he says “ma’am” all the time? Anybody can say “ma’am.”

  Well, then. Zan wouldn’t go back to New York at all. The hell with it! She would stay right here, right here on guard, until he had been got rid of. She’d stay and she’d force—

  Or else she would go back to New York and stay there, and the hell with it! And Nicky Pomerance was a rat fink, and he could whistle for Alexandra Terry.

  Her eyes began to ache from straining to distinguish the exit from the path to the cottage. How did she know he was in the cottage?

  Zan gave up watching and held her skull in her hands.

  The brain inside was not sixteen anymore. It was twenty-five years old. It knew what childish emotions were rippling along some surface or other, masquerading as thought. But the cold brain sat in the skull, and coldly it said, Alexandra, you are making a jackass out of yourself. Why alienate a man like Nicky? You may need him. Why antagonize the old lady? To what end? Is it worth it?

  Look at you, threshing and writhing! Like poor old fat Crystal, you’ve got to be right? Is that it? Or are you agonizing because you long for … you hunger and thirst after something you won’t “believe in” because (although you don’t know what it is) you know you cannot have it?

  In the dark kitchen of the Halloran house they were fighting. The red-bearded boy was thrown against the gas range; metal rattled. The black-bearded man staggered and slipped on the vinyl floor. They rose; they fell, arms flailing.

  Then the man was hunched over the sink, whimpering. The boy was backed against a cupboard, panting.

  The man said, “Quit with this. Quit, will you?”

  “You started it,” said the boy. “You had to crawl on your hands and knees under the gold dust plant and listen in on Alexandra’s party. So you found out you’re dead. I didn’t do it.”

  “Alexandra, Alexandra.” The man turned on the water and put his head under the gushing faucet. “God Almighty, my leg is killing me.” He straightened, dripping. “Get me a bottle of bourbon out of the bar, will you, Al?”

  He
limped heavily into the Hallorans’ living room and put himself down on a brocaded sofa, wet head and all. The red-bearded boy brought him the bottle.

  He said, “Smitty, you never bought the medicine. You spent all the money I gave you. You haven’t got any medicine left.”

  “So what?”

  “So your case stops being arrested. Sooner or later you’ll get contagious.”

  “Why don’t you tell Alexandra what the gook doctor told you?”

  “Stop it. Stop it,” said the boy sadly. “I’ll see if I can find some of the medicine tomorrow,” he said in a moment.

  “You do that, you do that. It’s a hell of a thing, you know,” the man said.

  “Listen, Smitty, if you want, I can try to find the pearls before daylight.”

  “No,” said the black-bearded man. “I can go right to them. After all, I put them there.”

  “We ought to get away, though.”

  “What’s your hurry? When have I had it so good? Only thing missing—”

  The boy cringed.

  The man drank deep. “You know, I think you’re right, Al. I like the whole name, too. Alexandra,” he said in the dark.

  The red-haired boy went out of the house by the side door. He walked up to a tree and put his face on the rough bark.

  Chapter 12

  Mrs. Moffat came down early on Monday morning, being weary of lying wide-awake in her bed.

  Polly said, “Oh, Mrs. Moffat, Simon’s got a terrible big bruise swollen up on his cheekbone. He’ll maybe have a black eye. I didn’t know what to do for it.”

  “Did he say how it happened?”

  “He ran into something in the dark. That’s what he said.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Moffat.

  A contamination had come creeping in, a spoiling of her Eden. Polly was anxious, suspicious, confused, no longer in all simplicity pleased to be serving. There was turbulence and there was friction in the house. Zan against Simon. Mrs. Moffat forced to resist pressure. She finished her breakfast, pondering what could be done about this.

  Then she took up her cane, went out on the gravel paths, and seeing no sign of Simon’s bright head anywhere on the grounds, she made her way to the cottage door and rapped on it smartly.

  Simon was dressed in his brown trousers, yellow sports shirt. He let her into his room, which was in order. On the neatly made bed stood his small canvas bag, gaping open. On his face there was, indeed, an ugly bruise.

  Mrs. Moffat peered at the injury, took no alarm, but advised the application of ice to reduce the swelling. She then sat down in his only chair, wound her hands together at the head of her cane, and said, “I want you to listen to me, Simon.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed farthest from her. The bruised cheek toward the eastern wall—and the sunlight pouring through the high square windows on that side of the room, making a nimbus around his head.

  “I’ve been having too much fun,” Mrs. Moffat said bluntly. “The time has come for me to tell you just how Tommy Moffat looked to Zan and me. I don’t doubt he doesn’t look at all the same to you. Oh, that’s a great source of confusion, you see. Six of anybody’s acquaintances, strung out along the years, might not do much better than the six blind men did with the elephant.”

  She sighed and launched into a compressed and meticulous version of the events leading up to Tommy’s disappearance.

  “I don’t know whether you can possibly imagine,” she went on, “how a very young woman, about to bear her lover’s child, will feel when he abandons her. The child didn’t live, and Zan wasn’t sure she herself could go on living either. But she pulled out of that pit.”

  Simon didn’t speak. He had fallen into a deep dreamy mood to receive what was said to him.

  “Untrustworthy, unreachable, a man who cannot be held to answer,” she said mournfully. “That’s not your image of Tommy Moffat, I suppose.”

  “No,” he said. He sighed and threw his head back; his eyes were glittering. “I ran into him in Seoul. I was on leave and—restless. I met up with him and four other guys, his buddies. He was in a restless mood, too. I don’t know, Mrs. Moffat, whether you can possibly imagine what a couple of restless guys will get up to, in foreign cities especially.”

  “I don’t know,” she said placidly, letting herself fall into a simplicity of listening. “I’ve read about it.”

  She pressed the golden knob of her cane into her cheek and remembered earnest male novelists who had made explicit lists of deeds done and sensations encountered. But too many spun off into lyrical gasps, thick with symbols to the point where Mrs. Moffat could make nothing at all of the experiences. Perhaps it was simple. Grab, smash, rip, rape—revenge on all the women in the world (especially one’s mother), but Mrs. Moffat had always hoped that negatives alone were not motivation enough. She was willing to concede that she might never really know.

  “Smitty was the one with ideas,” Simon was saying. “He never ran out. I thought he was great. There was nothing he could dream up that I couldn’t do. Oh, Lord—” He smothered the oath or the invocation in his throat.

  She said aloud, dryly, “Joe Keating still cherishes his memories of ‘Hinky-dinky parlez-vous-ing,’ whatever he means by that. I don’t necessarily expect you to come to a bad end from such a spree,” she went on comfortably.

  Simon grinned. Teeth gleamed in the redness of hair. And then he sobered. “Well, this spree didn’t come to a very good end.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, after about ten days, I guess it was, some of those people turned on us, and there was fighting, and somebody yelled for cops and MP’s. Smitty and I took a big drop—I don’t know if we jumped or fell—off a balcony, and his leg buckled. But we went three-legged down the alleys, laughing, you know, like kids and shushing each other, and he said we should get behind this wall and … But it was a place we should never have got into.”

  The boy was not here, but far away. Mrs. Moffat neither spoke nor stirred.

  “Pretty soon things quieted down,” he said. “Smitty was on the ground in the dark. I said, ‘Up. Up. We better get going.’ And a couple of the people there came with lights and—and—and I was so … God, I was so—I was so shocked and shook, choking on my heart and so sick … Mrs. Moffat, I ran.” He sank facedown onto the bed. “See, I ran and left him. I get nightmares.”

  “Go on, as soon as you can,” said Mrs. Moffat calmly. “Go on. You left him in this place, you say? What happened to him?”

  Simon sat up. “I didn’t leave him very long.” He sounded faintly bitter. “I found the other guys. I tried to make them go with me to get him out of there. But they wouldn’t. So I turned him in to the cops—I mean, his location.”

  “They put him in jail, did they?”

  “Not really.”

  “In the hospital, I suppose?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You were charmed with him, I take it,” she said musingly. “You felt you’d let him down. So if he asked you to come here, you’d feel you must?”

  Simon had his hands hooked together by the bent fingers. “You’re right. I thought I should come, but,” he said, “I should go away now, Mrs. Moffat. I don’t want to bring things down on you or on Alexandra. I’ll be gone by tomorrow morning. I know what I can do to make it up to you, and I will, I promise.”

  She felt frightened. “I’ve known for quite a while,” she said, “that you’re not Simon Warren. I should have known it the first day.”

  “P-pardon?”

  “You didn’t realize the sundial had been moved.”

  “Where did it used to be, ma’am?” he asked, without guilt, but only curious.

  “In the middle of everything, of course,” she said impatiently. “But the big tree began to shade it too much of the day. Simon Warren never had a sister. He was a blond. You lied to me.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” he murmured. “There was nothing else that I could do.”

  “You ha
d no choice,” she mocked, and pulled down her mouth corners. How she despised that phrase—that cop-out phrase—always phony.

  The boy was staring at nothing.

  She said, with a spark of anger, “Well, what shall I call you? Peter?” (Simon called Peter.)

  “That’s close,” he murmured within his trance. “Smitty calls me Al.”

  “Smitty is what you call my grandson?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why does he call you Al?”

  “Lots of people do,” He pulled himself into a present decisiveness. “Mrs. Moffat, I don’t want you to know my real name. There’s a whole lot I don’t want you ever to know. It’s too bad, and it’s too sad, and I just want you to count the sunny hours.”

  Mrs. Moffat said, “I suppose that serves me right. But what’s wrong between you and your mother?”

  She thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then suddenly and somewhat coldly he said, “She’s dead. She killed herself. With pills.”

  Mrs. Moffat drew in her breath.

  “The Navy gave me compassionate leave to go to her funeral. But it was either my fault or my Dad’s fault, and I couldn’t go to her funeral with him there. How could I go? So that’s why I went on the town with Smitty. When you can’t stand the way things are, you’ve got to pretend it doesn’t matter. All right. That’s chicken.”

  “You had a choice,” said Mrs. Moffat.

  “Pardon?”

  (I suppose you think you knew that woman, you ignorant child, she fumed to herself. You knew what was life and death to her—when ninety-eight percent of her life you’d never even heard of!)

  “You could have chosen to figure you didn’t know ‘the way things were.’ It would have been a better gamble,” she said stiffly.

  “Everything I do turns out to be wrong,” he said, as if he had heard her railing at him. “I’ve let everybody down. I can’t make it up to them. All I want (I told you) is not to do it anymore, and maybe there’s only one way, and that’s just to quit—like she did.”

  “Where’s your father?” she snapped at him.

  “Oh, he … doesn’t want any part of me. He … got rid of me and forgot and got over me. He’s married again. He sent me five hundred dollars, but I can’t go home.”