Sophia said, “How was the trip, by the way, businesswise?”
And J thought; it was absurd.
Sophia was feeling pretty sure that poor J must have had a bad scare. She had immediately sensed the air of anxious gloom about him. Well, J wasn’t getting any younger, and for all his boasting about his physical prowess in the crisis she could imagine him fallen in the street and lying there, helpless and terrified. For which terror she certainly did not blame him. But, of course, in female wisdom she would not press him to admit this. Sophia resolved not only to understand, but to do it quietly.
The trouble was she could also imagine poor J’s frightened leap. The angles of his bones would have strained the cloth of his trousers with a most ungazellelike effect, and before the mirth got any higher in her throat (the crude but almost irresistible comedy of the banana peel, or dignity overthrown), Sophia had changed the subject.
J was speaking. “Oh, the trip was okay, businesswise. I was just a chip, you know. They threw me into the pot so they could see their next cards. Too many fancy clubs like that turn out to be run by the wrong people. So they threw me in just to keep one toe on the ground floor.” (J was often a reckless mixer of metaphors.) “In case that outfit is going anywhere. All I had to do,” he said, “was be there, sit quietly, and not fidget. In which endeavor I succeeded brilliantly.”
“That’s good.” Why so gloomy, Sophia was thinking.
No, it wasn’t, J thought. It was pseudowisdom, phony and absurd. For what did man make his marvelous machines? So that J could go, sit in Chicago on an expense account, take notes, and not fidget?
Now the San Fernando Valley was spread below to receive them into its soft haze, and the car became a drop in the stream pouring down. Sophia concentrated on getting through the maze of the interchange.
When they became a drop in the stream flowing east on the Ventura Freeway, Sophia said, “J, are you sure you feel perfectly all right?”
J roused himself from too long a silence.
“I would have been scared green,” added Sophia, the female, applauding male courage.
“You bet you would,” said J. “If you’d seen and heard old Evangeline, flinging out orders far and wide, with her diamonds heaving and her bosoms flashing. Enough to make your blood run cold.”
Sophia’s mouth tucked in at the corner. “Wait and tell it for the kids,” she said, recognizing a vaudeville turn in the making.
J said belatedly, “What’s up, anyhow? How is everything?”
“Sure you’re strong enough to find out?” Sophia said solemnly.
“I’ve got to know sometime,” said J in the same spirit.
“Well, let’s see. The dishwasher is on the blink. Naturally, since we have ten for supper, counting the Little kids. Cal, the gardener, says the Chinese elm has a fungus, and this is dire. That publisher is after your father again. He’s been calling; your father has, that is. My mother’s back at the Wimple with only twenty dollars left for the rest of the month. Her O.G.A. told her to give all the rest away, and then auras clashed, and she’s moved out of her boardinghouse until some evil spirit’s month there is up. Meanwhile Avery needs new glasses (so says our Amy) and must have them like last week. Nanjo has set her heart and soul on a dress at I. Magnin’s that costs three hundred and fifty dollars. Without it she might not be chosen, which is unthinkable. And Mrs. Arriola has announced that the house is haunted.”
“How the hell can it be haunted?” exploded J, reeling with the onslaught of the facts of his life. “It’s only eight years old!”
In the house which lay high on the long slope to the Verdugo hills and looked south and westward over the valley, the telephone was ringing.
Nancy Jo Little, aged sixteen, couldn’t hear the phone from where she sat in Cary Bruce’s sports car out on the street, under the pepper tree.
Grosvenor Winthrop Little V, aged twenty-seven, was entangled with his three small fry on the back lawn, where Mrs. Marietta Thomas, aged seventy-one, was imprisoned at the hips by a garden chair.
Mrs. Grosvenor Winthrop Little V (nee Marion Coons), aged twenty-six, was in the kitchen, and her hands were dusty with flour. She lifted them to indicate her helplessness and said in her sweet voice, “Amy, could you get that?”
Amy Alice Little Gardner, aged twenty-three, who was slouched to the back of her neck on one of the dinette benches, with slim trousered legs higher than her head, did not leap up gladly. She unfolded one token leg.
It was Avery Gardner, aged twenty-nine, lankly and lonesomely pacing the living room, who now regarded the instrument glumly for the space of four rings and then picked it up as if it might bite him.
“Mr. J Middleton Little, please?”
“He’s not here.”
“When do you expect him?”
“I don’t know,” said Avery, who could have guessed an hour if he had tried but felt disinclined to try.
“May I leave a message?” said the high-pitched voice that was possibly male. “With whom am I speaking? Is this a member of his family?”
“Son-in-law,” said Avery grudgingly.
“I see. Will you take down this number, please, and ask Mr. Little to call it at his very first opportunity?”
The voice gave a number. Avery began to write, but the downstroke of a seven began to interest him, and he continued it, ceasing to listen very hard.
“Tell him this is a messenger from Doctor Willing. Doctor Ambrose Willing. Have you got that?”
“Got that,’” said Avery with the sudden relish of a snapping crocodile.
“Thanks very much.”
“Not at all,” said Avery. He hung up and licked his lips. A vision was gathering in his head. Could one paint a telephone? Only its meaning, of course. Its impudence, its stridency, its power. Paint imperative sound, and the pain in it?
When he saw his wife’s dark head come around the doorframe, he glared at her to ward her off. Avery made for the bathroom. He was always seeking sanctuary in some bathroom or other, because all people (even Amy sometimes) were careless about interrupting the vulnerable, invisible, but so precious first glimpse and seed of the work. Avery took off his glasses, soaked a cloth in cold water, held it over his eyes, and watched his painting becoming more or less solid at the bottom and to the left, at least.
Marion was in the dining room inspecting the elongated table. “That looks rather nice, I think,” she said. “Who was on the phone?”
Amy gamboled toward the table and snitched a black olive. “I don’t know,” she said. “Avery hung up.”
Marion looked at her gravely. “I hope it wasn’t important.”
“How could it be?” said Amy, grinning around the olive.
In his hotel room near the airport Goodrick, having brought nothing with him but money, had no unpacking to do. So he settled down to wait for this man Little to ring him back. The first few words might tell him, for sure, whether there was anything in this fragile lead. Goodrick already knew that his employer would like very much to find out anything at all that Dr. Ambrose Willing might want kept silent.
Sophia took the “off” ramp neatly. Now that they were on a surface street J could feel her relief. “It’s a poltergeist according to Mrs. Arriola,” she explained. “That’s how come Aunt Geraldine’s cut-glass pitcher fell off the buffet, you see. Oh, it didn’t break. But what I’m afraid of …” Sophia went on, “suppose Marietta finds out? Are we going to have to be exorcised, do you think?”
“Oh, no,” groaned J. Everything Sophia said was clued in for him.
He was seeing a web, like a spider’s web, and himself in the middle of it. He had threads spun out to all the persons and things that Sophia had mentioned and to more besides. There were also threads spun between, connecting some of them with one another, because of him. J had the right to expect that one day death’s plucking finger would remove his central figure. But there should remain many other webs, around other spinning creatures, even if his own w
ere to fold up like a web on a broom.
The whole thing, everything on earth, was intertwined somewhere! There was this airy lace … elastic, but tough. And if some giant broom were to brush it all away in one great sweep, J didn’t think he wanted to survive. What should he do on the moon without Sophia or Avery or Marion or his father or (for that matter) his mother-in-law or the neighbors or the office—all his fellows?
CHAPTER 5
Sunday Evening
J sat in “his” chair in the family room with the Little kids swarming over him. Mary, aged six and a half, was screaming into his left ear. “What did you bring me, Grandad?” Grove, aged four and a half, was shouting, “Bring me? Bring me?” and even the baby, Donald, who was only two and a half, pounded on J’s kneecap with a tablespoon babbling, “Bing? Bing?”
He made his arms hard and held them off. “Nothing,” he said.
There was a sudden hush and the hovering possibility of howls. Then Marion, the children’s mother, was there making soothing noises. “Grandad is very tired. Poor Grandad has had a long, long trip.”
Sophia began to explain to the adults in low tones that J had had a nasty shock, and no wonder that, this once, he had forgotten. Marion began to promise television, which the children immediately preferred to a giftless grandfather who was in no mood for play. J couldn’t blame them for reading his mood. Off they went, hippety-hop, behind their mother into the den, where the crackling noises and jolly cries soon arose. The children’s father sighed and thanked aloud the powers-that-be for the baby-sitting aspects of the tube, destructive though it might be to their little minds. “Don’t give it another thought, Dad,” he said to his father and began to mix the before-supper drinks.
J found himself silent and knew that his silence was assumed to be evidence of a more or less broken heart over his unprecedented forgetfulness. So the tides of custom were flowing to obliterate such uncharacteristic behavior. Well, J had had a nasty experience. Oh, yes, he had been shocked, all right, although not altogether as they thought. One trouble was his heart had felt as if it were going to break as the car had turned into his driveway and Sophia had taken it into the double garage. It was that broken brick on the right that set him off, the one J always saw as he came in, always resolved to replace and had not replaced yet. Then it was the ivy on the fence, and it was the junk hanging on the garage walls. It was the very smell of his own garage. His heart had seemed to crack (twanging) from love of this earth the way it was.
Then Nanjo had come prancing across the front lawn to embrace him. She had her hair caught up high and away from her face, and J experienced the same old stab of pleasure in the sight. He had never liked the now declining fashion during which period a girl’s long hair hung straight down all around, so that she must peer between lank locks. He liked to be able to see the crisp purity of Nanjo’s small nose, the adorable tininess of her mouth and chin. He also knew that Nanjo knew as much and had wished to please him today. Oh, well, a father always knows these things.
His daughter-in-law, Marion, was at the front door, a pleasant-looking young woman, a little shorter and a little rounder than his own two lean girls. Marion had brushed his cheek with cool lips and murmured graceful welcome. And J’s heart had winced because he’d had to leave her out. (Oh, should he?)
Then Amy, his middle child, and her light smack. “Hi, Pops! So you made it, huh?” Very slim Amy in tight black pants and a tight black sweater, his mysterious one. J didn’t understand her and was a little afraid of her if the truth were told.
He had hauled his bag into the house, through the pleasant living room into the bedroom wing, down the hall to the huge square bedroom that pushed three sides out into the back garden. He’d washed his face in his and Sophia’s bathroom and had tried to pull himself together.
Then, from the glass-walled room across the back (in which the family really lived) he could see the garden and the small, bright, moving bodies out there. His mother-in-law, Marietta, had come waddling to touch cheeks with him, to beam upon him, with the familiar, quick, and easy moisture making her blue eyes shiny. “Home safe, dear J. Oh, yes—I asked my Own Good Angel to watch over you.”
J endured this without visible wincing. It was the sort of thing Marietta was always saying. She was, J thought, one of the most purely embarrassing conversationalists he had ever known in his life.
Then his son, Win, had come through the glass wall with his brood.
And here sat J with his own, his own, his seed all around him, and his wife, and his daughter-in-law, and his mother-in-law besides.
Win handed him his drink and said, “What’s all this about a hospital? On Saturday night! Sure you weren’t out on the town with some babe, Dad?”
Every one of J’s senses was somehow raw. He felt his son would never have said such a thing had he believed it to be possible.
Then Marion. “You weren’t really hurt, were you, Dad? You’re looking marvelous.”
(He wasn’t.)
Nanjo said, “Oh, pooh! He’s tough!”
(Which J was not.)
But he knew, with great sadness, that it was time for his vaudeville act. So he obliged. He did the dowager. He did the put-upon harangue of his first room-mate. He sacrificed and made them a picture of himself in a trouserless state, and they laughed. The deeper he sank into personal gloom the more he was credited with an artful deadpan delivery.
The time came for a fluttering of females, charmingly disputing over who should sit still and who serve the meal. Nanjo glided off at the end of the pack (as usual, J noted) a little late. Only Amy did not even pretend to join. She sighed and sat down on the floor.
Now Win, sitting with one ankle on the other knee and one hand on the ankle, drink in the other hand, his eyes in his handsome face wearing their accustomed optimistic but knowing twinkle, leaned forward and said, “I guess Mother told you about this slight—uh—financial bind, did she?”
“No,” said J, his poor heart fainting in his breast. “No, she did not.”
“Oh?” said Win. “Well, how would you like to take over the second mortgage on my house? Only five grand, with fierce high interest, by the way. I’m a little bit behind, and things are getting on the sticky side. Thirty days would do it.”
“I see,” said J listlessly. He saw, for one thing, that in Sophia’s judgment this news had not been suitable for the freeway. For another, he had a vision of the tightrope Win walked, by choice, into this credit-based economy. More than once already J had been his balance pole. But what matter?
Before J could speak again, Avery Gardner came drifting into the room. He had not been missed. Avery was a drifter; he came and he went; there was no pinning him down. “Oh, hi,” he said and turned his back to mix himself something at the bamboo bar.
“Hi, Avery,” said J absentmindedly. He was adding up sums of money. If he had not given Sophia the seven hundred and fifty dollars, that would have covered Nanjo’s expensive dress (about which he would no doubt soon be approached) and leave enough to cover Avery’s new eyeglasses which, J felt sure (they being so salient a feature of Avery’s personality), would be very expensive indeed. Then, if J eschewed the replacing of his blue suit, as he supposed he could, he might help out Marietta besides. But for the five thousand dollars he must scrounge among his assets for the least of several evils. But what did any of it matter?
“It’s secured, Dad,” Win was saying earnestly. “The house is worth half again as much as we paid, already, with the pool and all. If Faulkner doesn’t sign a week from Tuesday, then we will scale down and start selling, I suppose, here and there. But if he does … ho, ho … we’re in like Flynn!” Win drank deep. “So it’s no real risk,” he said, believing himself thoroughly.
“I guess we can manage,” J said numbly.
“Oh, hey, that’s great,” said Win. “That’s wonderful. See, I could get them off my back by taking it out of the office, but I’ve got to meet my payroll. Especially because of George
Faulkner showing up. Something happens to the atmosphere if payday’s postponed. It gets into the air conditioning.”
J wasn’t paying attention. He knew what he was doing. He was buying off his conscience because Win couldn’t have five out of seven seats to the moon. He’d be getting four, as it was. J looked at Win’s wife, Marion, who couldn’t go.
She wasn’t rejoicing, he noticed at once. Her large gray eyes met his almost hostilely for a second. Then Marion smiled as sweetly as ever and began to praise him softly.
Marietta reappeared from the kitchen, where she had probably been, as usual, enthusiastically in the way.
“What’s this about you being at the Wimple?” J asked her.
The Wimple was a shabby little hotel on a back street in Hollywood, whither Marietta tended to gravitate in moments of transition. The charm of the place had always escaped her son-in-law, but it had charm for Marietta, although her resources did not permit her to become a permanent resident there. “And what’s all this,” J went on, “about only twenty dollars left?”
“Until the first of the month, J dear,” said Marietta, putting her ample hips into a chair. She ate, as far as J could tell, like a bird, but whatever she ate seemed to turn magically into rosy flesh. She wore her gray hair in a Dutch bob, and it was not as grotesque as it might have been, at her age, because of the fresh and unlined smoothness of her plump face. Once you got used to it, that is.
“But she had need,” said his mother-in-law rapturously, “dear soul, and I was sent to help her. So there was nothing else, of course, that I could do.”
Amy put in the links her grandmother was leaving out. “Some character she met in the park, Pops. Wanted to get into some home … a cult-type joint, I guess … and didn’t have the entrance fee.”
“A beautiful, beautiful retreat!” beamed Marietta. “She took me to see. Ah, simple and immaculate—and filled with loving kindness. I knew, then.”
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