“What’s this?”
“I had better tell you, and I’m sorry. Doctor Willing, our mutual friend, has passed away.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t mention that it signifies. You never met him.”
“No, no. But gosh, I’m sorry to hear … he … he was …” (Barkis, thought J. Gone?)
“He was a very sick man,” said Tony. “We are all sorry. You won’t, and haven’t, mentioned anything he said?”
“No, no.”
“To anyone?”
“Not a soul,” bristled J. “What do you think?…”
“Careful,” said Tony. “Thank you. Just keep on that way.”
“As I said …”
“Very good. By the way, you met me, Tony Thees, casually in Chicago. You forgot the little package. Left it in a restaurant. I kindly brought it out for you and left it in your office. Got that?”
“Yes. I guess so. Sure.”
“It is hot in your office, of course, but you will receive it. Say ‘Thank you, Tony.’”
“Thank you very much, Tony,” said J.
“Good man.” Tony hung up.
J stood stunned, in the entrance area until Sophia called, “Who was that, dear?”
“Oh,” called J, “some fellow—says I met him in Chicago. Seems I mislaid a little package. He says he took it to my office.”
“Well,” called Sophia, “that was nice of him. What’s in the package, J?” Her voice was playing the game secrets-are-fun.
“Just something silly,” said J. (A ticket to the moon!) He made for his den.
He switched on the set, zipping past old movies and new games until he found a newscaster. J sat down, and he was trembling.
Out in the family room Sophia’s head was high. Her ears were straining.
The news ran through the wars and woes, the crimes and clashes. It took a long time before the newscaster changed his voice to the low funereal dragging that heralded an obituary.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this country has lost one of its very great men. Doctor Ambrose Willing, the man who …”
J sat through the eulogy doggedly.
“Doctor Willing,” the voice pricked up briskness, “died last night, Sunday, in a fall from the eighth story of a Chicago hospital. It is believed that he was under sedation, unsteady, and confused. His death was an accident. The Los Angeles Dodgers …”
J sat all the way through the sportscasting.
Oh, he should have made sure—should have checked and made sure—that somebody knew the old man’s notions. Should have been sure that authority knew. Poor old man, shouldn’t have been left all alone in pain and confusion. Somebody should have taken care.
J sat on into a comedy half hour.
Since J was not addicted to TV, and they had a houseguest, inevitably Sophia came to see why he was being so rude.
He gave her a look of desperate pleading. (Let me alone, please?) He couldn’t tell her that he was guilty, or even that he mourned. Her hand was suddenly on his forehead, testing for fever in her well-worn way. “J, you don’t feel right. There is something the matter. Now we are absolutely going to see the doctor in the morning. And I’m putting you to bed right smack now, and don’t you dare say No.”
“I do feel kinda awful.” J knew that his eyes were still beggars. (But don’t abandon me?)
“Is there pain, anywhere?” she demanded fiercely.
“No, no, I just feel so damned low, Sophia.” J could have bawled.
“Well,” she soothed, “it isn’t easy to get over the shock you had. But Doctor Lodge knows you so well. He’ll fix. Now get into your pajamas. I’ll fix you a hot drink. Go on, now. Scoot.”
J got up and began to walk feebly toward their bedroom. He was a hundred years old. Or a thousand. Or man, not old, not young. A few million years.
Marietta’s bulk loomed in the door to the family room. “Ah, you cannot feel depressed, dear J. So blessed.…”
Sophia gave J a push at the shoulder. She said to her mother, “This is J’s house. He can feel whatever he feels like feeling!” Marietta was blown away in the storm.
But J was bundled into bed with special pillows, as if he were one of the children and Sophia his mother … coddling-severe, in charge of him, commanding him into a position for peace and rest. And J went falling, with exquisite relief. He would have blurted out all he knew, as if in sanctuary, but Sophia would permit no such thing. She gave him his hot drink, that powerful symbol. (He didn’t need a hot drink; he needed what it meant.) She tucked him in and kissed his cheek. She soothed his brow; she opened the window; she dimmed the light; and let him alone, but not abandoned.
Well, J had all along known that he was sometimes Sophia’s child, as she was sometimes his. And when she was mother, he could afford to rest. He thought drowsily that he could make Win play the part of the ticket holder. Who would know the difference? Then Sophia could go! Even if it was all nonsense (Oh, poor old man! Poor crazy …), yet the thought that he might, after all, save Sophia made J feel better. Never mind brains. The race must have, from time to time, its brow soothed.
In the other room Marietta said, “Pray, Sophia. And do not be afraid. J is good.”
“J is no angel, Mother,” said Sophia tartly. And the Lord had better not cart him off to heaven under any such delusion, she thought grimly. (Oh, J, with half your natural teeth long gone and your hair all moth-eaten, and you can be so maddening … But don’t.…)
It was going to be a long night and long breakfast time, a long wait in the doctor’s waiting room tomorrow.
Sophia could wait. Maybe it was only psychological.
CHAPTER 13
Tuesday Morning
By dint of having been first on the list J got out of the doctor’s clutches by a little after 10 A.M. He and Sophia had come in two cars. They walked to the curb together.
J had suffered patiently through the tedious tests and examinations. The doctor had summoned Sophia to his private office to hear his verdict. There didn’t seem to be much the matter with J (pending some test results, of course). The doctor was not worried. Sophia really should have realized that the city of Chicago was, after all, a civilized part of the world. Now, what was this accident, exactly?
So J had done his bit about the dowager and had been pleased to notice that the act was crystallizing; he had the story properly timed and rolling. The doctor had laughed in all the right places.
He knew, however, that Sophia, who ought to have been satisfied, was on the contrary holding in her temper. She seemed to be good and mad at him. J possumed; he kissed her in the customary manner and told her that since he could take the day or any part of it off, he thought he’d run on down to Amy’s with the hundred and fifty dollars, which had been promised, agreed upon between her parents, but since forgotten. He’d make her take it.
“Of course, dear,” Sophia said too sweetly.
J pulled away from the curb, leaving Sophia standing beside her own vehicle, ready to bawl with a confusing combination of relief and rage. So J wasn’t going to die from natural causes, at least no sooner than anybody else. But Sophia had not been foolish to wonder. She had had cause! And it wasn’t very nice of J not even to notice the suffering to which his behavior had put her or the noble restraint with which she had endured it. Laugh, clown, laugh. Hah!
From the curb just behind her a black Mercury pulled away. It would have darted off on J’s heels, but a station wagon came barging into the street from an alley and clipped its front fender with a dainty metallic crunch. J had gone on. But Sophia, whose own way was now blocked, stood where she was, thinking, Oh, nuts! I’m a witness.
The wagon reversed, pulled back from the entanglement, which did not seem serious, took a sharp cut into the street, and roared away. Oh, oh! Hit and run! The driver of the Mercury got out, leaving the car’s door open, and made directly for Sophia. By now people had popped out of the pavements, as if they were angleworms after a rain. But So
phia, the only person who had already been here, braced herself.
“Excuse me,” the man said. “You saw that, ma’am?”
“Yes, I did,” she said stoically.
“His fault?”
“As far as I could tell, yes.” (Oh, the nuisance of being a witness, but it was her duty. Besides, she didn’t see how she could get out of it.)
“Get a look at the driver? Wait a minute!” The man bent closer. “Aren’t you Mrs. Little?”
“Yes,” said Sophia, realizing at the same time that she had seen his face before.
“So it was J M. Little just came out of this building?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Goodrick,” said the man, whose wide array of large white teeth were now displayed. “Been to see a doctor, has he? How is he? What’s the trouble?”
But Sophia was not the wife to hash over her husband’s health with a stranger. “You know my name,” she said. “Do you want my address? I did not get a look at the driver.”
But the man seemed to have forgotten all about the fact that she was a witness to his innocence in the matter of the small collision.
He said, “Wasn’t that a terrible thing happened in Chicago?” His cold eyes watched her.
Sophia was at once invaded by several emotions. Alarm, resistance to curiosity, and a violent curiosity of her own. She said, “Didn’t I see you at the airport? Weren’t you on the plane with my husband?”
Goodrick said, “Of course. Of course. What did he have to say about his room-mate?”
“Room-mate?” said Sophia, bewildered.
“In the hospital.”
“Why, nothing much,” she said, astonished.
“Come, come. Surely your husband tells you everything.”
Sophia bristled. What kind of remark was this!
“Didn’t he tell you his room-mate jumped out the window?” said Goodrick. “Didn’t do him any good, believe me, from the eighth floor.”
The shock was brutal. Sophia staggered.
“Mr. Little told you, didn’t he, what his room-mate said to him?”
Sophia didn’t like his voice in her ear. She pulled herself up. “I haven’t heard anything about this,” she said coolly. “If you want me for a witness, you can find my phone number.”
“He didn’t tell you!” said Goodrick. “Oh, come on now, Mrs. Little, that’s hard to believe.”
Sophia got into her car and began to slide across the front seat. The man leaned in at the window. “Mrs. Little, could I call on you and discuss …”
“I’m afraid not,” said Sophia. “You see it is very hard for me to believe what you say, and in fact I don’t believe a word of it. I did not, by the way, get the license of that station wagon. I doubt that I can help you.”
She drove away, maneuvering around the stalled Mercury with swift skill, watching in her rearview mirror, half afraid he would follow her. But cops had come. Goodrick seemed to be standing there with his left thumb to his mouth.
Sophia made for home, her anger drowned temporarily in a surge of pity. Oh, poor J if that’s what it was! How awful to see a man do such a thing! No wonder he’s been acting so peculiarly. Okay (anger surfaced), but why in the world didn’t he tell me, at least, all about it? And the children, too. It isn’t pleasant. It wouldn’t have made any of us happy. But to have seen such a thing, had that happen, and not tell us.…
What is wrong? Oh, does J think he ought not to have let it happen? Did he try to stop the poor man and fail? He must have been full of it, to tell that unpleasant stranger on the plane.
But what was the stranger doing outside Dr. Lodge’s office? Why had he called the house, as J said he had. Who was he?
Then she began to hear J doing his vaudeville turn, imitating the trivial complaints, aping a funny old sourpuss, dubbing him his room-mate. Wait a minute! That performance did not go with what she had just heard. No, it jarred. It clashed.
But if that Goodrick had been lying to her, why? Why was it his business, anyhow? And why, thought Sophia angrily, isn’t it mine?
Amy and Avery lived in an old frame house, not a block from the water, which someone had split up into apartments long ago. The street floor was abandoned; J suspected it of harboring rats. The old stairs came up into a long hall that bisected the place and led, at the far end, to a fire escape of sorts. The whole building was rickety and worn; the remodeling needed remodeling.
Sophia didn’t like to come here. It distressed her. J had always overcompensated, telling himself that this was Bohemia. But today, having taken it into his head to see how his middle child was faring, he let the effect hit him as it would.
Amy opened the door and showed surprise but welcome. Her apartment was strange enough without the added strangeness of its furnishings. J stepped in to what he supposed to be the living room, a large, high-ceilinged, almost square space, with two old-fashioned sash windows that overlooked not the ocean but a gas station. Here, since Amy kept the dark-green shades, their sharp edges unblurred by any drapery, drawn to the sills, there was very little light. The old floor was bare, except for half a dozen enormous pillows in sad, neutral colors. The walls bore in thick array many unframed canvases in a jumbled variety of sizes. The paintings were all by Avery, and J had never been able to figure out a single one of them. There was a fireplace, and there were two rather tall iron candelabra that stood on the floor. There were books piled in teetering columns in the corners.
Usually J tried to imagine the place by night. With a fire going, the candles lit, and young bodies sprawled on those cushions, there might be some coziness or even glamour here. By day it was simply gloomy, but the gloom was not even serenely austere, because of the colors writhing in the half dark on the walls.
Amy was in her usual outfit, the tight trousers and the tight jersey top; her black hair was tousled. She had a book in her hand, her finger marking her place. Where can she see to read? J wondered.
Drawn toward light, he peered into what he supposed had been a dining room but was now Avery’s studio. Avery was out walking, Amy said. He had a bit of a headache and wanted the air. The studio was smelly and messy, but light did come harshly through the big, bare bay window that also overlooked the gas station.
“Sit down, Pops,” said Amy, throwing her book on the floor to signify the turn of her attention to him exclusively. “How come you’re not at the office?”
J said he was taking the day off, and he asked to use the bathroom. This was located unhandily; the living room must be crossed by any customers from the bedroom. It was clean enough, perhaps just barely clean enough, but full of clutter. The antique tub stood on legs; the wash-basin faucets dripped upon yellow stains; the toilet flushed with a horrendous noise.
J came forth, reminding himself that this was all there was except the kitchen, very old and shabby and inconvenient, and the bedroom, which lay at the front of the building overlooking the street, where (he knew from other inspections) there was item: one double bed without headboard or spread; and item: three old wooden benches along one wall, on which all the clothing lay in heaps, the soiled beside the laundered.
He had always tried to take a liberal view. After all, there was no law that clothing must be kept in a certain order or even in any.
“When are you going to be going to the office?” he asked this daughter. “Your mother says you’ve got a job.”
“Starts tomorrow,” she said. “The worst of it is I’ve got to wear skirts and nylons. Ick!” She was piling three of the huge pillows to make a stack of them, thoughtful of his antique knees. J sat down, feeling ridiculously sultanic. “How about some elevenses?” she said mischievously. “A spot of wine?”
“Fine,” said J heartily. Amy covered her slight surprise at this quick acceptance and scuttled away.
“Staying on here, are you?” he said when she returned from the kitchen with a bottle and two unmatching glasses.
“The rent’s about as cheap as there is,” she sai
d carelessly.
“What have you got against chairs?” her father inquired.
“Not necessary.” She gave him his filled glass and sank down herself with such limber grace that he got her point. “What are you up to, anyhow, Pops?” she asked impudently.
So he told her about going to the doctor’s at her mother’s insistence, knowing that Amy’s fine eyes were probing to discover what might be behind his visit now. J was a little afraid of her. She had remarkable eyes. Her features were not stylishly pretty, but J realized suddenly that they would never be out of style. Amy, who didn’t ask to be thought beautiful, was, in fact, a classic beauty.
“The doctor said you were all right, did he?” she was asking.
“Fine. Fine,” said J, feeling shame. Had her own father been unable to see the real article without a label? Amy did not do the things a girl does which say, “SEE … THE … GIRL?… IS … SHE … NOT … ATTRACTIVE?… OH … ADMIRE … THE … PRETTY … GIRL!”
“Well, I’m glad you went,” Amy said in her abrupt way. “Poor Mom probably thought you’d found out you were dying of something loathsome and didn’t want to tell us so.”
“What?” said J feebly.
“Well, gosh,” said Amy, “you did act as if the end was near, so the hell with money.”
J pressed his lips grimly together. If it were so that Sophia had thought such a thought, he was sorry, but he was also very much annoyed.
“If you’re so healthy,” his daughter said, “why aren’t you back at the nine to five bit?”
“What’s this job you’ve got?” snapped J. “Nine to four thirty maybe?”
“Oh,” said Amy, grinning, “I’m going to interview applicants for jobs. I have to ask them a whole lot of nasty questions and check off the answers and cull out the ones who would make any foreseeable trouble if they did get hired. It doesn’t take experience. The questions have been mimeographed since the early dawn of Doctor Freud. It just takes a cold heart. But the pay’s quite good,” she added brightly.
J got out his checkbook.
“Hey!” she said.
Seven Seats to the Moon Page 12
