“That’s white of him when he’s losing money himself,” said J with normal cheer.
Sophia laughed. She then confirmed the news that Tobias, as usual, had telephoned out of the blue. Sophia’s brother was a man who made many careful plans, but he hated to let anyone else know what they were.
Marietta began a chant of praise and thanksgiving for the good health of her son-in-law, the devotion of her son, and the remarkable crispness of these particular carrots, but husband and wife were not listening to these tiresome ecstasies. J, for no reason except that he happened to feel like it, touched Sophia on her shoulder, and Sophia bent her head until her cheek brushed briefly the back of his hand. And there it was. They moved apart quickly lest Marietta turn around and begin to bless, with swimming eyes, this casual little miracle.
J, a bit shocked to find himself thinking that some truths were too holy for Marietta, said he had better get cleaned up and go tend bar, and Sophia said she wished he would.
She hadn’t asked him where he’d been all day. He hadn’t told her. Maybe Amy was right. Now that Sophia knew he wasn’t mortally ill, her suspicions had gone. Into thin air. The face in the bathroom mirror looked at J with calm encouragement. “We’re home,” the mirrored eyes were saying. The dialogue at the beach went glimmering, fading like a dream in the morning.
Sophia, in the kitchen, was thankful that she had cast out the devil of impatience. Oh, J could be wrong and stubborn in the wrong. Oh, J could be maddening! But J would never, until the world should end, leave off, according to his lights, protecting her. Ah, but someday, just the same, he would tell her whatever it was he now kept from her. And the truth was Sophia needn’t do a thing about it. The weight of all their years was pressure enough. Why should Sophia soil her soul, in the meantime, when all she had to do was wait, and he would tell her?
Her husband had ambled into the family room to inspect the resources of the bar when Nanjo came dancing out of the bedroom wing, wearing a dress and short jacket of soft green silk and pretty shoes to match.
“Hey, hey,” said her father. “What’s up?”
“Bobby James is taking me out to dinner.” Nanjo didn’t sound overjoyed.
“On Tuesday?”
“There’s no school tomorrow. Some dumb teacher’s convention.” Nanjo struck a pose and bent to notice where her skirt came on her left leg. “I look like something out of the gay nineties,” she said bitterly.
J understood that Bobby James, being a member of the establishment and well brought up besides, considered it only proper to take a date to some dignified and rather elegant restaurant, where even Nanjo wasn’t brash enough to go in the bright, fantastic costumes of her kind.
“You look pretty darned nice to me,” said J fatuously.
“Well, after all,” Nanjo mocked, “when I’m going out with one of the seeded suitors, I’m supposed to look nice to you.”
J winced, but he said steadily, “You’ll miss Uncle Tobias.”
“And that just breaks my heart,” said Nanjo. “Yah,” she cried as the doorbell played its little tune. “Set your watch, why don’t you, Daddy?” She went dancing away to let in Bobby James, who thought it proper to arrive exactly when he said he would. Nanjo seemed to think this was very dull of him.
J found that he didn’t envy Bobby an evening with Nanjo in her present mood.
In a moment his daughter brought her young man into the family room, or perhaps it was vice versa, because there was no convincing Bobby that he need not greet the elders politely and assure them that he would take good care of their precious child. The fact was that both J and Bobby enjoyed a chat. They inhabited the same world. Bobby gave respect to rank, and J enjoyed this and felt benign. After all, here was J Middleton Little in embryo, and who could help feeling well disposed toward oneself, when young, with whatever pity? But Nanjo wasn’t having any boring business talk tonight. “Well, are we going or aren’t we?” she demanded almost at once, and Bobby jumped to her command.
When they had gone, J couldn’t help feeling sorry to see that Nanjo was in the process of throwing this admirable … well, reliable and steady … well, all right, admirable suitor out of her life. Bobby, although presently infatuated, was no fool.
J, puttering at the bar, wondered if he had ever explained to her that courtesy was not his generation’s whimsical invention, but the discovery of a law. Why, he mused, should so many kids have to discover so many laws all over again, as if they were all Adams and Eves? Of course, maybe J had taken for law what was only a fad of his parents’ day, a passing notion, courtesy, out-of-date now. A way to get yourself liked; hypocrisy.
He then sat very still and listened to some angel saying in his ear, “Don’t you buy that dress. Okay,” argued this angel, who happened to speak American, “you gave Amy a check for some clothes. Fair is fair, eh? Well, you just put away that old stuff. Don’t you buy that dress for Nanjo, and never mind why not.”
J, however, knew more than the angel thought he did. He could get his feelings hurt, just like anybody else, and pretty soon, one of these days, he’d be confronting Nanjo.
Nanjo, in Bobby’s car, had found out a little more about the practical uses of courtesy than she had just seemed to know. “Oh, Bobby,” she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so bossy. I’m kind of feuding with Daddy, that’s all. It’s nothing to do with you.”
“What’s the trouble?” said Bobby, instantly concerned.
So she told him. She told him all the way to the restaurant and all the way through the first course. Bobby watched her. He adored her. He hadn’t read the book. All he knew, he didn’t want her to be picked by any talent scout to become rich and famous and far from him. But he tried so hard to be fair that the only note of common sense he dared sound was a protest on behalf of J’s motives.
“But listen, Nanjo, I’m pretty sure your father would do just about anything if he thought it was good for you. Gosh, I would.”
Nanjo, after all, was having a fine time, since they were discussing her favorite subject (which was Miss Nancy Jo Little). She smiled at Bobby, who swooned inside with delight.
“Oh, Daddy’s wonderful!” she said. “He really is. I know that. But see, he thinks of me as a baby. Well, to him I am. But still, if you’re going to have a career in motion pictures, you have to start when you’re young. And I’ll be seventeen in May.”
At this, her swain could only moan softly.
“I don’t say they have to choose me,” Nanjo went on. “I don’t even say I have to have that dress to make them do it. But it’s so perfect, and there it is in the store, and I found it, and when there’s this chance, and it’s right in front of me.…”
“I see what you mean,” said Bobby miserably.
“I put down fifty dollars,” said Nanjo in a minute, “so they’d hold it for me. It’s only three hundred dollars more.” She looked down at her plate.
Bobby, suddenly depressed, looked down at his. Honorable young men do not give the girls they are courting sums of money. Those who had raised Bobby had told him this. They hadn’t said why not, but he had believed them. He had also heard that nice girls don’t ask.
“Oh, well,” said Nanjo in another moment, “let’s not talk about it anymore.” But a sense of something shifting for the worse had fallen like a tent over the table.
Tobias Thomas was a dapper man about J’s age, who always seemed, wherever he was, to have just come from some more glamorous place. Sophia was fonder of him than she was willing to admit. She took the trouble, for instance, to put her best culinary foot forward when he was here.
Tobias, who evidently preferred his days to be long in the land, came dutifully to see his mother whenever he flitted through Los Angeles. J observed, however, that (as usual) Tobias had nothing to say to Marietta, and oddly enough neither had she very much to say to her only son. Marietta sat as one enthroned, basking silently in his token presence, while Tobias chatted along with his contemporaries,
not bothering to include her.
(Sooner or later Sophia would take her brother aside, and they would discuss their mother to each other’s satisfaction, because, after all, they and they alone had known her all their lives.)
But Tobias, as J knew, was not a possible source of revenue for his mother in her present emergency. According to his lights, Tobias was a generous man with money, but he shied off immediately if asked for any. Long ago he had Done His Share. This was well understood by all. Once, when flush, Tobias had bought the annuity upon which Marietta subsisted.
Twice every year he sent each of his sister’s children a check for twenty-five dollars, once at Christmastime and again on each child’s birthday. So far, he had not extended his largess to Sophia’s grandchildren. He sent his sister perfume twice every year, and for J, once a year at Christmas, there always arrived a wallet. The quality of these gifts might vary somewhat with the state of Tobias’ finances, but they always came.
J appreciated the fact that Tobias, for his sister’s sake, had never gone to work to charm any money out of J. Oh, he could have done it! Tobias happened to be a successful and experienced con man. It was his trade, and he seemed in good control of his considerable skill. J suspected that the trick of always appearing to have just come from, or being poised on the brink of just taking off for, some magic place where the money was greener was a part of his working costume. J, listening to him with affection (for who is as charming as a charming rascal?), bethought himself of this expertise and asked Tobias about this Mr. Pudney’s possible racket.
Tobias listened to the tale of J’s father, his manuscript, the Vanity Press, and opined that J was most probably correct in his judgments. Just the same, something about Tobias was taking notes. Some fox ears had quivered. Was there anything in this for Tobias? J felt it would be looked into.
He wondered what Tobias would make of a voyage to the moon and caught himself deciding that the doughy mass of the brainiest people might be better off with the leaven of a rascal or two.
Annette, wearing trousers, was lying on a bed in her hotel room with her knees up, one over the other, and the top leg swinging. “He wants to talk to you,” she reported. “He wants permission to tell his wife.”
Tony Thees, lounging on his elbow on the other bed, said gloomily, “At least he hasn’t told her yet. He better not. Mr. Smith’s dug up a connection that’s making him nervous. Certain exstudent of the old man’s happens to be related to Goodrick’s boss. So Goodrick and Company may be exactly what the old man was afraid of. Trouble is, if we pick up Goodrick and put him elsewhere, we might as well advertise. Looks like a bind, sweetheart.”
“What kind of a wife has he got, I wonder? I could go and see.”
“He’s all that dominated, and you get into the domestic scene, she’ll make him tell her.”
“I realize you know all about husbands and wives, Tony darling.” Annette was trying to be maddening?
“What he’d tell her is the moon biz,” said Tony, refusing to be annoyed. “Juicy bit for the Ladies Auxiliary, that.”
“He says he doesn’t believe a word of that,” she said. “Bluster, I guess.”
“So it’s uppermost in his mind?”
“You bet.”
“Well, the ladies could have a fine old panic, and it wouldn’t mean much.”
“But Goodrick and Company don’t belong to the Ladies Auxiliary,” said Annette shrewdly and maddeningly.
Tony swore. “I’m afraid Mr. Smith is going to have to change some plans. And that’s that.” He rolled over. “Dumb luck.”
“And when he does, it isn’t going to matter if Goodrick beats the secret out of our Little man? Goody!”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“He wasn’t what I expected,” she said thoughtfully, and this was maddening, too.
“So go to your hero,” said Tony. “So the old lady will put the old man’s back up by unjust suspicions, and they can have a fine old fight, which could put Goodrick off and might last long enough? Well, I guess that’s no sillier than the moon biz.”
“How long is long enough?” she snapped.
He hesitated. Then he said, “Till Sunday night.”
The girl said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Tony shrugged. He didn’t think it mattered much what she did. Why the devil wouldn’t she marry him, he wondered. True, he had been somewhat above himself when he’d asked her, but the refusal stung, just the same. She’d said she liked her own pad and didn’t want to move her stuff, and what was the matter with the way things were?
“Keep it cool, sweetheart,” he said, somewhat sarcastically.
CHAPTER 17
Tuesday Night
After dinner, when Marietta rose and left the group in the family room to toddle off to the bedroom wing, nobody, naturally, inquired why.
An auto horn began to blast out in the street and persisted beyond any time required to ask something to get out of its way.
“Would that be somebody for Nanjo?” frowned Sophia at last.
J, too, had begun to recognize not only the tone but the rhythm. He supposed he’d have to go tell Cary Bruce that Nanjo wasn’t here.
He excused himself and went out the front door. Yes, there was the low-slung car in its usual place under the pepper tree. Its headlights were bouncing beams off the silver-colored mailbox. As J crossed the lawn, the boy stopped his noise.
“Nanjo’s not here, Cary,” said J, being simply informative. He could see the face only faintly in light from the dash. He could sense tension and excitement.
The boy said, “Tell her to come out a minute, will you?”
“She isn’t here.”
“Tell her to come out, man,” said Cary. “Do that, why don’t you?”
J said sharply, “Didn’t you hear me?”
Cary said with enormous confidence, “Oh, she’s in there.”
It was an impasse. Nothing was getting through from one mind to the other.
To J Cary sounded like some old-time gangster in the movies who never listens but keeps on saying the same thing, adding a loud “I said,” thus indicating ruthless power. In J’s mind bloomed the imagined pleasure of dragging this impudent brat (who was calling him a liar) out of that car and beating him thoroughly. The trouble was J knew he couldn’t do it. Even if it were “wise.”
Cary, who had just seen the light go on in Nanjo’s room, had no idea that Marietta was in the house and, in fact, had only the vaguest awareness of her existence. Cary thought he had before him the usual “stupid” authoritarian who thought he could push people around.
“I got something to tell her,” he said impatiently. “Aw, come on, Nanjo!” Cary leaned on his horn again.
What Cary wanted to tell Nanjo was all about a shortcut to some money. It was, in fact, a way to take some from a place where a man kept it. It would take guts but, he thought proudly, he had guts. While thinking of himself with such a fine sense of his own bright courage, Cary had no time for a stupid old man like J, who thought he could stand in the way of progress by telling lies.
And J Middleton Little, on his own front lawn, felt paralyzed vis-à-vis the barbarian, while the maddeningly unreasonable, intrusive, hateful sound of the horn continued to corrupt the evening air. In the moment’s terror, he admitted to himself that Nanjo could have handled this, although her father could not.
In the house Sophia, outraged, wanted to call the police, but her brother Tobias strongly advised against this. He had no confidence in the police, he said. They were not, for one thing, very bright. And they couldn’t stop those kids. There weren’t enough of them. Did Sophia want a feud on?
Outside, a car came swooping to the curb, cutting in front of Cary’s vehicle. In the continuing noise J turned to look, and there was that girl, that Annette-something, putting her pretty foot upon his curbing.
J took steps toward her and grasped her arm. She bent away, and he put his arm around her to pull her
near so that she’d hear him speak. “I told you No,” he said into her ear. “Go on. Beat it.”
At this moment the front door opened. Tobias emerged and then Sophia. Cary, jolted by these arrivals, nevertheless now had his honor (otherwise known as fear of showing up chicken) on the line, so he kept the horn going. Surrounded by sound, the others must pantomime. Sophia stood in the door; Tobias came light-footed across the grass; J let go of the girl with a guilty start; the girl turned and looked, not at Cary, but with deep attention and a sudden cock of her head, at Cary’s car.
Tobias, looming up quietly, seemed suddenly alerted. He went down into a squat and peered under the sports car with deep attention.
Cary couldn’t understand this!
The girl made her mouth into a big O, and she too squatted down.
J couldn’t understand this, either.
The two of them, crouched there, had their heads together. Cary couldn’t hear what they were saying. The horn’s rhythm broke and stuttered. Helplessly curious, the boy let up on the noise.
Tobias said conversationally, “Lot of money been put into this crate, too. What a shame!”
“Major surgery,” the girl said. “What was he hollering for? A mechanic?”
Cary was outraged. He felt beside himself. If he knew anything in this world, he knew his car! It was his one hard contact with the laws of the universe. She wouldn’t run sweet if she wasn’t right. Didn’t Cary knock himself out to keep her running sweet? He revved up the motor.
Tobias rose. “Do you need a tow?” he shouted.
The girl rose. “You’re in bad shape, buddy,” she said. “Trade it in for a stock car, why don’t you?”
Cary yanked the lever. He screamed profane instructions at them all and took off, leaving rubber as he screeched around the corner.
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