“He’ll kill himself,” gasped J.
“I can’t stand those kids,” said Tobias cheerfully. “Hit ’em where they live, eh, young lady? Whoever you may be.”
“Oh,” said Annette, becoming another person, very young, helpless, appealing. “Mr. Little, my name is Annette Woods. You do remember Miss Cynthia Hamilton? She told me to look you up, so I hope you don’t mind.”
J was stricken dumb. The leery look in Tobias’ eye was visible even in the evening. He began to light-foot it (tactfully) across the grass. Sophia’s voice called from the housedoor. “Has he gone?”
Annette saw her and darted away from J. “Mrs. Little?” the girl said gushingly. “I’m sorry to come barging in like this, but I don’t know anybody else in this whole city. I’m Annette Woods. Miss Hamilton, in Columbus, Ohio? Well, she was my best teacher and my best friend, and she told me all about you.”
“You mean J’s cousin Cynthia?” said Sophia. “Is anything the matter?” she went on kindly.
The girl said, “I guess I’m a little bit scared. I need to talk to people I can be sure of. I don’t think I ought to be all by myself this evening.”
“Then come in, of course,” said Sophia.
J followed Tobias, who was stepping softly in the rear of the females. In the entrance area Tobias halted and said over his shoulder to his brother-in-law, “Watch it, J.”
J, who had bumped into him, grunted.
Tobias, craning around, was grinning. “I’m telling you, watch that dolly. It takes one to know one.” He winked and went on.
In the family room there was fluttering and a further exchange of, if not identities, at least labels. Marietta had come back to sit, rosy and fat, in her favorite chair and pour pious syrup over the introductions, during which Annette behaved like a little lady, Sophia behaved like a big lady, and J just sat down.
When the subject turned to Cary Bruce, Marietta (who heard no evil) dropped out.
Tobias began to expound on the subject of those kids. All gut and no wit. Easy enough to outfox such primitives. He winked at Annette, who remained sweetly respectful to an elder. That car was loaded, Tobias went on, and if his folks weren’t silly rich, the kid had probably gone in for what Tobias called greasy kid crime. Tobias had no patience with it. Crime for the sake of a mere machine? Or crime for kicks? What, foul up one’s record and impede and imperil one’s future for a few more miles per hour? Or the passing excitement of a gland or two? Crime, in Tobias’ opinion, was not a toy!
Having been very entertaining for the space of five minutes, Tobias signaled his sister, and Sophia announced that she would make him a stirrup cup of coffee and Tobias must keep her company. They adjourned to the kitchen for their talk. J shuddered to think of Tobias giving warning right there in the kitchen about this young con woman.
He looked at the young con woman.
She was sparkling. “He’s wonderful!” she said.
“He tells me it takes one to know one,” said J bluntly. J knew that Marietta couldn’t follow, but Annette did not, and she glanced at the stout woman warily.
Marietta had caught one clue. She now went into ecstasies over a son’s pure and unselfish devotion and her Own Good Angel’s approval of dear Tobias. J, not without sly pleasure, watched the girl’s face try to put on a mask suitable for listening to this.
The coffee appeared in a very few minutes. (Oh, yes, Tobias must have given his opinion.) That one tossed his beverage off and departed for his hotel, characteristically having told none of them which hotel it was. He was off very soon (he didn’t say exactly when) for foreign parts, although he omitted to say just which parts, naturally.
When he had gone, Marietta pronounced a kind of grace upon his visit and went into instant meditation.
In the slightly awkward silence that followed, Sophia said, “Now, my dear, in what way can we help you?”
“You have helped me already,” the girl said. “You are all so good. It is so wonderful to be where people believe in something.”
(Oh, oh, thought J, Marietta’s taken her in!)
“You see, I’m all alone,” said Annette, “and there is a young man. I … well … I guess I ran away from him. But you see, he’s turned up here, so I didn’t get away, and I’m afraid.…”
“What frightens you?” said Sophia.
Annette lowered her lids and murmured, “Myself.”
J watched for Sophia’s eyebrow to twitch, which it did.
“Aunt Cynthia,” the girl said, “told me you have a daughter.” She raised her humble gaze.
“An assortment of two,” said Sophia pleasantly. “Yes.”
(J listened to Sophia’s voice. He was lying low. This was a war of some kind. Annette was trying to fool Sophia. Sophia knew it and was trying to be courteous, all the same. J found himself betting on Sophia.)
“If it’s yourself you’re afraid of,” she said now in a kindly calm, “you’ll have to take it up with yourself, won’t you? How do we come into it?”
“Oh, just to see successfully married people! It’s hard for my generation. You can’t imagine.…”
Sophia smiled. “We are old,” she said gently. “Of course, we can’t imagine.”
Annette managed to look hurt. “I never had a family,” she said pathetically. “Dad had gone away before I remember. And my Mom died when I was only three and three quarters.”
(J did admire that three-quarters!)
“So I had foster homes. Miss Hamilton was the one older person … She was so good to me … The nearest thing to a mother I ever had.”
“She must have been a comfort,” said Sophia, sweetly skeptical. (Cynthia had been full of vinegar.)
“I know I’m putting too much on you, of course,” Annette said, rising. “It was good of you to let me come in at all. I’m only a stranger to you, I know, Mrs. Little. So I’ll go back to the hotel. Thank you very, very much.”
Rejected again was the name of the act. J lay low, admiring the performance, waiting for Sophia’s riposte.
“You have met my husband before, then?” said Sophia smoothly.
Annette looked down. Then she cast a nicely nervous glance at J. “Well,” her voice stumbled nicely, too, “I have this job in Chicago, you see, and it so happened I saw his name on the list for the banquet.”
So J found himself plop in the middle of the battlefield. Middle, hell! He was the disputed ground.
“You looked him up in Chicago, then?” said his wife.
“Well, it was only for a minute,” said the girl. “But he was so kind, and that’s why I thought.…”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you, Cousin Annette,” said J briskly. “What’s your young man’s name again? Tony, isn’t it?”
Annette licked her lip. “Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t realized that I’d said.”
“Well, you fix it for me to meet him,” said J, “and I will give him the news that you, being basically an old-fashioned good girl, have had the good judgment to seek the advice of older and wiser heads than your own. Okay?”
Her face had become a battleground of expressions.
“In fact,” said J, “it might be good for him, poor benighted chap, if he could have the benefit of actually seeing successfully married people. So why don’t you bring him to lunch here tomorrow?”
Sophia’s brows had gone as high as they could go, but J had drawn on his clown face. She knew it and lay low.
“Oh, I don’t think …” The girl looked as if she’d like to get out of here.
“Do try,” said Sophia graciously. “Will you be all right getting back to your hotel? Should J go with you?”
J said, “I’ll take her as far as her car.”
So there were farewell speeches, each sweeter than the preceding. This part ended in a draw, J felt.
Then he had the girl by her arm, and they were walking toward the curb.
She said as they went, “I’m sorry. I asked Tony. He said, No, absolutely don’t tell her. And he
can’t come here.”
“Why not?” J opened the car door. “I want to talk to him.”
“Because,” she said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Goodrick isn’t across the street in that dark parked car right now. He knows who Tony is.”
“You’re sure having a whole lot of fun with us old bodies,” said J. “Get in. Get in.”
“It’s not so funny, Mr. Little.”
“Call me Cousin J,” said J, “and explain to me why you’re stirring up the broth. You’re making mountains out of molehills with your own little hatchet. Now, I don’t want to threaten anybody, but it could be you’ll succeed in making it impossible for me to keep my mouth shut.”
She said with a gasp, “I’ll have to tell you this. Things are happening. If certain things do happen, then it won’t matter if you tell. But not yet.”
J said gently, “Did you really think Sophia was a fool?”
She said, “Tell your wife, then. Do that.” She was staring at the valley, but she snapped an order just the same.
J said, “Sorry, but what I say to my wife, or anybody else, is my business.”
She yanked at the car door; J slammed it shut. She drove away at once with an angry spryness. The dark car across the street sprang into life and went pelting after her. J rolled his eyes to heaven.
Then he stood, looking down at the great sparkle of the valley, wherein bright threads of freeways kept their constant double shimmer of relentless motion, the diamonds going one way, the rubies the other, and wide avenues with their neon blues and greens and reds slashed the basic pattern of yellow on black. Well, that was man, interrupting the dark and, with his discoveries, taking a shallow slab of the night away from the stars and the moon.
J felt a snatch at his breath. He—anxious, reckless, defiant, whimsical, touchy, and humanly inconsistent—what might he do, or not do, when he didn’t understand?
What he did was turn tail and head for his cave.
Sophia had taken the coffee cups off to the kitchen. Only Marietta was still sitting in the family room. J settled in his chair. Struck by the continuing silence, he looked and saw his mother-in-law’s bobbed white head bent and her plump pink hands pressed palm to palm in the classic attitude. J, realizing what she was up to, kept still, thinking two thoughts at once. She was his elder, but when had he paid any attention to her ideas? And what did she think her present effort would accomplish?
When she lifted her head at last, her rosy face enraptured, J blurted, “Say, how does that work?” At once ashamed, he continued, “I’m sorry, Marietta. I didn’t mean to make fun.”
“Of course you didn’t, dear J.”
“I got to wondering. You see,” he confessed, “I—uh—thought I heard an angel, earlier on.” He meant to speak lightly in a friendly way.
“Oh J! Of course you have a Good Angel of your very own. I have always known that. And have hoped.…” Her large blue eyes reminded J of certain marbles he had cherished when a lad.
“But I don’t know if I understand the system,” said J. “Now, God runs everything? You’d say so?”
“Of course, dear.”
“So what you do is, you ask your O. G. A.” J had let slip the family abbreviation. “I mean your angel, to tell God how you’d like things handled?” The blue eyes were blank, so J pursued his logic. “Okay then, supposing I ask my angel to tell God please not to let us, for instance, blow up the world. Does that count?”
“All true prayer is answered,” said Marietta easily.
(But then I’d be running the universe! thought J with shock.)
“There is nothing to worry about,” she was continuing. “All is good, and all is beautiful. If only you can see.”
J said softly, “I see.” But he did not. He thought he’d dare to state his wishes maybe, but he didn’t have the crust to assume that if he did, all his wishes must come true. He knew darned well that J Middleton Little had better not run any universe.
But Marietta was leaping onward in rising ecstasy. “Oh, J, I am so happy that you, too, understand these wonderful things! And now you have this lovely comfort for your own dear self!”
J didn’t have the heart to say that his own dear self, which it was all right (dear to J, that is), still didn’t see how the thing worked. He bent his head, smiling to imagine what a hell of a lot of mistakes he’d make. “Ah, love, could you and I with Him conspire.…”
But in a moment he realized that he, J Little, not only couldn’t run the universe, but right now, in his own chair, he was making a miserable mess of a very small corner of it. Head bent, hands clasped for no reason at all, he was fooling this fond foolish lady as he had not meant to do, and if he disillusioned her now, she would be hurt out of all proportion.
Sophia came in and said calmly, “What’s the matter, Mother?”
“All is gloriously well!” cried Marietta. “Good night! Good night!” She waddled away, still tearfully rejoicing.
“Anything special?” Sophia asked.
J, in cowardice, shook his head. How could he explain? He couldn’t explain a thing. He couldn’t, for instance, explain Annette, which he was going to have to do right now. Sophia sat down and said, still calm, “Quite an invasion. Well?”
“‘Well’ is right,” said J (pronouncing it à la Jack Benny). “And Tobias was right, too.”
“Was he?” said Sophia thoughtfully. “How much of what she said was true, I wonder.” Sophia seemed to be asking herself.
J said, “Not much. Struck me pretty phony.” He reached into his pocket. “Here.” He tossed her his ticket to the moon.
“Why, it’s beautiful!” said Sophia. “What is it, may I ask?”
“Well, it’s a kind of weight, I guess,” said J, “to—uh—hold things where you want them.” (Yah, he thought, exactly so!)
“You mean a paperweight?” said Sophia. He had, and he hadn’t. He didn’t answer. She looked up at him. “Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“No,” he said, “because I don’t know.”
“Well,” (Sophia, who could ask double questions, could hear double answers), “life is full of little mysteries, I guess. Shall we sit up for Nanjo,” she added amiably, “and give her fits about that miserable boy? I don’t want Nanjo hurt when he ends up in a ditch.”
“Nanjo is going to be hurt,” said J.
“What do you mean, dear?” Her voice kept steady.
“I mean sometime. Somehow. Listen, I don’t know what I mean. I don’t know what anything means, or why it has to mean anything. Who am I, that I should know?”
Sophia waited for this childish outburst to be overcome, and just as J’s “Sorry” had formed in his throat, she said quietly, “There was a little collision this morning when we left the doctor’s. One of the drivers called me by name. He said his name was Goodrick. He said you had a room-mate in the hospital, and he jumped out the eighth-floor window. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t there,” J blurted.
“Yes, you were,” said Sophia. “I called the hospital.”
“No, no. I mean I wasn’t there when the man jumped. I heard about it. But I wasn’t there.”
“Oh,” Sophia was hefting the ticket to the moon thoughtfully. “Then you had two room-mates,” she said shrewdly.
“What makes you say …”
“Because,” said Sophia confidently.
J had the feeling that his skull was made of glass and she could see his thoughts waltzing around in there. “I made a promise,” he said. “I made a foolish promise, Sophia.”
She listened as if she could hear his thoughts rustling, the other side of his words.
“But I never promised her anything. I said I wouldn’t tell one living soul something I accidentally overheard in Chicago. That’s it. That’s all.”
His wife’s face began to change.
“But that girl,” J exploded, “I don’t know who the hell she is. She came around and ordered me to tell you. But it seems to me t
hat, if I gave my word, it’s my business whether or not I keep it.”
“Well, it certainly is,” snapped Sophia and burst into tears.
So J went over and sat in the same chair and petted her while she wept. “Oh, J … at first I thought you were dying. And then I thought you had seen some terrible thing. But I didn’t want … I tried not to be a snoopy old … bossy old … oh.…”
So J crooned words to the effect that she had been put upon, yes, she had. She had been very patient withal, and it hadn’t been easy, and hush, he knew.
So he fathered her, for she was his child.
But when they heard Nanjo’s key in the front door, they scrambled as fast as they could to their bedroom, where very soon they began to behave like a man and a woman.
CHAPTER 18
Wednesday Morning
J decided against going downtown on Wednesday morning. After all, he had the week off, and he wasn’t sure but what Annette would turn up, bringing this Tony Thees. J didn’t want to miss a chance of getting out of the middle of some mysterious contest between mysterious factions. He also wanted to keep an eye out for Goodrick in case he was lurking. J didn’t want him bothering Sophia.
But the house was roaring; J was chased hither and thither; there was no peace.
There was no school. Nanjo was around. Marietta was around. It was a Mrs. Arriola day. She was around. J couldn’t even sit out on the terrace. Cal, the gardener, was around, out there pruning the Chinese elm, and would rather talk than do it.
Sophia was, of course, around too, and although there was peace between husband and wife, there was developing a touch of strain. It had occurred to J that, after all, he had told her, and what if he’d put her in the middle, too? He must, however, bite back warnings and alarms. Sophia had a habit of becoming very aggressively angry instead of afraid.
At the same time, it had occurred to Sophia that he had not, after all, really told her, and she was biting back many questions. Little loose ends. If he hadn’t gone to the office yesterday, how come he had the paperweight that J said somebody said had been left at the office? And how come J knew the name of the girl’s boyfriend? And hadn’t Sophia heard him say “Tony” at some other time?
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