“Noisier for me than for you,” said the boy on the aisle proudly. “More vibration.” He was leaning back, his Roman profile and high forehead cocked to the ceiling, like an early drawing of what would some day be a very distinguished-looking old man. He sat up again almost at once. When Casper had chanced to move his lips a moment ago, the traveling eyes had focused there. The eyes consumed sight like headlights a road. No one could note their special glances.
“He make it dead?” The question fell as ordinary from the girl’s lips as asking the time of day. This was always the way with them too. They had no balance yet—or maybe all of it, alive in a world without periphery, free-swung of the character they’d end by imposing on themselves. How he longed to be back there with them—where he had never been!
“Don’t know yet. At least this time, he’s working it from a small town. Somewhere in Utah, where he has a mine. How he ever expected to make a hoax like that work last time—from Mt. Sinai Hospital…! But that’s my uncle!”
“He’s the swimming pool one too, isn’t he,” she said.
“Yop. Though that was two wives back. She took that house with her, when she went. Lasted long enough to get Diddy onto crew, though.” The hunchback reached over to touch the deaf one’s arm. “’Member the day the butler fell in, running to answer the phone?”
The three burst into laughter, enjoying it hard, like a sweetmeat munched.
“He cried,” said the girl in green. “I remember. You two told me. No, Walter.”
“Who did?” said the one called Diddy.
“The butler. You told me, Walter. Yes, you did; I particularly remember. You found him in the basement with the ruined jacket. And I wormed out of you that you’d given him your whole next allowance—”
“Never mind,” the hunchback said quickly. His skin had an apricot tinge, suggesting a constant low fever.
“You never told me,” said Diddy. “Was it the famous day Austin came down from school? And we had the fest. The day you learned to swim?”
“No, not that day; Christ, what a day for me. No, it was—some time before. Never mind.”
“I remember particularly. Because I couldn’t,” she said matter-of-factly. Now and then in his classes there were dove-colored ones like this, who wouldn’t preen for the light that brought out their under-feathers in rainbow. He felt of the bottle in his pocket, a lump of bottled feeling to help him with knowledge never projected—past the rim.
“Couldn’t what?” asked Walter. He had the pure, innocent face which often grew from humps.
The deaf one shook his head just perceptibly at Walter. One didn’t expect these faint conversational clues from the deaf.
“Cry,” said the girl.
“Dr. Joel said it was your tear glands,” said Diddy. “Had nothing to do with—how you felt. And you can—now. I saw you.” He smiled down at her, if a guardian beast, a loving one. Why such a defense? Swain? “Yesterday. Not when you left Ninon. When you said good-bye to the girls. The troupe.” He grinned over her head, at Walter. “How I hated to leave that clutch of girls. I could cry myself.”
The girl looked down her short nose at him. She had the look of certain Jewish girls Casper had grown used to identifying—the ones who looked like Christians. “Oh that,” she said. “Only a brother would think…That’s just the troupe. That’s just tears.”
“Do you have to learn that too, like for the stage?” asked Walter. “Only I thought, onstage they use glycerine. Or that’s the movies, I guess.”
The girl looked at him fondly, then gave him a light hug. Another brother? “No, we don’t have to learn. It’s just the troupe themselves—boohoo every time. Glycerine. You’re always about forty years back.”
No wonder if the boy was that way, under that Toulouse-Lautrec vest. That compressed, eagle effect of the breastbone—who could expect modernity from it? Shakespeare’s eagle of pity, in a checked vest—or was the phrase Casper’s own? He felt of the bottle again, but was now too compelled by the three to leave. Clearly they had all known each other forever. No one knew him like that. Boohoo. Merde. The flask in his pocket—Italian or French? He couldn’t recall. If he had a hump, or a little black box, would that make him brave enough to take the bottle out and drink it down? Or offer it.
“Ninon’s superb,” said Walter. “Like a hummingbird.”
The other two broke out laughing again.
“With a very long, sharp beak,” said the brother. “Pity she couldn’t ride along with us. I’d like to know her better.” He looked down at his sister. “Your—what is she? Boss? Is that what one calls a ballet mistress?”
So. That would account for the girl’s air of confidence, short of a prima donna’s but, in a certain prescribed orbit, a star’s.
“She had to go on ahead,” the girl said lightly. “Ballet biz. With the Met. But you wouldn’t have got to know her any better. She’s all there already. In what you see.” She turned to each of them eagerly. “That’s what I like. For a person to be all there already. At least…I think.” She looked down at her hands, tightly clasped. “Oh, she lies a bit, now and then. But that’s only—theatre. Only pretending. And she lets you see that too.”
Both looked at her.
“And she wants to talk to Father,” said Diddy. “About you.”
All three were silent.
“Really, you were awful,” the girl said again. “The phone would have only cost—”
“Four guineas,” said her brother. “The British have at least made you begin to count costs.”
“The troupe again,” his sister said, grinning. “Buh-lieve me. Bed-sitting-room values, they said. If I expected to go on tour with them. Marks and Sparks for lingerie. And mince.”
“Pie?” said Walter.
“A sort of hamburger.”
A silence fell again.
“Your uncle,” said Diddy. “Always wondered…if he simply had to see his obituary, then…Well, not only ‘if,’ of course. Why.”
“Has eighteen movie theatres, four wives, couple of racehorses. Old masters. But only one obit. Seems the natural thing. He ought to have that too. While he can. Which is his motto.” Walter hesitated. “Has a bum heart. Nice guy really.”
The girl chuckled. “I knew what Anna would say about him. She’d say he was a bit fast.”
Laughter again.
“If he really wants his obit so bad,” said Diddy, “can’t he bribe it out of the Times. They keep ’em canned and ready, I understand.”
“The Times—you can’t bribe the Times! That would be like bribing—” She searched for a comparison.
“Father,” said Diddy.
Rhythms of others came clearer when the mind was liquored. The rhythm of these silences was plain.
“I won’t bribe Father,” said the girl. “He’d take it.”
“Trouble is, my uncle did try,” said Walter quickly. “Trouble was, there wasn’t anything on him, it turned out. All those racehorses and wives, and he didn’t even rate an obit set up ahead of time. ’Tween you and me, all he wants now is to spur them on.”
“From Utah?” said Diddy. He was fiddling with the black box, his long fingers delicate as calipers.
“Why not?” The hunchback’s great, clarified eyes went from one to the other happily. Yet he had a certain solicitude for them. Who was guarding who?
“Oh, those Mormons don’t mind multiple wives. But multiple deaths?” The deaf one had removed the box from his head altogether. And now he was tinkering with it, cocked intent on it in his lap, like a surgeon repairing his own stomach, or a scientist examining a spare, detachable head.
How cruelly scientific the young were, no matter what marshfires of emotion already surrounded them. No picture slot of death-for-them had as yet opened in their breasts. Their breasts were like armor, not to death itself, but to the idea.
Casper was about to get up. No, he wouldn’t offer the bottle. On the rim, one learned to be stingy. Finish it himself, and th
e great strophes would swing right through him. He would be Shakespeare.
Just then, the girl impulsively touched her brother’s arm. “David.” She waited until he raised his eyes to her lips. “Does the vibration seriously bother you?”
He understood perfectly. And answered joyously. But no sound came from the words his mouth shaped. Was that what the box did, then—helped him voice? He was swift to catch on that he hadn’t. “Oh no,” he said more carefully. “No, it’s wonderful. The noise. I float in it. Like being massaged—by elephants.” He leaned back again and closed his eyes.
Left alone, the other two were silent at first, as if it wasn’t fair to talk until their companion once more opened his eyes.
“I like those flashes out there on the wing,” the girl said then. She looked briefly past Casper, through the window. “Comforting. I suppose too that’s how they see us, down below.” As she leaned back again, her eyes met Casper’s. She smiled tentatively. Well-bred virginal fires; he had no trouble with them, nor with those Bronxy student wenches whose lips hung like vulva over their teeth. His short, mushroom-brown looks were said to be attractive to them, and his haircut and hornrims were a concession to that professorial image, never taken advantage of. Shrugged at the window, he hugged himself. I’d rather buy it. From the endlessly receptive whores, who were toothless down below. Then what was so familiar, crossing to him from this girl? Had she been listening—to his listening? Nobody ever noticed it.
“Walter,” he heard the girl say softly, as if their companion in the aisle was sleeping, though the deaf boy’s eyes, staring straight up, were open. “Watch out, I’m going to shift legs.” Carefully she did so, turning one foot from the ankle, round and round.
That bunch of muscle at the calf, only ugly thing about her. Whisky in him made him letch, for more whisky. Must be England he had embarked from. Or Japan.
“You do that for exercise, don’t you,” said Walter. “All the troupe.”
“Mmm. There’s a better one. Shake the leg all over. From the hip.” She giggled. “Two of us were doing that once, on the railway platform at Euston. Narsty-minded Englishman brushed past us, one of those city men with hard hats. ‘You Americans!’ he said, and pointed to the washrooms. ‘In there!’”
David, the deaf one, turned his head at their vibration. He looked past both her and Casper. “I like those flashes.” He was just putting the black thing on again. Had he somehow heard his sister’s remark, through the back of his magnificently long head? No, hold them all up by the legs, out would tumble all the same sentiments, like loaded dice.
Meanwhile, the liquor was dying in him. I am dying,
England, dying. Fading like verse. After dying, going to be sick. Multiple obits, in any washroom.
“Know what the Halecsy sisters have over their beds?” said the girl. “An electrically pulsating bleeding heart. I saw it.” She made a face.
“In the kibbutz, they worship electricity. Don’t they, Walter.” Her brother fingered the material of the seat in front. “Plastic? They told me some of the new plastics are stronger than metal. They want to be as modern out there!—and not in the service of the golden calf, either.
When I go back, it won’t be Tel Aviv, but the Negev.” He smiled. “Oh well, the Halecsys, poor things. Not the brightest.”
“Poor things?” said the girl. “The Halecsys? I was glad not to have to give them dresses any more—to outgrow them. They left Edwin and his mother. I know it. Though he’s never said.”
The two young men relapsed into a conventional male pause easily identifiable by any other male. Whoever Edwin was, they didn’t like him.
“Zoom,” said David, his eyes closing again. “My head’s in the clouds, and I’m following it. At the safest actuarial rate. What a healing vibration! Next best thing to my old dream of being inside a piano.” “What dream?” said Walter.
“Guess I never told you,” said the deaf boy, with no sign of having heard. They would all know each other’s questions, though. And answers. “Wouldn’t have told you for worlds, once. But I don’t have it any more. Not for years.” When he wasn’t looking straight at you, it was a little hard to catch his own words. “I’m inside this big concert grand, and I begin to feel the sound. First the thumps of the bass—like they did teach me, you know, hand on the sounding board, up the scale. In real life, there’s a point where I can’t feel the vibrations any more. But not inside that—dream. I go up, up. The treble is like a stair. But the last note at the top; that’s like a finger. That reaches out and touches me. Where I am, at the center core of all those tickling strings. It reaches out…and touches me, all by itself. And then—I can hear.” He opened his eyes, the dream still on his face, and saw their faces. His solicitude was immediate, for them. He went into a clown-flurry of gesture, slapping the seat, stamping his big feet in the aisle.
A stewardess went down it slowly, smiling side to side with that pretty, mandarin doll nod they all adopted, or didn’t know they had. “Boy,” said David, grinning after her. “What a piano.”
“Zoom,” said Walter agreeably. Casper now doubted they were related—except by handicap. But the girl, so much more than sister—where was she in this? She had a nagging familiarity. Like a telephone number—did that make sense?
Most unfortunately, for the past few minutes his head had been clearing. The secret bottle at his side warmed him, like Sterno. Not much left in the other one anyway, when the pilot himself, called by a stewardess, had come down the aisle. To speak severely (but like a gold-braided angel too, fair-headed past president of the Demolay junior Masons, and not blushing, like Casper, for having belonged to it) to this drunk in the back seat who’d kept falling asleep with his head on an old hen turkey’s shoulder. (Lord God, who would choose her to do that on; nobody, no doubt why she complained.) “Mr. Friend. Mr. Friend,” said Prince Hal, consort of all the stewardesses of the Western world, toss in the Low Countries too. The tone, as always, made Casper pay for his name. They’d have gotten it from the reservation, personal touch. “Afraid I’ll have to ask you for that bottle, Mr. Friend.” And the voice, a steel lever performing the task of a nutpick, had lifted Casper from the back seat and placed him in the vacant window seat here. “You three be all right?” the captain said, leaning over the seat with a Zeus smile. After which he’d moved forward to the cabin again, to consider the stars.
“Oh, planes can be anything,” the girl said. “The one Daddy and I took back during the war was dark as a stable. Full of wounded soldiers, but going home, so they were gay. ‘Is this a bomber?’ I said. And the whole caboodle, must have been eighty of them, heard it and laughed. And took turns holding my hand every time we veered. To evade. Though they said there was nobody out there. Like being on a roller coaster. And we had spiked tea. I loved it.”
“You said that on purpose, I bet,” said Walter. “About the bomber. To make them feel better—I know you. Why, you’d already made all those model kits, baby. With us.”
She didn’t answer this. “Fly, fly,” she said to the air at large, fluttering her fingers. Her shoulders narrowed. “Why dance?”
On either side of her, the two guardians sat up. And spoke together, yet alternate—like the paired Dromios in the plays, or the gentlemen from Verona—or one Laertes, cut down the middle. “You have to talk about it sometime, Ruth! What are you going to tell him?”
The girl halted exactly as she was, one hand lifted at the wrist, in an artifice she seemed unconscious of. “He wants to let me go, really. Didn’t you know?” She bent both hands, making them relax and arch in what must be another exercise—or entreaty to private magic. “And I’m afraid I want to stay with him, really. That’s why I was glad you came over to get me.”
“So it’ll be the same as always,” said the hunchback, and the listener at his elbow could hear the yearning stuck like a bone in that chicken-bone chest. “You’ll stay.”
“No, Walter. I’m just coming to tell him. I’m going. With t
he troupe.”
The two made no comment. The brother’s eyes never left her.
“Oh, I know I’m not going to make a dancer, for long. Ninon knows I know that.”
“Then why would she—?” said her brother.
“Oh, I don’t know what she’ll say to him,” said the girl. Turning away brusquely, she looked straight into Casper’s eyes, denying it.
He was still drunk enough to look back. Do I know your telephone number? He was the first to look away. Outside the window, the flashes were still at it. Glow, little glowworm.
“But I know who is going to be bribed,” he heard the girl say.
“Who?” they said.
“Edwin.”
“Edwin?”
“Yes, Edwin. I don’t know exactly for what.”
“If anything,” said the deaf one, in his cleanest articulation, “it would be that young bimbo—”
“You don’t understand Edwin at all. Neither of you. You never have.”
“He’s remarkable. And Father helped to make him so.” Her brother slurred the words roughly. “What more is there to understand?”
“Bribe him for what?” said Walter. “Who?”
Silence. O perfect caesura, O dangerous.
“Why, your father’s the most honorable man in the world!”
That might be. But the young hunchback’s will to innocence was as touching as his sternum, exposed forward and plain to all. “He took me in too…and he never…He could ask for anything…I could give. Why, that afternoon, day after my parents were killed…when David brought me home from school with him…I’ve never spoken about it, but—”
“Never mind, Walt,” said David.
“Sorry,” said his friend. “Trouble with air travel, takes your feet off the ground.”
“But you did speak!” The girl’s voice burred through the seat like electricity. “Don’t you remember? It was what my mother said to you that day that made you—stay. You told me, Walter. I’ve never forgotten it.”
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