MEL SON: A perfect thirty-eight—
PEPPER STEEP: Thank you, love—and saw that the demand for Miss Steep’s services was falling off rather too dramatically, I reverted to type, for I’m not a perfect thirty-eight, and I do not, whatever my charms of face and figure, exude riches, which is what’s called for today—I mean that 5th Avenue look that speaks of a four- year-old boy in the Central Park sunshine with his nanny, I mean that Biarritz aura. It is nature’s way. At any rate at thirty-one and a half I reverted to type, which in my case is Big Boned Northern California Rain Forest, and I knew that if I were to keep body and soul together I would have to leave New York. Well! What could a thirty-one-and-a-half-year-old gal do who all her working life had done nothing but watch the birdy? The birdy had flown. To start up a modeling agency or a modeling school in New York or any of those other places I mentioned and hope to make a go of it was simply out of the question. To be myself on the staff of such a school was inside the question but out of the answer. I’d earned too much big money in New York to take that kind of cut. But I had saved some of this money, and I thought I might start up an agency school in some smaller city. She’s an honest wench, however. She knew the market, knew the teensy-weensy demand for the graduates of such schools in such places. She would not have been giving full dollar value. The solution was the Charm School. A charm school in a town like Hartford has some tie-in with advertising. The big stores will use its girls for their Christmas brochures and ads. The developer may put one of its blondes up on water skis for the Hidden Lakes Estates billboard. (Forgive me my style as you did Dick’s. Probably as I go on I will work myself out of it. It’s just the way those of us who have been around, and are not perhaps too intelligent, talk.) But mostly the function of the Charm School is to teach charm, i.e. (very rapidly), “(1) a power of pleasing or attracting, as through personality or beauty; (2) a trait or feature imparting this power; (3) attractiveness—”
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: “(4) a trinket to be worn on a chain bracelet, etc.; (5) something worn for its supposed magical effect; amulet; (6) any action supposed to have magical power; (7) the chanting or recitation of a magic verse or formula.”
PEPPER STEEP: Yes. “—vt (8) to delight or please greatly by beauty, attractiveness, etc.; enchant.”
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: “(9) to act upon someone or something with or as with a compelling or magical force!”
PEPPER STEEP: Yes. I don’t do that.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on, please.
PEPPER STEEP: We aren’t a college, or even a finishing school. We’re not accredited. Our girls aren’t wealthy, they don’t come out of or go back into what is called polite society. You might be amused if you saw some of the things we do, there are books in our school, for instance, but we balance them on our heads. You’d be amused, but you’d need some charm yourself if you laughed. We render a service, you see. To the clumsy we do, the shy, the unconfident, to the ungraceful and ungainly and maladroit, to the bunglers and klutzes, the tongue-tied of body and spirit. Oh, we get them—all the wallflowers and fatties, all the unpopular, cripples to acne and dandruff. And I’m not just talking about teen-agers. There are housewives too. I mean the timid, I mean the terrified. There are women—a lot of them mothers—whose husbands have never seen them naked, who undress in closets and bathe only when they’re alone in the house—with the bathroom door locked and the radio off. They don’t go to doctors and they can’t purchase sanitary napkins in a drugstore, or bring themselves to buy a roll of toilet paper. I know one too shy to try on a dress in the curtained booth at the back of the department store, and another who won’t stand in front of a three-way mirror. Oh, the terror in Hartford! You just don’t know.
We have a winding staircase in my studio. Especially constructed; it cost me two thousand dollars. They come down the staircase with a book on their head. Making their entrances. At the level of the eighth stair they must begin to speak. “How do you do, Mrs. Powers? I’m so pleased you could come. Uncle Jim will be down in a moment. He asked me to take your coat and to see if there’s anything you’d like.” And they have to finish just as their foot touches the last tread. “Oh! Mr. Strong. I didn’t know you’d been admitted. Clotilda didn’t tell me. Would you like a cucumber sandwich in the library?” “Bless me, it’s Roger Thunder. How are you, Roger? Back from Persia already? How did you leave the Shah?” Don’t laugh—it’s true. The girls invent the speeches. And the names—I don’t make those up. They always use names like Powers and Strong and Thunder. They’re afraid, you see, and invest all other humans—even those of the mind: there’s no one at the bottom of the staircase—with strengths and fiercenesses.
“Hello, Mr. Lamb. Leave your umbrella outside, please. You’re dripping water on the rug.” Only the advanced ones say things like that.
MEL SON: What about this memory expert?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: She’s coming to that.
PEPPER STEEP: I’m coming to that.
We have toy telephones. They talk to tradesmen, to people who’ve invited them to parties. Or they call up the most distinguished people in Hartford and invite them to parties. They speak to the accounts department of stores to straighten out incorrect billings. Or I give assignments. I tell a woman that her lover is on the line but that her husband is standing in the room. Or that she must speak to the doctor in the middle of the night. “Yes, Doctor. Thank God your answering service was able to reach you. My breasts feel funny. My nipples have turned the color of root beer. I’ve a pimple suppurating in my behind. My vagina is steaming.” We teach them diets and care of the skin, grooming of the hair they learn, what cosmetics to use, the juice of which fruits for complexion. Clothes and color scheme and scents and polite conversation and how to bend to pick up a fallen glove and get in and out of cars.
And we offer instruction in courage and indifference. I take them with me to restaurants and have them return their steak or their soup while I sit by silently. Or we’ll go to waiting rooms in lawyers’ offices and when no one is looking they’ll take a tin of condoms from their purse and ask aloud, “Excuse me, who dropped this?” We—
MEL SON: Dick, she’s got to be one of your sponsors. This is the longest plug I’ve ever heard.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Be quiet.
MEL SON: I … I …
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on, Miss Steep. I want to hear about the memory expert now.
PEPPER STEEP: The memory expert. Yes. Arnold. He wrote me a letter. He wanted to enroll in the Charm School. I had been thinking for some time of admitting boys. They do in the dancing classes. Isn’t all the terror sexual, anyway? I agreed to see him and we set up an appointment for the following week. He came on a bus from Springfield. As soon as I saw him I knew it couldn’t work. I had expected a young man, a teen-ager, but he was older than me, in his early forties.
“Won’t the charm schools in Springfield have you?” I asked. “There’s Miss Doris’s, and a branch of Lovely Young Thing.”
“I never looked into them.”
“Let’s be frank with each other, shall we, Mr.—what is it?— Menchman?”
“Ma’am?”
“Are you straight? Or are you looking for some kind of … well—thrill?”
“Oh, no, ma’am.”
“Well, then?”
“I saw your presentation on television.”
Sometimes I’m asked to bring over some of the younger girls to one of the local stations. They act out social situations, do tea parties, that sort of thing. You remember this, Mel; you were on one of those shows.
MEL SON: I—I—
PEPPER STEEP: “You saw my presentation on television. Yes?”
“They were so poised. They were just children, but they were so poised.”
“Well, that’s very nice. Thank you, but I don’t—”
“Mignonne Gumbs, 13, Sheila Smith, 12, Pamela Fairfife, 14—I never saw composure like that in such young children. When Pamela Fairfife spilled tea on Mignonne Gumbs—that wa
sn’t planned, was it?”
“No. The tea was too hot. She couldn’t hold the handle.”
“I thought not. It looked too real. The way Mignonne Gumbs reassured her—telling her that the fabric was stain-resistant, and that she needn’t worry about having scalded her because the tea had landed on old scar tissue. She made up that part about the scar tissue, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
“Miss Gumbs had a lot of confidence by the time she graduated.”
“I could see that.”
“Those three particular students—that program was more than a year ago. How do you remember their names?”
“Oh, well, I remember.”
“I see,” I told him. “I really don’t think there’d be much for you in our school. You don’t want to learn to pour tea or come down steps.”
“From behind curtains.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“From behind curtains … onto a stage. Down into the audience. I—um … to talk … in front of people.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand.”
“I’m clumsy, Miss Steep. Your secretary, Miss Ganchi, let me into your office before you arrived or you would have seen. I tripped. I can’t even walk into a room. It’s as hard for me to cross a threshold as it might be for someone else to step from one car to another in a moving train. I don’t know how to stand, what to do with my hands—anything. People laugh.”
“I’m sorry. Your presence would be disruptive in our classes. You’d embarrass the girls.”
“They were wonderful.”
“Yes, well—”
“If it’s a question of money …”
“It’s not.”
“I need the training.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m—I’m a memory expert. I’m in show business. Or rather, I would be if I weren’t so clumsy. Listen, my act is the greatest in the world. I know that sounds very bold, but it’s true. I … I’m a freak, you see.”
“Please, Mr. Menchman.”
“No, it’s so. I am. I mean, there’s no trick to what I do. I do it. It’s not even talent. I have an eidetic imagination.”
“An eidetic—?”
“It’s called that. There are only about a hundred of us in the whole world. Maybe three—I’m one—are true eidetics.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s very simple. You’ve heard of a photographic mind?”
“Yes, of course.”
“There is such a thing. Nobody understands how it works, really, but it’s visual. Somehow, whatever I look at registers on the retina and on the mind simultaneously. In other people the mind receives the impression a zillionth of a fraction of a moment late, but with an eidetic there’s no lag. At least that’s what the theory is now. Anyway, when an eidetic tries to recall something he sees this picture. All he has to do is look at it. He can even close his eyes—as a matter of fact, he has to close his eyes or it would be like a double exposure—and the picture is right there on the eyelids.”
“Fascinating.”
“Oh, I’m a freak is all.”
“Do you remember things forever?”
“No. The pictures fade after a time. Just as a photographic proof will. They even turn that same murky purple. But it lasts for a couple of years at least. Even then I don’t forget everything; I just remember the way normal people do.”
“Well, I must say … Still, I don’t see how I’m the person to help you.”
“Oh, you are, Miss Steep. I’ll never forget how grand those children were. Sheila Smith lived next door to me before her family moved to Hartford. She was the sloppiest little girl I’d ever seen. There wasn’t a time when her nose wasn’t running. When I saw her on television … she’s so changed. Change me, Miss Steep. Teach me my body. I know I could be great—my act—but my body … People laugh. They don’t even pay attention to the feats I do; they think I’m a comic. You have to be in control of your body to be in the show business.”
“All I could teach you is to move like a woman. They’d still laugh.”
“No. You’d teach me grace.”
“It’s impossible, Mr. Menchman. The girls would be too embarrassed.”
“Then take me as a special student. I have money. Charge what you want. … Maybe you don’t believe me. Is that it? This is what is behind me in this room: To the right of the door as one enters—eidetics see from right to left, thus giving substance to the speculation that the idiosyncrasy is passed on through a Semitic gene; my grandfather on my father’s side was Jewish—are three blue bookshelves about five feet wide and held on the wall by twelve brackets, four brackets to a shelf, with three screws in each bracket. One bracket, the second from the right on the highest shelf, has Phillips head screws. On the top shelf are seventeen books, on the middle twelve, on the bottom fourteen. If you pick a shelf I will give you the titles, authors, publishers and colors of the spines or book jackets.”
“This isn’t necessary.”
“You think it’s a trick. I work with no assistant. Your trickster has an assistant.”
“I don’t think it’s a trick. It simply isn’t necessary.”
“It is necessary. I want you to know what I can do. Before you turn me down, you must see.”
“Please, Mr. Menchman. I believe you … Very well, what’s the fourth book from the left on the bottom shelf?”
“Titles and Forms of Address: A Guide to Their Correct Use. Armiger. A. and C. Black. Buff … Am I correct, madam?”
“Oh, I suppose so. I can’t see from here. Anyway, that isn’t the point.”
“The fifth book—”
“Really, Mr. Menchman—”
“The fifth book is Manners and Conduct by the Deans of Girls in Chicago High Schools. Allyn and Bacon. Mauve. The sixth—”
“You could have memorized all that before I came in. Turn around in your chair. Go on. Swivel about and face the bookshelf, please.”
“Are you—?”
“Just do it … Watch out!”
“What happened? What was that?”
“You knocked over an ashtray. Never mind, it didn’t break. Now keep your back to me.”
“Is this a test?”
“There are file cabinets behind my chair—”
“Two stacks, each containing four drawers. Am I correct, madam?”
“On the front of each drawer there’s a small frame with a manila card in it. What do the cards say?”
“A-Do. Dr-Hes. Hest-Q. R-Shipman. Shir-V. W-X-Y-Z. Two drawers have no cards. Do I have it right, madam?”
Well, I won’t go on about it. There are hundreds of things in even the emptiest of rooms. Looking only once, only casually, Arnold saw and registered them all. Every detail made its impression on him. At first only mildly interested but gradually fascinated, I led him about the Charm School—it was after hours by now—took him into rooms, turned on the lights and let him look briefly. Then he gave me back all of it. All of it. The thousand things, the million details. And it was just as if I were blind and he was giving me sight. Naming everything, hearing my inventory called off—the precise placement of the furniture, bare spots in the rugs, the patterns in the drapes, the number of holes in the speakers of the toy telephones—I had it all for the first time. I hadn’t known how much there was before.
By the time we’d finished our tour I had decided to help him. I could see he’d been telling the truth, both as to his gifts and his drawbacks. He was immensely clumsy—a stumbler, a toe stubber, a lumbering blunderer—and immensely excited. His excitement fed his clumsiness. Those pathetic flourishes, his corny “Am I correct, madam?” learned from some old fraud in a tent show. But his mind! His mind was a gallery of the world, of everything he had ever seen. Stuffed to bursting it was with all the odd-lots of memory, a warehouse of surfaces. No wonder he couldn’t move! So I agreed to work with him, though for the sake of the girls it had to be afte
r hours.
We used my studio, and after great effort I got him first to the point where he could stand in place without falling, then to where he didn’t knock telephones from desk tops when he sat down, and at last to move across a room without tripping. I didn’t dare try him on the stairway, of course, but after two or three weeks, he became relatively adroit in the simple conquest of ordinary human space. We still had no idea how he would behave on a stage—the equipment in my studio was limited—so neither of us really knew whether he was making any practical progress. We devised a curtain, however—that is, I did; Arnold was a long way off from doing any work with his hands—the area in front of it became Arnold’s “stage.”
The Dick Gibson Show Page 20
