The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  “Did you know there are three fundamental pieces of furniture— the table, the bed, and the chair—and that a people behaves according to the article of furniture dominant in its culture? Did you know that the living-room sofa, or couch, is only a sort of hybrid bed, and that it was introduced by the degenerate Assyrians as a means of formalizing adultery?”

  “You’re going too fast, I can’t take all this—”

  “There’s more. There’s always more. If you miss one truth there’ll be another along. It’s like streetcars. Wait, wait. The Axis Powers were the only nations involved in World War II which didn’t conclude their news broadcasts with weather reports. No question of secrecy was involved; it was simply a matter of the lack of regard for one’s fellows. Since the people within the range of a given broadcast knew whether it was raining or the sun was shining, they didn’t care what was happening in the rest of the country.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Flags! Red, green, blue, white, black and gold are the predominant colors used throughout the world for its flags because those are the colors—with the exception of red, which is always blood—that symbolize not only the basic forces of nature but the particular natural forces most valued by a culture. Your flag is a dead giveaway.”

  “What has this—”

  “Sandwiches! What’s the thickness ratio of the contents of a sandwich relative to its bread? Is lettuce used to add height? This gives us the hypocrisy quotient. Or those little soaps with a hotel’s trademark on the wrapper—”

  “What? What about those soaps?”

  “Or matchbooks! Matchbooks particularly. Why does a man become attached to the iconography of a particular trademark?”

  “Why does he? Is that significant?”

  “What’s to be made of the fact that soaps wane with use, that fire consumes the matchstick, that the height of a pile of letterhead stationery goes down in a drawer, that a swizzle stick is made to be snapped in two?”

  “What? What is to be made of it?”

  “Oh Dick, Dick. My real work isn’t the Seminoles, it isn’t zoos, it isn’t furniture or artifacts. It’s your program. My real work is your program, Dick. Look out, Dick. Be careful. Please be more careful. Watch your step. A scientist is warning you. Don’t take calls after the show. Don’t put people on hold. Get your rest, try not to worry. Be like the man in Cincinnati.”

  “Who is this? What’s this all about? What are you saying to me?”

  The anthropologist giggled and broke off; Dick heard the buzz of the broken connection. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but he was almost certain that the man had been disguising his voice. The giggle had been a sort of sudden relaxation. Something about it had seemed familiar.

  And then he remembered. A name flashed into his mind. No, he couldn’t be mistaken. Behr-Bleibtreau! It had to be. The idea was disquieting at first, but later, going back to the Deauville in the car, he was filled with a marvelous sense of relief. An enemy! He had an enemy. An enemy had appeared!

  5

  Angela called. Dick asked after Robert and the baby. They were both asleep, Angela said, but Robert would be getting up soon. If he wanted she could wake him now. Dick told her to let him sleep.

  He asked if she’d be working in the fall—she taught third grade in an all-black Tallahassee public school—but Angela was vague about it. It was very difficult, she said, to get someone really reliable to come in, and the baby was on a schedule which it might not be a good idea to upset just now.

  Dick asked if Robert, who was on the Attorney General’s staff, was involved in that Ft. Myers business. (Recently there had been a ghetto revolt in the Gulf Coast town, and the local authorities had been pressing for the death sentence under Florida’s Anti-Sedition Act.) Angela told him they were both so busy now they didn’t discuss each other’s work much. In fact, she said, she didn’t really know what had happened in Ft. Myers because she hadn’t been reading the papers. Dick started to explain, but Angela broke in to say that she thought she heard a sound from the baby’s room. He held on while she went in to check.

  The Sohnshilds were New Yorkers who had come to Florida in a spirit of missionary zeal, Robert believing it was more to the point to guarantee due process in the South than in New York. From the occasional references to him in the newspapers Dick knew that Robert was highly respected and very effective.

  Oddly enough Dick Gibson had heard of the couple even before they became Mail Baggers; he had read an article about the Sohnshilds in Esquire in the early sixties. Angela, the article said, had graduated from Smith with a Magna in Philosophy and had met Robert when both were graduate students at Harvard. By the time the article appeared each of them had already been through a number of successful careers. Angela had given piano recitals at Carnegie Hall and had appeared as a soloist with the London Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall. Her essays on the New Left, written in the fifties while she was still a graduate student, were said to be the best philosophic justification that radical politics had ever had. She had even been—though this had not been publicized because of her associations with the left—a speech writer for the Kennedys. Robert Sohnshild, as illustrious as his wife, had given up a successful private practice and an inherited seat on the New York Stock Exchange to become the first major news analyst on National Educational Televison, and, as an adviser to SCLC, had helped develop the principle of the Mississippi Freedom Schools. Somewhere he had also found time to establish the first successful, nationally distributed underground newspaper.

  The article in Esquire had been entitled “The Silver Spoon Set,” and in it four immensely successful young couples had posed, grinning, in full color in their lovely New York, Washington and Boston apartments, with silver spoons dangling from their mouths like cigarettes. In the text Robert was quoted as wanting to extricate himself from the tangled skein of personal success. “Cut your winnings,” he had said. “It’s a Thoreauvian thing. I refuse to be a great man. There are too many great men already. They explode on the world like bombs. What I want, and Angela agrees, is for men of talent and judgment and imagination—for men of success—to turn their backs on the ‘world’ and begin to pay some attention to the community.”

  The Sohnshilds had come to Florida at about the same time Dick started his show, and had called the program as a sort of lark the first week it was on the air. Robert, slightly tipsy and evidently very happy, had taken the phone away from Angela to announce his wife’s pregnancy. Though they had been married twelve years, it was to be their first child. Excited by their celebrity, Dick said that the unborn child would be the program’s mascot, and he invited the couple to become regular callers. Though they stopped phoning after the baby came, Angela had begun to call the program again about five months before.

  Angela returned to the phone.

  “It was nothing,” she said, “she probably just stirred in her sleep.”

  The baby was born with irises white as shirt buttons. It was blind.

  One of them was always awake when the baby was asleep. They had not been out of the house together since its birth and kept a constant vigil over its crib, convinced that its odd eyes were the signal of a crippled chemistry. When Angela called now she often sounded wild, offering an incredible picture of their grief. One night Dick had had to cut her off the air when she went into the details of her fifty-five hour labor.

  “You know,” Angela said, “Robert thinks I’m foolish, but I really think her irises are beginning to darken.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “Oh they’ll never be black, of course, but many people have gray eyes and see perfectly well. Robert’s eyes are grayish.”

  “Why don’t you get some sleep, Angela?” Dick said gently.

  “You know,” she said, “when Carol’s sleeping and her eyes are closed, she’s so beautiful. You can’t tell there’s a thing wrong with her. She’s just like anyone else. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind staying up half the ni
ght. So I can watch her and see how lovely she is with her eyes shut. Is that disloyal? Do you think it’s selfish?”

  “No, Angela, of course not.” Then he asked if she still kept up her piano.

  “Oh, yes,” Angela said. “Carol loves to hear me play.” She paused, and added fiercely, “Her hearing sense is no more acute than any child’s her age. I consider it a plus that she hasn’t begun to compensate. Perhaps she perceives light; perhaps that’s why. She’s no more tactile than another child. She’s hardly ticklish.”

  The baby would be two years old soon. The quality of their resistance seemed awful to him, worse even than their luck.

  “I still have them,” Angela said, and laughed bitterly.

  “I’m sorry, Angela, what was that?”

  “The silver spoons,” she said. “I still have them. I feed Carol her cereal from them.”

  Now whenever he picked up the phone he expected the caller to be Behr-Bleibtreau.

  He picked up the phone.

  “Hi,” a woman said, “this is Ingrid.” It was not a good connection. A baby, crying in the background, further impaired his understanding. “I called once before. On the occasion of my divorce. You probably don’t remember.” Offhand, he didn’t.

  “How are you, Ingrid?”

  “Never better,” she said glumly.

  “What have you been doing with yourself, Ingrid?”

  “Well, I’m a gay divorcee, the merry widow.” He hoped she wasn’t drinking; he didn’t want anything to happen to the baby.

  “Hey, you want to hear something wild? I bought this ’69 Buick hard-top and it’s got this gadget on it, a sort of memory device. It buzzes when you leave the key in the ignition and the door is open or the engine isn’t running. It’s optional, but I’m queer for inventions—autronic eyes that dim your headlights at the approach of oncoming cars, remote control TV sets, garage doors that open at the sound of a horn, timers that turn things on and off. I’ve got tortoise-shell prisms. I wear them like glasses and watch TV while I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. There’s a spigot for ice water on the door of my refrigerator. I have a ten-speed blender. I dissolve frozen orange juice in it. Oh, the things I’ve bought—there are Magic Fingers in my beds, great underwater lights in my swimming pool, water softeners, FM stereos, tape decks, rheostats, garbage compressors—you name it. Last month my electric bill was one hundred and seventy-eight dollars and fourteen cents. And I’ll tell you something—my life’s no emptier than the next one’s. I can take electricity or leave it alone. Things don’t corrupt you; they barely distract you.

  “I was at this party—my husband was there; we often run into each other; well, we know the same people and they know we still see each other; it’s no big deal—and it was getting a little rough and I thought maybe it was time to go. Well, when I left my friend’s house I could hear that gadget on my car. I don’t know why I hadn’t heard it when I’d parked; maybe I had. It was a kind of whining, not a buzz. It was like the sound of an animal in a trap, or like a child when it’s sick, or—you’ll laugh—like my own whimpering. Only I don’t whimper, never. This just sounded like whimpering would if I did. I’m not being dramatic—I was fascinated. When I got in and turned the key the noise stopped. Well, I know this sounds silly, but I thought, My God, maybe I’ve killed it. I suppose I was a little high. Sometimes I drink too much.

  “You know what I did when I thought I’d killed it? I turned off the motor to hear it again. Some people from the party found me there. They thought I was too drunk to drive or something. Well, I couldn’t just sit there all night, and these people meant well, but of course I couldn’t tell them what I’d been up to, so I pretended that I was too drunk, and I let them take me home in their car. When I got there I ducked in and asked the baby-sitter if she could stay for another thirty minutes, and called a cab and went back for my car.

  “You know I never stopped hearing it? When I got back it was the same as in my head. Maybe I have a sort of perfect pitch for machines.

  “I got in my car. There were still some people at the party and I didn’t want them to find me when they left, so I started the engine and of course the sound stopped at once. I remembered that if the door wasn’t shut properly the gadget was supposed to whine then too, so I opened my door just enough to disengage the lock, and the sound came back. Whenever I made a left turn and the door swung free the whine rose to a howl. I went out of my way to turn corners to hear it howl, to punish it.

  “It was crazy. I couldn’t get home. My left turns pushed me in circles, taking me places I’d never been. I realized that if I was to leave the door open I had to stay in good neighborhoods. The only one I could think of was my own, so I kept circling my own block. When I passed my house I could see the baby-sitter looking out the window for me. Maybe she heard the sound. Driving the car must have charged the battery and it seemed to scream, to sing like a siren. Maybe she even recognized the car, but I couldn’t stop.

  “By now I was low on gas. I found a station that was open all night, and the attendant asked me to turn off the engine while he checked under the hood. I pulled the key out of the ignition and shut the door tight. I still heard it in my head, but it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t as real; my pitch was imperfect finally. I have all the major credit cards, but I was impatient. I gave him cash and told him to keep the change. When I got back to my neighborhood the sitter’s father was looking out my window. She lives next door and he must have come over to take her place. I knew I had to go in. I gave him the money for his daughter, three dollars more than she was supposed to get. He was angry at first that I’d kept her out so late, but then he … well, sort of looked at me. I’ve known the man years; we’re friends. It was the hour; the lateness of the hour excited him. A woman coming home alone at four-thirty in the morning was thrilling to him. A woman giving him money out of her purse worked him up. God knows where he thought I’d been or what I’d been doing. He tried to kiss me, touch my breasts. ‘Oh, Ingrid,’ he said. He forced me down on the couch. ‘Please, Jack,’ I said. ‘Come on, Ingrid, what’s the difference? You’re one hell of an attractive woman.’ I know what he thought. Years we’d known each other, and he’d never made a pass. Not during my lousy marriage, not during my divorce, not once when he saw me going out with men or my ex spent the night at the house. The lateness of the hour, that excited him. Taking money from me for his daughter, the three dollars extra I gave because I’d inconvenienced her and which he thought was hush money.

  “‘I’ve been driving,’ I told him. ‘Jack, I left the party hours ago. I’ve been out driving by myself. Let me up, Jack. Jack, let me up.’ I think I embarrassed him; I think I hurt his feelings.

  “I put the car in the garage, left the key in the ignition and opened the windows. Maybe I heard it in my room, maybe it was only the whining in my head.

  “I can’t sleep without it. It has to be on. I use up batteries.”

  Then Ingrid said something which Dick couldn’t quite make out. “I think we have a bad connection,” he said.

  “I said it’s not an animal in a trap, not a baby crying.”

  “Have it disconnected. You don’t need it.”

  “I need it. It’s what—” The last word was lost.

  “What was that?”

  “I said it’s what mourns. I need it. It’s what says that everything isn’t okay. It’s my gadget for grief.”

  “Get rid of it,” Dick said.

  “Who would keen, who would cry?”

  “Look, this connection is very bad. I can hardly hear you. There’s some sort of interference.”

  “That—”

  “What did you say?”

  “That’s it. What you hear. I had a phone put in my car. I’m in a lover’s lane I know. The doors are locked and the engine’s off and the key’s in the ignition. Listen.”

  She must have put the phone up to the noise, because suddenly it became louder. Or perhaps she had opened the door and was s
winging it back and forth on its hinge, for the sound would rise to a howl and then suddenly grow softer.

  Dick Gibson listened to the queer yowl of the device, then heard the woman’s voice again. She seemed to be crooning a sort of encouragement to it. He strained to make out the words.

  “You tell ’em,” she was saying. “Tell him when he comes in. You tell him, sweetie, I st-st-stutter.”

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Henry.” It was Henry Harper.

  “What? Who? Oh, yeah.”

  “Isn’t this Henry Harper?”

  “You don’t think I’d be fool enough to give my right name, do you? Yes, I’m the boy you know as Henry Harper.”

  “Henry Harper isn’t your name?”

  “No it isn’t, and it’s a darn good thing I never told you what it really is. I had a lucky hunch when I called that first time and decided I’d better not be entirely open with you.”

  “Well, I don’t know how to respond to something like that, Henry. You put me at a terrible disadvantage. You’re free to misrepresent yourself as much as you please, and there’s nothing I can do about it except cut you off the air. I don’t like to do that to any caller, Henry. … You see? I called you Henry. I must sound pretty foolish if that isn’t who you are.” Dick was genuinely upset. “I suppose all the rest of it, your being rich and nine years old and all alone in an enormous mansion, that’s all misrepresentation too.”

  “Of course not. It’s an evidence of their truth that I couldn’t give my name out over the air.”

  “I see,” Dick said coolly.

  “I’m afraid you don’t at all. Do you know something? There are a whale of a lot of nosy parkers who listen to this program. If you look me up in the supplement to the Directory you’ll see I gave a P.O. box number instead of an address. That was another precaution, of course.”

  “A precaution against what?”

  “Why, against interference with my way of life. Look, I’m an immensely wealthy orphan. There’s the estate itself and three-quarters of a million dollars cold cash in my piggy banks, and I stand to come into a good deal more than that when I achieve my majority. Don’t you know these things represent enormous temptations to wicked and unscrupulous persons? My age makes me extremely vulnerable to vultures, and my status in the eyes of the authorities trebles that vulnerability.”