Zooey closed his eyes. "Fortunately, I know you don't mean that. Not deep down. We both know, deep in our hearts, that this is the only piece of hallowed ground in this whole goddam haunted house. This happens to be where I used to keep my rabbits. And they were saints, both of them. As a matter of fact, they were the only celibate rabbits in the--"
"Oh, shut up!" Franny said, nervously. "Just start, if you're going to. All I ask is that you at least try to be a little bit tactful, the way I'm feeling right now--that's all. You are without a doubt the most tactless person I've ever known in my life."
"Tactless! Never. Outspoken, yes. High-spirited, yes. Mettlesome. Sanguine, perhaps, to a fault. But no one has ever--"
"I said tactlessl" Franny overrode him. With considerable heat, yet trying not to be amused. "Just get sick sometime and go visit yourself, and you'll find out how tactless you are! You're the most impossible person to have around when somebody's not feeling up to par that I've ever known in my life. If somebody just has a cold, even, you know what you do? You give them a dirty look every time you see them. You're absolutely the most unsympathetic person I've ever known. You are!"
"All right, all right, all right," Zooey said, with his eyes still closed. "Nobody's perfect, buddy." Effortlessly, by softening and thinning his voice, rather than by raising it to a falsetto, he gave what was to Franny a familiar and always realistic imitation of their mother passing along a few cautionary words: "We say many things in heat, young lady, that we don't really mean and are very sorry for the next day." Then, instantly, he frowned, opened his eyes, and stared for several seconds at the ceiling. "Firstly," he said, "I think you think I have intentions of trying to take your prayer away from you or something. I don't. I do not. You can lie on that couch reciting the preamble to the Constitution for the rest of your life, as far as I'm concerned, but what I am trying--"
"That's a beautiful start. Just beautitul."
"Beg pardon?"
"Oh, shut up. Just go on, go on."
"What I started to say, I have nothing against the prayer at all. No matter what you think. You're not the first one who ever thought of saying it, you know. I once went to every Army & Navy store in New York looking for a nice, pilgrim-type rucksack. I was going to fill it with bread crumbs and start walking all over the goddam country. Saying the prayer. Spreading the Word. The whole business." Zooey hesitated. "And I don't just mention it, for God's sake, to show you I was once an Emotional Young Person Just Like Yourself."
"Why do you mention it, then?"
"Why do I mention it? I mention it because I have a couple of things I want to say to you, and it's just possible I'm not qualified to say them. On the ground that I once had a strong desire to say the prayer myself but didn't. For all I know, I may be a little jealous of your having a go at it. It's very possible, in fact. In the first place, I'm a ham. It may very well be that I hate like hell to play Martha to somebody else's Mary. Who the hell knows?"
Franny didn't choose to reply. But she drew Bloomberg slightly closer to her and gave him an odd, ambiguous little hug. Then she looked over in her brother's direction, and said, "You're a brownie. Did you know that?"
"Just hold the compliments, buddy--you may live to retract them. I'm still going to tell you what I don't like about the way you're going at this business. Qualified or not." Here Zooey stared blankly at the plaster ceiling for a matter of ten seconds or so, then closed his eyes again. "Firstly," he said, "I don't like this Camille routine. And don't interrupt me, now. I know you're legitimately falling apart, and all that. And I don't think it's an act--I don't mean that. And I don't think it's a subconscious plea for sympathy. Or any of that business. But I still say I don't like it. It's rough on Bessie, it's rough on Les--and if you don't know it yet, you're beginning to give off a little stink of piousness. God damn it, there isn't any prayer in any religion in the world that justifies piousness. I'm not saying you are pious--so just sit still--but I am saying all this hysteria business is unattractive as hell."
"Are you finished?" Franny said, sitting very notably forward. The tremor had returned to her voice.
"All right, Franny. C'mon, now. You said you'd hear me out. I've said the worst, I think. I'm just trying to tell you--I'm not trying, I'm telling you--that this just is not fair to Bessie and Les. It's terrible for them--and you know it. Did you know, God damn it, that Les was all for bringing a tangerine in to you last night before he went to bed? My God. Even Bessie can't stand stories with tangerines in them. And God knows I can't. If you're going to go on with this breakdown business, I wish to hell you'd go back to college to have it. Where you're not the baby of the family. And where, God knows, nobody'll have any urges to bring you any tangerines. And where you don't keep your goddam tap shoes in the closet."
Franny, at this point, reached rather blindly, but soundlessly, for the box of Kleenex on the marble coffee table.
Zooey was now gazing abstractedly at an old root-beer stain on the ceiling plaster, which he himself had made nineteen or twenty years earlier, with a water pistol. "The next thing that bothers me," he said, "isn't pretty, either. But I'm almost finished, so hang on a second if you can. What I don't like at all is this little hair-shirty private life of a martyr you're living back at college--this little snotty crusade you think you're leading against everybody. And I don't mean what you may think I mean, so try not to interrupt for a second. I take it that mostly you're gunning against the system of higher education. Don't spring at me, now--for the most part, I agree with you. But I hate the kind of blanket attack you're making on it. I agree with you about ninety-eight per cent on the issue. But the other two per cent scares me half to death. I had one professor when I was in college--just one, I'll grant you, but he was a big, big one--who just doesn't fit in with anything you've been talking about. He wasn't Epictetus. But he was no egomaniac, he was no faculty charm boy. He was a great and modest scholar. And what's more, I don't think I ever heard him say anything, either in or out of a classroom, that didn't seem to me to have a little bit of real wisdom in it--and sometimes a lot of it. What'll happen to him when you start your revolution? I can't bear to think about it--let's change the goddam subject. These other people you've been ranting about are something else again. This Professor Tupper. And those other two goons you were telling me about last night--Manlius, and the other one. I've had them by the dozens, and so has everybody else, and I agree they're not harmless. They're lethal as hell, as a matter of fact. God almighty. They make everything they touch turn absolutely academic and useless. Or--worse--cultish. To my mind, they're mostly to blame for the mob of ignorant oafs with diplomas that are turned loose on the country every June." Here Zooey, still looking at the ceiling, simultaneously grimaced and shook his head. "But what I don't like--and what I don't think either Seymour or Buddy would like, either, as a matter of fact--is the way you talk about all these people. I mean you don't just despise what they represent--you despise them. It's too damn personal, Franny. I mean it. You get a real little homicidal glint in your eye when you talk about this Tupper, for instance. All this business about his going into the men's room to muss his hair before he comes in to class. All that. He probably does--it goes with everything else you've told me about him. I'm not saying it doesn't. But it's none of your business, buddy, what he does with his hair. It would be all right, in a way, if you thought his personal affectations were sort of funny. Or if you felt a tiny bit sorry for him for being insecure enough to give himself a little pathetic goddam glamour. But when you tell me about it--and I'm not fooling, now--you tell me about it as though his hair was a goddam personal enemy of yours. That is not right--and you know it. If you're going to go to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl--because the enemy's there, and not because you don't like his hairdo or his goddam necktie."
A silence followed for a minute or so. It was broken only by the sound of Franny blowing her nose--an abandoned, protracted, "congested" blow, sugge
stive of a patient with a four-day-old head cold.
"It's exactly like this damned ulcer I picked up. Do you know why I have it? Or at least nine-tenths of the reason I have it? Because when I'm not thinking properly, I let my feelings about television and everything else get personal. I do exactly the same thing you do, and I'm old enough to know better." Zooey paused. His gaze fixed on the root-beer spot, he took a deep breath, through his nose. His fingers were still laced across his chest. "This last thing," he said abruptly, "will probably cause an explosion. But I can't help it. It's the most important thing of all." He appeared to consult the ceiling plaster briefly, then closed his eyes. "I don't know if you remember, but I remember a time around here, buddy, when you were going through a little apostasy from the New Testament that could be heard for miles around. Everybody was in the goddam Army at the time, and I was the one that got his ear bent. But do you remember? Do you remember it at all?"
"I was all of ten years old!" Franny said--nasally, rather dangerously.
"I know how old you were. I know very well how old you were. C'mon, now. I'm not bringing this up with the idea of throwing anything back in your teeth--my God. I'm bringing this up for a good reason. I'm bringing it up because I don't think you understood Jesus when you were a child and I don't think you understand him now. I think you've got him confused in your mind with about five or ten other religious personages, and I don't see how you can go ahead with the Jesus Prayer till you know who's who and what's what. Do you remember at all what started off that little apostasy? . . . Franny? Do you remember, or don't you?"
He didn't get an answer. Only the sound of a nose being rather violently blown.
"Well, I do, it happens. Matthew, Chapter Six. I remember it very clearly, buddy. I even remember where I was. I was back in my room putting some friction tape on my goddam hockey stick, and you banged in--all in an uproar, with the Bible wide open. You didn't like Jesus any more, and you wanted to know if you could call Seymour at his Army camp and tell him all about it. And you know why you didn't like Jesus any more? I'll tell you. Because, one, you didn't approve of his going into the synagogue and throwing all the tables and idols all over the place. That was very rude, very Unnecessary. You were sure that Solomon or somebody wouldn't have done anything like that. And the other thing you disapproved of--the thing you had the Bible open to--was the lines 'Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.' That was all right. That was lovely. That you approved of. But, when Jesus says in the same breath, 'Are ye not much better than they?'--ah, that's where little Franny gets off. That's where little Franny quits the Bible cold and goes straight to Buddha, who doesn't discriminate against all those nice fowls of the air. All those sweet, lovely chickens and geese that we used to keep up at the Lake. And don't tell me again that you were ten years old. Your age has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. There are no big changes between ten and twenty--or ten and eighty, for that matter. You still can't love a Jesus as much as you'd like to who did and said a couple of things he was at least reported to have said or done--and you know it. You're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who throws tables around. And you're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who says a human being, any human being--even a Professor Tupper--is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick."
Franny was now facing directly into the sound of Zooey's voice, sitting bolt upright, a wad of Kleenex clenched in one hand. Bloomberg was no longer in her lap. "I suppose you can," she said, shrilling.
"It's beside the point whether / can or not. But, yes, as a matter of fact, I can. I don't feel like going into it, but at least I've never tried, consciously or otherwise, to turn Jesus into St. Francis of Assisi to make him more 'lovable'--which is exactly what ninety-eight per cent of the Christian world has always insisted on doing. Not that it's to my credit. I don't happen to be attracted to the St. Francis of Assisi type. But you are. And, in my opinion, that's one of the reasons why you're having this little nervous breakdown. And especially the reason why you're having it at home. This place is made to order for you. The service is good, and there's plenty of hot and cold running ghosts. What could be more convenient? You can say your prayer here and roll Jesus and St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all in one." Zooey's voice stopped, very briefly. "Can't you see that? Can't you see how unclearly, how sloppily, you're looking at things? My God, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking. Not only is the way you're going at your prayer tenth-rate religion but, whether you know it or not, you're having a tenth-rate nervous breakdown. I've seen a couple of real breakdowns, and the people who had them didn't bother to pick and choose the place they--"
"Just stop it, Zooey! Just stop it!" Franny said, sobbing.
"I will, in a minute, in just a minute. Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you're able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can't you use the same energy to stay well and busy? All right, so I'm being unreasonable. I'm being very unreasonable now. But, my God, how you try what little patience I was born with I You take a look around your college campus, and the world, and politics, and one season of summer stock, and you listen to the conversation of a bunch of nitwit college students, and you decide that everything's ego, ego, ego, and the only intelligent thing for a girl to do is to lie around and shave her head and say the Jesus Prayer and beg God for a little mystical experience that'll make her nice and happy."
Franny shrieked, "Will you shut up, please?" "In just a second, in just a second. You keep talking about ego. My God, it would take Christ himself to decide what's ego and what isn't. This is God's universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what's ego and what isn't. What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don't! But you'd like your friend Professor Tupper's ego taken away from him. That's different. And maybe it is. Maybe it is. But don't go screaming about egos in general. In my opinion, if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren't using their true egos. Take your Professor Tupper. From what you say about him, anyway, I'd lay almost any odds that this thing he's using, the thing you think is his ego, isn't his ego at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic faculty. My God, you've been around schools long enough to know the score. Scratch an incompetent schoolteacher--or, for that matter, college professor--and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic or a goddam stonemason. Take LeSage, for instance--my friend, my employer, my Rose of Madison Avenue. You think it was his ego that got him into television? Like hell it was I He has no ego any more--if ever he had one. He's split it up into hobbies. He has at least three hobbies that I know of--and they all have to do with a big, ten-thousand-dollar workroom in his basement, full of power tools and vises and God knows what else. Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies." Zooey suddenly broke off. He was still lying with his eyes closed and his fingers laced, quite tightly, across his chest, his shirt-front. But he now ground his face into a deliberately pained expression--a form, apparently, of self-criticism. "Hobbies," he said. "How did I get off onto hobbies?" He lay still for a moment.
Franny's sobs, no more than partly muffled by a satin pillow, made the only sound in the room. Bloomberg was now sitting under the piano, on an island of sunshine, rather picturesquely washing his face.
"Always the heavy," Zooey said, a trifle too matter-of-factly. "No matter what I say, I sound as though I'm undermining your Jesus Prayer. And I'm not, God damn it. All I am is against why and how and where you're using it. I'd like to be convinced--I'd love to be convinced--that you're not using it as a substitute for doing whatever t
he hell your duty is in life, or just your daily duty. Worse than that, though, I can't see--I swear to God I can't--how you can pray to a Jesus you don't even understand. And what's really inexcusable, considering that you've been funnel-fed on just about the same amount of religious philosophy that I have--what's really inexcusable is that you don't try to understand him. There'd be some excuse for it if you were either a very simple person, like the pilgrim, or a very goddam desperate person--but you're not simple, buddy, and you're not that damned desperate." Just then, for the first time since he had lain down, Zooey, with his eyes still shut, compressed his lips--very much, as a matter of parenthetical fact, in the habitual style of his mother. "God almighty, Franny," he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been. You don't face any facts. This same damned attitude of not facing facts is what got you into this messy state of mind in the first place, and it can't possibly get you out of it."
Zooey abruptly placed his hands over his now quite damp face, left them there for an instant, then removed them. He refolded them. His voice picked up again, almost perfectly conversational in tone. "The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can't see why anybody--unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim--would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls--but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that--but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God." Zooey here clapped his hands together--only once, and not loud, and very probably in spite of himself. His hands were refolded across his chest almost, as it were, before the clap was out. "Oh, my God, what a mind!" he said. "Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don't say Solomon. Solomon would have had a few pithy words for the occasion. I'm not sure Socrates wouldn't have, for that matter. Crito, or somebody, would have managed to pull him aside just long enough to get a couple of well-chosen words for the record. But most of all, above everything else, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff. Why don't you think of these things? I mean it, Franny, I'm being serious. When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer--you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission. This was no St. Francis, with enough time to knock out a few canticles, or to preach to the birds, or to do any of the other endearing things so close to Franny Glass's heart. I'm being serious now, God damn it. How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou tryst-ing place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that--and you do--and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers." He suddenly sat up, shot forward, with an almost calisthenic-like swiftness, to look at Franny. His shirt was, in the familiar phrase, wringing wet. "If Jesus had intended the prayer to be used for--"
Franny and Zooey Page 12
