"Yes, I'm interested! Of course I'm interested! What do you think I'm--"
"All right, just don't yak at me for a minute, then," Zooey said, and rested the small of his back against the edge of the washbowl. He went on using the nail file. "Both books are about a Russian peasant, around the turn of the century," he said, in what was, for his implacably matter-of-fact voice, a rather narrative tone. "He's a very simple, very sweet little guy with a withered arm. Which, of course, makes him a natural for Franny, with that goddam Bide-a-Wee Home heart of hers." He pivoted around, picked up his cigarette from the frosted-glass ledge, dragged on it, then began to file his nails. "In the beginning, the little peasant tells you, he had a wife and a farm. But he had a looney brother who burned down the farm--and then, later, I think, the wife just died. Anyway, he Starts on his pilgrimage. And he has a problem. He's been reading the Bible all his life, and he wants to know what it means when it says, in Thessalonians, Pray without ceasing.' That one line keeps haunting him." Zooey reached for his cigarette again, dragged on it, and then said, "There's another, similar line in Timothy--'I will therefore that men pray everywhere.' And Christ himself, as a matter of fact, says, 'Men ought always to pray and not to faint.'" Zooey used his nail file in silence for a moment, his face singularly dour in expression. "So, anyway, he begins his pilgrimage to find a teacher," he said. "Someone who can teach him how to pray incessantly, and why. He walks and he walks and he walks, from one church and shrine to another, talking to this priest and that. Till finally he meets a simple old monk who apparently knows what it's all about. The old monk tells him that the one prayer acceptable to God at all times, and'desired' by God, is the Jesus Prayer--'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.' Actually, the whole prayer is 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner,' but none of the adepts in either of the Pilgrim books put any emphasis--thank God--on the miserable-sinner part. Anyway, the old monk explains to him what will happen if the prayer is said incessantly. He gives him some practice sessions with it and sends him home. And--to make a long story short--after a while the little pilgrim becomes proficient with the prayer. He masters it. He's overjoyed with his new spiritual life, and he goes on hiking all over Russia--through dense forests, through towns, villages, and so on--saying his prayer as he goes along and telling everyone he happens to meet how to say it, too." Zooey looked up, brusquely, at his mother. "You listening to this? You fat old Druid?" he inquired. "Or are you just staring at my gorgeous face?"
Mrs. Glass, bristling, said, "Certainly I'm listening!"
"All right--I don't want any party poops around here." Zooey gave a great guffaw, then took a drag on his cigarette. He kept the cigarette stationed between his fingers and went on using the nail file. "The first of the two little books, 'The Way of a Pilgrim,'" he said, "has mostly to do with the adventures the little pilgrim has on the road. Whom he meets, what he says to them, what they say to him--he meets some goddam nice people, incidentally. The sequel, 'The Pilgrim Continues His Way,' is mostly a dissertation in dialogue form on the whys and wherefores of the Jesus Prayer. The pilgrim, a professor, a monk, and some sort of hermit all meet and hash over things. And that's all there is to it, really." Zooey glanced up, very briefly, at his mother, then switched the nail file over to his left hand. "The aim of both little books, if you're interested," he said, "is supposedly to wake everybody up to the need and benefits of saying the Jesus Prayer incessantly. First under the supervision of a qualified teacher---a sort of Christian guru--and then, after the person's mastered it to some extent, he's supposed to go on with it on his own. And the main idea is that it's not supposed to be just for pious bastards and breast-beaters. You can be busy robbing the goddam poor box, but you're to say the prayer while you rob it. Enlightenment's supposed to come with the prayer, not before it." Zooey frowned, but academically. "The idea, really, is that sooner or later, completely on its own, the prayer moves from the lips and the head down to a center in the heart and becomes an automatic function in the person, right along with the heartbeat. And then, after a time, once the prayer is automatic in the heart, the person is supposed to enter into the so-called reality of things. The subject doesn't really come up in either of the books, but, in Eastern terms, there are seven subtle centers in the body, called cha-kras, and the one most closely connected with the heart is called anahata, which is supposed to be sensitive and powerful as hell, and when it's activated, it, in turn, activates another of these centers, between the eyebrows, called ajna--it's the pineal gland, really, or, rather, an aura around the pineal gland--and then, bingo, there's an opening of what mystics call the'third eye.' It's nothing new, for God's sake. It didn't just start with the little pilgrim's crowd, I mean. In India, for God knows how many centuries, it's been known as japam. Japam is just the repetition of any of the human names of God. Or the names of his incarnations--his avatars, if you want to get technical. The idea being that if you call out the name long enough and regularly enough and literally from the heart, sooner or later you'll get an answer. Not exactly an answer. A response." Zooey suddenly turned around, opened the medicine cabinet, replaced his nail file, and took down a remarkably stubby-looking orange stick. "Who's been eating my orange stick?" he said. With his wrist, he briefly blotted his perspiring upper lip, and then he began to use the orange stick to push back his cuticles.
Mrs. Glass took a deep drag on her cigarette, watching him, then crossed her legs and asked, demanded, "Is that what Franny's supposed to be doing? I mean is that what she's doing and all?"
"So I gather. Don't ask me, ask her."
There was a short pause, and a dubious one. Then Mrs. Glass abruptly and rather pluckily asked, "How long do you have to do it?"
Zooey's face lit up with pleasure. He turned to her. "How long?" he said. "Oh, not long. Till the painters want to get in your room. Then a procession of saints and bodhisattvas march in, carrying bowls of chicken broth. The Hall Johnson Choir starts up in the background, and the cameras move in on a nice old gentleman in a loincloth standing against a background of mountains and blue skies and white clouds, and a look of peace comes over everybo
dy's--"
"All right, just stop that," Mrs. Glass said.
"Well, Jesus. I'm only trying to help. Mercy. I don't want you to go away with the impression that there're any--you know--any incon-veniences involved in the religious life. I mean a lot of people don't take it up just because they think it's going to involve a certain amount of nasty application and perseverance--you know what I mean." It was clear that the speaker, with patent relish, was now reaching the high point of his address. He wagged his orange stick solemnly at his mother. "As soon as we get out of the chapel here, I hope you'll accept from me a little volume I've always admired. I believe it touches on some of the fine points we've discussed this morning. 'God Is My Hobby.' By Dr. Homer Vincent Claude Pierson, Jr. In this little book, I think you'll find, Dr. Pierson tells us very clearly how when he was twenty-one years of age he started putting aside a little time each day--two minutes in the morning and two minutes at night, if I remember correctly--and at the end of the first year, just by these little informal visits with God, he increased his annual income seventy-four per cent. I believe I have an extra copy, and if you'll be good enough--"
"Oh, you're impossible," Mrs. Glass said. But vaguely. Her eyes had again sought out her old friend the blue bathmat, across the room. She sat staring at it while Zooey--grinning but perspiring freely at his upper lip--went on using his orange stick. At length, Mrs. Glass heaved one of her premium sighs and returned her attention to Zooey, who, pushing at his cuticles, had pivoted a half turn toward the morning daylight. As she took in the lines and planes of his uncommonly spare unclothed back, her gaze gradually de-abstracted. In a matter of only a few seconds, in fact, her eyes appeared to jettison everything that was dark and heavy and to glow with fan-club appreciation. "You're getting so broad and lovely," she said, aloud, and reached out to touch the small of his back. "I was afraid all those crazy bar-bell exercises would do some--"
"Don't, willya?" Zooey said, quite sharply, recoiling.
"Don't what?"
Zooey pulled open the medicine-cabinet door and put the orange stick back in its niche. "Just don't, that's all. Don't admire my goddam back," he said, and closed the cabinet. He picked off a pair of black silk socks that were hanging on the towel bar and carried them over to the radiator. He sat down on the radiator, despite the heat--or because of it--and began to put on his socks.
Mrs. Glass gave a rather delayed snort. "Don't admire your back--I love that!" she said. But she was insulted, and a trifle hurt. She watched him put on his socks, with a mixed expression of injury and the ungovernable interest of someone who has been examining laundered socks for holes for a great many years. Then, suddenly, with one of her most audible sighs, she stood up and, grim and duty-bound, moved into the washstand area Zooey had vacated. Her first, blatantly martyred chore was to turn on the cold-water tap. "I wish you'd learn to put the caps back on things properly when you're finished using them," she said in a tone she fully meant to sound captious.
From the radiator, where he was attaching supporters to his socks, Zooey glanced up at her. "I wish you'd learn to leave the goddam party when it's over," he said. "I mean it, now, Bessie. I'd like about one minute of solitude in here--rude as it may sound. In the first place, I'm in a hurry. I have to be at LeSage's office at two-thirty, and I'd like to get a couple of things done downtown first. Let's go, now--do you mind?"
Mrs. Glass turned from her char duties to look at him and to ask a question of the kind that, over the years, had irritated every one of her children: "You're going to have some lunch before you go, aren't you?"
"I'll get a bite downtown... Where the hell's my other shoe?"
Mrs. Glass stared at him, deliberately. "Are you or aren't you going to speak to your sister before you leave here?" she demanded.
"I don't know, Bessie," Zooey answered, after a perceptible hesitation. "Just stop asking me that, please. If I had something really hot to say to her this morning, I would. Just stop asking me." One shoe on and tied, the other shoe missing, he suddenly got down on his hands and knees and passed a hand back and forth under the radiator. "Ah. There you are, you little bastard," he said. A small bathroom scale stood beside the radiator. He sat down on it, missing shoe in hand.
Mrs. Glass watched him pull it on. She didn't stay for the tying of the lace, however. Instead, she left the room. But slowly. Moving with a certain uncharacteristic heaviness--a drag, actually--that distracted Zooey. He looked up and over at her with considerable attention. "I just don't know any more what's happened to all you children," Mrs. Glass said vaguely, without turning around. She stopped at one of the towel bars and straightened a washcloth. "In the old radio days, when you were all little and all, you all used to be so--smart and happy and--just lovely. Morning, noon, and night." She bent over and picked up from the tiled floor what appeared to be a long, mysteriously blondish human hair. She made a slight detour with it over to the wastebasket, saying, "I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy." Her back was toward Zooey as she moved again toward the door. "At least," she said, "you all used to be so sweet and loving to each other it was a joy to see." She opened the door, shaking her head. "Just a joy," she said firmly, and closed the door behind her.
Zooey, looking over at the closed door, inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. "Some exit lines you give yourself, buddy!" he called after her--but only when he must have been sure that his voice wouldn't really reach her down the hall.
THE Glasses' living room was about as unready to have its walls repainted as a room can be. Franny Glass lay asleep on the couch, with an afghan over her; the "wall-to-wall" carpet had been neither taken up nor folded in at the borders; and the furniture--seemingly, a small warehouse of it--was in its usual static-dynamic distribution. The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla. There was a Steinway grand piano (invariably kept open), three radios (a 1927 Freshman, a 1932 Stromberg-Carlson, and a 1941 R.C.A.), a twenty-one-inch-screen television set, four table-model phonographs (including a 1920 Victrola, with its speaker still mounted intact, topside), cigarette and magazine tables galore, a regulation-size ping-pong table (mercifully collapsed and stored behind the piano), four comfortable chairs, eight uncomfortable chairs, a twelve-gallon tropical-fish tank (filled to capacity, in every sense of the word, and illuminated by two forty-watt bulbs), a love seat, the couch Franny was occupying, two empty bird cages, a cherrywood writing table, and an assortment of floor lamps, table lamps, and "bridge" lamps that sprang up all over the congested inscape like sumac. A cordon of waist-high bookcases lined three walls, their shelves cram-jammed and literally sagging with books--children's books, textbooks, second-hand books, Book Club books, plus an even more heterogeneous overflow from less communal "annexes" of the apartment. ("Dracula" now stood next to "Elementary Pali," "The Boy Allies at the Somme" stood next to "Bolts of Melody."
"The Scarab Murder Case" and "The Idiot" were together, "Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase" lay on top of "Fear and Trembling.") Even if a resolute and unusually stout-hearted team of painters had been able to deal with the bookcases, the walls themselves, directly behind them, might well have made any self-respecting artisan turn in his union card. From the top of the bookcases to within less than a foot of the ceiling, the plaster--a blistery Wedgwood blue, where visible--was almost completely covered with what may very loosely be called "hangings," meaning a collection of framed photographs, yellowing personal and Presidential correspondence, bronze and silver plaques, and a sprawling miscellany of vaguely citational-looking documents and trophy like objects of various shapes and sizes, all attesting, one way or another, to the redoubtable fact that from 1927 through most of 1943 the network radio program called "It's a Wise Child" had very rarely gone on the air without one (and, more often, two) of the seven Glass children among its panelists. (Buddy Glass, who, at thirty-six, was the program's oldest living ex-panelist, not infrequently referred to the walls of his parents' apartment as being a kind of visual hymn to commercial American childhood and early puberty. He often expressed regret that his visits in from the country were so few and far between, and pointed out, usually at enormous length, how much luckier his brothers and sisters were, most of whom still lived in or around New York City.) The decoration scheme for the walls was, in fact, the brain child--with Mrs. Glass's unreserved spiritual sanction and everlastingly withheld formal consent--of Mr. Les Glass, the children's father, a former international vaudevillian and, no doubt, an inveterate and wistful admirer of the wall decor at Sardi's theatrical restaurant. Mr. Glass's perhaps most inspired coup as a decorator was manifest just behind and above the couch where young Franny Glass was now sleeping. There, in almost incestuously close juxtaposition, seven scrapbooks of newspaper and magazine clippings had been bracketed, at the bindings, directly into the plaster. Year after year, plainly, all seven scrapbooks stood ready to be perused or pored over by old close friends of the family and casual visitors alike, as well as, presumably, the odd part-time cleaning woman.
Just mentionably, Mrs. Glass had managed earlier that morning to make two token gestures on behalf of the arriving painters. The room could be entered through either the hall or the dining room, and at each of these entrances there were glass-paned double doors. Directly after breakfast, Mrs. Glass had stripped the doors of their pleated silk curtains. And later, at an opportune moment, when Franny was pretending to sample a cup of chicken broth, Mrs. Glass had climbed up on the window seats with the agility of a mountain nanny goat and stripped all three of the sash windows of their heavy damask curtains.
The room had a single, a southern, exposure. A four-story private school for girls stood directly across the side street--a stolid and rather aloofly anonymous-looking building that rarely came alive till about three-thirty in the afternoon, when public-school children fr
om Third and Second Avenues came to play jacks or stoop-ball on its stone steps. The Glasses had a fifth-story apartment, a story higher than the school building, and at this hour the sun was shining over the school roof and through the Glasses' naked living-room windows. Sunshine was very unkind to the room. Not only were the furnishings old, intrinsically unlovely, and clotted with memory and sentiment, but the room itself in past years had served as the arena for countless hockey and football (tackle as well as "touch") games, and there was scarcely a leg on any piece of furniture that wasn't badly nicked or marred. There were scars much nearer to eye level, too, from a rather awesome variety of airborne objects--beanbags, baseballs, marbles, skate keys, soap erasers, and even, on one well-marked occasion in the early nineteen-thirties, a flying headless porcelain doll. Sunshine, however, was perhaps most particularly unkind to the carpet. It had originally been a portred color--and by lamplight, at least, still was--but it now featured a number of rather pancreas-shaped faded spots, unsentimental mementos, all, of a series of household pets. The sun at this hour shone as far, as deep, as mercilessly into the room as the television set, striking it squarely in its unblinking cyclopean eye.
Mrs. Glass, who did some of her most inspired, most perpendicular thinking on the threshold of linen closets, had bedded down her youngest child on the couch between pink percale sheets, and covered her with a pale-blue cashmere afghan. Franny now lay sleeping on her left side, facing into the back of the couch and the wall, her chin just grazing one of the several toss pillows all around her. Her mouth was closed, but only just. Her right hand, however, on the coverlet, was not merely closed but shut tight; the fingers were clenched, the thumb tucked in--it was as though, at twenty, she had checked back into the mute, fisty defenses of the nursery. And here at the couch, it should be mentioned, the sun, for all its ungraciousness to the rest of the room, was behaving beautifully. It shone full on Franny's hair, which was jet-black and very prettily cut, and had been washed three times in as many days. Sunshine, in fact, bathed the entire afghan, and the play of warm, brilliant light in the pale-blue wool was in itself well worth beholding.
Zooey, almost direct from the bathroom, with a lighted cigar in his mouth, stood for quite a while at the foot of the couch, at first busy tucking in the ends of a white shirt he had put on, then buttoning his cuffs, and then merely standing and looking. He wore a frown behind his cigar, as though the stunning lighting effects had been "created" by a stage director whose taste he considered more or less suspect. Despite the extraordinary fineness of his features, and his age, and his general stature--clothed, he could easily have passed for a young, underweight danseur--the cigar was not markedly unbecoming to him. For one reason, he was not really short-nosed. For another, cigars, with Zooey, were not in any patent way a young man's affectation. He had been smoking them since he was sixteen, and regularly, as many as a dozen a day--expensive panatelas, for the most part--since he was eighteen.