Once again he leaned forward on his elbows and buried his face in his hands. This time he sat motionless for almost a half hour.
When he moved again, it was as though marionette strings had been attached to him and given an overzealous yank. He appeared to be given just enough time to pick up his cigar before another jerk of the invisible strings swung him over to the chair at the second desk in the room--Buddy's desk--where the phone was.
In this new seating arrangement, the first thing he did was to pull his shirt ends out of his trousers. He unbuttoned the shirt completely, as if the journey of three steps had taken him into an oddly tropical zone. Next, he took his cigar out of his mouth, but transferred it to his left hand and kept it there. With his right hand he took his handkerchief off his head and laid it beside the phone, in what was very implicitly a "ready position." He then picked up the phone without any perceptible hesitation and dialled a local number. A very local number indeed. When he had finished dialling, he picked up his handkerchief from the desk and put it over the mouthpiece, quite loosely and mounted rather high. He took a deepish breath, and waited. He might have lighted his cigar, which had gone out, but he didn't.
ABOUT a minute and a half earlier, Franny, on a distinctly quavering note, had just declined her mother's fourth offer within fifteen minutes to bring in a cup of "nice, hot chicken broth." Mrs. Glass had made this last offer on her feet--in fact, halfway out of the living room, in the direction of the kitchen, looking rather grim with optimism. But the reintroduced quaver in Franny's voice had sent her quickly back to her chair.
Mrs. Glass's chair was, of course, on Franny's side of the living room. And most vigilantly so. Some fifteen minutes earlier, when Franny had been rehabilitated enough to sit up and look around for her comb, Mrs. Glass had brought over the straight chair from the writing table and placed it squarely up against the coffee table. The site was excellent for Franny-observ-ing, and also placed the observer within easy reach of an ashtray on the marble surface.
Reseated, Mrs. Glass sighed, as she always sighed, in any situation, when cups of chicken broth were declined. But she had, so to speak, been cruising in a patrol boat down and up her children's alimentary canals for so many years that the sigh was in no sense a real signal of defeat, and she said, almost immediately, "I don't see how you expect to get your strength and all back if you don't take something nourishing into your system. I'm sorry, but I don't. You've had exactly--"
"Mother--now, please. I've asked you twenty times. Will you please stop mentioning chicken broth to me? It nauseates me just to--" Franny broke off, and listened. "Is that our phone?" she said.
Mrs. Glass was already up from her chair. Her lips had tightened a bit. The ring of a telephone, any telephone, anywhere, invariably caused Mrs. Glass's lips to tighten a bit. "I'll be right back," she said, and left the room. She was chinking more audibly than usual, as if a box of assorted household nails had come apart in one of her kimono pockets.
She was gone about five minutes. When she returned, she had the particular facial expression that her eldest daughter, Boo Boo, had once described as meaning one of only two things: that she had just talked with one of her sons on the telephone or that she had just had a report, on the best authority, that the bowels of every single human being in the world were scheduled to move with perfect hygienic regularity for a period of one full week. "That's Buddy on the phone," she announced as she came into the room. From a habit of several years' standing, she suppressed any small token of pleasure that might have slipped into her voice.
Franny's visible reaction to this news was considerably less than enthusiastic. She looked, in fact, nervous. "Where's he phoning from?" she said.
"I didn't even ask him. He sounds as though he has a horrible cold." Mrs. Glass didn't sit down. She hovered. "Hurry up, now, young lady. He wants to talk to you."
"Did he say so?"
"Certainly he said so! Hurry up, now... Put your slippers on."
Franny let herself out of the pink sheets and the pale-blue afghan. She sat, pale and obviously stalling, on the couch edge, looking up at her mother. Her feet fished around for her slippers. "What'd you tell him?" she asked nervously.
"Just kindly go to the phone, please, young lady," Mrs. Glass said evasively. "Just hurry a little, for goodness' sake."
"I suppose you told him I'm at death's door or something," Franny said. There was no reply to this. She stood up from the couch, not so fragilely as a post-operative convalescent might have but with just a trace of timidity and caution, as if she expected, and perhaps rather hoped, to feel a trifle dizzy. She worked her feet more securely into her slippers, then came out from behind the coffee table gravely, untying and relying the belt of her dressing gown. A year or so earlier, in an unwarrantably self-deprecating paragraph of a letter to her brother Buddy, she had referred to her own figure as "irreproachably Americanese." Watching her, Mrs. Glass, who happened to be a great judge of young girls' figures and young girls' walks, once again, in lieu of a smile, tightened her lips a bit. The instant, however, that Franny was out of sight, she turned her attention to the couch. Clearly, from her look, there were not many things in the world she disliked more than a couch, a good eiderdown couch, that had been made up for sleeping purposes. She went around into the aisle made by the coffee table and began to give all the pillows in sight a therapeutic beating up.
Franny, in transit, ignored the telephone in the hall. She evidently preferred to take the longish walk down the hall to her parents' bedroom, where the more popular phone in the apartment was located. Although there was nothing markedly peculiar about her gait as she moved through the hall--she neither dallied nor quite hurried--she was nonetheless very peculiarly transformed as she moved. She appeared, vividly, to grow younger with each step. Possibly long halls, plus the aftereffects of tears, plus the ring of a telephone, plus the smell of fresh paint, plus newspapers underfoot--possibly the sum of all these things was equal, for her, to a new doll carriage. In any case, by the time she reached her parents' bedroom door her handsome tailored tie-silk dressing gown--the emblem, perhaps, of all that is dormitorially chic and fatale--looked as if it had been changed into a small child's woollen bathrobe.
Mr. and Mrs. Glass's bedroom reeked, and even smarted, of freshly painted walls. The furniture had been herded into the middle of the room and covered with canvas--old, paint-flecked, organic-looking canvas. The beds, too, had been drawn in from the wall, but they had been covered with cotton bedspreads Mrs. Glass herself had provided. The phone was now on the pillow of Mr. Glass's bed. Evidently Mrs. Glass, too, had preferred it to the less private extension in the hall. The handpiece lay detached from its catch, waiting for Franny. It looked almost as dependent as a human being for some acknowledgment of its existence. To get to it, to redeem it, Franny had to shuffle across the floor through a quantity of newspapers and sidestep an empty paint bucket. When she did reach it, she didn't pick it up but merely sat down beside it on the bed, looked at it, looked away from it, and pushed back her hair. The night table that ordinarily stood alongside the bed had been moved close enough to it so that Franny could reach it without quite standing up. She put her hand under a particularly soiled-looking piece of canvas covering it and passed the hand back and forth till she found what she was looking for--a porcelain cigarette box and a box of matches in a copper holder. She lit a cigarette, then gave the phone another, long, exceedingly worried look. With the exception of her late brother Seymour, it should be noted, all her brothers had overly vibrant, not to say sinewy, voices on the telephone. At this hour, it was very possible that Franny felt deeply hesitant about taking a chance on just the timbre, let alone the verbal content, of any of her brothers' voices on the phone. However, she puffed nervously on her cigarette and, rather bravely, picked up the phone. "Hello. Buddy?" she said.
"Hello, sweetheart. How are you--are you all right?"
"I'm fine. How are you? You sound as though you have a cold." Then, when there was no immediate response: "I suppose Bessie's been briefing you by the hour."
"Well--after a fashion. Yes and no. You know. Are you all right, sweetheart?"
"I'm fine. You sound funny, though. Either you have a terrible cold or this is a terrible connection. Where are you, anyway?"
"Where am I? I'm right in my element, Flop-sy. I'm in a little haunted house down the road. Never mind. Just talk to me."
Franny unplacidly crossed her legs. "I don't know exactly what you'd like to talk about," she said. "What all'd Bessie tell you, I mean?"
There was a most characteristically Buddy-like pause at the other end. It was exactly the kind of pause--just a trifle rich with seniority of years--that had often tried the patience of both Franny and the vif tuoso at the other end of the phone when they were small children. "Well, I'm not terribly sure what all she told me, sweetheart. Past a certain point, it's a little rude to go on listening to Bessie on the phone. I heard about the cheeseburger diet, you can be sure. And, of course, the Pilgrim books. Then I think I just sat with the phone at my ear, not really listening. You know."
"Oh," Franny said. She switched her cigarette over to her telephone hand and, with her free hand, reached again under the canvas cover on the night table and found a tiny ceramic ashtray, which she placed beside her on the bed. "You sound funny," she said. "Do you have a cold, or what?"
"I feel wonderful, sweetheart. I'm sitting here talking to you and I feel wonderful. It's a joy to hear your voice. I can't tell you."
Franny once again pushed back her hair with one hand. She didn't say anything.
"Flopsy? Can you think of anything Bessie may have missed? You feel like talking at all?"
With her fingers, Franny slightly altered the position of the tiny ashtray beside her on the bed. "Well," she said, "I'm a little talked out, to be honest with you. Zooey's been at me all morning."