“You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. It’s staggering how you jump straight the hell into the heart of a matter. I’m goosebumps all over . . . By God, you inspire me. You inflame me, Bessie. You know what you’ve done? Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve given this whole goddam issue a fresh, new, Biblical slant. I wrote four papers in college on the Crucifixion—five, really—and every one of them worried me half crazy because I thought something was missing. Now I know what it was. Now it’s clear to me. I see Christ in an entirely different light. His unhealthy fanaticism. His rudeness to those nice, sane, conservative, tax-paying Pharisees. Oh, this is exciting! In your simple, straightforward, bigoted way, Bessie, you’ve sounded the missing keynote of the whole New Testament. Improper diet. Christ lived on cheeseburgers and Cokes. For all we know, he probably fed the mult—”
“Just stop that, now” Mrs. Glass broke in, her voice quiet but dangerous. “Oh, I’d like to put a diaper on that mouth of yours!”
“Well, gee whizz. I’m only trying to make polite bathroom talk.”
“You’re so funny. Oh, you’re so funny! It just so happens, young man, that I don’t consider your little sister in exactly the exact same light that I do the Lord. I may be peculiar, but I don’t happen to. I don’t happen to see any comparison whatsoever between the Lord and a rundown, overwrought little college girl that’s been reading too many religious books and all like that! You certainly know your sister as well as I do—or should. She’s terribly impressionable and always has been, and you know it very well!”
The bathroom was oddly still for a moment.
“Mother? Are you sitting down out there? I have a terrible feeling you’re sitting down out there with about five cigarettes going. Are you?” He waited. Mrs. Glass, however, didn’t choose to reply. “I don’t want you sitting down out there, Bessie. I’d like to get out of this God-damned tub. . . . Bessie? You hear me?”
“I hear you, I hear you,” Mrs. Glass said. A fresh wave of worry had passed over her face. She straightened her back restively. “She’s got that crazy Bloomberg in bed with her on the couch,” she said. “It isn’t even healthy.” She gave a mighty sigh. For several minutes she had been holding her cigarette ashes in her cupped left hand. She now reached over, without quite having to get up, and emptied them into the wastebasket. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she announced, “I just don’t, that’s all. The house is absolutely upside down. The painters are almost finished in her room, and they’re going to want to get in the living room immediately after lunch. I don’t know whether to wake her up, or what. She’s had almost no sleep. I’m simply losing my mind. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve even been free to have the painters in this apartment? Nearly twen—”
“The painters! Ah! The dawn comes up. I forgot all about the painters. Listen, why haven’t you asked them in here? There’s plenty of room. What the hell kind of host will they think I am, not asking them into the bathroom when I’m—”
“Just be quiet a minute, young man. I’m thinking.”
As if in obedience, Zooey abruptly put his washcloth to use. For quite a little interval, the faint swush of it was the only sound in the bathroom. Mrs. Glass, seated eight or ten feet away from the shower curtain, stared across the tiled floor at the blue bathmat alongside the tub. Her cigarette had burned down to the last half inch. She held it between the ends of two fingers of her right hand. Distinctly, her way of holding it tended to blow to some sort of literary hell one’s first, strong (and still perfectly tenable) impression that an invisible Dubliner’s shawl covered her shoulders. Not only were her fingers of an extraordinary length and shapeliness—such as, very generally speaking, one w
ouldn’t have expected of a medium-stout woman’s fingers—but they featured, as it were, a somewhat imperial-looking tremor; a deposed Balkan queen or a retired favorite courtesan might have had such an elegant tremor. And this was not the only contradiction to the Dublin-black-shawl motif. There was the rather eyebrow-raising fact of Bessie Glass’s legs, which were comely by any criterion. They were the legs of a once quite widely acknowledged public beauty, a vaudevillian, a dancer, a very light dancer. They were crossed now, as she sat staring at the bathmat, left over right, a worn white terrycloth slipper looking as if it might fall off the extended foot at any second. The feet were extraordinarily small, the ankles were still slender, and, perhaps most remarkable, the calves were still firm and evidently never had been knotty.
A much deeper sigh than customary—almost, it seemed, a part of the life force itself—suddenly came from Mrs. Glass. She got up and carried her cigarette over to the washbowl, let cold water run on it, then dropped the extinguished stub into the wastebasket and sat down again. The spell of introspection she had cast on herself was unbroken, as if she hadn’t moved from her seat at all.
“I’m getting out of here in about three seconds, Bessie 1 I’m giving you fair warning. Let’s not wear out our welcome, buddy.”
Mrs. Glass, who had resumed staring at the blue bathmat, gave an absent-minded nod at this “fair warning.” And at that instant, more than just mentionably, had Zooey seen her face, and particularly her eyes, he might have had a strong impulse, passing or not, to recall, or reconstruct, or reinflect the greater part of his share of the conversation that had passed between them—to temper it, to soften it. On the other hand, he might not have. It was a very touch-and-go business, in 1955, to get a wholly plausible reading from Mrs. Glass’s face, and especially from her enormous blue eyes. Where once, a few years earlier, her eyes alone could break the news (either to people or to bathmats) that two of her sons were dead, one by suicide (her favorite, her most intricately calibrated, her kindest son), and one killed in World War II (her only truly lighthearted son)—where once Bessie Glass’s eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her husband nor any of her adult surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in, now, in 1955, she was apt to use this same terrible Celtic equipment to break the news, usually at the front door, that the new delivery boy hadn’t brought the leg of lamb in time for dinner or that some remote Hollywood starlet’s marriage was on the rocks.
She lit a fresh king-size cigarette abruptly, dragged on it, then stood up, exhaling smoke. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. The statement sounded, innocently, like a promise. “Just please use the bathmat when you get out,” she added. “That’s what it’s there for.” She left the bathroom, closing the door securely behind her.
It was rather as though, after being in makeshift wet dock for days, the Queen Mary had just sailed out of, say, Walden Pond, as suddenly and perversely as she had sailed in. Behind the shower curtain, Zooey closed his eyes for a few seconds, as though his own small craft were listing precariously in the wake. Then he pulled back the shower curtain and stared over at the closed door. It was a weighty stare, and relief was not really a great part of it. As much as anything else, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn’t quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.
Not five minutes later, Zooey, with his hair combed wet, stood barefoot at the washbowl, wearing a pair of beltless dark-gray sharkskin slacks, a face towel across his bare shoulders. A pre-shaving ritual had already been put into effect. The window blind had been raised halfway; the bathroom door had been set ajar to let the steam escape and clear the mirrors; a cigarette had been lit, dragged on, and placed within easy reach on the frosted-glass ledge under the medicine-cabinet mirror. At the moment, Zooey had just finished squeezing lather cream onto the end of a shaving brush. He put the tube of lather, without re-capping it, somewhere into the enamel background, out of his way. He passed the flat of his hand squeakily back and forth over the face of the medicine-cabinet mirror, wiping away most of the mist. Then he began to lather his face. His lathering technique was very much out of the ordinary, although identical in spirit with his actual shaving technique. That is, although he looked into the mirror while he lathered, he didn’t watch where his brush was moving but, instead, looked directly into his own eyes, as though his eyes were neutral territory, a no man’s land in a private war against narcissism he had been fighting since he was seven or eight years old. By now, when he was twenty-five, the little stratagem may well have been mostly reflexive, just as a veteran baseball player, at the plate, will tap his spikes with his bat whether he needs to or not. Nonetheless, a few minutes earlier, when he had combed his hair, he had done so with the very minimum amount of help from the mirror. And before that he had managed to dry himself in front of a full-length mirror without so much as glancing into it.
He had just finished lathering his face when his mother suddenly appeared in his shaving mirror. She stood in the doorway, a few feet behind him, one hand on the doorknob—a portrait of spurious hesitancy about making another full entrance into the room.
“Ah! What a pleasant and gracious surprise!” Zooey said into the mirror. “Come in, come in!” He laughed, or gave his roar, then opened the medicine cabinet and took down his razor.
Mrs. Glass advanced, meditatively. “Zooey . . .” she said. “I’ve been thinking.” Her usual seating accommodation was directly at Zooey’s left. She started to lower herself into place.
“Don’t sit down! Let me drink you in first,”
Zooey said. Getting out of the tub, putting on his trousers, and combing his hair had apparently raised his spirits. “It isn’t often we have visitors at our little chapel, and when we do, we try to make them feel—”
“Just be still a minute,” Mrs. Glass said firmly, sitting. She crossed her legs. “I’ve been thinking. Do you think it would do any good to try to get hold of Waker? I don’t, personally, but what do you think? I mean in my opinion what that child needs is a good psychiatrist, not a priest or anything, but I may be wrong.”
“Oh, no. No, no. Not wrong. I’ve never known you to be wrong, Bessie. Your facts are always either untrue or exaggerated, but you’re never wrong—no, no.” With much delight, Zooey wet his razor and began to shave.
“Zooey, I’m asking you—just cut out the funny business, now, please. Do you or don’t you think I should get in touch with Waker? I could call that Bishop Pinchot or whatever his name is, and he could probably tell me where I could at least wire him, if he’s still on some crazy boat.” Mrs. Glass reached out and drew the metal wastebasket in close to her and used it as an ashtray for the lighted cigarette she had brought in with her. “I asked Franny if she’d like to talk to him on the phone,” she said. “If I could get hold of him.”
Zooey rinsed his razor briefly. “What’d she say?” he asked.
Mrs. Glass adjusted her sitting position with a little evasive shift to the right. “She says she doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”
“Ah. We know better than that, don’t we? We’re not going to take a straight answer like that lying down, are we?”
“For your information, young man, I’m not going to take any answer of any kind from that child today,” Mrs. Glass said, rallying. She addressed Zooey’s lathered profile. “If you have a young girl lying in a room crying and mumbling to herself for forty-eight hours, you don’t go to them for any answers.”
Zooey, without commenting, went on shaving.