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 from 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 port-red 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.
A Vermont-marble coffee table, rectangular and quite long, stood parallel and very close to the couch. Zooey abruptly went over to it. He moved an ashtray, a silver cigarette box, and a copy of Harper’s Bazaar out of the way, then directly sat down in the narrow space on the cold marble surface, facing—almost hovering over—Franny’s head and shoulders. He looked briefly at the clenched hand on the blue afghan, then, quite gently, with his cigar in his hand, took hold of Franny’s shoulder. “Franny,” he said. “Frances. Let’s go, buddy. Let’s not fritter away the best part of the day here. . . . Let’s go, buddy.”
Franny awakened with a start—a jolt, really, as though the couch had just gone over a bad bump. She raised up on one arm, and said, “Whew.” She squinted at the morning sunlight. “Why’s it so sunny?” She only partly took in Zooey’s presence. “Why’s it so sunny?” she repeated.
Zooey observed her rather narrowly. “I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy,” he said.
Franny, still squinting, stared at him. “Why’d you wake me up?” she asked. She was still too heavy with sleep to sound really fractious, but it was apparent that she felt there was some kind of injustice in the air.
“Well . . . it’s like this. Brother Anselmo and I have been offered a new parish. In Labrador, see. And we wondered if you’d give us your blessing before we—”
“Whew!” Franny said again, and put her hand on top of her head. Her hair, cut fashionably short, had survived sleep very well indeed. She wore it—most fortunately for the viewer—parted in the middle. “Oh, I had the most horrible dream,” she said. She sat up a bit and, with one hand, closed the lapels of her dressing gown. It was a tailored tie-silk dressing gown, beige, with a pretty pattern of minute pink tea roses.
“Go ahead,” Zooey said, dragging on his cigar. “I’ll interpret for you.”
She shuddered. “It was just horrible. So spidery. I’ve never had such a spidery nightmare in my entire life.”
“Spiders, eh? That’s very interesting. Very significant. I had a very interesting case in Zurich, some years back—a young person very much like yourself, as a matter of fact—”
“Be quiet a second, or I’ll forget it,” Franny said. She stared avidly into space, as nightmare-recallers do. There were half circles under her eyes, and other, subtler signs that mark an acutely troubled young girl, but nonetheless no one could have missed seeing that she was a first-class beauty. Her skin was lovely, and her features were delicate and most distinctive. Her eyes were very nearly the same quite astonishing shade of blue as Zooey’s, but were set farther apart, as a sister’s eyes no doubt should be—and they were not, so to speak, a day’s work to look into, as Zooey’s were. Some four years earlier, at her graduation from boarding school, her brother Buddy had morbidly prophesied to himself, as she grinned at him from the graduates’ platform, that she would in all probability one day marry a man with a hacking cough. So there was that in her face, too. “Oh, God, I remember it now!” she said. “It was just hideous. I was at a swimming pool somewhere, and a whole bunch of people kept making me dive for a can of Medaglia d’Oro coffee that was on the bottom. Every time I’d come up, they’d make me go down again. I was crying, and I kept saying to everybody, ‘You have your bathing suits on. Why don’t you do a little diving, too?,’ but they’d all just laugh and make these terribly snide little remarks, and down I’d go again.” She gave another shudder. “These two girls that are in my dorm were there. Stephanie Logan, and a girl I hardly even know—somebody, as a matter of fact, I always felt terribly sorry for, because she had such an awful name. Shannon Sherman. They both had a big oar, and they kept trying to hit me with it every time I’d surface.” Franny put her hands over her eyes briefly. “Whew!” She shook her head. She reflected. “The only person that made any sense in the dream was Professor Tupper. I mean he was the only person that was there that I know really detests me.”
“Detests you, eh? Very interesting.” Zooey’s cigar was in his mouth. He revolved it slowly between his fingers, like a dream-interpreter who isn’t getting all the facts in the case. He looked very contented. “Why does he detest you?” he asked. “Without absolute frankness, you realize, my hands are—”
“He detests me because I’m in this crazy Religion seminar he conducts, and I can never bring myself to smile back at him when he’s being charming and Oxfordish. He’s on lend-lease or something from Oxford, and he’s just a terribly sad old self-satisfied phony with wild and woolly white hair. I think he goes into the men’s room and musses it up before he conies to class—I honestly do. He has no enthusiasm whatever for his subject. Ego, yes. Enthusiasm, no. Which would be all right—I mean it wouldn’t be anything exactly strange—but he keeps dropping idiotic hints th
at he’s a Realized Man himself and we should be pretty happy kids to have him in this country.” Franny grimaced. “The only thing he does with any zing, when he isn’t bragging, is correct somebody when they say something’s Sanskrit when it’s really Pali. He just knows I can’t stand him! You should see the faces I make at him when he isn’t looking.”
“What was he doing at the pool?”
“That’s exactly it! Nothing! Absolutely nothing! He was just standing around smiling and watching. He was the worst one there.”
Zooey, looking at her through his cigar smoke, said dispassionately, “You look like hell. You know that?”
Franny stared at him. “You could have sat there all morning without saying that,” she said. She added, with meaning, “Just don’t start in on me again, bright and early in the morning, Zooey, please. I mean it, now.”
“Nobody’s starting in on you, buddy,” Zooey said, in the same dispassionate tone. “You just happen to look like hell, that’s all. Why don’t you eat something? Bessie says she’s got some chicken soup out there she’s—”
“If anybody else mentions chicken soup to me just once more—”
Zooey’s attention, however, had been diverted. He was looking down at the sun-bathed afghan where it covered Franny’s calves and ankles. “Who’s that?” he said. “Bloomberg?” He put out a finger and gently poked a rather large and oddly mobile-looking bulge under the afghan. “Bloomberg? That you?”
The bulge stirred. Franny had her eye on it now, too. “I can’t get rid of him,” she said. “He’s suddenly become absolutely mad about me.”
Under the stimulus of Zooey’s investigating finger, Bloomberg abruptly stretched, then began to tunnel slowly up toward the open country of Franny’s lap. The instant his unprepossessing head emerged into daylight, sunlight, Franny took him under the shoulders and lifted him up into intimate greeting distance. “Good morning, Bloomberg dear!” she said, and kissed him fervently between the eyes. He blinked with aversion. “Good morning, old fat smelly cat. Good morning, good morning, good morning!” She gave him kiss after kiss, but no reciprocal waves of affection rose from him. He made an inept and rather violent attempt to cross over to Franny’s collarbone. He was a very large mottled-gray “altered” tomcat. “Isn’t he being affectionate?” Franny marvelled. “I’ve never seen him so affectionate.” She looked at Zooey, possibly for corroboration, but Zooey’s expression, behind his cigar, was noncommittal. “Pet him, Zooey! Look how sweet he looks. Pet him.”
Zooey put out a hand and stroked Bloomberg’s arched back, once, twice, then quit, and got up from the coffee table and meandered across the room to the piano. It stood, in profile, wide open, in all its black, Steinway enormity, opposite the couch, its bench almost directly across from Franny. Zooey sat down on the bench, tentatively, then looked with very apparent interest at the sheet music on the stand.
“He’s so full of fleas it isn’t even funny,” Franny said. She grappled briefly with Bloomberg, trying to coerce him into a docile lap-cat’s repose. “I found fourteen fleas on him last night. Just on one side.” She gave Bloomberg’s hips a mighty, downward push, then looked over at Zooey. “How was the script, anyway?” she asked. “Did it come last night finally, or what?”
Zooey didn’t answer her. “My God,” he said, still looking at the sheet music on the stand. “Who took this out?” The sheet music was entitled “You Needn’t Be So Mean, Baby.” It was about forty years old. A sepia reproduction of Mr. and Mrs. Glass was featured on the cover. Mr. Glass was wearing a top hat and tails, and so was Mrs. Glass. They were smiling rather brilliantly at the camera, both of them leaning forward on their evening canes, feet wide apart.
“What is it?” Franny asked. “I can’t see.”
“Bessie and Les. ‘You Needn’t Be So Mean, Baby.’ ”