A titter of audience appreciation came from the couch. “I never heard that,” Franny said. “What’s Boo Boo’s religious philosophy? I didn’t think she had any.”
Zooey said nothing for a moment, and then: “Boo Boo’s? Boo Boo’s convinced Mr. Ashe made the world. She got it from Kilvert’s ‘Diary.’ The schoolchildren in Kilvert’s parish were asked who made the world, and one of the kids answered, ‘Mr. Ashe.’ ”
Franny was delighted, and audibly so. Zooey turned and looked at her, and—unpredictable young man—made a very dour face, as though he had suddenly eschewed any and all forms of levity. He took down his foot from the window seat, parked his cigar end in the copper ashtray on the writing table, and came away from the window. He moved across the room slowly, hands in his hip pockets, but not without some direction in his mind. “I should get the hell out of here. I’ve got a lunch date,” he said, and immediately stooped to make a leisurely and proprietary examination of the interior of the fish tank. He tapped on the glass with his fingernail, importunately. “I turn my back for five minutes and everybody lets my black mollies die off. I should’ve taken them to college with me. I knew that.”
“Oh, Zooey. You’ve been saying that for five years. Why don’t you go buy some new ones?”
He went on tapping on the glass. “All you college snips are the same. Hard as nails. These weren’t just any black mollies, buddy. We were very close.” So saying, he stretched out on his back on the carpet again, his slight torso fitting in rather tightly between the 1932 Stromberg-Carlson table radio and an overfilled maple magazine stand. Again only the soles and heels of his brogues were visible to Franny. However, no sooner was he stretched out than he sat bolt upright, his head and shoulders suddenly propelled into view, with somewhat the macabre-comic effect of a corpse falling out of a closet. “Prayer’s still going, eh?” he said. Then he dropped back out of sight again. He was still for a moment. Then, in an almost unintelligibly thick Mayfair accent: “I’d rather like a word with you, Miss Glass, if you’ve a moment.” The response to this, over at the couch, was a distinctly ominous silence. “Say your prayer if you want to, or play with Bloomberg, or feel free to smoke, but give me five minutes of uninterrupted silence, buddy. And, if possible, no tears at all. O.K.? You hear me?”
Franny didn’t answer straightway. She brought her legs in closer to her, under the afghan. And gathered in the sleeping Bloomberg somewhat closer to her, too. “I hear you,” she said, and drew her legs in still closer to her, as a fortress draws up its bridge before the siege. She hesitated, then spoke up again. “You can say anything you want if you don’t get abusive about it. I just don’t feel like a workout this morning. I mean it.”
“No workouts, no workouts, buddy. And if there’s one thing I never am, it’s abusive.” The speaker’s hands were folded benignly on his chest. “Oh, a little brisk sometimes, yes, when the situation warrants. Abusive, never. Personally, I’ve always found that you can catch more flies with—”
“I mean it, now, Zooey,” Franny said, more or less addressing his brogues. “And I wish you’d sit up, incidentally. Every time all hell breaks loose around here, it seems very funny to me that it always comes from that spot right where you’re lying. And you’re always the one that’s there. C’mon, now. Just please sit up.”
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 tactless!” 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 beautiful.”
“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 abo
ut 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, suggestive 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?”