Again he answered, “Yes, sir.”
“And after that,” he continued, “do not be deceived by others.”
“Yes, sir; yes, sir,” he replied.
—Mu-Mon-Kwan.
The lettering on the beaverboard being as small as it was, this last entry appeared well in the upper fifth of its column, and Zooey could have gone on reading for another five minutes or so, staying in the same column, without having to bend his knees. He didn’t choose to. He turned around, not abruptly, and walked over and sat down at his brother Seymour’s desk—pulling out the little straight chair as though it were something he did every day. He placed his cigar on the right-hand edge of the desk, burning end out, leaned forward on his elbows, and covered his face with his hands.
Behind him and at his left, two curtained windows, with their blinds half drawn, faced into a court—an unpicturesque brick-and-concrete valley through which cleaning women and grocery boys passed grayly at all hours of the day. The room itself was what might be called the third master bedroom of the apartment, and was, by more or less traditional Manhattan apartment-house standards, both unsunny and unlarge. The two eldest Glass boys, Seymou
r and Buddy, had moved into it in 1929, at the respective ages of twelve and ten, and had vacated it when they were twenty-three and twenty-one. Most of the furniture belonged to a maplewood “set”: two day beds, a night table, two boyishly small, knee-cramping desks, two chiffoniers, two semi-easy chairs. Three domestic Oriental scatter rugs, extremely worn, were on the floor. The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing. A stranger with a flair for cocktail-party descriptive prose might have commented that the room, at a quick glance, looked as if it had once been tenanted by two struggling twelve-year-old lawyers or researchists. And, in fact, unless one chose to make a fairly thoughtful survey of the reading matter extant, there were few, if any, certain indications that the former occupants had both reached voting age within the predominantly juvenile dimensions of the room. True, there was a phone—the controversial private phone—on Buddy’s desk. And there were a number of cigarette burns on both desks. But other, more emphatic signs of adulthood—stud or cuff-button boxes, wall pictures, the telling odds and ends that collect on chiffonier tops—had been removed from the room in 1940, when the two young men “branched out” and took an apartment of their own.
With his face in his hands and his handkerchief headgear drooping low over his brow, Zooey sat at Seymour’s old desk, inert, but not asleep, for a good twenty minutes. Then, almost in one movement, he removed the support for his face, picked up his cigar, stowed it in his mouth, opened the left-hand bottom drawer of the desk, and took out, using both hands, a seven- or eight-inch-thick stack of what appeared to be—and were—shirt cardboards. He placed the stack before him on the desk and began to turn the cards over, two or three at a time. His hand stayed only once, really, and then quite briefly.
The cardboard that he stopped at had been written on in February, 1938. The handwriting, in blue-lead pencil, was his brother Seymour’s:
My twenty-first birthday. Presents, presents, presents. Zooey and the baby, as usual, shopped lower Broadway. They gave me a fine supply of itching powder and a box of three stink bombs. I’m to drop the bombs in the elevator at Columbia or “someplace very crowded” as soon as I get a good chance.
Several acts of vaudeville tonight for my entertainment. Les and Bessie did a lovely soft-shoe on sand swiped by Boo Boo from the urn in the lobby. When they were finished, B. and Boo Boo did a pretty funny imitation of them. Les nearly in tears. The baby sang “Abdul Abulbul Amir.” Z. did the Will Mahoney exit Les taught him, ran smack into the bookcase, and was furious. The twins did B.’s and my old Buck & Bubbles imitation. But to perfection. Marvellous. In the middle of it, the doorman called up on the housephone and asked if anybody was dancing up there. A Mr. Seligman, on the fourth—
There Zooey quit reading. He gave the stack of cardboards a solid-sounding double tap on the desk surface, as one taps a deck of cards, then dropped the stack back into the bottom drawer and closed the drawer.
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-observing, and also placed the observer within easy reach of an ashtray on the marble surface.
Re-seated, 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.