As directed, I took the lead, almost happily. An instant later, a silk hat materialized in the air beside me, considerably down and at the left, and my special, only technically unassigned cohort grinned up at me—for a moment, I rather thought he was going to slip his hand into mine.
My three guests and my one friend remained outside in the hall while I briefly cased the apartment.
The windows were all closed, the two air-conditioners had been turned to “Shut,” and the first breath one took was rather like inhaling deeply in someone’s ancient raccoon-coat pocket. The only sound in the whole apartment was the somewhat trembling purr of the aged refrigerator Seymour and I had acquired second-hand. My sister Boo Boo, in her girlish, naval way, had left it turned on. There were, in fact, throughout the apartment, any number of little untidy signs that a seafaring lady had taken over the place. A handsome, small-size, ensign’s navy-blue jacket was flung, lining down, across the couch. A box of Louis Sherry candies—half empty, and with the unconsumed candies all more or less experimentally squeezed—was open on the coffee table, in front of the couch. A framed photograph of a very resolute-looking young man I’d never seen before stood on the desk. And all the ashtrays in sight were in full blossom with crumpled facial tissues and lipsticked cigarette ends. I didn’t go into the kitchen, the bedroom, or the bathroom, except to open the doors and take a quick look to see if Seymour was standing upright anywhere. For one reason, I felt enervated and lazy. For another, I was kept pretty busy raising blinds, turning on air-conditioners, emptying loaded ashtrays. Besides, the other members of the party barged in on me almost immediately. “It’s hotter in here than it is on the street,” the Matron of Honor said, by way of greeting, as she strode in.
“I’ll be with you in just a minute,” I said. “I can’t seem to get this air-conditioner to work.”
The “On” button seemed to be stuck, in fact, and I was busily tinkering with it.
While I worked on the air-conditioner switch—with my hat still on my head, I remember—the others circulated rather suspiciously around the room. I watched them out of the corner of one eye. The Lieutenant went over to the desk and stood looking up at the three or four square feet of wall directly above it, where my brother and I, for defiantly sentimental reasons, had tacked up a number of glossy eight-by-ten photographs. Mrs. Silsburn sat down—inevitably, I thought—in the one chair in the room that my deceased Boston bull used to enjoy sleeping in; its arms, upholstered in dirty corduroy, had been thoroughly slavered and chewed on in the course of many a nightmare. The bride’s father’s uncle—my great friend—seemed to have disappeared completely. The Matron of Honor, too, seemed suddenly to be somewhere else. “I’ll get you all something to drink in just a second,” I said uneasily, still trying to force the switch button on the air-conditioner.
“I could use something cold to drink,” said a very familiar voice. I turned completely around and saw that she had stretched herself out on the couch, which accounted for her noticeable vertical disappearance. “I’ll use your phone in just a second,” she advised me. “I couldn’t open my mouth anyway to talk on the phone, in this condition, I’m so parched. My tongue’s so dry.”
The air-conditioner abruptly whirred into operation, and I came over to the middle of the room, into the space between the couch and the chair where Mrs. Silsburn was sitting. “I don’t know what there is to drink,” I said. “I haven’t looked in the refrigerator, but I imagine—”
“Bring anything,” the eternal spokeswoman interrupted from the couch. “Just make it wet. And cold.” The heels of her shoes were resting on the sleeve of my sister’s jacket. Her hands were folded across her chest. A pillow was bunched up under her head. “Put ice in it, if you have any,” she said, and closed her eyes. I looked down at her for a brief but murderous instant, then bent over and, as tactfully as possible, eased Boo Boo’s jacket out from under her feet. I started to leave the room and go about my chores as host, but just as I took a step, the Lieutenant spoke up from over at the desk.
“Whereja get all these pictures?” he said.
I went directly over to him. I was still wearing my visored, oversize garrison cap. It hadn’t occurred to me to take it off. I stood beside him at the desk, and yet a trifle behind him, and looked up at the photographs on the wall. I said they were mostly old pictures of the children who had been on “It’s a Wise Child” in the days when Seymour and I had been on the show.
The Lieutenant turned to me. “What was it?” he said. “I never heard it. One of those kids’ quiz shows? Questions and answers, and like that?”
Unmistakably, a soupçon of Army rank had slipped unnoisily but insidiously into his voice. He also seemed to be looking at my hat.
I took off my hat, and said, “No, not exactly.” A certain amount of low family pride was suddenly evoked. “It was before my brother Seymour was on it. And it more or less got that way again after he went off the program. But he changed the whole format, really. He turned the program into a kind of children’s round-table discussion.”
The Lieutenant looked at me with, I thought, somewhat excessive interest. “Were you on it, too?” he said.
“Yes.”
The Matron of Honor spoke up from the other side of the room, from the invisible, dusty recesses of the couch. “I’d like to see a kid of mine get on one of those crazy programs,” she said. “Or act. Any of those things. I’d die, in fact, before I’d let any child of mine turn themself into a little exhibitionist before the public. It warps their whole entire lives. The publicity and all, if nothing else—ask any psychiatrist. I mean how can you have any kind of a normal childhood or anything?” Her head, crowned in a now lopsided circlet of flowers, suddenly popped into view. As though disembodied, it perched on the catwalk of the back of the couch, facing the Lieutenant and me. “That’s probably what’s the matter with that brother of yours,” the Head said. “I mean you lead an absolutely freakish life like that when you’re a kid, and so naturally you never learn to grow up. You never learn to relate to normal people or anything. That’s exactly what Mrs. Fedder was saying in that crazy bedroom a couple of hours ago. But exactly. Your brother’s never learned to relate to anybody. All he can do, apparently, is go around giving people a bunch of stitches in their faces. He’s absolutely unfit for marriage or anything halfway normal, for goodness’ sake. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what Mrs. Fedder said.” The Head then turned just enough to glare over at the Lieutenant. “Am I right, Bob? Did she or didn’t she say that? Tell the truth.”
The next voice to speak up was not the Lieutenant’s but mine. My mouth was dry, and my groin felt damp. I said I didn’t give a good God damn what Mrs. Fedder had to say on the subject of Seymour. Or, for that matter, what any professional dilettante or amateur bitch had to say. I said that from the time Seymour was ten years old, every summa-cum-laude Thinker and intellectual men’s-room attendant in the country had been having a go at him. I said it might be different if Seymour had just been some nasty little high-I.Q. showoff. I said he hadn’t ever been
an exhibitionist. He went down to the broadcast every Wednesday night as though he were going to his own funeral. He didn’t even talk to you, for God’s sake, the whole way down on the bus or subway. I said that not one God-damn person, of all the patronizing, fourth-rate critics and column writers, had ever seen him for what he really was. A poet, for God’s sake. And I meant a poet. If he never wrote a line of poetry, he could still flash what he had at you with the back of his ear if he wanted to.
I stopped right there, thank God. My heart was banging away something terrible, and, like most hypochondriacs, I had a little passing, intimidating notion that such speeches were the stuff that heart attacks are made of. To this day, I have no idea at all how my guests reacted to my outbreak, the polluted little stream of invective I’d loosed on them. The first real exterior detail that I was aware of was the universally familiar sound of plumbing. It came from another part of the apartment. I looked around the room suddenly, between and through and past the immediate faces of my guests. “Where’s the old man?” I asked. “The little old man?” Butter wouldn’t have melted in my mouth.
Oddly enough, when an answer came, it came from the Lieutenant, not the Matron of Honor. “I believe he’s in the bathroom,” he said. The statement was issued with a special forthrightness, proclaiming the speaker to be one of those who don’t mince everyday hygienic facts.
“Oh,” I said. I looked rather absently around the room again. Whether or not I deliberately avoided meeting the Matron of Honor’s terrible eye, I don’t remember, or don’t care to remember. I spotted the bride’s father’s uncle’s silk hat on the seat of a straight chair, across the room. I had an impulse to say hello, aloud, to it. “I’ll get some cold drinks,” I said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“May I use your phone?” the Matron of Honor suddenly said to me as I passed by the couch. She swung her feet to the floor.
“Yes—yes, of course,” I said. I looked at Mrs. Silsburn and the Lieutenant. “I thought I’d make some Tom Collinses, if there are any lemons or limes. Will that be all right?”
The Lieutenant’s answer startled me by its sudden conviviality. “Bring ’em on,” he said, and rubbed his hands together, like a hearty drinking man.
Mrs. Silsburn left off studying the photographs over the desk to advise me, “If you’re going to make Tom Collinses—please, just a teentsy, teentsy little bit of gin in mine. Almost none at all, if it isn’t too much trouble.” She was beginning to look a bit recuperated, even in just the short time since we’d got off the street. Perhaps, for one reason, because she was standing within a few feet of the air-conditioner I’d turned on and some cool air was coming her way. I said I’d look out for her drink, and then left her among the minor radio “celebrities” of the early thirties and the late twenties, the many passé little faces of Seymour’s and my boyhood. The Lieutenant seemed well able to shift for himself in my absence, too; he was already moving, hands joined behind his back, like a lone connoisseur, toward the bookshelves. The Matron of Honor followed me out of the room, yawning as she did—a cavernous, audible yawn that she made no effort to suppress or obstruct from view.
As the Matron of Honor followed me toward the bedroom, where the phone was, the bride’s father’s uncle came toward us from the far end of the hall. His face was in the ferocious repose that had fooled me during most of the car ride, but as he came closer to us in the hall, the mask reversed itself; he pantomimed to us both the very highest salutations and greetings, and I found myself grinning and nodding immoderately in return. His sparse white hair looked freshly combed—almost freshly washed, as though he might have discovered a tiny barbershop cached away at the other end of the apartment. When he’d passed us, I felt a compulsion to look back over my shoulder, and when I did, he waved to me, vigorously—a great, bon-voyage, come-back-soon wave. It picked me up no end. “What is he? Crazy?” the Matron of Honor said. I said I hoped so, and opened the door of the bedroom.
She sat down heavily on one of the twin beds—Seymour’s, as a matter of fact. The phone was on the night table within easy reach. I said I’d bring her a drink right away. “Don’t bother—I’ll be right out,” she said. “Just close the door, if you don’t mind. . . . I don’t mean it that way, but I can never talk on the phone unless the door’s closed.” I told her I was the exact same way, and started to leave. But just as I’d turned to come out of the space between the two beds, I noticed a small collapsible canvas valise over on the window seat. At first glance, I thought it was mine, miraculously arrived at the apartment, all the way from Penn Station, under its own steam. My second thought was that it must be Boo Boo’s. I walked over to it. It was unzipped, and just one look at the top layer of its contents told me who the real owner was. With another, more inclusive look, I saw something lying on top of two laundered Army suntan shirts that I thought ought not to be left alone in the room with the Matron of Honor. I picked it out of the bag, slipped it under one arm, waved fraternally to the Matron of Honor, who had already inserted a finger into the first hole of the number she intended to dial, and was waiting for me to clear out, and then I closed the door behind me. I stood for some little time outside the bedroom, in the gracious solitude of the hall, wondering what to do with Seymour’s diary, which, I ought to rush to say, was the object I’d picked out of the top of the canvas bag. My first constructive thought was to hide it till my guests had left. It seemed to me a good idea to take it into the bathroom and drop it into the laundry hamper. However, on a second and much more involved train of thought, I decided to take it into the bathroom and read parts of it and then drop it into the laundry hamper.
It was a day, God knows, not only of rampant signs and symbols but of wildly extensive communication via the written word. If you jumped into crowded cars, Fate took circuitous pains, before you did any jumping, that you had a pad and pencil with you, just in case one of your fellow-passengers was a deaf-mute. If you slipped into bathrooms, you did well to look up to see if there were any little messages, faintly apocalyptical or otherwise, posted high over the washbowl.
For years, among the seven children in our one-bathroom family, it was our perhaps cloying but serviceable custom to leave messages for one another on the medicine cabinet mirror, using a moist sliver of soap to write with. The general theme of our messages usually ran to excessively strong admonitions and, not infrequently, undisguised threats. “Boo Boo, pick up your washcloth when you’re done with it. Don’t leave it on the floor. Love, Seymour.” “Walt, your turn to take Z. and F. to the park. I did it yesterday. Guess who.” “Wednesday is their anniversary. Don’t go to movies or hang around studio after broadcast or pay forfeit. This means you, too, Buddy.” “Mother said Zooey nearly ate the Feenolax. Don’t leave slightly poisonous objects on the sink that he can reach and eat.” These, of course, are samples straight out of our childhood, but years later, when, in the name of independence or what-have-you, Seymour and I branched out and took an apartment of our own, he and I had not more than nominally departed from the old family custom. That is, we didn’t just throw away our old soap fragments.