Franny and Zooey (11 page)
Zooey, looking over at the closed door, inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. "Some exit lines you give yourself, buddy!" he called after her--but only when he must have been sure that his voice wouldn't really reach her down the hall.
THE Glasses' living room was about as unready to have its walls repainted as a room can be. Franny Glass lay asleep on the couch, with an afghan over her; the "wall-to-wall" carpet had been neither taken up nor folded in at the borders; and the furniture--seemingly, a small warehouse of it--was in its usual static-dynamic distribution. The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla. There was a Steinway grand piano (invariably kept open), three radios (a 1927 Freshman, a 1932 Stromberg-Carlson, and a 1941 R.C.A.), a twenty-one-inch-screen television set, four table-model phonographs (including a 1920 Victrola, with its speaker still mounted intact, topside), cigarette and magazine tables galore, a regulation-size ping-pong table (mercifully collapsed and stored behind the piano), four comfortable chairs, eight uncomfortable chairs, a twelve-gallon tropical-fish tank (filled to capacity, in every sense of the word, and illuminated by two forty-watt bulbs), a love seat, the couch Franny was occupying, two empty bird cages, a cherrywood writing table, and an assortment of floor lamps, table lamps, and "bridge" lamps that sprang up all over the congested inscape like sumac. A cordon of waist-high bookcases lined three walls, their shelves cram-jammed and literally sagging with books--children's books, textbooks, second-hand books, Book Club books, plus an even more heterogeneous overflow from less communal "annexes" of the apartment. ("Dracula" now stood next to "Elementary Pali," "The Boy Allies at the Somme" stood next to "Bolts of Melody," "The Scarab Murder Case" and "The Idiot" were together, "Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase" lay on top of "Fear and Trembling.") Even if a resolute and unusually stout-hearted team of painters had been able to deal with the bookcases, the walls themselves, directly behind them, might well have made any self-respecting artisan turn in his union card. From the top of the bookcases to within less than a foot of the ceiling, the plaster --a blistery Wedgwood blue, where visible-- was almost completely covered with what may very loosely be called "hangings," meaning a collection of framed photographs, yellowing personal and Presidential correspondence, bronze and silver plaques, and a sprawling miscellany of vaguely citational-looking documents and trophy like objects of various shapes and sizes, all attesting, one way or another, to the redoubtable fact that from 1927 through most of 1943 the network radio program called "It's a Wise Child" had very rarely gone on the air without one (and, more often, two) of the seven Glass children among its panelists. (Buddy Glass, who, at thirty-six, was the program's oldest living ex-panelist, not infrequently referred to the walls of his parents' apartment as being a kind of visual hymn to commercial American childhood and early puberty. He often expressed regret that his visits in from the country were so few and far between, and pointed out, usually at enormous length, how much luckier his brothers and sisters were, most of whom still lived in or around New York City.) The decoration scheme for the walls was, in fact, the brain child--with Mrs. Glass's unreserved spiritual sanction and everlastingly withheld formal consent--of Mr. Les Glass, the children's father, a former international vaudevillian and, no doubt, an inveterate and wistful admirer of the wall decor at Sardi's theatrical restaurant. Mr. Glass's perhaps most inspired coup as a decorator was manifest just behind and above the couch where young Franny Glass was now sleeping. There, in almost incestuously close juxtaposition, seven scrap-books of newspaper and magazine clippings had been bracketed, at the bindings, directly into the plaster. Year after year, plainly, all seven scrapbooks stood ready to be perused or pored over by old close friends of the family and casual visitors alike, as well as, presumably, the odd part-time cleaning woman.
Just mentionably, Mrs. Glass had managed earlier that morning to make two token gestures on behalf of the arriving painters. The room could be entered through either the hall or the dining room, and at each of these entrances there were glass-paned double doors. Directly after breakfast, Mrs. Glass had stripped the doors of their pleated silk curtains. And later, at an opportune moment, when Franny was pretending to sample a cup of chicken broth, Mrs. Glass had climbed up on the window seats with the agility of a mountain nanny goat and stripped all three of the sash windows of their heavy damask curtains.
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 that 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--"
