Nothing That Meets the Eye (30 page)

“Well, it could be that it isn't Billy. I suppose there're quite a few parakeets that take to the outdoors in such nice weather as this. Don't take him if you don't think he's yours.”

“He is Billy! It's Billy!” the children yelled.

“Tin-ng! Rrrrrr-rrrr-r!” the parakeet said.

Mr. McKenny left with his ten-dollar reward. He was smiling a little as he walked up York Avenue and it was not because he was ten dollars the richer but because he was thinking of the faces of the three children. Suddenly he realized he was staring into the window of a pet shop. A cage of parakeets hung in an upper corner. One of the parakeets was almost entirely yellow. And there was the standard price fastened to the door of their cage: a dollar ninety-eight each. Mr. McKenny went in and bought the yellow bird with part of his ten dollars. If nobody advertised a missing yellow parakeet—and this yellow one would be hard to pass off as another bird—he would keep her himself.

He lived in a brownstone house, one of about a dozen remaining on either side of the street, crowded in by several colossal apartment buildings. Mr. McKenny had seen all the apartment buildings go up—on the sites of brownstones that had come down—in the seventeen years that he had been living in his present apartment. He knew all his neighbors in the brownstones, that is, the ones who kept window boxes of geraniums and pots of begonias and spent a lot of time sitting at their windows looking out at the street, which was practically everybody. The street was full of elderly people, couples and widows and widowers, many of whom could barely make ends meet, Mr. McKenny knew. He supposed that he fared a little better than most of them. There was a woman in the next house whose husband had died two years ago, to whom Mr. McKenny took a pot of stew or chicken soup now and then when he had the money himself to make a big batch. Another old man, who was confined to a wheelchair, Mr. McKenny often took for outings, wheeling him around and around the block.

Now, as Mr. McKenny walked down his block, three or four thin, veinous hands waved at him from behind morning glory vines and blossoming geraniums. It was June and a fine, bright day.

“Hello, there, Mr. McKenny! Saw your picture in the paper yesterday. Say, you're a celebrity!”

“Not quite!” Mr. McKenny said, chuckling. “Hello, Mrs. Zabriskie,” he greeted another woman who was sitting on the cement parapet of her stoop. “How're you?”

“Afternoon, Mr. McKenny. What you got there? Another bird you found?”

Mr. McKenny smiled. “Nope.” He lifted the tan paper bag casually. “Just bought myself a summer shirt.”

June went by and most of July, bringing such hot, breezeless days that Mr. McKenny put his birdcages out on the fire escape in the early morning before the sun got there and made it too hot. He fixed a cold salmon mold, garnished it with hard-boiled eggs and lettuce, and took it to Mr. Tucker, the man who lived in a wheelchair. He brought ice cream a couple of times a week to the woman whose husband had died.

One morning, as Mr. McKenny leaned out of his window to get his birds in out of the climbing sun, he saw a fine male parakeet of royal blue with touches of green perched on the rail of his fire escape. He knew at once that it was not one of his own, though he had now about twenty-five parakeets in readiness for the increased summer business. The parakeet looked at him brightly, then resumed its chattering and hopping along the rail. It was talking to the other parakeets, all of which were looking with interest at the free bird. Mr. McKenny called to the bird softly, his heart beating fast.

“Fw-w! Fw-w! Here birdie, birdie, birdie,” he said gently, not moving from his position, which was bent at the waist, one hand on the top of Freddie and Queenie's cage, the other hand on the windowsill. Then gradually he drew back, taking the cage with him into the room.

The parakeet on the fire escape hopped and chattered as if he were amused.

Mr. McKenny took every cage in. No use trying too hard with a loose parakeet. Either it would join the other birds in the room or it wouldn't. Mr. McKenny crouched on the floor back of the birdcages and began to talk to the parakeet again. “Here, sweetie, sweetie, sweetie. Come on in. Aren't you hungry? Tweetie, tweetie?”

He put on his parakeet record, very low. His other birds cackled and chattered as they ate their breakfast, and the parakeet jumped from the fire escape onto the windowsill to get a better view. He was going to win, Mr. McKenny knew it. After a moment, he crept very slowly toward the window and sprinkled some birdseeds on the carpet. The parakeet looked at them curiously. And then it jumped down. Still moving slowly, Mr. McKenny circled it and closed the window. He had already closed the other front window, which was a little to the left.

He prepared an empty cage with seeds and water and set it on the floor with its door open. Sometimes parakeets liked to go back into cages if they had been on their own and a bit frightened for several hours. Then, having checked to see that there was no possible escape for the parakeet in the apartment, he went out and bought the morning papers.

Mr. McKenny had hardly hoped for a notice this soon, but there it was in the lost and found column of the Times: “parakeet. Felix. Blue with some green. Lost 48th St. East yesterday. Beloved pet. Reward.” And then the phone number.

“Felix?” Mr. McKenny called to the bird.

“Fee-ix!” replied the parakeet impatiently, over its shoulder as it were, and continued sidling around the caged parakeets like a cocky sailor.

“Felix!” said Mr. McKenny, extending a finger.

“Fee-ix! Har! Har! Har!”

“Har! Har! Har! Har! Har!” echoed the parakeets in the cages.

“Arrrk or-set!” Queenie suggested.

“Oh, no! No dark closet for Felix! That wouldn't be nice.” Mr. McKenny had apologized to Queenie so many times for having put her into a dark closet the day the reporter had come, Queenie had learned the two words. He went to the telephone, held the paper up close to his eyes and carefully dialed the number.

A woman with a foreign accent answered and said it was Miss Somebody's residence, a name Mr. McKenny did not catch.

“I think I have found the parakeet,” Mr. McKenny said.

“Ah! Felix? You think so? Un moment, s'il vous plait!—Mademoiselle!”

Mr. McKenny held the wire and nearly a minute passed. Then another excited feminine voice said:

“Hello! You've got Felix? Where are you? You really have Felix?”

“Yes, I think so, but I can't be sure,” said Mr. McKenny, feeling surer by the minute.

“Where? Where did you find him? Where can I find you?”

“I can bring him to you. I have a cage,” Mr. McKenny said out of old habit. “Perhaps you can tell me your address.”

Mr. McKenny took down the address and printed the name, Dianne Walker. A simple name, yet when that French maid had said it . . . Mr. McKenny said he could bring Felix over in about forty-five minutes. That would give him time for his cup of tea and piece of toast. Felix would also have to be coaxed into a cage.

In less than fifteen minutes Mr. McKenny had finished his breakfast, but Felix was still at large in the apartment. Mr. McKenny crept up close and, distracting Felix with one hand, set his hat down gently over the bird with the other. He got Felix into the cage with no more damage than a little bleeding V in one forefinger.

“You're going to be very much happier where I'm taking you,” Mr. McKenny said soothingly, and with no hard feelings about the bite. “I'm going to take you home.”

Automatically, he put the cage into a brown paper shopping bag and laid part of a newspaper over the top so that the cage could not be seen. Then he smiled at himself. This time he needn't hide the parakeet from anyone! But he let the paper stay, anyway. Perhaps the less his neighbors knew, the better.

It was one of those remodeled brownstone houses with the kitchen downstairs in front and a chime doorbell that was answered by a maid—as different from Mr. McKenny's brownstone as a palace is from a third-class rooming house. The maid glanced at the bulky shopping bag.

“Ah! The man with Felix! Yes! Come in!” She swung the door open.

“Thank you.” As soon as Mr. McKenny stepped into the hall, he heard a confusion of voices. A couple of men—they looked like reporters—came out of a door into the hall. Then, before he could turn to try to escape, a young woman with blond hair ran past the two men toward him.

“Oh, you dear man! You've got Felix?” she asked excitedly.

Mr. McKenny was surrounded. The shopping bag was taken from his hand. Somebody pulled the cage out of the bag and a shout went up at the sight of the bird.

“It is my Felix!” the young blond woman cried. “Oooooh!” She embraced the cage, sending Felix into a flutter of excitement himself.

A couple of cameras clicked and flashed.

“Tell us how you found the parakeet, sir,” a reporter said in Mr. McKenny's face. “Just come in here, sir, will you, please?”

The whole group, including a couple of women reporters, moved into a large living room filled with red roses.

“This story's big. You know who Dianne Walker is, don't you?” the reporter asked.

“I'm afraid—”

“She's number one box office of the year in Hollywood and on Broadway,” the man whispered in Mr. McKenny's ear.

Mr. McKenny did not understand the sentence. He supposed she was an actress. She was posing for photographers now with Felix sitting on her red-nailed finger, kissing her lips. In fact, a hush came over everybody as all eyes turned to where the camera focused. Once more Mr. McKenny thought of escape. A reward—whatever it was—would not be worth what the publicity would do to him.

“She just told us,” the same reporter was saying in his ear, “that she wouldn't go on tonight if she didn't get her parakeet back. She says Felix brings her all her luck.”

Click!

“All right, Miss Walker, thank you!”

“Will you tell us how you caught the parakeet?” one of the women reporters asked.

Cameras swung around on Mr. McKenny.

“Well, I—I was getting my own parakeet cages in from my fire escape a little before eight this morning, when I—” At that moment, Mr. McKenny's eye fell on a familiar face: it was the face of the tall young reporter who had come to his house to interview him last month.

“Go on, Mr. McKenny,” he said, giving Mr. McKenny a little smile and a wave. It did not somehow look friendly to Mr. McKenny. He plunged on. “I saw this parakeet—Felix—sitting on the rail of my fire escape. I knew it wasn't one of mine because I haven't any just this color.” He had told the young reporter he hadn't any parakeets of his own, he remembered suddenly. “So I called to it—I took my own birds in and set them on the floor—in their cages. I kept calling to Felix to come in.”

“Did you know it was Felix then?”

“No, I mean, I kept calling to it the way I'd call to any bird. Finally, he came in and I shut the window. I had bought my papers and saw that a parakeet of this description was lost.”

“You mean, you accidentally saw the ad in the paper?”

“Which paper?”

“I looked to see if such a parakeet was missing. I immediately called the phone number.”

Miss Walker stepped forward—she was wearing a tight black sweater, slacks that seemed to be made of tiger skin, and heelless slippers—holding out several bills in her hand. “I am very happy to give this honest man one hundred dollars as a reward for my beloved Felix Mendelssohn!” she announced to the whole room.

The cameras clicked again as Mr. McKenny looked mutely at the money in his hand. Mr. McKenny was asked to smile. Miss Walker kissed his cheek and held it for what seemed to Mr. McKenny an hour until six cameras clicked. Mr. McKenny murmured that he had to be going.

“Oh-h,” said Miss Walker. “Can't I offer you a cup of coffee, at least, before you go?”

“Thank you. I don't drink coffee,” said Mr. McKenny. “I think I'd better go. Thank you very much for your generous reward. It's much more than I had expected. I really don't think I—”