The Early Stories (42 page)

His father opened his door and got out also. At the revelation of this even greater, more massive height, the Dutchman spat on the asphalt, taking care not to hit any shoes. Still working against that invisible resistance in the air, he jerkily pivoted and began to strut toward his car.

“No, wait a minute, mister,” Robert's father called, and began to stride after him. The pink face, abruptly drained of fury, flashed above the soaked shoulder of the Hawaiian shirt. The Dutchman went into his trot. Robert's father, in his anxiety at seeing a conversation broken off, gave chase; his lengthening stride lifted his body off the ground with an awesome, floating slow motion. Under the shimmer of the road his shadow seemed to be falling away from his feet. His voice drifted faintly down the glaring highway. “Wait a minute, mister. I want to ask you something.” As the perspective closed the distance between them, the Dutchman's legs twittered like a pinioned insect's, but this was an illusion; he was not caught. He arrived at the door of his Oldsmobile, judged he had time to utter one more curse, uttered it, and dodged into the glistening green shell. Robert's father arrived at the bumper as the car pulled out. The tense wrinkles on the back of his shirt implied an urge to hurl himself upon the fleeing metal. Then the wrinkles relaxed as he straightened his shoulders.

Erect with frustration, arms swinging, he marched down the side of the road just as, fifteen years before, in spats and a top hat made of cardboard, he had marched at the head of that parade.

Inside the car, Joanne was jiggling the baby and beaming. “That was wonderful,” she said.

With an effort of contraction Daddy shrank into his place behind the steering wheel. He started the car and turned his big head sadly to tell her, “No. That man had something to say to me and I wanted to hear what it was. If I did something wrong, I want to know about it. But the bastard wouldn't talk sense. Like everybody else in this county—I can't understand them. They're Julia's people.”

“I think he thought we were Gypsies,” Mother said. “On account of the old trunk in the back. Also, the lid was up and he couldn't see our
Pennsylvania license plate. They're very anxious, you know, to keep the ‘impure races' out of this section. Once the poor fellow heard us talk, he was satisfied, and I think embarrassed.”

“He seemed awfully mad about nothing,” Joanne said.

Mother's voice quickened, became fluid. “Well, that's how they
are
, Joanne. The people in this part of the country are just mad all the time. God gave them these beautiful valleys and they're hopping mad. I don't know why. I think there's too much starch in their diet.” Her dietary theories were close to her heart; her touching on them conferred on Joanne a daughter's status.

Robert called forward, “Daddy, I don't think he really had any information to share.” He spoke partly to hear his old voice again, partly to compete for attention with his newly created sibling, and partly in a vain hope of gathering to himself some of the glory his father now and then won in the course of his baffled quest for enlightenment. Primarily, Robert spoke to show his wife how accustomed he was to such scenes, how often such triumphant catastrophes had entered his life at home, so that he could be quite blasé about them. This was not true: he was intensely excited, and grew even more so as in folds of familiarity the land tightened around him.

Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?
 

Of the three telephones in the apartment, the one in the living room rested on a tabouret given to Fred Platt's grandmother by Henry James, who considered her, the Platts claimed, the only educated woman in the United States. Above this cherrywood gift hung an oval mirror, its frame a patterned involvement of cherubs, acanthus leaves, and half-furled scrolls; its gilt, smooth as butter in the valleys between figures, yielded on the crests of the relief to touches of Watteau brown. Great-Uncle Randy, known for his whims and mustaches, had rescued the mirror from a Paris auction. In the capacious room there was nothing of no intrinsic interest, nothing that would not serve as cause for a narrative, except the three overstuffed pieces installed by Fred's father—two chairs, facing each other at a distance of three strides, and a crescent-shaped sofa, all covered in spandy-new, navy-blue leather. This blue, and the dark warm wood of inherited cabinets, the twilight colors of aged books, the scarlet and purple of the carpet from Cairo (where Charlotte, Uncle Randy's wife, had caught a bug and died), and the dismal sonorities of the Seicento Transfiguration on the west wall vibrated around the basal shade of plum. Plum: a color a man can rest in, the one toward which all dressing gowns tend. Reinforcing the repose and untroubled finality of the interior were the several oval shapes. The mirror was one of a family, kin to the feminine ellipse of the coffee table; to the burly arc of Daddy's sofa, as they never failed to call it; to the ovoid, palely painted base of a Florentine lamp; to the plaster medallion on the ceiling—the one cloud in the sky of the room—and the recurrent, tiny gold seal of the Oxford University Press, whose books, monochrome and Latinate as dons, were among the chief of the senior Platt's plum-colored pleasures.

Fred, his only son, age twenty-five, dialled a JUdson number. He listened
to five burrs before the receiver was picked up, exposing the tail end of a girl's giggle. Still tittery, she enunciated, “Carson Chem-i-cal.”

“Hello. Is—ah, Clayton Thomas Clayton there, do you know?”

“Mr. Thomas Clayton? Yes, he is. Just one moment, please.” So poor Clayton Clayton had finally got somebody to call him by his middle name, that “Thomas” which his parents must have felt made all the difference between the absurd and the sublime.

“Mr. Clayton's of-fice,” another young woman said. “About what was it you wished to speak to him?”

“Well, nothing, really. It's a friend.”

“Just one moment, please.”

After a delay—purely disciplinary, Fred believed—an unexpectedly deep and even melodious voice said, “Yes?”

“Clayton Clayton?”

A pause. “Who is this?”

“Good morning, sir. I represent the Society for the Propagation and Eventual Adoption of the A. D. Spooner Graduated Income Tax Plan. As perhaps you know, this plan calls for an income tax which increases in inverse proportion to income, so that the wealthy are exempted and the poor taxed out of existence. Within five years, Mr. Spooner estimates, poverty would be eliminated: within ten, a thing not even of memory. Word has come to our office—”

“It's Fred Platt, isn't it?”

“Word has come to our office that in recent years Providence has so favored thee as to incline thy thoughts the more favorably to the Plan.”

“Fred?”

“Congratulations. You now own the Motorola combination phonograph-and-megaphone. Do you care to try for the Bendix?”

“How long have you been in town? It's damn good to hear from you.”

“Since April first. It's a prank of my father's. Who are all these girls you live in the midst of?”

“Your father called you back from Europe?”

“I'm not sure. I keep forgetting to look up ‘wastrel' in the dictionary.”

That made Clayton laugh. “I thought you were studying at the Sorbonne.”

“I was, I was.”

“But you're not now.”

“I'm not now.
Moi et la Sorbonne, nous sommes kaput
.” When the other was silent, Fred added,
“Beaucoup kaput.”

“Look, we should get together,” Clayton said.

“Yes. I was wondering if you eat lunch.”

“When had you thought?”

“Soon?”

“Wait. I'll check.” Some muffled words—a question with his hand over the mouthpiece. A drawer scraped. “Say, Fred, this is bad. I have something on the go every day this week.”

“So. Well, what about June 21? They say the solstice will be lovely this year.”

“Wait. What about today? I'm free today, they just told me.”

“Today?” Fred had to see Clayton soon, but immediately seemed like a push. “
Comme vous voulez, monsieur
. One-ish?”

“All right, uh—could you make it twelve-thirty? I have a good bit to do.…”

“Just as easy. There's a Chinese place on East Forty-ninth Street run by Australians. Excellent murals of Li Po embracing the moon in the Yalu,
plus
the coronation of Henri Quatre.”

“I wonder, could that be done some other time? As I say, there's some stuff here at the office. Do you know Shulman's? It's on Third Avenue, a block from here, so that—”

“Press of work, eh?”

“You said it,” Clayton said, evidently sensing no irony. “Then I'll see you then.”

“In all the old de dum de dumpty that this heart of mine embraces.”

“Pardon?”

“See you then.”

“Twelve-thirty at Shulman's.”

“Absolutely.”

“So long.”

“À bientôt. Très bientôt, mon chéri.”

The first impulse after a humiliation is to look into a mirror. The heavy Parisian-looking glass, hung on two long wires, leaned inches from the wall. A person standing would see reflected in it not his head but the carpet, some furniture, and perhaps, in the upper portion of the oval, his shoes and cuffs. By tilting his chair Fred could see his face; thus a momentary escapee from a hectic cocktail party checks his flushed mask in the bathroom mirror. Here, in this silent overstuffed room, his excited appearance annoyed him. Between his feverish attempt to rekindle friendship—his mind skidding, his tongue wagging—and Clayton's response an embarrassing and degrading disproportion had existed.

Until now it had seemed foolishly natural for Clayton to offer him a job. Reportedly he had asked Bim Blackwood to jump Harcourt for a publicity job at Carson Chemical. Bim had said, without seeing anything funny in the word, that Clayton had lots of “power” at Carson. “In just three years, he's near the top. He's a
killer
. Really.”

It had been hard to gather from Bim's description exactly what Clayton did. As Bim talked on, flicking at the stiff eave of brown hair that overhung his forehead with a conceited carelessness, he would say anything to round out a sentence, never surrendering his right to be taken seriously. “It's an octopus,” he had asserted. “You know, everything is chemicals ultimately. Clayton told me the first thing he was given to do was help design the wrapper for an ammoniated chewing gum they were just putting out. He said the big question was whether chalk-white or mint-green suggested better a clean feeling in the mouth. They had a survey on it; it cost thousands and
thousands
—thousands of little men going inside people's mouths. Of course he doesn't draw any more; he consults. Can you imagine doing nothing all day but
consult?
On pamphlets, you know, and ‘flyers'—what
are
flyers anyway?—and motion pictures to show to salesmen to show them how to explain the things they sell. He's
ter
ribly involved with
tele
vision; he told me a
horr
ible story about a play about Irish peasants the
Carson Chemical Hour
was putting on and at the last minute it dawned on everybody that these people were
organic farmers
. Clayton Clayton saw it through. The killer instinct.”

Clayton hadn't had to go into the Army. Shadowy lungs, or something. That was the thing about poor children: they acquired disabilities which give them the edge in later life. It's unjust, to expect a man without a handicap to go far.

Fred's position was not desperate. An honorable place in the family investments firm was not, as Father had said, with his arch way of trotting out clichés as if they were moderately obscure literary quotations, “the fate worse than death.” Furthermore—he was a great man for furthermores—anyone who imagined that the publicity arm of Carson Chemical was an ivory tower compared with Brauer, Chappell & Platt lived in a fool's paradise.