XXXXXXXX

P.S. Daddy got his X-rays back from the hospital and we're all so relieved. Its a growth but it isn't malignant. I spoke to Mother on the phone last night. Incidentally she sent her regards to you, so you can relax about that Friday night. I don't even think they heard us come in.

P.P.S. I sound so unintelligent and dimwitted when I write to you. Why? I give you my permission to analyze it. Let's just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible, especially me. I love you. FRANCES (her mark)

Lane was about halfway through this particular reading of the letter when he was interrupted —intruded upon, trespassed upon—by a burly-set young man named Ray Sorenson, who wanted to know if Lane knew what this bastard Rilke was all about. Lane and Sorenson were both in Modern European Literature 251 (open to seniors and graduate students only) and had been assigned the Fourth of Rilke's "Duino Elegies" for Monday. Lane, who knew Sorenson only slightly but had a vague, categorical aversion to his face and manner, put away his letter and said that he didn't know but that he thought he'd understood most of it. "You're lucky," Sorenson said. "You're a fortunate man." His voice carried with a minimum of vitality, as though he had come over to speak to Lane out of boredom or restiveness, not for any sort of human discourse. "Christ, it's cold," he said, and took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Lane noticed a faded but distracting enough lipstick streak on the lapel of Sorenson's camel's-hair coat. It looked as though it had been there for weeks, maybe months, but he didn't know Sorenson well enough to mention it, nor, for that matter, did he give a damn. Besides, the train was arriving. Both boys turned a sort of half left to face the incoming engine. Almost at the same time, the door to the waiting room banged open, and the boys who had been keeping themselves warm began to come out to meet the train, most of them giving the impression of having at least three lighted cigarettes in each hand.

Lane himself lit a cigarette as the train pulled in. Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.

Franny was among the first of the girls to get off the train, from a car at the far, northern end of the platform. Lane spotted her immediately, and despite whatever it was he was trying to do with his face, his arm that shot up into the air was the whole truth. Franny saw it, and him, and waved extravagantly back. She was wearing a shearedraccoon coat, and Lane, walking toward her quickly but with a slow face, reasoned to himself, with suppressed excitement, that he was the only one on the platform who really knew Franny's coat. He remembered that once, in a borrowed car, after kissing Franny for a half hour or so, he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself.

"Lane!" Franny greeted him pleasurably—and she was not one for emptying her face of expression. She threw her arms around him and kissed him. It was a station-platform kiss—spontaneous enough to begin with, but rather inhibited in the follow-through, and with somewhat of a forehead-bumping aspect. "Did you get my letter?" she asked, and added, almost in the same breath, "You look almost frozen, you poor man. Why didn't you wait inside? Did you get my letter?"

"Which letter?" Lane said, picking up her suitcase. It was navy blue with white leather binding, like half a dozen other suitcases that had just been carried off the train.

"You didn't get it? I mailed it Wednesday. Oh, God! I even took it down to the post—"

"Oh, that one. Yes. This all the bags you brought? What's the book?" Franny looked down at her left hand. She had a small pea-green clothbound book in it. "This? Oh, just something," she said. She opened her handbag and stuffed the book into it, and followed Lane down the long platform toward the taxi stand. She put her arm through his, and did most of the talking, if not all of it. There was something, first, about a dress in her bag that had to be ironed. She said she'd bought a really darling little iron that looked like it went with a doll house, but had forgotten to bring it. She said she didn't think she'd known more than three girls on the train—Martha Farrar, Tippie Tibbett, and Eleanor somebody, whom she'd met years ago, in her boarding-school days, at Exeter or someplace. Everybody else on the train, Franny said, looked very Smith, except for two absolutely Vassar types and one absolutely Bennington or Sarah Lawrence type. The Ben-nington-Sarah Lawrence type looked like she'd spent the whole train ride in the John, sculpting or painting or something, or as though she had a leotard on under her dress. Lane, walking rather too fast, said he was sorry he hadn't been able to get her into Croft House—that was hopeless, of course—but that he'd got her into this very nice, cozy place. Small, but clean and all that. She'd like it, he said, and Franny immediately had a vision of a white clapboard rooming house. Three girls who didn't know each other in one room. Whoever got there first would get the lumpy day bed to herself, and the other two would share a double bed with an absolutely fantastic mattress. "Lovely," she said with enthusiasm. Sometimes it was hell to conceal her impatience over the male of the species' general ineptness, and Lane's in particular. It reminded her of a rainy night in New York, just after theatre, when Lane, with a suspicious excess of curb-side charity, had let that really horrible man in the dinner jacket take that taxi away from him. She hadn't especially minded that—that is, God, it would be awful to have to be a man and have to get taxis in the rain—but she remembered Lane's really horrible, hostile look at her as he reported back to the curb. Now, feeling oddly guilty as she thought about that and other things, she gave Lane's arm a special little pressure of simulated affection. The two of them got into a cab. The navy-blue bag with the white leather binding went up front with the driver.

"We'll drop your bag and stuff where you're staying—just chuck them in the door—

and then we'll go get some lunch," Lane said. "I'm starved." He leaned forward and gave an address to the driver.

"Oh, it's lovely to see you!" Franny said as the cab moved off. "I've missed you." The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn't mean them at all. Again with guilt, she took Lane's hand and tightly, warmly laced fingers with him.

ABOUT an hour later, the two were sitting at a comparatively isolated table in a restaurant called Sickler's, downtown, a highly favored place among, chiefly, the intellectual fringe of students at the college—the same students, more or less, who, had they been Yale or Harvard men, might rather too casually have steered their dates away from Mory's or Cronin's. Sickler's, it might be said, was the only restaurant in town where the steaks weren't "that thick"— thumb and index finger held an inch apart. Sickler's was Snails. Sickler's was where a student and his date either both ordered salad or, usually, neither of them did, because of the garlic seasoning. Franny and Lane were both having Martinis. When the drinks had first been served to them, ten or fifteen minutes earlier, Lane had sampled his, then sat back and briefly looked around the room with an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding himself (he must have been sure no one could dispute) in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl—a girl who was not only extraordinarily pretty but, so much the better, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt. Franny had seen this momentary little exposure, and had taken it in for what it was, neither more nor less. But by some old, standing arrangement with her psyche, she elected to feel guilty for having seen it, caught it, and sentenced herself to listen to Lane's ensuing conversation with a special semblance of absorption.

Lane was speaking now as someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where his voice can do absolutely no wrong. "I mean, to put it crudely," he was saying, "the thing you could say he lacks is testicularity. Know what I mean?" He was slouched rhetorically forward, toward Franny, his receptive audience, a supporting forearm on either side of his Martini.

"Lacks what?" Franny said. She had had to clear her throat before speaking, it had been so long since she had said anything at all.

Lane hesitated. "Masculinity," he said.

"I heard you the first time."

"Anyway, that was the motif of the thing, so to speak—what I was trying to bring out in a fairly subtle way," Lane said, very closely following the trend of his own conversation. "I mean, God. 1 honestly thought it was going to go over like a goddam lead balloon, and when I got it back with this goddam 'A' on it in letters about six feet high, I swear I nearly keeled over."

Franny again cleared her throat. Apparently her self-imposed sentence of unadulterated good-listenership had been fully served. "Why?" she asked. Lane looked faintly interrupted. "Why what?"

"Why'd you think it was going to go over like a lead balloon?"

"I just told you. I just got through saying. This guy Brughman is a big Flaubert man. Or at least I thought he was."

"Oh," Franny said. She smiled. She sipped her Martini. "This is marvellous," she said, looking at the glass. "I'm so glad it's not about twenty to one. I hate it when they're absolutely all gin."

Lane nodded. "Anyway, I think I've got the goddam paper in my room. If we get a chance over the weekend, I'll read it to you."

"Marvellous. I'd love to hear it."

Lane nodded again. "I mean I didn't say anything too goddam world-shaking or anything like that." He shifted his position in the chair. "But—I don't know—I think the emphasis I put on why he was so neurotically attracted to the mot juste wasn't too bad. I mean in the light of what we know today. Not just psychoanalysis and all that crap, but certainly to a certain extent. You know what I mean. I'm no Freudian man or anything like that, but certain things you can't just pass over as capital-F Freudian and let them go at that. I mean to a certain extent I think I was perfectly justified to point out that none of the really good boys—Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Shakespeare, for Chrissake—were such goddam word-squeezers. They just wrote. Know what I mean?" Lane looked at Franny somewhat expectantly. She seemed to him to have been listening with extra-special intentness.

"You going to eat your olive, or what?"

Lane gave his Martini glass a brief glance, then looked back at Franny. "No," he said coldly. "You want it?"

"If you don't," Franny said. She knew from Lane's expression that she had asked the wrong question. What was worse, she suddenly didn't want the olive at all and wondered why she had even asked for it. There was nothing to do, though, when Lane extended his Martini glass to her but to accept the olive and consume it with apparent relish. She then took a cigarette from Lane's pack on the table, and he lit it for her and one for himself. After the interruption of the olive, a short silence came over the table. When Lane broke it, it was because he was not one to keep a punch line to himself for any length of time. "This guy Brughman thinks I ought to publish the goddam paper somewhere," he said abruptly. "I don't know, though." Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted — or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect—he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye. "I mean critical essays on Flaubert and those boys are a goddam dime a dozen." He reflected, looking a trifle morose. "As a matter of fact, I don't think there've been any really incisive jobs done on him in the last—"

"You're talking like a section man. But exactly."

"I beg your pardon?" Lane said with measured quietness.

"You're talking exactly like a section man. I'm sorry, but you are. You really are."

"I am? How does a section man talk, may I ask?"

Franny saw that he was irritated, and to what extent, but, for the moment, with equal parts of self-disapproval and malice, she felt like speaking her mind. "Well, I don't know what they are around here, but where I come from, a section man's a person that takes over a class when the professor isn't there or is busy having a nervous breakdown or is at the dentist or something. He's usually a graduate student or something. Anyway, if it's a course in Russian Literature, say, he comes in, in his little button-down-collar shirt and striped tie, and starts knocking Tur-genev for about a half hour. Then, when he's finished, when he's completely ruined Turgenev for you, he starts talking about Stendhal or somebody he wrote his thesis for his M.A. on. Where I go, the English Department has about ten little section men running around ruining things for people, and they're all so brilliant they can hardly open their mouths—pardon the contradiction. I mean if you get into an argument with them, all they do is get this terribly benign expression on their—"

"You've got a goddam bug today—you know that? What the hell's the matter with you anyway?"

Franny quickly tipped her cigarette ash, then brought the ashtray an inch closer to her side of the table. "I'm sorry. I'm awful," she said. "I've just felt so destructive all week. It's awful, I'm horrible."

"Your letter didn't sound so goddam destructive."

Franny nodded solemnly. She was looking at a little warm blotch of sunshine, about the size of a poker chip, on the tablecloth. "I had to strain to write it," she said. Lane started to say something to that, but the waiter was suddenly there to take away the empty Martini glasses. "You want another one?" Lane asked Franny. He didn't get an answer. Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.

"Franny," Lane said patiently, for the waiter's benefit. "Would you like another Martini, or what?"

She looked up. "I'm sorry." She looked at the removed, empty glasses in the waiter's hand. "No. Yes. I don't know."

Lane gave a laugh, looking at the waiter. "Which is it?" he said.

"Yes, please." She looked more alert.

The waiter left. Lane watched him leave the room, then looked back at Franny. She was shaping her cigarette ash on the side of the fresh ashtray the waiter had brought, her mouth not quite closed. Lane watched her for a moment with mounting irritation. Quite probably, he resented and feared any signs of detachment in a girl he was seriously dating. In any case, he surely was concerned over the possibility that this bug Franny had might bitch up the whole weekend. He suddenly leaned forward, putting his arms on the table, as though to get this thing ironed out, by God, but Franny spoke up before he did.

"I'm lousy today," she said. "I'm just way off today." She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car. Again she felt the trickle of disloyalty and guilt, which seemed to be the order of the day, and reacted to it by reaching over to cover Lane's hand with her own. She withdrew her hand almost immediately and used it to pick her cigarette out of the ashtray. "I'll snap out of this in a minute," she said. "I absolutely promise." She smiled at Lane—in a sense, genuinely —and at that moment a smile in return might at least have mitigated to some small extent certain events that were to follow, but Lane was busy affecting a brand of detachment of his own, and chose not to smile back. Franny dragged on her cigarette. "If it weren't so late and everything," she said, "and if I hadn't decided like a fool to go out for honors, I think I'd drop English. I don't know." She tipped her ashes. "I'm just so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers I could scream." She looked at Lane. "I'm sorry. I'll stop. I give you my word. . . . It's just that if I'd had any guts at all, I wouldn't have gone back to college at all this year. I don't know. I mean it's all the most incredible farce."

"Brilliant. That's really brilliant."

Franny took the sarcasm as her due. "I'm sorry," she said.

"Stop saying you're sorry—do you mind? I don't suppose it's occurred to you that you're making one helluva sweeping generalization. If all English Department people were such great little tearer-downers, it would be an altogether different—" Franny interrupted him, but almost inau-dibly. She was looking over his charcoal flannel shoulder at some abstraction across the dining room.

"What?" Lane asked.

"I said I know. You're right. I'm just off, that's all. Don't pay any attention to me." But Lane couldn't let a controversy drop until it had been resolved in his favor. "I mean, hell," he said. "There are incompetent people in all walks of life. I mean that's basic. Let's drop the goddam section men for a minute." He looked at Franny. "You listening to me, or what?"

"Yes."

"You've got two of the best men in the country in your goddam English Department. Man-lius. Esposito. God, I wish we had them here. At least, they're poets, for Chrissake."

"They're not," Franny said. "That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they're not poets." She stopped, self-consciously, and put out her cigarette. For several minutes now, she had seemed to be losing color in her face. Suddenly, even her lipstick seemed a shade or two lighter, as though she had just blotted it with a leaf of Kleenex. "Let's not talk about it," she said, almost listlessly, squashing her cigarette stub in the ashtray. "I'm way off. I'll just ruin the whole weekend. Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair, and I'll just disappear."

The waiter came forward very briefly, and left a second Martini in front of each of them.

Lane put his fingers—which were slender and long, and usually not far out of sight—around the stem of his glass. "You're not ruining anything," he said quietly. "I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want—some bastard with wavy hair?"

"No. Can't we let it go? Please. I'm feeling absolutely lousy, and I'm getting a terrible—"

"I'd be very happy to drop the whole subject —I'd be delighted. Just tell me first what a real poet is, if you don't mind. I'd appreciate it. I really would." There was a faint glisten of perspiration high on Franny's forehead. It might only have meant that the room was too warm, or that her stomach was upset, or that the Martinis were too potent; in any case, Lane didn't seem to notice it.

"I don't know what a real poet is. I wish you'd stop it, Lane. I'm serious. I'm feeling very peculiar and funny, and I can't—"

"All right, all right—O.K. Relax," Lane said. "I was only trying—"

"I know this much, is all," Franny said. "If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem, for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings—excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men."

Lane took time to light a cigarette for himself before he said anything. Then: "I thought you liked Manlius. As a matter of fact, about a month ago, if I remember correctly, you said he was darling, and that you—"

"I do like him. I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect. . . . Would you excuse me for just a minute?" Franny was suddenly on her feet, with her handbag in her hand. She was very pale.

Lane got up, pushing back his chair, his mouth somewhat open. "What's the matter?" he asked. "You feel all right? Anything wrong, or what?"

"I'll be back in just a second."

She left the room without asking directions, as though she knew from former lunches at Sick-ler's just where to go.

Lane, alone at the table, sat smoking and taking conservative drinks from his Martini to make it last till Franny got back. It was very clear that the sense of well-being he had felt, a half hour earlier, at being in the right place with the right, or right-looking, girl was now totally gone. He looked over at the sheared-rac-coon coat, which lay somewhat askew over the back of Franny's vacant chair—the same coat that had excited him at the station, by virtue of his singular familiarity with it—and he examined it now with all but unqualified disaffection. The wrinkles in the silk lining seemed, for some reason, to annoy him. He stopped looking at it and began to stare at the stem of his Martini glass, looking worried and vaguely, unfairly conspired against. One thing was sure. The weekend was certainly getting off to a goddam peculiar start. At that moment, though, he chanced to look up from the table and see someone he knew across the room—a classmate, with a date. Lane sat up a bit in his chair and adjusted his expression from that of all-round apprehension and discontent to that of a man whose date has merely gone to the John, leaving him, as dates do, with nothing to do in the meantime but smoke and look bored, preferably attractively bored.

THE ladies' room at Sickler's was almost as large as the dining room proper, and, in a special sense, appeared to be hardly less commodious. It was unattended and apparently unoccupied when Franny came in. She stood for a moment —rather as though it were a rendezvous point of some kind—in the middle of the tiled floor. Her brow was beaded with perspiration now, her mouth was slackly open, and she was still paler than she had been in the dining room. Abruptly, then, and very quickly, she went into the farthest and most anonymous-looking of the seven or eight enclosures—which, by luck, didn't require a coin for entrance—closed the door behind her, and, with some little difficulty, manipulated the bolt to a locked position. Without any apparent regard to the suchness of her environment, she sat down. She brought her knees together very firmly, as if to make herself a smaller, more compact unit. Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black. Her extended fingers, though trembling, or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty. She held that tense, almost fetal position for a suspensory moment—then broke down. She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped, without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst. When she stopped, it was as though some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body. Her face tear-streaked but quite expressionless, almost vacuous, she picked up her handbag from the floor, opened it, and took out the small pea-green clothbound book. She put it on her lap—on her knees, rather—and looked down at it, gazed down at it, as if that were the best of all places for a small pea-green clothbound book to be. After a moment, she picked up the book, raised it chest-high, and pressed it to her—firmly, and quite briefly. Then she put it back into the handbag, stood up, and came out of the enclosure. She washed her face with cold water, dried it with a towel from an overhead rack, applied fresh lipstick, combed her hair, and left the room.

She looked quite stunning as she walked across the dining room to the table, not at all unlike a girl on the qui vive appropriate to a big college weekend. As she came briskly, smiling, to her chair, Lane slowly got up, a napkin in his left hand.

"God. I'm sorry," Franny said. "Did you think I'd died?"

"I didn't think you'd died," Lane said. He drew her chair for her. "I didn't know what the hell happened." He went around to his own chair. "We don't have any too goddam much time, you know." He sat down. "You all right? Your eyes are a little bloodshot." He looked at her more closely. "You O.K., or what?"

Franny lit a cigarette. "I'm marvellous now. I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life. Did you order?"

"I waited for you," Lane said, still looking at her closely. "What was the matter anyway? Your stomach?"

"No. Yes and no. I don't know," Franny said. She looked down at the menu on her plate, and consulted it without picking it up. "All I want's a chicken sandwich. And maybe a glass of milk. ... You order what you want and all, though. I mean, take snails and octopuses and things. Octopi. I'm really not at all hungry." Lane looked at her, then exhaled a thin, overly expressive stream of smoke down at his plate. "This is going to be a real little doll of a weekend," he said. "A chicken sandwich, for God's sake."

Franny was annoyed. "I'm not hungry, Lane —I'm sorry. My gosh. Now, please. You order what you want, why don't you, and I'll eat while you're eating. But I can't just work up an appetite because you want me to."

"All right, all right." Lane craned his neck and caught the waiter's attention. A moment later, he ordered the chicken sandwich and the glass of milk for Franny, and snails, frogs' legs, and a salad for himself. He looked at his wrist-watch when the waiter had gone, and said, "We're supposed to be up at Tenbridge at one-fifteen, one-thirty, incidentally. No later. I told Wally we'd probably stop off for a drink and then maybe we'd all go out to the stadium together in his car. You mind? You like Wally."

"I don't even know who he is."

"You've met him about twenty times, for God's sake. Wally Campbell. Jesus. If you've met him once, you've met him—"

"Oh. I remember. . . . Listen, don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else." Franny made her voice stop. It sounded to her cavilling and bitchy, and she felt a wave of self-hatred that, quite literally, made her forehead begin to perspire again. But her voice picked up again, in spite of herself. "I don't mean there's anything horrible about him or anything like that. It's just that for four solid years I've kept seeing Wally Campbells wherever I go. I know when they're going to be charming, I know when they're going to start telling you some really nasty gossip about some girl that lives in your dorm, I know when they're going to ask me what I did over the summer, I know when they're going to pull up a chair and straddle it backward and start bragging in a terribly, terribly quiet voice—or name-dropping in a terribly quiet, casual voice. There's an unwritten law that people in a certain social or financial bracket can name-drop as much as they like just as long as they say something terribly disparaging about the person as soon as they've dropped his name—that he's a bastard or a nymphomaniac or takes dope all the time, or something horrible." She broke off again. She was quiet for a moment, turning the ashtray in her fingers and being careful not to look up and see Lane's expression. "I'm sorry," she said. "It isn't just Wally Campbell. I'm just picking on him because you mentioned him. And because he just looks like somebody that spent the summer in Italy or someplace."

"He was in France last summer, for your information," Lane stated. "I know what you mean," he added quickly, "but you're being goddam un—"

"All right," Franny said wearily. "France." She took a cigarette out of the pack on the table. "It isn't just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness' sake. I mean if he were a girl—

somebody in my dorm, for example—he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through Wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so—I don't know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way." She stopped. She shook her head briefly, her face quite white, and for just a fractional moment she felt her forehead with her hand—

less, it seemed, to find out whether she was perspiring than to check to see, as if she were her own parent, whether she had a fever. "I feel so funny," she said. "I think I'm going crary. Maybe I'm already crazy."

Lane was looking at her with genuine concern—more concern than curiosity.

"You're pale as hell. You're really pale—you know that?" he asked. Franny shook her head. "I'm fine. I'll be fine in a minute." She looked up as the waiter came forward with their orders. "Oh, your snails look beautiful." She had just brought her cigarette to her lips, but it had gone out. "What'd you do with the matches?" she asked.

Lane gave her a light when the waiter had gone. "You smoke too much," he said. He picked up the small fork beside his plate of snails, but looked at Franny again before he used it. "I'm worried about you. I'm serious. What the hell's happened to you in the last couple of weeks?"

Franny looked at him, then simultaneously shrugged and shook her head. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing," she said. "Eat. Eat them snails. They're terrible if they're cold."

"You eat."

Franny nodded and looked down at her chicken sandwich. She felt a faint wave of nausea, and looked up immediately and dragged on her cigarette.

"How's the play?" Lane asked, attending to his snails.

"I don't know. I'm not in it. I quit."

"You quit?" Lane looked up. "I thought you were so mad about the part. What happened? They give it to somebody else?"

"No, they did not. It was all mine. That's nasty. Oh, that's nasty."

"Well, what happened? You didn't quit the whole department, did you?" Franny nodded, and took a sip of her milk. Lane waited till he had chewed and swallowed, then said, "Why, for God's sake? I thought the goddam theatre was your passion. It's about the only thing I've ever heard you—"

"I just quit, that's all," Franny said. "It started embarrassing me. I began to feel like such a nasty little egomaniac." She reflected. "I don't know. It seemed like such poor taste, sort of, to want to act in the first place. I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm. Kissing everybody and wearing their makeup all over the place, and then trying to be horribly natural and friendly when your friends came backstage to see you. I just hated myself. . . . And the worst part was I was usually sort of ashamed to be in the plays I was in. Especially in summer stock." She looked at Lane. "And I had good parts, so don't look at me that way. It wasn't that. It was just that I would've been ashamed if, say, anybody I respected—my brothers, for example—came and heard me deliver some of the lines I had to say. I used to write certain people and tell them not to come." She reflected again. "Except Pegeen in

'Playboy,' last summer. I mean that could have been really nice, only the goon that played the Playboy spoiled any fun it might have been. He was so lyrical—God, was he lyrical!" Lane had finished his snails. He sat looking deliberately expressionless. "He got terrific reviews," he said. "You sent me the reviews, if you recall." Franny sighed. "All right. O.K., Lane."

"No, I mean you've been talking for a half hour as though you're the only person in the world that's got any goddam sense, any critical ability. I mean if some of the best critics thought this man was terrific in the play, maybe he was, maybe you're wrong. That ever occur to you? You know, you haven't exactly reached the ripe, old—"

"He was terrific for somebody that just has talent. If you're going to play the Playboy right, you have to be a genius. You do, that's all—I can't help it," Franny said. She arched her back a trifle, and, with her mouth a trifle open, she put her hand on top of her head. "I feel so woozy and funny. I don't know what's the matter with me."

"You think you're a genius?"

Franny took her hand down from her head. "Aw, Lane. Please. Don't do that to me."

"I'm not doing any—"

"All I know is I'm losing my mind," Franny said. "I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting —it is, it is. I don't care what anybody says."

Lane raised his eyebrows at that, and sat back, the better to make his point. "You sure you're just not afraid of competing?" he asked with studied quietness. "I don't know too much about it, but I'd lay odds a good psychoanalyst—I mean a really competent one—would probably take that statement—"

"I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete—that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash." She paused, and suddenly picked up her glass of milk and brought it to her lips. "I knew it," she said, setting it down. "That's something new. My teeth go funny on me. They're chattering. I nearly bit through a glass the day before yesterday. Maybe I'm stark, staring mad and don't know it." The waiter had come forward to serve Lane's frogs' legs and salad, and Franny looked up at him. He, in turn, looked down at her untouched chicken sandwich. He asked if the young lady would perhaps like to change her order. Franny thanked him, and said no.

"I'm just very slow," she said. The waiter, who was not a young man, seemed to look for an instant at her pallor and damp brow, then bowed and left.

"You want to use this a second?" Lane said abruptly. He was holding out a folded, white handkerchief. His voice sounded sympathetic, kind, in spite of some perverse attempt to make it sound matter-of-fact.

"Why? Do I need it?"

"You're sweating. Not sweating, but I mean your forehead's perspiring quite a bit."

"It is? How horrible! I'm sorry. . . ." Franny brought her handbag up to table level, opened it, and began to rummage through it. "I have some Kleenex somewhere."

"Use my handkerchief, for God's sake. What the hell's the difference?"

'Wo—I love that handkerchief and I'm not going to get it all perspiry," Franny said. Her handbag was a crowded one. To see better, she began to unload a few things and place them on the tablecloth, just to the left of her untasted sandwich. "Here it is," she said. She used a compact mirror and quickly, lightly blotted her brow with a leaf of Kleenex. "God. I look like a ghost. How can you stand me?"

"What's the book?" Lane asked.

FRANNY literally jumped. She looked down at the disorderly little pile of handbag freight on the tablecloth. "What book?" she said. "This, you mean?" She picked up the little clothbound book and put it back into her handbag. "Just something I brought to look at on the train."

"Let's have a look. What is it?"

Franny didn't seem to hear him. She opened her compact again and took another quick glance into the mirror. "God," she said. Then she cleared everything—compact, billfold, laundry bill, toothbrush, a tin of aspirins, and a gold-plated swizzle stick—back into her handbag. "I don't know why I carry that crazy gold swizzle stick around," she said. "A very corny boy gave it to me when I was a sophomore, for my birthday. He thought it was such a beautiful and inspired gift, and he kept watching my face while I opened the package. I keep trying to throw it away, but I simply can't do it. I'll go to my grave with it." She reflected. "He kept grinning at me and telling me I'd always have good luck if I kept it with me at all times."

Lane had started in on his frogs' legs. "What was the book, anyway? Or is it a goddam secret or something?" he asked.

"The little book in my bag?" Franny said. She watched him disjoint a pair of frogs'

legs. Then she took a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it herself. "Oh, I don't know," she said. "It's something called 'The Way of a Pilgrim.' " She watched Lane eat for a moment. "I got it out of the library. This man that teaches this Religion Survey thing I'm taking this term mentioned it." She dragged on her cigarette.

"I've had it out for weeks. I keep forgetting to return it."

"Who wrote it?"

"I don't know," Franny said casually. "Some Russian peasant, apparently." She went on watching Lane eat his frogs' legs. "He never gives his name. You never know his name the whole time he's telling the story. He just tells you he's a peasant and that he's thirty-three years old and that he's got a withered arm. And that his wife is dead. It's all in the eighteen-hundreds."

Lane had just shifted his attention from the frogs' legs to the salad. "Any good?" he said. "What's it about?"

"I don't know. It's peculiar. I mean it's primarily a religious book. In a way, I suppose you could say it's terribly fanatical, but in a way it isn't. I mean it starts out with this peasant—the pilgrim—wanting to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly. You know. Without stopping. In Thessa-lonians or someplace. So he starts out walking all over Russia, looking for somebody who can tell him how to pray incessantly. And what you should say if you do." Franny seemed intensely interested in the way Lane was dismembering his frogs' legs. Her eyes remained fixed on his plate as she spoke. "All he carries with him is this knapsack filled with bread and salt. Then he meets this person called a starets—some sort of terribly advanced religious person—and the starets tells him about a book called the Thilokalia.' "Which apparently was written by a group of terribly advanced monks who sort of advocated this really incredible method of praying."

"Hold still," Lane said to a pair of frogs' legs.

"Anyway, so the pilgrim learns how to pray the way these very mystical persons say you should—I mean he keeps at it till he's perfected it and everything. Then he goes on walking all over Russia, meeting all kinds of absolutely marvellous people and telling them how to pray by this incredible method. I mean that's really the whole book."

"I hate to mention it, but I'm going to reek of garlic," Lane said.

"He meets this one married couple, on one of his journeys, that I love more than anybody I ever read about in my entire life," Franny said. "He's walking down a road somewhere in the country, with his knapsack on his back, when these two tiny little children run after him, shouting, 'Dear little beggar! Dear little beggar! You must come home to Mummy. She likes beggars.' So he goes home with the children, and this really lovely person, the children's mother, comes out of the house all in a bustle and insists on helping him take off his dirty old boots and giving him a cup of tea. Then the father comes home, and apparently he loves beggars and pilgrims, too, and they all sit down to dinner. And while they're at dinner, the pilgrim wants to know who all the ladies are that are sitting around the table, and the husband tells him that they're all servants but that they always sit down to eat with him and his wife because they're sisters in Christ." Franny suddenly sat up a trifle straighter in her seat, self-consciously. "I mean I loved the pilgrim wanting to know who all the ladies were." She watched Lane butter a piece of bread. "Anyway, after that, the pilgrim stays overnight, and he and the husband sit up till late talking about this method of praying without ceasing. The pilgrim tells him how to do it. Then he leaves in the morning and starts out on some more adventures. He meets all kinds of people—I mean that's the whole book, really—and he tells all of them how to pray by this special way."

Lane nodded. He cut into his salad with his fork. "I hope to God we get time over the weekend so that you can take a quick look at this goddam paper I told you about," he said. "I don't know. I may not do a damn thing with it —I mean try to publish it or what have you— but I'd like you to sort of glance through it while you're here."

"I'd love to," Franny said. She watched him butter another piece of bread. "You might like this book," she said suddenly. "It's so simple, I mean."

"Sounds interesting. You don't want your butter, do you?"

"No, take it. I can't lend it to you, because it's way overdue already, but you could probably get it at the library here. I'm positive you could."

"You haven't touched your goddam sandwich," Lane said suddenly. "You know that?"

Franny looked down at her plate as if it had just been placed before her. "I will in a minute," she said. She sat still for a moment, holding her cigarette, but without dragging on it, in her left hand, and with her right hand fixed tensely around the base of the glass of milk. "Do you want to hear what the special method of praying was that the starets told him about?" she asked. "It's really sort of interesting, in a way." Lane cut into his last pair of frogs' legs. He nodded. "Sure," he said. "Sure."

"Well, as I said, the pilgrim—this simple peasant—started the whole pilgrimage to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you're supposed to pray without ceasing. And then he meets this starets—this very advanced religious person I mentioned, the one who'd been studying the Thilokalia' for years and years and years." Franny stopped suddenly to reflect, to organize. "Well, the starets tells him about the Jesus Prayer first of all. 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.' I mean that's what it is. And he explains to him that those are the best words to use when you pray. Especially the word 'mercy,'

because it's such a really enormous word and can mean so many things. I mean it doesn't just have to mean mercy." Franny paused to reflect again. She was no longer looking at Lane's plate but over his shoulder. "Anyway," she went on, "the starets tells the pilgrim that if you keep saying that prayer over and over again—you only have to just do it with your lips at first—then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don't know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats, and then you're actually praying without ceasing. Which has a really tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook. I mean that's the whole point of it, more or less. I mean you do it to purify your whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything's about." Lane had finished eating. Now, as Franny paused again, he sat back and lit a cigarette and watched her face. She was still looking abstractedly ahead of her, past his shoulder, and seemed scarcely aware of his presence.

"But the thing is, the marvellous thing is, when you first start doing it, you don't even have to have faith in what you're doing. I mean even if you're terribly embarrassed about the whole thing, it's perfectly all right. I mean you're not insulting anybody or anything. In other words, nobody asks you to believe a single thing when you first start out. You don't even have to think about what you're saying, the starets said. All you have to have in the beginning is quantity. Then, later on, it becomes quality by itself. On its own power or something. He says that any name of God—any name at all—has this peculiar, selfactive power of its own, and it starts working after you've sort of started it up." Lane sat rather slouched in his chair, smoking, his eyes narrowed attentively at Franny's face. Her face was still pale, but it had been paler at other moments since the two had been in Sickler's.

"As a matter of fact, that makes absolute sense," Franny said, "because in the Nembutsu sects of Buddhism, people keep saying 'Namu Amida Butsu' over and over again—which means 'Praises to the Buddha' or something like that— and the same thing happens. The exact same—"

"Easy. Take it easy," Lane interrupted. "In the first place, you're going to burn your fingers any second."

Franny gave a minimal glance down at her left hand, and dropped the stub of her still-burning cigarette into the ashtray. "The same thing happens in 'The Cloud of Unknowing,' too. Just with the word 'God.' I mean you just keep saying the word 'God.' " She looked at Lane more directly than she had in several minutes. "I mean the point is did you ever hear anything so fascinating in your life, in a way? I mean it's so hard to just say it's absolute coincidence and then just let it go at that—that's what's so fascinating to me. At least, that's what's so terribly—" She broke off. Lane was shifting restively in his chair, and there was an expression on his face—a matter of raised eyebrows, chiefly—

that she knew very well. "What's the matter?" she asked.

"You actually believe that stuff, or what?"

Franny reached for the pack of cigarettes and took one out. "I didn't say I believed it or I didn't believe it," she said, and scanned the table for the folder of matches. "I said it was fascinating." She accepted a light from Lane. "I just think it's a terribly peculiar coincidence," she said, exhaling smoke, "that you keep running into that kind of advice—

I mean all these really advanced and absolutely unbogus religious persons that keep telling you if you repeat the name of God incessantly, something happens, Even in India. In India, they tell you to meditate on the 'Om,' which means the same thing, really, and the exact same result is supposed to happen. So I mean you can't just rationalize it away without even—"

"What is the result?" Lane said shortly.

"What?"

"I mean what is the result that's supposed to follow? All this synchronization business and mumbo-jumbo. You get heart trouble? I don't know if you know it, but you could do yourself, somebody could do himself a great deal of real—"

"You get to see God. Something happens in some absolutely nonphysical part of the heart— where the Hindus say that Atman resides, if you ever took any Religion—and you see God, that's all." She flicked her cigarette ash self-consciously, just missing the ashtray. She picked up the ash with her fingers and put it in. "And don't ask me who or what God is. I mean I don't even know if He exists. When I was little, I used to think—" She stopped. The waiter had come to take away the dishes and redistribute menus.

"You want some dessert, or coffee?" Lane asked.

"I think I'll just finish my milk. But you have some," Franny said. The waiter had just taken away her plate with the untouched chicken sandwich. She didn't dare to look up at him.

Lane looked at his wristwatch. "God. We don't have time. We're lucky if we get to the game on time." He looked up at the waiter. "Just coffee for me, please." He watched the waiter leave, then leaned forward, arms on the table, thoroughly relaxed, stomach full, coffee due to arrive momentarily, and said, "Well, it's interesting, anyway. All that stuff

... I don't think you leave any margin for the most elementary psychology. I mean I think all those religious experiences have a very obvious psychological background—you know what I mean. . . . It's interesting, though. I mean you can't deny that." He looked over at Franny and smiled at her. "Anyway. Just in case I forgot to mention it. I love you. Did I get around to mentioning that?"

"Lane, would you excuse me again for just a second?" Franny said. She had got up before the question was completely out.

Lane got up, too, slowly, looking at her. "You all right?" he asked. "You feel sick again, or what?"

"Just funny. I'll be right back."

She walked briskly through the dining room, taking the same route she had taken earlier. But she stopped quite short at the small cocktail bar at the far end of the room. The bartender, who was wiping a sherry glass dry, looked at her. She put her right hand on the bar, then lowered her head—bowed it—and put her left hand to her forehead, just touching it with the fingertips. She weaved a trifle, then fainted, collapsing to the floor.

IT was nearly five minutes before Franny came thoroughly to. She was on a couch in the manager's office, and Lane was sitting beside her. His face, suspended anxiously over hers, had a remarkable pallor of its own now.

"How are ya?" he said, in a rather hospital-room voice. "You feel any better?" Franny nodded. She closed her eyes for a second against the overhead light, then reopened them. "Am I supposed to say 'Where am I?'" she said. "Where am I?" Lane laughed. "You're in the manager's office. They're all running around looking for spirits of ammonia and doctors and things to bring you to. They'd just run out of ammonia, apparently. How do you feel? No kidding."

"Fine. Stupid, but fine. Did I honestly faint?"

"And how. You really conked out," Lane said. He took her hand in his. "What do you think's the matter with you anyway? I mean you sounded so—you know—so perfect when I talked to you on the phone last week. Didn't you eat any breakfast, or what?" Franny shrugged. Her eyes looked around the room. "It's so embarrassing," she said.

"Did somebody have to carry me in here?"

"The bartender and I. We sort of hoisted you in. You scared the hell out of me, I'm not kidding."

Franny looked thoughtfully, without blinking, at the ceiling while her hand was held. Then she turned and, with her free hand, made a gesture as though to push back the cuff of Lane's sleeve. "What time is it?" she asked.

"Never mind that," Lane said. "We're in no hurry."

"You wanted to go to that cocktail party."

"The hell with it."

"Is it too late for the game, too?" Franny asked.

"Listen, I said the hell with it. You're going to go back to your room at whosis—Blue Shutters—and get some rest, that's the important thing," Lane said. He sat a trifle closer to her and bent down and kissed her, briefly. He turned and looked over at the door, then back at Franny. "You're just going to rest this afternoon. That's all you're going to do." He stroked her arm for a moment. "Then maybe after a while, if you get any decent rest, I can get upstairs somehow. I think there's a goddam back staircase. I can find out." Franny didn't say anything. She looked at the ceiling.

"You know how long it's been?" Lane said. "When was that Friday night? Way the hell early last month, wasn't it?" He shook his head. "That's no good. Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly." He looked down at Franny more closely. "You really feel better?"

She nodded. She turned her head toward him. "I'm terribly thirsty, that's all. Do you think I could have some water? Would it be too much trouble?"

"Hell, no! Will you be all right if I leave you for a second? You know what I think I'll do?"

Franny shook her head to the second question.

"I'll get somebody to bring you some water. Then I'll get the headwaiter and call off the spirits of ammonia—and, incidentally, pay the check. Then I'll get a cab all ready, so we won't have to hunt all around for one. It may take a few minutes, because most of them will be cruising around for people going out to the game." He let go Franny's hand and got up. "O.K.?" he said.

"Fine."

"O.K., I'll be right back. Don't move." He left the room.

Alone, Franny lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. Her lips began to move, forming soundless words, and they continued to move.

___________________________________________

ZOOEY

THE facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do. As a counterbalance, then, we begin with that everfresh and exciting odium: the author's formal introduction. The one I have in mind not only is wordy and earnest beyond my wildest dreams but is, to boot, rather excruciatingly personal. If, with the right kind of luck, it comes off, it should be comparable in effect to a compulsory guided tour through the engine room, with myself, as guide, leading the way in an old one-piece Jantzen bathing suit.

To get straight to the worst, what I'm about to offer isn't really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie, and those who have seen the footage have strongly advised me against nurturing any elaborate distribution plans for it. The dissenting group, it's my privilege and headache to divulge, consists of the three featured players themselves, two female, one male. We'll take the leading lady first, who, I believe, would prefer to be briefly described as a languid, sophisticated type. She feels that things might have gone along well enough if I'd just done

boy will be seen reading an exceedingly lengthy letter (which will be reprinted here in full, I can safely promise) sent to him by his eldest living brother, Buddy Glass. The style of the letter, I'm told, bears a considerably more than passing resemblance to the style, or written mannerisms, of this narrator, and the general reader will no doubt jump to the heady conclusion that the writer of the letter and I are one and the same person. Jump he will, and, I'm afraid, jump he should. We will, however, leave this Buddy Glass in the third person from here on in. At least, I see no good reason to take him out of it.

TEN-THIRTY on a Monday morning in November of 1955, Zooey Glass, a young man of twenty-five, was seated in a very full bath, reading a four-year-old letter. It was an almost endless-looking letter, typewritten on several pages of second-sheet yellow paper, and he was having some little trouble keeping it propped up against the two dry islands of his knees. At his right, a dampish-looking cigarette was balanced on the edge of the builtin enamel soapcatch, and evidently it was burning well enough, for every now and then he picked it off and took a drag or two, without quite having to look up from his letter. His ashes invariably fell into the tub water, either straightway or down one of the letter pages. He seemed unaware of the mes-siness of the arrangement. He did seem aware, though, if only just, that the heat of the water was beginning to have a dehydrating effect on him. The longer he sat reading—or re-reading —the more often and the less absently he used the back of his wrist to blot his forehead and upper lip.

In Zooey, be assured early, we are dealing with the complex, the overlapping, the cloven, and at least two dossier-like paragraphs ought to be got in right here. To start with, he was a small young man, and extremely slight of body. From the rear—

particularly where his vertebrae were visible—he might almost have passed for one of those needy metropolitan children who are sent out every summer to endowed camps to be fattened and sunned. Close up, either full-face or in profile, he was surpassingly handsome, even spectacularly so. His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like "the blueeyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo." A more general and surely less parochial view was that his face had been just barely saved from too-handsomeness, not to say gorgeousness, by virtue of one ear's protruding slightly more than the other. I myself hold a very different opinion from either of these. I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces—a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast—

could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second. But what was undiminishable, and, as already so flatly suggested, a joy of a kind forever, was an authentic esprit superimposed over his entire face—especially at the eyes, where it was often as arresting as a Harlequin mask, and, on occasion, much more confounding. By profession, Zooey was an actor, a leading man, in television, and had been for a little more than three years. He was, in fact, as "sought after" (and, according to vague second-hand reports that reached his family, as highly paid) as a young leading man in television perhaps can be who isn't at the same time a Hollywood or Broadway star with a ready-made national reputation. But possibly either of these statements, without elaboration, can lead to an overly clear-cut line of conjecture. As it happened, Zooey had made a formal and serious debut as a public performer at the age of seven. He was the second youngest of what had originally been seven brothers and sisters*—five boys and two girls—all of whom, at rather conveniently spaced intervals during childhood, had been heard regularly on a network radio program, a children's quiz show called "It's a Wise Child." An age difference of almost eighteen years between the eldest of the Glass children, Seymour, and the youngest, Franny, had helped very considerably to allow the family to reserve a kind of dynastic seating arrangement at the "Wise Child" microphones, which lasted just over sixteen years— from 1927 well into 1943, a span of years connecting the Charleston and B-17 Eras. (All this data, I think, is to some degree relevant.) For all the gaps and years between their individual heydays on the program, it may be said (with few, and no really important, reservations) that all seven of the children had managed to answer over the air a prodigious number of alternately deadlybookish and deadly-cute questions—sent in by listeners—with a freshness, an aplomb, that was considered unique in commercial radio.

* The aesthetic evil of a footnote seems in order just here, I'm afraid. In all that follows, only the two youngest of the seven children will be directly seen or heard. The remaining five, however, the senior five, will be stalking in and out of the plot with considerable frequency, like so many Banquo's ghosts. The reader, then, may care to know at the outset that in 1955 the eldest of the Glass children, Seymour, had been dead almost seven years. He committed suicide while vacationing in Florida with his wife. If alive, he would have been thirty-eight in 1955. The second-eldest child, Buddy, was what is 'known in campus-catalogue parlance as "writer-in-residence" at a girls' junior college in upper New York State. He lived alone, in a small, unwinterized, unelectrified house about a quarter of a mile away from a rather popular ski-run. The next-eldest of the children, Boo Boo, was married and the mother of three children. In November, 1955, she was travelling in Europe with her husband and all three of their children. In order of age, the twins, Walt and Waker, come after Boo Boo. Walt had been dead just over ten years. He was killed in a freakish explosion while he was with the Army of Occupation in Japan. Waker, his junior by some twelve minutes, was a Roman Catholic priest, and in November, 1955, he was in Ecuador, attending a Jesuit conference of some kind. Public response to the children was often hot and never tepid. In general, listeners were divided into two, curiously restive camps: those who held that the Glasses were a bunch of insufferably "superior" little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth, and those who held that they were bona-fide underage wits and savants, of an uncommon, if unenviable, order. At this writing (1957), there are former listeners to "It's a Wise Child" who remember, with basically astonishing accuracy, many of the individual performances of each of the seven children. In this same thinning but still oddly coterielike group, the consensus is that, of all the Glass children, the eldest boy, Seymour, back in the late twenties and early thirties, had been the "best" to hear, the most consistently "rewarding." After Seymour, Zooey, the youngest boy in the family, is generally placed second in order of preference, or appeal. And since we have a singularly workaday interest in Zooey here, it may be appended that, as an ex-panelist on "It's a Wise Child," he had one almanaclike distinction among (or over) his brothers and sisters. Off and on, during their broadcasting years, all seven of the children had been fair game for the kind of child psychologist or professional educator who takes a special interest in extra-precocious children. In this cause, or service, Zooey had been, of all the Glasses, hands down, the most voraciously examined, interviewed, and poked at. Very notably, with no exceptions that I know of, his experiences in the apparently divergent fields of clinical, social, and newsstand psychology had been costly for him, as though the places where he was examined had been uniformly alive with either highly contagious traumas or just plain old-fashioned germs. For example, in 1942 (with the everlasting disapproval of his two eldest brothers, both of whom were in the Army at the time) he had been tested by one research group alone, in Boston, on five separate occasions. (He was twelve during most of the sessions, and it's possible that the train rides—ten of them—held some attraction for him, at least in the beginning.) The main purpose of the five tests, one gathered, was to isolate and study, if possible, the source of Zooey's precocious wit and fancy. At the end of the fifth test, the subject was sent home to New York with three or four aspirins in an engraved envelope for his sniffles, which turned out to be bronchial pneumonia. Some six weeks later, a long-distance call came through from Boston at eleven-thirty at night, with much dropping of small coins in an ordinary pay phone, and an unidentified voice—with no intention, presumably, of sounding pedantically waggish—informed Mr. and Mrs. Glass that their son Zooey, at twelve, had an English vocabulary on an exact par with Mary Baker Eddy's, if he could be urged to use it. To resume: The long, typewritten, four-year-old letter that Zooey had checked into the bathtub with, on this Monday morning in November, 1955, had obviously been taken out of its envelope and unfolded and refolded on too many private occasions during the four years, so that now it not only had an over-all unappetit-lich appearance but was actually torn in several places, mostly along the creases. The author of the letter, as stated earlier, was Zooey's eldest living brother, Buddy. The letter itself was virtually endless in length, overwritten, teaching, repetitious, opinionated, remonstrative, condescending, embarrassing—and filled, to a surfeit, with affection. In short, it was exactly the kind of letter that a recipient, whether he wants to or not, carries around for some time in his hip pocket. And that professional writers of a type love to reproduce verbatim:

3/18/51

DEAR ZOOEY,

I've just finished decoding a long letter that came from Mother this morning, all about you and General Eisenhower's smile and small boys in the Daily News who fall down elevator shafts and when am I going to have my phone in New York taken out and get one installed up here in the country, where I really need it. Surely the only woman in the world who can write a letter in invisible italics. Dear Bessie. I get five hundred words of copy from her like clockwork every three months on the subject of my poor old private phone and how stupid it is to pay Good Money every month for something nobody's ever even around to use any more. Which is really a big fat lie. When I'm in town, I invariably sit talking by the hour with my old friend Yama, the God of Death, and a private phone's a must for our little chats. Anyway, please tell her I haven't changed my mind. I love that old phone with a passion. It was the only really private property Seymour and I ever had in Bessie's entire kibbutz. It's also essential to my inner harmony to see Seymour's listing in the goddam phone book every year. I like to browse through the G's confidently. Be a good boy and pass that message along for me. Not quite word for word, but nicely. Be kinder to Bessie, Zooey, when you can. I don't think I mean because she's our mother, but because she's weary. You will after you're thirty or so, when everybody slows down a little (even you, maybe), but try harder now. It isn't enough to treat her with the doting brutality of an apache dancer toward his partner—which she understands, incidentally, whether you think so or not. You forget that she thrives on sentimentality almost as much as Les does.

My telephone problems aside, Bessie's current letter is really a Zooey letter. I'm to write and tell you that you have your Whole Life Before You and that it's Criminal if you don't go after your Ph.D. before you go in for the actor's life in a big way. She doesn't say what she'd like you to get the Ph.D. in, but I assume Math rather than Greek, you dirty little bookworm. At any rate, I gather that she wants you to have something to Fall Back On if for some reason the acting career doesn't work out. Which may be very sound, and probably is, but I don't feel like coming right out and saying so. It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope. I actually had to struggle at the mailbox this morning to know who Bessie was when I saw her name on the return address of the envelope. For one good enough reason, Advanced Writing 24-A loaded me up with thirty-eight short stories to drag tearfully home for the weekend. Thirty-seven of them will be about a shy, reclusive Pennsylvania Dutch lesbian who Wants To Write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect.

I take it for granted you know that for all the years I've been moving my literary whore's cubicle from college to college, I still don't have even a B.A. It seems a century ago, but I think there were two reasons, originally, why I didn't take a degree. (Just kindly sit still. This is the first time I've written to you in years.) One, I was a proper snob in college, as only an old Wise Child alumnus and future lifetime English-major can be, and I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck. And, two, Seymour had his Ph.D. at an age when most young Americans are just getting out of high school, and since it was too late for me to catch up with him in style, I wasn't having any. Of course, too, I knew for certain when I was your age that I'd never be forced to teach, that if my Muses failed to provide for me, I'd go grind lenses somewhere, like Booker T. Washington. In any particular sense, though, I don't think I have any academic regrets. On especially black days I sometimes tell myself that if I'd loaded up with degrees when I was able, I might not now be teaching anything quite so collegiate and hopeless as Advanced Writing 24-A. But that's probably bunk. The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.

I do think your case is a lot different from mine. Anyway, I don't think I'm really on Bessie's side. If it's Security you want, or that Bessie wants for you, your M.A. will at least always qualify you to pass out logarithm tables at any dreary boys' prep school in the country, and most colleges. On the other hand, your beautiful Greek will do you almost no good at all on any good-size campus unless you have a Ph.D., living as we do in a brass-hat, brass-mortarboard world. (Of course, you can always move to Athens. Sunny old Athens.) But the more I think of it, the more I think to hell with more degrees for you. The fact is, if you want to know, I can't help thinking you'd make a damn site better-adjusted actor if Seymour and I hadn't thrown in the Upanishads and the Diamond Sutra and Eckhart and all our other old loves with the rest of your recommended home reading when you were small. By rights, an actor should travel fairly light. When we were kids, S. and I once had a beautiful lunch with John Barrymore. He was bright as hell, and full of lore, but he wasn't burdened down with any of the cumbersome luggage of a too formal education. I mention this because I was talking to a rather pompous Orientalist over the weekend, and at one point, during a very deep, metaphysical lull in the conversation, I told him I had a little brother who once got over an unhappy love affair by trying to translate the Mundaka Upanishad into classical Greek. (He laughed uproariously—you know the way Orientalists laugh.)

I wish to God I had some idea what will happen to you as an actor. You're a born one, certainly. Even our Bessie knows that. And surely you and Franny are the only beauties in the family. But where will you act? Have you thought about it? The movies? If so, I'm scared stiff that if ever you gain any weight you'll be as victimized as the next young actor into contributing to the reliable Hollywood amalgam of prizefighter and mystic, gunman and underprivileged child, cowhand and Man's Conscience, and the rest. Will you be content with that standard box-office schmalz? Or will you dream of something a little more cosmic—zum Beispiel, playing Pierre or Andrey in a Technicolor production of War and Peace, with stunning battlefield scenes, and all the nuances of characterization left out (on the ground that they're novel-istic and unphotogenic), and Anna Magnani daringly cast as Natasha (just to keep the production classy and Honest), and gorgeous incidental music by Dmitri Popkin, and all the male leads intermittently rippling their jaw muscles to show they're under great emotional stress, and a World Premiere at the Winter Garden, under floodlights, with Molotov and Milton Berle and Governor Dewey introducing the celebrities as they come into the theatre. (By celebrities I mean, of course, old Tolstoy-lovers —Senator Dirksen, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gayelord Hauser, Georgie Jessel, Charles of the Ritz.) How does that sound? And if you go into the theatre, will you have any illusions about that? Have you ever seen a really beautiful production of, say, The Cherry Orchard? Don't say you have. Nobody has. You may have seen "inspired" productions, "competent" productions, but never anything beautiful. Never one where Chekhov's talent is matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul onstage. You worry hell out of me, Zooey. Forgive the pessimism, if not the sonority. But I know how much you demand from a thing, you little bastard. And I've had the hellish experience of sitting next to you at the theatre. I can so clearly see you demanding something from the performing arts that just isn't residual there. For heaven's sake, be careful.

Granted I'm off today. I keep a good neurotic's calendar, and it's three years, to the day, since Seymour killed himself. Did I ever tell you what happened when I went down to Florida to bring back the body? I wept like a slob on the plane for five solid hours. Carefully adjusting my veil from time to time so that no one across the aisle could see me—I had a seat to myself, thank God. About five minutes before the plane landed, I became aware of people talking in the seat behind me. A woman was saying, with all of Back Bay Boston and most of Harvard Square in her voice, ". . . and the next morning, mind you, they took a pint of pus out of that lovely young body of hers." That's all I remember hearing, but when I got off the plane a few minutes later and the Bereaved Widow came toward me all in Bergdorf Goodman black, I had the Wrong Expression on my face. I was grinning. Which is exactly the way I feel today, for no really good reason. Against my better judgment, I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.

Last month, Dean Sheeter (whose name usually transports Franny when I mention it) approached me with his gracious smile and bull whip, and I am now lecturing to the faculty, their wives, and a few oppressively deep-type undergraduates every Friday on Zen and Ma-hayana Buddhism. A feat, I haven't a doubt, that will eventually win me the Eastern Philosophy Chair in Hell. The point is, I'm now on the campus five days a week instead of four, and what with my own work at nights and on weekends, I have almost no time to do any elective thinking. Which is my plaintive way of saying that I do worry about you and Franny when I get a chance, but not nearly so often as I'd like to. What I'm really trying to tell you is. that Bessie's letter had very little to do with my sitting down in a sea of ashtrays to write to you today. She shoots me some priority information about you and Franny every week and I never do anything about it, so it isn't that. What brings this on is something that happened to me at the local supermarket today. (No new paragraph. I'll spare you that.) I was standing at the meat counter, waiting for some rib lamb chops to be cut. A young mother and her little girl were waiting around, too. The little girl was about four, and, to pass the time, she leaned her back against the glass showcase and stared up at my unshaven face. I told her she was about the prettiest little girl I'd seen all day. Which made sense to her; she nodded. I said I'd bet she had a lot of boy friends. I got the same nod again. I asked her how many boy friends she had. She held up two fingers. "Two!" I said. "That's a lot of boy friends. What are their names, sweetheart?" Said she, in a piercing voice, "Bobby and Dorothy." I grabbed my lamb chops and ran. But that's exactly what brought on this letter—much more than Bessie's insistence that I write to you about Ph.D.s and acting. That, and a haiku-style poem I found in the hotel room where Seymour shot himself. It was written in pencil on the desk blotter: "The little girl on the plane/ Who turned her doll's head around/ To look at me." With these two things on my mind, I thought as I was driving home from the supermarket that at long last I could write to you and tell you why S. and I took over your and Franny's education as early and as highhandedly as we did. We've never put it into words for you, and I think it's high time one of us did. But now I'm not so sure I can do it. The little girl at the meat counter is gone, and I can't quite see the polite face of the little doll on the plane. And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is beginning to drive me out of my seat. It seems terribly important to try, though.

The age differences in the family always seemed to add unnecessarily and perversely to our problems. Not really between S. and the twins and Boo Boo and me, but between the two twosomes of you and Franny and S. and me. Seymour and I were both adults—he was even long out of college—by the time you and Franny were both able to read. At that stage, we had no real urge even to push our favorite classics at the two of you—not, anyway, with the same gusto that we had at the twins or Boo Boo. We knew there's no keeping a born scholar ignorant, and at heart, I think, we didn't really want to, but we were nervous, even frightened, at the statistics on child pedants and academic weisenheimers who grow up into faculty-recreation-room savants. Much, much more important, though, Seymour had already begun to believe (and I agreed with him, as far as I was able to see the point) that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge. Dr. Suzuki says somewhere that to be in a state of pure consciousness— satori—is to be with God before he said, Let there be light. Seymour and I thought it might be a good thing to hold back this light from you and Franny (at least as far as we were able), and all the many lower, more fashionable lighting effects—the arts, sciences, classics, languages—till you were both able at least to conceive of a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light. We thought it would be wonderfully constructive to at least (that is, if our own "limitations" got in the way) tell you as much as we knew about the men—the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas—who knew something or everything about this state of being. That is, we wanted you both to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankaracharya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence. That, anyway, was the big idea. Along with all this, I suppose I'm trying to say that I know how bitterly you resent the years when S. and I were regularly conducting home seminars, and the metaphysical sittings in particular. I just hope that one day—

preferably when we're both blind drunk—we can talk about it. (Meantime, I can only say that neither Seymour nor I ever had a notion, that far back, that you were going to grow up into an actor. We should have, no doubt, but we didn't. If we had, I feel certain S. would have tried to do something constructive about it. Surely somewhere there must be a special prep course for Nirvana and points East designed strictly for actors, and I think S. would have found it.) The paragraph should close, but I can't stop muttering. You'll wince at what comes next, but come it must. I think you know that I had the best intentions of checking in now and then after S.'s death to see how you and Franny were holding up. You were eighteen, and I didn't worry about you overly. Although I did hear from a gossipy little snip in one of my classes that you had a reputation in your college dorm for going off and sitting in meditation for ten hours at a time, and that made me think. But Franny was thirteen at the time. I simply couldn't move, though. I was afraid to come home. I wasn't afraid you'd both, in tears, take up a position across the room and fire the complete set of Max Mueller's Sacred Books of the East at me, one by one. (Which would have been masochistic ecstasy for me, probably.) But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me. As I remember very well, I let a whole year go by after the funeral before I came back to New York at all. After that, it was easy enough to come in for birthdays and holidays and be reasonably sure that questions would run to when my next book would be finished and had I done any skiing lately, etc. You've even both been up here on many a weekend in the last couple of years, and though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word. Today is the first time I've really wanted to speak up. The deeper I get into this goddam letter, the more I lose the courage of my convictions. But I swear to you that I had a perfectly communicable little vision of truth (lamb-chop division) this afternoon the very instant that child told me her boy friends' names were Bobby and Dorothy. Seymour once said to me—in a crosstown bus, of all places— that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold. That suddenly hit me at the meat counter, and it seemed a matter of life and death to drive home at seventy miles an hour to get a letter off to you. Oh, God, how I wish I'd grabbed a pencil right there in the supermarket and not trusted the roads home. Maybe it's just as well, though. There are times when I think you've forgiven S. more completely than any of us have. Waker once said something very interesting to me on that subject—in fact, I'm merely parroting what he said to me. He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving. That may be truer than true. How can I know? All I do know for certain is that I had something happy and exciting to tell you—and on just one side of the paper, doublespaced—and I knew when I got home that it was mostly gone, or all gone, and there was nothing left to do but go through the motions. Lecture you on Ph.D.s and the actor's life. How messy, how funny, and how Seymour himself would have smiled and smiled—and probably assured me, and all of us, not to worry about it. Enough. Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might. If you do anything at all beautiful on a stage, anything nameless and joy-making, anything above and beyond the call of theatrical ingenuity, S. and I will both rent tuxedos and rhinestone hats and solemnly come around to the stage door with bouquets of snapdragons. In any case, for what little it's worth, please count on my affection and support, at whatever distance.

--BUDDY

As always, my passes at omniscience are absurd, but you, of all people, should be polite to the part of me that comes out merely clever. Years ago, in my earliest and pastiest days as a would-be writer, I once read a new story aloud to S. and Boo Boo. When I was finished, Boo Boo said flatly (but looking over at Seymour) that the story was "too clever." S. shook his head, beaming away at me, and said cleverness was my permanent affliction, my wooden leg, and that it was in the worst possible taste to draw the group's attention to it. As one limping man to another, old Zooey, let's be courteous and kind to each other.

Much love, B.

THE last, the under, page of the four-year-old letter was stained a sort of off-cordovan color, and it was torn in two places along the folds. Zooey, finished reading, treated it with some little care as he put the letter back into page-one order. He tapped the pages, to even them out, against his dry knees. He frowned. Then, mercurially, as though he'd read the letter, by God, for the last time in his life, he stuffed it like so much excelsior into its envelope. He placed the thick envelope on the side of the tub and began to play a little game with it. With one finger he tapped the loaded envelope back and forth along the tub edge, seeing, apparently, if he could keep it in motion without letting it fall into the tub water. After a good five minutes of this, he gave the envelope a faulty tap and had to reach out quickly and grab it. Which ended the game. Keeping the retrieved envelope in his hand, he sat lower, deeper, in the water, letting his knees submerge. He stared abstractedly for a minute or two at the tiled wall beyond the foot of the tub, then glanced at his cigarette on the soapcatch, picked it off, and took a couple of test drags on it, but it had gone out. He sat up again, very abruptly, with a great slosh of tub water, and dropped his dry left hand over the side of the tub. A typewritten manuscript was lying, face up, on the bathmat. He picked it up and brought it aboard, as it were. He stared at it briefly, then inserted his four-year-old letter in the middle pages, where the stapling in a manuscript is tightest. He then propped the manuscript against his now wet knees, an inch or so above the waterline, and began to turn the pages. When he came to page 9, he folded the manuscript, magazine-style, and began to read or to study.

The role of "Rick" had been heavily underlined with a soft-lead pencil.

TINA (morosely): Oh, darling, darling, darling. I'm not much good to you, am I? RICK: Don't say that. Don't ever say that, you hear me?

TINA: It's true, though. I'm a jinx. I'm a horrible jinx. If it hadn't been for me, Scott Kincaid would have assigned you to the Buenos Aires office ages ago. I spoiled all that. (Goes over to window) I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes. I feel like someone in a terribly sophisticated play. The funny part is, I'm not sophisticated. I'm not anything. I'm just me. (Turns) Oh, Rick, Rick, I'm scared. What's happened to us? I can't seem to find us anymore. I reach out and reach out and we're just not there. I'm frightened. I'm a frightened child. (Looks out window) I hate this rain. Sometimes I see me dead in it. RICK (quietly): My darling, isn't that a line from "A Farewell to Arms"? TINA (Turns, furious): Get out of here. Get out! Get out of here before I jump out of this window. Do you hear me?

RICK (grabbing her): Now you listen to me. You beautiful little moron. You adorable, childish, self-dramatizing—

Zooey's reading was suddenly interrupted by his mother's voice—importunate, quasiconstructive—addressing him from outside the bathroom door: "Zooey? Are you still in the tub?"

"Yes, I'm still in the tub. Why?"

"I want to come in for just a teeny minute. I have something for you."

"I'm in the tub, for God's sake, Mother."

"I'll just be a minute, for goodness' sake. Pull the shower curtain." Zooey took a parting look at the page he had been reading, then closed the manuscript and dropped it over the side of the tub. "Jesus Christ almighty," he said.

"Sometimes I see me dead in the rain." A nylon shower curtain, scarlet, with a design of canary-yellow sharps, flats, and clefs on it, was bunched up at the foot of the tub, attached with plastic rings to an overhead chromium bar. Sitting forward, Zooey reached for it and shot it the length of the tub, closing himself off from view. "All right. God. Come in if you're coming in," he said. His voice had no conspicuous actor's mannerisms, but it was rather excessively vibrant; it "carried" implacably when he had no interest in controlling it. Years earlier, as a child panelist on "It's a Wise Child," he had been advised repeatedly to keep his distance from the microphone.

The door opened, and Mrs. Glass, a medium-stout woman in a hairnet, sidled into the bathroom. Her age, under any circumstance, was fiercely indeterminate, but never more so than when she was wearing a hairnet. Her entrances into rooms were usually verbal as well as physical. "I don't know how you can stay in the tub the way you do." She closed the door behind her instantly, as someone does who has been waging a long, long war on behalf of her progeny against post-bath drafts. "It isn't even healthy," she said.

"Do you know how long you've been in that tub? Exactly forty-five—"

"Don't tell me! Just don't tell me, Bessie." "What do you mean, don't tell you?" "Just what I said. Leave me the goddam illusion you haven't been out there counting the minutes I've—"

"Nobody's been counting any min utes, young man," Mrs. Glass said. She was already very busy. She had brought into the bathroom a small, oblong package wrapped in white paper and tied with gold tinsel. It appeared to contain an object roughly the size of the Hope diamond or an irrigation attachment. Mrs. Glass narrowed her eyes at it and picked at the tinsel with her fingers. When the knot didn't give, she applied her teeth to it. She was wearing her usual at-home vesture— what her son Buddy (who was a writer, and consequently, as Kafka, no less, has told us, not a nice man) called her prenotification-of-death uniform. It consisted mostly of a hoary midnight-blue Japanese kimono. She almost invariably wore it throughout the apartment during the day. With its many occultish-looking folds, it also served as the repository for the paraphernalia of a very heavy cigarette smoker and an amateur handyman; two oversized pockets had been added at the hips, and they usually contained two or three packs of cigarettes, several match folders, a screwdriver, a claw-end hammer, a Boy Scout knife that had once belonged to one of her sons, and an enamel faucet handle or two, plus an assortment of screws, nails, hinges, and ball-bearing casters—all of which tended to make Mrs. Glass chink faintly as she moved about in her large apartment. For ten years or more, both of her daughters had often, if impo-tently, conspired to throw out this veteran kimono. (Her married daughter, Boo Boo, had intimated that it might have to be given a coup de grace with a blunt instrument before it was laid away in a wastebasket.) However Oriental the wrapper had originally been designed to look, it didn't detract an iota from the single, impactful impression that Mrs. Glass, chez elle, made on a certain type of observer. The Glasses lived in an old but, categorically, not unfashionable apartment house in the East Seventies, where possibly two-thirds of the more mature women tenants owned fur coats and, on leaving the building on a bright weekday morning, might at least conceivably be found, a half hour or so later, getting in or out of one of the elevators at Lord & Taylor's or Saks or Bonwit Teller's. In this distinctly Manhattanesque locale, Mrs. Glass was (from an undeniably hoyden point of view) a rather refreshing eyesore. She looked, first, as if she never, never left the building at all, but that if she did, she would be wearing a dark shawl and she would be going in the general direction of O'Connell Street, there to claim the body of one of her half-Irish, half-Jewish sons, who, through some clerical error, had just been shot dead by the Black and Tans.

Zooey's voice suddenly and suspiciously spoke up: "Mother? What in Christ's name are you doing out there?"

Mrs. Glass had undressed the package and now stood reading the fine print on the back of a carton of toothpaste. "Just kindly button that lip of yours," she said, rather absently. She went over to the medicine cabinet. It was stationed above the washbowl, against the wall. She opened its mirror-faced door and surveyed the congested shelves with the eye—or, rather, the masterly squint—of a dedicated medicine-cabinet gardener. Before her, in overly luxuriant rows, was a host, so to speak, of golden pharmaceuticals, plus a few technically less indigenous whatnots. The shelves bore iodine, Mercurochrome, vitamin capsules, dental floss, aspirin, Anacin, Bufferin, Argyrol, Musterole, Ex-Lax, Milk of Magnesia, Sal Hepatica, Aspergum, two Gillette razors, one Schick Injector razor, two tubes of shaving cream, a bent and somewhat torn snapshot of a fat black-and-white cat asleep on a porch railing, three combs, two hairbrushes, a bottle of Wildroot hair ointment, a bottle of Fitch Dandruff Remover, a small, unlabelled box of glycerine suppositories, Vicks Nose Drops, Vicks VapoRub, six bars of castile soap, the stubs of three tickets to a 1946 musical comedy ("Call Me Mister"), a tube of depilatory cream, a box of Kleenex, two seashells, an assortment of used-looking emery boards, two jars of cleansing cream, three pairs o£ scissors, a nail file, an unclouded blue marble (known to marble shooters, at least in the twenties, as a "purey"), a cream for contracting enlarged pores, a pair of tweezers, the strapless chassis of a girl's or woman's gold wristwatch, a box of bicarbonate of soda, a girl's boarding-school class ring with a chipped onyx stone, a bottle of Stopette—and, inconceivably or no, quite a good deal more. Mrs. Glass briskly reached up and took down an object from the bottom shelf and dropped it, with a muffled, tinny bang, into the wastebasket. "I'm putting some of that new toothpaste they're all raving about in here for you," she announced, without turning around, and made good her word. "I want you to stop using that crazy powder. It's going to take all the lovely enamel off your teeth. You have lovely teeth. The least you can do is take proper—"

"Who said so?" A sound of agitated tub water came from behind the shower curtain.

"Who the hell said it's going to take all the lovely enamel off my teeth?"

"I did." Mrs. Glass gave her garden a final critical glance. "Just please use it." She nudged an unopened box of Sal Hepatica a little with the trowel of her extended fingers to align it with the other sempervirents in its row, and then closed the cabinet door. She turned on the cold-water tap. "I'd like to know who washes their hands and then doesn't clean the bowl up after them," she said grimly. "This is supposed to be a family of all adults." She increased the pressure of the water and cleansed the bowl briefly but thoroughly with one hand. "I don't suppose you've spoken to your little sister yet," she said, and turned to look at the shower curtain.

"No, I have not spoken to my little sister yet. How 'bout getting the hell out of here now?"

"Why haven't you?" Mrs. Glass demanded. "I don't think that's nice, Zooey. I don't think that's nice at all. I asked you particularly to please go see if there's anything—"

"In the first place, Bessie, I just got up about an hour ago. In the second place, I talked to her for two solid hours last night, and I don't think she frankly wants to talk to any goddam one of us today. And in the third place, if you don't get out of this bathroom I'm going to set fire to this ugly goddam curtain. I mean it, Bessie." Somewhere in the middle of these three illustrative points, Mrs. Glass had left off listening and sat down. "Sometimes I could almost murder Buddy for not having a phone," she said. "It's so unnecessary. How can a grown man live like that—no phone, no anything? No one has any desire to invade his privacy, if that's what he wants, but I certainly don't think it's necessary to live like a hermit." She stirred irritably, and crossed her legs. "It isn't even safe, for heaven's sake! Suppose he broke his leg or something like that. Way off in the woods like that. I worry about it all the time."

"You do, eh? Which do you worry about? His breaking a leg or his not having a phone when you want him to?"

"I worry about both, young man, for your information."

"Well... don't. Don't waste your time. You're so stupid, Bessie. Why are you so stupid? You know Buddy, for God's sake. If he were twenty miles in the woods, with both legs broken and a goddam arrow sticking out of his back, he'd crawl back to his cave just to make certain nobody sneaked in to try on his galoshes while he was out." A short, pleasurable, if somewhat ghoulish, guffaw sounded behind the curtain. "Take my word for it. He cares too much about his goddam privacy to die in any woods."

"Nobody said anything about dying," Mrs. Glass said. She gave her hairnet a minor and needless adjustment. "I've been trying the whole entire morning to get those people that live down the road from him on the phone. They don't even answer. It's in fur iating not to be able to get him. How many times I've begged him to take that crazy phone out of his and Seymour's old room. It isn't even normal. When something really comes up and he needs one— It's infuriating. I tried twice last night, and about four times this—"

"What's all this 'infuriating' business? In the first place, why should some strangers down the road be at our beck and call?"

"Nobody's talking about anybody being at our beck and call, Zooey. Just don't be so fresh, please. For your information, I'm very worried about that child. And I think Buddy should be told about this whole thing. Just for your information, I don't think he'd ever forgive me if I didn't get in touch with him at a time like this."

"All right, then! Why don't you call the college, instead of bothering his neighbors? He wouldn't be in his cave anyway at this time of day—you know that."

"Just kindly lower that voice of yours, please, young man. Nobody's deaf. For your information, I have called the college. I've learned from experience that that does absolutely no good whatsoever. They just leave messages on his desk, and I don't think he ever goes anywhere near his office anyway." Mrs. Glass abruptly leaned her weight forward, without getting up, and reached out and picked up something from the top of the laundry hamper. "Do you have a washrag back there?" she asked.

"The word is 'washcloth,' not 'washrag,' and all I want, God damn it, Bessie, is to be left alone in this bathroom. That's my one simple desire. If I'd wanted this place to fill up with every fat Irish rose that passes by, I'd've said so. Now, c'mon. Get out."

"Zooey," Mrs. Glass said patiently. "I'm holding a clean washrag in my hand. Do you or don't you want it? Just yes or no, please."

"Oh, my God! Yes. Yes. Yes. More than anything in the world. Throw it over."

"I won't throw it over, I'll hand it to you. Al ways throw everything, in this family." Mrs. Glass got up, took three steps over to the shower curtain, and waited for a disembodied hand to claim the washcloth.

"Thanks a million. Clear out of here now, please. I've lost about ten pounds already."

"It's no wonder! You sit there in that tub till you're practically blue in the face, and then you —What's this?" With immense interest, Mrs. Glass bent down and picked up the manuscript Zooey had been reading before she made her entrance into the room. "Is this the new script Mr. LeSage sent over?" she asked. "On the floor?" She didn't get an answer. It was as if Eve had asked Cain whether that wasn't his lovely new hoe lying out there in the rain. "That's a marvellous place to put a manuscript, I must say." She transported the manuscript over to the window and placed it with care on the radiator. She looked down at it, appearing to inspect it for wetness. The window blind had been lowered— Zooey had done all his bathtub reading by the light from the three-bulb overhead fixture—but a fraction of morning light inched under the blind and onto the title page of the manuscript. Mrs. Glass tilted her head to one side, the better to read the title, at the same time taking a pack of king-size cigarettes from her kimono pocket."'The Heart Is an Autumn Wanderer,'" she read, mused, aloud. "Unusual title." The response from behind the shower curtain was a trifle delayed but delighted. "It's a what? It's a what kind of title?"

Mrs. Glass's guard was already up. She backed up and re-seated herself, a lighted cigarette in her hand. "Unusual, I said. I didn't say it was beautiful or anything, so just—"

"Ahh, by George. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to get anything really classy past you, Bessie girl. You know what your heart is, Bessie? Would you like to know what your heart is? Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage. How's that for a catchy title, eh? By God, many people—many uninformed people—think Seymour and Buddy are the only goddam men of letters in this family. When I think, when I sit down for a minute and think of the sensitive prose, and garages, I throw away every day of my—"

"All right, all right, young man," Mrs. Glass said. Whatever her taste in televisionplay titles, or her aesthetics in general, a flicker came into her eyes—no more than a flicker, but a flicker— of connoisseurlike, if perverse, relish for her youngest, and only handsome, son's style of bullying. For a split second, it displaced the look of all-round wear and, plainly, specific worry that had been on her face since she entered the bathroom. However, she was almost immediately back on the defensive: "What's the matter with that title? It is very unusual. You! You don't think anything's unusual or beautifull I've never once heard you—"

"What? Who doesn't? Exactly what don't I think isn't beautiful?" A minor groundswell sounded behind the shower curtain, as though a rather delinquent porpoise were suddenly at play. "Listen, I don't care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, every thing is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God. Any thing . 'Peter Pan.' Even before the curtain goes up at 'Peter Pan,' I'm a goddam puddle of tears. And you have the gall to try to tell me I'm—"

"Oh, shut up," Mrs. Glass said, absently. She gave a great sigh. Then, with a tense expression, she dragged deeply on her cigarette and, exhaling the smoke through her nostrils, said— or, rather, erupted—"Oh, I wish I knew what I'm supposed to do with that child!" She took a deep breath. "I'm absolutely at the end of my rope." She gave the shower curtain an X-ray-like look. "You're none of you any help whatsoever. But none!

Your father doesn't even like to talk about anything like this. You know that! He's worried, too, naturally—I know that look on his face—but he simply will not face anything." Mrs. Glass's mouth tightened. "He's never faced anything as long as I've known him. He thinks anything peculiar or unpleasant will just go away if he turns on the radio and some little schnook starts singing."

A great single roar of laughter came from the closed-off Zooey. It was scarcely distinguishable from his guffaw, but there was a difference.

"Well, he does!" Mrs. Glass insisted, humorlessly. She sat forward. "Would you like to know what I honestly think?" she demanded. "Would you?"

"Bessie. For God's sake. You're going to tell me anyway, so what's the difference if I—"

"I honestly think—I mean this, now—I honestly think he keeps hoping to hear all you children on the radio again. I'm serious, now." Mrs. Glass took another deep breath.

"Every single time your father turns on the radio, I honestly think he expects to tune in on

'It's a Wise Child* and hear all you children, one by one, answering questions again." She compressed her lips and paused, unconsciously, for additional emphasis. "And I mean all of you," she said, and abruptly straightened her posture a trifle. "That includes Seymour and Walt." She took a brisk but voluminous drag on her cigarette. "He lives entirely in the past. But entirely. He hardly ever even watches television, unless you're on. And don't laugh, Zooey. It isn't funny."

"Who in God's name is laughing?"

"Well, it's true! He has absolutely no conception of anything being really wrong with Franny. But none! Right after the eleven-o'clock news last night, what do you think he asks me? If I think Franny might like a tangerine! The child's laying there by the hour crying her eyes out if you say boo to her, and mumbling heaven knows what to herself, and your father wonders if maybe she'd like a tangerine. I could've killed him. The next time he—" Mrs. Glass broke off. She glared at the shower curtain. "What's so funny?" she demanded.

"Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I like the tangerine. All right, who else is being no help to you? Me. Les. Buddy. Who else? Pour your heart out to me, Bessie. Don't be reticent. That's the whole trouble with this family—we keep things bottled up too much."

"Oh, you're about as funny as a crutch, young man," Mrs. Glass said. She took time to push a stray wisp of hair under the elastic of her hairnet. "Oh, I wish I could get Buddy on that crazy phone for a few minutes. The one person that's supposed to know about all this funny business." She reflected, with apparent rancor. "It never rains but it pours." She tapped her cigarette ash into her cupped left hand. "Boo Boo won't be back till the tenth. Waker I'd be afraid to tell about it, even if I knew how to get hold of him. I never saw a family like this in my entire life. I mean it. You're all supposed to be so intelligent and everything, all you children, and not one of you is any help when the chips are down. Not one of you. I'm just a little bit sick of—"

"What chips, for God's sake? When what chips are down? What would you like us to do, Bessie? Go in there and live Franny's life for her?"

"Now, just stop that! Nobody's talking about anybody living her life for her. I'd simply like somebody to go in that living room and find out what's what,--that's what I'd like. I'd like to know just when that child intends to go back to college and finish her year. I'd like to know just when she intends to put something halfway nourishing into her stomach. She's eaten practically nothing since she got home Saturday night —but nothing! I tried—not a half hour ago—to get her to take a nice cup of chicken broth. She took exactly two mouthfuls, and that's all. She threw up everything I got her to eat yesterday, practically." Mrs. Glass's voice stopped only long enough to reload, as it were.

"She said maybe she'd eat a cheeseburger later on. Just what is this cheeseburger business? From what I gather, she's practically been living on cheeseburgers and Cokes all semester so far. Is that what they feed a young girl at college these days? I know one thing. I'm certainly not going to feed a young girl that's as run-down as that child is on food that isn't even—"

"That's the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That's putting the ole foot down. If she's determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn't have it in peace."

"Just don't you be so fresh, young man—Oh, that mouth of yours! For your information, I don't think it's at all impossible that the kind of food that child takes into her system hasn't a lot to do with this whole entire funny business. Even as a child you practically had to force that child to even touch her vegetables or any of the things that were good for her. You can't go on abusing the body indefinitely, year in, year out —

regardless of what you think."

"You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. It's staggering how you jump straight the hell into the heart of a matter. I'm goosebumps all over... By God, you inspire me. You inflame me, Bessie. You know what you've done? Do you realize what you've done? You've given this whole goddam issue a fresh, new, Biblical slant. I wrote four papers in college on the Crucifixion —five, really—and every one of them worried me half crazy because I thought something was missing. Now I know what it was. Now it's clear to me. I see Christ in an entirely different light. His unhealthy fanaticism. His rudeness to those nice, sane, conservative, tax-paying Pharisees. Oh, this is exciting! In your simple, straightforward, bigoted way, Bessie, you've sounded the missing keynote of the whole New Testament. Improper diet. Christ lived on cheeseburgers and Cokes. For all we know, he probably fed the mult—"

"Just stop that, now" Mrs. Glass broke in, her voice quiet but dangerous. "Oh, I'd like to put a diaper on that mouth of yours!"

"Well, gee whizz. I'm only trying to make polite bathroom talk."

"You're so funny. Oh, you're so funny! It just so happens, young man, that I don't consider your little sister in exactly the exact same light that I do the Lord. I may be peculiar, but I don't happen to. I don't happen to see any comparison whatsoever between the Lord and a rundown, overwrought little college girl that's been reading too many religious books and all like that! You certainly know your sister as well as I do—or should. She's terribly impressionable and always has been, and you know it very well!" The bathroom was oddly still for a moment.

"Mother? Are you sitting down out there? I have a terrible feeling you're sitting down out there with about five cigarettes going. Are you?" He waited. Mrs. Glass, however, didn't choose to reply. "I don't want you sitting down out there, Bessie. I'd like to get out of this God-damned tub. . . . Bessie? You hear me?"

"I hear you, I hear you," Mrs. Glass said. A fresh wave of worry had passed over her face. She straightened her back restively. "She's got that crazy Bloomberg in bed with her on the couch," she said. "It isn't even healthy." She gave a mighty sigh. For several minutes she had been holding her cigarette ashes in her cupped left hand. She now reached over, without quite having to get up, and emptied them into the wastebasket. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do," she announced, "I just don't, that's all. The house is absolutely upside down. The painters are almost finished in her room, and they're going to want to get in the living room immediately after lunch. I don't know whether to wake her up, or what. She's had almost no sleep. I'm simply losing my mind. Do you know how long it's been since I've even been free to have the painters in this apartment? Nearly twen—"

"The painters! Ah! The dawn comes up. I forgot all about the painters. Listen, why haven't you asked them in here? There's plenty of room. What the hell kind of host will they think I am, not asking them into the bathroom when I'm—"

"Just be quiet a minute, young man. I'm thinking."

As if in obedience, Zooey abruptly put his washcloth to use. For quite a little interval, the faint swush of it was the only sound in the bathroom. Mrs. Glass, seated eight or ten feet away from the shower curtain, stared across the tiled floor at the blue bathmat alongside the tub. Her cigarette had burned down to the last half inch. She held it between the ends of two fingers of her right hand. Distinctly, her way of holding it tended to blow to some sort of literary hell one's first, strong (and still perfectly tenable) impression that an invisible Dubliner's shawl covered her shoulders. Not only were her fingers of an extraordinary length and shapeliness—such as, very generally speaking, one wouldn't have expected of a medium-stout woman's fingers—but they featured, as it were, a somewhat imperial-looking tremor; a deposed Balkan queen or a retired favorite courtesan might have had such an elegant tremor. And this was not the only contradiction to the Dublin-black-shawl motif. There was the rather eyebrow-raising fact of Bessie Glass's legs, which were comely by any criterion. They were the legs of a once quite widely acknowledged public beauty, a vaude-villian, a dancer, a very light dancer. They were crossed now, as she sat staring at the bathmat, left over right, a worn white terrycloth slipper looking as if it might fall off the extended foot at any second. The feet were extraordinarily small, the ankles were still slender, and, perhaps most remarkable, the calves were still firm and evidently never had been knotty.

A much deeper sigh than customary—almost, it seemed, a part of the life force itself—suddenly came from Mrs. Glass. She got up and carried her cigarette over to the washbowl, let cold water run on it, then dropped the extinguished stub into the wastebasket and sat down again. The spell of introspection she had cast on herself was unbroken, as if she hadn't moved from her seat at all.

"I'm getting out of here in about three seconds, Bessie 1 I'm giving you fair warning. Let's not wear out our welcome, buddy."

Mrs. Glass, who had resumed staring at the blue bathmat, gave an absent-minded nod at this "fair warning." And at that instant, more than just mentionably, had Zooey seen her face, and particularly her eyes, he might have had a strong impulse, passing or not, to recall, or reconstruct, or reinflect the greater part of his share of the conversation that had passed between them—to temper it, to soften it. On the other hand, he might not have. It was a very touch-and-go business, in 1955, to get a wholly plausible reading from Mrs. Glass's face, and especially from her enormous blue eyes. Where once, a few years earlier, her eyes alone could break the news (either to people or to bathmats) that two of her sons were dead, one by suicide (her favorite, her most intricately calibrated, her kindest son), and one killed in World War II (her only truly lighthearted son)—where once Bessie Glass's eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her husband nor any of her adult surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in, now, in 1955, she was apt to use this same terrible Celtic equipment to break the news, usually at the front door, that the new delivery boy hadn't brought the leg of lamb in time for dinner or that some remote Hollywood starlet's marriage was on the rocks.

She lit a fresh king-size cigarette abruptly, dragged on it, then stood up, exhaling smoke. "I'll be back in a minute," she said. The statement sounded, innocently, like a promise. "Just please use the bathmat when you get out," she added. "That's what it's there for." She left the bathroom, closing the door securely behind her. It was rather as though, after being in makeshift wet dock for days, the Queen Mary had just sailed out of, say, Walden Pond, as suddenly and perversely as she had sailed in. Behind the shower curtain, Zooey closed his eyes for a few seconds, as though his own small craft were listing precariously in the wake. Then he pulled back the shower curtain and stared over at the closed door. It was a weighty stare, and relief was not really a great part of it. As much as anything else, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacylover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.

NOT five minutes later, Zooey, with his hair combed wet, stood barefoot at the washbowl, wearing a pair of beltless dark-gray sharkskin slacks, a face towel across his bare shoulders. A pre-shaving ritual had already been put into effect. The window blind had been raised halfway; the bathroom door had been set ajar to let the steam escape and clear the mirrors; a cigarette had been lit, dragged on, and placed within easy reach on the frosted-glass ledge under the medicine-cabinet mirror. At the moment, Zooey had just finished squeezing lather cream onto the end of a shaving brush. He put the tube of lather, without re-capping it, somewhere into the enamel background, out of his way. He passed the flat of his hand squeakily back and forth over the face of the medicine-cabinet mirror, wiping away most of the mist. Then he began to lather his face. His lathering technique was very much out of the ordinary, although identical in spirit with his actual shaving technique. That is, although he looked into the mirror while he lathered, he didn't watch where his brush was moving but, instead, looked directly into his own eyes, as though his eyes were neutral territory, a no man's land in a private war against narcissism he had been fighting since he was seven or eight years old. By now, when he was twenty-five, the little stratagem may well have been mostly reflexive, just as a veteran baseball player, at the plate, will tap his spikes with his bat whether he needs to or not. Nonetheless, a few minutes earlier, when he had combed his hair, he had done so with the very minimum amount of help from the mirror. And before that he had managed to dry himself in front of a full-length mirror without so much as glancing into it.

He had just finished lathering his face when his mother suddenly appeared in his shaving mirror. She stood in the doorway, a few feet behind him, one hand on the doorknob—a portrait of spurious hesitancy about making another full entrance into the room.

"Ah! What a pleasant and gracious surprise!" Zooey said into the mirror. "Come in, come in!" He laughed, or gave his roar, then opened the medicine cabinet and took down his razor.

Mrs. Glass advanced, meditatively. "Zooey..." she said. "I've been thinking." Her usual seating accommodation was directly at Zooey's left. She started to lower herself into place.

"Don't sit down! Let me drink you in first,"

Zooey said. Getting out of the tub, putting on his trousers, and combing his hair had apparently raised his spirits. "It isn't often we have visitors at our little chapel, and when we do, we try to make them feel—"

"Just be still a minute," Mrs. Glass said firmly, sitting. She crossed her legs. "I've been thinking. Do you think it would do any good to try to get hold of Waker? I don't, personally, but what do you think? I mean in my opinion what that child needs is a good psy chi atrist, not a priest or anything, but I may be wrong."

"Oh, no. No, no. Not wrong. I've never known you to be wrong, Bessie. Your facts are always either untrue or exaggerated, but you're never wrong—no, no." With much delight, Zooey wet his razor and began to shave.

"Zooey, I'm asking you—just cut out the funny business, now, please. Do you or don't you think I should get in touch with Waker? I could call that Bishop Pinchot or whatever his name is, and he could probably tell me where I could at least wire him, if he's still on some crazy boat." Mrs. Glass reached out and drew the metal wastebasket in close to her and used it as an ashtray for the lighted cigarette she had brought in with her.

"I asked Franny if she'd like to talk to him on the phone," she said. "If I could get hold of him."

Zooey rinsed his razor briefly. "What'd she say?" he asked. Mrs. Glass adjusted her sitting position with a little evasive shift to the right. "She says she doesn't want to talk to anybody."

"Ah. We know better than that, don't we? We're not going to take a straight answer like that lying down, are we?"

"For your information, young man, I'm not going to take any answer of any kind from that child today," Mrs. Glass said, rallying. She addressed Zooey's lathered profile.

"If you have a young girl lying in a room crying and mumbling to herself for forty-eight hours, you don't go to them for any answers."

Zooey, without commenting, went on shaving.

"Answer my question, please. Do you or don't you think I should try to get in touch with Waker? I'm afraid to, frankly. He's so emotional —priest or no priest. If you tell Waker it looks like rain, his eyes all fill up."

Zooey shared his amusement at this remark with the reflection of his own eyes in the mirror. "There's hope for you yet, Bessie," he said.

"Well, if I can't get Buddy on the phone, and even you won't help, I'm going to have to do something," Mrs. Glass said. Looking vastly troubled, she sat smoking for a long moment. Then: "If it was something strictly Catholic, or like that, I might be able to help her myself. I haven't forgotten everything. But none of you children were brought up as Catholics, and I really don't see—"

Zooey cut her short. "You're off," he said, turning his lathered face toward her.

"You're off. You're way off. I told you that last night. This thing with Franny is strictly non-sectarian." He dipped his razor and continued to shave. "Just take my word, please." Mrs. Glass stared full and pressingly at his profile, as if he might say something further, but he didn't. At length, she sighed, and said, "I'd almost be satisfied for a while if I could get that awful Bloomberg off that couch with her. It isn't even sanitary." She dragged on her cigarette. "And I don't know what I'm supposed to do about the painters. This very minute they're practically finished in her room, and they're going to be champing at the bit to get in the living room."

"You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems," Zooey said. "And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled, what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and—well, we iron things out together, that's all."

Mrs. Glass seemed on the point of being diverted by Zooey's method of dealing with problems, but it was her day to suppress all forms of amusement. She stared at him for a moment, and then, slowly, a new look gathered in her eyes—resourceful, crafty, and a trifle desperate. "You know, I'm not as stupid as you may think, young man," she said.

"You're all so secretive, all you children. It just so happens, if you must know, that I know more about what's behind all this than you think I do." For emphasis, lips compressed, she brushed some imaginary tobacco flakes from the lap of her kimono. "For your information, I happen to know that that little book she carried all around the whole house with her yesterday is at the whole root of this whole business." Zooey turned and glanced at her. He was grinning, "How'd you figure that out?" he said.

"Just never mind how I figured it out," Mrs. Glass said. "If you must know, Lane has called up here several times. He's terribly worried about Franny." Zooey rinsed his razor. "Who in hell is Lane?" he asked. Unmistakably, it was the question of a still very young man who, now and then, is not inclined to admit that he knows the first names of certain people.

"You know very well who he is, young man," Mrs. Glass said with emphasis. "Lane Coutell. He's only been Franny's boy friend for a whole year. You've met him at least half a dozen times that / know of, so just don't pretend you don't know who he is." Zooey gave a genuine roar of laughter, as if he clearly relished seeing any affectation brought to light, his own included. He went on shaving, still delighted. "The expression is Franny's 'young man,'" he said, "not her 'boy friend." Why are you so out of date, Bessie? Why is that? Hm?"

"Never mind why I'm so out of date. It may interest you to know that he's called up here five or six times since Franny got home—twice this morning before you were even up. He's been very sweet, and he's terribly concerned and worried about Franny."

"Not like some people we know, eh? Well, I hate to disillusion you, but I've sat by the hour with him and he's not sweet at all. He's a charm boy and a fake. Incidentally, somebody around here's been shaving their armpits or their goddam legs with my razor. Or dropped it. The head's way out of—"

"Nobody's touched your razor, young man. Why is he a charm boy and a fake, may I ask?"

"Why? Because he is, that's all. Probably because it's paid off. I can tell you one thing. If he's worried about Franny at all, I'll lay odds it's for the crummiest reasons. He's probably worried because he minded leaving the goddam football game before it was over—worried because he probably showed he minded it and he knows Franny's sharp enough to have noticed. I can just picture the little bastard getting her into a cab and putting her on a train and wondering if he can make it back to the game before the half ended."

"Oh, it's impossible to talk to you! But absolutely impossible. I don't know why I try, even. You're just like Buddy. You think everybody does something for some peculiar reason. You don't think anybody calls anybody else up without having some nasty, selfish reason for it."

"Exactly—in nine cases out of ten. And this Lane pill isn't the exception, you can be sure. Listen, I talked with him for twenty deadly goddam minutes one night while Franny was getting ready to go out, and I say he's a big nothing." He reflected, arresting his razor stroke. "What in hell was it he was telling me? Something very winning. What was it? ... Oh, yes. Yes. He was telling me he used to listen to Franny and me every week when he was a kid —and you know what he was doing, the little bastard? He was building me up at Franny's expense. For absolutely no reason except to ingratiate himself and show off his hot little Ivy League intellect." Zooey put out his tongue and gave a subdued, modified Bronx cheer. "Phooey," he said, and resumed using his razor. "Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day."

Mrs. Glass directed a long and oddly comprehensive look at his profile. "He's a young boy not out of college yet. And you make people nervous, young man," she said—

most equably, for her. "You either take to somebody or you don't. If you do, then you do all the talking and nobody can even get a word in edgewise. If you don't like somebody—

which is most of the time —then you just sit around like death itself and let the person talk themself into a hole. I've seen you do it."

Zooey turned full around to look at his mother.

He turned around and looked at her, in this instance, in precisely the same way that, at one time or another, in one year or another, all his brothers and sisters (and especially his brothers) had turned around and looked at her. Not just with objective wonder at the rising of a truth, fragmentary or not, up through what often seemed to be an impenetrable mass of prejudices, cliches, and bromides. But with admiration, affection, and, not least, gratitude. And, oddly or no, Mrs. Glass invariably took this "tribute," when it came, in beautiful stride. She would look back with grace and modesty at the son or daughter who had given her the look. She now presented this gracious and modest countenance to Zooey. "You do," she said, without accusation in her voice. "Neither you nor Buddy know how to talk to people you don't like." She thought it over. "Don't love, really," she amended. And Zooey continued to stand gazing at her, not shaving. "It's not right," she said— gravely, sadly. "You're getting so much like Buddy used to be when he was your age. Even your father's noticed it. If you don't like somebody in two minutes, you're done with them forever." Mrs. Glass looked over, abstractedly, at the blue bathmat, across the tiled floor. Zooey stood as still as possible, in order not to break her mood. "You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes," Mrs. Glass said to the bathmat, then turned again toward Zooey and gave him a long look, with very little, if any, morality in it. "Regardless of what you may think, young man," she said. Zooey looked back at her steadily, then smiled and faced around to examine his beard in the mirror. Mrs. Glass, watching him, sighed. She bent and put out her cigarette against the inside of the metal wastebasket. She lit a fresh cigarette almost at once, and said, as pointedly as she was able, "Anyway, your sister says he's a brilliant boy. Lane."

"That's just sex talking, buddy," Zooey said. "I know that voice. Oh, do I know that voice!" The last trace of lather had been shaved away from his face and throat. He felt his throat critically with one hand, then picked up his shaving brush and began to re-lather strategic parts of his face. "All right, what does Lane have to say on the phone?" he asked. "According to Lane, what's behind Franny's troubles?" Mrs. Glass sat slightly and avidly forward, and said, "Well, Lane says it all has to do—this entire thing—with that little book she's got with her all the time. You know. That little book she kept reading all yesterday and dragging with her everywhere she—"

"I know that little book. Go on."

"Well, he says, Lane says, it's a terribly religious little book—fanatical and all like that— and that she got it out of the library at college and now she thinks maybe she's—" Mrs. Glass broke off. Zooey had turned toward her with somewhat menacing alertness.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"He said she got it where?"

"Out of the library. At college. Why?"

Zooey shook his head, and turned back to the washbowl. He put down his shaving brush and opened the medicine cabinet.

"What's the matter?" Mrs. Glass demanded. "What's the matter with that? Why such a look, young man?"

Zooey didn't reply till he had opened a new package of razor blades. Then, dismantling his razor, he said, "You're so stupid, Bessie." He ejected the blade from his razor.

"Why am I so stupid? Incidentally, you just put a new razor blade in yesterday." Zooey, his face expressionless, locked a new blade into his razor and began his second-time-over shave.

"I asked you a question, young man. Why am I so stupid? Didn't she get that little book out of her college library, or what?"

"No, she didn't, Bessie," Zooey said, shaving. "That little book is called 'The Pilgrim Continues His Way,' and it's a sequel to another little book, called 'The Way of a Pilgrim,'

which she's also dragging around with her, and she got both books out of Seymour and Buddy's old room, where they've been sitting on Seymour's desk for as long as I can remember. Jesus God almighty."

"Well, don't get abusive about it! Is it so ter rible to think she might have gotten them out of her college library and simply brought them—"

"Yes! It is terrible. It is terrible when both books have been sitting on Seymour's goddam desk for years. It's depressing."

An unexpected, a singularly noncombatant, note came into Mrs. Glass's voice. "I don't go in that room if I can help it, and you know it," she said. "1 don't look at Seymour's old—at his things."

Zooey said, quickly, "All right, I'm sorry." Without looking at her, and although he hadn't quite finished his second-time-over shave, he pulled the face towel down from his shoulders and wiped the remaining lather off his face. "Let's just drop this for a while," he said, and tossed the face towel over onto the radiator; it landed on the title page of the Rick-Tina manuscript. He unscrewed his razor and held it under the cold-water tap. His apology had been genuine, and Mrs. Glass knew it, but evidently she couldn't resist taking advantage of it, perhaps because of its rarity. "You're not kind," she said, watching him rinse his razor. "You're not kind at all, Zooey. You're old enough to at least try for some kind of kindness when you're feeling mean. Buddy, at least, when he's feeling—" She simultaneously took in her breath and gave a great start as Zooey's razor, new blade and all, slam-banged down into the metal wastebasket.

Quite probably Zooey hadn't intended to send his razor crashing into the wastebasket but had merely brought his left hand down with such suddenness and violence that the razor got away from him. In any case, it was certain that he hadn't intended to strike and hurt his wrist on the side of the washbowl. "Buddy, Buddy, Buddy," he said. "Seymour, Seymour, Seymour." He had turned toward his mother, whom the crash of the razor had startled and alarmed but not really frightened. "I'm so sick of their names I could cut my throat." His face was pale but very nearly expressionless. "This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don't mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one. I wish to God Buddy'd make up his mind. He does everything else Seymour ever did—or tries to. Why the hell doesn't he kill himself and be done with it?"

Mrs. Glass blinked her eyes, just once, and Zooey instantly looked away from her face. He bent over and fished his razor out of the waste-basket. "We're freaks, the two of us, Franny and I," he announced, standing up. "I'm a twenty-five-year-old freak and she's a twenty-year-old freak, and both those bastards are responsible." He put his razor on the edge of the washbowl, but it slid obstreperously down into the bowl. He quickly picked it out, and this time kept it in the grasp of his fingers. "The symptoms are a little more delayed in Franny's case than mine, but she's a freak, too, and don't you forget it. I swear to you, I could murder them both without even batting an eyelash. The great teachers. The great emancipators. My God. I can't even sit down to lunch with a man any more and hold up my end of a decent conversation. I either get so bored or so goddam preachy that if the son of a bitch had any sense, he'd break his chair over my head." He suddenly opened the medicine cabinet. He stared rather vacuously into it for a few seconds, as though he had forgotten why he opened it, then put his undried razor in its place on one of the shelves.