The Protégé

by Charlotte Armstrong

  She punched her remote control irritably, changing channels. She was just too old to be afraid of gangs and robbers. It wasn’t really real, this kind of fear. She and Polly would lock the doors and the downstairs windows as they always did. The phone was, as ever, at her bedside. Why, if she wanted to, Mrs. Moffat could even arm herself. There was a gun in the house. Her husband had kept it by him for years. She’d been taught to use it. She never had. She wasn’t sure how clean it was, but she didn’t doubt it constituted a weapon. An equalizer, she thought grumpily.

  At least she hadn’t been reckless enough to offer him one of the indoor guest rooms.

  She then seemed to know that Simon Warren might not have accepted such an offer. It was the cottage, shabby but adequate, and “hidden all around,” that was “perfect” for him.

  The thick lead of the stubby pencil came off in wide strokes on the notebook paper.

  DEAR SMITTY:

  Hell, it was easy. I ask the usher. “Right down there, in the pink hat,” he says, and then he takes me right down there. So I ride home with her. How do you like that? She’s rich, all right, but I don’t know—she doesn’t make a big deal out of—

  The pencil hesitated; then it blackened out the last line. The hand pushed the notebook away and positioned the cheap envelope. P. H. ALLENSTAG, JR. the pencil wrote. His hand turned over, back to the table, fingers lax. The waiter came with a plate on which a mound of pale french fried potatoes obscured everything else. The boy with the red beard picked up the notebook, but the envelope he pushed to his left, placing the written name where it could be easily read. Then, chin to chest, he twisted his neck as far as it could twist and looked up slyly to watch the waiter’s face. The waiter put the plate down and went away.

  Alexandra Terry, looking out her window at some Manhattan towers, said into the telephone, “Nicky? Zan here. I’ve got a question.”

  “Ask me anything,” said Nicholas Pomerance, looking out at his smog-smudged view of the sprawl of Los Angeles, “but tell me how you are.”

  “Will you be around, come the tenth of August, and for a fortnight thereafter? And I’m fine.”

  “Ah,” said he, “we are threatening our annual pilgrimage, are we?”

  “We are,” said Zan. “I’d like to know whether I will have a squire during that span. You see, if it turns out I’d rather choose another time—”

  “Any time, Zan. Any time. I’m doing business at the old grindstone. Took my vacation in June, fool that I was.”

  “And where did you go in June?”

  “Ahunting.”

  “Ahunting what?”

  “Birds. What else? Beware the playboy image, Zan, when I, like any other trapped and salaried male, go my dreary rounds with only the slightest interludes for dalliance.”

  “Ah, so,” she said, grinning to herself over an image of his bland and sometimes deceptively foolish-looking face.

  Nicky cast a glance toward the two lovelies in his kitchen, who were discussing the mystique of the omelet and disputing procedures. Nicky didn’t trust them. He was going to make the omelet.

  “By the way,” he said, “how is my sister?”

  “The complete suburban housewife,” said Zan. “Four wee hands tugging at her apron strings already, and the rumor of two more come spring. Didn’t you know?”

  Nicky groaned. “Well, Jane does tend to be thorough.”

  Zan didn’t speak, and he said alertly, “Anything else I ought to know?”

  “Oh, there’s a spot of other news, such as it is. I went to the law. I am now legally a widow.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked suspiciously. “You’ve got reason to start in to worry about, for instance, Enoch Arden?”

  “No, no,” said Zan. “But it’s seven years since Tommy Moffat took off. So it was the classic thing, wasn’t it? I just came all over sensible, I guess.”

  “Oh, surely not,” drawled Nicky, “more sensible than usual? You are going to be sensible and stay with your grandmother?”

  “Of course.”

  “How is the old lady?” Nicky asked smoothly. “All right, isn’t she?” Over the phone, Zan sent the image of widened eyes.

  “Okay, so I should have gone to see her …”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Zan forgave him for nothing. “The last thing Gran expects is a gentleman caller. But I can rely on you, can’t I?”

  “I’ll make it a point to meet your plane. How’s that for a reckless offer?”

  She gave him the day—Monday—and the flight number.

  “You’re not by any chance taking a one-way ticket this time?” he inquired with a wheedling air.

  “Is this not a reckless question, Nicky?”

  “No, no, certainly not. I can be almost as sensible as you. Wanna bet?”

  “I’m thinking,” she admitted.

  “No harm in that,” said he.

  Zan hung up smiling. Nicky amused her, and she was fond of him. If she had not confided her true motives in the matter of going to the law, why should she? Now that Zan had prospered and had her own money in the bank, she had had the bitter thought that it was wise to protect herself. Tommy Moffat was just the type to pick up the scent of money, however far away he might (or might not) be. And it was not only Zan’s earned money, but old Mrs. Moffat’s estate, too. Zan was the heir. It had all been willed to her, and Tommy specifically disinherited and cause given that no probate court could ignore. But someone had pointed out to Zan that if Tommy could prove himself to be still legally her husband—then there might be trouble. Zan, for a long time, had had her guard up against any more trouble than she had already seen. So, although it had upset her (irrationally) to have Tommy declared legally dead, for all she knew he was dead, and if not, it was better to have on record somewhere the whole story from Zan’s point of view.

  She began to roam restlessly through her rooms. They were perfect, absolutely perfect. She had decorated them herself and showed them off from time to time to confirm, or inform, that she had her skills. But now they bored her. Everything here was exactly as she thought it ought to be, and she was perishing of something like frustration.

  Zan was twenty-five years old, slender, with good taut lines to her figure, and a pretty face, distinguished by a mouth that might have been ugly since it was set, full-lipped, forward of her cheeks, but that by virtue of this defect, was very attractive. She was her own woman, or almost. She wore what she liked, trusting her taste. She had energy and verve. She was succeeding; better than that, she had learned a lot. She had done very well.

  To have become a junior partner in a going concern at Zan’s age was an achievement not to be despised. But the texture of life had more to it than status or financial gain. Her senior—Grace Bond, of Bond & Terry, Interiors—had begun, since the partnership, to emanate certain rays that Zan didn’t want to think about. She couldn’t be sure what they were, but the one sure way not to have to think about what they might be was to pull out and move, for instance, to the coast.

  Zan sat down and began to add up the pros and cons for Southern California.

  It would be risky to start all over again and on her own in a new town. She wouldn’t mind that; on the contrary, what sport!

  She would also be living closer to old Mrs. Moffat and better able to watch over her, so dangerously aged and alone in that big old house—alone, that is, with Polly, who was not, in Zan’s opinion, the brightest person in the world. There was no use pretending that the old lady was going to live forever, and it wasn’t sensible not to be conscious of the fact that when the inevitable did happen, Zan would, at that time, be forced to hop it out there and remain a good deal longer than it took to hold a decent funeral, too. There was the property to deal with, and Zan had to do it. She didn’t need the property; silly to pretend it wouldn’t be interesting to have it. Zan wasn’t afraid to think these thoughts because she was sure of her own sincere hope that death would hold off for a good while yet. She was very fond
of her husband’s grandmother, who had stood by Zan during the most difficult period of her entire life. (Zan had no intention of going through anything any worse. Not if she could help it.) Well, then, she could keep a closer eye on Gran … and say she was keeping an eye on her legacy, which would make a marvelous excuse for getting out of her present commitments without argument. Everybody respected a money motive. Such was the virtue of a cliché.

  Now then, she mused on, once out there, she might or she might not marry Nicky Pomerance. His sister, Jane, who had been Zan’s buddy in college, had once insisted that they look each other up. Zan had known him a long time. Three, almost four years now? Nicky was thirty-five—a sensible age—and he was no unknown quantity. He was a burned child, just as she was. His divorce had been a painful enough experience to keep Nicky from being romantically carried away on any future occasion. And Zan, having survived her own crisis, was never again going to be taken in by moonlight and roses. It might work out rather well.

  But she stopped herself from adding up the pros and cons of a marriage to Nicky. There wasn’t enough evidence in. How reliable was their personal compatibility? Would their two careers be compatible at all?

  And where was the gain?

  Zan had no desire to get married for the sake of getting married. To live with a cheater and be a cheat herself didn’t seem worth the price of the wedding costumes. (As for champagne, that was available at any time.) And children, Zan didn’t think about—anymore.

  Well, she would scout out many prospects on the coast this visit. How she could start herself in a new phase of her career, what strings she might have to pull, what security there was in the way of paying jobs, in case her private enterprise should fail.

  But then she ran her fingers through her very short dark hair and held her skull, her bone tightly. Thinking. Thinking. She’d burst someday of thinking. Zan knew how to get what she wanted—with intelligence, industry, persistence, and plan—but how did you get what you really wanted when intelligence, industry, persistence, and plan had nothing to do with it?

  Chapter 3

  Monday was another clear hot day. When Mrs. Moffat came down, Simon was already at work in the cottage. So said Polly, who had given him breakfast on the porch. He hadn’t wanted to come in to the breakfast nook in his work clothes, Polly explained.

  So Mrs. Moffat’s morning was like any other morning except for a sense of his hidden presence and a conviction of his continuing efforts. She marveled that he was no bother at all. There was no turbulence; he neither demanded nor intruded. Yet he did not cease to be thoughtful. Near noon he came quietly to report, saying that he needed more steel wool and he’d just go and get some and pick up a hamburger while he was away. He’d be back, he prophesied, by two o’clock.

  Pleased with him because she wouldn’t have to wonder where he was, Mrs. Moffat offered him the car, but he refused. He didn’t have a driver’s license at the moment, he said, and anyhow he’d rather not risk her car in the traffic. “It’s pretty wild to me,” he said.

  So, although Mrs. Moffat ate her lunch alone and took her rest as usual, her mind was full of quite unusual questions. Where in the world had he been, for pity’s sake, that traffic could intimidate him (aged twenty-eight)? On some ship at sea? Yet sailors had shore leave, and they had it in cities, didn’t they? Maybe he’d been in the Army, creeping on his belly in the mud or crawling through some jungle. But surely not all the time. More likely he’d been in a hospital, and if so—for a very long siege—and why, and where? She thought to herself crossly, That’s what you get for being selfish. You get to die of curiosity. She wished she’d let him give her a rough outline of his troubles.

  When she heard him returning on schedule, it came to her that she was going to be shown a shining kitchenette before the day was over. She had no doubt of it. And would it not be cruel—too cruel—not to give him the earned pleasure of cooking something out there, at least once? Mrs. Moffat was well aware of an old truth. Whatever you worked so hard to “keep,” in the sense of care-taking, became in some measure your rightful possession.

  She phoned the gas company and asked them to send someone to turn on the gas in her cottage. They promised to come tomorrow.

  So she and Simon, who had put on his one and only suit (how could he be carrying another in that tiny bag?) took a summer supper on the porch, and in the evening, when the sun struck gold on the tops of the back and eastern hedge, but the porch lay in shadows and was deliciously cool, they sat on there together.

  He had again chosen the slender bentwood rocker, and she the rocker that was padded well. His was drawn close to the screen. He seemed often to yearn outward. There was a dainty understanding between them. She had the privilege of rocking as much or as little as she liked, and whenever; the boy rocked only slightly and in interludes, of a sort, making himself responsible for never permitting any dizzying conflict of their rocking chair rhythms.

  As Mrs. Moffat kept prattling on about one thing or another, she was no longer at all startled by her guest’s red beard and head. She had accepted his appearance, as she was beginning to accept his listening presence. Oh, she knew his attention waxed and waned, and that sometimes he was listening only to sound patterns. But he was no bother. He didn’t fidget.

  Even so, she stopped the flood at last. “I don’t know why you let me talk so much, Simon.”

  “I like to hear you talk, ma’am,” he said lazily.

  “I don’t see why.” If she sounded as if she were pouting, then so be it.

  “You say things that I never did know,” he answered soberly, “and it’s wonderful to me.”

  Mrs. Moffat dropped the subject, too alarmingly charmed by his answer to dare pursue it.

  When the phone rang, she went indoors to speak to Crystal. Would Marguerite care to come over? Joe and Flo would be glad to pick her up, and Claire had a good book from the library, so that the other four could have a game. Mrs. Moffat discovered that she did not—in the least—want to go have a game. She begged off, saying that she had company. She explained about the neighbor’s child. Claire could make the fourth, couldn’t she?

  “Well,” said Crystal, “whatever you say,” and hung up. Miffed. Claire was a terrible bridge player, a born fourth, a last resort.

  Mrs. Moffat began to tell her “company” about Crystal and Claire. They were widows of her own vintage who had taken an apartment together. On the whole they got along, but Mrs. Moffat had a hunch that sometimes it was rough going. So different. Crystal was quite a large woman. Well, the fact was, Crystal had become obese. Claire was vague. She couldn’t focus long enough to worry, in Mrs. Moffat’s opinion, while Crystal worried all the time and had to be eating and drinking to comfort herself.

  As she laughed with affection over the foibles of her friends, she wondered if Simon could detect the affection in all that she had been saying. “This kind of catty old gossip I’ll bet you never did know,” she said. “I’m fond of them, Simon, I’m very fond. Sometimes I think I thought to ask them both to come live with me. There’s space. But what if we were miserable, the three of us? It’s my house. How could I put them out if once I asked them in?”

  She began to wish she weren’t saying this. “I talk too much,” she rattled on. “I talk your head off and forget to ask how you slept in that miserable old bed, and you don’t tell me.”

  He roused himself to speech at once. “Oh, the bed’s just fine, Mrs. Moffat. I went right off, at first. But then I woke up … and I guess too many ghosts were fighting in my head. I couldn’t go back to sleep anymore. But I could hear all kinds of little sounds, and I listened to them.”

  “I do that,” she said in pleasure and astonishment. “I waken, and as you say, it’s as if ghosts were fighting in my head. You get used to it.”

  “Do you?” he murmured.

  “So I listen to the little sounds of all the little creatures who live here, too. When you’re as old as I am, Simon, you’ll have lots of tim
e to listen to whole other worlds.” She roused herself from wonder. “You ought to sleep the night through, soundly. Have you been ill, my dear?”

  He didn’t answer. His breath seemed caught.

  (I shouldn’t have said that, she scolded herself. “My dear” indeed!) “I think you need some solid rest and a better balanced diet than hamburgers,” she said severely. “Have you written to your folks, Simon? Do they know where you are?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She was surprised—this thoughtful boy?

  His chair was still, but not quite still. It trembled? “I don’t want to talk about it,” he muttered reproachfully. “Mrs. Moffat, do you remember?” he struck out boldly. “One time, wasn’t there a robbery in your house?”

  “Oh, yes.” She gave her chair a hard push. “Oh, yes. One summer somebody got in. I suppose you were small enough to think that was exciting.” She felt cross with him.

  “Excuse me. I can see you don’t wear jewelry. Didn’t you ever get the jewelry back?”

  “No, no,” she said. “That was a long time ago, and all forgotten. I’m not very fond of beads and things.”

  “I guess you had insurance?” Was he “making” talk?

  “Oh, my husband,” said Mrs. Moffat, “was a great believer in insurance.” Now, now, she had no business being cross with him because he hadn’t written to his mother. The young didn’t bother to keep in touch these days. She slowed her chair. “Simon, you puzzle me,” she blurted.

  “I’m sorry,” he said alertly. “Is it all right, ma’am, if I stay for tonight and go away in the morning?”

  “Where will you go?” she said, after a moment’s breathlessness.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I realize,” she said tartly in another moment, “that to mope and whine that nothing matters is quite the thing in some circles today. But thank goodness the young are not all alike. Some of them think things matter, and right or not, they are right to think so, in my opinion.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” he murmured sullenly. “Or if it matters. Or where I should go.”