The Protégé

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Mrs. Moffat was definitely annoyed with him. “In my opinion,” she said, “you should go home.”

  He seemed startled.

  “However,” she continued, “my opinion is uninformed, you will agree? So if you would prefer to stay on in the cottage for a few more days … until the ghosts in your head fight things out to some kind of conclusion, I don’t mind.” She rocked violently. “Maybe by that time you will begin to ‘know’ a thing or two or at least have the human courage to imagine that you do.”

  His chair was motionless. Twilight was coming on. The light was tweedy now. A small, sweet breeze came by.

  He said, in his soft, grainy voice, “I guess I’ve been wishing I could stay here a little longer. How will I know when to put myself out, though?” Was he teasing or not?

  Sometimes, when he drew away and looked at her with pure curiosity, she found it stimulating and delightful—an affirmation of her existence.

  This time he could be teasing. Mrs. Moffat heard a sudden playback of her staccato voice, preaching so irritably, and she sank back. Her chair rocked backward; her little feet came up from the floor. Simon scraped his own feet backward to have them under him and be ready to catch her from going all the way over. But Mrs. Moffat spoke in a voice enriched with amusement (because who needed “affirmation of her existence”? What solemn nonsense! Either she existed or she didn’t. She ought to know without depending on an itinerant youth for testimony).

  “When you become a bother to me, Simon,” she said, “I’ll mention it. Don’t you worry. I have no obligation to you, remember—nor you to me, for pity’s sake. So long as your staying here is pleasant for both of us, why shouldn’t you stay? I can’t think of a single solitary reason why not. Can you? I’ve found it pleasant so far,” she added. “So far.”

  He raised his head. He laughed out loud. He said, “I just didn’t have any idea—any idea …”

  “I am quite surprised myself,” she said, beaming.

  “Smitty didn’t tell me,” he crowed. Then he stopped, as if he must beware.

  “Who is Smitty?” She rocked gently. She didn’t care who Smitty was. She was pleased with herself, and him, to—with the world, the texture of time, and many things.

  “This—friend of mine, ma’am.”

  “And what didn’t Smitty tell?” she droned amiably.

  “Oh—he was just talking about his grandmother.”

  Mrs. Moffat started to preen herself and say something proud about grandmotherhood, but then, remembering, she did not.

  “Would it be pleasant for you,” he said in a moment, “if there were a ring of flowers around the sundial again?”

  She rocked judiciously. “It might be. It might be.”

  “May I dig up a flower bed for you?” He was eager, but restrained. “Maybe your gardener—you said you had one—maybe he’d show me how to put some flowers in? I don’t know anything about flowers. This is just to inform you, ma’am.”

  “Nor does Ben,” she said promptly, thinking that Simon sometimes used “ma’am” as if it were her name, for instance, “Maggie.” “He doesn’t know a rose from a violet from a bird-of-paradise. He can cut the grass and clip and prune and spend entirely too much time hand watering. But flowers don’t mean a thing to a ‘gardener’ in these parts. Not anymore. We might, I suppose, go to some nursery and be advised.”

  “Could we?”

  “Well, of course, we could. I seem to remember—” She spoke of old remembered flowers, seeing them in her mind’s eye, as they had once bloomed, in a low ring around the sundial, when the sundial had been centered on the back lawn and not in the bay at the side. This element of her vision she didn’t mention. It didn’t occur to her to do so. How pleasant to be dredging up the names of the blue Agathaea? The tiny, tiny ones? Lobelia! Dianthus for pink—pinks, yes—dianthus. And marigolds, for yellow. But you had to watch the snails to grow marigolds. Five million, four hundred eighty-two thousand, and two snails lived here. Did Simon realize?

  “Couldn’t we eat them?” he said, as merry as she.

  “We might; we might.” Mrs. Moffat was having a wonderful time. And furthermore, she was getting used to it. “Then, of course, there was always heartsease,” she said happily.

  Upstairs at last, and in her bed and the house darkened and all quiet, Mrs. Moffat let herself entertain a stray thought she had had during the evening. Could it be some form of amnesia that ailed the boy? He took no interest in his old house, his old yard. He never mentioned his family. What if he had been told what his name was, yet did not really “know” it? Simon had never answered her question about an illness. Suppose he had had what is commonly called a mental illness? Ought she to meddle? She said to herself, Nonsense. How can it do him anything but good to fool around with a flower bed and eat some decent meals at regular hours and have a place to stay for a few nights, and a little peace? That couldn’t hurt him or anyone in the world! I’ll do as I see to do, she thought, and said the Lord’s Prayer, blurring the part about “Lead us not …” “Deliver us from evil.”

  She woke in the deep dark, hearing the little sounds. How could he have amnesia? What melodrama! He remembered the sundial, didn’t he? And the flowers that used to be. He remembered Sunday school and Tommy Moffat. A ghost stirred in her head. Strange, how he had mentioned the time her house had been burglarized and her “jewelry” taken. All her pretty fakes, her strings of “pearls,” and only the loss of her garnet pin to regret, and that for “sentimental reasons.” It had happened the summer that Tommy had lived here and played with Simon Warren. Did Simon know or only half remember what Mrs. Moffat had for years suspected? Tommy Moffat was a thief—a thief and a fugitive from justice. Had he been a thief already, the summer he had been eleven?

  DEAR SMITTY:

  I could have dug them up last night, but I didn’t know where she keeps any tools. You said there’s no hurry. Now I’ve got a better idea. I’ll dig them up in the daytime. She’s not going to know. It would be good if I stay here until you figure how to cash them in.

  Listen, it takes two damn hours on the damn bus to get where you are supposed to be, and Sunday night I took the trouble and I couldn’t find you, so I guess you get your mail. Just don’t forget your name, will ya, fella?

  The writing trailed off; the book slapped shut.

  Chapter 4

  Ben Guest drove his truck in early Tuesday morning and parked it where he always did—near the garage. He got out and came around to let down his tail gate and the ramp for his power mower. But then he looked across the lawn, braced, and went striding past the window behind which Mrs. Moffat was just finishing her breakfast. The sour look Ben wore reminded her that Simon had been up since dawn and was out there now, already digging around the sundial.

  She hurried out and across the grass to where Simon was coiled on the ground and Ben was standing over him haranguing, gesturing, and obviously very angry.

  Ben saw her and turned, growling. “He hadn’t ought to make a mess like that, Mrs. Moffat. Flowers! Pah!” Ben spat. “What does he think? He’s got to go pretty near to China? And I’m telling you, any of them pebbles gets jammed in my mower …”

  “This is Simon Warren, Ben,” she said firmly. “Simon, this is my gardener, Ben Guest.” She became aware of Simon’s work. He had removed the sod from a ring that was two feet wide, and he had dug deep. There was a rim of the dry and sandy soil around his trench. He had evidently, on hands and knees, been stirring the soil still deeper with a hand trowel. But he was coiled now, his bare toes braced, ready to spring up, his head, all covered with red lamb’s wool, ready to butt.

  “Whyncha wait till I come?” Ben was snarling. “Who’s going to edge that thing, I’m asking you, and who’s going to comb them stones out of my mower’s way?”

  Simon spoke before she could. “I am,” he said.

  “Damn right,” said Ben. “I’m not.”

  Mrs. Moffat, to her surprise, kept still.

 
Ben was reacting to the beard. Simon was reacting to hostility. He came up with a slow rippling of muscles; he rose with hard control and a readiness that had dark warning in it.

  Ben felt it, too. He said, “Listen, Miz Moffat, if you gave him permission, that’s one thing—”

  “I told you that she had,” said Simon indifferently, as if it were too late now. Ben must be punished.

  “Well, listen,” Ben said, stepping backward. “I hadda check. Don’t look to me you know what you’re doing,” he flared. “And if Miz Moffat don’t want me to do her yard work no more, let her say so.”

  Mrs. Moffat (who was inwardly tickled to pieces) said serenely, “I think you had better go and do the work you are hired to do, if you please, Ben. Mr. Warren and I have a little project here, and we are going to have some fun with it. However, when we have finished, I would suggest that you rake the pebbles out of the lawn, since you know best about your mower, don’t you?”

  Ben mumbled. He spat, and just missed, the tip of her cane and her neat black shoe. Simon’s eyes flashed. The words on the tip of his tongue were words Mrs. Moffat knew primarily from reading novels. He did not speak them. Ben swallowed the same kinds of words and walked away.

  Mrs. Moffat tried not to smile, but she knew her eyes were laughing. The boy had turned to watch her face intently. He was serious. He didn’t answer her mischief with even the suggestion of a wink. He knew she was delighted, and he was wondering why.

  Well, she couldn’t tell him why. How could she say she was glad to discover that he had some force in him, that he was not boneless? Something in their relationship shifted over to another position. She said, trying out her own kind of force, showing it forth gently but deliberately, “Simon, I would like it very much if you could be ready by ten thirty to go with me on some errands. You can help me with my packages; we can stop in at the nursery. And I also think that you must have some work shoes. Something very cheap will do, don’t you think so?”

  But now he sent some mischief back, “Yes, ma’am,” he said, with the shadow of an extra syllable. Ma’ama.

  “That’s a very fine trench, my friend,” she said, grinning at him. “It’ll make a good deep foundation.”

  “For heartsease,” he said, hiding in the beard.

  She bought him some sneakers and another pair of work pants, and then, knowing that for some reason she could do today what she could not have done yesterday, she said she was beginning to tire of seeing him in a suit coat every evening, and since sports shirts were perfectly acceptable, especially on informal occasions in the summer, she intended him to have at least two of them. She chose two cool cotton sports shirts, taking care that they were not expensive. Simon took out some money and paid for the sports shirts. Mrs. Moffat deferred to this, offering no objection. Side by side they walked out to the car, Mrs. Moffat demurely pleased with them both.

  Crystal Adams said to Flo Keating, on the phone, “We can’t help being concerned about Marguerite Moffat. When Claire and I ran into them in the market, we couldn’t believe it! There was Marguerite running around with this young man, this very young man, at her heels like a puppy dog. And Flo, dear, he is an absolutely weird-looking character … A beard! Oh, all over his face, and red! Oh, yes, and all in little curls, like something off a frieze. I can’t tell you how startled we were. They seemed—chummy.”

  “Do you mean he is staying on with her?”

  “Well, that was certainly what she implied! And after all, even if he used to live next door when he was a little boy, it’s all very well to be kind, but we wonder whether Marguerite is being wise.”

  “Do you think Joe ought to take a look at him?”

  “Oh, I was hoping you might say just that. Yes, I do, Flo. After all, a man …”

  “I’ll see if he wants to drop in on Marguerite and let you know. I’m dying to see him myself. I never heard of such a thing. You say ‘chummy’?”

  “Definitely,” said Crystal in mournful tones.

  At four o’clock, Simon, wearing the blue sports shirt, was sitting in what had become “his” rocker, poring over the garden book they had purchased at the nursery. Mrs. Moffat watched him contentedly.

  When Joe and Flo rang the front doorbell and Polly let them in, Mrs. Moffat heard their voices and went into the house to greet them.

  She knew at once exactly why they had come, so she hung back teasingly, enjoining them to sit down indoors. Flo had a way of letting her pupils fly upward and to the right when she was socially nervous, which was often. But Joe, who had spent his married life scoffing at social nerves, came out with it bluntly. They’d heard she had some young fellow staying here. Was he still here, and if so, where was he?

  Simon was so absorbed in what he was reading that he did not at first take any notice when they came parading to the porch.

  “Here are some friends of mine, come to call,” said Mrs. Moffat.

  He leaped to his feet. “I’m sorry. Oh, I’m s-sorry.”

  “Flo, this is Simon Warren—Mrs. Keating. And Mr. Keating, Simon.”

  Joe held out his right hand automatically and said, “Your folks used to live next door, eh? How long ago was that?”

  But the skin of Simon’s face, what could be seen of it, had flushed. He seemed hideously embarrassed. “Very nice,” he said, backing away. “Very nice to meet you, Mrs. Keating, ma’am—sir. Would you please excuse me? Mrs. Moffat, may I please go out to my room?” He was already backed against the screen door. He seemed shy as a deer.

  No, he isn’t, she thought grimly. He wants out, and he’s getting out, and he means to have his way.

  She said graciously, “Why, of course, Simon—but do come back and chat if you can?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, with a look that gave her the score. He wouldn’t. He slipped outside. He ran on the grass and vanished onto the path that led to the cottage.

  Somewhat troubled by a glimpse, a flash, a picture in her mind, Mrs. Moffat begged her old friends to sit down.

  After a few minutes of Joe’s exhaustive questioning Mrs. Moffat began to be glad that Simon had run away. She answered as best she could. “Just out of the service,” she told them, a statement which would have to do. Herself, she had never asked how long “a little while” had been. On his way home, of course. At least, she assumed so. She watered down that lie. But he had cleaned out the old cottage for her, and so beautifully. Naturally she had asked him to stay on a bit out there. He was such a nice boy, and polite and helpful. She would quite enjoy entertaining him for a brief but indefinite period. Flo said, “He’s awfully shy, isn’t he, Marguerite?”

  “He seems so,” Mrs. Moffat equivocated.

  Joe had to know exactly when the Warrens had moved away and where they had gone and how old Simon had been at the time and how many years he had been in the service and which branch.

  Mrs. Moffat became vague and offered tea or something stronger.

  Joe took beer and went right on asking questions. “Why does a kid like that want to wear all those whiskers? Crazy,” said Joe.

  “Oh, now, Joe,” said Flo, “they all do.”

  “What I say—you never know what’s hiding under a mass of whiskers,” Joe said. His clean-shaven cheeks sagged in dewlaps. No matter what Joe felt he always looked as sad as a bloodhound. “From what I hear today, I wouldn’t give one of those beards the house room.”

  “But he’s not staying in the house,” said Flo, betraying her thoughts. “He isn’t in the house at night.”

  Mrs. Moffat chided her friends for being “silly” and imperiously turned the talk to something else. Flo’s eyes were full of fear that they had offended, and she, too, kept the barricade. Joe subsided.

  Simon had vanished; he did not reappear.

  When Joe and Flo had given up and gone away, their hostess sat by herself on the porch, swaying gently. She wasn’t offended. She had been a little startled. She ought not to resent their concern, dear old Flo and Joe. Tender-and-gruff. Ah,
well …

  Polly came for the glass and the teacups.

  Shall I ask Polly? thought Mrs. Moffat. She might remember. But she did not ask Polly, because Polly might indeed remember, and the truth was Mrs. Moffat did not wish to risk being confirmed in a freakish suspicion that she was ashamed to mention. No, no, she must be wrong. She was probably thinking of some other neighbor’s boy … whichever one she had suddenly seen in her memory’s eye, racing after Tommy Moffat across her yard, Tommy’s blue-black head in the lead and a towhead bouncing after.

  DEAR SMITTY:

  It really was funny. You’d have got a laugh out of it. These characters came to call, see, and I forgot. I absolutely forgot I’ve got all this hair on my face—and I’m thinner, and all that. First thing that hit me—They’ll recognize! They’ll know me from the pictures in the paper! So I ran like hell. Then I had to laugh.

  Listen, I’ve got some sad news. I guess your old buddy’s been by the sundial himself, unless a couple of scared little kids didn’t remember straight. Believe me, the stuff isn’t where you told me. And I should know, because (like her gardener said) I pretty near got through to China. (Is that a laugh?)

  Listen, it seems to me now, you were probably better off …

  The pencil stopped, returned, and made thick and furious strokes over the last sentence. The notebook closed.

  Chapter 5

  Time was a lake. It must have its feeding springs and its outlets, since it was not stagnant, yet there was no turbulence. The golden days went dimpling and rippling by.

  Mrs. Moffat’s guest, or servant, or protégé, was in and out of the grounds. Whenever he left, he told her when to expect him back again. He did not always tell her where he was going, especially in the evenings.

  She wondered about girls. Mrs. Moffat was not so old or so forgetful that she didn’t imagine he might need a girl. Well, then—that being his business and surely not hers—perhaps he found a girl from time to time. Mrs. Moffat wasn’t so innocent or so ignorant that she could suppose there were no girls to be found. He was twenty-eight and had been to the wars. No celibate he. She was only moderately curious, having never herself been a young man in a strange city in need of a girl, about how they were to be found. A boy would know. She was, in fact, much comforted by these thoughts, because if he had settled in and never, never chosen to leave her place or her company, then, indeed, she would have been forced to ask herself what about girls? She was glad that he did not imprison himself here. If she wanted to be cold-blooded about it, this was not only because she needn’t worry about girls too much, but because she could also conclude that Simon felt no need to be in hiding (under a beard) and hidden all around. No, no, Mrs. Moffat cast off the negatives.