The Protégé

by Charlotte Armstrong

  She would never ask Simon why he had run from the Keatings. Why ask, when she knew? Joe was transparent enough to be read in an instant. Catechism was his style. Mrs. Moffat was foxier than that.

  She was glad Simon did not confine himself. She was ashamed of the thought that this meant he felt no need to hide. No, she was glad for his sake, if to try out the—well, call it traffic—from home base was a learning process. Perhaps he was beginning to “recognize” things. For herself, the lonely evenings were excellent for balance. She enjoyed them, too.

  When he was what she thought of as “at home,” he seemed to have drawn up limits for himself. The cottage he accepted as his place. He had told Polly not to bother. He felt perfectly free on the grounds. But he had never ventured very far into her house. He would come willingly to the porch, although he always kept to the outer portion of it.

  The first time she invited him to watch television with her Simon declined. He would rather read, he said. So she gave him books; she gave him classics. They wouldn’t hurt him, and besides, classics were what she owned in abundance. But the books he craved as if he were starving were garden books. He didn’t say so, but Mrs. Moffat could perfectly well see, and she searched out all that her husband had ever acquired, and she picked up nursery catalogues around town, which he also studied with a passion, as he studied all that grew. He inspected the ring around the sundial every hour on the hour, or so it seemed, and was sent into a trance when a plant had taken hold. She would see him full length on the grass, fascinated by a single seedling.

  They toured the territory every day, and every day she told him less, and he told her more. He was a fountain of botanical names.

  Once when she found a California poppy that had gone to seed and showed him the tiny exquisite pagoda and the shining black dots within, he became so still, in contemplation, that she held her breath. He was gone into the texture of time. He had sunk into its vertical dimensions? Oh, my! She breathed again, wondering what she had meant by such thoughts, but not pressing for the answers.

  On Sunday morning Mrs. Moffat went to church alone. Simon confessed that he really didn’t want to go. He didn’t understand what was said and done there; he guessed he never had. Could he please be excused?

  She did not coax him. He was looking well. She could even imagine that he had gained some solid flesh. His head was brilliant in the sun. She thought, Let him worship in the garden. What will God care?

  That day (in meditation) Mrs. Moffat was able to identify what it was about him that so appealed to her. He was considerate and clean and industrious. All these traits had been praiseworthy in her prime. But what really fascinated and held her was her growing conviction of the boy’s capacity for being happy. (His only just lightly crusted over, his rising, his ready-to-burst talent and need.) So long as she kept away from any mention of his family, his worldly fortunes, his recent past, or anything to do with reasons for confusion or sadness, he was on the very brink of a childlike and primitive joy, and sometimes when he succumbed, Mrs. Moffat both rejoiced and trembled. To see a young person—or anybody else for that matter—just plain and perfectly happy was the most pleasant and exhilarating sight in the world. And very rare. She could not resist the temptation to throw him in the way of such a mood … and she was beginning to be quite clever about it, too.

  But at the same time, she felt guilty because it was poor preparation for life outside her private paradise. For traffic? Almost nobody over the age of ten admitted to feeling this kind of happiness anymore; in an adult it was definitely suspect. Oh, this kind of happiness had been out of fashion even in Mrs. Moffat’s youth. It was not a fashion. It was an older phenomenon than fashion. Simply to see it was enchanting.

  Ah, well, I’m a selfish old woman, she said to herself, and I’ll do as I please, while I may.

  She couldn’t kid herself that golden days went on forever.

  One evening when Simon, who had spent the whole day in the open area of her yard, was drowsing in his chair, Mrs. Moffat got on to the subject of Cynthia. “My son, Thomas,” she was saying, “as I think I’ve told you, was never physically as strong as people ought to be. I must have overprotected him, as they say today. If so, then so be it. You never did meet my son’s wife, Cynthia. You wouldn’t have paid her any mind if you had. I did not want them to marry. That was an instinct, I think now. I couldn’t argue. I was afraid to seem jealous.” Mrs. Moffat was nodding like a puppet with its head on a string. She stiffened her neck and said, “I was jealous, all right. Among other things. I sometimes wonder, looking back, whether I protected him enough. Cynthia was a year or two older than he, a decisive, enterprising woman, very strong—or so she seemed. And what ‘seeming’ notions!” Mrs. Moffat snorted. “Cynthia would stride into a room, Simon. She had big bones and strong feet, and oh, she put them down. She would lay out, in a loud voice, some noble plan; she’d have every step organized, driving very logically and intelligently toward some goal. That was going to be it. But the next week, you see, or sometimes the very next day, she would produce an equally well-ordered but entirely different ambition. She was the least decisive, or perhaps I should say the least persistent, person. I’ve ever known. Poor child, Tommy, to be hers.”

  There. She had broken her own rule. Simon was listening peacefully. If he had noticed, he gave no sign.

  “Now I don’t necessarily subscribe,” she said, “to the doctrine that children are molded like pale little pieces of putty by the ignorant or misguided fingers of adults, whence stemmeth all their problems, so that the buck never stops until Adam and Eve, if then. I do believe that theory needs some modification.” (What a pleasure it was to speak her mind and use whatever words she cared to use. This was a thing that had been creeping and growing. Simon accepted, without fidgeting, and seemed to absorb, in some curious way of his own; everything she said in whatever language. And gradually she was trusting him to do so.)

  “But I think now,” she continued, “that a child who is denied his chance to put forth tendrils of his own, and take some hold, is a poor unlucky little child.

  “Cynthia is dead now,” Mrs. Moffat rushed on, “and we used to say of the dead nothing but good. But times have changed. After Thomas died, Cynthia immediately resolved to take a job and put her little one—he was only three—into a nursery school. Well, that lasted six months perhaps. Then she decided to put him with a foster family. She had a hundred reasons why, all quite sound. And that lasted … oh, a little while. All of a sudden it was her duty to stay at home and raise him herself, but that turned out not to be wise. I forget why. So to another foster family. Another would be better, of course. Far fields, Simon, always far fields. If Cynthia was in the East, she longed for the benefits of the glorious West. In the West, the advantages of the East rose up. The one year—the one summer—when at last she let us have him … it had been promised. We had understood that we could keep him and, I suppose, mold him until he was grown.”

  Simon was silent.

  “She came and took him away in September,” said Mrs. Moffat sadly. “You wouldn’t have understood what was happening. I was too old a woman … too old even then. My husband had his business in the daytime. I simply wasn’t spry enough. So we let him go. Oh, he was a handful that summer,” she said, painfully bright, “and so were you, as I remember.”

  He didn’t respond. His eyes kept wide open, regarding her with that opaque look he so often had. His owl look, she called it to herself. There were a few more words, bitter in her mouth, and she let them out. “His mother taught him nothing. She picked him up; she threw him down; she gave him to this one or that one; she snatched him back. He had no chance. The best I can do, to forgive her, is tell myself she had no idea what she was doing—and I can almost believe it, because neither did I, at that time.” Her head bent” in old sorrow.

  Simon stirred.

  “Never mind,” she said, and dropped him all the way out of her attention. This boy was not her grandson who h
ad been lost so long ago. He was only a passing stranger, a temporary playmate for the old lady, an entertainment.

  Simon said, in a moment, “Like a seedling, do you mean, Mrs. Moffat, that you transplant too often?”

  “I suppose,” she said listlessly. The analogy wasn’t perfect. Let it go.

  “I can see,” he said solemnly, “that you ought to persist, on the way to a goal.”

  Mrs. Moffat didn’t respond. If he was demonstrating that he had been listening all along, trying to please her, he wasn’t succeeding.

  He thinks I was preaching, she mused. Perhaps I was.

  “If I could have a goal, Mrs. Moffat, I think I know now what it would be.”

  “You do?” She sighed indifferently.

  “Working with plants!” He was breathless, as if he were revealing a great secret.

  “Why not, then?” said Mrs. Moffat carelessly. She was very tired. She wished she were in her bed and all voices still.

  “They aren’t trying to mold anybody,” he said with something of a spark, as if she had asked him why. “Plants don’t tell you this is right and that is wrong and tell you something else tomorrow. Plants aren’t confusing. I don’t think they are confused. That’s wonderful to me.”

  “Oh, you’re never going to fool a rose,” she said, rousing herself to some courteous animation. “It needs what it needs—that’s all it knows. So if it’s lucky, it buds and blooms and fades and makes some seed—or a wild rose may—and what seeds are lucky will do the same.” She would go up to bed as soon as she felt a little less depressed and a little more competent to get there.

  “You believe in luck?” he said alertly.

  “Of course I do,” she said wearily. “Too many things go on that we haven’t any other name for.” Mrs. Moffat was exhausted. She had talked too much. She didn’t want to talk for days and days.

  “Luck,” he was murmuring. “It must be good luck just to be here.”

  Oh, child, she thought, teach your grandmother. Was he dreaming of becoming her gardener, another old Mr. McGregor, aged twenty-eight? What about girls? What about marriage? Blooming and seeding? She said nothing.

  “I could learn to be a gardener,” Simon was saying. “I could persist. If I wasn’t so afraid that everything’s too late for me. There are too many things I can’t change now.” He bit his knuckle. “Do you think I could be a gardener?”

  “How should I know,” she said, “whether you can or not, or what your luck will be? For your information, Simon, old ladies are much tempted to play the wise old women. But the truth is, old women are old, and their maxims are old stuff. Who knows if they hold? Don’t sit at my feet, you silly man, in a world-and-time that’s through with me.”

  “Don’t,” he said, startled and as if she were giving him pain.

  She had given herself pain. “Things change and people die. I don’t suppose you can imagine how little I will mind.”

  “What if I can?” he breathed. “Because to me sometimes it seems like the peaceful answer.”

  Mrs. Moffat’s conscience woke up screaming. No, no, no, no, thought Mrs. Moffat. This is wrong—worry and strife—this isn’t any fun at all.

  “By the way, Simon,” she said briskly, brushing all moping and whining aside, “I’ve had a letter from my granddaughter. She’ll be here on the tenth.”

  He turned away sadly.

  “Simon?”

  Sometimes he wouldn’t rouse, even when she called his name.

  “I can tell you,” said Mrs. Moffat, “that Zan doesn’t give a hoot about plants and gardens. That I’m sure of. She’s a city girl, Zan is. She has a friend who takes her out, you know. She doesn’t …” Mrs. Moffat was about to say, “Hang around all the time and listen to my philosophy,” but she shut her mouth.

  “How many days before she comes?” he asked drearily.

  Mrs. Moffat pretended not to have heard. If she had meant that he must leave, she wouldn’t have given the message obliquely. He ought to know that by now. But she couldn’t scold him. She was sorry that she had let her own spirits spiral downward during this evening. She was sorry to see him enfolded by that mysterious numbness.

  “I have a surprise for you,” she said, rallying all her forces. “Something I don’t believe you’ve noticed in all your snoopings and prowlings.”

  “Yes, ma’am?” He was polite.

  “There’s a big concrete bin sunk in the ground out behind the garage. Mr. McGregor used to use it for his compost heap.

  She watched him waken. (Oh, yes, he had read all about compost!)

  “But how long has it been there?” he gasped. “Oh, Mrs. Moffat, if it’s full and it’s been working all these years—”

  “It may be very ripe and rich,” she said, “or all the good leached out of it, for all I know. You’d better go see in the morning.”

  As good as magic, she thought, watching him yearn toward the dark garden. Her own heart was lightening. “You look as if you just found the map to the buried treasure,” she teased him.

  But when she was abed, she thought, What did I hear? What did he say? What have I done? Tossed him a bit of bait? The illusion of a goal? The news of a smelly old compost heap because I knew he would rejoice? But sliding myself out from under whatever dark old sorrows he may have been ready to let me help him carry?

  The truth is, I do not want a piece of his past sorrow. I would much prefer to see him happy every day. If he has a past to hash over and reinterpret, let his ghosts fight it out in his head. I may be a wicked old woman, to keep tricking him into patches of joy for the sake of the pleasure it gives me. But if so, so be it. Let him take his risks, she thought grumpily, and turned her cheek to the pillow.

  A fire escape ran by the open window. The air that rose up from the dirty downtown Los Angeles street at one o’clock in the morning was somewhat less foul than the air in this room.

  “I can stay there,” said the red-bearded boy who was sitting on the windowsill, “for a while.”

  “There has got to be a way,” said the man who was lying on the bed. “I’m thinking. While I’m doing that, you stay there.”

  “I don’t like this crummy room, when I’m in a better place. You know that.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve met a girl who’s got a better place. I come here for the mail. By the way, thanks for your name.”

  “That’s okay.”

  The only light came from a bare bulb in the ceiling. The man on the bed had the crook of his elbow over his eyes to shield them from the glare.

  “Say, Smitty, speaking of girls, your cousin (I guess she must be) is showing up on the tenth.”

  “What cousin is this?” said the man in a moment.

  “Zan, they call her.”

  A police car screamed by below, and the red-bearded boy looked out the window to watch its progress. The man on the bed had become rigid.

  “Alexandra is her real name, I think,” said the boy in the window. “Alexandra Terry. She runs some business in New York. Mrs. Moffat says she comes out every summer.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said the man on the bed thickly.

  “You feeling okay?”

  “All but my leg,” the man said in a vicious snarl.

  The red-bearded boy stood up.

  “It aches like hell, and it always will,” said Smitty, “but you’re the one who’s blaming you. I never said so.” He took his arm away from his unshaved face. His eyes were odd. One seemed almost sealed shut by a melting and rehardening of the flesh and bone of his brow.

  “You’re sure you’ve got the medicine for far enough ahead?” said his visitor. “You’re keeping the money for it?”

  “Sure. Sure. The tenth, you say?” The man rolled and put his feet to the floor. “Hang in there, baby. Be nice to Zan, but not too nice.”

  When his voice stopped, the red-bearded boy kept right on listening intently, so the man said, “You stick to the old lady. Zan’s not for you. One of these days, when I figur
e how to put the proposition, somebody’s going to pay the two of us for staying out of their lives. That’s all we’ve got to sell, old buddy. Yah, Zan’s a girl. So what? I know where there’s girls in Mexico. Listen, I’d tell you more, but I’m interested to see what they do. I want to think about it.”

  “That’s okay,” said the boy.

  Chapter 6

  At 3 P.M. Los Angeles time Zan walked off the jet, was met, kissed and complimented, and carried off into the maze of the city in Nicky’s car. It was agreed that she must be taken at once to Mrs. Moffat’s house, where she would stay close for a day or two. Zan did believe that by Wednesday her grandmother might be just as glad to be rid of her for dinner and the evening. “She’s used to being quiet,” Zan explained. “She will have had it on chit-chat, so you may appear then.”

  “Wouldn’t it be sensible,” said Nicky plaintively, “for you to give me a carbon copy of your fortnit’s shedyool? My secretary could compare it with mine, and we’d know where we were, wouldn’t we?”

  “For God’s sake, Nicky!” said Zan mildly.

  “You career females tend to assume you can have it both ways. Say please?” He was grinning.

  “Oh, please forgive me,” she said sweetly, “for assuming Wednesday.”

  “No need to be sickening. Wise, however, to set a tone. We shall assume Wednesday.”