The Protégé

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Mrs. Moffat found herself adrift. Something was wrong with the chronology.

  “Simon, how long ago did your mother die?”

  “When I was nineteen.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-four, ma’am.” He put both hands on the top of his head as if they were a cap. “Don’t ask me any more, Mrs. Moffat. All this time you didn’t—you never did—and it was wonderful to me. But it couldn’t last. Nothing good can last—nothing.”

  “Nothing bad can last either,” she said briskly. “Go get some ice on your face. And if that doesn’t help, you must see the doctor.”

  Mrs. Moffat rose. Simon got to his feet, head bent slightly to one side as if he listened.

  She gave him a haughty look. “That wasn’t a question. That was an order.”

  He let his breath out; he turned for the kitchenette.

  Mrs. Moffat was sorting out the sequences. If he had gone on the town with Tommy Moffat at the time of his mother’s funeral, then the riot in Seoul had been five years ago. Where had the boy been in the meantime?

  She was looking down and could see into his canvas flight bag. It was empty except for an envelope, business size. She read the inscription: Paul Henry Allenstag, Jr. Then the name of a hospital. At the upper left she read Hale Mohalu.

  She rocked on her small feet, not yet knowing in full consciousness why.

  And somebody was pounding on the door. Zan burst through it. Mrs. Moffat lifted her head high and stared. Simon came out of the kitchenette.

  Zan said severely, “You shouldn’t be in here, Gran.”

  Her grandmother said loftily, “Why not, pray?”

  “Because,” said Zan, her eyes flashing, “he hasn’t been feeling well, and he might have something contagious, and if he hasn’t considered the risk for you, I have.”

  Mrs. Moffat looked at Simon, who was holding a tea towel to his face. In the only eye that she could see there was such despair, it was as if she watched the spirit dying.

  She said, in icy command, “Zan, go outside and wait. I’ll be there in one minute. Do as I say, and do it right away, and close the door.”

  To Simon she said, “If you think you must go in the morning, then of course you must. And you needn’t say another word except one. Tomorrow you must say goodbye and let me wish you luck, which with all my heart I surely must do. Shall I expect you at dinner?”

  “No, ma’am,” he stammered. “No, I don’t think … I have some errands quite a way from here.”

  “I see. But you and I will take breakfast together.”

  She turned her back and marched out of the cottage.

  Not bad, she said to herself, paying no attention to Zan, who fell in at her side and seemed to be exhorting or explaining or apologizing.

  That, Mrs. Moffat went on to herself, was a pretty fair recovery and rather decent behavior for an old lady who leads the sheltered life you lead. She knew now what had so rocked her.

  Mrs. Moffat had the habit of forcing herself to pronounce (correctly or not) an unfamiliar place-name, so that she would recognize it again. A word she had not seen on that envelope was sticking in her mind. Kalaupapa, on Molokai.

  A peninsula, as she saw it, with surf and seabirds. Three churches, one of them Father Damien’s. A tiny jail, a fire engine, cottages rent-free. A few more than two hundred people were still there. Many could have gone back into the world, but they preferred not to try to cope with so much prejudiced loathing. They would stay where they were until, one day, there would be nothing left but cemetery stones.

  New patients were treated at Hale Mohalu, in Honolulu, for what was now properly called Hansen’s disease. She remembered the subject of the sermon yesterday. And Simon’s fierce cleanliness could be fear.

  She could not know, of course, whether the boy was a leper. She could see no signs; she might not know all the signs. He could have spent the five missing years at the place of treatment. She thought perhaps Tommy Moffat was there, even now. The house the two of them had stumbled into in Seoul must have been a house of lepers, or why, when “the people there came with a light,” had Simon choked on his own heart in such terror?

  It was a disease that disfigured. Although surely, surely, it was not so easily caught—what, in a few minutes or even hours? Mrs. Moffat had read that this was an ancient superstition.

  A tremor was rippling up and down her back—here in the morning sunshine. Was it not written, unclean? Unclean!

  Ancient superstition was not cast out in a few minutes or even hours—no.

  Zan had her by the arm and was shaking her. “Gran, you’re not even listening. What’s the matter?”

  They were at the porch door.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Moffat.

  Not a word of this to Zan. Not a word. The decision made itself; her mind closed on it with a snap. Because Zan must go elsewhere for the night. But Zan would not leave Mrs. Moffat here, if she knew. She would not go elsewhere by herself and be safe. She would stir up authorities, uproar and turbulence. But Mrs. Moffat had other procedures in mind and things to accomplish during this day. Zan must go soon.

  “I’m trying to decide,” said Mrs. Moffat. “Go eat your breakfast, and then we’ll talk.”

  Nicky Pomerance, being busy, had snatched a sandwich in conference. He came back to his own office at one fifteen to find that Zan had been calling him persistently.

  He dialed the number. It was the Huntington-Sheraton Hotel.

  “Zan, what are you doing there?”

  “Oh, Nicky, Gran threw me out.” He could hear the feather edge of hysteria in her wailing voice. “I had to get out. I’m about frantic. Could you please come over here as soon as you can?”

  “Honey, I’m up to my neck—What do you mean, threw you out?”

  “She did. She said that I must go. She said I didn’t understand, and she couldn’t explain things she’d known all her life so that I would. She said she didn’t have time. Simon is leaving tomorrow, and there are certain things she simply has to do, and it’s like life or death.

  “I didn’t know what to make of it! I tried to calm her down. I tried to get her to take a pill. I wanted to call the doctor. But she was furious, Nicky.

  “She said I was intolerably presumptuous. It was her house and not mine. I had no business jumping to the conclusion that she didn’t know what she was doing, and no right in her home if she didn’t want me there. And that’s true.”

  Zan was crying.

  “Look, Zan, I can’t get away. Why don’t you take a cab here? By the time you arrive, I can manage a coffee break.”

  “No, no, I can’t leave this phone. He’s gone somewhere. But Polly’s going to call me when he comes back.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I need—”

  “Where did the Warrens go in Pennsylvania?” His businesslike tone steadied her.

  “Bryn Mawr.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Something like fifteen years.”

  “I’m going to do a little checking.”

  “Oh, yes—do.”

  “And I’ll get to you as soon as I can—say between four thirty and five. You take a pill. Take a nap, Zan.”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said on a long breath, quietly.

  Zan went to the window and looked out at the broad acres, the lawns and terraces, and scarcely saw them.

  She knew very well that she herself had forced her grandmother to that final cruel plainspeaking. She had rejected even a trial belief in what the old lady was saying. She had been outraged by the thought that her own protective instinct, based on loving concern, so pure and sound, could be ignorant and destructive.

  But now Zan felt lost and miserable, having perceived that her “instinct” was partially based on a conviction of superiority, for which she had no warrant, and it was also otherwise mysterious to herself. She did not understand why she was overreacting. She could not name a specif
ic possibility to fear as much as this. Murder, was it? No, not murder. Maybe it wasn’t fear that she felt.

  She was obsessed. She could not stop her mind’s picturing their two heads. The old lady’s with the knot on top, the profile dainty and turned up somewhat saucily. And the boy’s strangely beautiful helmet of bright hair and the uncanny sweep of the color around cheeks and chin. The head bent graciously, the face grave, as if he were old and she were young, he were wise and she were frivolous.

  No, no. Zan caught herself embroidering symmetrically. The point was not which of them was wise or foolish, old or young. The point was that they were in a state of gentle companionship, ageless, and too innocent to believe. One of the desperate needs of the human heart is to trust somebody, and no questions asked. Zan, who could not, could not bear to see such risk taken, such punishment asked for.

  Chapter 13

  After Zan’s taxi had come and she had departed finally, although not before she had stirred up poor Polly to vigilance (as Mrs. Moffat knew and deplored), the old lady took a hasty bite of lunch very early and went up the stairs.

  She paused at the top to listen to Polly snicking the locks on doors and windows, sighed, for there was no use forbidding this, went into her bedroom, sat in her favorite chair, and took up the phone.

  Simon had left the property on foot—to do whatever errands he needed to do. Mrs. Moffat was sure he would return to say good-bye. She had figured out what to do in the meantime.

  She dialed the area code for Boothbay Harbor, Maine, then the numbers that would give her information there. She asked for the phone number of Paul Henry Allenstag, a summer inhabitant. In a twinkling she had it. She was not surprised. A junior had a senior for a father. Peter was “close” to Paul. The nickname could also be Al. In Boothbay it was summer; Mrs. Moffat was pleased and excited.

  Her finger plodded through all the numbers.

  “Hello?” a woman answered.

  “Mr. Paul Henry Allenstag?”

  “I’m sorry, he isn’t here. This is Mrs. Allenstag. Can I help you?”

  “My name is Marguerite Moffat. I’m calling from California. Tell me if there is a son, a Paul Henry, Jr.?”

  “Why, yes. There is.” The woman’s voice grew cautious.

  “Mrs. Allenstag, I am seventy-four years old. Your stepson is a friend of my grandson. He has been here at my house. I’m worried about him. I feel his own people ought to know where he is.”

  “Oh, that is kind of you, Mrs. Moffat. We have been worried. He ought to have been home long ago. My husband is at his office in New York, but he’s commuting to the house in Westport, although he usually stays in town in the summer, and he hasn’t come up for the weekends at all. Perhaps you’d rather talk to Paul’s father?”

  “No—I think to you. Please bear with me, Mrs. Allenstag. It’s important.” Mrs. Moffat thought the woman sounded openhearted and ordinarily kind, at least. “Did the boy’s mother kill herself?”

  “No, no!”

  “No?” said Mrs. Moffat sharply.

  “Well, of course, she did take too many sleeping pills, but it was one of those accidents. She was caught in the pill cycle, you see. One to pep up, one to calm down—one for every mood.”

  “There wasn’t a death wish?”

  “Oh, who knows, really?”

  “Her son thinks he knows. Thinks it’s his guilt. Or his father’s.”

  “Oh, I’m sure not. Paul, he was in the Navy—an honorable place to be—and sons are let go, don’t you think?”

  “I do agree,” said Mrs. Moffat approvingly.

  “And his father is not to blame for being what his father is. If she couldn’t cope with the life she led, she should have revised it. I don’t mean to speak ill—I am not to blame, Mrs. Moffat—especially since I didn’t meet my husband while his first wife was alive. Nor is Gretchen to blame. Gretchen’s the daughter, a darling girl. She was only twelve at the time. Give me your address and phone number. I’ll tell my husband. I’m sure he’ll do something.”

  Mrs. Moffat gave the information. She said, unsatisfied, “You think he’ll do something? But why does the boy think his father wants no part of him?”

  “Oh. Well. Is it possible you haven’t heard? I suppose it is. That seems strange. It—let’s see—must have been soon after his mother died that young Paul defected to the Communists and made tapes and motion pictures for them, and said terrible things about this country, and hideously embarrassed his father, who’s in Wall Street, you see. Of course, the charitable thought is that they brainwashed him. Some people think he oughtn’t to have succumbed, but I wonder what they know about it.”

  “But how did he get out?”

  “The story is they just let him sit in some prison camp for close on five years, and then one day, without warning, they dumped him over the border. I guess he was no more use to them.”

  “I daresay he was never much,” said Mrs. Moffat grimly. “That kind of treason is getting to be obsolete.”

  “What?”

  “You can hear it on TV just about every evening,” said Mrs. Moffat. “What an evil place this country is and how all its institutions need destroying. Quite the ‘in’ thing to advocate subversion. Why wasn’t his return in the news?”

  “Oh, the military snatched him up and put him in a hospital in Hawaii and debriefed him. I thought they seemed disgusted and determined not to let him hit the front pages.”

  “Who seemed?”

  “A Dr. Enoch Grant, the one who phoned us. Paul’s father sent five hundred dollars for tickets home. That was almost two months ago. It’s been a suspenseful summer. I’ve—never met the boy.”

  “I hope,” said Mrs. Moffat, “that you get to meet him.”

  “Oh, but surely—”

  “You must tell his father,” said Mrs. Moffat, “that he is carrying such a staggering load of self-reproach that he is more than half convinced that the whole world would be better off without him in it.”

  “Oh, don’t,” the woman said. “Oh, keep him there until his father gets there. Oh, no—that shouldn’t be. It’s unfair. It punishes living people too much—too much.”

  “I agree,” Mrs. Moffat said.

  She rested a few minutes. Then she put in a call to Dr. Enoch Grant at the hospital in Pearl Harbor. He was not there. Messages were left: he was to call a certain operator.

  Mrs. Moffat took off her dress and stretched out on her bed, but she dared only doze. She must pick up the phone when it rang. So she let chunks of information tumble through her mind like a child’s blocks. The temptation was to build with them, put them in sequence, and call it consequence.

  Shock of his mother’s death, fear of his guilt in the matter, sent him on the town.

  Tommy Moffat (with the best ideas) had charmed him into excesses; they had pushed the fun too far. The boy had made two of the three legs of the fugitive pair, mirthfully staggering the alleys. Hiding behind the wall in the dark until the shocking sight of loathsome faces had sent him running in uncontrollable revulsion. Guilty of this, he had tried and failed to rescue his friend, and at last, because he could do no better, he had betrayed his friend to the authorities. Bogged down in shame, he had drifted across borders with disreputable people and been snatched up for a prize victim and had weakly succumbed.

  Ah. Too simple. Too, too simple. Too much was discarded, unregarded. If his mother had been caught up in the pill cycle, then no specific resolution to take too many was necessary. The whole stupid and futile regime was suicidal enough. But people can dig their own graves with their teeth at the table, and often do, and whose guilt is that?

  Tommy Moffat was no consequence of anything that Simon had ever done, no punishment. Tommy Moffat was bad luck, walking.

  And as for the brainwashing—the brain by clever pressures altered, “opinion” grafted in—Mrs. Moffat thought that had had a very brief vogue. It could have had a political value commensurate with the trouble taken for a very short period
of time, when only a few knew that this sort of thing could be done, but a great many did not know and so could be fooled. These days there was a more generally accepted and universally applied understanding of psychological principles and, in fact, it was quite difficult to give forth a didactic opinion even in the parlor without friendly neighborhood analysts concluding you must “really believe” something else.

  Opinion. Opinion.

  Come now, she thought sleepily. Let us formulate Moffat’s law.

  Hm. Everyone walks carrying a hoop of his own horizons, large or small (since scales differ) and more or less illuminated by his own understanding. What resemblance or relationship his world has to the real one, none can know. But the one sure-thing bet is this: The world I “really believe in” does not, it cannot, it never will coincide with reality.

  And the great glory of this law—of course! of course!—was the prevalence of loopholes!

  Mrs. Moffat’s phone rang.

  “Dr. Grant here.”

  “Oh, yes, Doctor. I am Dr. Moffat.” Well, she had a question. She’d have to lie to get an answer. “I need a fact or two about Paul Henry Allenstag, Jr. You examined him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, Doctor. Underweight, listless, malnutrition, obviously. What’s he doing in California?”

  “What’s the reference to leprosy?”

  “Oh, that!” The doctor, so far away, had a strong laugh. “Well, I don’t blame you for not getting the straight of it. Seems a doctor on the other side, some sadistic type, I guess, told him that’s why they were putting him over the border. Said he’d contracted it and they didn’t want to be bothered, so let the Americans deal with it.”

  “That was a lie.”

  “Sure it was a lie. He was a pretty mixed-up kid. Didn’t know who to believe there for a while.”

  “I keep getting the impression that leprosy’s in the picture somehow.”

  “Well, this gook doctor must have had access to what they wrung out of him in the first place—five years ago. You must have heard about his buddy, Doctor. His buddy, the leper?”