Lemon in the Basket

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Oh,” said Rufus, “that’s right. I heard it on TV. I see what you mean.”

  Tamsen thought, No, he doesn’t.

  And to her shock, the Doctor said, “No, you don’t, Rufus, old boy. Just sit tight.”

  Tamsen began to rephrase what Duncan had said, in her own mind. The King of Alalaf has just arrested twenty-eight Americans on suspicion of espionage, and Americans don’t like that. Therefore, Alalaf is, at the moment, in the bad graces of the news-conscious people of this country. Therefore …

  “That does make everything a little awkward,” said Maggie and glided smoothly on. “Did you meet those men at the University there, Duncan?”

  “I met some of them, sure,” Duncan said. “Just a bunch of poor-but-honest schoolteachers trying to get along. Not obviously the cloaks-and-daggers that Al Asad, may his tribe increase, is saying he thinks they are. Of course, who knows?”

  “Our government is going to have something to say about this, eh, Dad?” said Rufus smugly. “I’ll bet there’s pressure on.”

  Rufus wants to play inside-dopester, thought Tamsen as she watched the Judge move his shoulders, refusing to state what inside dope he might really know. The Judge had long ago given up the bench, so Duncan had told her, for the exercise of his native talent, which was that of negotiation, the art of the possible, or compromise. How could he give a wise and seasoned answer to a question so … well … inept?

  Phillida answered. “Now, Rufus,” she chided in her gay and somewhat mocking manner, “you’ve seen by the papers that we are definitely frowning.” Then she said to the Judge, “But if Mitch is going to take the knife to the heir to the throne and the idol of the people of Alalaf, and Maggie takes his mama in, here, as I suppose she will—”

  “Of course,” said Maggie. “Of course, for pity’s sake! Alice Foster’s daughter!”

  “But won’t that seem pro-Alalaf, at a bad time?”

  “No, no,” said the Judge. “I can blame my wife’s compassionate heart and transcend politics, can’t I?”

  “Pretty All-American, that,” said Duncan. “And All-American Mitch had better be right, I suppose.”

  Tamsen, who was following all this, knew that not everyone here could follow and it made her uneasy.

  “If Mitch says that the poor little fellow will benefit from the operation, then, of course, he will,” proclaimed Maggie.

  “I say he may,” Mitch corrected. “I’ll need him here a while before I add up the chances.”

  “Say … uh … whose little fellow is this?” said Lurlene. “Excuse me, but you all go so fast.” Her eyes thanked Tamsen for the phrase and Tamsen smiled at her.

  “The King’s grandson,” said Duncan kindly. “The heir to the throne. Eleven years old. Saiph, they call him. Al Saiph, I guess it should be.”

  “For heaven’s sakes,” said Lurlene rather skeptically.

  “So you’d better be right, eh, Mitch?” Rufus repeated Duncan’s phrase just as if it were new and his own. But he was catching on, now.

  “You’re damned right, I’d better be right,” said the Doctor genially, “and, if asked, I expect to be. Cool it, everybody.”

  “And thanks a lot, Duncan,” said Phillida merrily, “for getting Mitch into this one.”

  “Who, me?” drawled Duncan. “Can I help it if I’m there to look at the old King’s shiny new University and Alice Foster and the Princess Jaylia happen to mention that the boy’s got this trouble and I just happen to have a brother who happens to be the only wizard extant? Taken them a year to do anything about it,” he grumbled. He was a man who liked things done.

  “Alice Foster’s grandson is not my patient yet,” said Mitch.

  “Wait a minute,” Rufus said. “Alice Foster’s grandson has got to be half American. So how can the King be anti-American?”

  “The child is a quarter, Rufus,” said Maggie gently. “Alice married an Australian. Not long after we were graduated, her daddy gave her a trip around the world. Do you know,” Maggie squinted thoughtfully, “Alice may have gone into orbit. She seems to have been going around the world ever since.”

  “Great old gal, Alice,” said Duncan comfortably.

  “So what’s-her-name, the daughter …” Rufus was poor at names.

  “Jaylia,” Maggie prompted.

  “Isn’t she the one who married the Playboy Prince, what’s-his-name?”

  “Aljedi was his nickname,” the Judge prompted.

  “A prince of what?” said Lurlene. Tamsen opened her mouth to tell her but Rufus kept right on. Lurlene was just too far behind.

  “Wait a minute,” Rufus said, “I remember now. He was the Playboy Prince who burned himself up in a racing car crash. Right?”

  “Yes, he did,” said Maggie gravely.

  “Kind of thoughtless, wasn’t that?” said Rufus. He smacked his lips together.

  “Of whom?” said the Judge politely.

  “Of what’s-his-name, the Playboy Prince.” Rufus made a grand gesture and Tamsen had to duck it slightly. “This boy’s father. I mean, here is a chap supposed to get to be the king of this piddling little country. Shouldn’t he have thought of that before he goes in for one of the most dangerous sports in the world? Especially when all he’s got to leave behind him is the one child, didn’t you say, Maggie?”

  “Just the one,” said Maggie quietly.

  “And he’s not quite right, at that,” said Rufus sharply.

  Tamsen noticed that Lurlene was watching her own husband with a certain resentful sullenness, as if he had begun to speak in a foreign tongue, and she was not only lost but spited.

  “No, no,” Rufus went on, as if the silence around the table had disputed him, “there is such a thing as responsibility to the people. Why did this Playboy Prince have to see how fast he could drive a car? Pretty childish. Oil money, they’ve got, haven’t they? But could he afford that?”

  Rufus was sounding painfully righteous, but Tamsen said in her soft voice, “I certainly think you have a point, Rufus.”

  The Judge said, in an offhand way, “I believe the King had other sons.”

  “One killed in a plane,” said Maggie, “and one in battle, and one who just seems to have died. But Aljedi was the favorite of the people and now they worship Saiph, so Alice says. Oh there is another heir, a nephew, you see.”

  “Ah, lots of characters in that country who wouldn’t mind being King, either,” said Duncan easily. “Don’t worry about it, Rufus.”

  Maggie rang her little bell.

  “Yes,” said Rufus loudly, “but wouldn’t you think this particular idiot prince ought to have watched himself?” He turned his gaze on Tamsen suddenly. “What do you say, Chief?”

  “I don’t know,” she said feebly.

  “There may be,” cut in Maggie, “a great many things we don’t know. But we do seem to know that Alice Foster’s grandson (and the King’s, too, of course)”—Maggie dismissed kings as mere in-laws—“cannot live very long unless an operation can help him.”

  “Well, that’s too bad, naturally,” said Rufus.

  The Judge had switched Phillida to the subject of her pet projects for helping unfortunate children, when Rufus burst out again.

  “But if that’s so,” he said, as if no one had spoken since his own last sentence, “it looks to me as if Mitch has got a little pressure. What if Mitch says to the King, what’s-his-name, ‘See here, I am an American and I’m not going to operate on your grandson until you let those Americans out of your jail.’ How about that?” Rufus was looking crafty. He expected praise.

  “How about that?” said his brother Mitch mildly.

  “Well, the way their minds work …”

  “The trouble is, Rufus, old boy,” said Duncan, “I spent a whole week there, a year ago, and even I, child-prodigy that I am, haven’t the slightest idea how their minds work.”

  “I was there a whole day, a week ago,” Mitch said, “and I haven’t, either.”

  “But you co
uldn’t,” gasped Tamsen belatedly, “use a little boy’s life …” For pressure, her thought continued, or for blackmail!

  “Kinda mess up the image of the All-American compassionate heart. Wouldn’t it, just?” drawled Duncan, sending her his smile.

  “Oh, say,” said Lurlene, who by now had caught on to some of this, “you got to have reverence for life. I mean, don’t you? Especially of a little child.”

  And now Rufus was staring at his wife.

  “Sure you do, Lurlene.” Duncan was the quickest and he broke the somewhat wincing silence. “Mitch is in that business, so don’t you worry.” Then he called the table’s length, “Hey, Maggie, are you going to have to dedicate this dump they are naming after you?”

  “Alas,” said Maggie, becoming tragically weary of her worldly burdens, “since I am still alive, I suppose I must.”

  “Oh go on,” said Phillida. “You’ll love every minute—”

  “Of course,” said Maggie in the same tragic tones, “and so will my audience.”

  Her children laughed at her, as (Tamsen realized) they had been intended to do.

  2

  Tamsen, savoring the evening behind them, was quiet for the first part of their long ride home. Duncan Tyler didn’t mind, having other things to think about. He was startled when she said, suddenly, “What does your brother Rufus feel?”

  “Feel? Oh, you mean because he didn’t have his pretty wreath to lay on the family altar?” Duncan had expected this to come up, sooner or later. “Don’t worry, honey. He’s used to that.”

  “Is he? Really?”

  Duncan knew the shades of her soft voice. He began to declaim, being free to do so with his bride of six months, and enjoying the exercise of the privilege. “Rufus,” he said, “was born what you might call one of the untalented of this world. Nice fellow, but … well … not bright. The folks had to squeak him through the easiest college courses known to man, and it took persistence, believe me. On their part, that is. Well, of course, he couldn’t qualify for medical. Dad did wangle him into law school, where he washed out almost immediately. In fact, I think it was immediately. As for science, since I doubt he realizes firmly that two and two will usually make four—”

  “Oh, Duncan!”

  “No, no,” he said, wondering if she could have been hearing meanness in what he thought of as his humorous vein. “Honey, an IQ is an IQ, rough measure though that may be. Everybody knows it’s not his fault.”

  “But if it’s not his fault …”

  “Then nobody blames him,” Duncan finished for her.

  They were trundling through the western section of the city. Duncan was thinking it was hard for Tamsen to understand the family attitude. He must, he supposed, teach her.

  “What has he done?” she asked in another moment.

  “Well, Rufus thought he’d start at the bottom in industry and work up. Turned out it takes some yeasty kind of thing to rise, and he didn’t have it. So he dropped that and thought he’d be a salesman and make a wad, which is respectable, you know. But there seemed to be some kind of self-starting energy involved there that he doesn’t have, either. They lived with, or on, Lurlene’s mother for years.”

  “He just keeps on failing?” Tamsen said, in mourning tones.

  “Well, no. I think he’s just stopped trying,” said Duncan cheerfully. “After all, why should he pursue that will-o’-the-wisp, security, when he’s got about as much of it as humans get. He’s got the family. He’s got some comfortable friends of his own, I presume. And of course, he’s got Lurlene, and he is devoted to her. Well, she never has, and still doesn’t, demand too much intellectual brilliance, would you say? So Rufus may be a whole lot happier than any of us miserable strivers.”

  “I don’t think so,” Tamsen said.

  “My love, my little bleeding heart,” said Duncan, “mind, when you empathize, that you allow for the fact that the other fellow isn’t just like you.”

  “But he has to feel accepted,” she said stubbornly.

  “As what and by whom?” said Duncan, who had known that he must come bluntly to this, sooner or later. “Must he be accepted as what he isn’t, by people pretending to be what they are not? Which is to say, as uninformed and unintelligent as he?”

  “Oh, Duncan, that’s cruel,” she cried, bending forward in pain. “I think that’s cruel!”

  “We do, too,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding her.

  They went along silently for a while.

  “Wait a minute. You didn’t get fooled, did you?” Duncan asked her, suddenly.

  “What?”

  “You do realize, for instance, that Maggie knows she couldn’t make it in the modern theatre? That the Judge is not licking his chops over this ‘honor’? He gets asked to do what he still can do, but he is tired. As for Mitch, he hasn’t even scratched the surface of what he intends to accomplish before he’s through. And Phillida gave up her own career, years ago, to be a pretty darned good wife and mother. If she has energy left over and does these charity things, it’s not her name she wants in bronze. And look at me, the bright young educator. Believe me, I am one who knows better than most how terrifyingly ignorant I really am. And I guess you don’t consider yourself on top of the world of art, eh?”

  “It bothers me to pieces,” said Tamsen promptly, “that the one they chose to hang is not the one I like the best.”

  “All right,” Duncan chuckled. “Granted, Rufus seems to have fallen into fast company. Also granted, it did seem on the sore-thumbish side tonight. But, as the Chinese used to say, ‘No blame.’ And we were not beating him down, for the fun of it. He’s one of us.”

  They began the descent into the canyon, where they lived in a brown-shingled house of mad design that delighted them both for its charming unorthodoxy. Duncan parked the car where it must stand, beside Tamsen’s Volkswagen, because there was no garage. He went around and took her out, into his arms.

  “Do you and I,” he said, into her sweet-scented hair, “make ourselves miserable because Mitch, our brother, has his marvelous skill to save that little foreign prince? Ah, no! Rejoice! Rejoice!”

  “I do,” Tamsen said into his shoulder. “I do.”

  Dr. Mitchel Tyler was a fast driver; he liked the freeways. Phillida said, as they sped the long way, in order to get home sooner, “Lurlene! Lurlene! How she does get herself up!” Phillida had begun life as a dress designer and now shuddered. “Has science discovered whether good taste is hereditary or environmental?”

  “What Foundation has cared enough?” said her husband. “I don’t know what the dickens Rufus is doing these days. Not making any money, I’d imagine.”

  “It doesn’t take money,” said Phillida, “to eschew orange roses on chiffon, plus rhinestones, for a Sunday night on the terrace.”

  The Doctor pursued his own thoughts. “I tried to find old Rufus something to do, but if he won’t sink in his teeth or persevere …”

  “No room in my business, either,” she agreed. “Even a do-gooder has to be good at it.” She, too, had once tried to find Rufus a job.

  “Oh, he’ll never be a charity case. The family sees to that.”

  “Maybe he’s been overprivileged.”

  “Oh, come on.” There was no such thing, in the Doctor’s opinion.

  “Of course, he early made his bed by marrying Lurlene when he was what … twenty?”

  “No accounting for tastes.” The Doctor grinned. “That’s not been researched.”

  “It wasn’t shotgun, either,” mused Phillida, without malice. “Or where’s the evidence?” (Rufus and Lurlene had no children.)

  “Oh, Rufus is all right, I suppose.” The Doctor turned his head. “When shall we go ahead and have our fourth, Phillida?”

  “Whenever you have time, dear,” said his wife cheerfully.

  They swooped down into the underground garage and left the car, and rode in a deep and comfortable silence up to their very modern and spacious apartment in
one of the newest high-rise buildings in the City of Los Angeles.

  “Is Rufus all right, William?” asked Maggie suddenly.

  The Judge regarded her fondly, where she sat in negligee, cozily near, in the corner of his own huge bedroom where it was their habit to share a nightcap. “I should think so, Maggie darling. He didn’t mention money.”

  “But then, I suppose in all the excitement we forgot to ask if he needed any.” Maggie sighed and then said the opposite of what she was thinking. “What a perfect triumph of a Tyler evening.”

  He answered her thoughts. “Not everybody needs a career, Maggie darling. Nor would relish the bother of it.”

  “I wish he could find at least a hobby that … would engross him, you know?”

  “Not the sort of thing that can be found for him.”

  “But oh, I wish I could have told them …”

  The Judge, who was used to skipping along beside her, waited patiently to know where her thoughts had gone this time.

  “I didn’t much like hearing poor young Aljedi so unhappily misunderstood.”

  The Judge made the jump. “The Playboy Prince? Condemned under that cliché? It was a state secret, Maggie darling, and not ours to tell.” The Judge thought that Rufus was not to blame, this time. Some secrets made for misunderstanding.

  “Not even our state,” Maggie agreed. “William, do you suppose he flirted, poor afflicted fellow, with that flaming death because he knew he hadn’t long to live in any case?”

  “I see that you suppose so,” said the Judge, amused at Maggie’s way of stating her answer as if it were the question. “Perhaps it was his hobby to risk a life that wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “I would, too,” she said darkly.

  “Same defect the little boy has, wasn’t it? Late diagnosis, and no known cure. I’d say that Mitch thinks there is a chance for the lad, in these latter days.”