by Carol
Dix kept his eyes downcast. “My little brother wanted it for a bathtub toy, so I took it, but the people fell out when they were passing the shield, so I put the ship back. I dont know where the people are. But my brother cried, so I gave him the Rosalie instead. That was a French ship going to Havana. It had a canary in a cage, but I got rid of the crew first so my brother wouldnt be scared. He likes it in his bathtub.”
"Your brother must be quite a little admiral” said the Teacher. “There are other reports: the Naronic, in 1893; the Carol Deering, the Waratah—well, that's only part of the trouble. Far more serious are the famous missing persons. For instance, the envoy Benjamin Bathurst, of the court of His Majesty George III, due to return from Vienna to England, went to examine the horses in the stable. The ostler was the last person to see him alive. Quite simply, he vanished. There have been hundreds of these cases, often cited by your little Earth presses as ‘collective hallucination.’ Judge Crater has become the subject of jokes; still he was never found, was he?
“And on the twelfth of December in the year 1910 of their flawed arithmetic, a young girl living in New York went for a walk in Central Park. You seemed to have been concentrating more clearly in that phase. People could still walk through parks without being attacked by vicious persons, an inevitable result of the devolution which is now being enacted in your project. This girl was named Dorothy Arnold. She was looking forward to giving a party for her school mates, and she was seen by several of them on Fifth Avenue. She walked through the Seventy-ninth Street entrance to the park and was never seen again, and I remind you this was in the days when no crime whatever existed in the park. What happened then, Dix?"
Dix tried to remember. “Oh, yes," he said. “It was because I wanted to see if I could turn a person into a bird. Remember, I showed you the little paper in New York, the Sun, that had the story? On the lake near the Seventy-ninth Street entrance to Central Park a swan appeared, and nobody could figure out how it got there. It worked, but the swan died a few days later. I didn’t want it to die."
"What about Amelia Earhart?" asked the Teacher.
Dix tried to look innocent and aggrieved at the same time. “But you told me not to collect Dinky Aircraft any more, so hers was the last. I gave up right after that. I tried to send some of them back, but my dolls don’t know what they are. They call them unidentified fitting objects and write a lot of silly things about them."
“Perhaps the episode that annoyed me most," said the Teacher, “began in—" he consulted a beam of light, “the year 1919. A person named Ambrose Small, living in Toronto, Canada, was the proprietor of the Toronto Grand Opera House. On the evening of December second he was in his office until six o'clock. No one saw him leave the building, there was no damage in any way to the building, but Small vanished. He left more than a million dollars behind. His secretary was arrested, because bonds of large denomination were found in his sisters house, and eventually the secretary served six years in prison. But no trace of Small was ever found, no clues, no leads to his whereabouts.
“In 1926, in the London paper News of the World, a man called A. Framton, a theater manager, was found dead. His skull was supposedly fractured, but there was no way in which he could have fallen in his carpeted premises; the skull itself showed no wounds. Several days after the body was found it disappeared. It was never seen again.
Shortly before the disappearance of Small and the strange passing of Ambrose Framton, there was another highly publicized mystery, the sort I deplore for the stupid gossip and investigations that result. This was the case of a talented writer named Bierce, who may or may not have been seen in Mexico, New York, California, or a dozen other places where he was supposed to have turned up. But he didn't turn up. He simply wasn't there one minute after he was there. Obviously, there is one unfortunate conclusion to be drawn. You were beginning to lapse into your lack-of-concentration period, and you were motivated by selfish or private requirements. Tell me, Dix, why were you collecting Ambroses?"
“Well, you told me not to collect boats," mumbled Dix.
He remembered the Ambroses vividly; they hadn't been any fun to play with and even Little Brother hadn't been able to use them in his strategy games. They were in his collection case at home now, in the “A" compartment, and needed attention and care; he wouldn’t admit it, but he was undeniably sorry that the whole idea of the Ambrose Collection had been undertaken.
“So your little project, a supposedly benign race patterned after your civilization, is failing in the main because of your tiny attention span and your inability to teach the pets how to live amicably together. This tends to reflect your own conflicts, I’m afraid, and that is a decidedly poor method of working. I want you to go home and talk to your little brother and make him see that he is too old for extra-Here toys. Your penchant for failure is worrisome to me; if there is the slightest sign that you have revealed your presence to the dolls, in any way at all, the project will end.”
Dix said, “Yes, I see” and planned some punishments for Little Brother.
Little Brother knew what to expect. He had been tuned in to Dix all that period. If Dix ever found out about the two new people Little Brother had impulsively assembled (to help Dix) there would be a miserable punishment. The dolls were usually flawed and unpredictable, clumsy, inexpert copies of true-people, idiotically self-absorbed and almost chauvinistically vicious when frustrated, as though they knew they were only toys and were drawing on imaginary strength and courage to mask their impotence. Briefly, Little Brother allowed himself to wonder what would have happened if a cleverer, less flawed person than Dix had chosen the small universe for a science-project; but this was a disloyal thought, so it was erased. Little Brother hoped still that his beautiful new people, the little golden dolls, would renew the Teachers faith in Dix’s attention-span. But the dolls could only imitate Dix’s archetypal behavior; and too often Dix allowed his own frustrations to foment and emerge as aggression. Little Brother hoped for the best and hid inside the project room.
Kirbye Farmer, the girl all young America envied, took her third Valium pill of the day and rehearsed various scenes in which she would be forced to report failure to Wanger and Branch. “Now, look, fellows, you can’t win them all ...” or “He’s a closet queen. No use trying.” Or “He’s hooked on his PR woman, and-”
Since the historic week in 1970 that Kenosha, Wisconsin, had loosed a teenage Kirbye on the great world, her true self and her analyst had both become richer and more self-enlightened. What was the use of saying anything at all to those two store clowns that didn’t put Kirbye in her customary light of successful, modest radiance? Surely there was another way to eradicate all blame for Kirbye and ...
There was something phony about that PR woman. Nobody looked like that for real.
There was something phony about that gorgeous young man. Nobody looked like that and nobody behaved like that.
Of course, there was always the possibility that still waters ran deep, you couldn’t tell a book by its cover, there was more here than met the eye, or that the world was trying to con Kirbye Farmer. All that talk about playing games. The chances were that games were actually being played. What tremendous American business organization wanted to be involved in scandal? Wasn’t it up to ruthless crusaders like Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Nader and Kirbye Farmer to tell the truth as they saw it, never mind if a couple of whited sepulchers got hurt?
Kirbye stretched the skin around her eyes so she could apply liquid eyeliner over the eyelid-base and add pressed eyeshadow in a line just above the first line, then a third line in Apricot Silver above that. It gave the effect of no makeup at all, the photographers had assured her. Her all-over base was so natural that the moisture cream under it and the matte finish over it didn’t look like anything more than the slightest tinge of youthful flushed pleasure, and the liquid rouge over the base but under pressed powder heightened the innocence of the effect. Her lips were coated with pasture-p
osy honey-bloom (colored vaseline), then touched with Plasma Pink lipstick and sealed by Ecstatic Moment Gloss. Her lashes were applied with special light-navy glue that sparkled under lamplight and were of the same tawny-beige shade that her hairdresser used twice a month on her long, swinging hair, assisted to a certain heft by transplants. Her teeth needed no Perl-Drop #7 whitener because they had all been capped in Kenosha, and her breasts had been enhanced by silicone injection as a fifteenth-birthday present from her parents. Her legs were covered with the same shade of base as her face, and her contact lenses made her eyes a limpid green or blue, or occasionally violet, hue. She wore no fingernail polish; it looked fake.
Kirbye’s fame had come about because of this naturalness and her tomboyish stance. She talked to herself in front of the mirror for a while, hands stuck into imaginary pockets just over her hipbones, and tried to remember Late Late Shows in which James Stewart had won out over artificial villains to bring the natural, unaffected American way of life to his admirers. She practiced letting her voice break at the emotional moments of her speech which consisted, so far, of nursery rhymes. No sense doing any thinking until the mannerisms and poses were right.
Only when she was satisfied that she was the Girl Next Door did she allow herself to plot. The trouble was that she didn’t think clearly.
‘I'll let those smartasses outsmart themselves,” she decided, and swung her magnificent mane over one shoulder. She wore no bra, no briefs and no shoes, only faded, recycled velvet jeans and a T-shirt that said “Drink Moxie,” picked out in sequins, as she padded along the corridor of the hotel to Wanger s room. She knocked on the door, yelled “It’s a bust, look out!” and waited, giggling, for Wanger and Branch to let her in.
“You mean John and this PR are having orgies?” yelled Branch. “Wow. Still waters certainly run deep.”
“Can't tell a book by its cover,” said Wanger knowingly.
“I wonder if they need a fourth,” murmured Branch, mostly to himself.
"We certainly can't have this kind of thing going on in connection with this new store opening,” said Wanger. “That's for sure. We've got to put a stop to it. I believe it's up to us to prevent a scandal.”
“It sure would be a scandal,” said Kirbye, pouring herself a few fingers of vodka and adding a splash of ginger beer. “Gee, I don't know if I'd want my mother and father to shop in a store where the president has orgies.”
“Z certainly wouldn't want my mother and father to shop in a store where the president has orgies if they were alive,” said Branch. “It kind of makes us all look—oh, I don't know—cheap.” He looked away shyly.
“The Sun stores have never been cheap,” said Wanger. “Only in price. Never in morality. I can remember when J. C. Young ...” he paused. The words had slipped out. For the moment he couldn't remember exactly who J. C. Young was.
Branch picked it up. “He's the real president, J. C. Young! I know he's the real president. But what happened? I mean—who is this impostor? How did he get in? What's been happening, outside of the orgies?”
Wanger poured himself a drink and toasted Kirbye, who was curled up like a kitten in a big armchair, curling her toes. “Listen. There isn't just a question of orgies here. There's something else. You know what I think?”
He put his finger to his lips and ran around the 258
room running his hand into vases and under picture frames to find bugs. Then he shrugged. “I think . ..”
Kirbye and Branch leaned forward, accidentally bumping heads. “Make a wish,” said Kirbye in her little-girl voice.
“I think,” said Wanger, “that WE’VE ALL BEEN BRAINWASHED. ITS A COMMIE PLOT.”
Branch fell back on the sofa and rolled up his eyes. “Good God,” he said. “Orgies. Commies. What kind of dirty game is this, I’d like to know?”
At that moment, Little Brother was deciding to take no chances. He was in the project room and he was tuned in. He heard everything Wanger and Branch said; it almost made him cry. Now he would have to remove his two beautiful, wonderful persons before Dix got home to set some really bad examples.
Part VIII
Anthea was patient as she told John she couldn’t see him that very moment, but that she would see him the following day.
“All day?” asked John.
“Yes, if you like. Do you remember how to get to my house?”
“Yes. I go to Paddington Station and ask for a cheap ticket—”
“You could get a first-class,” said Anthea gently.
“—and then I get off the train at Taplow and you’ll be there.”
“Yes. And if you like we can go on a picnic.”
“Really? Can we? That’s when you bring your own lunch, isn’t it? I’ll be there early.”
Anthea told him which train to take and sat back. Her desk was covered with papers. Most of them dealt with events in the Piccadilly Sun store in which the press might be interested. She seemed to know vaguely which editor belonged to which newspaper and magazine, but any connection with her own life was completely coincidental.
Her telephone rang. It was a woman she had met a few days before who had attached herself mysteriously to Anthea. Each time she rang up she began, “I know you’re shamefully busy, so I wouldn’t dream of taking up your time ..then on she would chatter about her own woes and infirmities. Anthea thought of her as Mrs. Albatross, which was quite close to the woman’s actual name. Mrs. Albatross was the wife of an American lawyer who was very rich and seemed to arrange acquittal for all his dubious criminal clients by passing out millions of dollars to judges. The American press occasionally ran stories about “hints of Albatross investigation,” “four judges involved in Albatross scandal,” but nothing was really ever done to Mr. Albatross; indeed, he was a leading light of an important American legal body.
Mrs. Albatross had found Anthea at some press party and next morning had initiated daily telephone calls, usually starting with her infirmities-list, then on into:
“You know, I feel that you’re a truly sincere person, and that’s why I can tell you this: don’t you think your aloofness may put some people off, particularly in your job? I know you, of course, so it wouldn’t bother me, but I can understand why some people might find you remote, so to speak. I’m only mentioning this because it’s so important for all of us to know ourselves, and sometimes your friends are the best mirror! Yes, indeed.”
Anthea would murmur something while Mrs. Albatross caught her breath.
“And another thing, I find that so many people—not you, of course, which is why I can talk to you, it’s what makes us close—are phonies! Indeed they are. So many men, some I could mention on the legal staff of your very own store, are so jealous of Mr. Albatross that they say terrible things about him, and about my daughter, too. She's a teacher, you know. She teaches English, and the first thing she did with her students, not that they're really children or anything, but because she believes in fundamentals, is to teach them the terrible burden of orthodoxy. She believes in speaking and writing relevantly. If they try to use ‘as' instead of ‘like,' she points out the affectation of it, and there are only two authors she will allow them to read for her course—both extremely relevant and violent. Violence is such a good answer to all that's being perpetrated these days when applied in educational techniques, don't you agree?"
“Oh, jolly good," Anthea muttered, looking for something in her desk drawer.
“There! Don't you think it's true that most English people never say ‘jolly good' any more? That's something I've made notes about—the true new speech of social dialogue. My daughter tells me I ought to have it published, but one's own relatives are always a bit prejudiced, I think. My daughter says when she comes over here next month she wants to meet you. I've told her what firm friends we've become, and she'll be able to help you immeasurably with your press releases and things like that. My husband will be coming over then, too, and I know you'll want to meet him. He likes people who keep
busy, like you, which is why I would never dream of disturbing you at work. I've been a good pupil.”
“Mmmm," said Anthea, finding her comb and running it through her hair.
“Mr. Albatross would find one fault with you, though. I'll bet you can't guess what it is! You're too polite to strangers, like waiters and things. Now servants are always crazy about me, I always ask for their little girl or their mother if their mother is in the hospital, but Mr. Albatross is much more aware of the hostilities of the working classes, and if his meat isn't done just right he not only sends it back he complains about the waiter to the management. Which I couldn't do, not for a million dollars, because I like to have people like me, but that’s one of the faults in our society, and—”
Today Anthea said suddenly, "I must ring off now. Someone has come into my office.”
“Oh, of course, I understand completely. I wouldn’t dream of keeping you. I’d love to come in and take you out for tea or a drink or something, but my head has been splitting all day. The doctor back home told me it was psychosomatic, but he was being conveniently abrupt, I felt, so—”
Anthea hung up. If educational violence was needed, educational violence would be applied.
She had not the slightest qualms about taking another day off from work. If the president of an organization summoned you, then that was top priority. She spent the early morning at home preparing some sandwiches and eggs, poured coffee into a vacuum jar, and tried not to let her hands tremble, as they tended to do whenever she thought about seeing John.
She took him to picnic near Cliveden Reach. They walked through spectacular rose gardens until they were out of sight of everyone.
“This is beautiful” said John solemnly. “Is it yours?”
“Not any more,” she said at first, then; “No. It’s part of a great estate. If you look out the upstairs windows of the house itself you can see—well, it looks like half the world. When this property was made over by its owner to the National Trust, he said, ‘I have tried to use Cliveden as a place to bring about better understanding between the English-speaking world and various groups of sections of people of other countries. Here have foregathered ministers, MP’s, business men, trade unionists, educationists, civil servants ..She stopped, because what she was going to add would have meant nothing to John; he did not know the meaning of the world ‘scandal’; and a fall from valor was not within his grasp.