by Philip Wylie
-were the final clinching proofs. If it had been an honest accident Biff would have thought of his delivery at once--and admitted it. Whooped about it. Crowed over it. But Biff had prepared that little disavowal--for the first person who reminded him that his misfortune was not untinged with good luck.
Mrs. Bailey, realizing that Biff's gaze was resting on her and that he vaguely wanted something done or said, crossed the room to Jimmie's side. "You mustn't make him talk so much! He's in agony!"
"I'm all right," Biff protested. His voice grew weaker. There was a tremor in it.
"Jim, old kid. I'm sorry I socked you this morning."
"It's okay. Forget it."
"I want you to know I'm sorry--that's all. I'll be getting the old whiffaroo pretty soon, and Doc Cather will be going over me, and if the works slip--anyhow, I want you to know."
Jimmie nodded. He was looking straight at Biff. Biff looked away.
Mrs. Bailey was streaming tears.
Mr. Bailey blew his nose, sumptuously.
Sarah said shrilly, "Why isn't the doctor here! Why isn't anything being done! He may even be--right here before our eyes!"
Mr. Bailey said, "Quiet, Sarah. He'll be along any minute. The intern says Biff'll keep the way he is, a while."
Sarah began to bawl.
Jimmie walked closer to his brother. His grin was amiable, only a little bit sardonic. "Your pretty puss is unscratched, anyhow!"
"I must have thrown my hands over my face at the time. A protective reflex. I dunno. . . ."
Then the surgeon arrived. He was dressed in white and he walked fast, like a man entering from the wings, for an act. "Well!" he exclaimed. "What have we here?" Jimmie thought it was close to tops for asininity.
Mr. Bailey said, "My son's pretty badly hurt, Doctor Cather. It goes without saying, of course, that no expense is to be spared. Specialists from Chicago, New York, by air--if they can help you in any way. Everything!"
The surgeon was grinning at his patient. Biff grinned back. His mother said,
"Money doesn't mean a thing, doctor!"
Then the surgeon said something that revised Jimmie's opinion of him. It made Jimmie think that he was probably a whacking good surgeon. "Oh, I'll send you a stiff bill, Mrs. Bailey. Never worry about that!" He took the hem of the blanket that covered Biff. "You folks better run along while I have a look. Come back after dinner. Say around nine, ten o'clock."
Jimmie glanced at the intern. He had not in any way noticed the man until then.
The intern was stepping forward to help the surgeon. It ran through Jimmie's mind that the intern was a shrewd-looking duck, with wide, apperceptive eyes, the pointed nose of the curious, and an air about him of knowledgableness. Jimmie also thought that he'd been standing there, watching everything, all that time. As the intern began a swift, technical explanation of his findings, he winked at Jimmie. . . .
Supper began mordantly. For one thing, Mrs. Bailey was weeping steadily. For another, the food was overcooked-caked and dry. Mrs. Bailey kept apologizing for her tears.
"He'll be all right," Sarah said. "He's tough. Tough as Jimmie--almost." Her blue gaze met Jimmie's violently--and he wondered why.
"We must eat," Mr. Bailey said earnestly. "We'll need our strength."
Jimmie was eating right along. In fact, he found himself hungry. That surprised him. He had been through a lot that day. For a mere Midwestern town, Muskogewan was unreasonably productive of excitement.
"The poor boy!" said Biff's mother. "The poor, poor boy!"
"Popinjay, that doctor," said Mr. Bailey. "Wonder if he's as good as his reputation?"
"Where were you?" Sarah asked bluntly of Jimmie.
"Me? Working."
"They said you left the factory about five. They said a dame drove you away."
"That was a British spy," Jimmie answered calmly.
His mother raised her voice. "Don't make jokes!"
"All right. It was a gal that works at the plant. She offered me a ride home."
Sarah became alert. "But she didn't drive you home!"
"Where did you go?"
"Guess!"
Sarah said, "Some roadhouse, I bet."
"That's exactly right. Olga--her name is Olga, and she's a Hungarian spy, really--
drove me to the Four Flamingoes. We had saki--that's rice wine--with some cousins of the Emperor of Japan who work around here as butlers--" he looked up somberly--
"Pardon the slur, Westcott, on an honorable profession--"
Mrs. Bailey said, "How can you two--? When--" Sarah said, "Is she pretty? And what's her name?"
"Dinah," said Jimmie. "She's black. An Abyssinian spy--"
"Oh, for heaven's sake!" said his father.
"Anyhow," his sister observed, "you feel pretty good."
Jimmie suddenly realized that he did feel pretty well. He could not, for the life of him, figure out why. Certainly he was not taking any excessive pleasure out of Biff's revenge on himself. Certainly he had not grown so cold toward his family in two days that he enjoyed seeing them suffer. But he felt an unmistakable rise of his spirits.
He let them rise while his parents and his sister sank into a fresh morass of silence. Presently his mother whispered, "Right now, he might be--!"
"Steady!" said her husband.
Jimmie said, half reassuringly, half in protest of the morbid anticipations of his mother, "Oh, he'll be all right. You could see that, by his face. That intern said so too.
He's the kind who know their onions."
"I suppose you"--his mother said hotly--"are a bit of a surgeon yourself! Along with all your other intellectual accomplishments! I suppose you could tell, from a glance, that Biff was perfectly all right!"
"Some," Jimmie said quietly. ""I've seen a lot of people hurt, you know."
Nobody answered that. Sarah kept glancing at her brother with intentness. She was thinking. Her face slowly showed conclusion--illuminating conclusion; when it did, Jimmie said, "All right. What is it?"
"You think," Sarah said, "that Biff brought on that accident on purpose, to skip being drafted! It amuses you--in a nice, fiendish way!"
Jimmie was startled. Her conclusion was accurate. Evidently, she had been wondering about his behavior at the hospital; and the selfsame theory had skipped through her own mind, and she had instantly fitted it upon him. The Baileys, he thought, were equipped with subtle minds--when they wanted to use them subtly. He wondered what he should say to Sarah--and he was staring at her lazily while he tried to make up his mind--when his father spoke for him.
"Sarah! I don't want you to say anything like that again--ever! Jimmie was darned fine with Biff just now!"
Sarah said, "You've considered the possibility, too, Dad!"
"Sarah!!!" That was Mrs. Bailey.
Mr. Bailey, meanwhile, was facing his daughter and growing red. "What kind of a contemptible piece of perverted nonsense is this, daughter! Biff did no such thing.
Jimmie thought no such thing. No such foul idea ever touched my own mind! I've noticed several times recently that you have a taint of evil-thinking, though--like your mother's mother. You watch that, Sarah!"
A fraction of Sarah's black hair was immaculately made up in a flattened pompadour that stood out over her forehead like a segment of a fat, flat snake. The remainder billowed down her back in a Nubian cascade. When she swung her head about quickly, which she did often, her back hair flared like a dancer's skirt, and her pompadour wobbled. It was alluring--under the proper hat. Au naturel, it was grotesque.
The rest of Sarah was handsome enough. An inexperienced young woman. A highly untamed young woman. That combination meant--she would get the experience, someday. Just as her mother had. And, like her mother, she would probably have an experience which was mostly confining and arbitrary, so her taming would consist of a shift of her libido to clubs, civic improvement, national affairs, and, no doubt, the rabid avoidance of international entanglements.
Jimmie
smiled. "Withdraw the subject, Sarah. It's out of bounds, anyhow. Biff's hurt worse now than he'd ever have been in any training camp!"
That statement was not an argument. Nevertheless Mr. Bailey accepted it as conclusive. "Exactly!" he said, with a warm look at his son. It was the first warm look Jimmie had received from his father since the one that had been bent upon him at the station. Mr. Bailey was well disposed to people who helped him rationalize his way out of difficult situations.
The family drove down to the hospital promptly at nine. Jimmie walked. His insistence on walking was becoming a sort of insult to his family. But he went on insisting. "Only eight blocks or so," he said. "I'll make it--never fear."
The family had gone in by the main entrance. But Jimmie, when he reached the hospital, went around to the emergency entrance, where the ambulances were unloaded.
He heard laughter down a corridor and he walked toward it. The intern who had been in the receiving room was kidding a nurse. On Jimmie's appearance, the nurse smiled once, prettily, and hurried away.
"My name's Bailey," Jimmie said.
"Yes. I know. Mine's Heiffler. Your brother's fine."
"I thought he would be. Were you there for the operation?"
Heiffler nodded. "I assisted the assistant. Cather's good, you know. Damned good.
Too, good, for this burg. He likes it here. Why--I can't imagine. I'm from Chicago.
Siddown."
Jimmie sat. "Tell me the details."
Heiffler reached for one of Jimmie's cigarettes. "Compound fracture of both femurs. Set, now. Take traction. Three ribs busted. Both ankles more or less sprained.
Internal organs present and accounted for. No damage. Shaken up, bruised, contused, cut on knees. Shock--well, you can't be sure. Some, anyway. Took ether perfectly. Asleep now. No lasting harm at all--to his body." The intern's brown eyes burned at Jimmie.
"Oh?"
"I rode the bus. Answered the call. Picked him off the street."
"Was he conscious?"
"Semi."
"Say anything?"
"He was laughing."
"Laughing, eh."
"Has your family talked to the cops?"
"No," Jimmie said.
"I did. They left here a while ago. Kind of hard accident to explain. Clear road, good visibility, no traffic except your brother waiting on the stop street, and this dinge whizzing through on the boulevard."
"Colored man, eh?"
"Yeah."
"He hurt?"
"Killed. Deader'n hell. His car looked like an accordion."
"Have his lights on?"
"You can't ask him," the intern answered petulantly. He regarded Jimmie a moment. "The sarge says the reflectors were warm, though. What he could find of 'em."
He hesitated again. "You know what I'm talking about, don't you? I noticed how you questioned him--"
Jimmie said, «Yeah."
"Nice kids, this generation! Brave, dependable, responsible, calm, sane, intelligent--wonderful!"
"You belong to it. You ought to know."
"I'm a poor kike who worked my way through medical school after working it through college! I like people--decent ones--and I like medicine! I don't like people that murder other people just because somebody is going to take away their candy!"
Jimmie smiled a little. "Maybe I can chivvy that lad into the army, someday, yet.
Maybe--maybe-- he'll payoff."
"He won't get in the army!"
"He will if I make him," Jimmie answered fiercely.
"No. There'll be a report of all this. You know. Nothing that your family, or the draft board, will ever see. Something only the army will see. A couple of army doctors, anyhow. They're trying hard to weed out the screwballs, this time, before they demand any hard work from 'em. Your brother'll be sent to camp, maybe, by the local board. He'll come back--without knowing why."
Jimmie thought for a while. He smiled again. "That might do him a lot of good."
"I doubt it. It might. You're just back from London, I hear."
"Yesterday."
"Can they stand another blitz--all winter--if they get it?"
"I hope so."
"I don't give a damn what you hope. What do you think?"
"I hope so. Y ou ought to know something about people's ability to take it where they live."
Heiffler chuckled. "You're a pretty sound egg, Bailey--considering your brother!"
"He could have been sound."
"Mmm. Environment--"
"That colored man--have a family?"
"Five kids. A wife. She came here looking for him, about eight. The police don't hurry to notify those people."
"I'd like her name and address."
The intern wrote it down, after searching in a file. "How much steam has Hitler got left?"
Jimmie shrugged. "Does it matter?"
There was a pause. "I see what you mean."
"Still, it would be worth a lot to American character, I think, if every city and town in the country was bombed once. Just once. Be a big rebirth of fundamental qualities. Cheap--at the price. As I heard a woman say last night, 'We kill more people with cars than the British lost to bombs--and we don't get upset!' It's a happy thought, Heiffler--especially on this occasion. Good night."
CHAPTER VII
WEDNESDAY PASSED--and a Friday.
Jimmie knew he was going to count the weeks in that fashion. He would keep doing it, at least until he was sure beyond all doubt that Audrey was not going to the home of Dan, the music teacher, two nights in every seven, or until he was sure that she had stopped going there.
His family was preoccupied with Biff. Biff was better. He'd written two very amusing letters for the Daily Dispatch. One was about having your legs broken. The other was about pretty nurses.
Jimmie was relieved by his family's absorption in his brother, because he was very busy with himself.
Two things had arrived at the Bailey home on the day after Biff's accident.
Audrey's diaries--by registered post--mailed, ingeniously, in a small carton that bore the name of the Corinth Works. That stratagem would cause his family to think, if they noticed the package, that it contained business matters. Mr. Corinth's scrapbooks had also come--by truck. Into them, Jimmie had plunged. He had read every evening--from dinner to bedtime, and afterward. But he had hidden the diaries in his closet.
The big scrapbooks, thick with pastings, were like the other tangibles in the old man's life: they showed imagination and resourcefulness, a keen ability to anticipate the future, a steady, critical awareness of present values. In the scrapbooks were editorials and articles and speeches, pronunciamentos by politicians and world leaders, maps and pictures, reviews of movies and reviews of plays, scraps of laymen's opinions, predictions, interpretations, headlines--and personal letters, letters from people unknown to Jimmie and letters from people known to everybody in the nation.
As he read, hour by hour and night by night, the saga of the six years he had missed at home-edited and interpreted through the selections of the venerable chemist--
Jimmie began to understand what had happened to America, to his own family, to Muskogewan, to everyplace and everybody. He began to guess, also, the tenor of the old man's thoughts and hopes anent America's future--after the war. That Mr. Corinth had such a catholic knowledge of world affairs was not remarkable.
Many other scientists had the same knowledge; and of them, many lived and worked not in the great cities, not in the gigantic factories, but in towns like Muskogewan and factories like the paint and dye works. It was, on first glimpse, somewhat remarkable that a man in a town in the center of a continent had such broad, important and intimate contacts. But, on reflection, Jimmie remembered that many Americans, in many villages, had stayed on their own doorsteps and made their mousetraps--and the world had built cement highways right up to their porches.
The realization that Mr. Corinth was a great man had come to Jimmie immediately, upon t
heir first meeting as grown men--the meeting on the afternoon of Jimmie's return. The realization that Mr. Corinth was a great American, and would always be known and remembered as such, came more slowly. Certainly Muskogewan had little inkling of the impressive qualities of its white-haired citizen. Muskogewan regarded him as an eccentric old duck who had a million dollars, made paint, and who knew a lot of important people, for some odd reason. Social Muskogewan felt that a good many of Mr. Corinth's guests would have been happier with them at the country club than they were in the rather ugly Corinth home, eating the plain vittles cooked by black Rarietta, and sitting all afternoon in a drizzling rain with a .22 rifle, waiting for a groundhog to appear in a pasture--which the beast never did. A cabinet member had done that, once, with Mr. Corinth. There was even an editorial about it, snipped from the Muskogewan Dispatch, in the old man's books. It said that, "our up-to-date and handsome city affords far better entertainment for personages of note than host Corinth seems to understand--or care about, for that matter."
Jimmie learned from the bulky ledgers.
But in every moment of his reading, and during every hour of his day-long labors at the laboratory, the awareness of the other parcel of reading matter burned in the back of his mind. At night, as he lay in his bed, listening to the slick crackle of tires on the avenue and the pattering scratch of bare twigs on the walls, he envisioned Audrey's diaries as if they had a penetrating radiance which he could see shining through his closet door. In the daytime, wherever he was, he was as conscious of them as if they had a musical tone that he alone could hear but that he could not escape.
He had every sort of thought about them. His principal idea was that to read such diaries was to eavesdrop. The fact that Audrey had voluntarily sent them to him made no difference. At least, for several days, he assured himself that it made no difference. It then occurred to him that there might be nothing in the package but blankbooks--that the maneuver was a practical joke. A psychological joke. To satisfy that suspicion, he unwrapped the bundle. A dozen leather-covered books were disclosed. He flipped the leaves. They were solid with neat, tall, ink-written words put down in a circular backhand. So it was the diaries, all right. He put them back.