Caviar

by Theodore Sturgeon

  It was quite a layout. Jones had a nice income and used it. Big house, big rooms, big butler. We were the last to arrive. We got rid of our coats and were shown into the library, where cocktails were being served. I stopped at the door and looked around the room. Over in a corner Jones was talking to a stout old apple who seemed all jowls and boiled shirt. Shanaman, I surmised. Talking uninterestedly with Jones’s slightly washed-out wife, was Claire Feltner. I knew her well; she hung around the studio a lot. A nasty thought occurred to me; I noticed Claire there many a time when Jakie was out. Jones always seemed to be around at the time. I began to see why Jakie had been so anxious to bring Claire and Jones into the same room. He wanted to watch them. That was bad.

  I rescued Jakie from the voluminous feminine counterpart of Shanaman. The network manager’s wife had poor Feltner in a corner and was pounding his ear frighteningly with an account of her husband’s metabolism.

  Introductions were made all around, and I left Maria with Jakie while I joined Jones and Shanaman. The talk was general and too loud. Just about then I began to wish I hadn’t come. That went on all the time I was there. I disliked particularly this business of our being in that big room free to wander from person to person for Lord knows how long until dinner was served. In a matter of minutes Maria could stumble across one of her little poltergeists, and then—well, in a matter of minutes Maria did.

  Shanaman was building up to a terrific climax in an unfunny story, when I saw Maria across the room from me, looking from Shanaman to Mrs. Jones and back again. There was something about her stance, her eyes, that told me she was fighting the thing. I broke away from Shanaman as fast as I could. Not fast enough. Maria got to Mrs. Jones before I did, sat down beside her, began talking swiftly. As I got there, Mrs. Jones rose, glaring at Shanaman, and went over to her husband.

  “What goes on?” I asked anxiously.

  “Oh, Eddie, it happened again.” She would have cried if I hadn’t caught her hands, squeezed them until they hurt. “Shanaman plans to put a network crew in your station if he takes it over. Everyone will lose his job, except you, Eddie!”

  “And you told that to Mrs. Jones?”

  “Yes—don’t you see? She suspected it, and Shanaman knew he was going to do it! I couldn’t help myself, Eddie!”

  “That’s all right, kid,” I whispered. “No hair off our necks.” I watched the Joneses. It seemed to me that he didn’t believe his wife. She was evidently furious with him for his stupidity and said so into his ear. He turned his back on her and went to Claire Feltner. She went over to see if she couldn’t pump some information out of Shanaman. Jakie stood near them, glumly watching his wife puckering up to Jones.

  “Try to keep away from Jakie,” I said, turning back to Maria. But she had slipped away when I was looking at Jones. She was standing by the window behind me, kneading her hands and staring out into the night. I figured it was best to leave her alone as long as she could stand it. Meanwhile, I was going to try to keep the rest of them away from her. I barged in on Shanaman’s conversation with Mrs. Jones. It was short and sweet. She was just winding up what must have been quite a scintillating piece of vituperation.

  “—and don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, you old wolf,” she was saying. She was hopping mad. Shanaman looked bewilderedly indignant. It was too late to do anything about it.

  “My dear lady,” he said pompously, “I regret exceedingly that your suspicions should have reached such a state. Ah—Mr. Jones. Will you come here a minute?” Jones looked up, saw what was happening, came rabbiting over. I saw the studio deal flitting out the window when I saw Jones reach out and clip his wife across the mouth. Shanaman held up his hands in horror, then barged across the room to his wife.

  Then everything happened at once. Maria popped up from nowhere, nudged Jakie Feltner, whispered in his ear, nodded toward Claire. Jakie roared, reached out, spun Jones around and smeared him with a terrific right hook. Shanaman, fear of publicity plastered all over his fat face, bolted for the door with his wife.

  And that was the wind-up of Jones’s precious little dinner party. Maria filled in the details for me on the way home. It seemed that Jones had been seeing Jakie’s wife, and Maria, possessed, told Jakie how far it had gone, and he punched Jones’s mouth. Mrs. Jones’s hysterical calling of Shanaman’s bluff sprang, I imagine, from jealousy and the desire to hurt Jones. It was an unholy mess, one of those awful things that are awful when they happen and funny afterward. Except for one thing. Jones didn’t get up after Jakie knocked him down. He smashed his silly brains out on the brass andiron in the fireplace.

  The rest of it was rough. When the trial was over and poor old Feltner got sent up for thirty years on a second-degree murder charge, there wasn’t much left for me. Unfavorable publicity pulled a lot of advertising contracts, and anyway, as I said, there are too many radio stations in this town. But the notoriety hadn’t finished with me when it took my living away from me. Eddie Gretchen turned out to be the guy with a thousand friends who never heard of him. The radio game was strictly on the receiving end, for me. Old Shanaman’s bolting for the door the night of the murder hadn’t done him a bit of good; he was subpoenaed and put on the grill with the rest of us. I hadn’t liked the way he cried about it—after all, big shots and little, we were all in the same boat—and he got even with me by passing the word around the studios that I wasn’t to get so much as an audition. That, after seven years in radio! Yeah, it was rough. I’d always had money and I didn’t know how to go about being poor. I learned. Maria had a couple of grand in the cooler but that went quickly, along with what I’d saved, which wasn’t a hell of a lot. I hit the jolly old rock-ribbed bottom the day I tried to get a job as a studio page and got well treated until somebody remembered me and I got handed the rush. The smell even reached into publishing houses, and the feature articles I used to sell brought checks every six months instead of every two weeks. I sold a little stuff under a phony name; but for that Maria and I would have starved. We lost our place and our furniture and the car. Bad. But I couldn’t lose Maria. She almost left me right after the trial, feeling herself guilty of Jones’s murder. I talked her out of that, telling her that he had it coming to him anyway; and then she got morbid and turned on the gas one day. I got there in time, and the police emergency squad brought her around. After that she buckled down like the ace she was, and tried helping instead of hindering. God, when I think of her down on her four bones scrubbing floors, and rubbing her white hands raw on my shirts, I know what they mean when they say “For richer, for poorer”…

  I stood out on the sidewalk in front of the radio playhouse and shivered because I had sold my overcoat six weeks before. There was nowhere else to turn to, and I hadn’t the gall to go back to Maria so early in the day. Uptown, downtown, crosstown—all the same to me.

  A man walked up, looked me over, handed me a slip of paper. It said, “Could you tell me how to get to South Ferry from here?”

  I said, “Sure. Take the Seventh Avenue subway—”

  He shook his head, pointed to an ear. Deaf. I took the pencil he offered, wrote down the directions. He tipped his hat, went his way. I remember wondering how a guy like that got such a nice warm coat. Some agency, I guessed. I got all my faculties and no overcoat. He’s a deaf mute and has an overcoat. I’ll take the overcoat.

  Then the great idea hit me. I smacked my hands together, whooped like a drunken Indian, and headed at a dead run for the West Side, where Maria was trying to make a home for me out of an eleven-a-month cold water flat. I reached it, flung myself up three flights of stairs, fell gasping and moaning for breath inside the room. Maria didn’t know what to make of it, and figured even less when I got wind enough to explain. If she was possessed, I wanted to know, could she keep from tipping anybody off about it if she wrote the information down?

  “I don’t know, Eddie. I never tried it.”

  “Well, try it, damn it. Try it!”

  “H-how?
”

  I glanced at the ninety-eight cent alarm clock on the stove. “Come on, babe. Get your coat on. We’re going to get some money.”

  She was used to me by this time or she never would have done it. I didn’t tell her until we reached the pawnshop that the money was coming from the one thing of value she’d hung onto—the star sapphire I’d given her as an engagement ring the day before we got married. Under the three golden spheres I relieved her of it, shoved an old envelope and a stub of pencil into her hands, and dragged her in.

  I knew the broker well by that time. The only Irishman I’d ever seen in a hock shop. “Terry, me lad,” I shouted. “I’m about to do you a favor. Hock me this ring for eighty bucks and you can’t lose a thing.” I gave it to him. He grunted sourly. Maria started forward, about to speak. I shoved her toward a trunk, pointed at the paper and pencil. She grinned and began to write.

  “I’ll give ye ten,” said Terence.

  “And I’ll take me pathronage ilsewhere,” I mocked him.

  “Twinty, an’ ye’re a young thief.”

  “Sivinty-foive, ye grave-robber.”

  “Twinty-two an’ a half, and be dommed to ye. It’s white gold, not platinum.”

  “Platinum’s twenty bucks an ounce on the open market you pernicious old Gael, and gold’s thirty-five. Don’t blind me with your jeweler’s tricks.”

  And still not an interruption from Maria.

  Terence looked at the ring carefully through his glass. “Thirty dollars.”

  “Will you make that thirty-two fifty?”

  “I will that, and there I’m done.”

  “You’re a good business man, Terence, and I’ll treat you right. You just went up ten dollars and I can afford to come down ten. That’s meeting you halfway at sixty-five dollars.” Maria’s pencil scribbled busily.

  “Fifty dollars to get yez out o’ my store,” said the broker with a great effort.

  “Fifty-seven fifty.”

  We settled at fifty-five; I signed the book and we left. As soon as we were outside I snatched the envelope. Maria had written no less than twelve times, “Don’t be a fool. He only paid sixty for it when it was new.”

  I kissed her then and there. “It works,” I breathed. “It works!”

  She looked at the envelope. The truth will out,” she grinned. “But Eddie—I didn’t want to pawn that ring. I—”

  “You dry up and leave it to me, pal,” I said. “Come home—I want you to dig up that dress of yours—you know, the black-brown one with the truffles on it.”

  “Ruffles,” she said. “You eat truffles. But it’s an evening gown, Eddie. Where—”

  “—are we going? West five-two street, babe, and we’re going to scrabble up all the dirt from gutter to gutter.” I stopped in front of a “Tuxedos to Hire” joint. “I’m going in here. You beat it home and pretty up.”

  She did, under protest. I got myself a fair-enough dinner jacket, and brought it home. In two hours we looked like a million. I tucked the thin little roll into my pocket, and we started. We took the subway to Fiftieth and caught a cab there to go to Fifty-second. A thirty-cent cab ride looks just as good as a three-dollar one at the far end of the line. I carried a battery of sharp pencils and Maria had my little black book.

  Well, it was a snap, I’d barge into a table, and because I looked it and felt it, the old “friends” thought I was up on top again, and so they were glad to see me. Maria sat quietly with her book in front of her. I told everyone she was gathering material for a novel. Once in a while she would look sharply at a couple of faces and begin to scribble madly. For once in my life I let other people pick up the checks, and we worked practically the whole street. We got out of there with eighteen bucks left, which is something of a record, and I took the lady all the way home in a taxi. We spent the rest of the night poring through the book.

  Man! What a haul! There was enough dirt there to resurface the Dust Bowl and ten like it. Advance information on big business deals; messings about with the Stock Exchange; who was seeing who, how long, why, and how much it cost; what book a major studio was going to buy; the truth about that fixed fight at the Garden Monday night. I found Maria an excellent editor. Once the little old poltergeist had dissipated, she was quite impersonal about what she found out. We took, out of more than two hundred juicy items, ten that were due to happen within the next twenty-four hours. They were carefully picked to do the least possible harm if they were made public, and they all packed a wallop. There was an act of sabotage, three elopements, a decision on the locale of the premiere of a new picture, two business deals, a diplomatic stroke of genius, a lapse of option on an erstwhile great movie star, and the name and address of a firm which was going to get a government contract for high-pressure boilers on the battlewagons under construction at Boston Navy Yard. I wrote them up, wording them for the most punch, and first thing the next morning I took them up to the newspaper with the largest newsstand circulation in the country. I was in the office for forty minutes, and I walked out with fifty bucks advance. The following day I got a wire to come in and go to work. Every item had come as predicted. Score, one hundred per cent.

  So I’m back in the big time again. Yes, I’m the guy they talk about. The one about whom they say, “Did you see his column today? Holy Swiss cheese, where does that man get all his information?” And “I’d like to know how a Broadway columnist gets that radio personality.”

  Well, I get the first from my wife, who sits quietly, writing in a little black book. She gets her dope from a thousand million little poltergeisten. And don’t mention radio to me too often. The name of Eddie Gretchen still stinks on the stem, but I don’t care. I don’t use it any more. You ought to know who I am by this time.

  Shadow, Shadow

  on the Wall

  IT WAS well after bedtime and Bobby was asleep, dreaming of a place with black butterflies that stayed, and a dog with a wuffly nose and blunt, friendly rubber teeth. It was a dark place, and comfy with all the edges blurred and soft, and he could make them all jump if he wanted to.

  But then there was a sharp scythe of light that swept everything away (except in the shaded smoothness of the blank wall beside the door: someone always lived there) and Mommy Gwen was coming into the room with a blaze of hallway behind her. She clicked the high-up switch, the one he couldn’t reach, and room light came cruelly. Mommy Gwen changed from a flat, black, light-rimmed set of cardboard triangles to a night-lit, daytime sort of Mommy Gwen.

  Her hair was wide and her chin was narrow. Her shoulders were wide and her waist was narrow. Her hips were wide and her skirt was narrow, and under it all were her two hard silky sticks of legs. Her arms hung down from the wide tips of her shoulders, straight and elbowless when she walked. She never moved her arms when she walked. She never moved them at all unless she wanted to do something with them.

  “You’re awake.” Her voice was hard, wide, flat, pointy too.

  “I was asleep,” said Bobby.

  “Don’t contradict. Get up.”

  Bobby sat up and fisted his eyes. “Is Daddy—”

  “Your father is not in the house. He went away. He won’t be back for a whole day—maybe two. So there’s no use in yelling for him.”

  “Wasn’t going to yell for him, Mommy Gwen.”

  “Very well, then. Get up.”

  Wondering, Bobby got up. His flannel sleeper pulled at his shoulders and at the soles of his snug-covered feet. He felt tousled.

  “Get your toys, Bobby.”

  “What toys, Mommy Gwen?”

  Her voice snapped like wet clothes on the line in a big wind. “Your toys—all of them!”

  He went to the playbox and lifted the lid. He stopped, turned, stared at her. Her arms hung straight at her sides, as straight as her two level eyes under the straight shelf of brow. He bent to the playbox. Gollywick, Humptydoodle and the blocks came out; the starry-wormy piece of the old phonograph, the cracked sugar egg with the peephole girl in it, t
he cardboard kaleidoscope and the magic set with the seven silvery rings that made a trick he couldn’t do but Daddy could. He took them all out and put them on the floor.

  “Here,” said Mommy Gwen. She moved one straight-line arm to point to her feet with one straight-line finger. He picked up the toys and brought them to her, one at a time, two at a time, until they were all there. “Neatly, neatly,” she muttered. She bent in the middle like a garage door and did brisk things with the toys, so that the scattered pile of them became a square stack. “Get the rest,” she said.

  He looked into the playbox and took out the old wood-framed slate and the mixed-up box of crayons; the English annual story book and an old candle, and that was all for the playbox. In the closet were some little boxing-gloves and a tennis racket with broken strings, and an old ukulele with no strings at all. And that was all for the closet. He brought them to her, and she stacked them with the others.

  “Those things, too,” she said, and at last bent her elbow to point around. From the dresser came the two squirrels and a monkey that Daddy had made from pipe cleaners, a small square of plate-glass he had found on Henry Street; a clockwork top that sounded like a church talking, and the broken clock Jerry had left on the porch last week. Bobby brought them all to Mommy Gwen, every one. “Are you going to put me in another room?”

  “No indeed.” Mommy Gwen took up the neat stack of toys. It was tall in her arms. The top fell off and thunked on the floor, bounced, chased around in a tilted circle. “Get it,” said Mommy Gwen.

  Bobby picked it up and reached it toward her. She stooped until he could put it on the stack, snug between the tennis racket and the box of crayons. Mommy Gwen didn’t say thank you, but went away through the door, leaving Bobby standing, staring after her. He heard her hard feet go down the hall, heard the bump as she pressed open the guest-room door with her knee. There was a rattle and click as she set his toys down on the spare bed, the one without a spread, the one with dusty blue ticking on the mattress. Then she came back again.