by Max Shulman
“A bad arrangement,” said Jefferson solemnly. “Very bad.”
“Very,” agreed Dr. Silenko.
“Look,” said Jefferson, “tomorrow night you’re dissecting a monkey. What are you doing the night after?”
“Grinding his kidneys,” said Dr. Silenko.
“Oh,” said Jefferson. “Please continue.”
“My third team,” said the doctor, “will investigate pesticides. Of course, the late Rachel Carson did a brilliant job in this field, and for a time her book had a very real effect. But there has, I fear, been considerable backsliding. The pesticide makers are pretty determined fellows, and the farmers, quite understandably, prefer spraying to weeding. We must preserve Miss Carson’s gains.”
“And you’re the kid who can do it,” said Jefferson, patting her knee. “Next?”
“Team number four will look into food packaging.”
“What’s the matter with food packaging?” he asked curiously.
“We’re not sure, but we have well-formed suspicions. I’m talking of the new plastic packages—polyethylene, squeeze bottles, and all the other substances made of long, synthetic molecules which do not occur in nature. How stable are those molecules? What happens when a plastic package has been on a grocer’s shelf for six months or a year? Do the molecules in the package begin to unravel? And if so, do they enter the foodstuff? And if so, how do they affect the human who eats the foodstuff? Not favorably, is my guess.”
“You’re scaring me half to death,” said Jefferson, his face a study in delight. Oh, sweet Lord, what a pile of ammunition this pretty lady doctor was going to give him! Great balls of fire, what a barrage he was going to turn loose on the country! He would get people so shaky that every tobacco counter in America would be positively mobbed! He might, in fact, bring back cigarette rationing.
“And your fifth team?” he asked, beaming on the pretty lady doctor.
“The fifth team will study drinking water, which, to be perfectly honest, is not my field. Dr. Levine is in charge of the project. He’s the short man with the large red beard over there. Would you like to talk to him?”
“Directly, missy, directly. First let me ask you something: when you prove all these things we’ve been talking about, how do you go about telling folks?”
“We publish our findings in the Quarterly of the American Nutritional Society,” she answered.
“Oh, swell!” said Jefferson silently. Aloud, and with his most fetching smile, he said, “Missy, I got some powerful good news for you. When you finish your experiments, I am going to put the results on the television—coast-to-coast!”
“Television!” exclaimed Dr. Silenko, taken aback. “Good heavens!”
“Why not?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said hesitantly. “Isn’t it a bit gaudy?”
“Yes, it is,” said Jefferson, putting on his most earnest expression. “I’ll admit it.… And I know it’s strange to you and all the good people you’re working with. I mean, you’re nice, quiet, studious ladies and gentlemen, and you don’t cotton to hoopla and stuff like that.… But remember, missy, what you’re doing here is trying to warn the United States of America that it’s getting poisoned to death. Now, can you think of a better way to spread the alarm than the television?”
“I suppose when you put it that way—” said Dr. Silenko.
Jefferson rose and shook her hand. “I want to thank you for your time and patience, Doctor, and I’d certainly admire to call on you some evening—when you finish with the monkey.”
He bowed, turned, and started toward Dr. Levine, the short man with the large red beard. But Virgil intercepted him in mid-passage.
“You’re looking mighty pleased, Pa.”
“I am, boy, I am. Had a fine talk with Dr. Silenko.”
“First-class scientist,” said Virgil.
“First-class!” agreed Jefferson. “Got a pretty fair set of knockers too. She spoken for?”
“Well, I’ve heard some talk about her and Linden-Evarts.”
“That settles it,” said Jefferson decisively. “Boy, you pay off that hyphenated loony-bird and pack him in.”
“No, Pa,” said Virgil.
“Boy, this is your Daddy talking.”
“Daddy, this is the president of Acanthus talking. To get these people here, I promised them tenure.”
“What’s that?”
“That means an unbreakable lifetime contract. They can not be fired.”
“You’re one hell of a sharp trader,” said Jefferson, shaking his head. “Praise God you stayed out of the cigarette company.”
“Amen,” said Virgil.
“Okay, you made a promise and we got to stick with it. We can’t fire that loony-bird, but we sure as death can keep him from nosing around in my business.”
“No, Pa. I promised them academic freedom too. They can teach, speak, research, write, and publish anything they please.”
Jefferson smiled uneasily. “You mean within reason, of course, don’t you, boy? You surely didn’t give ’em license to teach like Communism, for instance? Or atheism?”
“I surely did. Also, if they are so minded, free love, racial equality, and safecracking.”
“A little joke, huh, boy?” said Jefferson, his smile increasing in size and nervousness. He looked into Virgil’s eyes for confirmation. He found none. His smile faded. “My son, my son,” he said hollowly, “what is happening here?”
“What is happening here,” Virgil answered, “is what you call a university.”
“No, a bird sanctuary,” said Jefferson. “That’s what is happening here. A bird sanctuary—for loony-birds.”
Virgil grinned. “Maybe so, Pa,” he said, “but useful loony-birds.” He reached out and stopped a short man with a large red beard who was heading toward the sherry. “Levine,” he said, “I don’t believe you’ve met my father.”
The gloom scudded from Jefferson’s face. “How do,” he said winsomely, clasping the doctor’s hand. “I understand you’re our expert on water.”
“Water! Feh!” sneered Levine. “That stuff’ll kill you!”
“Is that a fact now?” said Jefferson, taking the doctor tenderly by the arm. “Come, let’s set, and you tell me all about it.”
Chapter 7
While Jefferson and Virgil Tatum poured sherry into the new faculty of Acanthus College, Barbara Ogilvie Owens Fuller—Boo—sat at home and thought about sex.
Her home was a Southern manor house with a portico and columns, surrounded by spotless white outbuildings, a paddock, a meadow, a lawn, and a fragrant sprinkling of magnolias, honeysuckle, and jasmine. Boo sat on the portico wearing blue jeans and a checkered shirt, yet somehow looking as perfectly the mistress of the manse as though she were decked in a picture hat and a flower print dress of silk. She sat easy, her long, elegant bones comfortably arranged in a wicker chaise. A bourbon-on-the-rocks stood on a wicker table beside her. The evening breeze was cool, a nightingale sang in a bay tree, and visions of coition passed sweetly through Boo’s mind’s eye.
It would have come as a shock to Owens Mill, and most especially to Boo’s constant suiter Virgil, to learn how much time she gave to thinking about sex. The consensus locally was that she had little or no interest in the subject. In the eighteen years since Boo’s son Gabriel had been born, tireless espionage by her devoted friends had uncovered not one single lapse of chastity. All were satisfied now that she was a woman of admirable virtue, and all were properly depressed.
All were mistaken. Boo’s sex life, though far from rambunctious, was quite suited to her needs. On those rare occasions when she felt her juices boiling over, she made a discreet trip to New York City and spent a discreet weekend with a discreet admirer. He was an eminently eligible man, which is to say he had no wife, no foreign accent, and, most significant, no mustache. He was clean-living, gainfully employed, potent, considerate, agreeably scented, and he regularly proposed marriage to Boo. She just as regularl
y said no thank you. He accepted her rejections calmly. Although he honestly wanted to take Boo to wife, or at least to multiply her infrequent visits by ten or twenty, he grew increasingly comfortable in this unencumbered, nonbinding liaison.
Boo always left New York feeling slightly besmirched, but in time the guilt would pass. Was this trip really necessary? she would ask herself, and the answer, if somewhat hesitant, was always affirmative. The trips were necessary. They kept her pores open and her reputation intact. Also they gave her a chance to get to Bergdorf-Goodman’s.
Every so often Boo toyed with the idea of severing her New York connection and taking up with Virgil instead. But in the end, she always abandoned the notion. Two things were against it: first, though she had genuine affection for Virgil, it was not that kind; second, Virgil would flatly refuse to consider unsanctified coupling with the lady he loved. His rigid ante-bellum code demanded marriage or nothing, and marriage is precisely what Boo did not want.
She did not want to marry Virgil or her New York friend or any of the other hopefuls who kept appearing. Boo, in her own fashion, had an underlay of chivalry every bit as stout as Virgil’s: she regarded it as a manifest breach of honor to become one man’s wife while she was still in love with another. And she was in love with another. Now, tonight, eighteen long years after he had left her bed, she remained deeply, immutably, rhapsodically in love with the father of her son Gabriel.
It was Gabriel’s father Boo was thinking of as she sat in the wicker chaise on the columned portico. Looking back over a gap of eighteen years, she could still feel, physically feel, lips on lips, body on body, hands on breasts and buttocks. She could hear his voice; she could see his eyes; she could smell his hair. The old rapture was upon her, fresh, undiminished, good as new.
As these things are reckoned, thought Boo, I am a lucky woman. I have a perfect memory of a perfect love. I have enough sexual activity to forestall dry rot. I have here in Owens Mill a busy, productive life—an estate to run, horses to breed, dozens of kinfolk and scores of friends to visit and entertain. I have a raft of worthy projects—the hospital, the orphanage, the symphony orchestra, the art gallery, the Red Cross, the League of Women Voters, and The Mermaid.
Of all Boo’s good works, The Mermaid was her very favorite. It was a quarterly of poetry, hand-set and deckle-edged, in which the bards of Owens Mill and its environs could find release for their lyric urges. To be sure, nobody ever actually read the magazine; still, it was prominently to be seen in the homes of all the local bon ton. Boo was The Mermaid’s editor, publisher, and sole financial backer. And, in addition, writing modestly under the simple pseudonym Leda, Boo contributed to each issue a love poem brimming with ladylike, but definitely sexy, symbolism.
But over and above sweet memories, beyond busyness and family and friends and civic virtue and the sowing of culture, Boo had one soul-salving, marrow-deep, heart-warming delight: her eighteen-year-old son Gabriel. He was a beautiful, mercurial boy, a challenge and a comfort, an authentic genius in science and no fool in the arts and the humanities. Only one small aspect of Gabriel’s character gave Boo occasional pause: he was something of a hermit. He vastly preferred machines and books to friends, especially to female friends. Boo, of course, did not like to see his life so circumscribed, but at bottom, she was not dismayed. She felt sure that gentle, persistent prodding on her part would rectify his social underdevelopment, because Gabriel, stormy though his temperament and dazzling though his mentality, was at the same time a dutiful, obedient boy whose first thought was ever to please his mother.
Yes, thought Boo again, I am a lucky woman. I am a happy woman.… And, save for one omission, I am a fulfilled woman.
Inside the entrance hall of the house Boo heard the grandfather clock chime the quarter-hour. She rose and went in the front door. She headed toward the television set in the library, passing, as she walked, through a succession of gracious, uncluttered, tranquil, tastefully appointed rooms. Any woman, coming for the first time into these rooms, would be moved to admiration so great that envy would be shamed; any man, no matter where his origins, would feel instantly and peacefully at home.
As Boo entered the library she found the television set not in its accustomed place in the cupboard. It had been dismantled into what looked to Boo like several million little tubes and wires and coils and gizmos, which were now arranged in a neat circle on the library floor. Seated in the center of the circle was Boo’s son, Gabriel Owens Fuller.
“Gabriel!” she cried, clasping her bosom.
“Hush!” he said, not looking up. He was a tall, slender boy with a shock of raven hair, an olive complexion, a mobile mouth, a straight patrician nose, and black, smoldering, restless, enormously intelligent eyes. The eyes darted now over the ring of television parts around him, giving each one a short but intent examination. Sometimes he emitted little grunts of satisfaction, sometimes snarls of annoyance. His face, like a blinker light, turned alternately dark with frustration and bright with joy.
“Don’t tell me hush,” said Boo sternly. “I’m your mother, remember?”
Gabriel looked up. “Oh, hi, Ma,” he said pleasantly.
“That’s better. Now would you mind explaining what you’re doing with the television set?”
“Oh, sure. I’m adapting it for UHF.”
“But there’s no UHF in this part of the country.”
“Bound to come along in another five, six years.”
“Dandy!” said Boo with a wintry smile. “Gabriel, I hate to be a bore, but there’s a program I want very much to look at in fifteen minutes.”
“So look at the set in your bedroom.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s okay.”
“And while I am watching television, do you know what you will be doing?”
“Picking up these pieces and putting them together?”
“Precisely!”
“No, Ma, I don’t believe I will,” he said with the air of a man who had given the question long consideration. “I’ve been sitting here kicking around an idea. Maybe I’ll drop the UHF after all. I’ve got a hunch—” his voice rose in excitement—“that with a little more equipment, I can turn this stuff into an X-ray machine!”
“Which no home should be without,” observed Boo.
“I’ll need to take the condenser out of the air-conditioner. Okay?”
Boo put on her gentlest, tenderest face. She laid a loving hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “Son,” she began, “dear, dear son, I—”
“Gawd!” he groaned. “Here it comes again!”
“Here it conies again,” agreed Boo, still tender, still gentle. “You know there’s a freshman dance at Acanthus tonight. Why are you home fiddling with machinery instead of at the college having fun?”
“Fun, she says!”
“Yes, fun,” Boo insisted. “Meeting people is fun, you know. Conversation is fun. Even girls are fun.… You want me to get you some testimonials?”
“Girls are hell!” he cried, flinging up his arms.
Boo stayed sweetly calm. “Gabriel, you are a normal, healthy, attractive young man. Why this morbid fear of girls?”
“It’s not fear,” he declared. “It’s like I keep telling you, Ma, I just don’t know how to talk to them.”
“Nonsense. Anybody who can build an X-ray machine and fly a helicopter and make his own digital computer surely shouldn’t have any trouble talking to a teen-age girl.”
“Ha!” he exclaimed tragically. “That’s exactly the trouble. I talk to them about pi-mesons and they get glassy. I try Doppler, Rutherford, even John Glenn. So what happens? They get glassier and glassier till finally they actually forget to chew their gum.… This is fun? This is hell! This is a holocaust! Ma, let’s face it: girls are just too damn dumb!”
“I see. So what’s your plan, Gabriel—to go through college without a date?”
“I’m glad you asked that question,” he replied seriously. “Because I’ve given i
t a lot of thought. This’ll come as a surprise, Ma, but it happens I do like girls … only there’s one small proviso: they’ve got to have a brain. Not a scientific brain necessarily; just a brain. So here’s what I’ve been thinking: maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong age bracket. Maybe I ought to find me a more mature type girl.”
“How mature?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Like thirty. Thirty-five maybe.”
“Dear God!” gasped Boo. “Son,” she said, deftly recovering her composure and her benevolent smile, “listen to your mother who gave you birth and loves you very dearly. Forget this plan of yours. Find a girl your own age.”
“They’re too dumb.”
“Then educate her. Mold her.”
Gabriel shook his head. “They won’t stay molded.”
“Try.”
“Aw—”
“For me. For your mother.”
He sighed. “Well, if you say so—”
“I say so.”
“Okay, I’ll go to Acanthus tonight.”
“Thank you.”
“It won’t work, you know.”
“That’s what I like—confidence. All right, pal. Hit the road.”
“Now? But the dance doesn’t start for another half-hour. I’ll stay with you and watch this tv show you’re so keen about.”
Boo hesitated a tiny moment. “If you want to,” she said, “but I don’t think you’ll like it. It’s an old documentary, a rerun, made seven or eight years ago. I’m afraid you’ll think it’s pretty old-fashioned.”
“Let’s find out. Come on.”
He offered Boo his arm. She concealed a flicker of nervousness, managed a smile, took his arm. They went to Boo’s room—chintz, airiness, pastels, softness, delicately wrought furnishings. Gabriel switched on the television set. They sat in a pair of handsome little armchairs.
The tv set crackled. A forest of lines appeared, waved, then formed themselves into a picture. It showed a mean street on Los Angeles’ skid row. Background music was heard: a drum softly stroked with brushes, an understated bass fiddle, a sad, goosy clarinet. The opening titles crawled over the picture: “IRA SHAPIAN presents THE SUN-BAKED SLUMS.”