Reseated, Mrs. Glass sighed, as she always sighed, in any situation, when cups of chicken broth were declined. But she had, so to speak, been cruising in a patrol boat down and up her children's alimentary canals for so many years that the sigh was in no sense a real signal of defeat, and she said, almost immediately, "I don't see how you expect to get your strength and all back if you don't take something nourishing into your system. I'm sorry, but I don't. You've had exactly--"
"Mother--now, please. I've asked you twenty times. Will you please stop mentioning chicken broth to me? It nauseates me just to--" Franny broke off, and listened. "Is that our phone?" she said.
Mrs. Glass was already up from her chair. Her lips had tightened a bit. The ring of a telephone, any telephone, anywhere, invariably caused Mrs. Glass's lips to tighten a bit. "I'll be right back," she said, and left the room. She was chinking more audibly than usual, as if a box of assorted household nails had come apart in one of her kimono pockets.
She was gone about five minutes. When she returned, she had the particular facial expression that her eldest daughter, Boo Boo, had once described as meaning one of only two things: that she had just talked with one of her sons on the telephone or that she had just had a report, on the best authority, that the bowels of every single human being in the world were scheduled to move with perfect hygienic regularity for a period of one full week. "That's Buddy on the phone," she announced as she came into the room. From a habit of several years' standing, she suppressed any small token of pleasure that might have slipped into her voice.
Franny's visible reaction to this news was considerably less than enthusiastic. She looked, in fact, nervous. "Where's he phoning from?" she said.
"I didn't even ask him. He sounds as though he has a horrible cold." Mrs. Glass didn't sit down. She hovered. "Hurry up, now, young lady. He wants to talk to you."
"Did he say so?"
"Certainly he said so! Hurry up, now... Put your slippers on."
Franny let herself out of the pink sheets and the pale-blue afghan. She sat, pale and obviously stalling, on the couch edge, looking up at her mother. Her feet fished around for her slippers. "What'd you tell him?" she asked nervously.
"Just kindly go to the phone, please, young lady," Mrs. Glass said evasively. "Just hurry a little, for goodness' sake."
"I suppose you told him I'm at death's door or something," Franny said. There was no reply to this. She stood up from the couch, not so fragilely as a post-operative convalescent might have but with just a trace of timidity and caution, as if she expected, and perhaps rather hoped, to feel a trifle dizzy. She worked her feet more securely into her slippers, then came out from behind the coffee table gravely, untying and relying the belt of her dressing gown. A year or so earlier, in an unwarrantably self-deprecating paragraph of a letter to her brother Buddy, she had referred to her own figure as "irreproachably Americanese." Watching her, Mrs. Glass, who happened to be a great judge of young girls' figures and young girls' walks, once again, in lieu of a smile, tightened her lips a bit. The instant, however, that Franny was out of sight, she turned her attention to the couch. Clearly, from her look, there were not many things in the world she disliked more than a couch, a good eiderdown couch, that had been made up for sleeping purposes. She went around into the aisle made by the coffee table and began to give all the pillows in sight a therapeutic beating up.
Franny, in transit, ignored the telephone in the hall. She evidently preferred to take the longish walk down the hall to her parents' bedroom, where the more popular phone in the apartment was located. Although there was nothing markedly peculiar about her gait as she moved through the hall--she neither dallied nor quite hurried--she was nonetheless very peculiarly transformed as she moved. She appeared, vividly, to grow younger with each step. Possibly long halls, plus the aftereffects of tears, plus the ring of a telephone, plus the smell of fresh paint, plus newspapers underfoot--possibly the sum of all these things was equal, for her, to a new doll carriage. In any case, by the time she reached her parents' bedroom door her handsome tailored tie-silk dressing gown--the emblem, perhaps, of all that is dormitorially chic and fatale--looked as if it had been changed into a small child's woollen bathrobe.
Mr. and Mrs. Glass's bedroom reeked, and even smarted, of freshly painted walls. The furniture had been herded into the middle of the room and covered with canvas--old, paint-flecked, organic-looking canvas. The beds, too, had been drawn in from the wall, but they had been covered with cotton bedspreads Mrs. Glass herself had provided. The phone was now on the pillow of Mr. Glass's bed. Evidently Mrs. Glass, too, had preferred it to the less private extension in the hall. The handpiece lay detached from its catch, waiting for Franny. It looked almost as dependent as a human being for some acknowledgment of its existence. To get to it, to redeem it, Franny had to shuffle across the floor through a quantity of newspapers and sidestep an empty paint bucket. When she did reach it, she didn't pick it up but merely sat down beside it on the bed, looked at it, looked away from it, and pushed back her hair. The night table that ordinarily stood alongside the bed had been moved close enough to it so that Franny could reach it without quite standing up. She put her hand under a particularly soiled-looking piece of canvas covering it and passed the hand back and forth till she found what she was looking for--a porcelain cigarette box and a box of matches in a copper holder. She lit a cigarette, then gave the phone another, long, exceedingly worried look. With the exception of her late brother Seymour, it should be noted, all her brothers had overly vibrant, not to say sinewy, voices on the telephone. At this hour, it was very possible that Franny felt deeply hesitant about taking a chance on just the timbre, let alone the verbal content, of any of her brothers' voices on the phone. However, she puffed nervously on her cigarette and, rather bravely, picked up the phone. "Hello. Buddy?" she said.
"Hello, sweetheart. How are you--are you all right?"
"I'm fine. How are you? You sound as though you have a cold." Then, when there was no immediate response: "I suppose Bessie's been briefing you by the hour."
"Well--after a fashion. Yes and no. You know. Are you all right, sweetheart?"
"I'm fine. You sound funny, though. Either you have a terrible cold or this is a terrible connection. Where are you, anyway?"
"Where am I? I'm right in my element, Flop-sy. I'm in a little haunted house down the road. Never mind. Just talk to me."
Franny unplacidly crossed her legs. "I don't know exactly what you'd like to talk about," she said. "What all'd Bessie tell you, I mean?"
There was a most characteristically Buddy-like pause at the other end. It was exactly the kind of pause--just a trifle rich with seniority of years--that had often tried the patience of both Franny and the vif tuoso at the other end of the phone when they were small children. "Well, I'm not terribly sure what all she told me, sweetheart. Past a certain point, it's a little rude to go on listening to Bessie on the phone. I heard about the cheeseburger diet, you can be sure. And, of course, the Pilgrim books. Then I think I just sat with the phone at my ear, not really listening. You know."
"Oh," Franny said. She switched her cigarette over to her telephone hand and, with her free hand, reached again under the canvas cover on the night table and found a tiny ceramic ashtray, which she placed beside her on the bed. "You sound funny," she said. "Do you have a cold, or what?"
"I feel wonderful, sweetheart. I'm sitting here talking to you and I feel wonderful. It's a joy to hear your voice. I can't tell you."
Franny once again pushed back her hair with one hand. She didn't say anything.
"Flopsy? Can you think of anything Bessie may have missed? You feel like talking at all?"
With her fingers, Franny slightly altered the position of the tiny ashtray beside her on the bed. "Well," she said, "I'm a little talked out, to be honest with you. Zooey's been at me all morning."
"Zooey? How is he?"
"How is he? He's fine. He's just tiptop. I could just murder him, tha
t's all."
"Murder him? Why? Why, sweetheart? Why could you murder our Zooey?"
"Why? Because I just could, that's all! He's completely destructive. I've never met anyone so completely destructive in my life! It's just so unnecessary! One minute he launches this all-out attack on the Jesus Prayer--which I happen to be interested in--making you think you're some kind of neurotic nitwit for even being interested in it. And about two minutes later he starts raving to you about how Jesus is the only person in the world he's ever had any respect for--such a marvellous mind, and all that. He's just so erratic. I mean he goes around and around in such horrible circles."
"Tell about it. Tell about the horrible circles."
Here Franny made the mistake of giving a little exhalation of impatience--she had just inhaled cigarette smoke. She coughed. "Tell about it! It would just take me all day, that's all!" She put a hand to her throat, and waited for the wrong-passage discomfort to pass. "He's just a monster," she said. "He is! Not really a monster but--I don't know. He's so bitter about things. He's bitter about religion. He's bitter about television. He's bitter about you and Seymour--he keeps saying you both made freaks out of us. I don't know. He jumps from one--"
"Why freaks? I know he thinks that. Or thinks he thinks it. But did he say why? What's his definition of a freak? He say, sweetheart?"
Just here, Franny, in apparent despair at the naivete of the question, struck her forehead with her hand. Something she very probably hadn't done in five or six years--when, for example, halfway home on the Lexington Avenue bus, she discovered she had left her scarf back at the movies. "What's his definition?" she said. "He has about forty definitions for everything! If I sound slightly unhinged, that's the reason why. One minute--like last night--he says we're freaks because we were brought up to have only one set of standards. Ten minutes later he says he's a freak because he never wants to meet anybody for a drink. The only time--"
"Never wants to what?"
"Meet anybody for a drink. Oh, he had to go out last night and meet this television writer for a drink downtown, in the Village and all. That's what started it. He says the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable. He says he never even wants to have lunch with anybody, even, unless he thinks there's a good chance it's going to turn out to be Jesus, the person--or the Buddha, or Hui-neng, or Shankaracharya, or somebody like that. You know." Franny suddenly put out her cigarette in the tiny ashtray--with some awkwardness, not having her second hand free to brace the ashtray. "You know what else he said to me?" she said. "You know what he swore up and down to me? He told me last night he once had a glass of ginger ale with Jesus in the kitchen when he was eight years old. Are you listening?"
"I'm listening, I'm listening... sweetheart."
"He said he was--this is exactly what he said--he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass oPS ginger ale and eating saltines and reading 'Dombey and Son,' and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you--that's exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he's perfectly qualified to give me a lot of advice and stuff! That's what makes me so mad! I could just spit! I could I It's like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something... It's just awful. He talks and talks and talks. And if he isn't talking, he's smoking his smelly cigars all over the house. I'm so sick of the smell of cigar smoke I could just roll over and die."
"The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn't have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We'd never see our Zooey again."
There were several experienced verbal stunt pilots in the Glass family, but this last little remark perhaps Zooey alone was coordinated well enough to bring in safely over a telephone. Or so this narrator suggests. And Franny may have felt so, too. In any case, she suddenly knew that it was Zooey at the other end of the phone. She got up, slowly, from the edge of the bed. "All right, Zooey," she said, "All right."
Not quite immediately: "Beg pardon?"
"I said, all right, Zooey."
"Zooey? What is this?... Franny? You there?"
"I'm here. Just stop it now, please. I know it's you."
"What in the world are you talking about, sweetheart? What is this? Who's this Zooey?"
"Zooey Glass," Franny said. "Just stop it now, please. You're not being funny. As it happens, I'm just barely getting back to feeling halfway--"
"Grass, did you say? Zooey Grass? Norwegian chap? Sort of a heavyset, blond, ath--"
"All right, Zooey. Just stop, please. Enough's enough. You're not funny... In case you're interested, I'm feeling absolutely lousy. So if there's anything special you have to say to me,
please hurry up and say it and leave me alone." This last, emphasized word was oddly veered away from, as if the stress on it hadn't been fully intended.
There was a peculiar silence at the other end oPS the phone. And a peculiar reaction to it from Franny. She was disturbed by it. She sat down again on the edge of her father's bed. "I'm not going to hang up on you or anything," she said. "But I'm--I don't know--I'm tired, Zooey. I'm just exhausted, frankly." She listened. But there was no response. She crossed her legs. "You can go on like this all day, but I can't," she said. "All I am is on the receiving end. It isn't terribly pleasant, you know. You think everybody's made of iron or something." She listened. She started to speak up again but stopped when she heard the sound of a voice being cleared.
"I don't think everybody's made of iron, buddy."
This abjectly simple sentence seemed to disturb Franny rather more than a continued silence would have. She quickly reached over and picked a cigarette out of the porcelain box, but didn't prepare to light it. "Well, you'd think you did," she said. She listened. She waited. "I mean, did you call for any special reason?" she said abruptly. "I mean, did you have any special reason for calling me?"
"No special reason, buddy, no special reason."
Franny waited. Then the other end spoke up again.
"I suppose I more or less called to tell you to go on with your Jesus Prayer if you want to. I mean that's your business. That's your business. It's a goddam nice prayer, and don't let anybody tell you anything different."
"I know," Franny said. Very nervously, she reached for the box of matches.
"I don't think I ever really meant to try to stop you from saying it. At least, I don't think I did. I don't know. I don't know what the hell was going on in my mind. There's one thing I do know for sure, though. I have no goddam authority to be speaking up like a seer the way I have been. We've had enough goddam seers in this family. That part bothers me. That part scares me a little bit."
Franny took advantage of the slight pause that followed to straighten her back a trifle, as though, for some reason, good posture, or better posture, might come in handy at any moment.
"It scares me a little bit, but it doesn't petrify me. Let's get that straight. It doesn't petrify me. Because you forget one thing, buddy. When you first felt the urge, the call, to say the prayer, you didn't immediately start searching the four corners of the world for a master. You came home. You not only came home but you went into a goddam collapse. So if you look at it in a certain way, by rights you're only entitled to the low-grade spiritual counsel we're able to give you around here, and no more. At least you know there won't be any goddam ulterior motives in
this madhouse. Whatever we are, we're not fishy, buddy."
Franny suddenly tried with one hand alone to get a light for her cigarette. She opened the matchbox compartment successfully, but one inept scratch of a match sent the box to the floor. She bent quickly and picked up the box, and let the spilled matches lie.
"I'll tell you one thing, Franny. One thing I know. And don't get upset. It isn't anything bad. But if it's the religious l
ife you want, you ought to know right now that you're missing out on every single goddam religious action that's going on around this house. You don't even have sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup--which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse. So just tell me, just tell me, buddy. Even if you went out and searched the whole world for a master--some guru, some holy man--to tell you how to say your Jesus Prayer properly, what good would it do you? How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose? Can you tell me that?"
Franny was now sitting up rather abnormally straight.
"I'm just asking you. I'm not trying to upset you. Am I upsetting you?"
Franny answered, but her answer evidently didn't carry.
"What? I can't hear you."
"I said no. Where are you calling from? Where are you now?"
"Oh, what the hell's the difference where I am? Pierre, South Dakota, for God's sake. Listen to me, Franny--I'm sorry, don't get riled. But listen to me. I have just one or two very small things more, and then I'll quit, I promise you that. But did you know, just by the way, that Buddy and I drove up to see you in stock last summer? Did you know we saw you in 'Playboy of the Western World' one night? One god-awful hot night, I can tell you that. But did you know we were there?"
An answer seemed to be called for. Franny stood up, then immediately sat down. She placed the ashtray slightly away from her, as if it were very much in her way. "No, I didn't," she said. "Nobody said one single--No, I didn't."
"Well, we were. We were. And I'll tell you, buddy. You were good. And when I say good, I mean good. You held that goddam mess up. Even all those sunburned lobsters in the audience knew it. And now I hear you're finished with the theatre forever--I hear things, I hear things. And I remember the spiel you came back with when the season was over. Oh, you irritate me, Franny! I'm sorry, you do. You've made the great startling goddam discovery that the acting profession's loaded with mercenaries and butchers. As I remember, you even looked like somebody who'd just been shattered because all the ushers hadn't been geniuses. What's the master with you, buddy? Where are your brains? If you've had a freakish education, at least use it, use it. You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessation from all hankerings.' It's this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line--in one damn incarnation or another, if you like--you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to--be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to--there's nothing wrong in trying." There was a slight pause. "You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I'm talking about. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world." There was another, slighter pause. "I used to worry about that. I don't worry about it very much any more. At least I'm still in love with Yorick's skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick's skull. I want an honorable goddam skull when I'm dead, buddy. I hanker after an honorable goddam skull like Yorick's. And so do you, Franny Glass. So do you, so do you... Ah, God, what's the use of talking? You had the exact same goddam freakish upbringing I did, and if you don't know by this time what kind of skull you want when you're dead, and what you have to do to earn it--I mean if you don't at least know by this time that if you're an actress you're supposed to act, then what's the use of talking?"
Franny and Zooey Page 14