Behind
Edith Pritchet came Bill Laws and Charley
McFeyffe.
Both were loaded down with armfuls of gro
ceries. “Big
celebration,” Laws revealed, with a cautious, half-apologetic nod at
Hamilton. “Where’s the kitchen? I want to put this stuff down.”
“How’s it going, friend?” McFeyffe said craftily, with
a broad wink. “Having a good
time? I’ve got twenty cans
of beer in this
sack; we’re all set.”
“Great,” Hamilton said, still dazed.
“All
you have to do is snap your fingers,” McFeyffe
added, his broad face flushed and perspiring. “I mean, all
she
has
to do.”
After
McFeyffe came the small, humorless figure of
Joan
Reiss. The boy, David Pritchet, walked beside her.
Taking up the rear
hobbled the sour, dignified war vet
eran,
his wrinkled face an expressionless mask.
“Everybody?” Hamilton inquired, sick with dismay.
“We’re
going to play charades,” Edith Pritchet in
formed him joyously. “I dropped over this afternoon,”
she
explained to Hamilton. “Your cute little wife and I had a good, long,
heart-to-heart chat.”
“Mrs. Pritchet—” Hamilton began, but Marsha quickly
cut him off.
“Come
on in the kitchen and help me get things
ready,”
she said to him in a clear, commanding voice.
Reluctantly,
he followed after her. In the kitchen, McFeyffe and Bill Laws stood around,
awkward and clumsy, not certain how to occupy themselves. Laws
grinned fleetingly, a brief grimace touched with
appre
hension and what might have been guilt. Hamilton
couldn’t tell; Laws turned hastily away and busied
him
self unwrapping endless cold
cuts and sandwich spreads.
Mrs.
Pritchet liked hors d’oeuvres.
“Bridge,” Mrs. Pritchet was saying emphatically in the
other room. “But well need at
least four people. Can we
count
on you, Miss Reiss?”
“I’m
afraid I’m not much good at bridge,” Miss Reiss’
colorless voice answered. “But I’ll do the best I can.”
“Laws,”
Hamilton said, “you’re too smart for this. I
can see McFeyffe, but not you.”
Laws
didn’t look directly at him. “You worry about
yourself,” he said huskily, “I’ll worry about me.”
“Don’t you have enough sense to—”
“Massa Hamilton,” Laws burlesqued, “Ah jes’ strings
along wit’ what Ah finds. Iffen Ah do,
Ah lives longah.”
“Cut it out,” Hamilton said, flushing resentfully. “Don’t
turn that junk on me.”
Dark eyes mocking, hostile, Laws turned his back. But he was shaking;
his hands trembled so badly that Marsha
had to take the pound of smoked bacon from him.
“Leave
him alone,” she chastised her
husband. “It’s his life.”
“That’s
where you’re wrong,” Hamilton said. “It’s
her
life. Can you
live on cold cuts and sandwich spreads?”
“It’s not so bad,” McFeyffe said, philosophically. “Wake
up, friend. This is the old lady’s
world—correct? She runs
this
place; she’s the boss.”
Arthur
Silvester appeared in the doorway. “Could I have a glass of warm water and
bicarbonate of soda,
please? My stomach’s a
bit acid, today.”
Putting
his hand on Silvester’s frail shoulder, Hamilton said to him, “Arthur,
your God doesn’t hang around this place; you won’t like it here.”
Without a
word, Silvester brushed past him and over to the sink. There, he received his
glass of warm water
and soda from Marsha;
going off in a corner he concen
trated on it, excluding all else.
“I
still can’t believe it,” Hamilton said to his wife.
“Believe what, darling?”
“Silky.
She’s gone. Absolutely. Like a moth you slap between your hands.”
Marsha shrugged
indifferently. “Well, she’s around
somewhere,
in some other world. Back in the
real
world s
he’s still cadging drinks and strutting her
stuff.” The way
she said the
word “real” made it sound smutty and con
taminated.
“Can I help?” Edith Pritchet, fluttering coyly, appeared
in the doorway, a great mass of wobbling flesh encased in
an outrageously garish flowered silk dress. “Good
ness, where can I find an apron?”
“Over in the closet, Edith,” Marsha said, showing her
where.
With
instinctive aversion, Hamilton drew away from the creature as she waddled past
him. Mrs.
Pritchet
smiled fatuously
at him
,
a knowing expression on her face. “Now, don’t you sulk, Mr.
Hamilton. Don’t spoil
our party.”
When Mrs.
Pritchet had waddled back out of the kitchen and into the living room, Hamilton
cornered Laws. “You’re going to let that monster control your
life?”
Laws
shrugged. “I never had a life. You call guiding people around the Bevatron
a life? People who don’t understand anything about it, people who wandered in off
the streets, a bunch of tourists without technical
training—”
“What are you doing, now?”
A shudder
of defiant pride passed over Laws. “I’m in charge of research for the
Lackman Soap Company,
down in San
Jose.”
“I
never heard of it.”
“Mrs. Pritchet invented it.” Not quite looking at Ham
ilton, he explained, “It makes
those fancy perfumed bath
soaps.”
“Christ,” Hamilton said.
“That
isn’t much, is it? Not for you. You wouldn’t be caught dead with a job like
that.”
“I
wouldn’t manufacture perfumed soaps for Edith
Pritchet,
no.”
“I tell you what,” Laws said, in a low, unsteady voice.
“You try being colored awhile. You try bowing and
saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ to any piece of white trash
that happens
to come along, some Georgia cracker so ignorant he
blows his nose on the floor, so moronic he can’t
find the
men’s room without somebody to guide him there.
Me
to
guide him there. I practically have to show him how
to let down his pants. Try that awhile. Try putting your
self
through six years of college washing white men’s dishes in a two-bit hash
house. I’ve heard about you; your Dad was a big shot physicist. You had plenty
of money; you weren’t working in any hash house. Try getting a degree the way I
did. Try carrying that degree around in your pocket a few months, looking for a
job. Winding up guiding people around with an arm band on your sleeve. Like one
of those Jews in a concentra
tion camp. Then
maybe you won’t mind operating the re
search end of a perfumed soap plant”
“Even
if the soap plant doesn’t exist?”
“It
exists
here
.”
Laws’ dark, lean face was bleak with defiance.
“And that’s where I am. As long as I’m here, I’m going to make the best of
it”
“But,” Hamilton protested, “this is an illusion.”
“Illusion?”
Laws grinned sarcastically; with his hard fist he thumped the wall of the
kitchen. “It feels real enough to me.”
“It’s in Edith Pritchet’s mind.
A man of your intelligence—”
“Save that,” Laws broke in
brutally. “I don’t want to hear it. Back there, you weren’t so concerned
with my intelligence. You didn’t particularly mind if I was a guide; you didn’t
act very bothered.”
“Thousands of people are
guides,” Hamilton said uncomfortably.
“People like me, maybe. But not
people like you. Want to know why I’m better off here? Because of you, Hamilton.
It’s your fault, not mine. Think that over. If you’d made some attempt, back
there … but you didn’t. You had your wife and house and cat and car and
job. You had it fine … naturally, you want to go back. But not me; I didn’t
have it so fine. And I’m not going back.”
“You are if this world
ceases,” Hamilton said.
A cold, vitriolic hate appeared on
Laws’ face. “You’d break this up?”
“Bet your life.”
“You
want me back with an arm band, don’t you? You’re like the others—you’re no
different. Never trust
a white man; that’s
what they told me. But I thought you
were
my friend.”
“Laws,” Hamilton said, “you’re the most neurotic son
ofabitch I’ve ever met.”
“If I
am, it’s your fault.”
“I’m
sorry you feel that way.”
“It’s
the truth,” Laws said emphatically.
“Not
exactly. Part of it is true. There’s a hard kernel of truth down in it,
somewhere. Maybe you’re right; maybe you ought to stay here. Maybe this would
be the
better place for you—Mrs. Pritchet
will take care of you,
if you get down on all fours and make the right
noises. If you walk the proper distance behind her and don’t annoy her. If you
don’t mind perfumed soap and cold
cuts and
asthma cures. Back in the real world you’d have
to keep fighting it out
with everybody. Maybe it’s time you had a rest. You probably couldn’t have won,
any
how.”
“Stop pestering him,” McFeyffe said, listening. “It’s a
waste of time—he’s nothing but a coon.”
“You’re
wrong,” Hamilton said to McFeyffe. “He’s a human being and he’s tired
of losing. But he won’t win here, and neither will you. Nobody wins here but
Edith Pritchet.” To Laws, he said: “This will be worse than being
pushed around by white men
…
in
this world you’ll be in the hands of a fat, middle-aged white
woman.”
“Dinner’s ready,” Marsha called sharply from the
living room. “Everybody come and get it”
* * * * *
One by one
they filed into the living room. Hamilton
emerged
just in time to see Ninny Numbcat, attracted by the smell of food, appear in
the doorway. Rumpled from
having
slept in a shoe box in the closet, Ninny wandered across Edith Pritchet’s line
of march.
Crossly, half-stumbling, Mrs. Pritchet said, “Good
ness.” And Ninny Numbcat, getting ready to hop up on
somebody’s lap, disappeared. Mrs. Pritchet went on her way without noticing, a
tray of petits fours gripped in
her lumpy
pink fingers.
“She
took your cat,” David Pritchet spoke up shrilly, in a loud, accusing
voice.
“Don’t worry about it,” Marsha said absently. “There’re
plenty more.”
“No,”
Hamilton corrected thickly. “There aren’t. Remember? There goes the whole
class of cats.”
“What was that?” Mrs. Pritchet asked. “What was that
term? I didn’t catch it.”
“Never mind,” Marsha said quickly, seating herself at
the table and beginning to serve. The others took their
places. The last to appear was Arthur Silvester. Having finished his glass of
warm water and baking soda, he entered from the kitchen, carrying a pitcher of
tea.
“Where’ll
I put this?” he asked querulously, hunting for a place on the crowded
table, the glass pitcher large, slippery, and shiny, in his withered hands.
“I’ll
take it,” Mrs. Pritchet said, smiling vacantly. As
Silvester came toward her, she reached up for the pitch
er.
Silvester, without a change of expression, raised the pitcher and brought it
down on the woman’s head with all his atrophied strength. A gasp of disbelief
rose from the table; everybody was on his feet.
An instant
before the pitcher struck, Arthur Silvester faded out of existence. The pitcher
itself, falling from his dissolved hands, dropped to the carpet, shattering and
rolling. Tea spilled everywhere, an ugly, urine-
colored stain.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pritchet said, vexed. Along with Arthur
Silvester, the smashed pitcher, the pool of steam
ing tea, ceased to exist.
“How unpleasant,” Marsha managed, after awhile.
“I’m
glad that’s over,” Laws said thinly, his hands
shaking. “That—was close.”
Abruptly,
Joan Reiss rose from the table. “I’m not
feeling
well. I’ll be back in a moment.” Turning quickly,
she hurried out
of the living room, down the hall, and
disappeared
into the bedroom.
“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Pritchet inquired anxiously, gaz
ing around the table. “Is there something upsetting
the
girl? Perhaps I can—”
“Miss Reiss,” Marsha called, in an urgent, penetrating
voice, “please come back here. We’re eating
dinner.”
“I’ll have to go see what’s troubling her,” Mrs. Pritchet
sighed, beginning to struggle to her feet.
Hamilton was already out of the room. “I’ll handle it,” he
said, over his shoulder.