Authors: Vin Packer
Ida Burroughs said, “Now, Arnie, you don’t mean that.”
“I mean it all right, and Bud knows I mean it!”
“Yes,” Burroughs said, “I know you mean it.”
That night when Bud Burroughs returned to the Pi Pi house, before he did anything else he went up to his room and got Peter’s keys to the refrigerator and Peter’s medicine case. He was not surprised to find the four sugar cubes in the case, where Peter had promised to put them, but he was relieved by his decision to destroy them. So much for the likelihood of his causing anyone any harm; so much for his experiment. No one would be any the worse for it now…. Nor would anyone have been any the worse for what Bud flushed down the Pi Pi toilet. Four ordinary Dominoes couldn’t hurt a fly.
Earlier that evening, the blinking blue light above the telephone in Clinton Shepley’s laboratory signaled that someone was on the line. Shepley glanced up, annoyed. Before the interruption, his thin six-foot frame had been hunched over a breeding case, his dark eyes fixed on two praying mantes. As Shepley picked up the arm of the phone, the female decapitated the male, while the male continued to hold his amorous posture on her.
“Shepley speaking.”
“Shepley speaking,” said the voice.
“Charles!”
“Hi, Dad.”
“Where are you?”
“At the reception desk. May I come up?” “Of course!” “I’ll be right up.”
Clinton Shepley put down the receiver and glanced at his wristwatch; it was ten minutes to seven.
He made a note of the number of males the female mantis had devoured, and then switched off the show lights in the breeding case. He fished in the pocket of his lab coat for a cigarette, scratched a match against a wooden bench, and walked to the window, sucking in the smoke.
He had been with the institute for twenty-five years, counting those years when he was on leave of absence during World War II. He had had several opportunities, before Billy’s accident, to leave the institute for more remunerative positions, but there had always been the extra money from his father’s estate. Now, with the expense of Billy’s illness eating that up, Clinton Shepley’s income was barely adequate. There was compensation in the knowledge that, given two or three more years he hoped to have the most definitive information ever collected concerning the mating habits of invertebrates; there was even more recompense in the fact he was doing the work he did best, and the Richmond Institute was the only place where he could accomplish it.
But he was not a bachelor, like old Stanchfield in Reptiles, who was going into his eleventh year of a study on venomous tree snakes, nor was Natalie very much like Wendt’s wife, who followed him into the sea in pursuit of information about the nest structures of Poikilotherms.
If he had married anyone but a woman like Natalie, Billy’s illness might have seemed a tragedy which they could, thank God, afford, but instead, it was a tragedy which deprived them of the things Natalie had counted on in their marriage, and every day Clinton Shepley was reminded of this fact.
“You want to hear my nightmare, Clint?” she had said that morning at breakfast, before the call from Charles. “All right.”
“You and I were out at dinner and it was a very fancy restaurant, and you ordered dinner for us. Remember that time we went to Le Provençal?”
“Vaguely.”
“Vaguely?
On East Sixty-second Street, remember? I was all gussied up and we sat at a little table in the back. Billy must have been about thirteen, because I remember he was old enough to sit with Charles, so we didn’t have a sitter, and it was winter, I remember, because it was snowing.”
“What has that got to do with your nightmare, Natalie?”
“In my nightmare, we were in the same kind of restaurant. I mean, it might even have been Le Provençal. It probably was. You ordered dinner. I remember that part, except I don’t remember what we had for a main course. The entrée. That part I don’t recall. I recall that we started with Quiche Lorraine. Guess what we drank.”
“What did we drink?”
“Taittinger Blanc de Blancs 1959. That was right in my nightmare.”
“Why was it a nightmare?”
“I’m getting to that, Clint! We started with Quiche Lorraine and Taittinger Blanc de Blancs 1959, and we finished with soufflé Grand Marnier, accompanied by those enormous strawberries with cream on them. They were as big as plums. And the wine steward brought us Moët et Chandon Dom Perignon 1959. That was right in my nightmare, the year and everything … Well, my teeth fell out.”
“I see.”
“It may not sound like much, but they began falling out when the waiter put down the Quiche Lorraine, and I kept putting them one by one into my handkerchief, and by the time the strawberries came, ‘I didn’t have a tooth in my mouth. Can you imagine how I felt?”
“What did you do, gum your strawberries?”
“I know it
sounds
funny, Clint, but I woke up with goose bumps all over my body. I had to turn on Long John to quiet me down, and his whole program was about the Jet Set. Well, I guess the only Jet Set we qualify for anymore is the Jim Dooley Jet Set.”
“Were we in the Jet Set? I hadn’t realized.”
“We went to Paris.”
“What’s the Jim Dooley Jet Set?”
“New York to Miami. Come on down! Hi, Brooklyn! Hello, Five forty-two Lexington! Haven’t you ever seen him on television?”
“I’m sorry you had a nightmare.”
“When Billy’s. better, I want to go to Acapulco; that’s the ‘in’ place now.”
“Well. When Billy’s better, it might not be the ‘in’ place anymore. By then, the moon might be the ‘in’ place, Natalie.”
“If I didn’t believe Billy was going to get well, I wouldn’t be able to keep on living like this, Clint.”
• • •
The institute overlooked the East River, with its Pearl-Wick Hampers and Pepsi-Cola signs, and the tugs that glided past, and in the distance the smoke from the factories of Queens, the beginnings of Long Island, the lights of the bridge and traffic stealing back and forth across it. Clinton Shepley liked the view, even the advertisements amused him; he liked the whole neighborhood of the institute, and he was glad when his financial circumstances forced the move here from Riverside Drive.
Natalie was always harping on the fact that the outdoor phone booths on East End Avenue were broken into nearly every night, and that the dope addicts who were involved in the Janice Wylie murder case had lived only two blocks away from their apartment, but the neighborhood held many good memories for Clinton Shepley, not the least of which were memories of his walks with Charles along the promenade by the East River.
When Charles was a youngster, he was always dropping in at the institute after school and on Saturdays. Billy had rarely shown any interest in the place; he showed up only when he wanted to borrow a few dollars. But Charles had genuinely loved watching the experiments; he used to sit for hours with Clinton Shepley waiting for a Callinecte to attract a female, or for a gray Sepia to come up from the mud and change its color to purple-black stripes for the female, or for a wolf spider to complete his dance around his mate.
During their walks along the promenade, Charles would talk of his ambition to be a zoologist, and what branch of the science he wanted to concentrate on, and what college he thought offered the most. But the conversation was not limited to that; in Charles, Clinton Shepley found what he missed with Natalie, the easy rapport which lent itself to discussions of people — Charles telling of this boy in his class, or that teacher — Clinton Shepley regaling Charles with stories of Stanchfield’s habit of favoring certain snakes by allowing them to sleep nights in his bathroom, and of Wendt’s wife climbing a tree to sketch the foam nest of a Poly-pedates rheinwartii, only to come hysterically upon a bag of bats…. They were boon companions, Clinton Shepley and his younger son.
But a change had come over Charles after Billy’s accident; it showed first in his grades, and ultimately in his estrangement from his father. He was polite, but distant; attentive when Clinton Shepley discussed things with him, but unenthusiastic. Around this period, too, he picked up this knack for imitating people; he was very good at it. Even his face seemed to take on the features of the person he was mimicking. It became very hard to find Charles beneath them all.
While Clinton Shepley waited for his son to come up to the laboratory, he felt the same apprehension he had after his telephone conversation that morning. He should not have lied to Charles; he probably wouldn’t have told the old Charles a lie; he might have been able to make that Charles see some humor in Natalie Shepley’s pathetic maneuver, or at least help him see how pathetic it was. But now he was so out of touch with his son; and the knowledge of the promise of silverware had come as a shock to Clinton Shepley, as well.
Of course it was the reason for Charles’s visit; in minutes, there would be the confrontation, and what was he to tell the boy?
He might begin by saying, “You see, Charles, it wasn’t so much your mother’s fear for you — that’s only the superficial motivation, but go deeper. She projects her fears onto me and you and even onto Billy. Charles,” chuckling? “she even sent away to one of those mail order houses for a phony family coat of arms to hang in Billy’s room to impress the nuns with his lineage.”
But that would hardly undo the damage, would it? She had made a fool of him in the eyes of his fraternity; what was there to say to make
that
less humiliating?
Clinton Shepley took a last drag on his cigarette, ground out the stub in the ash tray, and waited for his son without the slightest notion of how to handle the situation.
• • •
But the situation was not the one he was expecting.
Charles Shepley had also had time to reflect on the past, on the hours he had spent with his father at the institute, their walks along the promenade, the way it used to be; he had thought of little else during his ride up from Fifty-seventh Street on the Third Avenue bus, and his leisurely walk across to East End Avenue.
Suddenly, he had come to. It was 1966, and he was nineteen years old, and the past five years were at an end, and this was the beginning of where he had left off. And he
did
care that Lois Faye had chosen to stay at Terry’s; he did and would maybe for a long time want that girl so badly that he could conjure up the sensation of having her, and feel the sensation prick the flesh of his fingertips, and feel his insides do a loop, but he did not care, not any longer, enough to exist for that and that alone. Nor was he as he had been before he met her, the only non-astronaut who could hang in space weightless, floating around like a gas balloon with an endless supply of helium.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt something important, Dad.”
“You didn’t. It’s good to see you, Charles.”
They shook hands, and Charles removed his overcoat. While his father was hanging it up in the lab closet, Charles snapped on the light in the mantes’ breeding case.
“Is this Lolita? I remember you writing me about her.”
“No, that’s Lynda Bird. She just destroyed George Hamilton; he was her sixth suitor.”
“Poor George. Lost his head, hmmm?”
“All seven did.”
“Does decapitation actually make the male mantis more potent? I read that somewhere.”
“That’s the theory. Of course, science is always turning up evidence that the male in lower organisms is superfluous.”
“The other night I was thinking about those lizards that reproduce themselves by parthenogenesis. Cnemidophorus tessellatus, isn’t that the name?”
“Yes. I didn’t know you were still interested in all this.”
“I haven’t been for awhile, but I’d like to get back to it.”
“Would you, Charles?”
“Yes.”
“I’m delighted to hear it!”
“Of course, Far Point isn’t the best college for what I want.”
His father pulled up a lab stool and sat beside him; he said, “And you’re thinking of leaving, is that it?” “No.”
Charles’s father looked surprised. Charles said, “A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits; isn’t that what you always used to say?” He grinned at his father. “You were a real corn ball, weren’t you?”
“What do you mean I
was?
I still am.”
“I remember a lot of
your
old platitudes: keep on keeping on; if someone hands you a lemon, squeeze it and start a lemonade stand: a year from now, what will I regret not having done today?; when you’re through learning, you’re through; you have two duties — to worry, and not to worry; happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
… You
were full of them. But I only remember Mom saying one.”
“What was that?”
“Money is honey, my little sonny, and a rich man’s joke is always funny. Remember?” They both laughed.
“She still says it, all the time,” said Charles’s father. “I think it made a dent,” Charles said, “I think I took a ride on it for a while.”
“What do you mean, Charles?”
“Well, I figured if I couldn’t have the best, I didn’t want second best.”
“You mean Princeton? You could have gone to Princeton, Charles. Your grades kept you out of Princeton.”
“I know it. But all her talk about money got to me, I think. I think I felt she’d resent it if I went to such an expensive school. Or maybe ‘I just used that for an excuse to just give up … I don’t know.”
His father lit a cigarette. He said, “I never understood why you lost your interest in school after Billy’s accident.”
“I guess I felt sorry for myself. I thought I was going to have my own car, like Billy did, and go to Princeton — “
His father interrupted, “Where students can’t have their own cars.”
Charles snickered. “Is that a fact?”
“They get around on bicycles.”
Charles hit his forehead with his palm, “Well, that’s what I mean. I
didn’t
think … Anyway, the wheels are beginning to turn again. They aren’t going full speed yet, but they’re starting. I’d like to talk about it with you, Dad.”
“I’d like that, too.”
“Do you suppose Mom can afford to feed another mouth tonight?”
• • •
Natalie Shepley did not drink very much; when she did, she went the Cherry Heering, Tia Maria, crème de menthe, Grand Marnier route. She really did not like the taste of whiskey or gin or rum or vodka. But with ginger ale, whiskey went down very smoothly, and she
did
collect fancy whiskey containers. She had them in various shapes: a boat, a frog, a clock, an airplane, a dwarf, a Christmas tree, and now a bottle of Dickel whiskey in the shape of a powder horn.
Clint had called from the institute around seven fifteen and said Charles was there and coming home with Clint for dinner, and they were going to stop for some liquor; what would she like?