The Dick Gibson Show (27 page)

We have a winding staircase in my studio. Especially constructed; it cost me two thousand dollars. They come down the staircase with a book on their head. Making their entrances. At the level of the eighth stair they must begin to speak. “How do you do, Mrs. Powers? I’m
so
pleased you could come. Uncle Jim will be down in a moment. He asked me to take your coat and to see if there’s anything you’d like.” And they have to finish just as their foot touches the last tread. “Oh! Mr. Strong. I didn’t know you’d been admitted. Clotilda didn’t tell me. Would you like a cucumber sandwich in the library?” “Bless me, it’s Roger Thunder. How
are
you, Roger? Back from Persia already? How did you leave the Shah?” Don’t laugh—it’s true. The girls invent the speeches. And the names—I don’t make those up. They always use names like Powers and Strong and Thunder. They’re afraid, you see, and invest all other humans—even those of the mind: there’s no one at the bottom of the staircase—with strengths and fiercenesses.

“Hello, Mr. Lamb. Leave your umbrella outside, please. You’re dripping water on the rug.” Only the advanced ones say things like that.

M
EL
S
ON
: What about this memory expert?

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: She’s coming to that.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: I’m coming to that.

We have toy telephones. They talk to tradesmen, to people who’ve invited them to parties. Or they call up the most distinguished people in Hartford and invite
them
to parties. They speak to the accounts department of stores to straighten out incorrect billings. Or I give assignments. I tell a woman that her lover is on the line but that her husband is standing in the room. Or that she must speak to the doctor in the middle of the night. “Yes, Doctor. Thank God your answering service was able to reach you. My breasts feel funny. My nipples have turned the color of root beer. I’ve a pimple suppurating in my behind. My vagina is steaming.” We teach them diets and care of the skin, grooming of the hair they learn, what cosmetics to use, the juice of which fruits for complexion. Clothes and color scheme and scents and polite conversation and how to bend to pick up a fallen glove and get in and out of cars.

And we offer instruction in courage and indifference. I take them with me to restaurants and have them return their steak or their soup while I sit by silently. Or we’ll go to waiting rooms in lawyers’ offices and when no one is looking they’ll take a tin of condoms from their purse and ask aloud, “Excuse me, who dropped this?” We—

M
EL
S
ON
: Dick, she’s got to be one of your sponsors. This is the longest plug I’ve ever heard.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: Be quiet.

M
EL
S
ON
: I … I …

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: Go on, Miss Steep. I want to hear about the memory expert now.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: The memory expert. Yes. Arnold. He wrote me a letter. He wanted to enroll in the Charm School. I had been thinking for some time of admitting boys. They do in the dancing classes. Isn’t all the terror sexual, anyway? I agreed to see him and we set up an appointment for the following week. He came on a bus from Springfield. As soon as I saw him I knew it couldn’t work. I had expected a young man, a teen-ager, but he was older than me, in his early forties.

“Won’t the charm schools in Springfield have you?” I asked. “There’s Miss Doris’s, and a branch of Lovely Young Thing.”

“I never looked into them.”

“Let’s be frank with each other, shall we, Mr.—what is it?— Menchman?”

“Ma’am?”

“Are you straight? Or are you looking for some kind of … well—
thrill?”

“Oh, no, ma’am.”

“Well, then?”

“I saw your presentation on television.”

Sometimes I’m asked to bring over some of the younger girls to one of the local stations. They act out social situations, do tea parties, that sort of thing. You remember this, Mel; you were on one of those shows.

M
EL
S
ON
: I—I—

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: “You saw my presentation on television. Yes?”

“They were so poised. They were just children, but they were so
poised.”

“Well, that’s very nice. Thank you, but I don’t—”

“Mignonne Gumbs, 13, Sheila Smith, 12, Pamela Fairfife, 14
—I never saw composure like that in such young children. When Pamela Fairfife spilled tea on Mignonne Gumbs—that wasn’t planned, was it?”

“No. The tea was too hot. She couldn’t hold the handle.”

“I thought not. It looked too real. The way Mignonne Gumbs reassured her—telling her that the fabric was stain-resistant, and that she needn’t worry about having scalded her because the tea had landed on old scar tissue. She made up that part about the scar tissue, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.”

“Miss Gumbs had a lot of confidence by the time she graduated.”

“I could
see
that.”

“Those three particular students—that program was more than a year ago. How do you remember their names?”

“Oh, well, I remember.”

“I see,” I told him. “I really don’t think there’d be much for you in our school. You don’t want to learn to pour tea or come down steps.”

“From behind curtains.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“From behind curtains … onto a stage. Down into the audience. I—um … to talk … in front of people.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand.”

“I’m clumsy, Miss Steep. Your secretary, Miss Ganchi, let me into your office before you arrived or you would have seen. I tripped. I can’t even walk into a room. It’s as hard for me to cross a threshold as it might be for someone else to step from one car to another in a moving train. I don’t know how to stand, what to do with my hands—anything. People laugh.”

“I’m sorry. Your presence would be disruptive in our classes. You’d embarrass the girls.”

“They were wonderful.”

“Yes, well—”

“If it’s a question of money …”

“I
t’s
not.”

“I need the training.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m—I’m a memory expert. I’m in show business. Or rather, I would be if I weren’t so clumsy. Listen, my act is the greatest in the world. I know that sounds very bold, but it’s true. I … I’m a freak, you see.”

“Please, Mr. Menchman.”

“No, it’s so. I am. I mean, there’s no trick to what I do. I
do
it. It’s not even
talent.
I have an eidetic imagination.”

“An eidetic—?”

“It’s called that. There are only about a hundred of us in the whole world. Maybe three—I’m one—are true eidetics.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s very simple. You’ve heard of a photographic mind?”

“Yes, of course.”

“There is such a thing. Nobody understands how it works, really, but it’s visual. Somehow, whatever I look at registers on the retina and on the mind simultaneously. In other people the mind receives the impression a zillionth of a fraction of a moment late, but with an eidetic there’s no lag. At least that’s what the theory is now. Anyway, when an eidetic tries to recall something he sees this picture. All he has to do is look at it. He can even close his eyes—as a matter of fact, he
has
to close his eyes or it would be like a double exposure—and the picture is right there on the eyelids.”

“Fascinating.”

“Oh, I’m a freak is all.”

“Do you remember things forever?”

“No. The pictures fade after a time. Just as a photographic proof will. They even turn that same murky purple. But it lasts for a couple of years at least. Even then I don’t forget everything; I just remember the way normal people do.”

“Well, I must say … Still, I don’t see how I’m the person to help you.”

“Oh, you
are,
Miss Steep. I’ll never forget how grand those children were. Sheila Smith lived next door to me before her family moved to Hartford. She was the sloppiest little girl I’d ever seen. There wasn’t a time when her nose wasn’t running. When I saw her on television … she’s so
changed.
Change
me,
Miss Steep. Teach me my body. I know I could be great—my
act
—but my body … People laugh. They don’t even pay attention to the feats I do; they think I’m a comic. You have to be in control of your body to be in the show business.”

“All I could teach you is to move like a woman. They’d still laugh.”

“No. You’d teach me grace.”

“It’s impossible, Mr. Menchman. The girls would be too embarrassed.”

“Then take me as a special student. I have money. Charge what you want. … Maybe you don’t believe me. Is that it?
This is what is behind me in this room:
To the right of the door as one enters—eidetics see from right to left, thus giving substance to the speculation that the idiosyncrasy is passed on through a Semitic gene; my grandfather on my father’s side was Jewish—are three blue bookshelves about five feet wide and held on the wall by twelve brackets, four brackets to a shelf, with three screws in each bracket. One bracket, the second from the right on the highest shelf, has Phillips head screws. On the top shelf are seventeen books, on the middle twelve, on the bottom fourteen. If you pick a shelf I will give you the titles, authors, publishers and colors of the spines or book jackets.”

“This isn’t necessary.”

“You think it’s a trick. I work with no assistant. Your trickster has an assistant.”

“I don’t think it’s a trick. It simply isn’t necessary.”

“It
is
necessary. I want you to know what I can do. Before you turn me down, you must see.”

“Please, Mr. Menchman. I believe you … Very well, what’s the fourth book from the left on the bottom shelf?”

“Titles and Forms of Address: A Guide to Their Correct Use.
Armiger. A. and C. Black. Buff … Am I correct, madam?”

“Oh, I suppose so. I can’t see from here. Anyway, that isn’t the point.”

“The fifth book—”

“Really,
Mr. Menchman—”

“The
fifth
book is
Manners and Conduct
by the Deans of Girls in Chicago High Schools. Allyn and Bacon. Mauve. The sixth—”

“You could have memorized all that before I came in. Turn around in your chair. Go on. Swivel about and face the bookshelf, please.”

“Are you—?”

“Just do it … Watch out!”

“What happened? What was that?”

“You knocked over an ashtray. Never mind, it didn’t break. Now keep your back to me.”

“Is this a test?”

“There are file cabinets behind my chair—”

“Two stacks, each containing four drawers. Am I correct, madam?”

“On the front of each drawer there’s a small frame with a manila card in it. What do the cards say?”