The Dick Gibson Show

1

From an address at the annual “Annals of Broadcasting” Dinner:

Mr. Irwin Schlueter, Chief of the American Radio Institute’s Division of Research and Development, suggested that the technological development which most influenced the character of radio broadcasting in the United States in the decades of the fifties and sixties was television, that it produced an impact on the medium at least as powerful as the impact of the talkies on the silent films of the twenties, but that after television the next most powerful influence, and in the long run an influence which could outstrip even the influence of television, had been a series of “gadgets” developed in the sixties — none of them, from an engineering standpoint, spectacular in themselves, and some of which were merely the application of principles known for years.

It’s almost [Mr. Schlueter said] like observing the piecemeal development of the wheel. I say “development” because almost certainly the wheel was never “invented,” but was instead a slow, cumulative serendipity.

Tape, of course, has liberated the radio man from his studio and given him a mobility he never had before. Miniaturization has contributed further to this process. The ongoing evolution of the cassette with its terrific convenience has provided additional acceleration of the trend, and “solid-state,” or the so-called instant-on, because of the reporter’s new ability to begin his on- the-spot broadcast without waiting for tubes to warm up, has had even more far-reaching effects on field radio, and has given the radio man not only mobility but time, and not only time but the potential to make of himself a peripatetic broadcasting station.

But if these gadgets have exercised an influence on the broadcaster, think of the enormous consequences for the listener. Consider instant-on itself. In the thirty-five to forty-three seconds it used to take to “build a sound,” the listener’s mood — this has been repeatedly demonstrated in psychological testing— becomes one of honed impatience. He wishes, say, to hear a particular program and turns on his radio. There is solid scientific evidence that by the time the radio has warmed up, a small antipathy has developed in the listener, an aggression which has first to be overcome before receptivity can be properly exploited. Thus the broadcaster’s burden is a double one: he must sell his listener before he sells him. By eliminating “dead time,” solid- state obviates this. Indeed, further studies have shown that by instantly responding to his will, solid-state actually predisposes a listener to accept a program. The average listener is not a scientist, of course, but even if he understands the basic principles of electronics he does not consciously think of them when he turns on his radio. For him there is only the subliminal impression — solid-state increases this — that there is a continuous entertainment or dialogue going on in the world which he may bring in or exclude instantly, as though by magic. This gives him a sense of power. It is no accident that the operating manuals accompanying new radios designate the various knobs and dials under the pseudo-generic label “controls.”

Where solid-state has thus far had its greatest effect is in the area of car radio, where, depending upon the time of day, the listenership may sometimes be as high as 84 percent. Try to imagine what conflict there could be in a driver’s mind when, on the one hand, he was pushed along through space at a mile a minute while on the other he was stymied by a cold car radio. He might have traveled as much as a mile, or even further, before bringing in the first clear signal of a broadcast. Was he in time or wasn’t he? For the listener in the car the time lag meant not impatience or hostility, but confusion — an emotion more difficult of placation than even those others, and more dangerous, too, when you consider that this man was “at the controls” of a murderous, powerful machine. With the highway development program what it is today, and with cars every year given greater and greater horsepower, the discrepancy between speed and its tube-radio opposite could only have become greater, and the burden of the programmers — who have to keep all sorts of audiences in mind — heavier. Undoubtedly, highway safety would suffer. Nor do I make a callous joke when I say that it is not the radio man’s first duty to kill off his market. Radio is a business dependent upon revenues from advertising. Advertising is dependent upon sales. Humanitarian considerations aside, when a man dies in a crash you have not lost simply a good customer — and make no mistake; he is a good customer; he’s driving a car, advertised on radio, for which he buys gas, advertised on radio, to or from a home which he has bought with a bank loan, advertised on radio, and furnished with a thousand things, all advertised on radio—but the good customer’s family as well. There is inevitably a period of mourning, and mourning — I don’t care what religion you’re talking about — means one thing and one thing only: abstinence. And abstinence, humanitarian considerations aside, is bad for business. Solid-state does away with all this.

Yet it is one of the peculiar paradoxes of our age that while reducing the time lag between broadcast and reception has had an unparalleled effect in shaping broadcasting, there has been, collaterally, a development which goes in an opposite direction altogether, and is, as of this moment, the single most important event in the entire history of radio.

I am speaking, of course, of the so-called tape delay, the small, inexpensive instrument which by utilizing extra gears and blind- alley loopings forces the recording tape through false waystations so that by the time it is played a six-second interval has been created in which the broadcaster can cut or, in more sophisticated models, edit offensive statements before they go out over the air. What this has meant for programming is only now beginning to be realized. Unquestionably, however, its greatest effect has been in the area of the audience- participation principle— specifically the telephone talk show. Without the six-second delay tape, or something very much like it, this kind of programming would be impossible. Most of the American public, of course, is decent and responsible and have no need of instrumentation to monitor them. Nevertheless fail-safe equipment will be a necessary adjunct of the telephone talk landscape as long as we live in a society part of whose vocal instincts, emboldened by the cloak of anonymity, are vicious and disturbed and exhibitionist. It’s inconceivable that a sponsor could continue to support a show which did not have the safety valve provided by a system like tape delay. This despite the fact that advertisers have known — known from the beginning — the incredible attractiveness of audience-participation programming.

Indeed, the self-entertainment principle has always played a major role in our industry, in local as well as network programming. At its most oblique level it manifested itself in the presence of the studio audience itself, its laughter, its spontaneous and sometimes not-so-spontaneous applause. One of the old- time host’s key phrases, perhaps the single most classic sentence in radio, so deep-seated in our culture and consciousness that whenever it is uttered today it takes on the dimensions of a joke, was “Keep those cards and letters coming in.” What was this if not a direct appeal to the audience-participation instinct? But there is a whole history of shows which flourished entirely on the strength of their dependence upon the audience, an audience which provided not only a presence at the entertainment, but was in fact the entertainment itself. One need only point to the success of the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, whose origins date almost to the beginning of radio. I don’t think I have to remind anyone here tonight that “The Amateur Hour” is still with us in its adapted TV format, or that CBS’s Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour has had the longest continuous run in television.

But there have been many such programs — everything from “man on the street” shows and quiz programs to good old Mr. Anthony, where people with problems could come to seek help. There was Candid Microphone, and most of you will remember Bride and Groom, where real couples actually got married on the air. Nor should I omit from this list the famous Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, which when it recently went off the air at Don’s retirement was the longest continuous program in the history of broadcasting, not just in America but in the entire world! There was Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a hit on radio long before it ever went on television, and there was and still is Art Linkletter’s House Party, the very name of which conveys my theme. Further, the dominance of daytime TV’s popular game shows must seek its origins in radio programs like Art’s. Many of these programs have been responsible for some of the biggest billings in the industry.

I am not here tonight to stir up nostalgic memories or to enunciate glorious names from the putative Golden Age of Radio, however. Suffice it to say that industry executives and advertisers have always been aware of the rich possibilities of participation programming. The development of magnetic tape — and before that of wire — led naturally to news interviews, press conferences and the like, the whole “voices in the news” syndrome being still another instance of audience participation. With McLuhan and his celebrated “global village” concept we get only the articulation of a principle which the industry has understood instinctively — that the listener needs to become a communicant. The elaborate production radio of the thirties and forties — your “Big Broadcasts,” et cetera — were never the natural function of radio, but arose merely as substitute, pro tern arrangements, groping and expensive, a settling for less by shoveling on more. And isn’t it a fact that in the so-called Golden Age of Radio your biggest shows—Amos ’n’ ‘Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, Henry Aldrich, Jack Benny, and every single soap opera that was ever on the radio — by attempting to portray the ordinary lives of ordinary people with whom listeners could identify, was making an effort to get around the audience-participation principle? Is it too far-fetched to suggest that Allen’s Alley was the comic prototype of today’s telephone talk program?

I think we ought not to proceed — in a deeper sense this is not a digression — without first acknowledging that we in radio owe much to a great engineer with a great idea. Probably, shamefully, most of us do not even know his name — I know I didn’t — despite the fact that many of us here tonight owe our professional lives to him. I refer, of course, to Brandon Sline, the developer of the tape delay. When I knew I was to address you I cast about in my mind for a suitable topic. When I looked around me at the not inconsiderable achievements of radio in our own age, I naturally came in the course of my deliberations to consider the tape delay, and determined to have on the dais with me the man chiefly responsible for it. It wasn’t easy tracking him down; indeed, it took considerable research just to discover his name. Thus our debts go often unpaid because we are simply unaware of them. Working in his own spare time in his own home on a means of providing the broadcaster with what he thought of as a margin for error, this man, unaffiliated with any network, a staff engineer — I had almost said an ordinary staff engineer — at WSNO, Rutledge, Vermont, invented a simple device which has become a contribution more sweeping and more telling than any since Marconi’s. Yes, since Marconi’s. For with just this device and the ordinary house telephone, he has made every home in America its own potential broadcasting station, and every American his own potential star. I’m going to ask him to stand. Brandon? That’s right. That’s right. Applaud him you well may. Brandon Sline, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Brandon. You know, ladies and gentlemen, as we were all applauding Brandon it occurred to me that he, the tinkerer engineer, though a professional, working on his equipment in his own workshop as he did, encompasses the best principles of amateurism, and that it is fitting indeed that his device gives voice to amateurs.

It isn’t for me so much as for psychologists to explain the public’s urge to communicate directly. Be that as it may, the instinct seems to be the deepest one in entertainment; I don’t think I need point out to you that “ham” radio existed before commercial radio. At the same time that this urge is basic, however, it is also dangerous. Just as an agency like the FCC must regulate and oversee our industry, so must there be machinery to regulate and oversee the public when it is given its voice. It would be instructive, but depressing, I’m afraid, to play for you some of the excisions that have been recorded and preserved from even a single program. You would think we lived in Pandora’s box. A friend of mine who works one of these shows has said that if he had a dollar for each time he has had to black out the word “kike” or “nigger” or some even less fragrant obscenity, he wouldn’t have to work again for the rest of his life. He claims to have heard more filth than any member of the vice squad in the wickedest streets of New York City. It seems a pity that a minority should have it in its power to distress and frustrate the good listener for even the few seconds of silence that follows an unacceptable remark. Have we developed solid-state and instant-on only to have our radios go dead on us in the middle of what is often the most interesting part of a conversation? Aren’t we likely to re- create the same psychological blocks we have been at such great pains to propitiate?

It is for this reason that we are currently working on a tape delay that does all that present tape delays do but then accelerates the tape so that the next decent conversation may be heard immediately — creating, in effect, if not in fact, an apparently seamless conversation. We’re close to a breakthrough on this one. And when it occurs we will truly have pulled time’s teeth at last. Indeed, as the entire industry now gears itself to the telephone talk show, the fabulous “two-way radio” concept seems a fullfilment of what radio has always promised — a means of open discourse, of people-to-people priorities. Of course there is always room for improvement. One area that must be explored is the area of sound itself. If two-way radio is to take its rightful place on the American air something must be done to soften the sibilant “tunnel effect” of telephone sound and bring it closer to studio standards. We’re working on that too. In the meanwhile, so much has already been accomplished that I think we may say with as much accuracy as pride that only now is the real Golden Age of Radio upon us. …

2

The Golden Age is upon me. Heavy. I think it really is Pandora’s box. “Dick Gibson, WBOX, and all I know is what you tell me.” (I live in a box.)

I used the phones as early as ’53. Before there was even amplification equipment, let alone tape delay. Repeating laboriously, like a translator at the UN, everything the caller said, and not just words but inflections too, mimicking the voice as well as I was able, and not just the voice but the accent, and not just the words and the inflections and the voice and the accent, but also the passion, the irritation and complaint and sulking triumph, listening so closely and working so hard that my head hurt and when it was my turn to answer I couldn’t shake the caller’s style and borrowed his vocabulary and traded on his posture so that he thought I was baiting him and grew angry, and then I had to mimic that and that made him angrier which raised the ante of my imitation once more until at the end we were shouting at each other and one of us finally had to hang up. And still so involved after the call was finished that when I took the next call the first caller’s style sometimes continued to prevail, intruding itself into what I repeated of the new conversation, fading only as I began gradually to catch the new caller’s emphasis — a round robin of personality. Dick Gibson, KOPY. Dick Gibson, KAT.

Then, when technology at last caught up with us innovators and pioneers, going to the phones again, at last empowered to be myself. But something else changed, though at first I couldn’t identify it. When I understood, it was very odd. I had something in my hands again. In Hartford I’d been empty-handed. The phone was like the scripts I used to hold during my apprenticeship.

It seemed right to be burdened. It seemed appropriate that a man on the radio should be connected and not permitted that merely conceptual and apparent connection — his voice — like a beast in Whipsnade, seemingly loose. Fetters give me. Let there be heavy equipment; attach me by cords, electronic leashes, to my microphonic stakes.

(Alternatively, how would it be if I could roam free, speak in deserts as in auditoriums, ad lib while swimming, mumble on mountains, ask strangers for the time of day in the streets and have my sounds picked up in Texas or Timbuktu? Build me of crystal, Lord. I would be Jesus Crystal. In Excels is Diode.)

He was already forty years old when he was asked to resign from the station in Hartford. A playback of the tapes satisfactorily demonstrated to the managers that he had not initiated any of the foul language; he had merely been unable to control it. Probably he would have resigned anyway, for that night had shown him how tired he was of all spurious controversy, as well as of his own unconscious baiting of his guests. Besides, he had fallen in love with Carmella, Pepper Steep’s sister.

He took her with him to Pittsburgh in the spring of 1959, two months after he had been asked to resign. It was Carmella herself who decided they could not be married. Strangely, it was on religious grounds that she turned him down. She had asked him what he was.

“Me? I don’t know. I’ll be what you are.”

“I’m nothing.”

“Then there’s no problem. Neither am I.”

“Then there’s a problem. I want my life to be regularized. I was born a Gentile. That was the name of our little sect in California when I was a girl — the Gentile Church. It was the only one in America. As the elders died off and people moved away there was no one left to carry on the traditions. The Mosque was abandoned.”

“The Mosque?”

“Jesus was a Jew. The Jews were Arabs. Arabs worship in mosques. Pepper and I went back a few years ago. I thought of staying on, but the firehouse isn’t there any more.”

“The firehouse?”

“The Mosque was in the firehouse. Anyway, I’ve been nothing since. I could be a Catholic if my husband was one, or a Jew, or anything at all. I want to be something.”

“Look, I was born a Methodist. You could be a Methodist.”

“What do Methodists do? I couldn’t be Methodist if it went against my conscience as a Gentile.”

“Well, I don’t know what they do. I don’t remember. Maybe we could take instruction.”

“Can they smoke?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ve been trying to give up smoking.”

“Well, there’s nothing in the religion that says they have to smoke … I know — Baptists aren’t supposed to smoke. We could be Baptists.”

“Would you promise to be a good Baptist?”

“Certainly.”

“I don’t believe you. Besides, it all seems so artificial. I’d much prefer just to stay with you and wait until I fall in love with someone who’s already something.”

And that became their arrangement.

The normal and ordinary and the public were her passions, not instinctively so much as self-consciously. For example, she loved to prepare long lists of electric kitchen appliances, such hardware being to her what jewels and furs were to other women. Dick often found her doodles on telephone pads where she had drawn, with some skill, electric carving knives, blenders, toasters — all the latest products from GE. She would have made a superb interior decorator of a very special sort. Museums could profitably have come to her to furnish typical rooms of the mid-century middle class in the best of popular taste. She watched what everyone else was watching on television. Her opinions were almost always consistent with the samplings revealed in polls. When they weren’t she would steep herself in the arguments of the majority until there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between its position and her own.

It was very odd. He knew that one day she would cheat on him. Not because of money or love or youth or power or sensuality; one day her heart would be captured by someone so respectable, someone so responsible and normal, that he would even have to be told that Carmella had “set her cap for him.” (That the fellow would have to be told in the first place was certain, for he would be a passive man, flattered and frightened by her and not believing his luck. It was almost as certain that the news would have to be broken to him in just such phrases, the only style that would not kill him.) So someday her prince would come, and he could be almost anyone — though there were some things he could not be. He could be married but not Catholic, he could be Catholic but not married; Carmella would not begin her new life by being damned out of her old one. She was already thirty-four, which set additional imperatives, not for herself, for in a way she was selfless; for example, she had no ordinary greeds, did not require riches or excitement, and had no urge to prolong her youth as such.

But at thirty-four sociology and raw percentages took over. How many men were still bachelors at thirty-four? (The man could not be as much as five minutes younger than herself. She was unwilling to live under even the least psychological aspersion. Thus, she forbade the unsavory and pined for the prescribed. Even during the short time she stayed with Dick she insisted that the daily paper and the milk be delivered — not because she was lazy, not even because she read the paper or drank the milk, but because these things were tokens of decency.) And of those who were still single at thirty-four and born before April 11—her birthday — how many were homosexuals, mama’s boys, playboys whose heterosexual profligacies were the danger signals of a too extravagant need? How many were losers or becoming losers? (Was Dick Gibson — when he resigned from WHCN he once again withdrew the name — a loser? He was already forty and sensed that the great apprenticeship, like some recurrent disease from childhood, would soon be on him again. Was he normal? He had been told by Carmella that he had none of the normal man’s accouterments, and he could have told her that he did not even possess a character. Was he even sexually normal? He had not lived with a woman since Miriam in Morristown almost twenty-one years before, and although he was not virginal, sexually he had the past of a nineteen-year-old boy.) There were other requirements. Even if she were able to find someone who was sexually acceptable, he would have to be a man who was already established, his goals not already realized, perhaps, but within marching distance. It would not do for him to be a beginner, for once a beginner always a beginner. (That, he thought, was still another strike against himself.) Then, on a lower order of the imperative, Carmella would want him to have friends — old army buddies, perhaps — whom she would not entirely approve of, and one failing friend from childhood, say, regard for whom would be a measure of her husband’s loyalty and manliness. It was pretty slim pickings. But though he understood the percentages, he also knew how determined Carmella was and that people always get what they want, that all goals are within marching distance.

So the adultery was inevitable and placed an extraordinary burden on Dick Gibson (now, as he had been twenty-one years before with Miriam, Marshall Maine again, having, in his own mind, retired “Dick Gibson” when he lost the Hartford show), because the assumption ordinarily made about two people who live together without being married is that the relationship is invulnerable to outside pressures. For a man the least approachable woman is the woman who already has a lover. She seems inviolate as a newlywed or nun. Carmella’s open flirting confused men; they never comprehended their eligibility. (Shy men, decent men, why would they?) As often as not they thought themselves toyed with. The burden of proof was on Carmella. She had to allay their fears, and she allayed them at Marshall’s expense, cuckolding him out of wedlock. He dreaded their public appearances together. More than once, even before they left Hartford, he thought of calling the whole thing off.

Yet Carmella’s very need of the normal was the most fascinating thing about her. It was pathological. To the degree that she yearned for respectability she lacked it, so that as long as he stayed with her he enjoyed a heady sense of the forbidden. For all her absent-minded doodles of electric frying pans and steam irons, she seemed to him the most abandoned woman he had ever known, wilder than the Creole girls of Mauritius, crazier than the brutish whores he had been with in London during the war. It was her need to convert everything into the routine and domestic, her necessity to pretend even with him that they were just the nice couple next door, that fueled his lust. It was very clear; she was inviting him to play House, a game which she played so ferociously that there was something sinful in their supper- times, a wickedness in her burned meats and scorched vegetables, something so tantalizing in her bridey pout over a failed cake that he grew hard contemplating the unrisen dough. A vagrant smell of the amiss from the oven was often enough. For him Carmella was a French maid come to life out of pornography. In his imagination her bare behind bloomed just out of sight beneath her pinafores, and he often thought he could see the wide twin grins of her rump. Their arguments — it never went this far; they didn’t have arguments — would have had to have been settled by sexually seditious spankings. Sometimes she made perky mouths at him, as if she was his daughter as well as his bride, and it was both his torment and a source of his pleasure that she never stopped thinking of the day when she would have a real husband.

They had gone to Pittsburgh for his mother’s funeral, but Carmella liked the city and it was she who decided that they would not return to Hartford. Then she wept, understanding that she could make such a decision only because her life was so irregular.

Though Marshall’s father was an old man by this time — Carmella told him that they were married — he still enjoyed performing as much as ever. Only a week after he had buried his wife he was playing the role of a dirty old man, and Carmella was an ideal prop for him. Leering, he might pretend to a sudden palsy. Then, his right hand twitching uncontrollably, he would bring it up to the level of Carmella’s breasts. In this way he managed to brush them at least a half-dozen times a day, or, in passing, to strum her behind every hour or so. Lest he be misunderstood — his peculiar pride wanted it made perfectly clear that he was lascivious and not physically impaired — he occasionally arranged to get his hand tangled inside Carmella’s skirt, where it thrashed about like a fish in a sack making rash plunges and rushes. All Carmella said at these times was “Please, Dad,” or “Now Dad, you know that’s just perfectly silly.” She probably assumed that every family had its eccentric, and that it was perfectly normal for old men, even supposititious fathers-in-law, to turn lewdly on their sons’ wives.

With his brother Arthur it was something else again.

Like Marshall, Arthur had never married. In real estate now — they were staying with him until they found an apartment — Arthur lived in a big house in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. After his mother’s death he had tried to convince his father to come and live with him, but had been unable to budge the old man. Carmella and Marshall were present on one such occasion, Carmella sitting on the sofa between Arthur and the father.

“Be reasonable, Papa. Why do you need the aggravation of a house? List it with me. I’ll give it my special attention. We’ll put it on the market for twenty thousand, add another thousand realtor’s fee, and when I dump it you can keep the extra grand yourself. The buyer doesn’t have to know I’m your son. Then you come in with me. There’s the solarium, for God’s sake. Remember how you and Mama used to enjoy sitting in the solarium when you came out to see me in Squirrel Hill? You don’t need this cave.”

“Cave? You call where your Mama and me lived our lives and raised our children a cave? Are you a cave man? Is your brother a cave man? Am I? Did I ever pull your mama around — may she rest — by the hair? Did I hit her on her head with a club? Music you had. Every Saturday afternoon these walls were alive with the sound of the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. What’s the matter, you don’t remember Milton Cross? Is music like that heard in a cave? Carmella, tell him.”

Carmella, looking from one to the other, was taking it all in.

“That’s not the point, Papa. What I’m—”

“It’s not the point? It’s not? Big shot, what’s the point? What’s the point, teddy bear? That you got a solarium, that my big-shot son owns the sunshine? You don’t own the sunshine. I want sun I go in the yard. My backyard is covered with sunshine like a lawn. You think you get more in your solarium? In fact you get less.”

“Papa, why are you so upset?”

“I’m not upset, sonny, I’m not upset. But when you ask me to give over my memories, you ask something which will never happen. Your mama’s spirit is in this house. A woman don’t live in a home forty-two years so her spirit can be listed with her son for twenty-one thousand dollars.” Here his hands flew up like a bird to Carmella’s tits, one finger getting caught in the décolletage.

“Mama’s dead, Papa. When are you going to face that?”

“Mama’s dead not even two weeks, Arthur,” Marshall told his brother quietly. “You’ve got to give Papa time.” He had never called them Mama and Papa in his life. Neither had Arthur.

“Now, Dad, you know that’s perfectly silly,” Carmella told the old man, pulling his hand out from where it had become caught in her brassiere.

“Time,” Papa said fiercely, turning on Marshall. “You could give me a million years. I’ll never forget her.” His palsied old hand floated down to splash about in Carmella’s crotch.

Carmella took the hand and held it in both of her own. “Please, Dad,” she murmured sweetly.

The two sons were having the time of their lives. Biblically ferocious, they shouted back and forth at each other like Italian sons in melodrama. They glowed with a Fifth Commandment intensity. Meanwhile the old man was now a wild Greek patriarch, now ancient Bulgar, now wily WASP whittler and fisherman, now proud old chief, between the peaks of his wrath declining to mournful Jew, actual tears in his eyes when he spoke brokenly of his dead wife, the late lady who for years had led him a merry chase with her Maw Green stunts. Carmella might have been on the sidelines of some three-sided tennis match as she followed the volleys from father to son to brother to father to brother. For her their vaudeville turns were like a dream come true; the vague religiosity of their syntax was holy to her. There was gemütlich in the room like sunshine in the backyard.

“I didn’t know Methodist families were this warm and close,” she broke in during a lull.

“What, are you kidding?” Arthur said. “Methodist families are the closest families there are. The closest. We’d kill for each other. Anything, anything at all. One for all and all for one among Methodist brothers. Right, kid?” He punched his brother’s arm.

“Right,” Marshall said. “Right, kid.”

“You know,” Carmella said shyly, “you all make me feel ashamed.”

“Ashamed?”

“Of what, dear?” Papa asked. In a sudden seizure, his fingers leaped across her cleavage to her far nipple.

“Of the way I’ve deceived you.”

“Deceived?” Arthur said.

She covered her eyes with her hands. “We’re not really married,” she said, and peered out at Arthur from behind what would have been her ring finger.

Marshall had been expecting a widower, someone with children in high school. He had looked jealously on the balding and pot-bellied and pin-striped. Love would come from that quarter, he thought. And it would be love, hearts erupting in floozy passion, Carmella the Queen of the Cocktail Lounge and Wild West, a Claire Trevor knocking like last opportunity on Mr. Right’s storm doors and aluminum siding. He had been wary of just such a juxtaposition; even at Mama’s funeral he had steered her clear of all avunculars, his brother’s corny cronies, men in liquor, furniture, restaurants and automobiles. He had been rude, accepting their condolences with perfunctory replies as he jerked Carmella next to him as if for support — though the gesture was vicious, like a man with a beast on a stage doing hidden, close-order things with the leash. For the truth was he loved her as much as the man in liquor ever could — perhaps even more since it was still rare and grand for him to be with a woman. It was lovely waking up beside her. On those mornings when she was out of bed first he felt deprived of some special treat he had come to depend on. It was lovely to be in rooms with her or to sit with her in taxicabs, lovely to share space. It was lovely to have her with him in restaurants, to see her head bent over the big menu as in prayer.

Carmella loves Arthur.

In an instant his brother had been transformed. From a life-long kibitzer he had become one of the earnest of the world. Suddenly he seemed to acquire wrists, great rawboned red things that hung from hick cuffs. He had become all that Carmella wanted merely by Carmella’s wanting it.

But now Arthur took them for lovers and grew shy. Even his father had to find some other role to play. It was all right to feel up a daughter-in-law but a mistress was a perfect stranger. Carmella’s strategy in revealing the true state of their arrangement was superb. What followed was inevitable. Arthur grew more sedate and Carmella more ardent, his humility like a sign to her from an astrologer. Now she had a focus for her needs. She was convinced — and so was Marshall — that Arthur was the one and only. For Marshall it was as if all the torch songs he had played all those years on the radio were suddenly coming true, a delphic Tin Pan Alley. His heart was breaking. It was terrible, but not unpleasant.

One day he told Arthur — they were in Arthur’s solarium—“She’s set her cap for you.”

“Aw, come on,” Arthur said, “what are you talking about? I’m your brother, for gosh sakes.”

“She’s got a crush on you, kid.”

“Blood is thicker than water.”

“You’re the apple of her eye, I get a feeling.”

“Say, what do you think I am?” Arthur said. “We grew up together. We lived under the same roof. We’re flesh and blood.”

“My impression is the love bug has bit her. That’s the long and the short of it.”

And it was love. Seeing it in her, Marshall was as embarrassed and awed in its presence as his brother. It was profane, it was passionate. Ah, his heart. Breaking, breaking, broken. He had the blues. He had the blues to his shoes. He moped. He moped and hoped. He saddened and baddened. He felt the terror of exclusion and loved Carmella the more, estrangement dislocating him and making him feel as he had as a child tuning Atlanta, St. Louis, Cleveland or Toronto.

Carmella joined them, and Arthur, decent but flustered and guilt working in him like a decision, went off to fetch tea.

“I suppose you haven’t actually slept with him yet,” Marshall said miserably. Of course he knew that she hadn’t, that she wouldn’t dream of going to bed with his brother until he was out of the picture, so that by her propriety the adultery became deeper than the mere technical one of flesh.

She seemed as miserable as he did, her pain — she wasn’t very intelligent, the strategy had been a lucky stroke — conceiving how to get out of her difficulties. “What are you going to do?” he asked her.

“Oh Richard”—he hadn’t told her he was no longer Dick Gibson—“what’s going to happen? He loves you.”

“Blood is thicker than water. I’m the apple of his eye.”

“He’s so ashamed. Sometimes I think he hates me for what he’s doing to you. I could be a good Methodist wife to him — I know I could. Redemption happens, people change. We could have kids. The house is marvelous, but there’s a lot that needs to be done. Once we were married we might even be able to talk Dad into staying with us. Children need grandparents. Did Arthur have grandparents?”

“He used mine.”

“Oh Rich, forgive me. I didn’t mean—”

“Has he made his move?”

“He’s too good. He wants your word that it’s all right.”

He hadn’t thought Carmella would stay with him after she blew their cover, but if anything she was with him more than ever now. Their lovemaking grew wilder in the last days. It was as if she understood the criminal source of Arthur’s feeling for her and tried to make herself worthy of it.

One night about a week later, she put him to sleep with the most incredible lovemaking of all. He rode Carmella about the room like a horse, slapping at her ass as she, bucking and running, strong as a wrestler in her passion, carried him. Later, he inexplicably woke up. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again, he got up without even looking toward Carmella’s side of the bed and went up to the big solarium at the top of the house and entered the great diced glass room. He had never been there at night before. Rain fell heavily on the glass ceiling and he kept ducking his head involuntarily. Remaining dry under the steadily ticking rain seemed another facet of the illusion. Great storm-trooper shafts of lightning flashed all about him and he blinked timidly. He walked to one huge vaulting wall of glass and looked out. Though he was higher than the trees and saw nothing moving, he sensed a great wind. The rain simply appeared, visible only as it exploded against the glass. It was if he were flying in it. He thought of radio, of his physics-insulated voice driving across the fierce fall of rain; it seemed astonishing that it ever got through. Now, though he was silent, it was as if his previous immunities still operated, as if his electronically driven voice pulled him along behind it, a kite’s tail of flesh. He stood in the sky. He raised his arm and made a magic pass.

“This is Dick Gibson,” he whispered, facing the thunder, “of all the networks, coast to coast.” The lightning burned along its fuse. “Latest flash from Dick Gibson: Dick Gibson loves Carmella Steep.” It exploded and made an electric alphabet soup of the wet, dark sky. “This is not Dick Gibson,” Dick Gibson said. “This is God,” he called softly across the heavens and raised his right arm and threw a thunderbolt at downtown Pittsburgh. It was just possible that because of all this turbulence his voice would get through, that someone might pick him up on the rib of an umbrella or the buckle of his galoshes. And he thought of Carmella as of some mortal woman he had loved, the memory of his recent ride apt, as if he’d had to change her into a horse in order to love her.

Arthur was touching his shoulder.

The radio man wheeled. “I want you to have Carmella,” he said. “I want you to teach her the laws of calm and Methodism and to get all that dreck out of her pussy and line it with mortal children before it’s too late. I want her to be charming to your clients and rearrange the furniture and mix it up in the Mix-master. I would marry her myself but I am not religious, though I am a god.”

“Don’t,” his brother said. “I’m sorry, I’m—”

“Can you stand in the sky?”

“Please,” Arthur said, “I feel lousy about this.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ve been very decent. You’ve — what’s that? Who’s there?” A pale shape was moving in the darkness. “Carmella?” The lightning flashed again and he saw that she was naked, as was Arthur. So she hadn’t waited. It was exactly as if she had broken an appointment with him.

Now his heart was broken. It was a Dick Gibson first. He went downstairs and packed. There wasn’t much. He played the radio as he put his few belongings together.

He had been off the radio for three months when he left Pittsburgh. For the next few months, into the winter of 1960, he traveled about the country. He had some money — he had saved perhaps $30,000 over the course of his career — and he used planes and rented cars as he had once used trains and buses. Since the apprenticeship was on him again, he went to the places where he had first broken into radio: to Kansas and Maine and eastern Washington, to Roper, Nebraska, where he had worked for the Credenza brothers on KROP, to Arkansas and Montana, to all those unbeaten paths and peripheral places on the American pie where he had been young. There were motels everywhere; it was all beaten paths. He stayed in the motels and listened to the radio, monitoring the stations he had once worked, referring to his log, the by-now thick notebook in which he kept records not only of the programs he had done but the times at which they had been broadcast. He listened out of some deep anniversarial sense, not celebrational but memorial. These time slots were his birthdays and sacred holidays, the ear’s landmarks, and what he heard came across to him not as news or music or sports but as the sound of time itself.

A few of the stations for which he had worked had become network affiliates, and in such cases he stayed only long enough to absorb some of their local programming before moving on to the next town. Once or twice he found that a station had long since closed down and he had a nervous, complicated sense of stricken time, the place’s mornings and evenings and afternoons without demarcation for him, as if invisible bombs had fallen on abstractions. These occasional disappointments apart, he discovered that most of his old stations were not only still in operation but were almost the same as during his apprenticeship. Even some of the voices he heard were familiar to him, for the voice ages less than anything; it is more constant than a nose or the shape of the mouth that houses it. There were familiar commercials, intact after all these years, slogans he hadn’t thought about for a quarter of a century but which lined his memory like nursery rhymes and released in him surges of affection for jewelry stores, all-night restaurants, lumberyards, nurseries and farm-equipment agencies. Yet even when he recognized a familiar voice he never called the station to remind an old colleague of their mutual past. He was content merely to listen, reassured by the familiar, his nostalgia a sort of credentials.

Despite change, much had remained the same — or else progressed sequentially that having known the beginning he might have anticipated what came afterward. Again he was struck by his old sense of the several Americas; he knew that lurking behind the uniformities of federal highway system and the green redundancy of enormous exit signs that made Sedalia seem as important as Chicago, and the blazing fifty-foot logotypes of the motels, and colonial A&P’s and Howard Johnsons’ like outposts of Eastern empire in west Texas’s scrub country, and teller’s cage Dairy Queens wantonly labeled as old steamer trunks, and enamelly service stations, and in back of all the franchised restaurants and department stores — there was a Macy’s in Kansas City — dance studios, taco stands, drugstores, motion picture theaters and even nightclubs, and to the side of the double arches of the hamburger drive-ins and the huge spinning chicken buckets canted from the perpendicular like an axis through true north, America atmospherically existed. It wasn’t the land; he had no mystic’s or patriot’s or even householder’s sense of the land at all. Region somehow persisted inside monolith. The Midwest threw a shadow as exotic as Spain’s. He believed in all of it. New Englanders were salty, Southerners proud. Westerners independent, Easterners sophisticated, Appalachians wise and taciturn and knew the old, authentic songs. And beneath all that, beneath all the clichés of region, he believed in further, ultimate disparities between rich and poor and lovely and ugly and quick and dull and strong and weak. And structuring even these, adumbrating difference like geologic layer, character, quirk, personality like a coat of arms, and below personality the unspoken, and below the unspoken the unspeakable, so that as he walked down Main Street he might just as well have been in Asia. It didn’t matter that the columnists were syndicated or that the rate of exchange was one hundred cents on the dollar; he felt a vague, xenophobic unease. He stared at people as at landmarks or battlegrounds or historic sites; he moved up and down the aisles of Rexall’s Drugstore as through someone else’s church, and picked at the Colonel’s fried chicken like some fastidious visitor to Easter Island pantomiming his way through a feast of guts.

He came away renewed, refreshed, his youth somehow confirmed in the spectacle of his abiding uneasiness. The apprenticeship could continue; he was anxious to go back on the radio.

It was at about this time he began to send out his demonstration records.

But he was restless. He preferred thirteen- or twenty-six-week contracts to anything longer, and developed a reputation in the industry as a drifter. Strangely, this didn’t hurt him. Somehow his itinerancy was attractive to station managers; it even lent him a certain glamour. What he was looking for was the ideal format. It formed in his mind slowly. What this was all about, what his apprenticeship meant, was that he wanted to do the perfect radio program. He didn’t know what that was, but he began to suspect it would have something to do with the telephone.

In Ames, Iowa, at KIA — he was Bill Barter — he did one of the first telephone swap programs in the United States. Called Merchandise Mart, it was really a sort of classified ads column. People called up, described an article on the air they wanted either to trade or sell and left their telephone number. When the caller hung up Bill would describe the article again briefly and give out the telephone number a second time. The program was popular, and Bill, who had never owned much himself, had a genuine curiosity about his callers. He was surprised and even confused by how casually they offered to exchange one plum of possession for another. Their notions of trade indicated whim, sudden decision, mysteriously changed minds, ways of life and thinking that hinted at Hegelian alternatives. Thus upright pianos went for motorboats, motorboats for lawn furniture, lawn furniture for air conditioners. In their descriptions the items were almost always new or used only once or twice or for part of a season, and Bill Barter imagined unspoken tragedy, disqualifying accident, sons fallen overboard and drowned and the outboard cast out. The objects seemed to come with a curse, a heavy resonance of ruin and loss. It never occurred to him that they might not work and needed repairs; his callers did not seem horsetraders seeking an advantage. Indeed, the only times he was suspicious were when something was offered for outright sale.

Other calls — hi-fi for a power mower — suggested windfall, upward mobility, some sudden unmiring intimate as disaster. So that he seemed continually caught in waves of disparate fortune, high and low tides of luck. He had a feeling of horserace, a seesaw sense of change. As the middleman he was untouched, a node through which the currents raced, and this, despite the innocuousness of the program, made him uneasy about it.

Sometimes he could not resist thrusting himself into the deals of his callers. It was frustrating; the middleman was always dropping out of the middle, and he never knew if the traders found each other. It probably seemed playful to the audience, but he was in dead earnest.

A woman called.

“Good morning. Merchandise Mart.”

“I want to speak to Bill.”

“Bill speaking. Go ahead, please.”

“Bill, I’ve got a nice double plot in Ames Gardens Cemetery. I’ll trade it for a washer and dryer or sell it outright at a 20-percent discount. My number is Field 3-8927.”

“Aren’t you going to die?”

“What’s that?”

“Aren’t you going to die? Did what you have go away? Are you cured?”

“Listen, I want to speak to Bill.”

“I’m Bill. You are speaking to him. Are you and your husband splitting up? Are you a spinster? Have you been living with your sister and now she’s getting married? I’m Bill.”

“Quit horsing around, then, and take my number.”

“Field 3-8927. I’m Bill. Are you marrying someone from an old Ames family with its own section in Ames Gardens? I’m not horsing around. Why a washer and dryer? Your voice is young. Maybe you have a lot of children and too many dirty clothes. Are you looking for a larger plot? Have you decided that your babies will be buried with you? I’m not horsing around. Do you have different ideas about death? Don’t hang up. I’m not horsing around. I’m Bill. Have you made up your mind to be cremated? Don’t ha—”

An old man with a cultured voice called.

“Bill Barter’s Merchandise Mart. Go ahead please, you’re on the air.”

“Sir, I have an eighteenth-century Chinese Chippendale stand made of aromatic tea wood and in mint condition. The piece has been in my family for two hundred and thirty-seven years.”

“Gee, what would you take for something like that?”

“Well, I thought if I could get a real nice Barca-lounger or Simmons Hide-a-Bed—”

People’s conceptions and arrangements bewildered and terrified him. A young man wanted to exchange a motorcycle helmet for a crucifix. Gardening tools went for animal traps, sheet music for rifles.

A teen-age boy called up. “I’ve got nineteen pair of women’s high- heel shoes in sizes 7A through 9 double B. Assorted colors. I’ve got eleven pair of brown pumps. I’ll take yellow belts and percale pillowcases.”

Once or twice he offered to buy things from his callers. He simply wanted to get to the bottom of at least one mystery.

A woman called the program. “I’ve got a sixty-pound bow, Bill, and a complete set of newly re-feathered arrows plus quiver and arm guard.”

“That’s just what I’m looking for.”

“You?”

“How much? What do you want?”

“Have you got puppets? I need puppets.”

“I’ll give you cash. Buy the puppets.”

“I need used puppets.”

“Why? Why, for God’s sake? I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

“It isn’t the money,” the woman whispered. “Only used puppets will do.”

The program made him nervous and he left it when his contract ran out.

A few months later he did a straight telephone request show in Fort Collins, Colorado.

“‘The Theme from The Apartment’ for Roger.” It was a man’s voice.

“‘Days of Wine and Roses,’” a little girl sobbed. “It goes out for Phil and Doris.”

“Is that your mommy and daddy? Do they drink? Is someone with you?”

There were experiments. At KBS in Needles, California, he arranged to call old colleagues who had telephone shows of their own. They kidded each other about former employers and sent out regards over the air from mutual friends. He was trying to create an aura of the thick past, an untrue sense of ebullient history. They should seem to have been boys together — close, loyal, raucous as student princes from operetta.

“Go on, Jeff, give my KBS listeners one of your famous commercials.” And as Jeff, across the country, complied, Dick — he was Marty Moon in Needles — drowned out his friend’s voice in campfire guffaw.

One night in Ohio he called backstage to the Shubert Theater in New York and talked a stagehand into leaving the phone off the hook. By manipulating sound levels his listeners were able to hear a hollow performance of the second act of Hello Dolly, together with comments by the principals as they stood in the wings waiting for their cues.

He tried to impart a sense of the spontaneous and wacky by giving his audience the impression that it had just occurred to him to telephone some world leader. Then he attempted to call De Gaulle or Nehru or Khrushchev. Most of the program was taken up with just the mechanics of placing such a call, with kibitzing the operators here and overseas. He never got through, of course, but once he reached a minor official in the Soviet Union who spoke a little English. Neither knew what to say to the other.

He placed calls to whorehouses. He called a Mafia drop he had heard about, the town drunk, the village idiot. By now he was as obsessed with the telephone as he had once been with radio.

One Monday night (he was off on Mondays) he was drinking in his hotel room in Richmond, Virginia. He’d had a letter that day from Arthur. Carmella was pregnant but was having difficulty. She was older than either of them had thought, probably too old to have an easy pregnancy. She was very sick, and it was a question of whether they would be able to save the baby. The doctor was afraid her water bag would break. She would have to be in bed for five months. Dick started to think about his old mistress and about his brother and about his life. He had drunk enough to be very sad. The radio was on, as it nearly always was whenever he was home — for years he had been unable to live without the sound; it often played all night; it influenced his dreams and was the first thing he heard when he woke up in the morning — tuned to a controversy show, one very much like the one he’d had five years before in Hartford. The guest, a Klansman, had even been on his old show once. He was very outspoken and people called up either to support him or to ask him annihilating questions. Since he had been in the game a long time, he was just as equable with his enemies as with his fans.

Dick hadn’t actually been listening to the program, but now he picked up the phone by his bed and absent-mindedly began to dial the station. When he was connected he was put on hold. As he waited his mind was empty, not confused so much as fiercely blank. He had no idea what he was going to say, and when his turn came he began to talk about his life. He told about his childhood and his family, about his apprenticeship and about Miriam, about the war and about Carmella, who he said he loved, and all about Carmella’s trouble. The show’s host must have recognized his voice and didn’t try to interrupt him, letting him go on as long as he wanted. Then he talked about the last five years without Carmella, and he began to cry.

This got to the host; the man tried to reassure him gently that everything was all right.

“No, it isn’t. But if you want to know who I am,” he said, “I’m Dick Gibson.”

3

“Dick Gibson?”

“Yes.”

“Dick Gibson?”

“Yes. Turn your radio down. We’re on a six-second tape delay.”

“What? Oh. Yeah. Just a minute. I’ll turn my radio down.”

“Please. … It’s two-fifty on the Sun Coast, a balmy seventy- one degrees outside our WMIA studios on Collins Boulevard.”

“Dick Gibson?”

“Yessir.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you two months.”

“I’m pleased you finally got through. Go ahead, sir.”

“Dick Gibson?”

“Yes. Go ahead, please.”

“Your feet stink.”

“Oh?”

“I smell them over my radio.”

“But you turned your radio down.”

“I smell them over my telephone.”

The crank hung up. Dick took another call.

He’d had the program for a little more than two years and had been Dick Gibson uninterruptedly all that time. He would never not be Dick Gibson again; he had even had his name changed legally. Laying to rest the apprenticeship forever, he had at last found his format.

The program was a simple one, a variation of something he and radio had done for years. It was a telephone talk show, but slightly different from the hundreds of other telephone talk shows. Dick Gibson’s Night Letters was a sort of club really, a kind of verbal pen pals. WMIA, a powerful clear channel, 50,000-watt station, sent out its signal in a northerly and westerly pattern, regularly reaching states throughout the South and Middle Atlantic regions. His listener/callers, chiefly from Florida and Georgia, though almost as often from Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas and Virginia to the north and Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas to the west, were loosely organized into clubs called Listening Posts or Mail Bags. There were perhaps 15,000 members who for a fee — which barely covered the cost of printing and handling — received a directory of the membership. (Countless others who were not members listened regularly and called the program.) Meetings were rarely held, but from time to time Dick traveled to one Listening Post or another and met fans. Though he preferred talking to them on the phones, it was something the members wanted.

Anyone could telephone the program, but many of his callers were regulars, people who through some trick or other of dialing or patience were able to get through repeatedly. He recognized many of their voices, but he could even identify those who called in less frequently. Crank calls like the one he had just taken were rare. He barely ever had to cut anyone off the air; the six-second tape delay was a nuisance, and he wouldn’t have bothered with it except that the FCC required it. As it was, he used it sparingly; his Southerners were gentle in their speech, however violent they may have been in their private lives.

The show went on from one A.M. until four, and during the course of a program Dick might take anywhere from fifteen to forty telephone calls. He was in no hurry to move things along or to get in as many calls as possible. He had become very patient, learning in the course of the show’s run that you got the most out of people when you let them go at their own pace. He would not, for example, have cut off the man who told him his feet stank.

A light was blinking on the Arkansas line.

“Night Letters,” Dick Gibson said.

“Gibson bwana?”

It was an old friend, the caveman from Africa, the last member of the mysterious Kunchachagwa tribe. He had been discovered by anthropologists near the Fwap-dali digs on the great Ennedi Plateau in eastern Chad. The last of his race, Norman — no one could pronounce his real name, an indecipherable gaggle of clucks and chirps — had been found by the scientists as he wandered helpless and distraught outside the opening of his cave. The night before, the very night his people had discovered fire — the story had come out slowly, painfully — they had panicked and been asphyxiated in the ill-ventilated cave when a group of young, zealous hunters, made too daring by the novelty of the flames, began to throw everything they could find onto the pyre. The anthropologists comforted him and taught him English.

“Oh awful,” Norman had told Dick on the air one night, “eberyting hot, eberyting in flames. Burn up our mores, artifacts an’ collective unconscious. Eberyting go up hot hot. Young bucks burn totems, taboos, cult objects and value system, entire shmeer go up dat ebening. Whole teleology shot to shit.”

Norman had spent a happy summer with the anthropologists who debriefed and photographed him. He slept in a tent under mosquito netting. “I don’t care what you say,” Norman confessed one night, “white fellers got to be gods. Dey introducing Norman to mosquito netting. In cabe we don’t hab dis convenience.” Now, he slept under the stuff on his farm in Arkansas even in winter, using the same netting the anthropologists had given him, though it was much worn and there were holes in it. Dick tried to convince him that it should be repaired, but Norman thought it was white man’s magic that made it work.

In the fall, after that first pleasant summer, while Norman’s trauma slowly healed, the anthropologists could not decide what to do with Norman when they returned to their various universities.

“It’s not fair to the poor fellow to take him back with us to civilization. His ways are not our ways. He’d only be lost in New Haven.”

“A chap can be acculturated,” Norman had pleaded.

“I don’t see what else can be done with him,” another of the scientists said. “He’s little better than an orphan now. Intelligent though he is, he wouldn’t be able to survive alone. He’d be just as miserable by himself here in Chad as he would in the States.”

“No, Doctor. We live in two different worlds. It couldn’t work.”

“Den dis las’ one take Norman by de han’ an’ lead him into de forest. Get funny look in he eyes an’ whistle ‘Born Free.’ But Norman find way back to digs.”

The discussion went on until it was time for the anthropologists to leave. “Can we sell him to the circus, perhaps?” one of the scientists finally asked. They consulted Norman and he consented to be sold to the circus.

“Poor Norman, him culturally disoriented,” Norman told Dick on one of the first evenings he called. (Norman owned no radio; as far as Dick could tell, he had no notion that he was even on the air. Dick supposed that when the phone was installed in his shack in Arkansas some practical joker had given him Dick’s number. Possibly Norman thought it was the only number he could get.) “Him all alienated thoo and thoo. How you like dat Norman for de culture lag?”

“Were you really a caveman?” Dick asked him on another occasion.

“Oh, sah,” Norman said passionately, “my people hab nuttin’. We so backward. We neber heard ob cars or planes or tools. We so backward we neber heard ob de wheel or trees. Shee-it, we neber eben heard ob air.”

Norman had not been a success with the circus. His masters were kind — it was from them that he picked up much of the rest of what he knew of English — but the public dismissed him as a fraud. No amount of newspaper clippings or reprints from scientific journals could convince them of his authenticity. They didn’t have the patience to read them, and his gentle demeanor and essential passivity destroyed whatever confidence they might have placed in a wilder, club-swinging Neanderthal. “Norman too hip, too cool for dem public cats. Him speak to owners. Dey say hokey Wild Man of Borneo ruin it for legitimate cabeman like Norman, and advise him to go into different business. ‘What public really go fo’,’ dey say, ‘is if Norman sit up on platform above tank and let rubes th’ow baseballs at him.’ But Norman don’ like dat. Whut de hell? I son of Aluminum Siding Salesman when I back wit’ my people in de cabe.”

“An Aluminum Siding Salesman?”

“Yassuh. Dat’s our Kunchachagwa word for ‘chief.’ Yassuh”— Southerners had taught him all the rest of what he knew of English—“How you call in yo’ language—‘chief.’ Aluminum Siding Salesman way we say dat.”

So when Norman refused to become a target for baseballs the circus owners had to let him go. He signed up with a lecture bureau and traveled briefly around the South giving talks, but fearing the same reaction he had received in the circus he took measures to improve his act. He appeared before them naked.

“Folks,” he would say, “y’all see befo’ you a tragic essample ob de noble sabage. I looks out ober dis yere audience ob ladies an’ gennelmuns in yo’ all’s fancy finery an’ it gibs me de culture shock. Acherly, if No’man not be so perlite he lak to bust him sides laughin’ jest to look at yo’ all’s suits an’ coats an’ whatnot.

“Shoot! Yo’all eber lib in a cabe? You prob’ly tink sech ting all dark an’ slimy. But I tell you sho as ah lib de Stone Age was de bes’. Ain’ no air pollution in de Stone Age, ain’ no angst, ain’ no sech ting as identity crisis. Course we had our shibboleths and societal taboos, dass true. Fo’ essample, we worship peanut shells, an’ ebery autumn when de leaves fall offen de trees we tink it’s gone be de end ob de wod’ for sho’. But whut dat mean? It all relatib. Eberyting relatib. Norman, him see fire an’ him see wheel, him see television an’ him see Indiana, an’ dere ain’ no comparison. When de blood ob Aluminum Siding Salesman run in yo’ veins, I guess yo’ neber be satisfied wit cibilization. But I say one ting fo’ yo’all — I sho’ laks dat mosquito netting. De proper study ob mankind is man.”

Usually he was arrested.

After the lecture tour he took a job in a foundry, and with the money he saved he was able to buy a little piece of bottomland in Arkansas.

“Norman,” Norman told Dick one night, “trace de whole entire history ob western cibilization all in his own self. Start out in de Stone Age, in on de birt’ ob fire — may dey rest in peace — go into de foundry fo’ de Iron Age, an’ now he a farmer. Eben do some time in show biz. It jest goes to show dat it’s true whut dey say — ontogeny sho’ nuff recapitulates phylogeny an’ make no mistake! Him all tuckered out do. Tink dis nigger skip de Industrial Rebolution!”

Dick wondered how Norman was feeling tonight. The caveman was a moody caller, and at times recently he had seemed almost deranged with gloom. “Norman, how are you?”

“Norman all messed up, Gibson Bwana. Crop come up. Norman get him ’nudder culture shock.”

“What’s happened, Norman?”

“I buy farm fum white man, neber tink to ask what he planted. Norman just a jerk, neber make it in de white man’s worl’.”

“Come on, Norman, that’s no way to talk. You’re very adaptive.”

“You know whut dat son bitch planted?”

“Well, let’s see—”

“Peanuts! Him planted peanuts. I neber see so many peanuts. In cabe in Chad we got maybe altogedder five peanuts. My people worship little feller peanut. Now Norman got him more peanuts den de Kunchachagwa Pope. Make him nerbous to tink he got so many. If Mama only alibe to see …” His voice cracked and trailed off.

“Norman — you’ve got to stop thinking like that. Your mother’s dead. She died when the tribe discovered fire.”

“Sho, Norman know dat. Still, Mama very religious woman, very ortodox. Her stay in de temple all de day, make holy holy. Wouldn’t she be pleased to see her Norman wit all dem peanuts!”

“She’d be very proud.”

“Also — har, har — Norman in lub.”

“What was that?”

“Norman fall in lub.”

“That’s wonderful, Norman. Who’s the lucky girl?”

“Her — tee hee — her— No. Norman dassn’t say. Not ’llowed speak name ob female fo’ de marriage ceremony.”

“Oh?”

“I speak to she fadder do. Him ’gainst de marriage.”

Dick could imagine what the prospect of a caveman in the family might do to a parent. “Well, sometimes these things happen,” he said soothingly. “Still, if the girl loves you—”

“Dat’s jus’ whut Norman tell he sweetheart. She say she want to finish school.”

“That isn’t unreasonable. If you both still feel this way after she graduates—”

“Can’t wait much longer. Norman no chicken. Him be forty yar nex’ comet. An’ little girl just startin’ de kindergarten.”

“You’ve fallen in love with a child in kindergarten?”

“Otre temps, otre moeurs.”

“Norman, that’s … You can’t—”

“Gibson bwana prejudiced as de udder white man,” Norman said sourly.

“Prejudiced? What’s prejudice got to do with it? … What other white man?”

“Udder white man — de redneck. She fadder.”

“The little girl’s white?”

“Whut dat matter? After we married we go back to Chad. Whut dipperence color make in a cabe?”

“Norman, you live in Arkansas! Listen to me. I want you to promise— Norman, listen to me. Listen to me, please.”

“Norman got to go. Some fellers poundin’ at de cabin do’.” Gibson could hear it, an alarming Tattle and some confused shouting.

“Norman?”

But the line went dead.

A newsbreak and a couple of commercials followed. Dick took the next call at seven minutes after three. It was from an Atlanta man who couldn’t sleep and called Dick to share with him the thought that had kept him up all night. He worked as an adjustor for an insurance company and was puzzled by the fact that people always told funny stories at lunch. “Why lunch? Why humor?”

“Well probably you eat with your co-workers, and most of them are men, right?”

“Yes, but you’re on the wrong track. These aren’t dirty jokes. Mostly they aren’t even jokes at all. They’re anecdotes, amusing things that happen to them in the business, or about odd people they used to know. Sure, sometimes people are smutty, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“My point is that you’re with your colleagues. It’s mostly an all- male company.”

“That’s so, but just as often the secretaries come with us, or some of the girls from the typing pool. It isn’t just men. Why humor? Why lunch? That’s what I’m driving at.”

“That’s what I’m driving at. You’re with colleagues. Isn’t it natural for people who know each other this way to talk about the oddball things that have happened to them?”

“Sure, but why lunch? We see each other socially at other times and it isn’t like that. I see Schmidt. Schmidt’s probably my best friend. But when we go to parties or out to dinner, Schmidt’s a totally different person. We talk about issues, or the news, or maybe our kids. There isn’t all that laughing.”

“I don’t understand. Does it bother you to hear a humorous story?”

“I didn’t say it bothered me. I never said it bothered me. But don’t you see? Everything is funny; it’s always funny. Everybody in my department is an adjustor, but often we eat with underwriters or salesmen or computer personnel or even with the company physicians. We’re a big company, one whole floor is a clinic where people come to be examined for their policies. But it doesn’t make any difference if a man is a doctor or a salesman or an adjustor like myself. Whenever he speaks up at lunch it’s to tell a funny story or make some wisecrack. That’s the way it was with the last company I worked for, and the firm I was with before that when I was in another business. It’s universal.”

“Well, if you enjoy these stories—”

“Certainly I enjoy them. I laugh as hard as the next guy, but what is it? We’re adjustors. We see awful stuff. I mean, our nose is in it every day of the week. Probably the only time you ever saw an adjustor was when some guy sideswiped your car while it was parked outside your house. He looked at it and told you to go ahead and get it fixed. But that isn’t the half of it — it isn’t a tenth of it. Every day I see someone with his neck creamed or his leg torn off at the pocket, or his house up in flames and his kid third-degreed in her bedroom. You see pictures of accidents in the papers, but you don’t see these. They don’t show you the totals.

“And the underwriters know what’s going on too. They know everything there is to know about casualty and percentages, and the docs the same. Either you’re realistic in the insurance business or you go under. Do you know that 39 percent of the people who apply for life insurance are uninsurable unless they pay some fantastic premium, and 7 percent are uninsurable no matter what the premium is? There isn’t a premium large enough they could pay to insure themselves. And they’d pay it too.”

“Well, there’s your answer, then. You people see so much horror that you’ve got to have some sort of safety valve or you couldn’t take it. That’s why you tell each other funny stories.”

“No! It’s the same in any business. It’s the same in your business. Don’t the announcers all kid around when you go to lunch?”

“Yes, but—”

“Certainly. In every business. I used to be in the toy business before I went into insurance. It was the same there.”

“Well, then, the pressures,” Dick Gibson said, genuinely interested now in the problem. “Or perhaps it’s the fact that it’s mid-day. The temperature is highest then. You’ve moved your bowels, you’re not tired out yet, you’ve got all your energy. You’ve—”

“No. What is that? The temperature, your bowels? What is that, astrology? No. Why humor? I’m talking about good will — people wrestling to pick up checks or at least to leave the tip and the sky’s the limit, the world’s their oyster and good mood on them like the birthmark. No. No,” the caller said excitedly. “And all the fear that engines us gone, the personality seamless as brushstrokes on a painted wall. And to get as good as you give — the ears open and the heart as well. Lunch’s good democracy. The menu a ballot, you’re voting your appetite.”

“Certainly,” Dick Gibson said, “that would put you in a good mood.”

“What? Yes … But maybe a joke is a shyness, an anecdote no assertion and good will a finesse. I think maybe it’s strategy, a camouflage, some Asian nuance of delay. Sure. To miss profundity is to lose face.”

“I’m glad I could help you.”

“Well, you have. I think I’ll be able to sleep.”

“I’m sorry to lose a listener.”

“What? Oh. Yes. Ha ha. Why lunch? Why gags, humor, good will? Why can’t it always be lunchtime?”

The voice cracked, trailed off, and the connection was broken. Dick took three more calls and signed off for the night.

He left the studio and walked to the Fontainebleau where he garaged his car. Mopiani, one of the Negro night men, complimented him. “That was a good program, Dick. I listened on a ’68 Cadillac. Used both speakers. Drained the battery.”

He got into his car and started up Collins Boulevard to the Deauville. He loved Miami Beach, as he admired and loved all excess. He was at home in inflation, and saw the bizarre luxury hotels along the strip as a unique and lovely manifestation. Air conditioning and paper bathing suits, celebrities, amphibious automobiles, the open bus-trains that pulled tourists up and down the shopping mall on Lincoln Road, marinas, eleven different varieties of bagel, the infinite quinellas of pancake combination in the delicatessens (“Woolfie’s” and “Google’s” were his home cooking), glass-bottom boats, weather, Italian knit, sun-tan lotions and the parking problem. (Mopiani was only one of several personal attendants; indeed, he had never owned a car in his life and had purchased this one merely to have it parked.) He was visible in Miami Beach, a celebrity; he’d never been one before, not in this way. He was an intimate of bartenders, cigarette girls and wandering girl photographers (they still had them here; for all its modern patina, one of the Beach’s excesses was the past: thus, the entertainers were often older stars, the Tony Martins and Jimmy Durantes and Joe E. Lewises who were famous from a vintage of fame he had known as a boy). He enjoyed the vaguely North African sense of the place, its spanking whitewash and tiny Oriental-like shops. Though the vegetation was at first unreal to him — as though it too, like the bagel styles and lush, semi-kosher mood of the hotel kitchens, might have been imported — he had come to look upon palm trees as the very essence of tree, and to dismiss the familiar oaks and elms and maples of his past as spurious and faintly contrived. He knew beach boys, towel boys, the captains of fishing boats and their one-man crews, girl lifeguards, maître d’s, chambermaids, Cuban bookies, cops. And they knew him. To be a celebrity, he decided, was to be part of an intricately hierarchical staff, to know semi-secret passageways, backstairs, greenrooms, to have an inexhaustible supply of first names and exist placidly at last with one’s world, to belong to it as to a country club.

He lived in the Deauville Hotel facing the Atlantic in a small celebrity suite which he got at a discount, and his pockets were always filled with Deauville matchbooks — changed regularly as the sheets each morning — a Vandyked cavalier, the hotel’s symbol, on the front cover. Though he was trying to give up smoking, for some reason he could not give up the matches, and when he offered a light it was always with a strange flourish that he tossed the matchbook on the table. There were Deauville matchbooks on top of the dash of his car, in his jackets, in his rooms, in the studio, everywhere, his small, semi-official litter. Similarly, he stuffed his pockets with the tiny, wrapped hotel soaps, using them as sachets, so that he always smelled faintly of Dial and Deauville. There were other things, cavalier-topped swizzle sticks— though he was not much of a drinker — and Deauville stationery on which he jotted down memos to himself and which he actually preferred for his business correspondence to the official WMIA letterhead. For some reason these souvenirs had become important to him; he did not know why.

It was a beautiful night. The hotels seemed capable of storing energy, and now mysteriously reflected their whiteness. He drove a new convertible, the top down, like a well-paid private detective in movies, and as he drove, privileged at red lights which he stopped for or ignored according to some delicate discretionary sense of his own, he had a notion of coast, a feel of margin. Behind him lay the long drought of his inland life, his singleness (here raised to bachelordom; there were many bachelors in this place) and apprenticeship, which of late he had begun to grudge, resentful of it as of a detour. He played the radio low as he drove slowly along the attenuated strip of twenty- and twenty-five-story hotels like eccentric figures in geometry with their ramps looping like doorman’s braid and their cantilevered balconies that shoved out from the shoulders of the buildings like the epaulets of drum majors — and the buildings themselves, amok parabolas of frosting or the ribbed pockets of gadgets for slicing hard-boiled eggs. Sandcastles! And beyond the great wall of hotels that traced the soft veer of the strand, the sea itself, the fishy Atlantic, a new element. It was this — all that water — that now joined the air, fire and clay of his life, and seemed to make it whole. Here he lived, here, behind the deep water, exactly at sea level, where his voice with nothing to stop it might climb miles, a straight, clear trajectory of sound, spraying old Heaviside’s umbrella of ionosphere, deep as stars, sharp as night. He loved his luck, but it made him nervous. It might turn out to be merely temporary, like a spell of good weather. (Was that why he loved Florida, because the weather was more constant here and he took it as a sign of other, deeper constants?)

He drove up the ramp outside the main entrance to the Deauville and turned his car over to Geraldine, Nick the night man’s girl friend.

“How are you, Geraldine?”

“Not so hotsy, not so totsy. Wisht I was back in ’bama on the farm. Nick and me tuned in the show tonight on a Lincoln Continental while we necked. Turned on the air conditioning and it give me the swollen glands.”

He went inside and picked up his key from the night manager.

“Hi Dick.”

“’Lo Rick.”

“Seen Nick?”

“Nick’s chick.”

“That hick?”

“She’s sick.”

He wasn’t sleepy and went past his suite to Carol’s room, a few doors down. Carol was one of the entertainers in the lounge.

He rapped their signal. “Carol?”

“What is it? Who’s there?”

“Dick, honey. I’m a little nudgy tonight. Okay if I come in for a few minutes and talk?”

He heard someone ask who the hell was out there at this time of night. “Dick, I can’t,” Carol said from behind the door. “Not tonight.”

She must have let one of the guests pick her up, something that happened only when she was very blue. She was married, but her husband had abandoned her and her two children. Now the kids lived with her folks in Michigan; he guessed she missed them pretty bad. Sometimes she used his shoulder to cry on, though he would have preferred her to call up and tell him about it on the air.

“See you tomorrow, Carol,” he said. He leaned closer to the door. “You didn’t remember our signal,” he whispered.

There was soft music playing behind the door of Sheila’s room. Sheila was the dance instructor at the hotel, but occasionally she picked up extra money by dealing for the house in private games around Miami. He rapped their signal and when Sheila opened the door he saw that she was still in her Gwen Verdonish skin-tight clothes — musical-comedy red bell-bottoms that went up and around her body like a scuba diver’s rubber suit. She probably had a dozen such outfits. Something about her wiry, dancer’s body struck him as vicious, but he liked her very much.

He asked if he could come in. “My God,” she said, “you too? Everyone’s making a play for the help tonight. I saw Carol bring a tourist up earlier, and what’s-his-name, the swim pro, Finder, has some minky old bag from Cleveland with him. I guess that other one, Mrs. Loew, must have checked out today.”

“Finder’s keepers.”

“Finder’s keepers. Ha ha. These corridors are snug with sin, I do declare. Must be the moon. Whassamatter, Dicky?”

“I want to learn Rhumba.”

“You’re too old to learn Rhumba. Whassamatter, Dicky? Got the heebie jeebies?”

He loved show folk. They were just as worldly and understanding in person as on stage.

“Not the heebie jeebies, no. Say,” he said, “I have an idea. Why don’t we make love?”

“Well, come on in,” she said. “I do declare.”

He sat down on the side of her bed.

“You never tried to put the make on me,” she said. “What’s up?”

“To find out if you will is why. To see if you’re as worldly and understanding as you are on stage.”

“Whassamatter, Dicky?”

“Yes or no.”

“Well, yes then. Heck, yes.”

Taking her hand, he brought her down beside him on the bed and gave her a kiss. Then he tried to undress her, but he had trouble with her skin-tight clothes.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing? Hey! What are you doing?”

“I think I tore it. Send me the bill.”

“It’s a costume, dummy. It doesn’t work like regular clothes. The bell bottoms go up over my head. You take it off like a sweater. Don’t you know anything about dancing girls?”

She took the bottoms of the strange pants and rolled them up her long legs as if pulling on stockings, maneuvering her body intricately as they rose astonishingly above her hips where they unsnapped at the crotch like a baby’s pajamas. She was naked underneath. Dick gasped and gazed in wonder. “Send me the bill. I want to pay it.”

They made love and smoked. Dick offered her a light from his matchbook, but was disappointed to see that she had plenty of Deauville matchbooks of her own. Then they drank Sheila’s scotch, which he stirred with the cavalier-topped swizzle stick. The FM played “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago and Dick saw through a chink in the drapes that there was a full moon. Naked, he got out of bed and opened the curtains. Sliding back the glass doors, he stepped out on the balcony. Below him the illuminated swimming pool glowed like an enormous turquoise; beyond it the narrow, perfect lawn of beach meshed with the dark Atlantic, the uneven, concentric tops of the waves seen from above like the curved rows of an amphitheater.

He sat in a wrought iron and rubber chaise longue and crossed his arms on his chest. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that Sheila was watching him from the bed. “Come on out,” he said. “This is swell.”

“Do you know what your ass looks like pressing through those rubber straps? Like a zebra’s.”

“Come on out,” he said. “The sun will be coming up in a little bit. It’s going to be terrific.”

Reluctantly she got up and put on a dressing gown. She brought Dick’s underwear out and sat in a chaise next to his. “Here,” she said, “put this on.”

“Why? I’m comfortable.”

“How old are you, Dicky?”

“Pushing fifty. Why?”

“You’re not in the first bloom of youth is all.”

“Oh. Aesthetic reasons. Okay.” He took the underwear and pulled it on. “Is my body really that bad?”

“Pushing fifty’s pushing fifty. But actually, if you want to know, you surprised me tonight.”

“Not bad for an old man?”

“Not bad for an old man.”

He leaned over and kissed her. “Hey,” he said, “how come you were still up?”

“Oh,” she said, “like you. I had the blues.”

“Not like me,” he said. “I’m terrific. Say, look at those palm trees over on the Nautilus’s patio. That’s really beautiful. I never noticed them before. You can’t see them from my angle. They must be Royal Hawaiians or something.”

“I guess.”

“Gee,” Dick said, “the palms, the beach, the sea, the moon and stars and air. It’s really terrific, isn’t it? Listen to what they’re playing on the FM. That’s ‘Mood Indigo.’”

“I guess.”

“That’s one of my favorite songs, ‘Mood Indigo.’”

“I used to do a kind of a ballet thing to ‘Stardust.’”

“Did you? I bet it was beautiful.”

“It was corny.”

“Well, sure it was corny. Hell, yes, it was corny. But what could be cornier than this, any of this? Listen,” he said, becoming excited, “once, long before I ever pushed fifty, during the war, I had this idea about what my life would be like. It was going to be special, really something. I mean really something. Do you know what I mean?”

“Do I ever,” Sheila said. “I grew up thinking I was going to be another Chita Rivera and have the dancing lead on Broadway. I thought I’d be on Hollywood Palace one week and introduced from Ed Sullivan’s audience the next.”

“But your life is special,” Dick Gibson said. “It is. You’re here. Excuse me, but you’re here with me. My life is exceptional too. I mean, what I thought back then was that it would be touched by cliché. Look, look, the sun’s coming up! I can hear the seagulls screeching! It’s dawn. … That it would be as it is in myth. That maybe I might even have to suffer more than ordinary men. Well, I was prepared. If that’s what it costs, that’s what it costs. Sure. Absolutely. Pay life the two dollars and let’s get going! … That I would even have enemies. Well, face it, who has enemies? Is there a nemesis in the house? People are too wrapped up in themselves to have it in for the other guy. But anyway, that’s what I thought. That was my thinking about it, that I’d have enemies like Dorothy had the Witch of the West … Look, look, the sun is like a soft red ball. The wind’s coming up. You can hear it stir the palms … That I’d have this goal, you see, but that I’d be thwarted at every turn. I’ve always been in radio. I thought maybe my sponsors would give me trouble, or my station manager. Or the network VP’s. Or, God yes, I admit it, the public. That somehow they’d see to it I couldn’t get said what needed to be said. That I’d be kicked and I’d be canned, tied to the railroad tracks, tossed off cliffs, shot at, winged, busted, caught in traps, shipwrecked, man overboard and the river dragged. But that I’d always bounce back, you understand; I’d always bounce back and live in high places where the glory is and the tall corn grows. That my birthdays would be like third-act curtains in a play. I didn’t remember any of this until tonight. That’s funny, that I’d forget about it when it was all I wanted, all I’ve been waiting for …”

“Whassamatter, Dicky?”

“Nothing. Nothingsamatter. Nothingsamatter. Nothing! Listen, they’re playing ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well.’ You want to go steady?”

“Shh,” she said, “don’t shout so.”

“Was I shouting? Was I really shouting? Well, I’m sorry,” he said. He looked hard at the sunrise. “I thought it would be trite,“ he said. “I thought it would be trite and magnificent.”

“You’re a funny guy.”

“Ha ha.”

“Poor Dick.”

“Boo hoo.”

“It’s late. Why don’t we go inside?”

“I’m all right. It’s beginning to happen. I was waiting for it to start and it’s starting. I should have come to Florida years ago. It’s beginning. I can feel it. This is it, I think. I think maybe this is it.”

4

“I have a call on the Florida line. Hello. Night Letters.”

“Hello? Hello?” A kid’s voice.

“Turn your radio down, sonny.”

“All right.” A pause. Dead air. He had stopped trying to fill up the time it took for a caller to turn his radio down. What did his listeners care what the temperature was in Miami? As for the time, they’d been up all night too. They knew the time — none better.

“Hello?”

“I’m here, sonny. Up kind of late tonight.”

“Yes.”

“No school tomorrow?”

“There’s school.”

“Where you calling from, sonny?”

“Jacksonville.”

“Want to ask me a riddle?” When kids called they usually had jokes to tell or riddles to ask. A good sport, Dick gave up even when he knew the answer.

“Naw.”

“Naw, eh? Well what’s on your mind? What’s the temperature up in Jacksonville?”

“I don’t know. I’m not outside.”

“I’ll bet you’re not. Where you calling from? Is there a phone in your room?”

“Yes.”

“Do your parents know you’re using it at this hour? I’ll bet when they put that phone in they told you that having your own extension was a privilege and not a right. What do you think they’d say if they knew you were using it to call a radio station at a quarter of two in the morning? You think they’d approve of that?”

“No. But they’re dead.”

“Oh. … Well gee, son, I’m sorry to hear that. That doesn’t change the principle, though. It’s still kind of late for a youngster to be up. Youngsters need sleep … Are they both dead?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sorry, son. What did you want to talk about? Do you want to give me your name?”

“Henry Harper.”

“What did you want to talk about, Henry?”

“How do I join a Listening Post and get your Night Letter Directory? Is there a certain age you have to be?”

“How old are you, Henry?”

“I’m nine.”

“I don’t think we have anyone your age in any of our Listening Posts.”

“Oh.”

“But in all fairness, Henry, I’m sure there isn’t anything against it in our bylaws. All you do is send your name and address care of this station and write me a little something about yourself for the Night Letter. You write, don’t you?”

“I print.”

“To tell you the truth, Henry, I think you’d be better off in the Cub Scouts.”

“That’s best left up to me, I should think.”

“Just as you say, Henry. Maybe you’d better get some rest now though.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Oh?”

“I would if I could.”

“Do you want to talk about it, Henry? Do you want to talk about your Mommy and Daddy?”

“They’re dead. I told you that.”

“I see.”

“They died in a freak accident.”

“What grade are you in, Henry? What’s your favorite subject?”

“Third grade. Social Studies. Mother and Father were hobbyists. There’s money. This isn’t an extension.”

“I see.”

“Mother and Father were hobbyists. They’d done everything. They’d gone spelunking in Turkey and all along the Golden Crescent in Iran. They once sailed in a dhow from Dar-es-Salaam in the Indian Ocean all the way round Dondra Head to Columbo. There were motorcycles, of course, and skiing and safaris, and once they were the special guests of the Norwegian whale fisheries on an Antarctic whale hunt. Both of them raced cars and were licensed balloonists. They were fun parents,” Henry said, sighing.

“The freak accident?” Dick Gibson said gently.

“Yes. They’d become interested in sky diving. It happened right here in Jacksonville on the estate. I was there. I was seven. Father jumped first and then Mother. Only something went wrong. Father’s chute opened, but Mother delayed opening hers, and she fell right on top of him at about two thousand feet. She must have killed him instantly, broke his neck. They fell together another few hundred feet or so. Mother tried to open her chute but her lines must have been all fouled with Father’s. She got the reserve pack open, but the chute never bellied properly. She was able to hitchhike the rest of the way down on the buoyancy in Father’s chute, but she had no control over her drift, and they tumbled down over the trees into the private zoo. Since she was all tangled up in Father’s lines, she wasn’t able to disentangle herself in time. She spooked the tiger and it killed her. She never had a chance.”

“You saw this?”

“I didn’t see the tiger part,” the boy said. He began to cry.

“Don’t cry, son. Don’t cry, Henry.”

“Yes, sir,” Henry said. “Sorry.”

“Listen, son, why don’t you go into your grandparents’ room and tell them you’re upset?”

“They’re dead. They died in a freak accident.”

“The tiger?”

“No, sir. They were John Ringling North’s guests on the circus train, and they’d gone back to talk to the alligator woman and the midgets and the four-armed boy in the last car when the bridge buckled. Every car made it to the other side but the freaks’.”

“I see. Your uncle, then. Your aunt.”

“They’re dead too. Everybody’s dead,” Henry said.

“Well, who’s home, son? Who’s home, Henry?”

“Nobody’s home. They’re all dead.”

“Well, somebody’s got to be there. Who do you stay with?”

“I live by myself.”

“What about the housekeeper?”

“I fired the housekeeper. She wasn’t thorough.”

“You said you lived on an estate. What about the gardener?”

“The gardener’s dead.”

“Henry, children often have terrific imaginations. Sometimes they like to tease grown-ups.”

“I don’t like to tease grown-ups. I don’t have a terrific imagination. What do you want me to do, swear that everybody is dead? Okay, I swear it. I swear it on my honor.”

“Well what about the legalities?”

“How do you mean?”

“How can you live by yourself? Legally, that is. Don’t the courts have anything to say?”

“Plenty. They have plenty to say. When my parents died I was given over to the custody of my grandfather. But then he and Grandmother died in the freak accident. There were no other relatives. I had an executor and he died, and the man who took over for him, he died too. I guess all the provisions for me just finally ran out. I don’t blame anyone. There’s a curse on me, I think. My guardians are wiped out. There’s a trust fund which I don’t get till I’m twenty-one, but there’s cash. There’s a lot of cash around the house — about three quarters of a million dollars — and I use that to live. I’m all alone here. But I go to school. I never play hooky.”

“Henry, a boy needs adult guidance. How can you live in a big house all by yourself? What about your meals?”

“I’m all right. I’m fine. I make my own breakfast and the school has a hot lunch program. At night I eat in restaurants. I take taxis to them, or sometimes if I don’t feel like going out I have a cab bring over some chicken from the Colonel.”

“Well, that’s all very fine, Henry, but I really think you shouldn’t be by yourself.”

“If I had a little brother … They wouldn’t let me adopt one, do you think?”

“No, Henry.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Listen, Henry, I’d like you to make me a promise.”

“What?”

“Will you promise?”

“I’ll have to hear what it is first. I won’t step into anything blindfolded.”

“I want you to promise that first thing tomorrow you’ll get in touch with the authorities and tell them about your arrangements. Will you promise me that, Henry?”

“Certainly not. I can take care of myself. Listen, I pay my bills. I’m never behind on the gas or electricity. The phone’s always taken care of. I go for my checkups when I’m supposed to and I leave the cash with the nurse right after the examination. They never have to bill me. If I need a plumber or a roofer I know how to get in touch with one. I use the Yellow Pages. I’m fair with the merchants. Cash on the barrelhead — which is more than a lot of adults can say. I even give to charity.”

“Well, who do you play with, Henry?”

“I don’t play much. But I go to ballgames whenever I want. Last September I wanted to see the World Series, so I just hopped on a jet and went. I got the tickets from a scalper outside the stadium but they were good seats. Listen, I’m very responsible. I’m no wild kid or anything.”

“It’s your life, Henry, but I think you’re making a mistake.”

“Don’t get me wrong. It was fine living with my grandparents. They were nice people. When they died I had a good relationship with my executor. He was an old friend of the family and we got along very well. The man who took his place when he died, that’s another story. Well, he was a perfect stranger. I’m sorry he had the heart attack, of course, but I didn’t mourn or anything. I just don’t want anyone adopting me for my money. Listen, I’m all right.”

“Except you can’t sleep nights.”

“What? What’s that? Well, yes, but your program helps a lot. That’s why I called. I want to join a Listening Post. I mean, I listen to all these old people who call up and tell you their troubles and they try to put a good face on things but you can tell they’re scared and that their hearts are broken. They break my heart. They remind me of my first executor. He was terminal, just like that Mrs. Dormer who calls from Sun City. I think it would help if I could write some of those people. I don’t mean I’d give them advice — though I could probably give them some pretty good advice. I could tell them that it doesn’t matter, that it’s important to have courage, that that’s what matters. But I don’t mean advice. Anyway, they probably wouldn’t take it from a kid. But maybe I could help some of them with money — you know, to get their operations or bring their sons home from San Diego to see them before it’s too late. I have all this cash lying around. I don’t need much. I’d move into a smaller house like a shot, but I can’t put the estate on the market because I can’t enter into contracts yet. That’s the big hitch about being a kid and living by yourself, you can’t enter into contracts. I think I might move into a smaller house anyway and just close down the big one. Anyway, I’d like to join one of the Listening Posts. I probably have more in common with some of these people than you might expect, and — let’s face it — it would make me feel a whole lot better to be able to help out. So that’s why I called. I wanted to thank you too. You do very good work.”

“You’re a good boy, Henry,” Dick said, and he hung up after promising to send the materials as soon as he got the boy’s application.

Moved by Henry’s call, but not quite certain that it wasn’t a joke, he felt strangely troubled the rest of the evening. The callers seemed similarly affected; they were subdued and even the number of calls fell off sharply. Dick had to stretch out conversations with people he normally wouldn’t have kept on the air more than five minutes.

The Refugee called. He had come to the country before the war but that’s how he referred to himself. It was never clear what country he had emigrated from, and he spoke with no trace of an accent. He was a boring sort of refugee. The only clue to his foreign origin was that when he became excited — and being on the radio usually made him excited — he often confused the usages of “how” and “why” and of “good” and “well.” He would say that he liked his meat “good done,” and once he had made an impassioned speech in support of his local police. “It’s wrong, Mr. Gibson, why the public doesn’t support its policemen. The way these young punks scream ‘police brutality’ every time one of them is arrested is positively sickening. We should honor every last cop on the beat, and instead of castigating him we should get down on our knees and tell him ‘Good done, thou well and faithful servant.’” Maybe the Refugee was a joker too.

“Why are you tonight, Mr. Gibson?” the Refugee asked.

“Fine, and you?”

“Can’t complain. I’ve got my health and well name. What more could I want?”

“Not a thing.”

“That’s what I say. The important thing is to be merry, get along with your neighbors and show your wellwill.”

Dick wondered if the man was putting him on. Perhaps his callers were all unemployed actors.

“Are you still there, Mr. Gibson?”

“Here I am.”

“Good, as I was saying, it’s always a well idea to be friendly. It doesn’t cost a thing and it’s often good worth it.”

“Hmn.”

“That’s my thinking on it, anyway.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Sure I am. It doesn’t make sense to grouse and pout when you can wear a smile and be a well friend. I don’t know how these pessimists always look on the dark side of things. I ask myself how, but it just doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“Good, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I just wanted to call and tell you why things are going.”

“Wellnight,” Dick Gibson said.

“Wellbye,” the Refugee said.

“Your feet stink.”

“Dick boy.”

“Mrs. Dormer?”

“Yes, Dick boy. That’s right, Dick boy.”

“How are you, Mrs. Dormer?”

“Not so fit as a fiddle. I don’t suppose it will be too much longer now.”

“That’s foolish, Mrs. Dormer. You’ve had these sieges before. You’ll get over this one just as you got over the others. Are you taking good care of yourself?”

“I’ve been in bed for the past week. Frances had to put the call through. I can’t hold the phone. Frances is holding it for me right now. I haven’t the strength.”

“How is Frances, Mrs. Dormer?”

“Frances is fine, Dick boy. I’m afraid I’ve been a terrible burden to her, but she’s a good girl. Do you know she missed Tom’s graduation to come out here when she heard?”

“She must be a comfort.”

She certainly is, Dick boy. She is a comfort, but I don’t see why she didn’t wait until her son graduated to come out. It would just have been a few days. That Dr. Pepper can be a terrible alarmist sometimes.”

“Well, he just wanted you to be comfortable, Mrs. Dormer.”

“I know that, Dick boy, but I’m thinking of poor Tom. He’s got no father and now here’s his mother who won’t even be at his graduation.”

“He’ll be fine, Mrs. Dormer.”

“Lord, I hope so. That’s my prayer, Dick boy.”

“You just try to be comfortable and don’t worry about anything. That way you’ll get better sooner.”

“I don’t really believe that, Dick boy, do you?”

“Well, certainly I do. Of course I do. You’re just a little discouraged now because of Tom.”

“She’s stopped taking her medicine, Mr. Gibson.”

“Who’s there? Who is that? Frances?”

“It’s Frances, Mr. Gibson. Mother’s stopped taking her medicine. She won’t take any of her pills. Would you say something to her? Just say something to her, would you, Mr. Gibson?”

“Mrs. Dormer?”

“I’m here, Dick boy.”

“This is shocking, Mrs. Dormer. I’m really surprised. Here’s Frances, come to be with you all the way from Chicago, missing her son’s graduation. All she wants is for you to get better, and here you are acting like a naughty child who won’t take her medicine! How do you think that makes Frances feel?”

“I’ve called to say goodbye, Dick boy. I’m weaker every day. I’ll slide into a coma soon. You shouldn’t try to trick an old woman on her deathbed.”

“Now Mrs. Dormer, you mustn’t say things like that. You’re a religious woman, Mrs. Dormer. Only God can tell when a person’s going to … what you just said. You believe that, don’t you?”

“I called to say goodbye to you and all my friends in the Listening Posts, and to thank all the nice people who took the trouble to send me cards and little notes. I don’t think I’ll be able to speak to you again, and I want you to listen. It’s a great effort for me to speak at all, and you shouldn’t make me argue about what is obvious. Now you’ve got to listen. Will you listen, Dick boy?”

“I wish you wouldn’t—”

“Will you?”

“Yes, ma’m. I’m listening.”

“Mr. Gibson, she won’t even take her pain killers. I’m sorry to blubber like this, but you don’t know the agony my mother’s in.”

“Frances?”

“Gracious, Mr. Gibson, do you know she’s actually lying here naked on the bed because the pressure of her night clothes is just too painful on her skin? I never saw my mother naked in my life, Mr. Gibson, and now she won’t even cover herself with a handkerchief. She’s going to get pneumonia. Besides everything else, she’s going to come down with pneumonia. If she’d take her pain killers we could dress her properly and then she wouldn’t come down with pneumonia. She won’t listen, Mr. Gibson. I’m going to put the phone back to her ear. You make her listen, will you?”

“Frances, Dick boy doesn’t want to hear all this. Shame on you for making such a fuss. I’ve got wonderful friends in the Listening Post organizations who love me and who I love, and a lot of them are just as sick and broken as I am, and you’ve got no right to upset them like this. I wanted to say goodbye to my good friends, and it looks like no one is going to let me do that.”

“Mrs. Dormer?”

“What is it, Dick boy?”

“Look, Mrs. Dormer, you have got wonderful friends in the Listening Posts. You have. And because they do love you they don’t like to see you give up like this. They want you to fight back, just as you fought back in the past. Why don’t you take your pain pills and whatever else Dr. Pepper thinks you ought to have. Don’t let those good friends down. Don’t give up. Will you promise that? Will you make that promise to me and to your good friends in the Listening Posts?”

“No, Dick boy, I won’t. And who said anything about giving up, Dick boy? It’s because I haven’t given up that I won’t take those pills. That boy who was on last week, that Henry Harper, he mentioned my name and said he wanted to give me advice, that old dying people should have courage. Well, I’ll show him courage! What does he know about it? That’s why I won’t take those pills. Do you know how it hurts me? I hadn’t meant to talk like this, but it seems no one will let me say what I wanted to say, that you all want me to believe everything’s all right, not so’s you can believe it too, but so’s you can believe I believe it and be comforted. I call that selfish. And everything isn’t all right. Do you know how it hurts? Do you know how bad it is? My voice, just my own voice coming out of my throat is enough pressure to pull the skin off me. Just my words. Just the weight of my words in my throat is like being cut with knives. Just that. Just to say ‘flower’ is a torture to me. Just to whisper it. I’m killing myself, I’m killing myself to speak and now you make me say all this. I want to be still. All I want is to be still.”

“Hush.” Dick said, frightened. “Hush, Mrs. Dormer. Please hush.”

“I’m going to say it. Let me, for God’s sake, will you please? You’re killing me, Dick boy.”

“Go ahead, Mrs. Dormer. Go ahead, ma’m.”

“I want … I want … to thank you all. You’ve been … my family. Now I know, I know it’s awful for an old dying woman to call up and oppress folks this way and give them bad dreams. It’s awful. It’s vulgar, a phone call from the death bed. It’s inexcusable and I’m sorry, and now all this other has come out and I’ve made a mess — but I did have to tell you all goodbye and thank you for the happiness you’ve given me. And this is the only way I have, don’t you see? I had to make peace with my friends and give them my love. I had to. Goodbye, all my good friends, and God bless you. God bless you, Dick boy. Goodbye, my dear.”

“Goodbye,” Dick Gibson said. “Goodbye, Mrs. Dormer. I love you.” He waited a moment to see if she would answer, but he heard nothing and finally he hung up and took another call.

There was a call on the Tennessee line.

“Night Letters. Go ahead, please.”

“You can wish me a happy birthday.”

“Happy birthday. Who is this?”

“Don’t you recognize my voice?”

“Help me out. Where in Tennessee are you calling from?”

“Knoxville.”

Dick opened the directory and turned to the Knoxville page. The voice was thickish with no hint of a Southern accent. Quickly he ran down the one- and two-word descriptions of voices he had penciled in beside each of the names. Next to one he found the word “whiskey.” He had a go. “Harold Flesh?”

“That’s right.”

“Get any cards from the Mail Baggers?”

“Them Mail Baggers come through when you’re laid up in the hospital. When you got a broken leg they come to your room and write their names on your cast.”

“Well, Harold, so many of the Mail Baggers have trouble, you see.” Recently he had begun to detect a note of piety in his voice. It was not unpleasant. “They’re kept pretty busy cheering up our Mail Baggers who really need it. An awful lot of our people have trouble, Harold.”

“They’re trouble shooters.”

“Well, there’s a lot of fun in them too, Harold.”

“They pitch in for a wreath. They sit with the kids when it’s time for the funeral.”

“That isn’t all there is to it, Harold.”

“They knit and they bake. They read to the blind from newspapers.”

“I think you’ve got it wrong, Harold.”

“Have I, yeah? They have the names of cleaning women and lend you Consumer’s Report. They bring back an ice cream when they walk to the corner. Naw, I didn’t get no cards from them. I can stand on my feet, nothing’s broke. I didn’t get no cards.”

“Do you know what I think? I think that as soon as you hang up folks are going to call to wish you a happy birthday. I’ll bet that’s exactly what happens. I’ll bet some of them sing their greetings right over the phone. You see if I’m not right.”

“Big deal.”

“You’ll see.”

“Big deal.”

“I’m certain of it. They’ll wish you happy birthday and sing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.’”

“Sure, sure.”

“They will.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll bet. I can imagine.”

“Mark my words.”

“Big deal. Federal case.”

“That’s what I think, Harold. The Mailbaggers—”

“We’ll see,” Harold cut in. Hurriedly he told Dick goodbye.

Then Henry Harper called.

“I’ve been trying to get Mrs. Dormer in Sun City since that night she spoke to you. Nobody answers the phone. Is she alive? Is she all right?”

“I don’t know, Henry. I haven’t heard.”

“Tell her she’s got to take her pills. That was foolish what I said about courage. She has to take her medicine. Mrs. Dormer, do you hear me? Please take your pills. You mustn’t have pain. You mustn’t have pain on my account.”

“My ears were pierced when I was ten years old,” a woman told him from Ft. Lauderdale. “It was the central event of my life.”

“How come?”

“My mother did it herself. She used a needle — like the gypsies — and for an anesthetic she held ice cubes to my lobes. The ice melted and soaked the collar of my dress. There was a lot of blood. It mixed with the melted water from the ice cubes, and with my tears too, I guess. Ice isn’t a good anesthetic. And Father was weeping to see me in pain, but Mother saw that the aperture would close. ‘Run,’ she said, ‘bring something we can slip through the hole.’ You’re supposed to use an earring, but Mother’s own ears had never been pierced and we didn’t have any. The colored girl offered hers but Mother wouldn’t take them. Father brought nylon fishing line. ‘It’s fifty-pound strength,’ he said, ‘it’s all I could find.’ They tried to push the fishing line through my ears, but it was too thick, of course, and Mother jabbed at my ears some more, pressing with the head of the pin this time, and a little white flesh fell off on my shoulder like the rolled-up paper in a punch- board, and after a while they could just slip the fishing line through. Father had used it before and there was salt from the ocean on the line—”

“This is a terrible story,” Dick said.

“Wait. The point isn’t pain. Wait. It isn’t the mess they made. There’s mess at birth. Wait.”

“Well, go on.”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Wait. … I slept with the fishing line in my ears and the wounds suppurated and they took me to the doctor. The doctor was furious, of course. He removed the fishing line at once, and treated me with salves and antibiotics. ‘We’ll be lucky,’ he said, ‘if the ears don’t turn gangrenous. You came to me just in time.’

“But evidently we didn’t, or the infection hadn’t run its course, because the pain was worse than before and every morning there was blood on the pillow. Father wanted to take me back to the doctor, but something had happened to Mother. She’d become fierce. As I say, like a gypsy. ‘The doctor’s a fool,’ she said, and brought a newborn kitten and set it beside me on the bed and poured milk on my ears, and the kitten licked the milk, licked the ears, nursing my lobes. It felt strange and fine, and when the kitten wearied of licking at the dry lobes I would daub more milk on them and set the kitten back at my ears.

“In a few days the kitten came by herself and would lick at the lobes even without the milk. Maybe she thought the blood and the pus were part of the milk. Mother was a modern woman. I don’t know where she learned about this; maybe she read it, or maybe she just knew. So there we were, this ten-year-old Madonna and kitten, and even after my ears had healed I went around with it on my shoulder, transferring it from one shoulder to the other, its tongue at my ear, as though it were itself an earring.

“Then one day the kitten was gone. It disgusted Father, Mother said. Anyway, it had already done its job, she said. I cried, but Mother said Father had forbidden me the kitten and that was that.

“But it wasn’t Father — it wasn’t Father at all. It was Mother. Wait. You’ll see.

“Two days after the kitten disappeared my mother came and examined my ears. She took each lobe and rolled it between her fingers like dough. ‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘They’re lovely and strong. I have a surprise.’

“They weren’t beautiful. They were hideous and mysterious to me. The holes had collapsed and were clean as scars. Like navels they were, with just that texture of lifeless second growth. Or properly speaking, not holes at all. One was a crease, an adjustment that flesh makes, like the change in a face when a tooth has been pulled. And one was a hole — a terrible absence where a feature should be. Or like a child’s sex organ, perhaps, unhaired and awful. Awful — they were awful.

“Mother’s surprise was earrings, of course. I was ten when this happened. Do you follow me? My character had already been formed. It had been formed on the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale with the characters of my friends, and at motion-picture theaters and at pajama parties on weekends and by the long, extended summer of my Florida life.

“Then Mother showed me the earrings. Two pairs. One the post kind — button earrings, they’re called. Tiny coins like gold beauty spots. She put them in my ears and showed me my reflection in a glass. ‘Take them out. Mother. Please.’

“‘Are they heavy?’ she said. ‘Are you sensitive there? Don’t worry. We’ll butter the posts, or dip them in fat from a chicken I have. They’ll be all right.’

“‘Please, Mother. Oh, please take them out.’

“It was what I saw in the mirror. I was someone foreign, someone old. Like the gypsy again, or an aunt in a tintype. Like a man who tells fortunes, or someone who died. Like a child on a stage who plays the violin.

“Mother took the earring out and put in the other pair of earrings. These hung from a wire, a treacherous loop, and when they went in they opened fresh wounds. ‘How do you like them?’ my mother asked. This pair was silver, a long, thin, antique lattice and a queer wafer which swung from it. ‘Do you like them?’ she asked. She was so fierce. I knew they cost a lot. I knew more: I knew she had bought them even before she had pierced my ears! ‘They’re very nice,’ I said, and when she left I took them out, unwinding the loop from my ear as you might detach a key from a keyring. I slipped into the bathroom and got some of Mother’s vaginal jelly and greased the lobes. In the morning I left the house before she could see I wasn’t wearing the earrings.

“But now, now I was so conscious of my ears. I thought, I thought boys stared at them — you know? Nasty naked things. I went back and put the earrings on just to … well, cover myself. Again I was transformed into someone foreign, some little strange girl.

“That’s when everything began to change.

“All my girlhood, all my life, I had lived in the sun, but now my darkness wasn’t tan but something Mediterranean, a darkness in the genes, something gone black in the blood. There was pumice in it, a trace of volcanoes that slope to the sea, carbon on kettles from fires outdoors.

“I couldn’t ride a bicycle any more, or rollerskate. And the imagination of narrow disaster whetted: What if I should stumble? What if I should fall? The posts like actual stakes to me, the loopy wire hardware medieval. And dirty, dirty germs beyond the reach of sterilization— though I dropped the earrings every night in boiling water — as if the germs might be part of the metal itself, collected in its molecules, a poison of the intimate, the same reciprocal bacterial play as between a head and a hat or hair and a sweatband, toes and socks, a foot, a shoe. Foh! I was fearful not just because of the simple ripthreat to my ears, but because once the sores were reopened, once the crease had become a slash, the floodgates of disease would open too, death by one’s germs, one’s own now un-American alien chemistry.

“I took up music, one day simply appearing among my schoolmates with a violin (just as one day my surfboard disappeared: it was simply gone — my fierce mother, I suppose). And do you know that though I had no talent I played even from the beginning with a certain brooding seemliness? And the earrings like actual yokes, gyroscopic; I might have been fetching water from the well, balancing buckets up hills. Yes! Something even more Oriental than Mediterranean in the way I shuffled through childhood.

“Even in real summer I no longer wore shorts or jeans or went down to the sea in bathing suits. When skirts were short mine were long, when long, short — again that gyroscopic balance I spoke of — and don’t forget the earrings themselves, those gold and silver alternatives. (Why I could have been an alternative myself, a community reference point like a hyphen on a kitchen wall, Ft. Lauderdale’s little historical girl.)

“The boys were afraid of me, and gave off some dark respect, taking my gypsy bearings and seeing me even at thirteen and fourteen as whatever the adolescent equivalent of a divorcee might be. Thinking me hot where I was cool, cool where I burned. And although they sometimes asked me out — this was when I was sixteen or seventeen — it was as if there were chaperones behind a curtain, duennas, or invisible brothers, say, a troupe of jealous acrobats, dark ethnic stabbers with Mary’s medals on their necks.

“I am never without the earrings now — the collection has become enormous — and only take them off to boil them in water or sink them like teeth in a glass by my bed. I continue to soap my ears with vaginal jellies. And sometimes there are kittens too, still, which I train in the old way to pull at my cream-sweet lobes while I dream in my bed. I am thought reclusive, silent, but my silence is only the open secret of my ears. My hearing has been affected. Ears, I have ears. The better to hear you with, my dear.”

Ears, Dick Gibson thought, ears, yes. A chill went through him. The woman continued to talk, but he could barely follow her now; he was thinking of ears. Then she broke through his reverie. “—your fragile orphan, your soprano, or someone recovered from polio but not quite, who walks with a limp, the body’s broken English, something nasty there, the kind who groans in orgasm, who shouts dirty words during sex. Oh, my adoptive styles! I crochet but don’t drive, I stay in the house during menses, I burn easily, I go to museums, and am never seen without my sheet music.”

“Listen,” a caller said from Cincinnati, “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m a schemer. That’s how I happened to catch your show. Certainly. A schemer lies awake nights, what do you think? I’m calling from the kitchen. The wife’s in bed. Sometimes when the schemes aren’t there, I come down and make myself a sandwich and drink some milk. I try to relax. Listen — it’s the first time I’ve called — I’ve been meaning to ask. How many of your callers are schemers, do you think? How many are up nights, looking for angles, thinking up ways, dreaming of means?

“You know what they say? ‘Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ But let’s don’t kid ourselves, how many of us are inventors, how many of us are equipped? On the other hand, I’m not just talking about pipe dreams. A schemer has to look out for those. Because things look possible at night. Hope’s there, wishing is. But I’m looking for something sensible that would go, something meaningful that could really take off. As good as metals in the ground, opportunity like a national resource.

“After my wife had the baby I’d see her sterilizing bottles, preparing formulas, and I thought, what if there was a company that delivered that stuff already made up? What a boon that would be. I went to the milk people with my idea and they showed me why it wouldn’t work. (Though some outfit out west does it now and are making a killing.) Then I had this idea about renting shirts. You’d get them from the laundry and never have to buy any. They’d have your size on record and bring you fresh ones every week, different styles and colors, ties to match. So I went to this laundry company and they proved to me how it wasn’t feasible. That’s the secret, of course: it has to be feasible. Feasibility’s what separates the men from the boys schemer-wise. We’re always running up against the brick walls of the real; we live in a medium of reasons as other people live in a medium of air — on the one hand and on the other hand like left and right.”

“Why wasn’t it feasible?”

“What’s that, friend?”

“Why wasn’t it feasible for the laundry to rent shirts?”

“Oh. They have those now too. There’s a firm that does that now. Not the one that said it wasn’t feasible. … It’s timing. It’s timing and force. A schemer has to have those too. He has to know when to plunge.”

“I see.”

“Desalinization — that’s where the money is. Or steam cars, electric, you’d think you’d clean up. But it isn’t feasible, Detroit says. I dream of getting in on the ground floor of these things. And the Americanization of Europe, of Africa, the far East. Jungle drive-ins and ice cream on the Amazon and suits off the rack on Savile Row. The bottom of the sea — there’s a ground floor for you. The whole world is ground floor if you know where to stand.

“I’m a schemer. I’m a schemer and dreamer. In the army — Korea was on back then — I figured if you were in the Canine Corps they’d have to keep you stateside that much longer. It stands to reason — you train at the brute’s rate. A dog’s brain isn’t as quick as a man’s. Then I wondered if there might not be a difference between leashed dogs and unleashed. That figures too. Well, reason it out. A dog on a leash can be forced to do what you want. It’s harder when he’s not connected to you. So I put in for unleashed and saw to it that I was assigned the dumbest dog there. I stalled them for months. Then I applied for kennel master. My CO. told me it wasn’t feasible to make me kennel master. You had to be a vet.

“I’m scheming still. Sometimes the ideas come so thick and fast I can’t keep up with them — laundromats in motels, movies in airports, house sitters for people away on vacation. You know something? There’s never been a Western on the stage. I’m no writer, but something like that would go over big. If you could figure out what to do about the horses and cattle drives it might be feasible. I have these ideas. I swear to you, I no sooner begin the research on one plan when another pops into my mind. I count opportunities like sheep. How many of your listeners are like me? I’d be interested to know.”

“We’ll try to find out for you.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks for your call.”

“I was doing some reading about wines. There’s this one wine— Lafitte Rothschild — which sells for eighty to ninety dollars a bottle once it’s mature. It takes years to mature properly, years. In France, down in cellars, it’s carefully turned — they call that ‘laying wine.’ A man could spend his whole life on the job turning it, and then it might be his son or even his grandson who’s finally the one to bring it up. That’s why it’s so expensive. But once in a while they put it out on the market for the wine buffs before it’s ready. That’s called ‘first growth,’ and it can sell for as low as $2.00 a bottle. Well, I had an opportunity to buy out a shipment of this ‘first growth’ wine. I thought about it carefully. I considered it from every angle. I tried to look at it from the point of view of the big distributors. I weighed the pros and I weighed the cons, and finally I decided to do it. I invested all my savings and bought up about three thousand bottles at $2.38 a bottle. I built this special cellar and spent a lot of money to get it at the right temperature, and now I go down and I turn the bottles — a quarter turn clockwise in winter, a quarter turn counter clockwise in fall. And once a year I bring the bottles up to stand in the shade for a day in the spring when the barometer’s low. It’s a long shot, don’t think I don’t know it, a long-term proposition — thirty years, maybe more — but I’m a schemer, no pipe dreamer, I mind the feasibility and to hell with your get-rich-quick.”

“Well good luck,” Dick Gibson said.

“This year I had a heart attack — not a bad one, very mild really. ‘You can live a long time yet,’ the doctor told me. ‘Just get plenty of rest and try not to worry.’

“Say I do get plenty of rest, say I don’t worry. It isn’t feasible.”

Toward the end of that evening’s program, the anthropology professor called for the first time in months. Dick had never learned his name but always looked forward to one of his calls. The anthropologist was full of fascinating information; he was one of the few callers who apparently had no interest in talking about himself but simply enjoyed sharing some of the conclusions of his research with Dick and his audience. They chatted pleasantly for a time, the anthropologist feeding Dick a lot of interesting facts about the Seminole Indians who lived along the Tamiami Trail just west of Miami. Dick had seen their wretched cardtables along the roadside, makeshift lean-to “stores” hardly more sophisticated than a child’s lemonade stand, and had glimpsed their terrible hovels through the broken fences meant to screen them from the sight of tourists.

“They’re so poor,” Dick said.

“Oh Dick, the Navajos could give them a run for their poverty. Many tribes could. That’s not the point. The Seminoles are the only tribe that makes its camp outside a great metropolitan area. They’ve always done this. They did it when the land still belonged to the Indians. They lived on the doorstep of the Creek and Chickasaw and Choctaw. Seminole—Sim-a-nóle, or Iste Siminóla—means ‘separatist’ or ‘runaway’ in the Muskogean language.”

“I didn’t know that,” Dick Gibson said.

“They were the first suburbanites, you see. They conceive of their destiny as a Mighty-Have-Fallen warning to other peoples. In times of slavery they set up their villages outside the slavequarters. They were offering the example of their condition as a gift to the slaves.”

“Gee.”

“There’s a deep instinct at work here. Follow closely. The significance of the suburbs — I’m doing work on this — is that all peoples are in exile. Your two-week summer vacation is an example. (Traffic patterns and roads, by the way, follow morale patterns closely.) It’s all related to the Vacant-Throne theory of history. The czar had his summer palace, the President his summer White House. These are Diaspora symbols.”

Unfortunately it was time for Dick to sign off. He had to break in on the professor.

“Put me on hold,” the anthropologist whispered, “I have something to tell you.” Dick regularly received such requests, and sometimes the phones were lit up for as much as an hour after he went off the air. It may have been that people felt that reaching him privately lent a distinction even more profound than speaking to him on the air. Recently he had frequently obliged them, sometimes hearing terrible things in this way — awful things. People who were well spoken on the air often made no sense at all when they spoke to him privately afterwards — or they might suddenly lapse into some of the vilest language he had ever heard.

After signing off he came back to the professor. “What did you want to say?” he asked.

“Tell me,” the anthropologist said urgently, “whether a man sits or stands up to wipe himself, and I’ll tell you everything else about him. This cuts through cultures, Dick. It obliterates history and geography. Dick, it’s the single distinction between men. It annihilates everything else. Religion, laws, custom — these things are nothing. He stands because his mommy wiped him. Do you see this, Dick? He stands now because he still expects some great, warm soft hand to rub his shit away. All else is nothing. Freud never really understood the true significance of the anal-retentive concept. It’s his own term, but he missed the boat. Incidentally, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Freud himself was a stander.”

“I thought this had something to do with the Seminoles.”

“Forget the Seminoles. They’re nothing but a bunch of poor-mouth bastards. Poor mouth, poor mouth, that’s all they know. All that Mighty-Have-Fallen crap. Forget the Seminoles. The Seminoles aren’t my real work anyway. Dick, I have so many ideas, I’m exploding with insights. Truth is everywhere, Dick; significance is as available as gravity. Do you know the best place to learn about a people’s legal and penal system? Its zoos! Go to its zoos, Dick, and you’ll find out more about its laws and prisons in a half-hour than you would in its courts and jails in a year.”

“I don’t—”

“Did you know there are three fundamental pieces of furniture— the table, the bed, and the chair — and that a people behaves according to the article of furniture dominant in its culture? Did you know that the living-room sofa, or couch, is only a sort of hybrid bed, and that it was introduced by the degenerate Assyrians as a means of formalizing adultery?”

“You’re going too fast, I can’t take all this—”

“There’s more. There’s always more. If you miss one truth there’ll be another along. It’s like streetcars. Wait, wait. The Axis Powers were the only nations involved in World War II which didn’t conclude their news broadcasts with weather reports. No question of secrecy was involved; it was simply a matter of the lack of regard for one’s fellows. Since the people within the range of a given broadcast knew whether it was raining or the sun was shining, they didn’t care what was happening in the rest of the country.”

“I don’t see—”

“Flags! Red, green, blue, white, black and gold are the predominant colors used throughout the world for its flags because those are the colors — with the exception of red, which is always blood — that symbolize not only the basic forces of nature but the particular natural forces most valued by a culture. Your flag is a dead giveaway.”

“What has this—”

“Sandwiches! What’s the thickness ratio of the contents of a sandwich relative to its bread? Is lettuce used to add height? This gives us the hypocrisy quotient. Or those little soaps with a hotel’s trademark on the wrapper—”

“What? What about those soaps?”

“Or matchbooks! Matchbooks particularly. Why does a man become attached to the iconography of a particular trademark?”

“Why does he? Is that significant?”

“What’s to be made of the fact that soaps wane with use, that fire consumes the matchstick, that the height of a pile of letterhead stationery goes down in a drawer, that a swizzle stick is made to be snapped in two?”

“What? What is to be made of it?”

“Oh Dick, Dick. My real work isn’t the Seminoles, it isn’t zoos, it isn’t furniture or artifacts. It’s your program. My real work is your program, Dick. Look out, Dick. Be careful. Please be more careful. Watch your step. A scientist is warning you. Don’t take calls after the show. Don’t put people on hold. Get your rest, try not to worry. Be like the man in Cincinnati.”

“Who is this? What’s this all about? What are you saying to me?”

The anthropologist giggled and broke off; Dick heard the buzz of the broken connection. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but he was almost certain that the man had been disguising his voice. The giggle had been a sort of sudden relaxation. Something about it had seemed familiar.

And then he remembered. A name flashed into his mind. No, he couldn’t be mistaken. Behr-Bleibtreau! It had to be. The idea was disquieting at first, but later, going back to the Deauville in the car, he was filled with a marvelous sense of relief. An enemy! He had an enemy. An enemy had appeared!

5

Angela called. Dick asked after Robert and the baby. They were both asleep, Angela said, but Robert would be getting up soon. If he wanted she could wake him now. Dick told her to let him sleep.

He asked if she’d be working in the fall — she taught third grade in an all-black Tallahassee public school — but Angela was vague about it. It was very difficult, she said, to get someone really reliable to come in, and the baby was on a schedule which it might not be a good idea to upset just now.

Dick asked if Robert, who was on the Attorney General’s staff, was involved in that Ft. Myers business. (Recently there had been a ghetto revolt in the Gulf Coast town, and the local authorities had been pressing for the death sentence under Florida’s Anti-Sedition Act.) Angela told him they were both so busy now they didn’t discuss each other’s work much. In fact, she said, she didn’t really know what had happened in Ft. Myers because she hadn’t been reading the papers. Dick started to explain, but Angela broke in to say that she thought she heard a sound from the baby’s room. He held on while she went in to check.

The Sohnshilds were New Yorkers who had come to Florida in a spirit of missionary zeal, Robert believing it was more to the point to guarantee due process in the South than in New York. From the occasional references to him in the newspapers Dick knew that Robert was highly respected and very effective.

Oddly enough Dick Gibson had heard of the couple even before they became Mail Baggers; he had read an article about the Sohnshilds in Esquire in the early sixties. Angela, the article said, had graduated from Smith with a Magna in Philosophy and had met Robert when both were graduate students at Harvard. By the time the article appeared each of them had already been through a number of successful careers. Angela had given piano recitals at Carnegie Hall and had appeared as a soloist with the London Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall. Her essays on the New Left, written in the fifties while she was still a graduate student, were said to be the best philosophic justification that radical politics had ever had. She had even been — though this had not been publicized because of her associations with the left — a speech writer for the Kennedys. Robert Sohnshild, as illustrious as his wife, had given up a successful private practice and an inherited seat on the New York Stock Exchange to become the first major news analyst on National Educational Televison, and, as an adviser to SCLC, had helped develop the principle of the Mississippi Freedom Schools. Somewhere he had also found time to establish the first successful, nationally distributed underground newspaper.

The article in Esquire had been entitled “The Silver Spoon Set,” and in it four immensely successful young couples had posed, grinning, in full color in their lovely New York, Washington and Boston apartments, with silver spoons dangling from their mouths like cigarettes. In the text Robert was quoted as wanting to extricate himself from the tangled skein of personal success. “Cut your winnings,” he had said. “It’s a Thoreauvian thing. I refuse to be a great man. There are too many great men already. They explode on the world like bombs. What I want, and Angela agrees, is for men of talent and judgment and imagination — for men of success — to turn their backs on the ‘world’ and begin to pay some attention to the community.”

The Sohnshilds had come to Florida at about the same time Dick started his show, and had called the program as a sort of lark the first week it was on the air. Robert, slightly tipsy and evidently very happy, had taken the phone away from Angela to announce his wife’s pregnancy. Though they had been married twelve years, it was to be their first child. Excited by their celebrity, Dick said that the unborn child would be the program’s mascot, and he invited the couple to become regular callers. Though they stopped phoning after the baby came, Angela had begun to call the program again about five months before.

Angela returned to the phone.

“It was nothing,” she said, “she probably just stirred in her sleep.”

The baby was born with irises white as shirt buttons. It was blind.

One of them was always awake when the baby was asleep. They had not been out of the house together since its birth and kept a constant vigil over its crib, convinced that its odd eyes were the signal of a crippled chemistry. When Angela called now she often sounded wild, offering an incredible picture of their grief. One night Dick had had to cut her off the air when she went into the details of her fifty-five hour labor.

“You know,” Angela said, “Robert thinks I’m foolish, but I really think her irises are beginning to darken.”

“That would be wonderful.”

“Oh they’ll never be black, of course, but many people have gray eyes and see perfectly well. Robert’s eyes are grayish.”

“Why don’t you get some sleep, Angela?” Dick said gently.

“You know,” she said, “when Carol’s sleeping and her eyes are closed, she’s so beautiful. You can’t tell there’s a thing wrong with her. She’s just like anyone else. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind staying up half the night. So I can watch her and see how lovely she is with her eyes shut. Is that disloyal? Do you think it’s selfish?”

“No, Angela, of course not.” Then he asked if she still kept up her piano.

“Oh, yes,” Angela said. “Carol loves to hear me play.” She paused, and added fiercely, “Her hearing sense is no more acute than any child’s her age. I consider it a plus that she hasn’t begun to compensate. Perhaps she perceives light; perhaps that’s why. She’s no more tactile than another child. She’s hardly ticklish.”

The baby would be two years old soon. The quality of their resistance seemed awful to him, worse even than their luck.

“I still have them,” Angela said, and laughed bitterly.

“I’m sorry, Angela, what was that?”

“The silver spoons,” she said. “I still have them. I feed Carol her cereal from them.”

Now whenever he picked up the phone he expected the caller to be Behr-Bleibtreau.

He picked up the phone.

“Hi,” a woman said, “this is Ingrid.” It was not a good connection. A baby, crying in the background, further impaired his understanding. “I called once before. On the occasion of my divorce. You probably don’t remember.” Offhand, he didn’t.

“How are you, Ingrid?”

“Never better,” she said glumly.

“What have you been doing with yourself, Ingrid?”

“Well, I’m a gay divorcee, the merry widow.” He hoped she wasn’t drinking; he didn’t want anything to happen to the baby.

“Hey, you want to hear something wild? I bought this ’69 Buick hard-top and it’s got this gadget on it, a sort of memory device. It buzzes when you leave the key in the ignition and the door is open or the engine isn’t running. It’s optional, but I’m queer for inventions — autronic eyes that dim your headlights at the approach of oncoming cars, remote control TV sets, garage doors that open at the sound of a horn, timers that turn things on and off. I’ve got tortoise-shell prisms. I wear them like glasses and watch TV while I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. There’s a spigot for ice water on the door of my refrigerator. I have a ten-speed blender. I dissolve frozen orange juice in it. Oh, the things I’ve bought — there are Magic Fingers in my beds, great underwater lights in my swimming pool, water softeners, FM stereos, tape decks, rheostats, garbage compressors — you name it. Last month my electric bill was one hundred and seventy-eight dollars and fourteen cents. And I’ll tell you something — my life’s no emptier than the next one’s. I can take electricity or leave it alone. Things don’t corrupt you; they barely distract you.

“I was at this party — my husband was there; we often run into each other; well, we know the same people and they know we still see each other; it’s no big deal — and it was getting a little rough and I thought maybe it was time to go. Well, when I left my friend’s house I could hear that gadget on my car. I don’t know why I hadn’t heard it when I’d parked; maybe I had. It was a kind of whining, not a buzz. It was like the sound of an animal in a trap, or like a child when it’s sick, or — you’ll laugh — like my own whimpering. Only I don’t whimper, never. This just sounded like whimpering would if I did. I’m not being dramatic — I was fascinated. When I got in and turned the key the noise stopped. Well, I know this sounds silly, but I thought, My God, maybe I’ve killed it. I suppose I was a little high. Sometimes I drink too much.

“You know what I did when I thought I’d killed it? I turned off the motor to hear it again. Some people from the party found me there. They thought I was too drunk to drive or something. Well, I couldn’t just sit there all night, and these people meant well, but of course I couldn’t tell them what I’d been up to, so I pretended that I was too drunk, and I let them take me home in their car. When I got there I ducked in and asked the baby-sitter if she could stay for another thirty minutes, and called a cab and went back for my car.

“You know I never stopped hearing it? When I got back it was the same as in my head. Maybe I have a sort of perfect pitch for machines.

“I got in my car. There were still some people at the party and I didn’t want them to find me when they left, so I started the engine and of course the sound stopped at once. I remembered that if the door wasn’t shut properly the gadget was supposed to whine then too, so I opened my door just enough to disengage the lock, and the sound came back. Whenever I made a left turn and the door swung free the whine rose to a howl. I went out of my way to turn corners to hear it howl, to punish it.

“It was crazy. I couldn’t get home. My left turns pushed me in circles, taking me places I’d never been. I realized that if I was to leave the door open I had to stay in good neighborhoods. The only one I could think of was my own, so I kept circling my own block. When I passed my house I could see the baby-sitter looking out the window for me. Maybe she heard the sound. Driving the car must have charged the battery and it seemed to scream, to sing like a siren. Maybe she even recognized the car, but I couldn’t stop.

“By now I was low on gas. I found a station that was open all night, and the attendant asked me to turn off the engine while he checked under the hood. I pulled the key out of the ignition and shut the door tight. I still heard it in my head, but it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t as real; my pitch was imperfect finally. I have all the major credit cards, but I was impatient. I gave him cash and told him to keep the change. When I got back to my neighborhood the sitter’s father was looking out my window. She lives next door and he must have come over to take her place. I knew I had to go in. I gave him the money for his daughter, three dollars more than she was supposed to get. He was angry at first that I’d kept her out so late, but then he … well, sort of looked at me. I’ve known the man years; we’re friends. It was the hour; the lateness of the hour excited him. A woman coming home alone at four-thirty in the morning was thrilling to him. A woman giving him money out of her purse worked him up. God knows where he thought I’d been or what I’d been doing. He tried to kiss me, touch my breasts. ‘Oh, Ingrid,’ he said. He forced me down on the couch. ‘Please, Jack,’ I said. ‘Come on, Ingrid, what’s the difference? You’re one hell of an attractive woman.’ I know what he thought. Years we’d known each other, and he’d never made a pass. Not during my lousy marriage, not during my divorce, not once when he saw me going out with men or my ex spent the night at the house. The lateness of the hour, that excited him. Taking money from me for his daughter, the three dollars extra I gave because I’d inconvenienced her and which he thought was hush money.

“‘I’ve been driving,’ I told him. ‘Jack, I left the party hours ago. I’ve been out driving by myself. Let me up, Jack. Jack, let me up.’ I think I embarrassed him; I think I hurt his feelings.

“I put the car in the garage, left the key in the ignition and opened the windows. Maybe I heard it in my room, maybe it was only the whining in my head.

“I can’t sleep without it. It has to be on. I use up batteries.”

Then Ingrid said something which Dick couldn’t quite make out. “I think we have a bad connection,” he said.

“I said it’s not an animal in a trap, not a baby crying.”

“Have it disconnected. You don’t need it.”

“I need it. It’s what—” The last word was lost.

“What was that?”

“I said it’s what mourns. I need it. It’s what says that everything isn’t okay. It’s my gadget for grief.”

“Get rid of it,” Dick said.

“Who would keen, who would cry?”

“Look, this connection is very bad. I can hardly hear you. There’s some sort of interference.”

“That—”

“What did you say?”

“That’s it. What you hear. I had a phone put in my car. I’m in a lover’s lane I know. The doors are locked and the engine’s off and the key’s in the ignition. Listen.”

She must have put the phone up to the noise, because suddenly it became louder. Or perhaps she had opened the door and was swinging it back and forth on its hinge, for the sound would rise to a howl and then suddenly grow softer.

Dick Gibson listened to the queer yowl of the device, then heard the woman’s voice again. She seemed to be crooning a sort of encouragement to it. He strained to make out the words.

“You tell ’em,” she was saying. “Tell him when he comes in. You tell him, sweetie, I st-st-stutter.”

“Hello.”

“Hello, Henry.” It was Henry Harper.

“What? Who? Oh, yeah.”

“Isn’t this Henry Harper?”

“You don’t think I’d be fool enough to give my right name, do you? Yes, I’m the boy you know as Henry Harper.”

“Henry Harper isn’t your name?”

“No it isn’t, and it’s a darn good thing I never told you what it really is. I had a lucky hunch when I called that first time and decided I’d better not be entirely open with you.”

“Well, I don’t know how to respond to something like that, Henry. You put me at a terrible disadvantage. You’re free to misrepresent yourself as much as you please, and there’s nothing I can do about it except cut you off the air. I don’t like to do that to any caller, Henry. … You see? I called you Henry. I must sound pretty foolish if that isn’t who you are.” Dick was genuinely upset. “I suppose all the rest of it, your being rich and nine years old and all alone in an enormous mansion, that’s all misrepresentation too.”

“Of course not. It’s an evidence of their truth that I couldn’t give my name out over the air.”

“I see,” Dick said coolly.

“I’m afraid you don’t at all. Do you know something? There are a whale of a lot of nosy parkers who listen to this program. If you look me up in the supplement to the Directory you’ll see I gave a P.O. box number instead of an address. That was another precaution, of course.”

“A precaution against what?”

“Why, against interference with my way of life. Look, I’m an immensely wealthy orphan. There’s the estate itself and three-quarters of a million dollars cold cash in my piggy banks, and I stand to come into a good deal more than that when I achieve my majority. Don’t you know these things represent enormous temptations to wicked and unscrupulous persons? My age makes me extremely vulnerable to vultures, and my status in the eyes of the authorities trebles that vulnerability.”

“Has anyone actually tried to take advantage of you?”

“Oh, Dick, please — don’t be such a naif. You should see some of the letters in that P.O. box. When I drove to Jacksonville to pick up the first batch—”

“Drove to Jacksonville? You said you lived in Jacksonville.”

“I maintain a post office box there, yes, but just as I was reluctant to give my right name, so was I loath to declare my true place of residence. How many estates of the kind I described do you suppose there are in a city the size of Jacksonville? As I’ve been at one time or other a guest in them all, I know only too well how easy I would be to trace. Look, everything I told you before is substantively true. I wasn’t trying to deceive you personally, and I didn’t intend my natural precautions to be taken as a slander on the Mail Baggers themselves. The people in the Listening Posts are good people, but there are others — voyeurs — who listen to this program who have never bothered to list themselves in the Directory. It’s these people who aren’t my friends.”

“You lied once, and you lied twice. You could be lying a third time.”

“The Harpers are not liars, Mr. Gibson.”

“Hah.”

“Nor are we sitting ducks. I’ve explained why it’s necessary to misrepresent myself, why it’s necessary for me to hire a car to take me to Jacksonville to pick up my mail. If you read that mail you’d understand. I have money. People want to trick me. They make the most blatant overtures. There are people who will do anything for money, Mr. Gibson, and while I don’t care for the money itself, I have no intention of turning over my fortune to gold diggers and picklepusses. Not so long as that fortune can be used to relieve the miseries of my friends — and I consider all the legitimately unfortunate my friends. There are operations, medicines, birthday presents for children whose parents can’t afford them. There are vacations, holidays, financing alcoholics and addicts at sanitoria. There are so many good purposes to which my money can be put.”

“You’re a good boy, Henry. I’ve already told you,” Dick said bitterly. He felt that perhaps he was being unfair. The kid’s reasons — if he was a kid — were excellent, but a program like this was peculiarly susceptible to masquerades. His phones must not be used for disguises.

“Why are you doing this?” Henry pleaded. “I’m a child, an orphan. Do you think I’m Tom Sawyer? That I find being alone romantic, or that the enormous estate I live on is some dreamy little treehouse place where I can escape from the realities of the adult world? I’m a child. A child needs guidance, security, love. It’s his instinct to have these things. Do you suppose I’m the only little boy ever to overthrow his own instincts? I sleep with a light on, Mr. Gibson! When I sleep. Why do you suppose me so unnatural as to wish myself naked in the world? Is a little boy naturally a loner? Absurd! No. I place myself in this awful jeopardy because in addition to a child’s instinctive need for guidance and security and love, he has an even more powerful instinct for virtue. It’s like a tropism with us. We’re innocents, sir, every mother’s son of us, innocents who would legislate a just world where no one is deprived or disadvantaged, where virtue is rewarded and evil punished, and all needs annulled. I place myself in jeopardy not by choice, not by dint of rebellion, but because only by operating outside the law am I able to operate at all. Only in this way am I able to do my part, pull my own small boy’s weight in the world and do something with my little shaver’s instinctive sympathies. How long do you think I would be permitted to contribute to my favorite charities or allay with money — yes! I admit it; money, alas, is all that ultimately makes the difference — the sufferings of my fellows? How long would I be able to accomplish these things if I were to turn myself over to an executor or allow myself to be legally adopted? The best-willed bankers and trustees in the world would turn down my requests for funds to make my little gifts. And I’d respect them for it. I wouldn’t blame them one iota, for anything less would be a betrayal of their instincts and duties! The most loving, abnegative adoptive parents would do the same. That’s why I didn’t give my name.”

“You lied to me over the air on my program,” Dick Gibson said stubbornly.

“I’m a child, Mr. Gibson,” Henry Harper told him tragically. “I’ve a child’s emotions. Don’t expect self-control from me. Don’t look to me for emotional continence. I’m little and my passions are everywhere closer to the surface than in an adult. I’m small and may be bullied. It’s often difficult for a child to distinguish between pressure and the guidance his childishness requires. I warn you of this, for I know I will not be able to stand up to you. In any contest of wills between us yours is bound to emerge triumphant.”

“You lied,” Dick Gibson said. “I trusted you and you lied. Over the air. On my program. What’s your real name?”

“Very well then,” Henry Harper said. He was sobbing now and could barely catch his breath. “Very well then. My real name … my name … is … is Richard Swomley-Wamble. I live in Tampa, Florida.”

“How do I know that’s your real name?”

“It is.”

“How do I know?”

“I tell you it is.”

“How do I know it isn’t Edmond Behr-Bleibtreau?” It was thrilling to him to speak the name aloud. He listened for a reaction, some dead giveaway, but all he heard were the boy’s unbroken, now uncontrollable sobs.

“It’s what I said it is,” Henry Harper said, “and you’ll know it by the damage you’ve just done.”

A lady was on the phone. Her voice was familiar, though Dick was sure she had never called the program before. For one thing, she was shy and hesitant. Also her voice, though familiar, seemed altered.

Dick tried to help her out. “Take your time,” he said.

“Well, this is embarrassing to me.”

“Oh, come on,” he kidded, “we only go out to twenty-three states. There couldn’t be more than a million and a half people listening to you right now.”

“I was going to ask you a personal question.”

“Sure.”

“I don’t exactly know how to put it. I’m not really one of your regular listeners.”

“Win a few, lose a few.”

“I’ve only been listening to the program two weeks — since I’m on this case.”

“Are you a detective?”

“Oh, goodness no.” She laughed.

“That’s better. Well, since you’re not a detective, go ahead—shoot.”

The woman laughed again. “I’m calling from Ohio,” she said.

“How are we coming in up your way?” He was not as cheerful and expansive as he sounded, for Behr-Bleibtreau was on his mind. Ever since he had mentioned the man’s name on the air all his heartiness had been intended for Behr-Bleibtreau. He was showing the flag.

“Your station fades sometimes, but mostly it’s very clear.”

“Glad to hear it. Excuse me, let me just do a station break here. … WMIA, Miami Beach, the 50,000-watt voice of the Sun Coast. … I’m sorry, go ahead, ma’m.”

“Well, I was almost certain I was right, that’s why I called, but hearing you speak on the telephone, now I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what, ma’m?”

“Whether I know you.”

“Oh? Well, you know what? I was thinking your voice was familiar too.”

“I used to know somebody, oh years back. Gosh, if I’m right I’ll be giving away both our ages. He had [a voice something like yours, only your name is different. Marshall Maine?”]

Dick Gibson took her off the air. The six-second tape delay was enough to excise the passage.

[“I don’t use that name any more,”] he said into the phone while they were still off the air. [“Please don’t refer to it.”]

“That’s right,” he said easily when they were back on the air again. “Who might this be?”

“Well, I was Desebour then. Miriam?” He didn’t recognize the name. “I was working at the time in Morristown, New Jersey. A nurse? That’s why I laughed when you asked if I was a detective when I said I was on a case. Do you remember now? I don’t blame you if you forgot, me springing it on you like this. Why, it was only a few nights ago I was able to place you.”

Then he remembered the time they had lived together in the nursing home. “Well, of course,” he said. “How are you … Miriam, is it?”

“Miriam Kranz. You knew me as Desebour.”

“You’re originally from Iowa.”

“That’s right. Say, you’ve got a good memory. I’m glad to see you haven’t forgotten me.”

“No, of course not.”

“Old friends are the best friends.” Her voice had losts its reluctant edge, and she had become genuinely jolly.

“Kranz, eh?” He was surprised to find that he was slightly jealous.

“I’m a widow. You know, now that I think of it, you knew Kranz.”

“I did?”

“I’m sure he was around during your time. Let’s see [this would have been ’38, ’39. I left Morristown in ’40. You and I knew each other when I first got there. Kranz was there that whole time. He was one of my patients, a little fella. He had to be fed.”

“The one who got a hard-on when you gave him his dinner? Him?”

“Marshall! That’s terrible! We’re on the radio.”

“No, we’re on a tape delay. I’ve taken this part off. Don’t call me Marshall. Is that the one?”

Miriam giggled. “It is,” she said. “I married him right there in the nursing home.] He was a very nice man, you know.”

Now Dick remembered Miriam’s strange effect on him, how her voice telling a story, going at its own pace, random as landscape, had worked its cozy hypnotic sedation on him.

[“Whatever happened to the old bastard who came when you gave him enemas?”]

“Gracious sakes, man, I’m an old woman now. Let’s not go into all that. Folks must think we’re terrible.”

[“I took that part off. What happened to him?”]

“Well, that was just prostate trouble was what that was. He had a preternatural prostate. You know — tee hee — at the end, I could get that same reaction by taking his temp or just sitting him up in his chair. He knew he was dying, and do you know what he said to me one time? ‘Noitch Miriam, I’m a family man. I have grandchildren. I always tithed my church and believed in my God. I am as convinced of Heaven as I am of Kansas, and though I know I’m dying I want to tell you that you have made me happier in these past months than I have ever been in my life.’ Those were almost his last words, and I’ll never forget them.”

“What happened to you, Miriam? It’s been years since we’ve seen each other,” Dick said fondly.

“Oh,” she said, “a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. Kranz … Are we on the air now, [Marshall?”]

“Yes. [No, not that part. Call me Dick.”]

“Kranz had many wonderful qualities. If you didn’t know him well you might not have recognized them and just have dismissed him as a dirty little beast, but when you got to know him better he was a very fine gentlemen.”

Hearing her, it came back to Dick again how her voice had once been able to pull him out of time, float him snug as someone towed by swimmers. Her voice was quiet, historical almost; there was something in its cool timbre that assumed it would never be interrupted. As he listened to her he played absently with the six-second tape delay button. “For one thing, he was terrifically acute. He had a lot of savvy about current events. He knew more than the politicians, believe me; he was one of the canniest men I’ve ever known. He saw there was going to be a world [war] long before the rest of us dreamed of such a thing. ‘We’re sitting on a powder keg, Miriam,’ he used to say. [The Axis Powers,] those fellas over in [Germany,] Bulgaria, Finland, [Italy,] Rumania, [Japan] and Hungary, are out after everything we hold near and dear, and they’re not going to be satisfied till they get it. Why, everybody’s going to get into it — [France, England,] Costa Rica, [America,] Ecuador, San Marino, Syria — everybody. Now it’s an unfortunate thing, but there’s going to be some mighty big money made during all this. It’s going to be dog eat [dog, sure as you’re a] foot [high.] It’s coming, all right. Why, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some country like Japan weren’t planning its attack right now. It’ll be a sneak attack, I’ll bet you. We won’t have any warning. They’ll probably pick some out-of-the-way place like Pearl Harbor and do it on a Sunday morning in December after Thanksgiving and before Christmas when nobody’s expecting it.’ He had a terrific acumen in the political line.”

“It certainly sounds that way.”

“You know what he told me once? He said that probably once the war started there’d be a lot of technological advancement. He said you couldn’t tell him a smart man like Einstein didn’t have a little something extra up his sleeve, like unharnessing the power of the atom or something, and that’s what would finally win the war for us. He got all this just from reading between the lines in newspapers. I never saw anything like it. I tell you, he was one of the most logical men I’ve ever met. I’m sorry you didn’t have a chance to know him better. Anyway, he kept insisting that we all ought to be prepared, that there were going to be a lot of personal opportunities for people once the war started. He figured there’d be a black market. He was too old and sick, he said, or he’d be in there with the best of them. And he would have been too. He knew there’d be shortages once it started. He told me to buy up as many pairs of silk stockings as I could, that it didn’t make any difference what size they were. And Hershey bars. He was always after me to stockpile Hershey bars. He knew that meat and gasoline were going to be at a premium too, and he had this notion about rent control. The thing to do, he said, was get the most expensive penthouse apartments you could find up along Riverside Drive in New York City. He figured that rents would be controlled in those places for years and that you could sublet them at terrific profits. Another thing was theater tickets. They’d be hard to get once war came. He said that if a terrific composer like Richard Rodgers ever teamed up with a wonderful lyricist like Oscar Hammerstein, Jr., and they did a musical together set in some Western state back before the turn of the century, that it would be a wonderful escape for people all caught up in the war effort, and that anybody who invested money in such a show would make a fortune. I didn’t pay too much attention to any of this or I’d be a rich woman today.

“But you know, one thing he did convince me of was that there was going to be a terrific demand for R.N.’s. ‘You get your degree, Miriam,’ he said. ‘You get your R.N. license and you’ll have it made once war breaks out. Finish up, then enlist in the Army Nurse Corps. Don’t wait until December 7, 1941.’

“So that’s what I did. I enrolled as a student nurse at Morristown General, and I went into the Army Nurse program as soon as I graduated. Everyone on active duty as of 2400 hours on 6 December ’41 was promoted to first lieutenant, and if they agreed, as I did, to sign up for the duration they were jumped to captain. I was a major by V-E Day, stayed in for twenty years and rose to colonel before I retired.”

“After we were married Kranz put me through my student year at Morristown General and I made him the beneficiary of my $10,000 G.I. life insurance. He died just before the close of the war. I was with him at the time, on a stateside furlough. He had a hunch his time was up and, not wanting to die in bed, asked me to dress him. I got him into his clothes and tied his tie. When I finished knotting it he just looked down at it kind of thoughtfully for a moment and said, ‘You know, Miriam, styles come and styles go. Wide ties like this one aren’t going to be considered very fashionable in a while, but then, in about twenty-five years, they’re going to be more popular than ever.’ Marshall, these were the last words he ever spoke.”

Miriam related all this in her lazy style. Listening to her, Dick had a sense of the piecemeal forces of erosion. He never interrupted; even when she slipped and called him Marshall he let it pass. He was tilted back deep in his chair, his feet on the desk next to the microphone.

“I take only private cases now,” Miriam was saying. “The money’s better, for one thing — though I don’t need money, really. There’s my army pension, and Kranz, who had this terrific business sense, told me back in Morristown that the big thing in the fifties and sixties was going to be office equipment — copiers, things like that. I made some good investments and I’ve got a pretty fair-sized nest egg now.”

Yes, Dick thought, nest. He remembered their nest. He undid the buttons of his shirt and scratched his belly.

“I take cases mostly because it lets me travel — I’m with an agency that sends nurses all over the country. I meet a lot of interesting people. The sick are wonderful folks, Marshall. If you recall I once told you I have to help people. Thank God that’s never burned out in me. Well, they’re just so gentle. Sedation does that, of course, helplessness does. It hurts them to move and you have to do everything for them. And if they’re old they’re that much weaker anyway. Why, some of my patients I just take and tote them around as if they were babies. I was always strong, you’ll remember, and I’m a big old gal now. You probably wouldn’t recognize me.”

He had an erection. The pressure of his clothing was irritating, so he unzipped his fly and his penis sprung out of his pants. His director rapped on the glass of the control booth with a key. Marshall Maine glanced at him and waved lazily.

“Course, maybe I wouldn’t recognize you either,” she said. “Oh Lord, I was with so many young men in the army. You know, you get tired of young people after a time. Of course if they’re really sick they’re just as good as anybody else, but most of the time they don’t want to take their pills, and they never get over being embarrassed. You just can’t do for them like you can somebody who’s had some experience and seen the world and knows its ways. My patient here in Ohio, now; he’s a man about our age, Marshall, a widower with a bad phlebitis. A very interesting man. ‘Mrs. Kranz,’ he’ll say, ‘with my leg the way it is I just can’t handle myself on the bedpan. Would you mind very much if I just let go? You don’t have to do the sheets — heck, just throw them away and buy some more over the telephone through the Home Shopper.’ He’s very generous. I just can’t say enough about it. Naturally I have to clean him up afterward; you can’t let a person lie in his own dirt. Now you couldn’t do that with a young man; a young man would just as soon be constipated forever before he’d let you touch him.

”I want my patients to want my hands on their bodies,” Miriam said. “How else can I help them? Men in their fifties — I suppose you’re up there now yourself — whose stomachs have gone soft, who don’t try to hide their bald spots with fancy hair styles, and if they don’t shave for a couple of days, what of it? Who aren’t always squeezed up tight to keep their gas in, and are smooth on their chests as babies — those are your interesting men.”

He could not picture her as she had been. He remembered her voice, but couldn’t recall her face or the shape of her body. He didn’t know if she had been tall or heavy or anything about her. Nevertheless, though he had not seen her in thirty years, he had what he was sure was an exact impression of what she had become. He saw her dowager’s hump, the features of her face, the nose rounded and gently comical, the crow’s feet and wide mouth, the precise color of her hair, the immense rounds of breast, full as roasts, the wide lap beneath her nurse’s white uniform with its bas-relief of girdle and garter like landmarks under a light snow. He had removed his shirt and slipped out of his pants and underwear, and was almost as naked as he had been in Morristown when she had bathed him in bed, or as she herself had been when she padded about their small room doing her little chores and telling him stories of her life in Iowa. He closed his eyes for just a moment, content, irritated only by the distortion of her voice on the telephone.

“Well,” Miriam said, “it’s awfully late. I have to give my little man his pill. Maybe before I leave Ohio I’ll call again. I’m proud you made such a success, Marshall.”

He thanked her comfortably. He had pulled off one stocking and was rolling the other down his leg. “Ohio?”

“Yes. I told you that.”

“Cincinnati?” Behr-Bleibtreau, if that’s who the anthropologist had been, had made a pointed reference to the caller from Cincinnati.

“That’s right, Marshall. How’d you know that?”

“Your patient — what’s your patient’s name?”

“Well, that’s a matter of professional ethics, Marshall.”

“Does he know you listen to this program?”

“Why, yes, of course he does. He’s the one who told me about it. We’re listening to it together right now.”

“Listen,” he said, “his name’s Behr-Bleibtreau, isn’t it?”

“Marshall, I can’t tell you a patient’s name when I’m on a case, and that’s final.”

“It is Behr-Bleibtreau, isn’t it?”

“Final is final. You don’t know me when I make up my mind. I can be pretty darn stubborn. Goodnight now, Marshall.”

He looked down and saw that he was undressed. One knee-length sock, bunched over his heel, was all he was wearing.

“Listen—” he said.

“Goodnight now.” She hung up. Dick Gibson angrily pulled the sock the rest of the way off his foot.

“Your feet stink.”

He was talking to an old fellow. The man had been driving along the rough back road between Aliosto, Georgia, and Clendennon, Alabama, on his way to visit his son-in-law who was foreman of the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Anniston, when he spied a tree, uprooted and lying across some power lines near the side of the road. The tree was not a large one, but its weight was great enough to bow the lines, pressing them down to about the level of a man’s shoulders.

Before the old man retired he had worked for many years as a drill-press operator in a factory which manufactured and assembled playground equipment. He said that this is what had given him his great love for children. During his last five or six years with the company he had been appointed by his union to be the shop safety officer, and it was his responsibility to be on the lookout for potentially hazardous situations and to figure out means by which accidents could be cut to a minimum. Not only had he supervised the posting of several dozen instructive signs throughout the plant, but he had developed what he called a “check list,” a series of precautionary steps which a worker took before ever turning on his machine.

When the old man saw the tree lying in its treacherous sling, he said his first thought was that here was a terrific potential for an accident if he ever saw one. If the lines snapped, live wires would go jumping and bucking all over the place. The lines were close enough to the side of the road to hook a passing car. Even more urgent was the fact that some kid might be lashed by the energies in the broken cables. “There’d been a terrific wind up in Aliosto the night before last,” the old man said, “and I figured maybe some tornado had touched down in the woods and just picked up that old tree and set it down on them lines.

“Well, sir, I was at that point in my journey where I didn’t know would it be better to turn back to Aliosto or press on to Clendennon. I drive an old Hudson which the feller I got it from turned back the odometer, and it ain’t worked proper since. It don’t register at all except every ten thousand miles the first two numbers over on the left change, so was no way to tell how far I already come. That’s all woods and dirt road between Aliosto and Clendennon. You don’t pick up County double ‘S’ to Anniston till the other side of Clendennon, so one mile don’t look no different than another. Speedometer’s bust, too, so I couldn’t tell how fast I’d been coming, and I don’t wear no watch so I didn’t know how long neither. Anyway, I decided to continue along to Clendennon. Which it turned out come up a good deal faster than I thought it would.

“There’s a general store in Clendennon, and I went inside and asked the feller could I use his pay telephone. I called the phone company business office down to Anniston and told them what I seen. The girl there put me through to the service department, and I told them again.

“‘Well,’ says the feller in the service department, ‘we didn’t get no reports of any interruption in service. Whereabouts this happen?’

“‘On the road between Aliosto and Clendennon.’

“‘No,’ he says, ‘in which state, Alabama or Georgia?’

“‘Why, there ain’t no state line marker on that road,’ I told him. I didn’t see one.’

“So he asks me where I’m calling from and I tell him Clendennon, and he says Clendennon’s pretty close to the Georgia line and that if that tree was down on those wires in Georgia no Alabama truck could go out there and fix it.

“‘Well, man,’ I said, ‘somebody better. Them lines ain’t gonna hold up that tree much longer. Some kid could get hurt.’ This was summertime. There’s fishing all along back in them woods in the lakes. I’d already passed some boys on bicycles. So he says, well, could I do this much for him then — could I go back and get the shield numbers on the two poles holding up the wires that tree was flung across, and call him back.

“‘What shields are those?’ I asked.

“‘Why, the shields,’ he says. ‘The little tin plates that are on every telephone and power pole. They’re fixed about five and a half foot up the west side of the pole.’

“You know I never noticed them? I’m seventy-one years old and been around telephone poles all my life and I never did see that they had any tin plates on them. Well, I thought all this was his business and not mine and I told him so, but he tells me he just ain’t got no trucks available at this time. I probably would have dropped the whole thing, but I couldn’t stop thinking ‘bout them kids that could get hurt. My son-in-law didn’t know I was coming, he didn’t expect me, and it didn’t make no difference what time I finally got there, so I decided I’d go back.

“Well, that’s what I did, and a good thing too, because now those lines were no higher than a man’s belt, and when I looked up I could see that where they was attached at they was under more strain than ever. They could have bust loose from their connections right while I was standing there. Well. I looked for the plates the feller told me about and there they was, on the west side just like he said, and five and a half foot up, too. You ever see one?”

“No.”

“Well, they’re just like — what do you call it — insignia on a train conductor’s hat, and they’re tin, and they got these letters and numbers stamped on them, raised up like the figures on a license plate. Some kind of code. I wrote down the numbers and went back to Clendennon and called the fella again and give him the information.

“‘That’s Georgia,’ he says. ‘That’s a Georgia pole. You’ll have to call them.’”

“What a lot of red tape,” Dick Gibson said.

“No, no, that ain’t the point. Hang on a minute. You see, just like you, I thought it was all one company, but it isn’t. Georgia is Southern Bell, and that part of Alabama where I was is Talladega County Telephone Company.”

“Well, you went to a lot of trouble.”

“Wait. I called the phone company in Marietta, Georgia. That’s where they come out from to service Aliosto where I live, so I called them. This time I didn’t tell my story to the girl who answered the phone but asked to be put right through to the service department. I had the numbers of the shields right in front of me, and as soon as the man got on the line I told him, ‘Sir, I’m a stranger who while driving along the back road between Aliosto, Georgia, and Clendennon, Alabama, this morning happened to notice a tree pressing down on the lines between poles LF 644 and LF 643. When I first noticed the tree it was lying on the lines at about five and a half foot. When I went back, I would estimate about an hour and a half later, it had sunk to about three foot off the ground. That’s about one foot, three inches each hour. That tree is straining desperately at them wires, and I fear for the children in the area if the lines should snap. In fact, they may already have snapped.’ You know what he told me?”

“What?”

“That if the lines did snap, all that would happen is that the phone service in the area would be interrupted, and that they couldn’t have snapped or I wouldn’t be talking to him right now. He said there was no danger from exposed telephone cable, but that I’d better call the electric company because if there were power lines there — see, I thought power lines had something to do with phones, but it turns out they’re two different things — and they broke down, then there could be trouble. I asked him for the number of the electric company, and he said I’d have to get it from Information.”

“What a lot of—”

“Wait. I got the number of the electric company from Information and I asked for the service department. I told my story. Do you know what they told me in the service department?”

“What?”

“That I wanted the maintenance department.”

“I’ll be,” Dick said.

“No. Don’t you see? What’s the service department at the phone company is the maintenance department at the electric company.”

“Did you finally get the right department?”

“Sure I did. Once I knew what to ask for, sure I did.”

“Did you have any more trouble?”

The old man laughed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I can see you just don’t understand. I called the maintenance department. See, I thought I knew what was coming. That they’d want to know was there any power lines between them two poles in addition to the telephone cables. That they’d have to tell me what to look for and I’d have to go back again. Well, they asked me if I got the shield numbers and I told them I did and they said let’s have them, and I gave them to them and they said well, sir, thank you very much, we’ll look into it right away.”

“You certainly had yourself a morning,” Dick said.

“I said to this fella, ‘How do you know whether there’s power lines as well as phone cable along in there?’

“‘Why, sure there are,’ he said. ‘The F in the code tells us that.’”

“They took care of it, then?”

“I drove back from visiting my son-in-law the next day. The tree was gone. Not a sign of it. The lines was all taut as good fencing. For my own satisfaction I stopped the car to check the poles. I’d stopped at LF 663, so I counted the poles and finally come down to LF 644 and 643 and everything was clean as a whistle. That’s a terrific system. It’s better than an address. Course it is an address; that’s what those shields actually are.”

“Well, I’m glad they got it before somebody was hurt,” Dick Gibson said.

“Sure,” the man said. “This didn’t happen yesterday or last week.”

“No? From the way you were talking I thought it was a recent experience.”

“No. This was three years ago. I’m retired eight years and this was five years after I retired. It’s been three years since this happened.”

“I see.” He was anxious to take the next call. Perhaps Behr-Bleibtreau was trying to get through.

“There’s order,” the old man said.

“I’m sorry?”

“There’s order. There’s procedure. There’s records on everything. There’s system.”

“I suppose there is.”

“You bet your life. When I was in Anniston that time I asked my son-in-law to take me through the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. He showed me how everything worked. I asked a lot of questions. I couldn’t take it all in just that one time, so I went back. I had to go back two or three times. I found out all about it. There’s system, there’s order. I’m in a gas station anywhere in the country and I look at the bottom of the soda bottle and I see where it came from and I know how it got there. I know what happens to that bottle when they take it back. I look for certain tell-tale signs and I know approximately how many more times they’ll be able to use it. I know what happens to the glass when they throw it away.

“Then there’s cans. I know about them too. It’s what I do now. I find out about things. If I don’t understand something I get somebody to explain it to me till I do. I don’t rest till my curiosity is satisfied. I know how a letter gets from this place to that, just what the zip code does, who handles it. There’s organization, there’s process, procedure. There’s steps — like that check list I made up for the men in my plant. There’s a system and intersecting lines and connections. There’s meaning. My son-in-law gave me a shirt for Father’s Day. I put it on yesterday for the first time. You know what I found in the pocket?”

“What?”

“A slip of paper. ‘Inspected by Number 83.’ The shirt’s a Welford, 65 percent polyester, 35 percent cotton. It’s union-made in Chicago. I read the tags on it, the instructions they give you for washing. How can some shirt outfit you never heard of have eighty-three inspectors? And I’m taking eighty-three as an inside figure, mind you; probably the numbers go higher. I’m going to find out. I’ll find out what that number actually represents. I wrote Eighty-Three today. If I don’t get an answer I’ll write Eighty-Two. I’ll find out. I’ll see how it works, how it’s all connected. Everything’s connected. There’s order, there’s process, there’s meaning, there’s system. It ain’t always clear, but just stick with it and you’ll see. Then you’ll be amazed you never saw it. It’ll be as plain as the nose on your face. If it was a snake it would bite you.”

Behr-Bleibtreau didn’t call.

Richard Swomley-Wamble called.

“How are you, Henry?” Dick asked distantly.

“You still don’t trust me, do you?”

“Oh, well.”

“It no longer makes any difference whether you trust me or not,” Henry said. There was a catch in his voice.

“Come on, Henry,” Dick Gibson said, “you needn’t cry just yet. We’ve barely started our conversation.”

“I’m a child. Children cry.”

“Very well. Let’s drop it. What’s been happening, Henry?”

“Richard’s my name.”

“Richard, then.”

“I’m active.”

“Your charities?”

“You make it sound ignoble. Please don’t pick on me. Why must we always be so irritable with each other? I’m not saying all of it’s your fault. I’m responsible too. If I’ve been fresh, I apologize. I respect my elders — I do, though I suppose sometimes I say things that gives them the impression I’m conceited or think I know more about life than they do. I know you have experience and maturity, whereas I have only my idealism. Children can be pretty narrow sometimes. Look, I’m really very grateful to you. You took me into the Listening Post when I needed it very badly. I’ll never forget that. I’d really like very much for us to be friends.”

“All right,” Dick said, “so would I.” It was true. He had been uncertain of his ground with Richard from the first; even as he had baited him he felt himself in the wrong. And he had other things to worry about. “What have you been doing?” he asked.

“These past two weeks have been wonderful,” the boy said enthusiastically. “The Mail Baggers have been marvelous. You know, a lot of them just want to be cheered up, or if they do need something it’s usually very small. There’s a woman in Lakeland who’s bedridden. Her TV picture tube blew out last month and she wrote to ask if I could let her have thirty-five dollars to replace it. Thirty-five dollars may not be much to you or me, but when you’re trying to live on just your Social Security payments I guess it can seem like all the money in the world. I didn’t replace the tube but I did get her a new color set.”

“That was very kind of you, Richard.”

“I hope she doesn’t think I throw my money around to impress people. I thought she’d enjoy it.”

“I’m certain she does.”

“There’s just one thing—”

“What’s that?”

“Color sets require adjustment. That can be pretty hard on someone who’s bedridden. The set can’t be too close to the bed because of the radiation. I hope I didn’t make a mistake.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I bought three motorized wheelchairs last week and two hospital beds. I’ve arranged with several mothers who can’t afford it for their children to have music lessons. They rent the instruments and the rental is applied toward the purchase if the kids are still taking lessons two years from now. I put the rest of the money in escrow for them. Another mother wanted dancing lessons for her little girl and I arranged for those too. I bought two gross of imported dashikis and distributed them throughout the inner city. I’m sponsoring a Little League team in the Sarasota ghetto. Everyone will have his own uniform, even the kids on the bench. I bought some bicycles for people who have no way to get to work in the morning. I’m having some people’s plumbing fixed.”

“That was very thoughtful, Richard.”

“It robs people of their dignity when their toilets don’t flush properly.”

“You know, Richard, it sounds to me as though you’ve been spending a lot of money.”

“Oh, well.”

“No, I mean it,” Dick said. “I know you want to help and I realize that three-quarters of a million dollars is a great deal of money, but that money has to last until you’re twenty-one. At the rate you’re spending it might be very close.”

“That’s not a problem,” Richard said quietly.

“Oh?”

“It’s not a problem.”

“What is it, son? Has something happened?”

“Oh, Mr. Gibson,” the boy sobbed, “I’d hoped this call would be a happy one, that we’d just chat about people’s dreams coming true.”

“Well, fine, Richard.”

“No,” the boy said manfully. “I have a duty. I was fooling myself when I thought this could be a happy call.”

“What is it, Richard?”

“I really called to ask people not to write me any more. I won’t be able to help them.”

“I see.”

“I’m sorry if I got their hopes up.”

“What is it, Richard? Isn’t there any three-quarters of a million dollars?”

“Yes,” the boy said, suddenly fierce. “There is. It isn’t that.”

“I see. All right.”

“I can’t have them writing me any more, that’s all. I won’t be picking up my mail. They’d just be wasting their postage, and they can’t afford it.”

“All right,” Dick Gibson said, “I see.”

“I’m being adopted tomorrow,” Richard cried. “When I gave out my real name, some people … They reported me. The courts stepped in. They had the juvenile authorities out here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“I’m sorry, Richard,” Dick Gibson said.

“I shouldn’t say this—”

“What, lad?”

“The people who reported me are the ones who’ll be adopting me. I was like a … a finder’s fee.”

“Perhaps they’re nice,” Dick said encouragingly, “just the ones to give you guidance and security and love.”

“They’re pigs, Mr. Gibson.” The boy was crying uncontrollably.

“Don’t cry, Richard.”

“They’re greedy people, Mr. Gibson.”

“Richard, you know if you really dislike them that much you don’t have to stay with them. I’m sure the court would try to fix you up with parents who are more compatible. You don’t have to go with them, son. There’s no law that—”

“I’ve decided not to fight them.”

“But why, Richard? Why, son?”

“It wouldn’t make any difference. Anyone who’d want me now … It wouldn’t make any difference.” The boy blew his nose. He cleared his throat. Dick waited patiently while he got control of himself. “I won’t be calling your program any more,” he said at last. He spoke slowly, with great dignity.

“I see.”

“They won’t let me call the program.”

“I understand.”

“They’re taking the phone out of my room. I won’t have a radio.”

“Oh, son,” Dick said.

“I have to be in bed by eight-thirty every night.”

“Oh, son,” Dick Gibson said, “oh, Henry.” But the boy was no longer on the line.

Then there was a string of calls from some of the unhappiest people in the world.

One man had been laid off for eight months and was unable to find work. His wife and eldest daughter had taken jobs as domestics. He would be a domestic himself, he said, but people were afraid to have a white man in their houses.

A woman called. She’d awakened two hours before. Her husband was not in the house. Her little boy’s bed was empty. Their car was gone. A couple of suitcases were missing. They’d been having trouble lately. Her husband liked to listen to Dick’s program. Perhaps he was listening now. She pleaded with him to return, to call and let her know where he was.

A man had lost his wife about four months ago. He couldn’t sleep, and he was starting to drink, he said.

A high-school girl was having trouble with her stepfather. He had taken the locks off her bathroom and bedroom doors. She was afraid to be in the house alone with him.

Dick couldn’t recognize any of their voices. They were not Mail Baggers.

Then a man called who said he was phoning from a booth just outside the emergency room of Miami Municipal Hospital. “I been listening to your program on this transistor radio in the waiting room,” he said. “I called in to tell you about me. I take the cake. I thought you’d want to hear about it. If they gave out prizes they’d have to give me a big one. I take the cake.”

“Oh,” Dick said wearily.

“See, I live here. You understand me? In the emergency waiting room. This is where I live. I’m an emergency, do you follow?”

“They let you stay there?”

“Well, I’m an emergency, ain’t I? Sure, the docs and nurses let me sleep here on the leather sofa. You should see the shape some of these clowns are in — their heads all unbuttoned and their blood upside down. Boy oh boy. They give you bad dreams on the leather sofa, some of them. I got my eye on one guy sitting outside this booth in a wheelchair right now. He ain’t cut or burnt or nothing, but he looks pretty sick. Wife’s more upset than he is. She’s got this steel nigger comb, just keeps running it over and over through his hair and looking down at him from behind the wheelchair. Yeah, you really see it in a place like this — second-degree burns, third-degree, the works. And accident cases. You know what’s the worst accident case there is? Motorcycles. These kids come in, and I mean they’re totaled. Like they fell off the world. One time I seen a guy hold his eye in his hand like a marble. And raving maniacs—they’re cute. You wouldn’t believe the language comes out of their mouths — especially the women’s. My God, what’s on some people’s minds!

“Tonight a little kid come in who’d worked one of these washers onto his finger and it wouldn’t come off. They got a tool that cuts off rings and they used that. Imagine having a tool for something like that. That’s what gets me. They got a tool for everything. For pulling beans out of people’s noses and getting crud from their eye. There ain’t an emergency they haven’t worked out in advance.

“Most people couldn’t take living in a place like this. I know what to avoid. If it’s real bad, the ambulance driver comes running in first to tell the girl at the desk. Then I know it ain’t something I want to see and I get out of the way.”

“Why do you stay?”

“Why do I stay? In case something happens to me. I’m an epileptic, I got Grand Mal. That means the Big Bad. The Big Bad I got. But I’m right here, you follow? I’m Johnny on the spot. I’m never more than a minute from help.”

Dick didn’t know how he was going to get through the rest of the program. The man was waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t think of anything.

“I got a right,” the man said abruptly. “Hell, I’m an emergency. I got Grand Mal.”

“Where do you dress?” Dick finally managed. “What about your clothes?”

“Oh. Yeah. Well, that’s interesting about that. I got this buddy in the hospital laundry. He throws my stuff into the hopper with the sheets and the gowns. Everything on me is fresh every day. And there’s this vegetable on the seventh floor — they let me use his electric razor.”

“You’ve got it made,” Dick said.

“How do I eat? You know how I eat?”

“How do you eat?”

“I take my meals off hospital trays! I eat what the sick leave!”

“Terrific.”

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“I believe you.”

“Then what’s wrong? You think I’m talking about garbage? Full- course meals! Full-course breakfast! Full-course lunch! Everything full course. I eat better than you do. It’s balanced meals. A dietitian makes them up. I’m on a salt-free diet. My cholesterol’s lower than yours is. I could overeat if I wanted — sick people don’t have much appetite — but I watch myself, I don’t gorge.”

“Just push yourself away from the hospital cart, is that it? That’s the best exercise.”

“Yeah. Ha ha. Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I do have this little staph infection. What’s so terrible? It won’t kill me, I can live with it. The residents have their eye on it. It’s low grade, practically nothing.”

Dick groaned.

“Well, where should I go, hot shot, where? I’m an emergency. My life’s an emergency. Where’s an emergency gonna go?”

“I’m not criticizing.”

“Listen,” the caller said, “I ain’t stinted. I get everything I want. The chow’s good. I get dessert, even. I already told you. Ha ha. I take the cake.”

He couldn’t have taken any more calls. It was a good thing the show was almost over. He was tired. He did the commercials mechanically, announced the temperature and told his listeners the time, and then he reached forward, took the table microphone and brought it close to his mouth. He paused, not quite certain what he was going to say.

“I’m worried about Henry Harper,” he said at last. “I’m thinking about Ingrid in the Buick. I don’t even mention air pollution, foreign policy, or the terrible things that have been turning up in the artificial sweeteners. There’s crime in the streets, and to tell you the truth, we’ve mucked up our fields and streams too. I hope the Sierra Club wins its battle against the Disney interests in California. I’m troubled about the whales, and I mourn for the death of Lake Erie. The pill has harmful side effects and not enough people wear their safety belts. We ought to have better gun laws. Everywhere the environment is as run down as a slum. Strontium 90 takes a generation to break down, but even that’s faster than the non-bio-degradable soaps. The young have chromosome damage from LSD and the old live without point. Our diet isn’t any good. Where will the money come from for low-cost housing? Charcoal steaks cause irreversible lung damage; cancer is broiling in the barbecue. The pace is too fast and the noise level’s too high, color TV makes you sterile and too much sunshine queers your skin. Speed kills and hot water from the factories raises the temperature of the river and murders the fish. Food preservatives poison our breakfast cereal. There’s monosodium glutamate in the baby food and baldness in the hair spray. There’s BHA in the white bread. Oh God, there’s far too much nitrate in the soil, and unless the furriers become more responsible in five years the only leopards left alive will be in the zoos.

“I’m concerned about barium and arsenic in the drinking water of playground fountains, and about the carcinogenic wax on fruit like the bad queen’s toxin on Snow White’s apple. Jesus, friends, our bath water mustn’t be too hot and the rubber from our tires dissolves into the air so that we’re choking on our own tread. Keep all medicines out of the reach of children, I tell you. If you drive, don’t drink! Coffee is bad for us and we don’t know what aspirin does to our cells. We haven’t figured out our priorities. Smoking stunts your growth, and I don’t like the way they shunt the phosgene gas back and forth across the country on railroad cars. They’re playing Russian roulette with our lives. The long straightaways on our freeways can hypnotize you and there’s enough mercury in the eggs we consume to drive a thermometer. Don’t look directly into the eclipse. Only you can prevent forest fires. We’re drowning in litter, shipmates. Jet lag upsets the circadian rhythms and plays holy hell with the stewardess’s monthlies, and sonic boom is killing the gazelles. The air isn’t clean. Mark my words, the population explodes even as we drop dead. A thermal inversion melts the icebergs and our coastlines are drowning. An underground nuclear explosion can set off an earthquake, and I’m not so well myself.

“There’s too much obsession. I’m worried about Henry Harper. I wonder what happened to that man in Knoxville. To the lady with the pierced ears. I wish Angela and Robert would get out of the house. There’s nothing they can do about the baby. What will be will be. They mustn’t feel guilty. If they want, I’ll go up to Tallahassee myself and sit with the kid so they can go to the movies. It would do them good to get out once in a while. What does that old man mean, everything’s connected? That guy who called tonight should move out of the emergency room and rent an apartment. There’s too much obsession. I’m guilty as the next guy. I can’t stop thinking about Behr-Bleibtreau. He’s a man I knew in Hartford one time, and I think he holds a grudge against me. He might be trying to force some crazy showdown between us, and I can’t say I mind because I think it may be in the cards. Only … only …

“All those calls tonight. What’s happening to my program? What’s the matter with everybody? Why are we all so obsessed? I tell you, I’m sick of obsession. I’ve eaten my ton of it and I can’t swallow another bite. Where are my Mail Baggers, the ones who used to call with their good news and their recipes for Brunswick stew and their tips about speed traps between here and Chicago? How do your gardens grow, for Christ’s sake? What’s with the crabgrass? What’ll it be this summer, the sea or the mountains? Have the kids heard from the colleges of their choice? What’s happening?”

6

It was time for the Dick Gibson Picnic.

To promote the event the station had been playing a series of spot announcements, one or two a night at the beginning of the campaign but gradually reaching saturation a week before-the picnic. As in the previous year, it was decided that it would be held in Gainesville, Florida, a city about three hundred miles northwest of Miami. The management felt that though this worked a hardship on the heavy listenership concentrated in the Miami area, Gainesville was more accessible to the villagers and farm families of central and southern Georgia, southeastern Alabama and the great midlands of Florida itself than Miami proper, which would have been expensive and crowded even in the off-season. Although Miami contributed far and away the largest audience to the program, its participation in Listening Posts was disproportionately small. The backbone of the show was still the rural areas. Nevertheless, there were indications that an adjustment was taking place, the country people frightened perhaps by the increasing bluntness of the calls. All shows seek the level of the demands made upon them, but there was something alarming, as much to the management as to Dick Gibson, about the stridency of these demands, the way solipsism was gradually drowning out the inquiry, deference and courtesy that had set the show’s original tone. As long, however, as the sponsors showed no alarm, no one made any serious effort to force the show back to its original instincts. Perhaps they had not been instincts.

WMIA picked up the tab for feeding the thousand or so Dick Gibson Picnickers expected to turn out, but all the work of preparing the fried chicken, potato salad, roast corn, iced tea and Jellomold fell to the picnic’s official hosts, the Listening Post from Cordelle County, Georgia, who arranged, too, for the entertainment. Last year’s Entertainment Committee had been too ambitious, and while they had put together a first-rate show of singers, bands, groups and chorus lines from the local dancing schools, everyone agreed afterward that they had come to meet and mix with each other, not to sit for three hours in a hot tent. Hence, this year the Committee had decided to emphasize various games and comical races in which all the Mail Baggers might participate. In fact, the Entertainment Committee suggested that this year there be no structured activity. It was Dick Gibson who reminded them that people would be coming from all over the Southeast and that since most of them would be strangers to each other there ought to be at least some minimal group activity. He had also insisted that an effort be made to keep people belonging to the same Listening Post from sitting together at the picnic tables.

On the day before the picnic Dick drove to Gainesville in his convertible with the top down, taking along his director and his engineer, the only people from WMIA to attend. The station manager and several other of the station’s executives had planned to come, but Dick had discouraged this, pointing out that it would be better for the program if the Mail Baggers did not see him as just another employee of the station, and that the presence of a hierarchy would detract from their sense that the program belonged to them. The management conceded the point and so he went up to Gainesville accompanied only by his crew, Bob Orchard and Lawrence Leprese, who were already familiar to his audience. Particularly in the early days of the program, his listeners had become used to Dick’s good-natured kidding of the two men. “Bob,” he might suddenly complain to his engineer, “where are my Kentucky calls? You’re not giving me a strong enough Kentucky signal. Turn this station around and get me blue grass.” Invariably his little hint would inspire some Kentuckian to phone in, and then he would compliment the engineer on his improvement, building the conceit that the station was a sort of airplane which could be pointed in any direction they chose. He also commented on Lawrence Leprese’s wild sports shirts, painting a lurid picture for his audience of the director’s terrible taste. Actually, the man usually wore an ordinary dark business suit with a white shirt and plain tie, and so before going to Gainesville Dick had had to buy him the loudest shirt and Bermuda shorts he could find in the Deauville specialty shop.

There was a large sign taped to the long side of the convertible with Dick Gibson’s name painted on it in bold red letters, so that as he drove along he looked like the grand marshal of his own parade. In DeLand, Florida, where they stopped for gas, he forgot it was there and tore the sign in half when he opened the door on the driver’s side. They repaired it with scotch tape and drove the rest of the way up to Gainesville.

The station had booked three rooms for them at the Hotel Pick- Gainesville and they checked in at about six thirty on Friday evening. Tired from the long drive, Dick decided to have dinner sent to his room and then go to bed until it was time to do the show that night.

They had rented the facilities of WGSV, using the phone company’s carrier line to take the signal back to Miami. This affected the sound quality, but worse was that the station didn’t have the sophisticated phone setup WMIA did, so the program’s mechanics that night were very clumsy. All the incoming calls had to be handled through the receptionist’s switchboard and shunted by extension phone to the studio. Since the station ran an all-night record request show, naturally the girl at the switchboard fell behind and when Dick finished a conversation there was not always another caller on the line. Nor did he have any notion where a call was coming from and found it difficult to recognize his listeners’ voices. The occasion of the picnic and its publicity had reassured many of the old Mail Baggers that the program was being returned to them, inspiring them to call the show again, but it must have been clear to even the least astute that they’d been forgotten. Much air time was wasted in sly maneuvering between Dick and his callers, the caller wanting Dick to say his name and Dick trying to get the caller to do it for him. Though it was a dull program, it was a very hard night’s work for him. It was dull, hard work, but there was something pleasant about it too. It was like the old days, the very old days, before they knew each other too well, and had had to take everything slowly and carefully, offering each other gentle, civilized banalities.

Still, by sign-off, he was exhausted. This may have been one reason he was so unresponsive at the picnic the next morning. He had not actually slept before Friday’s show. From promotional considerations given the Pick-Gainesville in return for free accommodations, many Mail Baggers knew what hotel Dick was at, and at least half a dozen had called the room to invite him for drinks. By the time he told the desk to put no more calls through, he wasn’t sleepy, and he watched television until it was time to go down to the station. Even afterward, tired though he was, he found it difficult to sleep, finally dropping off for two hours before he was awakened for the picnic. Those people who wrote the management afterward to complain of his “distance” either were poor readers of mood or had never been exhausted. After all, he was no chicken, he was pushing fifty. This, at any rate, was what he told the station manager when asked to explain the large amount of critical mail that had poured into the station following the picnic. And if these explanations were not frank, it was not the first time he had not been entirely open with the management about the picnic. Good as they were, his reasons for not wanting the station executives in Gainesville had nothing to do with anything as remote as the program’s “image.”

It was Behr-Bleibtreau. He was convinced that something savage would happen. The man had once tried to strangle him. He hadn’t known his reasons then and he didn’t know them now, and though he felt the Mail Baggers would protect him from violence, he really believed the savagery would take some other form. He needed strength and concentration; the presence of his employers would have been deflective. If he was to put on a show—The Dick Gibson Show—it must be for his poor callers.

At 10 A.M. they entered Gainesville’s Emma Shulding Memorial Park and drove onto the broad expanse of contiguous athletic fields in the open convertible. The motorcycle policeman escorting them turned onto a green outfield and guided them past second base toward home plate. They toured slowly, giving as many of the Mail Baggers as felt like it an opportunity to approach the car. Dick, perched on the back seat, leaned down to shake their hands, scrutinizing their nametags in the few seconds they walked along beside the car, and whispered questions to them about their families. It surprised him that he knew so little about them. A man extended condolences on the death of Mrs. Dormer. It was the first confirmation he’d had of this.

“Then she is dead,” he said sadly.

Bob Orchard drove around behind the screen at home plate and the three of them got out. There was some difficulty with the public- address equipment, so Dick dispatched Bob Orchard to look at it. When his engineer got it working there were a few remarks and announcements by the president of the Cordelle County, Georgia, Listening Post. Then she introduced Bob Orchard and Lawrence Leprese, who both said a few words to the crowd. Leprese did little more than stand before them in the Bermuda shorts and loud sports shirt that Dick Gibson had bought. “How do you like ’em?” he asked. The Mail Baggers laughed and applauded.

Dick was introduced. He told them how glad he was to be there and that it looked like an even bigger turnout than last year’s. It wasn’t— the cop who conducted them across the playing field said later that there couldn’t be more than six or seven hundred people there — but Dick wasn’t trying to con them. He’d been looking for Behr-Bleibtreau, not sure he would recognize him — it had been ten years— studying each face, doubling back over groups he had already considered, losing track, beginning again, like someone trying to count spilled pennies on a rug. It was partly his distracted air that made him seem absent to the people who wrote the station to criticize him. Actually, he had never felt so keen, and though his words may have seemed bland, he experienced a genuine affection for his listeners, his special knowledge feeding his tenderness and making him protective as a statesman, fond as a champion. His ordeal would be theirs as well.

He publicly thanked the wonderful men and women of the Cordelle County, Georgia, Listening Post for the marvelous work they had done — he meant this sincerely, but our words are sometimes flattest when we are most deeply moved — and told the crowd that he would be out to meet as many of them personally as time would permit. Then he walked out to the raised pitcher’s mound, and there he remained for most of the day, choosing the spot not as the malcontents had it because he was showboating but because he wanted always to be within clear view of the crowd. Until lunchtime there were always four or five Mail Baggers around him, but after eating with the Cordelle County chapter, when he returned to the pitcher’s mound few people followed, and those who came up soon walked off. He continued to watch out for Behr-Bleibtreau, of course, and not until he had left the park did he begin to have doubts that it was Behr-Bleibtreau’s voice he had heard that night.

On the whole it was a pleasant day. The food was excellent and plentiful and they had good weather. His enemy never came.

If he failed to participate in the games it wasn’t because he felt superior or was a bad sport, but because he was worn out. After all, he was pushing fifty.

7

There was time for one more call.

“Night Letters — go ahead please.”

It was a woman, earnest and angry. “Well, thank God,” she said. “I thought the program would be over and done with before I reached you.”

“As a matter of fact, we haven’t much time. What did you want to talk about?”

“Listen, I’m a little flustered. I really didn’t think I was going to get through to you. I’ve never called one of these shows before.”

“I’d like to tell you to take your time, but the old clock on the wall—”

“I’m sorry. Well.” She took a deep breath. “I saw something today which makes me hopping mad. All I have to do is think about it and I can’t see straight.”

“What’s it all about, ma’m?”

“I called the Better Business Bureau and they say there’s nothing they can do about it, and I called the postal authorities and they tell me it has nothing to do with them, so I thought the only thing left was to try to arouse public opinion.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Dick Gibson said cheerfully.

“I have a twelve-year-old boy. I was cleaning his room today — well yesterday afternoon now — and I found something in one of his drawers. I tell you, I was never so shocked in my life.”

“Pornography,” Dick said.

“No, not pornography. I’m not a narrow-minded woman, Mr. Gibson. My son’s almost thirteen and I suppose he has a natural curiosity about the opposite sex. We don’t take Playboy, but I suppose he sees it often enough, and a lot of those other so-called men’s magazines too, probably. That’s just part of growing up and I accept it, but this is something else. No, not pornography. More obscene than pornography.”

“Look, ma’m, I hate to rush you, but this sounds like it might be something with a lot of pros and cons to it, and right now we just haven’t the time to—”

“I’m sorry. I’m a little nervous, and as I say, this thing has upset me so I guess I’m not really making much sense. Somebody’s got to do something about it. Somebody’s got to.”

“Well, you know, ma’m, Night Letters isn’t really that kind of talk show. We’re not a controversy program.”

“It was in a comic book.”

“We were off the track there for a while, but we’ve been trying to—”

“There was this ad.”

“Look, if it’s a commercial product, the FCC won’t—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mr. Gibson!”

“We’re not allowed to—”

“Listen to me, will you? Something’s got to be done about this. Children mustn’t—”

“Even if this is a war-toys thing I couldn’t—”

“It’s an ad. You mail in two dollars. They send pamphlets. They tell you how to do things. How to put together a zip gun and make your own bullets. ‘How to coat the blade of an ordinary pocket knife with one of the deadliest poisons known to man.’ I’m quoting from the ad. This is intended for children, Mr. Gibson. Do you have children? Just listen to this part. ‘Our instruction booklet—’”

“I have no chil—”

“‘—teaches you the secret of preparing an acid from ingredients normally available on your own front lawn. This acid, commonly known as eye acid, is from a formula long known only to the Seminole Indians, the only tribe in the United States never to sign a peace treaty with the American government. If so much as a single drop of this potent substance were to come into contact with the eye, vision would be permanently destroyed. Seeks out and destroys the optic nerve on contact! The fumes alone can impair vision for periods of up to ten years. Only your enemies need worry! Included in the booklet are simple directions for the mild antidote which completely protects you from the acid yourself. This is but one of the many exciting poisons described in our simple-to-follow manual. Never an offer like it! The directions are so clear that if you have ever baked a cake or even read a recipe you can make any one of the thirty deadly acids and poisons thoroughly and completely explained in this guide. Be as powerful as the cruelest murderers in history! The secrets of the Borgias! Know nature’s other face, unlock the awful powers of chemistry! For mere pennies we can show you how to concoct a poison so toxic that just one cupful thrown into the water supply is enough to debilitate a community of 100,000 persons. The powers of epidemic in your hands! Useful for the destruction of pesky animals! Protect your loved ones!’ That’s only part of it. Shall I go on? There’s worse, if you can imagine.”

Dick was excited, but something urged him to be prudent; he had to seem detached. He understood that his discretion had nothing at all to do with the new policy of the program, that it was important and useful to him personally.

He had to hear more, however. “Well, you know, dear,” he said mildly, “that’s kind of a wild ad, but I don’t really think our kids will be very interested in that sort of thing. They’re a pretty sensible bunch, most of them. Gosh, for every kid who goes wrong that you read about in the papers there must be ten thousand minding their own business and trying to get good grades.”

“Mr. Gibson, this is vicious. I’ve never heard of anything so vicious.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “we’ve got another few minutes, I suppose. If you want to tell us some of the rest, I guess we can cut a minute or so out of the theme music.” He spoke lazily and blandly, conscious that a tape recorder was taking down everything he said.

“Listen to this,” she said, “tell me there’s nothing wrong with a world where this sort of thing can get printed. I’m quoting: ‘In addition to the pamphlet on poisons we have prepared a useful handbook on the assembly of handguns, small bombs and the infamous Molotov Cocktail, together with a section on how to make volatile powders and explosives in the privacy of your own home from chemicals sold over the counter for pennies. For those who send in their money now we will include at no extra charge an additional booklet, the top-secret Commandos’ Bible, an indispensable guide to the deadly methods of the heroic commandos of World War II. Be prepared! Available nowhere else! Fully illustrated, as are all the pamphlets in this exciting new series! THE VIOLENT DEVICES THAT HELPED TO WIN THE WAR REVEALED AND EXPLAINED: the garrote, napalm, the plastic bomb, along with the new silent time bomb impossible to detect. This light (two pounds), lethal instrument can be slipped into the luggage of an unsuspecting traveler and preset to go off anywhere from forty-five minutes to three hours after his plane has taken off or his train has left the station. No ticking! Totally silent! When you discover the secret of how it’s done you’ll laugh that no one ever thought of it before.’ It’s all like that, Mr. Gibson. It makes me sick just to read it. And it’s so anonymous. You don’t even know who’s behind it. They just give a post-office box number.”

“I’ve got to admit,” Dick Gibson said, “it sounds a lot worse than the B-B guns they used to advertise in those books when I was a kid. I’m no expert, and this is just a lay opinion, mind you, but off the top of my head I don’t see how it can be legal.”

“They’ve got this disclaimer.”

“Oh? They’ve got a disclaimer, do they?”

“At the bottom of the ad.”

“Oh?”

“‘For educational purposes only. Not responsible for any bodily injury which may occur.’”

“Say,” Dick said, “that’s pretty clever. That’s how they get around it, is it? Whoops, I see we’ve just about run out of time.”

His director put the theme music on, and while the first few bars were playing Dick took her off the air and spoke casually into the phone. “Say,” he said, “I’d like to see a copy of that ad. Why don’t you send it to me? I’ve got this friend on the Attorney General’s staff in Tallahassee. I’ll look it over and if it seems as bad as you make it sound I’ll see that he gets a copy of it with my personal letter. What do you say?” His hands were trembling. “Will you send it to me?”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s a good idea. I’ll put it in the mail today.”

“Good deal,” he said. “Got to run now. Got to sign this ole program off the air.”

His thought was that here at last was something he could do. There was too much suffering. Too much went wrong; victims were everywhere. That was your real population explosion. There was mindless obsession, concentration without point, offs and ups, long life’s niggling fractions, its Dow-Jones concern with itself. What had his own life been, his interminable apprenticeship which he saw now he could never end? And everyone blameless as himself, everyone doing his best but maddened at last, all, all zealous, all with explanations ready at hand and serving an ideal of truth or beauty or health or grace. Everyone — everyone. It did no good to change policy or fiddle with format. The world pressed in. It opened your windows. All one could hope for was to find his scapegoat, to wait for him, lurking in alleys, pressed flat against walls, crouched behind doors while the key jiggles in the lock, taking all the melodramatic postures of revenge. To be there in closets when the enemy comes for his hat, or to surprise him with guns in swivel chairs, your legs dapperly crossed when you turn to face him, to pin him down on hillsides or pounce on him from trees as he rides by, to meet him on the roofs of trains roaring on trestles, or leap at him while he stops at red lights, to struggle with him on the smooth faces of cliffs, national monuments, chasing him round Liberty’s torch, or up girders of bridges, or across the enormous features of stone presidents. To pitch him from ski lifts and roller coasters, to Normandy his ass and guerrilla his soul. To be always in ambush at the turnings in tunnels, or wrestle him under the tides of the seas. Gestures, gestures, saving gestures, life-giving and meaningless and sweet as appetite, delivered by gestures and redeemed by symbols, by necessities of your own making and a destiny dreamed in a dream. To be free — yes, existential and generous.

To feed him his own poisons, to blind him with his acids, pickle him in his vicious, zany juices, catch him in his traps and explode him with his bombs.

He made up his mind to kill the man responsible for the ad.

The earnest woman was as good as her word. In two days the comic book was in his hands. As she had said, there was no way to identify who had placed the ad; all he had to go on was the name of the company—“Top Secret!”—and the address, a post-office box number in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He clipped the coupon, signed it with a false name and sent it in with his two dollars. For a return address he gave a post office box of his own which he rented for the purpose.

In his dealings with the post office he learned that while the government would not rent a box to anyone unwilling to furnish proper identification, neither would it reveal the identity of a boxholder to anyone other than the representative of an authorized law-enforcement agency. He had no real fear for himself. He was confident that when the time came he would get away with the murder, but these conditions made it difficult to find out the name of the man in Latrobe. He was not discouraged. He remembered the caller from Georgia, the old man who found connections in everything. Surely if there were ways to delve behind the anonymity of a Pepsi-Cola bottle, there were ways to discover who was responsible for placing the ad. (It was a long shot, of course, but he couldn’t help hoping it would turn out to be Behr-Bleibtreau.) Actually, he didn’t have to start with the post office box at all. He could get the man’s name from the agency that had accepted the advertisement. With his connections in radio and his knowledge of the media, that wouldn’t be difficult; a couple of phone calls would do it. There were many ways. If all else failed he could go to Latrobe — he had a vacation coming — rent a box there himself and simply wait for whoever came to pick up the mail for “Top Secret!” Nothing was more simple.

Meanwhile, he waited for the pamphlets, checking the box every other day for three weeks. Then he began to wonder which would be worse, if the man who placed the ad sent the material or if he were running a swindle. Once or twice he was tempted to write a letter complaining about the delay, but each time he decided against it. To prevent the postal authorities from becoming suspicious, every so often he addressed an envelope to himself, always writing these notes on Deauville stationery but mailing them in plain envelopes.

A month passed, and still he had had no response from Latrobe. He decided to write the followup letter after all, but the very day after he mailed it the pamphlets arrived. Ain’t that always the way, he thought as he opened the box and removed the manilla envelope.

He returned to the Deauville and pored over what he’d been sent. It was all there, everything that had been promised: the formulas for poisons, the instructions for assembling guns and bombs — everything. There was one item that hadn’t been mentioned in the ad, a single sheet of greasy paper like the stock used in fortune cookies, the inked letters on the cheap paper like frazzled cultures under magnification. The sheet contained tips for growing and recognizing marijuana. The pamphlets had been run off on a mimeograph machine from abused stencils, and the illustrations were crude and vaguely pornographic like the backgrounds in ancient eight-pagers. The staples that held them together were at odd angles to the page; several were rusty. He shook his head sadly at the poverty of being that was revealed by the author/illustrator of the pamphlets. It was too shabby — basement evil, the awry free enterprise of a madman. Would the devices even work? How could he kill him? Nothing would change.

He scrawled a note to Robert Sohnshild at the Attorney General’s Office in Tallahassee. “Dear Bob,” he wrote, “the enclosed material has recently come to my attention. Is there anything your office can do?” He added a brief postscript. “You know what my hopes are for you and for Angela and for the baby. We are powerless in these things. What more can I say?” He placed the note on top of the pamphlets, shoved everything back into the manilla envelope, resealed and readdressed it. Maybe I would have killed him, he thought, if the mails had been faster. Maybe if I ever find out the man’s name and happen to run into him I’ll still kill him. But probably not.

He left the envelope with the woman at the information desk of the Deauville to mail for him. Surrendering it, he thought, ah, the cliché, the relinquisher, the man who walks away from triumph, who renounces revenge.

He asked the doorman to bring his car. Perhaps it was Behr-Bleibtreau who had permitted him his destiny after all, Behr-Bleibtreau who would have been his enemy, who would have focused the great unfocused struggle of his life but who had failed to show up, who had left him standing high up on the pitcher’s mound in the Gainesville park, unheeded and alone and with an unobstructed view of the corny convertible with its top down and the mended Dick Gibson sign taped to its sides. On the mound there, silhouetted, a target of sorts but abandoned, with his arms at his sides, his shoulders slumped and only his eyes still moving, darting this way and that, searching desperately for the man who would bring the mortal combat with him that would save his life. And then even his eyes stilled, mute as his character, everything stilled at last except for the potato and wheelbarrow racers, the oddly coupled men and women tied together at the ankles or locked back to back or joined in gunnysacks or squeezed in barrels or pressed facing each other and scrabbling sideways in the crab’s oblique drift.

He drove down Collins Boulevard to the radio station and gave his car to the man in the Fontainebleau parking lot. He crossed the street at the light and rode up in the elevator to his studio. He waved wearily to the men in the control booth and took his place at his desk. The engineer asked for a voice level and Dick, confused for a moment, turned to see where the sound had come from.

“Give us a level, Dick,” Orchard repeated.

He looked at the microphone. “Please stand by,” he said softly. “One moment please.”

“Too low, Dick,” Lawrence Leprese said. “Can you move a little closer to the mike? We’ve got about a minute.”

“Oh,” he said.

“That’s better,” Leprese said.

“What I wanted,” he said slowly, “was to be a leading man, my life to define life, my name a condition — like Louis Quatorze.”

“A household word, is that it, Dick?” Leprese said over the loudspeaker. “The level’s good.”

“Not glory, not even fame.” The buttons on the phone were already lit. “Not a hero, not even very dependable—”

“Thirty seconds, Dick.”

“—but to be excited. To live at the kindling point, oh God, at the sound barrier.”

The On the Air sign came on. It flared behind its red glass, bright as blood on a smear on a slide. He leaned forward and spoke to the microphone. “This is Dick Gibson,” he said, “WMIA. The scrambled I Am’s of Miami Beach.”

He picked up the phone and jabbed one of the lighted buttons. “Good evening, Night Letters.”

“I’m this man’s mistress,” a woman said. “His wife is dying and he has to take her to a different climate. He’s asked me to—”

“Wrong number,” he said, and punched another button. “Night Letters.”

“My doggy was run over.”

“Line’s busy.” He took another call. “Night Letters.”

“I’m a peeping Tom. I think I’m going blind.”

“It’s a bad connection.” All the buttons on the phone panel were lit. He pressed one again. “Good evening. Night Letters.”

“If only, if only, if only—”

“Wrong number, bad connection, line’s busy, he ain’t in. This number isn’t in service!” He wiped his face and poked another button. “Hello, Night Letters. Who’s there?”

“The President of the United States. Dick, Bebe Rebozo and I are terribly concerned about what’s been going on in Vietnam …”

The End