Baby Is Three (12 page)

“You said that before,” said the girls. They spoke in unison, and the pair of them had only one voice, like the doubled leading tone in a major chord.

“There he shtood,” Henry went on, “shtill beating time after the music stopped. An’ the conductor, wi’
eyes
in his tears—wi’
tears
in his eyes—turned him around so he could
shee
the applause.”

“What was the matter with him?” asked the girls.

“He was deaf.”

“Who was?”

“Beethoven.” Henry wept.

“My God. Is that what you’re tying one on about?”

“You said to tell you the sad story,” said Henry. “You didn’t say tell you
my
sad story.”

“Okay, okay. You got money, ain’t you?”

Henry lifted his head and reared back to get perspective. It was then that the girl merged and became one; he realized that there had been one all along, in spite of what he had seen. That explained why they both had the same voice. He was extravagantly pleased. “Sure I got money.”

“Well, come on up to my place. I’m tired uh sittin’ around here.”

“Very gracious,” he intoned. “I shall now tell you the sad story of my laysted wife.”

“What type wife?”

“I beg your pardon? I’ve never been married.”

The girl looked perplexed. “Start over again.”

“Da capo,”
he said, with his finger beside his nose. “Very well. I repeat. I shall now tell you the story of my wasted life.”

“Oh,” said the girl.

“I have had the ultimate in rejections,” said Henry solemnly. “I fell in love, deeply, deeply, deeply, dee—”

“Who with?” said the girl tiredly. “Get to the point and let’s get out of here.”

“With a string bass. A bull, as it were, fiddle.” He nodded solemnly.

“Ah, fer Pete’s sake,” she said scornfully. She stood up. “Look, mister, I can’t waste the whole night. Are you comin’ or ain’t you?”

Henry scowled up at her. He hadn’t asked for her company. She’d just appeared there in the booth. She had niggled and nagged until he was about to tell her all the things he had come here to forget. And now she wanted to walk out. Suddenly he was furious. He, who
had never raised his hand or his voice in his whole life, was suddenly so angry that he was, for a moment, blind. He growled like the open D on a bass clarinet and leaped at her. His clawed hand swept past her fluffy collar and got caught, tore the collar a little, high on the shoulder.

She squealed in routine fear. The bartender hopped up sitting on the bar and swung his thick legs over.

“What the hell’s going on back there?” he demanded, pushing himself onto the floor.

The blonde said, shrilly and indignantly, exactly what she thought Henry was trying to do.

“Right there in the booth?” said a bourbon up the row.

“That I got to see,” replied a beer.

They started back, followed by the rest of the customers.

The bartender reached into the booth and lifted Henry bodily out of it. Henry, sick and in a state of extreme panic, wriggled free and ran—two steps. The side of his head met the bridge of the bourbon’s nose. Henry was aware of a dull crunch. There were exploding lights and he went down, rolled, got to his feet again.

The girl was screaming in a scratchy monotone somewhere around high E flat. The bourbon was sitting on the floor with blood spouting from his nose.

“Get ’im!”
somebody barked.

Powerful hands caught Henry’s thin biceps. A heavy man stood in front of him, gigantic yellow mallets of fists raised.

“Hold him tight,” said the heavy man. “I’m gonna let him have it.”

And then a sort of puffball with bright blue eyes was between Henry and the heavy man. In a soft, severe voice it said, “Leave him alone, you—you bullies! You let that man go, this very minute!”

Henry shook his head. He regretted the movement, but among the other things it made him experience was clearing sight. He looked at the puffball, which became a sweet-faced lady in her fifties. She had gentleness about her mouth and sheer determination in her crackling blue eyes.

“You better stay out of this, Granny,” said the bartender, not unkindly. “This character’s got it comin’ to him.”

“You let him go this instant!” said the lady, and stamped a small foot. “And that’s the way it is.”

“Al,” said the heavy man to the bartender, “just lead this lady off to one side while I paste this bastard.”

“Don’t you put a hand on me.”

“Watch your language, Sylvan,” said the bartender to the heavy man. He put a hand on the lady’s shoulder. “Come over here a sec—
uh!”

The final syllable was his staccato response to the old lady’s elbow in the pit of his stomach. That, however, was not the end of her—literally—chain reaction. She swung her crocus reticule around in a full-armed arc and brought it down on the heavy man’s head. He sank to the floor without a whimper. In the same movement she put her other hand swiftly but firmly against Henry’s jaw and pushed it violently. His head tipped back and smashed into the face of the man who stood behind him holding his arms. The man staggered backward, tripped, and fell, bouncing his skull off an unpadded bar stool.

“Come along, Henry,” said the old lady cheerfully. She took him by the wrist as if he were a small boy whose face needed washing, and marched him out of the cafe.

On the street he gasped, “They’ll chase us.…”

“Naturally,” said the lady. She put two fingers into her mouth and blew a piercing blast. A block and a half away, a parked taxicab slid away from the curb and came toward them. There was shouting from the cafe. The taxicab pulled up beside them. The lady whipped the door open and pushed Henry in. As four angry men shouldered out on the sidewalk, she reached deep into her reticule and snatched a dark object from it. She stood poised for a moment, and in the neon-shot half-light Henry saw what was in her hand—an old-fashioned, top-of-stove flat iron. He understood then why the heavy man had drowsed off so readily.

The lady hefted the iron and let it fly. It grazed the temple of one of the men and flew straight through a plate glass window. The man who was hit went to his knees, his hands holding his head. The other three fell all over each other trying to get back out of range. The lady skipped into the cab and said calmly, “Young man, take us away from here.”

“Yes,
ma’am!”
said the driver in an awed tone, and let in his clutch.

They jounced along in silence for a moment, and then she leaned forward. “Driver, pull up by one of these warehouses. Henry’s going to be sick.”

“I’m all right,” said Henry weakly. The cab stopped. The lady opened the door. “Come along!”

“No, really, I—”

The lady snapped her fingers.

“Oh, all right,” said Henry sheepishly. In the black shadows by the warehouse he protested faintly, “But I don’t
want
to be sick!”

“I know what’s best,” she said solicitously. She took his hand, spread it, and presented him with his long middle finger, point first, as if it were a clinical thermometer. “Down your throat,” she ordered.

“No!” he said loudly.

“Are you going to do as you’re told?”

He looked at her. “Yes.”

“I’ll hold your head,” she said. “Go on.”

She held his head.

Afterward, in the cab, he asked her timidly if she would take him home now.

“No,” she said. “You play the piano, don’t you, Henry?”

He nodded.

“Well, you’re going to play for me.” She reached forcefully into her reticule again, and his protest died on his trembling lips. “Here,” she said, and handed him an old-fashioned mint.

Priscilla mounted the stairs. She had a “walking-underwater” feeling, as if she were immersed in her own reluctance. She had trod these stairs many times at night—usually downward after a perplexing, intriguing series of experiments. She did not know why she should be returning to the laboratory now, except that she had been ordered to do so. She freely admitted that if it were not for the thin, straight figure in black who waited downstairs, she would certainly be in bed by now. But there was an air of command, of complete certainty, about the old lady who had saved her that was utterly compelling.

She walked quietly down the carpeted hall. The outer door of the lab office was ajar. There was no light in the office, but a dim radiance filtered in from the lab itself, through the frosted panel of the inner door. She crossed to it and went in.

Someone gasped.

Someone said, “Priscilla!”

Priscilla said, “Excuse
me!”
and spun around. She shot through the office and out into the hall, her cheeks burning, her eyes stinging. “He—he—” she sobbed, but could not complete the thought, would not review the picture she had seen.

At the lower landing she raced to the street door, valiantly holding back the tears and the sobs that would accompany them. Her hand went out to the big brass doorknob, touched it—

As the cool metal greeted her hand she stopped.

Outside that door, standing on the walk by the iron railings, radiating strength and rectitude, would be the old lady. She would watch Priscilla come out of the building. She would probably nod her head in knowledgeable disappointment. She would doubtless say, “I told you you would want to leave, and that it would be foolish.”

“But they were—” said Priscilla in audible protest.

Then came the thought of trustfulness: “Listen to me. Do you trust me?”

Priscilla took her hand away from the knob. She thought she heard the murmur of low voices upstairs.

She remembered the talk about Jon and his meeting with Edie at the party. She remembered herself saying, “I—just didn’t think it through.”

She turned and faced the stairs. “I can’t, I can’t possibly go back. Not now. Even if … even if it didn’t make any difference to me, they’d … they’d hate me. It would be a terrible thing to do, to go back.”

She turned until the big brass knob nudged her hip. Its touch projected a vivid picture into her mind—the old lady, straight and waiting in the lamplight.

She sighed and started slowly up the stairs again.

When she got to the office this time the light was on. She pushed
the door open. Jon was leaning against the desk, watching it open. Edie, his ex-wife, stood by the laboratory door, her wide-spaced eyes soft and bright. For a moment no one moved. Then Edie went to Jon and stood beside him, and together they watched Priscilla with questions on their faces, and something like gentle sympathy. Or was it empathy?

Priscilla came in slowly. She went up to Edie and stopped. She said, “You’re just what he needed.”

The wide dark eyes filled with tears. Edie put her arms out and Priscilla was in them without quite knowing which of them had moved. When she could, Edie said, “You are so lovely, Priscilla. You’re so very lovely.” And Priscilla knew she was not talking about her red hair or her face.

Jon put a hand on each of their shoulders. “I don’t understand what’s happening here,” he said, “but I have the feeling that it’s good. Priscilla, why did you come back?”

She looked at him and said nothing.

“What made you come back?”

She shook her head.

“You know,” he smiled, “but you’re just not talking. You’ve never done a wiser thing than to come back. If you hadn’t, Edie and I would have been driven apart just as surely as if you’d used a wedge. Am I right, Edie?

Edie nodded. “You’ve made us very happy.”

Priscilla felt embarrassed. “You are giving me an awful lot of credit,” she said in a choked voice. “I didn’t really do anything. I wish I had the—the bigness or wisdom you think I have.” She raised her eyes to them. “I’ll try to live up to it, though. I will …”

The phone rang.

“Now who could that—” Jon reached for it.

Priscilla took it out of his hand. “I’ll take it.”

Edie and Jon looked at each other. Priscilla said into the phone, “Yes … yes, it’s me. How in the world did you … Tonight? But it’s so late! Will you be there? Then so will I. Oh, you’re wonderful … yes, right away.”

She hung up.

Jon said, “Who was it?”

Priscilla laughed. “A friend.”

Jon touched her jaw. “All right, Miss Mysterious. What’s it all about?”

“Will you do something if I ask you? You, too, Edie?”

“Oh, yes.”

Priscilla laughed again. “We do have something to celebrate, don’t we?” When they nodded, she laughed again. Well, come on!”

It was easier to carry the chopsticks piano-player with Derek to help, Jane concluded. She watched the rapt faces in the club. The house counted good, and it was going great, but she couldn’t help thinking what it would be like if Derek hadn’t been so pigheaded about little Henry. She finished her chorus and the piano took it up metronomically, nudged on the upbeats of the authoritative beat of Derek’s bass. She looked at him. He was playing steadily, almost absently. His face was sullen. When he got absent-minded he wasn’t colossal any more; only terrific.

The piano moved through an obvious C-sharp seventh chord to change key to F-sharp, her key for the windup. She drifted into the bridge section with a long glissando, and disgust moved into her face and Derek’s in perfect synchronization as they realized that the pianist was blindly going into another 32 bars from the beginning.

Derek doubled his beat and slapped the strings hard, and the sudden flurry of sound snapped the pianist out of it. Blushing, he recovered the fluff. Jane rolled her eyes up in despair and finished the number. To scattered applause she turned to the piano and said, “Tinkle some. Derek and I are going to take ten. And while you’re tinkling,” she added viciously,
“practice
, huh?”

She smiled at the audience, crossed the stand and touched Derek’s elbow. “I’m going behind that potted palm and flip my lid. Come catch it.”

He put his bass out of harm’s way and followed her into the office. She let him pass her and slump down on the desk. She banged the door.

“You—”

He looked at her sullenly. “I know what you’re going to say. I threw out the best ten fingers in the business. I told you I don’t want to talk about it. You don’t believe that, do you?”