Baby Is Three (13 page)

“I believe it,” she said. Her eyes glittered. “Derek Jax, I love you.”

“Cut it out.”

“I’m not kidding. I’m not changing the subject, either. I love you this much. I’m going to call your hand, kid. I love you so much that I’m going to make you talk about what’s with this business of Henry, or I’m going to see you walk out of here with, and into, your doghouse.”

“That don’t make a hell of a lot of sense, Janie,” he said uncomfortably.

“No, huh? Listen, the guy I love talks to me. I understand him enough so he can talk to me. If he won’t talk to me, it’s because he thinks I won’t understand. I think you see what I mean. I love the guy I think you are. If you won’t talk about it, you’re just not that guy. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“Could be,” he growled. He rose and stretched. “Well, I guess I’ll be going. Nice working with you, Janie.”

“So long,” she said. She went and opened the door.

“By God,” he said, “you really mean it.”

She nodded.

He licked his lips, then bit them. He sat down. “Shut the door, Janie.”

She shut the door and put her head against it. He flashed her a look. “What’s the matter?”

She said hoarsely, “I got something in my eye. Wait.” Presently she swung around and faced him. Her smile was brilliant, her face composed. The vein in the side of her neck was thick and throbbing.

“Jane …” he said with difficulty, “that Henry—did he ever make a pass at you?”

“Why, you egghead. No! To him I’m something that makes music, like a saxophone. It’s you he’s interested in. Hell, did you see his face when you came in with your bass this afternoon? He’d rather play
to that bass than go over the falls in a barrel with me. If that’s all that was on your mind, forget it.”

“You make it tough for me,” he said heavily. “I’ll play it through for you a note at a time. Got a stick?”

She rummaged in the desk drawer and found him a cigarette. He lit it and dragged until he coughed. She had never seen him like this. She said nothing.

He seemed to appreciate that. He glanced at her and half his mouth flashed part of a smile. Then he said, “Did I ever tell you about Danny?”

“No.”

“Kids together. Kids get close. He lived down the pike. I got caught in a root one time, swimming in a rock quarry. Danny seemed to know the instant I got tangled. He couldn’t swim worth a damn, but in he came. Got me out, too.”

He dragged on his cigarette, still hungry, hot and harsh. The words came out, smoking. “There was a lot of stuff … we played ball, we run away from home, we broke into an ol’ house and pried loose a toilet and threw it out a fourth-floor window onto a concrete walk. We done a lot.

“We jived a lot. He had natural rhythm. We used to bang away on his ol’ lady’s piano. I played trumpet for a while, but what I wanted to do was play string bass. I wanted that real bad.

“We grew up and he moved away. Some lousy job trying to learn cabinet-making. Saw him a couple times. Half-starved, but real happy. I was playing bass by then, some. Had to borrow a fiddle. Wanted my own instrument
so
bad, never had the money. So one day he called me up long distance. Come over. I didn’t have no trainfare, so I hitchhiked. Met him at a barrelhouse joint in town. He was real excited, dragged me out to his place. A shack—practically a shanty. When we got in sight of it he started to run. It was on fire.”

Derek closed his eyes and went on talking. “We got to it and it was pretty far gone. I got there first. One wall was gone. Inside everything was burning. Danny, he—he screamed like a stung kid. He tried to jump inside. I hung on to him. Was much bigger’n him. Then
I saw it—a string bass. A full-size string bass, burning up. I sat on Danny and watched it burn. I knew why he’d moved out of town. I knew why he took up cabinet-making. I knew why he was so hungry an’—an’ so happy. Made the box with his own two hands. We watched it burn and he tried to fight me because I would not let him save it. He cried. Well—
we
cried. Just two kids.”

Jane said a single, unprintable word with a bookful of feeling behind it.

“We got over it. We roomed together after that. We done everything together. Crowd we ran with used to kid us about it, and that just made it better. I guess we were about nineteen then.”

He squeezed out a long breath and looked up at her with stretched, blind eyes. “We had something, see? Something clean and big that never happened before, and wasn’t nothing wrong with it.

“Then I come home one night and he’s at the back window staring into the yard. Said he was moving out. Said we weren’t doing each other any good. He was in bad shape. Somebody’d been talking to him, some lousy crumb with a sewer mouth and sewer ideas. I didn’t know what it was all about. We were still just kids, see?

“Anyway, I couldn’t talk him out of it. He left. He was half-crazy, all eaten up. Like the time we watched the bull-fiddle burn up. He wouldn’t say what was the trouble. So after he went I milled around the joint trying to make sense out of it and I couldn’t. Then I—”

Derek’s voice seemed to desert him. He coughed hard and got it back. “—Then I went and looked out the window. Somebody’d wrote our names on the fence. Drew a heart around ’em.

“I never gave a damn what anyone thought, see? But Danny, he did. I guess you can’t know how someone else feels, but you can get a pretty fair idea. First I was just mad, and then I pretended I was Danny looking at a thing like that, and I got an idea how bad it was. I ran out lookin’ for him.

“Saw him after a time. Up by the highway, staggering a bit like he was half-soused. He wasn’t, though. I ran after him. He was waiting for the light to change. There was a lot of traffic. Tried to get to him. Couldn’t begin to. He sort of pitched off the curb right under
oh my God I can still see it the big dual wheel it run right over his head …” he finished in a rapid monotone.

Jane put her hand on his shoulder. Derek said, “I didn’t know then and I don’t know now and I never will know if he was so tore up and sick he just fell, or if he done it on purpose. All I know is I’ve lived ever since with the idea I killed him just by being around him so much. Don’t try to talk me out of it. I know it don’t make sense. I know all the right answers. But knowing don’t help.

“That’s the whole story.”

Jane waited a long time and then said gently, “No, Derek.”

He started as if he had suddenly found himself in an utterly strange place. Gradually his sense of presence returned to him and he wiped his face.

“Yeah,” he said. “Your boy Henry. Danny—he played piano, Janie. I started with him. Danny played piano like nothing that ever lived except this Henry. Everything I ever drug out of a string bass was put in there first by the way he played piano. He used to sit and play like that and every once in a while grin at me. Shy.

“So I walk in here on a guy playing that kind of piano and he grins shy like that when he plays, and besides, here’s that
real close
stuff around him like a fog. That Henry’s a genius, Janie. And he’s a—he’s the type of guy they ought to use for a mold to make
people
out of. And he just wants to be near my fiddle. And me. And you want me to keep him around here until he knocks hisself off.

“Janie,” he said, with agony in his voice,
“I’m not goin’ through that again!”

Jane squeezed his shoulder. She looked back over the afternoon and evening and words flitted through her mind: “You won’t have to lose any sleep over him …” “Looks like you’ve made a conquest …” “Did he ever make a pass at you?” Aloud she told him, “I’ve sure said all the right things … take a swing at me, pudd’nhead.”

Derek pulled her hand close against his cheek, and pressed it there so hard it hurt her. She let him do it as long as he wanted. “I love you, Janie,” he whispered. “I shoulda told you all that about Danny a long time ago.”

“How could you tell till you tried?” she asked huskily. “Let’s go on out there before ol’ Kitten on the Keys drives all the customers away.”

“I can’t go in there,” said Henry Faulkner in genuine panic.

“You can and you will,” said the old lady firmly.

“Listen, there’s a man in there who’ll throw me out on sight.”

“Have I been wrong yet? This is your night to do as you’re told, young man, and that’s the way it is.”

In spite of himself he grinned. They went in through the herculite doors. Janie was just finishing a number. The piano fluffed the last chorus badly. Henry and the old lady stood in the back of the club until Derek and Jane walked off the floor.

“Now,” she said briskly, “go on up there and play for me. Play anything you want to.”

“But they have a piano player!”

“He’s in a pet. Just go up there.”

“Wh-what’ll I say to him?”

“Don’t say anything, silly! Just stand there. He’ll go away.”

He hesitated, and the lady gave him a small shove. He shambled around the dance floor and diffidently approached the piano.

The pianist was playing a dingdong version of
Stardust
. He saw Henry coming. “You again.”

Henry said nothing.

“I suppose you want to take my job again.”

Henry still said nothing. The man went on playing. Presently, “You can have it. How anyone can work with a couple sourpusses like that …“ He got off the stool in mid-chorus, leaving
Stardust’s
garden gate musically ajar. Henry’s right hand shot out and, catching the chord as if it had been syncopated instead of shut off, began molding it like a handful of soft clay. He sat down still playing.

Edie said, “I can’t help feeling a little peculiar. This is wonderful, so wonderful—but there are still two of us and one of you.”

“Three of us,” corrected Priscilla.

“In some ways that’s so,” said Jon. He swallowed the rest of his
drink and beckoned the waiter. “Pris is the best statistician and psychological steno I’ve ever run across. And you’re a genius with the machines. Why, between us we will do research that’ll make history.”

“Of course we will. But—isn’t three a crowd?”

Priscilla said, without malice, “From anyone but you I’d consider that a hint. Don’t worry about me. I have the most wonderful feeling that the miracles aren’t finished.”

“Pris, are you ever going to tell us about the miracles?”

“I don’t know, Jon. Perhaps.” Her eyes searched the club. Suddenly they fixed on a distant corner table. “There she is!”

“Who?” Jon twisted around. “Well, I’ll be damned!”

“What is it?” asked Edie.

“Excuse me,” said Jon, and rose. “Someone I’ve got to see.” He stalked over to the corner table and glowered down at its occupants. “May I ask you what you’re doing here?”

“Why, Dr. Prince!” said Pallas. “Imagine meeting you here!”

“What are you two doing here at this time of night?”

“We can go where we like,” said Verna, smoothing her snowy hair, “and that’s the way it is.”

“There’s no law against a lady having a spot at bedtime,” amended Verna.

“You two never cease to amaze me,” Jon said, chuckling in spite of himself. “Just be careful. I’d hate to see my prize exhibits get hurt.”

They smiled up at him. “We’ll be all right. We’ll talk to you again later, won’t we, Verna?”

“Oh, yes,” said Verna. “Definitely. That’s the way it is.”

Still chuckling, Jon went back to his table. “There sits the damnedest pair of human beings I’ve encountered yet,” he said as he sat down. “Three years ago they were senile psychotics, the two of them. As far as I can determine, they had no special therapy—they were in the County Home, and as mindless as a human being can get and stay alive. First thing you know they actually started feeding themselves—”

“Pallas and Verna!” said Priscilla. “You’ve mentioned—holy Pete! Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I’m on the Board out there. You know the case history. They have to report to me every sixty days.”

“Well—I—will—be—damned,” Priscilla intoned, awed.

“What is it, Pris? I didn’t think you’d ever seen them. They’ve never been to the lab.… Say, how did you recognize them just now?”

“Could … could you bring them over?”

“Oh, come now. This celebration is only for—”

“I’ve heard enough to be curious about them,” said Edie. “Do invite them, Jon.”

He shrugged and returned to the other table. In a moment he was back with the two spinsters. He drew out chairs for them in courtly fashion, and called a waiter. Pallas ordered a double rye, no chaser. Verna smiled like a kitten and ordered scotch on the rocks. “For our colds,” she explained.

“How long have you had colds?” he demanded professionally.

“Oh, dear, we don’t get colds,” explained Verna sweetly. “That’s because we drink our liquor straight.”

Dr. Jonathan Prince felt it within him to lay down the law at this point. A patient was a patient. But there was something in the air that prevented it. He found himself laughing again. He thought he saw Pallas wink at Priscilla and shake her head slightly, but he wasn’t sure. He introduced the girls. Without the slightest hesitation he introduced Edie as “my wife.” She colored and looked pleased.

“Listen to that music,” breathed Priscilla.

“Thought you’d notice it,” said Pallas, and smiled at Verna.

They all listened. It was a modal, moody, rhythmic invention, built around a circle of chords in the bass which beat, and beat, and beat on a single sonorous tone. The treble progressed evenly, regularly, tripped up on itself and ran giggling around and through the steady structure of the bass modulations, then sobered and marched again, but always full of suppressed mirth.

Priscilla was craning her neck. “I can’t see him!”

Verna said, “Why don’t you go up there, dear? I’m sure he would not mind.”

“Oh … really not?” She caught Pallas’s eye. Pallas gave her one firm nod. Priscilla said, “Do you mind?” She slipped out of her chair
and went up past the dance floor.

“Look at her,” breathed Edie. “She’s got that—that ‘miracle’ expression again.… Oh, Jon, she’s
so
lovely.”

Jon said, looking at the spinsters, “What are you two hugging each other about?”