The Moth (12 page)

“But, Jack! You could
injure
her!”

“Any change would be an improvement.”

When we were alone again, she draped herself over my chair and told me what she thought of me for a while and I did the same for her and then I got out my big inspiration. It was an abacus, that I had got at a bazaar, as they call it in Baltimore, out on East Baltimore Street. They’re a Chinese adding machine, with little red and green and blue and yellow and purple and black balls that slide on wires in a frame. I figured that with her eyes telling her how to add and subtract and multiply and divide it would be easier. “What is it, Mr. Loathsome?”

“You use it to count.”

“You think I’m weak in the mind?”

“Yes, only more so.”

“Well, I’ll be—”

“So far, I figure the trouble has been that nobody, anyway nobody on the arithmetic assignment, has any idea how dumb you are. But I have. By dint of this hard application your mother keeps talking about, I have finally worked down to it, that alongside of you, a backward tree toad would look like a glee club of Einsteins, so—”

“Cookie?”

“O.K.”

She stuck a cake in my mouth, picked up the abacus, shook it, smelled it, and tried it sidewise. “Cute.”

“Listen, stupid, I have an idea.”

“Then let’s have it.”

“That teacher of yours—”

“Lamson? She’s a dope.”

“However—”

“I owe it to her to do something with the subject. But
why?
Tell me that.”

“You could harpoon her.”

“... I don’t get this at all.”

“I don’t say, Miss Legg, that she’s not a dope. If you ask me, they’re all dopes. If they weren’t dopes they wouldn’t be teachers in the Sarah Read School. If you ask me the arithmetic’s no good to you and you’ll never have any use for it that a third assistant bank clerk couldn’t straighten out for you in five minutes and no charge for the service. Just the same, there it is. The rule book says you’ve got to learn it. And if, all at the same time you could learn it and give this Lamson a nice kick in the teeth—”

“You mean, with this thing, I could learn?”

“Well, you could try.”

Her face lit up the way it had when she was a little thing and you’d stuff lemon ice cream into her. She wasn’t that little any more, but she certainly wasn’t big. She was about medium, on height, but awful slim, even in the plaid skirt and red sweater she wore to make herself look thicker, and with the yellow curls hanging down her back in thick snakes. They had a little gold in them, and were soft and glossy and silky. Her eyes were blue, and right now they were dancing. Pretty soon she was cackling out loud, and I was. Putting one over on Miss Lamson seemed to be the funniest thing we could think of. I knew that if she, I, and the abacus could do it, Miss Lamson was due to have a surprise.

That, as well as I remember, was early in 1930, the end of my sophomore year, when I was twenty and she was ten. I held her on the abacus three or four weeks, to make sure she had things straight, but then she began doing it with a pencil. And then one day, as she was starting on the stuff I had waiting for her, she half closed her eyes, stared at the pencil, and said: “... Wait a minute.”

“Take your time.”

“Jack.”

“Yes?”

“... I can see that abacus.”

“And?”

“I believe—I can do it in my head.”

She read off the first problem, looked out the window for a few seconds, and gave me the answer. I figured it up. It was right. She zipped through the next problem and the next and the next after that, and had the answer before I could work it out on paper. Then we both said it at the same time: “Miss Lamson!”

Because she hadn’t pulled any of her stuff for Miss Lamson yet, being regarded as kind of a hopeless member of the awkward squad, so she didn’t get called on any more. We both had a sudden idea of what it was going to be like if she could do the stuff quicker than Miss Lamson could.

And then we had a perfectly hellish idea. At that time, on WFBR, there was an awful kid named Willie Saunders they found in the Roland Park School, that could do stuff in his head for some kind of a cereal program they had Friday evenings. So our idea was that Helen would challenge him. The station was pretty leery of it, for fear she’d flop, and wouldn’t give it any build-up at all, but after we thought it over that suited us fine, because that way we could spring it as a surprise. So the night she was to go on, it wasn’t much trouble to get myself invited to the hotel for dinner. She got permission to go to a movie, and around five forty-five I slid by in the car and picked her up and hauled her to the station, which was only a few blocks away. So around six fifteen I showed up for dinner and put on a big act that I didn’t want to miss Willie Saunders. None of them had ever heard of Willie, but they brought me in the Colonial Room where there was a radio and all of them kind of kept me company, Margaret, and Mr. Legg, and Mrs. Legg, none of them quite knowing what it was for, but taking my word for it Willie was pretty terrific. So it wasn’t long before the announcer gave one of those jolly statements, and asked Willie if he minded a little competition, and Willie, who had a wind-up so slow it took him a minute to say anything at all, said: “If if if if if anybody thinks they can figure faster than I I I I I can they’re perfectly welcome to to to to to to try.” So then the announcer introduced Helen.

What she said I can’t tell you because Mrs. Legg jumped up like she’d been hit by a thousand-volt wire, and then Margaret did and Mr. Legg did, and then they all turned to me. I shrugged and spread out my hands, like I was just as buffaloed as they were. Then we all closed in on the machine.

“Now, Willie and Helen, the government reports that coal production for last week, final week of the month just closed, was up one and one tenth per cent above production for the preceding week, which in turn was up one and two tenths per cent for the week before that, which in turn was up one per cent for the week before
that.
If production last week was eight million, eighty thousand, six hundred and forty tons, what was production the first week of the month?”

Willie began to sing it back at him: “The government reports that coal coal coal coal production for last week, final final final final final final—” She said nothing, but I could feel her eyes close and her mind focus on that abacus, while her finger tips played little tunes on her thumbs. Then, before Willie had even finished his song, she cut in with a bunch of figures.

“Right!”

The announcer fairly yelled it and from then on she mowed Willie down like a field of hay. By the end of the third question, he couldn’t even talk, but sat there blubbering so bad you heard somebody mutter: “Better take him out,” and that was the end of him. Then, when the announcer got chummy and said: “Well—well—
well
—Helen, you
are
a surprise.
Quite
a surprise! And where did you learn all this higher mathematics?” she shot it just like we had rehearsed it up: “All that I have learned or achieved I owe to my beloved teacher Miss Josephine Lamson of the Sarah Read School, East Read Street.” But I could hear the shake in her voice that said she would explode if they would all kindly step out of the way so she wouldn’t injure anybody.

I give you one guess how that set with the family, especially with Mrs. Legg, who never let you forget those “honors” she had taken in school, and was all hot, a little too hot if you ask me, for the girls to be a “credit” to her. We all went down to WFBR with Sandy, and got Helen, and brought her back, and when we got to the hotel who should be there, all excited and waiting for us, but Miss Lamson herself, and it knocked me over, that such a small slice of nothing could have been the cause of all the fuss. She was a tiny, dowdy little woman, in a rusty black coat and felt hat, maybe sixty years old, who giggled and laughed and took it all on herself that Helen had done what she had, and never even suspected that maybe there were a couple of other angles to it. To her, it was a surprise that Helen had saved up for her, nothing more. The rest of them, I’ll say that for them, knew some pretty good coaching had been pulled, and Mr. Legg was plenty grateful. Margaret, at the picture show that night, kept whispering I was a “swell guy,” and patting my hand, and in the studio, as long as her mother left us alone together, she was awful affectionate.

But the real celebration came next day, when Helen came up to the house as usual, and as soon as Nancy and Sheila and the Old Man had had their say, and we had the door closed she did a standing broad jump into my arms and I swung her around and we had the light scrimmage we generally led off with, meaning a general roughhouse. But it didn’t last as long as usual, and pretty soon she pushed me over on the sofa and sat down beside me and began stretching her hand over mine like it was a piano keyboard and she was trying to touch octaves. She had small, slim hands, but she was always trying to measure them against mine. “Thanks, Jack.”

“For what?”

“Everything. Undumbbelling me.”

“That’s impossible.”

“But you did it.”

“All we did was get back at Lamson. And did we—”

I started to cackle, but she wasn’t laughing. She was looking at me in a bashful, self-conscious, ashamed kind of way, and I asked her what the trouble was. “Nothing’s the trouble. But I want you to know I get it. That I know what it was you did for me—and it’s been a lot. That’s not so nice, to be a stumble-bum. Specially to that simpleton Lamson. Isn’t she a dilly, now? Isn’t she?”

“Well—how does it feel to be famous?”

“I’m not.”

“Oh yes. Locally anyway. And rich, I imagine.”

“No. Not on radio, if that’s what you mean.”

“But they pay! Big!”

“
If
you click.”

“Well, what do you call clicking?”

“Willie clicks.”

“You’ve ruined him.”

“Maybe, but I’ll never fill his shoes ... I noticed something. I mean, last night I found out why he clicks. Jack, it’s
because
he’s so slow and poky and silly. When somebody
that
mopey can turn up with the right answers, it
is
amazing, not to say amusing and highly laughable. But me, I’ll just be a smart brat—that is, if they try to promote me.”

That’s how it turned out. She got the right answers, but they didn’t tune in. But somebody like that, of course she didn’t need a tutor any more, so a little before my first summer working in the hotel I got fired. I missed her the worst way. I had got to look forward to those roughhouses.

The summer I graduated, right after I started working regular at the hotel, Mr. Legg took a place at Gibson Island, which is on the bay not far from Annapolis. The whole family stayed down there, though of course Margaret was driving into town all the time to buy this, that, and the other for the wedding. Every week end, naturally, I’d be invited. But it turned out that Helen, once more, needed help. Because, what with having a rep as a mathematical whiz, and actually being a mathematical punk, things had got crossed up at the school, and she’d been promoted too fast, and was in trouble again, this time with algebra. I’d hate to tell you how glad I was, that they’d send her up to me, at the hotel, by Sandy every day, so I could explain to her why (a + b) (a – b) = a2 – b2, and how upset I was, one of my first week ends at the island, at what Mr. Legg had to say about the people that had taken the cottage next door: “The Finleys, one of the best families in the state, Lee Finley’s in the Fidelity and Deposit, she’s a Dawson, from Prince Georges County, the boy, Dick, goes to Gilman—I was delighted when I heard who the place had been leased to... But, Jack, that boy runs liquor. He’s in and out with that boat he’s got at all hours of the night, he has a pistol, and he’s thick with Zeke Torrance.”

“Who’s he?”

“He runs the Log Cabin.”

“Oh—that place near Glen Burnie?”

“That’s the man. If Dick’s car is parked outside of there, it might be a wild boy stopping for a drink. But when Zeke is down here, it’s business, and Zeke has only one business. I complained about the pistol, but Finley only got disagreeable. It seems it’s owned under permit, and the boy uses it only for target shooting as he’s permitted to do. But—he wears it. It’s on him all the time, and he goes around with a silly grin on his face, giving a fifth-rate imitation of some character in a ninth-rate movie, and I don’t like it. And—he keeps tagging after Helen.”

“What?”

“‘Let’s go get a soda, ‘Let’s got to the picture show,’ ‘How about a swim’—”

“Does she
go?”

“No. She thinks he’s funny. But—I don’t know anything in years that has made me so nervous. He keeps following her around, and
looking at her.”

The next morning was Sunday, and Margaret wanted to fish from an outboard boat they had, so I was on the porch fixing hand lines, knives, and bait, and the rest of them were out front on canvas recliners, reading the papers. I had just checked my snoods when I saw this wild-looking boy cross over from next door, in dungaree pants and rough shoes and checked shirt. He was around seventeen I would say, fairly big, and heavy sunburned, with shaggy hair and a hangdog grin. He sat down, though I didn’t notice anybody ask him to, and then Mr. Legg said something and Helen looked surprised and came inside the screened-in porch, where I was. “Well, Jack, what’s the big idea?”

“Whose?”

“Dad’s. ‘Go put on your beach robe.’—?”

“The young visitor, maybe.”

“Dick? He’s a child.”

“Little children got big eyes.”

“And all this talk whenever Dick wants a date. ‘We don’t
want
her taken out yet, she’s much too
young
to be going around.’ What am I? Little Eva or something?”

“Going around with
him,
maybe your father means.”

“Well, who would?”

“He’s got to be told
something.”

“But—”

She looked down at herself, where she was, just a sliver of brown in a wisp of blue bathing suit, and then went inside and I could see her looking at herself in a mirror. Then she came out with the robe and began putting it on. “I don’t know my own strength, apparently.”