The Dick Gibson Show (50 page)

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.”