The Moth

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I think you’d make a go of it.”

  “Is this an offer?”

  “... It could be. It could very well be. I’ll go so far as to say I’d like it to be. But—you created the situation. It’s you that’s here morning, noon, and night, and it’s you who would continue to create a situation if you came in here permanently. Jack, before we discuss offers, I’d have to know your intentions toward Margaret.”

  “Your feelings are inside, and I think you know about them. Your intentions are what you’re going to do about them, and frankly, Mr. Legg, it wouldn’t be fair to Margaret or you or anybody to put on an act that I wanted to do something about them when there’s nothing I can do. My father’s in a bad way. I’ve got no work, and I don’t know of any work. So far as my intentions go, suppose you tell me.”

  “But if you had work?”

  “Watch me.”

  “Then let’s fix things up.”

  “O.K., I’d like a chance to get a little money together, say three or four or five months to pay off a few things that have come up in my senior year and bulge the bank balance up a little bit, and then, say around October or November—”

  “Fine, Jack. I like your attitude. Ah, before you go, I’d like you to know her mother will be—shall we say ?—relieved. Not only pleased, but eased, in her mind. To be perfectly frank, with Margaret having notions of going to New York and concertizing, we’ve been concerned.”

  “I don’t think you need be.”

  “Why not, Jack?”

  “I doubt if she’s got it.”

  “... So do we.”

  We were in his private office, a small paneled room with pictures of Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Francis Scott Key and some Cartarets in it, and he came over from behind the desk and leaned close to me and let me have it out of the side of the mouth in a way you wouldn’t think a member of the Maryland Club would ever talk. “... We think she’s kidding herself, and badly. Frankly, when Harold Randolph was alive and the piano seemed something for a young lady and one could be proud of her but not alarmed about her, I was all for it. But then when that vaudeville business started, and Randolph died and this new crowd came in at the Peabody—we’ve been growing uneasy, uneasy, uneasy. Jack, am I making myself clear?”

  Randolph was an F.F.V. that had run the Peabody Conservatory as long as anybody could remember. But somewhere around the time I entered college he had died, and Margaret had gone with some bozo from Texas that had pumped her full of stuff about temperament, and I knew what Mr. Legg meant. I just winked and he winked back. “Jack, suppose she did have it? It’s no life for a woman. I want her married. She’s crazy about you, so take it over. And Jack, I like that idea of getting a little stake, so you’re your own man. But don’t overdo. I mean, don’t worry about money. Soon as you’re married, get a baby started, so she—you get it, boy, get it?”

  He cackled and laughed and shook hands and opened the door on a crack and peeped out and then opened a panel and in there were bottles and glasses and fizz water. So we had a drink and he laughed and clapped me on the back some more. It sounds like one nice guy talking to another nice guy about what had to be settled before they could do something nice for a pretty nice girl, and I wish I could tell it that way. But what I said, which was what I meant, makes no sense unless you know what had happened, over at the college, the week before, on a Friday afternoon that Denny and I had to spend there, on account of a test we both had coming up the next morning. Denny had long since forgotten about engineering, and switched over to psychology and business practice and advertising and some more courses like that, that he could piece together for a degree, but we were in the same calculus class and they were throwing a test at us. We were both good at math, and there was no need to bone the test, so it was just an afternoon to kill. About three o’clock he came in our room carrying a big carton, with a colored fellow behind him carrying another, and he acted pretty mysterious about it. Come to find out it was beer, and where it came from I don’t know, but if you ask me his father had given an order and then asked the bootlegger to stop by, on his way into the District, with a little for Denny. But of course, in a case like that, Denny would have to talk big about his “connections.” That didn’t bother me any. It was a hot day in April and I took the bottles out, then took one of the cartons to the drug store and filled it with cracked ice and came back and put the stopper in the basin and loaded some bottles in and put ice around them and pretty soon we were set.

  So of course, nothing draws like beer, so it wasn’t long before we had company. We didn’t have many, not over four or five or six, because on a Friday afternoon nobody sticks around there that doesn’t have to. But we had that many, drinking out of the bottlenecks after Denny used the opener, and getting kind of sociable, that is, all except Morton. Morton was known simply as Salt, and when it rained he poured and at all other times he poured, a thin, do-gooder line that got on everybody’s nerves and of course only got worse with beer. However, nobody got sore at all, until after Cannon began his toasting. Who Cannon started to toast I don’t know, maybe the college or Governor Ritchie or General Pershing, it doesn’t make much difference and one guess is as good as another up to and including the Queen of Sheba. But where Salt began to look thick was on the toast to the class of 1931, that had graduated the year before. Cannon took a little trouble with it and it went something like this:

  “To that noble aggregation, which beat us by one year down life’s broad highway, the class of ’31—may they always be right, but right or left, ’31. Where, my friends, does one find such distinction, such achievement, as in the class of ’31? I pause for a reply, not knowing where to look. Is highway construction our test of solid accomplishment? This outfit has pressed more bricks than Coxey’s Army. Is it architecture? Think of the buildings that are being held up by the class of ’31. Is it philanthropy? This outfit has panhandled more dimes than John D. Rockefeller would be able to give away the whole coming year. Is it agriculture? Think of the apples ’31 has peddled in the streets, and only a year out of school yet. Is it tonsoriology ? A blind man could shave himself by the shine on the seat of these bastards’ pants. Is it—”

  “I don’t care for that.”

  “Salt, what have I said to offend you?”

  “It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.”

  “You mean my deep, mellifluous voice?”

  “I mean your scoffing tone.”

  “Are you by any chance taking up for these sons of bitches that showed not the least fraction of a human soul when we got here four years ago, that razzed us and taunted us and hazed us, that—”

  “I don’t take up for ’31 at all. To hell with them! But if they want work, there’s still work to do—”

  “Oh, yeah? Pray tell us.”

  Then Cannon asked Salt what he was going to do when he got his dip. He said he was going with the Consolidated Engineering Company, but it was quite well known that Consol was owned by his uncle, and had contracts all over, specially wherever the government needed dredges. That got him the raspberry, and Cannon went on: “Here’s to Admiral Byrd!”

  “Ray!”

  “Babe Ruth!”

  “Ray!”

  “Jean Harlow!”

  “Oh, boy!”

  “President Hoover!”

  “Hip, hip—”

  “Morituri, te salutamus!”

  But Salt had stood up when Mr. Hoover’s name was mentioned, and that was when Denny swung. There was quite a roughhouse, and I guess it was five or six o’clock when I got it quieted down and all of them thrown out. But along around ten, when the beer had worn off and we’d had something to eat, I lay down and kept thinking about it. “Denny, what was that he said? That sounded like Latin.”

  “May be in the dictionary.”

  I thought I remembered the first word of it, and sure enough after a while I found it. “Denny, you know what it means?
”

  “Not noticeably.”

  “‘We who are about to die salute you.’”

  “Well?”

  “Is that how he feels?”

  “Why not? He’s on the end of the plank.”

  “Is that how you feel, Denny?”

  “... I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to do when we graduate, Denny?”

  “Point of Rocks.”

  Point of Rocks is a place on the Potomac, thirty or forty miles up from the District on the Maryland side, where Mr. Deets had a little farm, but he used it mainly when he felt like fishing. That Denny would hole up there just gave you an idea how far things had gone in the way of jobs. Of course there hadn’t been much out of him about pro football since I cracked my knee. It turned out in a professional game if he didn’t have me to take him through the line he wasn’t going through the line, so after getting the liver, lights, and gizzard knocked out of him a couple of times he didn’t get called any more. “You really going to Point of Rocks?”

  “Well, where the hell would I go?”

  If it was the beer wearing off, or he’d been worrying, I don’t know, but he was disagreeable and sounded bitter. That was when I got it through my head at last: if it could take the starch out of Denny, it was bad. So that’s why I talked like I did to Mr. Legg. That wasn’t a nice kid talking to a nice father about a nice girl. It was a guy that was losing his nerve making the best of things he could.

  10

  ALL THAT TIME, NOT only after the New Year’s party but before it, when I’d be booked to appear with Margaret or tagged for one of her parties or seeing her for one reason or another, little Helen was growing up. When Margaret and I first began doing shows together she was around two and couldn’t talk yet. Just the same she knew me whenever I came, and I’d have to stand there and listen to her tell me all about it or anyway think she was telling me, and a little later, at the parties, I’d stuff her full of ice cream and the more I saw of her the more wonderful she thought I was and the more wonderful I thought she was. She was just a little tyke, with blue eyes and yellow hair, but I had never run into anything like her, for prettiness and friendliness and the smile that lit her up like a Christmas tree. When she was a little older we’d go out together, to the drugstore for a soda or wherever it would be, and we didn’t exactly walk, but we did a pretty good sashay: her in front, dancing along backwards, me coming along behind, with a doll in my arms or one of the puppies on a leash or the stroller, so I could push her if she got tired. A little later we’d go to the picture show. Then a little after that, when I was in college and she was in the Sarah Read School around the corner, she’d see my picture in the paper and call me up after the games and want to know why I hadn’t sent her tickets. I’d say she was a little young yet. It wasn’t until after the New Year’s party that I began coaching her in arithmetic. She was just naturally dumb at it, and there was some talk about it at dinner one night. Her father kept saying, “It’s all right, we’ll get a tutor,” but Mrs. Legg was pretty disagreeable about it that Helen didn’t study the subject, as she said. Then she got off a lot about the honors she had taken when she was a young girl at school, and you kind of got the idea she was sore because Helen wasn’t a credit to her. I kept thinking how easy everything, the music at least, had been for me at that age when Miss Eleanor made a game out of it, and then I heard myself say: “Mrs. Legg, why can’t I be her tutor?”

  “You, Jack?”

  “At least I know my math.”

  “Whoo!”

  Margaret exploded like it was the funniest thing she ever heard in her life, and Mrs. Legg was crossed up because she wasn’t in favor of a tutor. But Mr. Legg jumped at it. I don’t know why, but my guess is that even at that time he had his eye on me, on account of Margaret’s career bug, and this was just one more knot he could tie in my tether. The upshot was she was to come up to the house Saturday mornings, and I was even to get paid for it. I squawked at that, said I’d be glad to do it for nothing, but he was set that I had to get something, so we made it five dollars for two hours, ten to twelve.

  “Well, of all the cheap, chiseling suh-lugs, my overgrown friend, you certainly take the hand-whittled potato masher!”

  “Sit down and speak when I speak to you.”

  “Even gypping little chee-yildren!”

  “Little hoodlums, more like.”

  “And for a measly five bucks!”

  Hanging under some prints was a riding crop my father had had when he had chased the deer around Tara Hill, and I took it down and whacked her with it. Then we had some light scrimmaging around the study until Sheila came in with some cookies for the new pupil, when Helen turned from a brat into an angel, which was something she could do at the drop of a hat. “Oh, you darling! Cookies! I just love them!” She ran over and kissed Sheila, who didn’t quite know what her cue was, so I took over: “Nothing to get alarmed at, Sheila. Just inculcating a little discipline around the classroom, but she’s got a hide like a rhinoceros, so it’s a little noisy.”

  “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 wel
l 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.