Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

He nodded. “Ma’am?” He looked in the kitchen door. “May I look at this?”

“Certainly,” Mrs. Richards said, stirring, at the stove.

He went into the bathroom; probably laid out the same as the one he’d peed all over upstairs. Two candles on the back of the toilet tank put two flecks on each tile; and there was another candle up on the medicine cabinet.

He turned the taps, sat on the toilet top, and, with Newboy on his notebook, read at the “Prolegomena.”

The water rushed.

After a page he skipped, reading a line here, a verse paragraph further on. At some he laughed out loud.

He put down the book, shucked his clothing, leaned over the rim and lowered his chained, grimy ankle. Steam kissed the sole of his foot, then hot water licked it.

Sitting in the cooling tub, chain under his buttocks, he had scrubbed only a minute before the water was grey and covered with pale scalings.

Well, Lanya had said she wouldn’t mind.

He let that water out, and ran more over his feet, rubbing the gritty skin from his insteps. He’d known he was dirty, but the amount of filth in the water was amazing. He soaked and soaped his hair, rubbed his arms and chest with the bar till the chain tore it. He ground the balled washrag beneath his jaw, and then lay back with his ears under water, to watch the isle of his belly shake to his heart beat, each curved hair a wet scale, like the shingled skin of some amphibian.

Sometime during all this, Madame Brown’s high laughter rolled into the hall; and a little on, her voice outside the door: “No! No, you can’t go in there, Muriel! Someone’s taking a bath.”

He let out the water, and lay back, exhausted and clean, occasionally wiping at the tub-line of grit, wider than a garrison belt. He pressed his back against porcelain. Water trapped there poured around his shoulders. He sat, wondering if one could will oneself dry. And, slowly, dried.

He looked at his shoulder, peppered with pores, run with tiny lines he could imagine separated each cell, fuzzed with dark down. He brushed his mouth on his skin, licked the de-salted flesh, kissed it, kissed his arm, kissed the paler place where veins pushed across the bridge from bicep to forearm, realized what he was doing, with scowling laughter, but kissed himself again. He pushed to standing. Drops trickled the back of his legs. He was dizzy; the tiny flames wobbled in the tiles. He stepped out, heart knocking to the sudden effort.

He toweled roughly at his hair, gently at his genitals. Then, on his knees, he did a slightly better job washing away the hairs and grit and flaky stuff on the bathtub bottom.

He picked up his pants, shook his head over them; well, they were all he had. He put them on, combed his moist hair back with his fingers, tucked in his shirt, buckled on his sandal, and came out into the hall. Behind his ears was cool, and still wet.

“How many baths did you take?” Mr. Richards asked. “Three?”

“Two and a half.” Kidd grinned. “Hello, Ma—Mrs. Brown.”

“They’ve been telling me how hard you’ve worked.”

Kidd nodded. “It’s not that bad. I’ll probably finish up tomorrow. Mr. Richards? You said you had a razor?”

“Oh yes. You’re sure you don’t want to use my electric?”

“I’m used to the other kind.”

“It’s just you’ll have to use regular soap.”

“Arthur,” Mrs. Richards called from the kitchen, “you have that mug of shaving soap Michael gave you for Christmas.”

Mr. Richards snapped his fingers. “Now I’d forgot. That was three years back. I never did open it. Grew a beard since too. I had a pretty good-looking beard for a while, you know?”

“It looked silly,” Mrs. Richards said. “I made him shave it off.”

Back in the bathroom, he lathered his jaw, then scraped the warm foam away. His face cooled under the blade. He decided to leave his sideburns half an inch longer. Now (in two distinct stages) they came well below his ears.

For a moment, holding a hot washcloth across his face, he contemplated the patterns inside his eyes against the dark. But like everything in this house, they seemed of calculated inconsequence.

From the kitchen: “Bobby, please come in and set the table. Now!”

Kidd went into the living room. “Bet you’d hardly recognize me,” he said to Madame Brown.

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“Dinner’s ready,” Mrs. Richards said. “Kidd, you and Bobby sit back there. Edna, you sit here with June.”

Madame Brown went over and pulled out her chair. “Muriel, stay down there and be good, hear me?”

He squeezed between the wall and the table—and took some tablecloth with him.

“Oh, dear!” Madame Brown lunged to grab a tottering brass candlestick. (In suddenly bared mahogany, the reflected flame steadied.) By candlelight her face had again taken on that bruised-eyed tawdriness she had last night in the bar.

“Jesus,” Kidd said. “I’m sorry.” He pulled the cloth back down across the table and began to straighten silverware. Mrs. Richards had put out a profusion of forks, spoons, and side plates. He wasn’t sure if he got all of them in the right place or which were his or Bobby’s; when he finally sat, two fingers lingered on the ornate handle of a knife; he watched them rubbing, thick with enlarged knuckles and gnawed nails, but translucently clean. After baths, he reflected, when you’re still alone in the john, is the time for all those things you don’t want people around for: jerking off, picking your nose and eating it, serious nail biting. Was it some misguided sense of good manners that had kept him from any of these here? His thoughts drifted to various places he’d indulged such habits not so privately: seated at the far end of lunch counters, standing at public urinals, in comparatively empty subway cars at night, in city parks at dawn. He smiled; he rubbed.

“Those were my mother’s,” Mrs. Richards said, on the other side of the table. She set down two bowls of soup for Arthur and Madame Brown, then went back to the kitchen. “I think old silver is lovely—” her voice came in—“but keeping it polished is awfully difficult.” She came out again with two more bowls. “I wonder if it’s that—what do they call it? That sulfur dioxide in the air, the stuff eating away all the paintings and statues in Venice.” She set one in front of Kidd and one in front of Bobby, who was just squeezing into place—more plates and silverware slid on the wrinkling cloth; Bobby pulled it straight again.

Kidd took his fingers from the tarnished handle and put his hand in his lap.

“We’ve never been to Europe,” Mrs. Richards said, returning from the kitchen with bowls for her and June. “But Arthur’s parents went—oh, years ago. The plates are Arthur’s mother’s—from Europe. I suppose I shouldn’t use the good ones; but I do whenever we have company. They’re so festive—Oh, don’t wait for me. Just dig in.”

Kidd’s soup was in a yellow melmac bowl. The china plate beneath bore an intricate design around its fluted lip, crossed by more intricate scratches that might have come from cleanser or steel wool.

He looked around to see if he should start, caught both Bobby and June looking around for the same purpose; Madame Brown had a china bowl but every one else’s was pastel plastic. He wondered if he, or Madame Brown alone, would have merited the spread.

Mr. Richards picked up his spoon, skimmed up some soup.

So he did too.

With the oversized spoon-bowl still in his mouth, he noticed Bobby, June, and Madame Brown had all waited for Mrs. Richards, who was only now lifting hers.

From where he sat, he could see into the kitchen: Other candles burned on the counter. Beside a paper bag of garbage, its lip neatly turned down, stood two open Campbell’s cans. He took another spoonful. Mrs. Richards has mixed, he decided, two, or even three kinds; he could recognize no specific flavor.

Under the tablecloth edge, his other hand had moved to his knee—the edge of his little finger scraped the table leg. First with two fingers, then with three, then with his thumb, then with his fore-knuckle, he explored the circular lathing, the upper block, the under-rim, the wing bolts, the joints and rounded excrescences of glue, the hairline cracks where piece was joined to piece—and ate more soup.

Over a full spoon, Mr. Richards smiled and said, “Where’s your family from, Kidd?”

“New York—” he bent over his bowl—“State.” He wondered where he had learned to recognize this as the milder version of the blunt What-nationality-are-you? which, here and there about the country, could create unpleasantnesses.

“My people are from Milwaukee,” Mrs. Richards said. “Arthur’s family is all from right around the Bellona area. Actually my sister lived down here too—well, she did. She’s left now. And so has all of Arthur’s family. It’s quite strange to think of Marianne and June—we named our June after Arthur’s mother—and Howard and your Uncle Al not here anymore.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Richards said; Kidd saw him preparing to ask how long he’d been here, when Madame Brown asked: “Are you a student, Kidd?”

“No, ma’am,” realizing it was a question whose answer she probably knew; but liked her for asking. “I haven’t been a student for a while.”

“Where were you in school, then?” Mr. Richards asked.

“Lots of places. Columbia. And a community college in Delaware.”

“Columbia University?” Mrs. Richards asked. “In New York?”

“Only for a year.”

“Did you like it? I’ve spent a lot of time—Arthur and I have both spent a lot of time—thinking about whether the children should go away to school. I’d like for Bobby to go to some place like Columbia. Though State, right here, is very good.”

“Especially the poli-sci department,” Kidd said. Mr. Richards and Madame Brown spooned their soup away from them. Mrs. Richards, June, and Bobby spooned theirs toward them. One, he remembered, was more correct; but not which. He looked at the ornate silverware handles, diminishing in size either side of his plate, and finally simply sank his spoon straight down in the soup’s center.

“And of course it’s a lot less expensive.” Mrs. Richards sat back, with a constrained laugh. “Expense is always something you have to think about. Especially today. Here at State—” (Four more spoonfuls, he figured, and the soup would be too low for his compromise technique.) Mrs. Richards sat forward again. “You say, the poli-sci department?” She tipped her soup bowl toward her.

“That’s what someone told me,” Kidd said. “Where’s June going to go?”

Mr. Richards tipped his away. “I don’t know whether June has thought too much about that.”

Mrs. Richards said: “It would be very nice if June wanted to go to college.”

“June isn’t too, what you’d call, well, academic. June’s sort of my old-fashioned girl.” Mr. Richards, tipping his bowl, apparently couldn’t get enough; he picked it up, poured the last drops into his spoon, and set it down. “Aren’t you, honey?”

“Arthur, really…!” Mrs. Richards said.

“It’s very good, dear,” Mr. Richards said. “Very good.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kidd said. “It is,” and put his spoon on his plate. It wasn’t.

“I’d like to go to college—” June smiled at her lap—“if I could go someplace like New York.”

“That’s silly!” Mr. Richards made a disparaging gesture with his soup spoon. “It was all we could do to keep her in high school!”

“It just wasn’t very interesting.” June’s bowl—pink melmac—moved, under her spoon, to the plate’s rim. She centered it again. “That’s all.”

“You wouldn’t like New York,” Mr. Richards said. “You’re too much of a sunshine girl. June likes the sun, swimming, outdoor things. You’d wither away in New York or Los Angeles, with all that smog and pollution.”

“Oh, Daddy!”

“I think June ought to apply to the Junior College next term—” Mrs. Richards turned in mid-sentence from husband to daughter—“to get some idea if you liked it or not. Your marks weren’t that bad. I don’t think it would be such a terrible idea to try it out, at the Junior College.”

“Mom!” June looked at her lap, not smiling.

“Your mother went through college,” Mr. Richards said, “I went through college. Bobby’s going to go. If nothing else, it’s a place to get married in.”

“Bobby reads more than June,” Mrs. Richards explained. “He reads all the time, in fact. And I suppose he is more school-minded.”

“That Junior College is an awful place,” June said. “I hate everybody who goes there.”

“Dear,” Mrs. Richards said, “you don’t know everybody who goes there.”

Kidd, with his middle finger, was exploring the countersinking about some flathead screw, when Madame Brown said:

“Mary, how close are we to the second course? Arthur up there looks like he’s about to eat the bottom of his bowl.”

“Oh, dear me!” Mrs. Richards pushed back in her chair. “I don’t know what I’m thinking of. I’ll be right in—”

“You want any help, mom?” June said.

“No.” Mrs. Richards disappeared into the kitchen. “Thank you, darling.”

“Pass me your soup plates, everybody,” June said.

Kidd’s hand came up from under the tablecloth to join his other on the china plate to pass it—but stopped just below the table lip. Knuckles, fingertips, and two streaks on the back of the hand were smudged black.

He put his hand down between his legs and looked around.

Anyway, people were keeping their plates and just passing their bowls. He passed his with one hand, his other between his knees. Then the other joined it and he tried, without looking, to rub his fingers clean.

Mrs. Richards came in with two steaming ceramic bowls. “I’m afraid we’re vegetarian tonight.” She went out, returned with two more. “But there’s nowhere to get any meat that you can trust,” and returned again.

“You do that nice tunafish casserole,” Mr. Richards called after her. “That’s very good.”

“Ugh,” Bobby said.

“Bobby!” June said.

“Yes, I know, Arthur.” Mrs. Richards returned with a gravy boat, set it on the table, and sat. “But I just feel so funny about fish. Wasn’t it a couple of years back all those people died from some canned tuna that had gone bad? I just feel safer with vegetables. Though Lord knows, they can go bad too.”

“Botulism,” Bobby said.

“Really, Bobby!” Madame Brown laughed, a hand against her sparkling chains.

“Oh, I don’t think we’re doing so badly. Mashed potatoes, mushrooms, carrots—” Mrs. Richards indicated one and another of the bowls—“and some canned eggplant stuff I’ve never tried before. When I went to that health-food restaurant with Julia—when we were in Los Angeles?—she said they always use mushrooms and eggplants in place of meat. And I’ve made a sauce.” She turned to her husband, as though to remind him of something. “Arthur…?”

“What?” Then Mr. Richards too seemed to remember. “Oh, yes…Kidd? Well, we’ve taken up this little habit of having a glass of wine with our meals.” He reached down beside his chair, brought up a bottle, and set it beside the candle at his end of the table. “If it it isn’t something that appeals to you, you’re perfectly welcome to have water—”

“I like wine,” Kidd said.

Mrs. Richards and Madame Brown had already passed their wine glasses up. So Kidd did too; though the water glass at the head of his knife seemed the better size for wine drinking as he was accustomed to it.

Mr. Richards peeled away gold foil, pulled loose the plastic stopper, poured, passed back the glasses.

Kidd sipped; it was almost black in candlelight. At first he thought his mouth was burning—the wine was bubbly as soda pop.

“Sparkling burgundy!” Mr. Richards grinned and bobbed his glass. “We haven’t tried this one before. 1975. I wonder if that’s a good year for sparkling Burgundy?” He sipped. “Tastes okay to me. Cheers.”

The candle flame staggered, stilled. Above and below the ornate label, green glass flickered.

“I put a little wine in the gravy,” Mrs. Richards said. “In the sauce, I mean—it was left over from last night’s bottle. I like to cook with wine. And soy sauce. When we went to Los Angeles two years ago for Arthur’s conferences, we stayed with the Harringtons. Michael gave Arthur that shaving soap. Julia Harrington—she’s the one who took me to that Health Food restaurant—made absolutely everything with soy sauce! It was very interesting. Oh, thank you, Arthur.”

Mr. Richards had helped himself to mashed potatoes and now passed the dish. So had Madame Brown.

Kidd checked his fingers.

The rubbing had not removed any dirt; but it had divided it fairly evenly between both hands; the rough strips of nail back on the wide crowns were once more darkly ringed, as though outlined, nub and cuticle, with pen. He sighed, served himself when the dishes were passed to him, passed them on, and ate. His free hand, back beneath the tablecloth, found the table leg, again explored.

“If you’re not a student,” Madame Brown asked, “what do you put down in your notebook?—none of us could help noticing it.”

It was inside, in the kitchen, on the table by the chair; he could see it beyond her elbow. “I just write things down.”

Mrs. Richards hung her hands by the fingertips on the table edge. “You write! You’re going to be a writer? Do you write poetry?”

“Yeah.” He smiled because he was nervous.

“You’re a poet!”

Mr. Richards, June, and Bobby all sat back and looked. Mrs. Richards leaned forward and beamed. Madame Brown reached down with some silent remonstrance to Muriel.

“He’s a poet! Arthur, give him some more wine. Look, he’s finished his glass already. Go on, dear. He’s a poet! I think that’s wonderful. I should have known when you took that Newboy book.”

Arthur took Kidd’s glass, refilled it. “I don’t know too much about poetry.” He handed it back with a smile that, on a college football player, would have purveyed sheepish good will. “I mean, I’m an engineer…” As he took his hand away, wine splashed on the cloth.

Kidd said, “Oh, hey, I—”

“Don’t worry about that!” Mrs. Richards cried, waving her hand—which knocked against her own glass. Wine splashed the rim, ran down the stem, blotched the linen. While he wondered if such a thing were done on purpose to put strangers at ease (thinking: What an uncomfortably paranoid thought), she asked: “What do you think of him? Newboy, I mean.”

“I don’t know.” Kidd moved his glass aside: Through the base, he could see the diametric mold line across the foot. “I only met him once.”

At the third second of silence, he looked up, and decided he’d said something wrong. He hunted for the proper apology: but, like a tangle of string with a lost end, action seemed all loop and no beginning.

“You know Ernest Newboy? Oh, Edna, Kidd’s a real poet! And he’s helping us, Arthur! I mean, move furniture and things.” She looked from Mr. Richards to Madame Brown, to Kidd. “Tell me—” She spilled more wine—“is Newboy’s work just—wonderful? I’m sure it is. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I just got the book yesterday. I sent Bobby down to get it, because of that article in the Times. We have this very nice little book-and-gift shop down the street. They have just everything like that—But after the article, I was afraid they were going to be all out. I think it’s very important to keep up with current books, even if it’s just bestsellers. And I’m really interested in poetry. I really am. Arthur doesn’t believe me. But I do—I really do like it.”

“That’s just because you went to that coffee shop with Julia in Los Angeles where they were reading that poetry and playing that music.”

“And I told you, Arthur, the evening we came back, though I don’t pretend I understood it all, I liked it very much! It was one of the most—” she frowned, hunting for the right description—“exciting things I’ve…well, ever heard.”

“I don’t know him very well,” Kidd said, and ate more mushrooms; that and the eggplant weren’t bad. The mashed potatoes (instant) were pretty gluey, though. “I just met him…once.”

“I’d love to meet him,” Mrs. Richards said. “I’ve never known a real writer.”

“Mike Harrington wrote a book,” Mr. Richards objected. “A very good book, too.”

“Oh, Arthur, that was an instruction manual…on stresses and strains and the uses of a new metal!”

“It was a very good instruction manual.” Mr. Richards poured more wine for Madame Brown and himself.

“Can I have some?” Bobby said.

“No,” Mr. Richards said.

“How long have you been writing poetry?” Madame Brown was waiting with a forkful of well-sauced eggplant, June with one of carrots; Mrs. Richards had a very small fluff of potato on the tine tips of her fork—when it struck him that he didn’t know. Which seemed absurd, so he frowned. “Not very…” long, he’d started to say. He had a clear memory of writing the first poem in the notebook, seated against the lamppost on Brisbain Avenue. But had he ever written any poems before? Or was it something he’d wanted to do but never gotten around to? He could see not remembering doing something. But how could you not remember not doing something? “…for very long,” he said finally. “Just a few days, I guess,” and frowned again, because that sounded silly. But he had no more surety of its truth or falsity than he had of his name. “No, not very long at all.” He decided that was what he would say from now on to anyone who asked; but the decision simply confirmed how uncertain he was of its truth.

“Well, I’m sure—” there was only one more fluff of mashed potatoes on Mrs. Richard’s plate—“they must be very good.” She ate it. “Did Mr. Newboy like them?”

“I didn’t show them to him.” Somehow silverware, glasses, side-plates, and candles didn’t seem right for talking about scorpions, orchid fights, the invisible Calkins and the belligerent Fenster—

“Oh, you should,” Mrs. Richards said. “The younger men in Arthur’s office are always bringing him their new ideas. And he says they’ve been coming up with some looloos lately—didn’t you, Arthur? Arthur’s always happy to talk to the younger men about their new ideas. I’m sure Mr. Newboy would be happy to talk to you, don’t you think, Arthur?”

“Well,” Mr. Richards reiterated, “I don’t know too much about poetry.”

“I’d certainly like to see some of what you’ve written,” Madame Brown said and moved Mrs. Richards’ wine glass away from her straying hand. “Maybe some day you’ll show us. Tell me, Arthur—” Madame Brown looked over joined fingers—“what is going on at Maitland, now? With everything in the state it’s in, I’m amazed when I hear of anything getting done.”

She’s changing the subject! Kidd thought with relief. And decided he liked her.

“Engineering.” Mr. Richards shook his head, looked at Mrs. Richards—“Poetry…” changing it, rather bluntly, back. “They don’t have too much to do with one another.”

Kidd decided to give it a try himself. “I met an engineer here, Mr. Richards. His name was Loufer. He was working on…yeah, converting a plant. It used to make peanut butter. Now it makes vitamins.”

“Most people who like poetry and art and stuff,” Mr. Richards adhered, “aren’t very interested in engineering—” Then he frowned. “The vitamin plant? That must be the one down at Helmsford.”

Kidd sat back and saw that Madame Brown did too.

Mrs. Richards’ hands still spasmed on the table.

Mr. Richards asked: “What did you say his name was?”

“Loufer.”

“Don’t think I know him.” Mr. Richards screwed up his face and dropped his chin over the smooth gold-and-mustard knot of his tie. “Of course I’m in Systems. He’s probably in Industrial. Two completely different fields. Two completely different professions, really. It’s hard enough to keep up with what’s going on in your own field, what your own people are doing. Some of the ideas our men do come up with—they’re looloos all right. Like Mary says. Sometimes I don’t even understand them—I mean, even when you understand how they work, you don’t really know what they’re for. Right now I’m just back and forth between the office and the warehouse—lord only knows what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Just keeping up,” Madame Brown said, and leaned one elbow on the table. As she moved, the candle flame drifted back and forth across her left eye. “At the hospital, it was all I could do to read two or three psychology bulletins a week, what with the behaviorists and the gestaltists—”

“Peaches?” said Mrs. Richards, leaning forward, knuckles like two tiny mountain ranges on the table edge. “Would anyone like some peaches? For dessert?”

Maybe, Kidd thought, she really did want to talk about poetry—which would be fine, he decided, if he could think of anything to say. His own plate was empty of everything except the sauce-and-mashed-potato swamp.

“Sure.”

He watched the word hang over the table, silence on both sides.

“I don’t want any!” Bobby’s chair scraped.

Both candlesticks veered.

“Bobby—!” Mrs. Richards exclaimed, while June caught one and Mr. Richards caught the other.

Bobby was off into the living room. Muriel barked and ran after him.

“I’ll have some, dear.” Mr. Richards sat back down. “Let him go, Mary. He’s all right.”

“Muriel? Muriel!” Madame Brown turned back to the table and sighed. “Peaches sound lovely. Yes, I’ll have some.”

“Yes, please, Mother,” June said. Her shoulders were rather hunched and she was still looking at her lap, as though considering something intensely.

Mrs. Richards, blinking after her son, rose and went in the kitchen.

“If I went to school,” June blurted, looking up suddenly, “I’d go into psychology—like you!”

Madame Brown, slightly flattered, slightly mocking, turned to June with raised brows. Mocking? Or, Kidd wondered, was it simply surprise.

“I’d like to work with…mentally disturbed children—like you.” June’s fingertips were over the table edge too, but tightly together, and even, so that you’d have to count to find where right fingertips ended and left began.

“In my job, dear, at the hospital—” Madame Brown lifted her glass to sip; as she bent forward, loops of optic chain swung out like a glittering bib, and back—“I have more to do with the disturbed parents.”

June, now embarrassed by her outburst, was collecting plates. “I’d like to…to help people; like a nurse or a doctor. Or like you do—” Kidd passed his over; it was the last—“with problems in their mind.”

He dragged his hands back across the cloth (spotted with sauce, soup, pieces of carrot, the purple wine blot) and let them fall into his lap.

Mrs. Richards’ place was nearly as messy as his own.

“I know it’s a cliché—” Madame Brown shook her head—“but it really is true. The parents need the help far more than the children. Really: they bring their totally demolished child to us. And you know what they want in the first interview? It’s always the same: they want us to say, ‘What you should do is beat him.’ They come in with some poor nine-year-old they’ve reduced to a state of numb, inarticulate terror; the child can’t dress itself, can’t talk above a whisper, and then only in some invented language; it soils its clothing, and the only coherent actions it can make are occasional attempts at murder or, more frequently, suicide. If I said to them, ‘Beat her! Hit him!’ they would glow—glow with delight. When they discover we want to take the children away from them, they’re indignant! Under all the frustration and apparent concern, what they actually come hoping is that we will say, ‘Yes, you’re handling it all marvelously well. Just be a little firmer!’ The reason I’m successful at my job at all—” Madame Brown touched June’s shoulder and leaned confidently—“as all I really do is pry the children loose from their parents—is because what I’m saying, underneath all my pleasant talk about how much better it would be for the rest of the family if they let little Jimmy or Alice come to us, is: Wouldn’t it be ever so much more fun to work on one of your other children for a while? Wouldn’t it be ever so much more interesting to fight someone with a little more strength left than this poor half-corpse you’ve just brought in. Why not clear the field and start in on little sister Sue or big brother Bill? Or maybe each other. Try to get an only child away from its parents once they’ve driven it practically autistic!” Madame Brown shook her head. “It’s very depressing. I really think, sometimes, I’d like to change my field—do individual therapy. That’s what I’ve always been interested in, anyway. And since there’s nobody at the hospital now anyway—”

“But don’t you need licenses, or special examinations to do that, Edna?” Mrs. Richards asked from the kitchen. “I mean, I know it’s your profession, but isn’t fiddling with people’s minds dangerous? If you don’t know what you’re doing?” She came in with two long-stemmed dessert dishes, gave one to Madame Brown, and one to Mr. Richards. “I read an article—” She paused with her hands on the back of her chair—“about those encounter group things, I think they call them? Julia Harrington was going to one of those, two years ago. And the minute I read that article, I cut it out and sent it to her—it was just terrifying! About all those unskilled people leading them and how they were driving everybody crazy! Touching each other all over, and picking each other up in the air, and telling each other about everything! Well, some people just couldn’t take it and got very seriously ill!”

“Well I—” Madame Brown began some polite protest.

“I think it’s all poppycock,” Mr. Richards said. “Sure, people have problems. And they should be put away where they can get help. But if you’re just indulging yourself, somebody telling you to straighten up and fly right may be what you need. A few hard knocks never hurt anybody, and who’s in a better position to give out a few than your own parents, I say—though I’ve never lifted a hand to my own.” Mr. Richards lifted his hand, palm out, to his shoulder. “Have I, Mary? At least not since they were big.”

“You’re a very good father, Arthur.” Mrs. Richards came back from the kitchen with three more dessert glasses clutched together before her. “No one would ever deny that.”

“You kids just be glad your parents are as sane as they are.” Mr. Richards nodded once toward Bobby’s (empty) chair and once toward June’s; she was just sitting down in it after taking the plates into the kitchen. She put a cut glass bowl, filled with white, on the white cloth.

“Here you are,” Mrs. Richards said, passing Kidd his fruit.