The Uncollected J. D. Salinger - The Uncollected J. D. Salinger Part 4
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The Uncollected J. D. Salinger Part 4

"You're very tired. You don't mean what you're saying, dear."

The word "dear" whisked into position - upright in the darkness beside Mrs. Odenhearn's name.

"I just don't want to get married to anybody yet."

"Well! This is certainly very - unusual - Barbara. Carl loves you a great, great deal, dear."

"I'm sorry. Honestly."

There was a very brief silence. Mrs. Odenhearn shattered it. "You must do," she said suddenly, "what you think right, dear. I'm sure that if Carl were here he'd be a very, very hurt boy. On the other hand-"

Barbara listened. It amounted to an interruption, she listened so intently.

"On the other hand," said Mrs. Odenhearn, "it's always the best way to rectify a mistake before it's made. If you've given this matter a great, great deal of thought I'm sure Carl will be the last to blame you, dear."

The ship's library novel, upset by Mrs. Odenhearn's vigorous elbow, fell from the night table to the floor. Barbara heard her pick it up.

"You sleep now, dear. We'll see when the sun's shining beautifully how we feel about things. I want you to think of me as you would of your own mother if she were alive. I want so to help you understand your own mind," said Mrs. Odenhearn, and added: "Of course, I know that one can't alter children's minds so easily these days, once they're made up. And I do know you have a great, great character."

When Barbara heard the light snap off, she opened her eyes. She got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She came out almost at once, wearing a robe and slippers, and spoke to Mrs. Odenhearn in the darkness.

"I'm just going on the deck for a little while."

"What do you have on?"

"My robe and slippers. It's all right. Everyone's asleep."

Mrs. Odenhearn flicked on the table light again. She looked at Barbara acutely, neither approving nor disapproving. Her look said, "All right. It's over. I can hardly contain myself, I'm so happy. You're on your own for the rest of the cruise. Just don't disgrace or embarrass me." Barbara read the look faultlessly.

"Good-by."

"Don't catch cold, dear."

Barbara shut the door behind her and began to walk through the silent, lighted passages. She climbed the steps to A deck and walked through the concert lounge, using the aisle a cleaning squad had left between the stacked bodies of easy chairs. In less than four months' time there would be no easy chairs in the concert lounge. Instead, more than three hundred enlisted men would be arranged wakefully on their backs across the floor.

High above on the promenade deck, for nearly an hour Barbara stood at the portside rail. Despite her cotton pajamas and rayon robe there was no danger of her catching cold. The fragile hour was a carrier of many things, but Barbara was now exclusively susceptible to the difficult counterpoint sounding just past the last minutes of her girlhood.

Both Parties Concerned.

by J.D Salinger.

There really isn't much to tell--I mean it wasn't serious or anything, but it was kind of funny at that. I mean because it looked there for a while as though everybody at the plant and Ruthie's mother and all was going to have the laugh on us. They had all kept saying I and Ruthie were too young to get married. Ruthie, she was seventeen, and I was twenty, nearly. That's pretty young, all right, but not if you know what you're doing. I mean not if everything's Jake between she and you. I mean both parties concerned.

Well, like I was saying, Ruthie and I, we never really split up. Not really split up. Not that Ruthie's mother wasn't wishing we did. Mrs. Cropper, she wanted Ruthie to go to college instead of getting married. Ruthie got out of high school when she was fifteen only, and they wouldn't take her at where she wanted to go to till she was eighteen. She wanted to be a doctor. I used to kid her, "Calling Doctor Kildare!" I'd say to her. I got a good sense of humor. Ruthie, she don't. She's more inclined to be serious like.

Well, I really don't know how it all started, but it really got hot one night last month at Jake's Place. Ruthie, she and I were out there. That joint is really class this year. Not so much neon. More bulbs. More parking space. Class. Know what I mean? Ruthie don't like Jake's much.

Well, this night I was telling you about, Jake's was jam-packed when we got there, and we had to wait around for about an hour till we got a table. Ruthie was all for not waiting. No patience. Then finally when we did get a table, she says she don't want a beer. So she just sits there, lighting matches, blowing the out. Driving me nuts.

"What's the matter?" I asked her finally. It got on my nerves after a while.

"Nothing's the matter," Ruthie says. She stops lighting matches, starts looking around the joint, as though she was keeping an eye peeled for somebody special.

"Something's the matter," I said. I know her like a book. I mean I know her like a book.

"Nothing's the matter," she says. "Stop worrying about me. Everything's swell. I'm the happiest girl in the world."

"Cut it out," I said. She was being cynical like. "I just asked you a question, that's all."

"Oh, pardon me," Ruthie said. "And you want an answer. Certainly. Pardon me." She was being very cynical like. I don't like that. It don't bother me, but I don't like it.

I knew what was eating her. I know her inside out, her every mood like. "Okay," I said. "You're sore because we went out tonight. Ruthie, for cryin' out loud, a guy has a right to go out once in a while, doesn't he?"

"Once in a while!" Ruthie says. "I love that. Once in a while. Like seven nights a week, huh, Billy?"

"It hasn't been seven nights a week," I said. And it hadn't! We hadn't come out the night before. I mean we had a beer at Gordon's, but we came right home and all.

"No?" Ruthie said. "Okay. Let's drop it. Let's not discuss it."

I asked her, very quiet like, what was I supposed to do. Sit around home like a dope every night? Stare at the walls? Listen to the baby bawl its head off? I asked her, very quiet like, what she wanted me to do.

"Please don't shout," she says. "I don't want you to do anything."

"Listen," I said. "I'm paying that crazy Widger dame eighteen bucks just to take care of the kid for a couple hours a night. I did it just so you could take it easy. I thought you'd be tickled to death. You used to like to go out once in while," I said to her.

Then Ruthie says she didn't want me to hire Mrs. Widger in the first place. She said she didn't like her. She said she hated her, in fact. She said she didn't like to see Mrs. Widger even hold the baby. I told her that Mrs. Widger has had plenty of babies on her own, and I guessed she knew pretty good how to hold a kid. Ruthie said when we go out at night Widger just sits in the living room, reading magazines; that she never goes near the baby. I said what did she want her to do-get in the crib with the kid? Ruthie said she didn't want to talk about it any more.

"Ruthie," I said, "what are you trying to do? Make me look like a rat?"

Ruthie, she says, "I'm not trying to make you look like a rat. You're not a rat."

"Thanks. Thanks a lot," I said. I can be cynic like too.

She says, "You're my husband, Billy." She was leaning over the table, crying like-but, holy mackerel, it wasn't my fault!

"You married me," she says, "because you said you loved me. You're supposed to love our baby, too, and take care of it. We're supposed to think about things sometimes, not just go chasing around."

I asked her, very calm like, who said I didn't love the baby.

"Please don't shout," she says. "I'll scream if you shout," she says. "Nobody said you didn't love it, Billy. But you love it when it's convenient for you or something. When it's having its bath or when it plays with your necktie."

I told her I loved it all the time. And I do! It's a nice kid, a real nice kid.

She says, "Then why aren't we home?"

I told her then. I mean I wasn't afraid to tell her. I told her. "Because," I said, "I wanna have a couple of beers. I want some life. You don't work on a fuselage all day. You don't know what it's like." I mean I told her.

Then she tried to make funny like. "You mean," she says, "I don't slave over a hot fuselage all day?"

I told her it was pretty hot. Then she started lighting matches again, like a kid. I asked her if she didn't get what I meant at all. She said she got what I meant all right, and she said she got what her mother meant, too, when her mother said we were too young to get married. She said she got what a lot of things meant now.

That really got me. I admit it. I'm willing to admit it. Nothing really gets me except when she brings up her mother. I asked Ruthie, very quiet like, what she was talking about. I said, "Just because a guy wants to go out once in a while." Ruthie said if I ever said "once in a while" again, I'd never see her again. She's always taking things the way I don't mean them. I told her that. She said, "C'mon. We're here. Let's dance."

I followed her out to the floor, but just as we got there the orchestra got sneaky on us. They started playing Moonlight Becomes You. It's old now, but it's a swell song. I mean it isn't a bad song. We used to hear it once in a while on the radio in the car or the one at home. Once in a while Ruthie used to sing the words. But it wasn't so hot, hearing it at Jake's that night. It was embarrassing. And they must have played eighty-five choruses of it. I mean they kept playing it. Ruthie danced about ten miles away from me, and we didn't look at each other much. Finally they stopped. Then Ruthie broke away from me like. She walks back to the table, but she don't sit down. She just picks up her coat and beats it. She was crying.

Elaine.

by J.D Salinger.

On an exquisite Saturday afternoon in June, an assistant watch repairer named Dennis Cooney temporarily distracted the audience at an indoor flea circus just off Forty-third and Broadway by dropping dead. He was survived by his wife, Evelyn Cooney, and a daughter, Elaine, aged six, who had won two Beautiful Child contests; the first at the age of three, the second at the age of five, being defeated when she was four by a Miss Zelda "Bunny" Krakauer, of Staten Island. Cooney left his wife little insurance: enough for her to import her widowed mother, a Mrs. Hoover, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the aging woman had supported herself by working as a cashier in a cafeteria. The money was enough for the three to live in relative comfort in the Bronx. The superintendent of the apartment house in which Mrs. Cooney and her mother and daughter proceeded to live w as a Mr. Freedlander. A few years before Freedlander had been "super" of the house where they finally "got" Bloomy Bloomberg. Freedlander informed Mrs. Cooney that Bloomy didn't look any deader than Mrs. Cooney, or anybody. Freedlander made it clear to Mrs. Cooney that Bloomy never called Freedlander anything but Mort, and Freedlander never called Bloomy anything but Bloomy.

"I remember readin' all about it," remarked Mrs. Cooney enthusiastically. "I mean I remember readin' all about it."

Freedlander nodded approvingly. "Yeah, it was quite a case." He looked around his tenant's living room. "Where's Mrs. Boyle?" he asked. "I haven't seen her around lately."

"Who?"

"Mrs.- your mother."

"Oh. Mrs. Hoover. My mother's name is Hoover. I oughtta know. I was my name once !" Mrs. Cooney laughed immoderately.

Freedlander laughed with her. "What'd I call her?" he asked. "Boyle didn't I? We had a Mrs. Boyle in this apartment last. That's why. Hoover. Hoover's her name, eh? I get it."

''She's out," said Mrs. Cooney.

"Oh," said Freedlander.

"It's really awful. I mean she stays out for hours and hours. I keep thinking of her getting run over by a truck or something at her age."

''Yeah," Freedlander commented, sympathetically. ''Cigarette ?"

At the age of seven, little Elaine Cooney was sent to Public School 332 in the Bronx, where she was tested in accordance with the newest, most scientific methods, and consequently placed in Class 1-A-4, which included a group of forty-four pupils referred to among the faculty as the "slower" children. Every day Mrs. Cooney or her mother, Mrs. Hoover, brought the child to and from school. Usually it was Mrs. Hoover who made the delivery in the morning, and Mrs. Cooney would pick up her daughter in the afternoon. Mrs. Cooney went to the movies at least four times a week, frequently attending the late evening show, in which case she slept late mornings. Sometimes, owing to some unforeseen emergency, Mrs. Cooney was unable to call for her daughter. Under this not uncommon circumstance, the child was forced to wait as long as an hour by the second exit door from the corner, marked Girls, until her grandmother plodded irritably into view. On the way to and from school, the conversation between Elaine and her grandmother never achieved an exceptionally high degree of camaraderie between generations.

''Don't lose your lunch box again."

"What, Grandma?"

"Don't lose your lunch box again."

"Do I have peanut butter ?"

''Do you have what?"

"Peanut butter."

''I don't know. Your mother fixed your lunch. Pull up your pants."

It was always a conversation both varicose and unloved, like Mrs. Hoover's legs. The child didn't seem to mind. She seemed to be a happy child. She smiled a great deal. She laughed constantly at things that were not funny. She didn't seem to mind the bilious pastel and tasteless print dresses in which her mother dressed her. She didn't seem to live in the unhappy child's world. But when she was in the fourth grade her teacher, Miss Elmendorf, a tall, fine young woman with very bad legs and ankles, spoke of her to the principal. "Miss Callahan? I wonder if you can spare a minute."

"Indeed I can !" said Miss Callahan. ''Come in, dear !"

Young Miss Elmendorf dosed the door behind her. "That Cooney child I was telling you about-"

"Cooney. Cooney. Yes ! That very pretty child," said Miss Callahan, enthusiastically. ''Sit down, dear."

"Thank you . . . I think we'll have to drop her back a class, Miss Callahan. The work is much too difficult for her. She can't spell, she can't do arithmetic. Her oral reading is positively painful to listen to."

"Well !" said Miss Callahan. "Ding, dong, dell !"

"She's a sweet child," said Miss Elmendorf. "And certainly the most exquisite thing I've ever seen in my life. She looks like Rapunzel."

"Who ?" said Miss Callahan sharply.

"Rapunzel," said Miss Elmendorf.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair. Remember the fairy prince who climbed to the castle tower by Rapunzel's hair ?"

"Oh, yes," said Miss Callahan shortly. She picked up a pencil with her thin, genderless fingers. Miss Elmendorf was already sorry she had brought up that unfamiliar business about Rapunzel.

"I think," said Miss Elmendorf, "she'd find it less difficult if we dropped her to a lower class."

"Well, then ! In a lower class she goes, she goes, she goes !" sang out Miss Callahan, getting up like a man.

Miss Callahan had spoken, but Miss Elmendorf, dining alone at Bickford's Cafeteria that evening, decided that she couldn't just drop this child, this Rapunzel, into a lower class without a word to her or anything. Miss Elmendorf wanted to be disenchanted before she did any dropping. So she kept Elaine in the following, afternoon, hoping to be disenchanted.

"Elaine, dear," she said to her, "I'm going to let you report to 4-A-4 tomorrow instead of your own class. We'll just try it for a while. I don't think the work will be so hard for us. Do you understand, dear? Stand still."

"I'm in 4-B-4," said Elaine. What was Miss Ellumdorf talking about?

"Yes, dear; I know. But we're going to try 4-A-4 for a while. It won't be quite so hard for us. We'll get a much better foundation, so that when the new term starts 4-B-4 will be ever so much easier for us."

"I'm in 4-B-4," Elaine said. "I'm in 4-B-4."

The child is stupid, thought Miss Elmendorf. She's stupid. She's not bright. She's wearing the most horrid little green dress I ever saw. I look in those tremendous blue eyes, and there's nothing there, absolutely nothing. But this is the Rapunzel in my class. This is the beauty. This is the most glorious, slim-ankled, golden-haired, red-lipped, lovely-nosed, beautiful-skinned child I have ever seen in my life.

"We'll just try it for a while, shall we, Elaine?" Miss Elmendorf said, hopelessly. "We'll just see how we like it, shall we? Stand still, dear."