The Uncollected J.D. Salinger
by
J.D. Salinger









In June 1936 Valley Forge gave him his only diploma. As literary editor of
the yearbook, Salinger presented to the school a damply magnificent floral
arrangement, since set to music and still sung at Last Parade:
	
Hide not thy tears on this last day
Your sorrow has no shame;
To march no more midst lines of grey;
No longer play the game.
Four years have passed in joyful ways--
Woulds't stay these old times dear?
Then cherish now these fleeting days,
The few while you are here...
			--JD Salinger
			--Time magazine September 15, 1961	

The Uncollected J.D. Salinger


Contents:						Page:

A Boy in France						4		
(Saturday Evening Post 217, March, 1945)
A Girl I Knew						7
(Good Housekeeping 126, February, 1948)
A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist At All		14
(Mademoiselle 25, May, 1947)
Both Parties Concerned 					23
(Saturday Evening Post 26, February, 1944)
Elaine							25
(Story, March-April, 1945)
Go See Eddie						33
(Kansas Review, December, 1940)
I’m Crazy						36
(Colliers, December, 1945)
Last Day of The Last Furlough				42
(Saturday Evening Post, July, 1944)
Once a Week Won’t Kill You				50
(Story, November-December, 1944)
Personal Notes of an Infantryman			54
(Colliers 110, December 12, 1942)
Slight Rebellion Off Madison				56
(The New Yorker, December, 1946)
Soft Boiled Sergeant					60
(Saturday Evening Post, April, 1944)
The Hang of It						65
(Colliers, July, 1941)
The Heart of a Broken Story				67
(Esquire 16, September, 1941)
The Inverted Forest					72
(Cosmopolitan, December, 1947)
The Long Debut of Lois Taggett				114
(Story, September-October, 1942)
The Stranger						119
(Colliers, December, 1945)
The Varioni Brothers					123
(Saturday Evening Post 216, July, 1943)
The Young Folks					129
(Story 16, March-April, 1940)
This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise			133
(Esquire 24, October 1945)
Blue Melody						138
(Cosmopolitan, September 1948)
Hapworth 16, 1924					148
(The New Yorker, June, 1965)
				

A Boy in France
by J.D. Salinger



	After he had eaten half a can of pork and egg yolks, the boy laid his head back on the rain-sogged ground, hurtfully wrenched his head out of his helmet, closed his eyes, let his mind empty out from a thousand bungholes, and fell almost instantly asleep.  When he awoke, it was nearly ten o'clock--wartime, crazy time, nobody's time--and the cold, wet, French sky had begun to darken.  He lay there, opening his eyes, till slowly but surely the little war thoughts, those that cold not be disremembered, those that were not potentially and thankfully void, began to trickle back into his mind.  When his mind was filled to its unhappy capacity, one cheerless, nightful trend rose to the top:  Look for a place to sleep.  Get on your feet.  Get your blanket roll.  You can't sleep here.
	The boy raised his dirty, stinking, tired upper body, and from a sitting position, without looking at anything, he got to his feet.  Groggily he bent over, picked up and put on his helmet.  He walked unsteadily back to the blanket truck, and from a stack of muddy blanket rolls he pulled out his own.  Carrying the slight, unwarm bundle under his left arm, he began to walk along the bushy perimeter of the field.  He passed by Hurkin, who was sweatily digging a foxhole, and neither he nor Hurkin glanced with any interest at the other.  He stopped where Eeves was digging in, and he said to Eeves, "You on tonight, Eeves?"
	Eeves looked up and said, "Yeah," and a drop of sweat glistened and disengaged itself from the end of his long Vermont nose.
	The boy said to Eeves, "Wake me up if anything gets hot or anything," and Eeves replied, "How'll I know where you're gonna be at?" and the boy told him, "I'll holler when I get there."
	I won't dig in tonight, the boy thought, walking on.  I won't struggle and dig and chop with that damn little entrenching tool tonight.  I won't get hit.  Don't let me get hit, Somebody.  Tomorrow night I'll dig a swell hole, I swear I will.  But for tonight, for just now, when everything hurts, let me just find someplace to drop.  All of a sudden the boy saw a foxhole, a German one, unmistakably vacated by some Kraut during the afternoon, during the long, rotten afternoon.
	The boy moved his aching legs a little faster, going toward it.  When he got there he looked down into it, and his whole mind and body almost whimpered when he saw some G.I.'s dirty field jacket neatly folded and placed on the bottom of the hole, in the accepted claim.  The boy moved on.
	He saw another Kraut hole.  He hurried awkwardly toward it.  Looking down into it, he saw a gray woolen Kraut blanket, half spread, half bunched on the damp floor of the hole.  it was a terrible blanket on which some German and recently lain and bled and probably died.
	The boy dropped his blanket roll on the ground beside the hole, and then he removed his rifle, his gas mask, his pack and helmet.  Then he stooped beside the hole, dropped the little distance to his knees, reached down into the hole and lifted out the heavy, bloody, unlamented Kraut blanket.  Outside the hole, he rolled the thing into an absurd lump, picked it up and threw it into the dense hedgerow behind the hole.  He looked down into the hole again.  The dirt floor, he saw, was messy with what had permeated two folds of the heavy Kraut blanket.  The boy took his entrenching tool from his pack, stepped into the hole and leadenly began to dig out the bad places.
	When he was finished he stepped out of the hole, undid his blanket roll and laid the blankets out flat, one on top of the other.  As if they were one, he folded the blankets in half the long way, and then he lifted this bed thing, as though it had some sort of spine to it, over to the hole and lowered it carefully out of sight.
	He watched the pebbles of dirt tumble into the folds of his blankets.  Then he picked up his rifle, gas mask and helmet, and laid them carefully on the natural surface of the ground at the head of the hole.
	The boy lifted up the two top folds of his blankets, placed them aside slightly, and then he stepped with his muddy shoes into his bed.  Standing up, he took off his field jacket, bunched it up into a ball, and then he lowered himself into position for the night.  The hole was too short.  He could not stretch out without bending his legs sharply at the knees.  Covering himself with the top folds of his blankets, he laid his filthy head back on his filthier field jacket.  He looked up into the darkening sky and felt a few mean little lumps of dirt trickle into his shirt collar, some lodging there, some continuing down his back.  He did nothing about it.
	Suddenly a red ant bit him nastily, uncompromisingly, on the leg, just above his leggings.  he jammed a hand under the covers to kill the thing, but the movement caught itself short, as the boy hissed in pain, refeeling and remembering where that morning he had lost a whole fingernail.
	Quickly he drew the hurting, throbbing finger up to the line if his eye and examined it in the fading light.  then he placed the whole hand under the folds of the blankets, with the care more like that proffered a sick person than a sore finger, and let himself work the kind of abracadabra familiar to and special for G.I.'s in combat.
	"When I take my hand out of this blanket," he thought, "my nail will be grown back, my hands will be clean.  My body will be clean.  I'll have on clean shorts, clean undershirt, a white shirt.  A blue polka-dot tie.  A gray suit with a stripe, and I'll be home, and I'll bolt the door.  I'll put some coffee on the stove, some records on the phonograph, and I'll bolt the door.  I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door.  I'll open the window, I'll let in a nice, quiet girl--not Frances, not anyone I've ever known--and I'll bolt the door.  I'll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me--that one about being chartless--and I'll ask her to read some William Blake to me--that one about the little lamb that made thee--and I'll bolt the door.  She'll have an American voice, and she won't ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I'll bolt the door."
	The boy took his hurting hand out of the blankets suddenly, expecting and getting no change, no magic.  Then he unbuttoned the flap of his sweat-stained, mud-crumbly shirt pocket, and took out a soggy lump of newspaper clippings.  He laid the clippings on his chest, took off the top one and brought it up to eye level.  It was a syndicated Broadway column, and he began to read in the dim light:

	"Last night--and step up and touch me, brother--I dropped in at the Waldorf to see Jeanie Powers, the lovely starlet, who is here to attend the premiere of her new picture, The Rockets' Red Glare.  (And don't miss it, folks.  It's grand.)  We asked the corn-fed Iowa beauty, who is in the big town for the first time in her lovely lifetime, what she wanted to do most while she was here.  "Well," said the Beauty to the Beast, "when I was on the train, I decided that all I really wanted in New York was a date with a real, honest-to-goodness G.I.!  And what do you suppose happened?  The very first afternoon I was here, right in the lobby of the Waldorf I bumped square into Bubby Beamis!  He's a major in public relations now, and he's stationed right in New York!  How's that for luck?"  . . .  Well, your correspondent didn't say much.  But lucky Beamis, I thought to my--"

	The boy in the hole crumpled the clipping into a soggy ball, lifted the rest of the clippings from his chest, and dropped them all, on the natural ground to the side of the hole.
	He stared up into the sky again, the French sky, the unmistakably French, not American sky.  And he said aloud to himself, half snickering, half weeping, "Oo la-la!"
	All of a sudden, and hurriedly, the boy took a soiled, unrecent envelope from his pocket.  Quickly he extracted the letter from inside it and began to reread to for the thirty-oddth time:

MANASQUAN, NEW JERSEY,

July 5, 1944


	Dear Babe: Mama thinks you are still in England, but I think you are in France.  Are you in France?  Daddy tells mama that he thinks you are in England still, but I think he thinks you are in France also.  Are you in France?
	The Bensons cane down to the shore early this summer and Jackie is over at the house all the time.  Mama brought your books with us because she thinks you will be home this summer.  Jackie asked if she could borrow the one about the Russian lady and one of the ones you used to keep on your desk.  I gave them to her because she said she would not bend the pages or anything.  Mama told her she smokes too much, and she is going to quit.  She got poisoned from sunburn before we came down.  She likes you a lot.  She may go in the Wacks.
	I saw Frances on my bike before we left home.  I yelled at her, but she did not hear me.  She is very stuck up and Jackie is not.  Jackie’s hair is prettier also.
	There are more girls than boys on the beach this year.  You never see any boys.  The girls play cards a lot and put a lot of sun tan oil on each others back and lay in the sun., but go in the water more than they used to.  Virginia Hope and Barbara Geezer had a fight about something and don’t sit next to each other on the beach anymore.  Lester Brogan was killed in the army where the Japs are.  Mrs. Brogan does not come to the beach anymore except on Sundays with Mr. Brogan.  Mr. Brogan just sits on the beach with Mrs. Brogan, and he does not go in the water, and you know what a good swimmer he is.  I remember when you and Lester took me out to the float once.  I go out to the float myself now.  Diana Schults married a soldier that was at sea Girt and she went back to California with him for a week, but he is gone now and she is back.  Diana lays on the beach by herself.
	Before we left home, Mr. Ollinger died.  Brother Teemers went into the store to get Mr. Ollinger to fix his bike and Mr. Ollinger was dead behind the counter.  Brother Teemers ran crying all the way to the court house and Mr. Teemers was busy talking to the jury and everything.  Brother Teemers ran right in anyway and yelled Daddy Daddy Mr. Ollinger is dead.
	I cleaned out your car for you before we left for the shore.  There was a lot of maps behind the front seat from your trip to Canada.  I put them in your desk.  There was also a girls comb.  I think it was Frances.  I put it in your desk also.  Are you in France?

Love,

MATILDA

P.S.:  Can I go to Canada with you next time you go?  I won't talk much and I'll light your cigarettes for you without really smoking them.

Sincerely yours,

MATILDA

I miss you.  Please come home soon.

Love and kisses,

MATILDA



	The boy in the hole carefully put the letter back inside the dirty, worn envelope, and put the envelope back into his shirt pocket.
	Then he raised himself slightly in the hole and shouted, "Hey, Eeves!  I'm over here!"
	And across the field Eeves saw him and nodded back.
	The boy sank back into the hole and said aloud to nobody, "Please come home soon."  Then he fell crumbily, bent-leggedly, asleep.




A Girl I Knew
by J.D. Salinger
	


At the end of my freshman year of college, back in 1936, I flunked five out of five subjects. Flunking three out of five would have made me eligible to report for an invitation to attend some other college in the fall. But men in this three-out-of-five category sometimes had to wait outside the Dean’s office as long as two hours. Men in my group - some of whom had big dates in New York that same night - weren’t kept waiting a minute. It went one, two, three, the way most men in my group like things to go.
	The particular college I had been attending apparently does not simply mail people’s grades home, but prefers to shoot them out of some kind of gun. When I got home to New York, even the butler looked tipped off and hostile. It was a bad night altogether. My father informed me quietly that my formal education was formally over. In a way, I felt like asking for a crack at summer school or something. But I didn’t. For one reason, my mother was in the room, and she kept saying that she just knew I should have gone to see my faculty adviser more regularly, that that was what he was there for. This was the kind of talk that made me want to go straight to the Rainbow Room with a friend. At any rate, one thing leading to another, when the familiar moment came to me to advance one of my fragile promises really to apply myself this time, I let it go by unused.
	Although my father announced the same night that he was going to put me directly into his business, I felt confident that nothing wholly unattractive would happen for at least a week or so. I knew it would take a certain amount of deep, constructive brooding on my father’s part to figure out a way of getting me into the firm in broad daylight - I happened to give both his partners the willies on sight.
	I was taken a little aback, four or five evenings later, when my father suddenly asked me at dinner how I would like to go to Europe to learn a couple of languages the firm could use. First to Vienna and then maybe to Paris, he said unelaborately.
	I replied in the effect that the idea sounded all right to me. I was breaking off anyway with a certain girl on Seventy-Fourth Street. And I very clearly associated Vienna with gondolas. Gondolas didn’t seem like too bad a setup.



	A few weeks later, in July of 1936, I sailed for Europe. My passport photograph, it might be worth mentioning, looked exactly like me. At eighteen. I was six feet two, weighed 119 pounds with my clothes on, and was a chain smoker. I think that if Goethe’s Werther and all his sorrows had been placed on the promenade deck of the S.S. Rex beside me and all my sorrows, he would have looked by comparison, like a rather low comedian.
	The ship docked at Naples, and from there I took a train to Vienna. I almost got off the train at Venice, when I found out just who had the gondolas, but two people in my compartment got off instead - I had been waiting too long for a chance to put my feet up, gondolas or no gondolas.
	Naturally, certain when-you-get-to-Vienna rules had been laid down before my ship sailed from New York. Rules about taking at least three hours of language lessons daily; rules about not getting too friendly with people who take advantage of other, particularly younger, people; rules about not spending money like a drunken sailor; rules about the wearing of clothes in which a person wouldn’t catch pneumonia; and so on. But after a month or so in Vienna I had most of that taken care of: I was taking three hours of German lesson every day - from a rather exceptional young lady I had met in the lounge of the Grand Hotel. I had found, in one of the far-outlying districts, a place that was cheaper than the Grand Hotel - the trolleys didn’t run to my place after ten at night, but the taxis did. I was dressing warm - I had bought myself three pure-wool Tyrolean hats. I was meeting nice people - I had lent three hundred shillings to a very distinguished-looking guy in the bar of the Bristol Hotel. In short, I was in a position to cut my letter home down to the bone.
	I spent a little more than five months in Vienna. I danced. I went ice skating and skiing. For strenuous exercise, I argued with an Englishman. I watched operations at two hospitals and had myself psychoanalyzed by a young Hungarian woman who smoked cigars. My German lessons never failed to hold my unflagging interest. I seemed to move, with all the luck of the undeserving, from gemutlichkeit to gemutlichkeit. But I mention these only to keep the Baedeker straight.
	Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.
	Leah was the daughter in the Viennese-Jewish family who lived in the apartment below mine - that is, below the family I was boarding with. She was sixteen, and beautiful in an immediate yet perfectly slow way. She had very dark hair that fell away from the most exquisite pair of ears I have ever seen. She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence. Her hands were very pale brown, with slender, actionless fingers. When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as wholly legitimate.



	For about four months I saw her two or three evenings a week, for an hour or so at a time. But never outside the apartment house in which we lived. We never went dancing; we never went to a concert; we never even went for a walk. I found out soon after we met that Leah’s father had promised her in marriage to some young Pole. Maybe this fact had something to do with my not quite palpable, but curiously steady disinclination to give our acquaintanceship the run of the city. Maybe I just worried too much about things. Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance. I don’t know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago. A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.
	I met Leah a nice way.
	I had a phonograph and two American phonograph records in my room. The two American records were a gift from my landlady - one of those rare, drop-it-and-run gifts that leave the recipient dizzy with gratitude. On one of the records Dorothy Lamour sang Moonlight and Shadows, and on the other Connie Boswell sang Where Are You? Both girls got pretty scratched up, hanging around my room, as they had to go to work whenever I heard my landlady’s step outside my door.
	One evening I was in my sitting room, writing a long letter to a girl in Pennsylvania, suggesting that she quit school and come to Europe to marry me - a not infrequent suggestion of mine in those days. My phonograph was not playing. But suddenly the words to Miss Boswell’s song floated, just slightly damaged, through my open window:
	“Where are you?
	Where have you gone wissout me?
	I sought you cared about me.
	Where are you?”
	Thoroughly excited, I sprang to my feet, then rushed to my window and leaned out.
	The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk. When a few seconds had throbbed by, I said hello to her. She then looked up at me, and though she seemed decorously startled, something told me she wasn’t too surprised  that I had heard her doing the Boswell number. This didn’t matter, of course. I asked her, in murderous German, if I might join her on the balcony. The request obviously rattled her. She replied, in English, that she didn’t think her “fahzzer” would like me to come down to see her. At this point, my opinion of girls’ fathers, which had been low for years, struck bottom. But nevertheless I managed a drab little nod of understanding.
	It turned out all right, though. Leah seemed to think it would be perfectly all right if she came up to see me. Entirely stupefied with gratitude, I nodded, then closed my window and began to wander hurriedly through my room, rapidly pushing things under other things with my foot.



I don’t really remember our first evening in my sitting room. All our evenings were pretty much the same. I can’t honestly separate one from another; not anymore, anyway.
	Leah’s knock on my door was always poetry - high, beautifully wavering, absolutely perpendicular poetry. Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence an beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls. I was always half-eaten away by the respect and happiness when I opened the door for Leah.
	We would solemnly shake hands at my sitting-room door. Then Leah would walk, self-consciously but beautifully, to my window seat, sit down, and wait for our conversation to begin.
	Her English, like my German, was nearly all holes. Yet invariably I spoke her language and she mine, although any other arrangement at all might have made for a less perforated means of communication.
	“Uh. Wie geht es Ihnen?” I’d start out. (How are you?) I never used the familiar form in addressing Leah.
	“I am very well, sank you very much,” Leah would reply, never failing to blush. It didn’t help much to look at her indirectly; she blushed anyway.
	“Schon hinaus, nicht wahr?” I’d ask, rain or shine. (Nice out, isn’t it?)
	“Yes,” she’d answer, rain or shine.
	“Uh. Waren Sie heute in der Kino?” was a favorite question of mine. (Did you go to the movies today?) Five days a week Leah worked in her father’s cosmetics plant.
	“No. I was today working by my fahzzer.”
	“Oh, dass ist recht! Uh. Ist es schon dort?” (Oh, that’s right. Is it nice there?)
	“No. It is a very big fabric, with very many people running around about.”
	“Oh. Dass ist schlecht.” (That’s bad.)
	“Uh. Wollen Sie haben ein Tasse von Kaffee mit mir haben?” (Will you have a cup of coffee with me?)
	“I was already eating.”
	“Ja, aber Haben Sie ein Tasse anyway.” (Yes, but have a cup anyway.”
	“Sank you.”
	At this point I would remove my note paper, shoe trees, laundry, and other unclassifiable articles from the small table I used as a desk and a catchall. Then I would plug in my electric percolator, often commenting sagely, “Kaffee ist gut.” (Coffee is good.)
	We usually drank two cups of coffee apiece, passing each other the cream and sugar with all the drollery of fellow pallbearers distributing white gloves among themselves. Often Leah brought along some kuchen or torte, wrapped rather inefficiently - perhaps surreptitiously - in waxed paper. This offering she would deposit quickly and insecurely in my left hand as she entered my sitting room. It was all I could do to swallow the pastry Leah brought. First, I was never at all hungry while she was around; second, there seemed to be something unnecessarily, however vaguely, destructive about eating anything that came from where she lived.
	We usually didn’t talk while we drank our coffee. When we had finished, we picked up our conversation where we had left it - on it’s back, more often than not.
	“Uh. Ist die Fenster - uh - Sind Sie sehr kalt dort?” I would ask solicitously. (Is the window - uh - Are you very cold there?)
	“No! I feel very warmly, sank you.”
	“Dass ist gut. Uh. Wie geht’s Ihre Eltern?” (That’s good. How are your parents?) I inquired regularly after the health of her parents.
	“They are very well, sank you very much.” Her parents were always enjoying perfect health, even when her mother had pleurisy for two weeks.
	Sometimes Leah introduced a subject for conversation. It was always the same subject, but probably she felt she handled it so well in English that repetition was little or no drawback. She often inquired, “How was your hour today morning?”
	“My German lesson? Oh. Uh. Sehr gut. Ja. Sehr gut.” (Very good. Yes. Very good.)
	“What were you learning?”
	“What did I learn? Uh. Die, uh wuddayacallit. Die starke verbs. Sehr interessant.” (The strong verbs. Very interesting.)



	I could fill several pages with Leah’s and my terrible conversation. But I don’t see much point to it. We just never said anything to each other. Over a period of four months, we must have talked for thirty or thirty-five evenings without saying a word. In the long shadow of this small, obscure record, I’ve acquired a dogma that if I should go to Hell, I’ll be given a little inside room - one that is neither hot nor cold, but extremely drafty - in which all my conversations with Leah will be played back to me, over an amplification system confiscated from Yankee Stadium.
	One evening I named for Leah, without the slightest provocation, all the Presidents of the United States, in as close order as possible: Lincoln, Grant, Taft, and so on.
	Another evening I explained American football to her. For at least an hour and a half. In German.
	On another evening I felt called on to draw her a map of New York. She certainly didn’t ask me to. And Lord knows I never feel like drawing maps for anybody, much less have any aptitude for it. But I drew it - the U.S Marines couldn’t have stopped me. I distinctly remember putting Lexington Avenue where Madison should have been - and leaving it that way.
	Another time I read a new play I was writing, called He Was No Fool. It was about a cool, handsome, casually athletic young man - very much my own type - who had been called from Oxford to pull Scotland Yard out of an embarrassing situation:
	One Lady Farnsworth, who was a witty dipsomaniac, was being mailed one of her abducted husband’s fingers every Tuesday. I read the play to Leah in one sitting, laboriously editing out all the sexy parts - which, of course, ruined the play. When I had finished reading, I hoarsely explained to Leah that the play was “Nicht fertig yet.” (Not finished yet.) Leah seemed to understand perfectly. Moreover, she seemed to convey to me a certain confidence that perfection would somehow overtake the final draft of whatever the thing was I had just read to her…She sat so well on a window seat.



	I found out entirely by accident that Leah had a fiancé. It wasn’t the kind of information that stood a chance of coming up in our conversation.
	On a Sunday afternoon, about a month after Leah and I had become acquainted, I saw her standing in the crowded lobby of the Schwedenkino, a popular movie house in Vienna. It was the first time I had seen her either off the balcony or outside my sitting room. There was something fantastic and extremely heady about seeing her standing in the pedestrian lobby of the Schwedenkino, and I readily gave up my place in the box-office queue to go to speak to her. But as I charged across the lobby toward her over a number of innocent feet, I saw that she was neither alone nor with a girl friend or someone old enough to be her father.
	She was visibly flustered to see me, but managed to make introductions. Her escort, who was wearing his hat down over one of his ears, clicked his heels and crushed my hand. I smiled patronizingly at him - he didn’t look like much competition, grip of steel or no grip of steel; he looked too much like a foreigner.
	For a few minutes the three of us chatted unintelligibly. Then I excused myself and got back on the end of the line. During the showing of the film, I went up the aisle several times, carrying myself as erectly and dangerously as possible; but I didn’t see either of them. The film itself was one of the worst I’d seen.
	The next evening, when Leah and I had coffee in my sitting room, she stated, blushing, that the young man I had seen her with in the lobby of the Schwedenkino was her fiancé.
	“My fahzzer is wedding us when I have seventeen years,” Leah said, looking at a doorknob.
	I merely nodded. There a certain foul blows, notably in love and soccer, that are not immediately followed by audible protest. I cleared my throat. “Uh. Wie heisst er, again?” (What’s his name, again?)
	Leah pronounced once more - not quite phonetically enough for me - a violently long name, which seemed to me predestined to belong  to somebody who wore his hat down over one ear. I poured more coffee for both of us. Then, suddenly, I stood up and went to my German-English dictionary. When I had consulted it, I sat down again and asked Leah, “Lieben Sie Ehe?” (Do you love marriage?)
	She answered slowly, without looking at me, “I don’t know.”
	I nodded. Her answer seemed the quintessence of logic to me. We sat for a long moment without looking at each other. When I looked at Leah again, her beauty seemed too great for the size of the room. The only way to make room for it was to speak of it. “Sie sind sehr schon. Weissen Sie dass?” I almost shouted at her.
	But she blushed so hard I quickly dropped the subject - I had nothing to follow up with, anyway.
	That evening, for the first and last time, something more physical than a handshake happened to our relationship. About nine-thirty, Leah jumped up from the window seat, saying it was becoming very late, and rushed to get downstairs. At the same time, I rushed to escort her out of the apartment to the staircase, and we squeezed together through the narrow doorway of my sitting room - facing each other. It nearly killed us.


	When it came time for me to go to Paris to master a second European language, Leah was in Warsaw visiting her fiancé’s family. I didn’t get to say good-bye to her, but I left a note for her, the next-to-last draft of which I still have:

“Wien
“December 6, 1936
“Liebe Leah,
      “Ich muss fahren nach Paris nun, und
so ich sage auf wiedersehen. Es war sehr
nett zu kennen Sie. Ich werde schreiben
zu Sie wenn ich bin in Paris. Hoffentlich 
Sie sind haben eine gute Ziet in Warsaw
mit die familie von ihre fiancé. Hoffent-
lich wird die Ehe gehen gut. Ich werde
Sie schicken das Buch ich habe ges-
prochen iiber, ‘Gegangen mit der Wind.’
Mit beste Grussen.
“Ihre Freund
“John”

Taking this note out of Jack-the-Ripper German, it reads:

“Vienna
“December 6, 1936
“Dear Leah
     “I must go to Paris now, and so I say
good-bye. It was very nice to know you.
I hope you’re having a good time in War-
saw with your fiance’s family. I hope the
marriage goes all right. I will send you
that book I was talking about, Gone with
the Wind. With best greetings,
“Your friend,
“John”

But I never did write to Leah from Paris. I never wrote to her again at all. I didn’t send a copy of Gone with the Wind. I was very busy in those days.
Late in 1937, when I was back in college in America, a round, flat package was forwarded to me from New York. A letter was attached to the package:

“Vienna
“October 14, 1937
“Dear John,
   “I have many times thought of you and
wondered what is become of you. I my-
self am now married and am living in
Vienna with my husband. He sends you
his great regards. If you can recall, you
and he made each other’s acquaintance in
the hall of the Schweden Cinema.
   “My parents are still living at 18 Stiefel
Street, and often I visit them, because I
am living in the near. Your landlady, Mrs.
Schlosser, has died in the summer with
cancer. She requested me to send you
these gramophone records, which you for-
got to take when you departed, but I did
not know your address for a long time.
I have now made the acquaintance of an 
English girl named Ursula Hummer, who
has given to me your address
   “My husband and I would be extremely
pleased to hear from you frequently
   “With very best greetings,
“Your friend,
“Leah”

Her married name and new address were not given.
	I carried the letter with me for months, opening and reading it in bars, between halves of basketball games, in Government classes, and in my room, until finally it began to get stained, from my wallet, the color of cordovan, and I had to put it away somewhere.



	About the same hour Hitler’s troops were marching into Vienna, I was on reconnaissance for geology 1-b, searching perfunctorily, in New Jersey, for a limestone deposit. But during the weeks and months that followed the German takeover of Vienna, I often thought of Leah. Sometimes just thinking of her wasn’t enough. When, for example, I had examined the most recent newspaper photographs of Viennese Jewesses on their hands and knees scrubbing the sidewalks, I quickly stepped across my dormitory room, opened a desk drawer, slipped an automatic into my pocket, then dropped noiselessly from my window to the street, where a long-range monoplane, equipped with a silent engine, awaited my gallant, foolhardy, hawklike whim. I’m not the type that just sits around.
	In late summer of 1940, at a party in New York, I met a girl who not only had known Leah in Vienna, but had gone all through school with her. I pulled up a chair, but the girl was determined to tell me about some man in Philadelphia, who looked exactly like Gary Cooper. She said I had a weak chin. She said she hated mink. She said that Leah had either got out of Vienna or hadn’t got out of Vienna.
	During the war in Europe, I had an Intelligence job with a regiment of an infantry division. My work called for a lot of conversation with civilians and Wehrmacht prisoners. Among the latter, sometimes there were Austrians. One feldwebel, a Viennese, whom I secretly suspected of wearing lederhosen under his field-gray uniform, gave me a little hope: but it turned out he had known not Leah, but some girl with the same last name as Leah’s. Another Wiener, an unteroffizier, standing at strict attention, told me what terrible things had been done to the Jews in Vienna. As I had rarely, if ever, seen a man with a face quite so noble and full of vicarious suffering as this unteroffizier’s was, just for the devil of it I had him roll up his left sleeve. Close to his armpit he had the tattooed blood-type marks of an old SS man. I stopped asking personal questions after a while.
	A few months after the war in Europe had ended, I took some military papers to Vienna. In a jeep with another man, I left Nurnburg on a hot October morning and got into Vienna the next, even hotter, morning. In the Russian Zone we were detained five hours while two guards made passionate love to our wrist watches. It was midafternoon by the time we entered the American Zone of Vienna, in which Stiefelstrasse, my old street, was located.
	I talked to the Tabak-Trafik vendor on the corner of Stiefelstrasse, to the pharmacist in the near-by Apotheke, to a neighborhood woman, who jumped at least an inch when I addressed her, and to a man who insisted that he used to see me on the trolley car in 1936. Two of these people told me that Leah was dead. The pharmacist suggested that I go to see a Dr. Weinstein, who had just come back from Vienna from Buchenwald, and gave me his address. I then got back into the jeep, and we cruised through the streets toward G-2 Headquarters. My jeep partner tooted his horn at the girls in the streets and told me at great length what he thought of Army dentists.
	When we had delivered the official papers, I got back into the jeep alone and went to see Dr. Weinstein.



It was twilight when I drove back to Stiefelstrasse. I parked the jeep and entered my old house. It had been turned into living quarters for field-grade officers. A red-haired staff sergeant was sitting at an Army desk on the first landing, cleaning his fingernails. He looked up, and, as I didn’t outrank him, gave that long Army look that holds no interest or curiosity at all. Ordinarily I would have returned it.
	“What’s the chances of my going up to the second floor just for a minute?” I asked. “I used to live here before the war.”
	“This here’s officers’ quarters, Mac,” he said.
	“I know. I’ll only be a minute.”
	“Can’t do it. Sorry.” He went on scraping the insides of his fingernails with the big blade of his pocket knife.
	“I’ll only be a minute,” I said again.
	He put down his knife, patiently. “Look, Mac. I don’t wanna sound like a bum. But I ain’t lettin nobody go upstairs unless they belong there. I don’t give a damn if it’s Eisenhower himself. I got my - “ He was interrupted by the sudden ringing of a telephone on his desk. He picked up the phone, keeping an eye on me, and said, “Yessir, Colonel, sir. This is him on the phone….Yessir….Yessir….I got Corporal Santini puttin’ ‘em on the ice right now, right this minute. They’ll be good and cold….Well, I figured we’d put the orchestra right out on the balcony, like. Account of there’s only three of ‘em….Yessir….Well, I spoke to Major Foltz, and he said the ladies could put their coats and stuff in his room….Yessir. Right, sir. Ya wanna hurry up, now. Ya don’t wanna miss any of that moonlight….Ha,ha,ha!….Yessir. G’bye, sir.” The staff sergeant hung up, looking stimulated.
	“Look,” I said, distracting him, “I’ll only be a minute.”
	He looked at me. “What’s the big deal, anyhow, up there?”




A Young Girl In 1941 With No Waist At All
by J.D. Salinger



	The young man in the seat behind Barbara at the jai alai games had leaned forward finally and asked  if she were ill and if she would like to be escorted back to the ship. Barbara had looked up at him, had looked at his looks, and said yes, she thought she would, thank you, that she did have kind of a headache, and that it was certainly was awfully nice of him. Then they had stood up together and left the stadium, returning to the ship by taxi and tender. But before she had gone into her cabin on B deck, Barbara had said nervously to the young man : “Hey. I could just take an aspirin or something. I could meet you on the deck where the shuffleboard  stuff is. You know who you look like? You look like a boy who was in a lot of West Pointy pictures with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and-when I was little. Never see him anymore. Listen. I could just take an aspirin. Unless you have something else-“ The young man had interrupted her, saying, in so many words, that he had nothing else to do. Then Barbara had walked quickly forward to her cabin. She was wearing a red-and-blue striped evening gown, and her figure was very young and sassy. There were several years to go before her figure stopped being sassy and just became a very pretty figure.
	The young man-his name was Ray Kinsella, and he was a member of the ship’s Junior Entertainment Committee-waited for Barbara at the railing on the portside of the promenade deck. Nearly all the passengers were ashore and, in the stillness and moonlight, it was a powerful place to be. The only sound in the night came from the Havana harbor water slucking gently against the sides of the ship. Through the moon mist the Kungsholm could be seen, anchored sleepy and rich, just a few hundred feet aft. Farther shoreward a few small boats corked about.
	“I’m back,” said Barbara.
	The young man, Ray, turned. “Oh. You changed your dress.”
	“Don’t you like white?”-quickly.
	“Sure. It’s fine,” said Ray. She was looking at him a little nearsightedly, and he guessed she probably wore glasses when she was home. He looked at his wrist watch now. “Listen. A tender’s going to leave in a minute. Would you like to go ashore again and horse around a little? I mean do you feel all right?”
	“I took an aspirin. Unless you have something else to do,” said Barbara. “I don’t want to stay on the ship very much.”
	“Let’s hurry, then,” said Ray, and took her arm.
	Barbara had to run to keep up with him. “Golly,” she said, “how tall are you anyway?”
	“Six-four. Hurry a little.”
	The tender bobbed only slightly in the calm water. Ray slipped his hands under Barbara’s arms, eased her down to the tender pilot and then jumped into the boat himself. The little action disordered a single lock of his dark hair and hiked up the back of his dinner jacket. He pulled down his jacket, and a pocket comb immediately found its way to his hand; he passed it just once, brought up in the rear by the careful flat of his other hand, through his hair. Then he looked around. Besides Barbara and himself and the pilot there were only three people in the tender. One of them he identified as a A-deck stewardess-she probably had a shore date with one of the crew. The other two people, a couple in their late forties, were familiar-faced passengers whom Ray didn’t know by name-they were regulars at the horse-racing game each afternoon, he knew though. He lost interest at that point and steadied Barbara as the little craft shoved off.
	The wife, however, was beginning to look interested in Barbara and Ray. She was a beautifully, a perfectly, gray-haired woman in a long sleeved evening gown with Thurber dogs in the pattern. She was wearing a pear-shaped diamond ring and a diamond bracelet. Just on sight no one very sensible would have laid bets on her background. She might, years ago, have walked very erectly across a Broadway stage, with an ostrich fan, singing A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody, or something similarly ostrich fan-ish. She might have been an ambassador’s daughter or a fireman’s daughter. She might have been her husband’s secretary for years. As only second-class beauty can be identified, there is no way of telling.
	She spoke to Barbara and Ray suddenly.
	“Isn’t it a heavenly night?”
	“It certainly is,” Ray said.
	“Don’t you just feel wonderful?” the woman asked Barbara.
	“I do now. I didn’t before,” Barbara answered politely.
	“Oh,” said the woman, smiling, “I just feel wonderful.” She slipped her arm through her husband’s. Then for the first time she noticed the stewardess from A deck, who was standing beside the pilot. She called to her: “Don’t you just feel marvelous tonight?”
	The stewardess turned. “I beg your pardon?” Her tone was that of an off-duty snob.
	“I said don’t you feel just wonderful. Isn’t it a heavenly night?”
	“Oh,” said the stewardess, smiling briefly, “I guess so.”
“Oh, it is,” said the woman emphatically. “One would never know it was nearly December.” She visibly squeezed her husband’s hand and addressed him in the same ecstatic tones she had been using. “You do feel marvelous, don’t you darling?”
Sure do,” said her husband and winked at Barbara and Ray. He wore a wine-colored dinner jacket that was cut very full, letting him look huge rather than overweight.
The woman turned and looked out over the water. “Heavenly,” she said softly. She touched her husbands sleeve. “Darling, look at those sweet little boats.”
“Where?”
“There. Over there.”
“Oh yeah. Nice.”
The woman spoke suddenly to Barbara. “I’m Diane Woodruff and this is my husband Fielding.”
Barbara and Ray in turn introduced themselves
“Of course!” said Mrs. Woodruff to Ray. “You’re the boy who runs all the tournaments. Lovely.” She again looked out over the water. “Those poor little boats. They all belong in bathtubs.” She looked at Barbara and Ray. “Where are you both going? Why don’t you come along with us? Of course! You must. Say you will. Please do.”
“Well, I-it’s very nice of you,” answered Ray. “I don’t know what Barbara had-“
“I’d love to,” said Barbara. “Where are you going? I mean, I’ve never been to Havana before.”
“Everywhere!” said Mrs. Woodruff roundly. “Well, isn’t this just perfect?” She leaned forward and called again to the stewardess. “Dear, wouldn’t you like to join us? Please do.”
“I’m sorry. I hafta meet somebody. Thanks just the same, though.”
“What a pity. Fielding, darling, you look like a college boy, so young. It’s indecent.”
“Me? An old punk like me?”
“Where are you from dear?” Mrs. Woodruff asked Barbara.
“Coopersburg, Pennsylvania. It’s near Pittsburgh.”
“Oh, how nice. And you?”
“Salt Lake City,” said Ray.
“We’re from San Francisco. Isn’t it wonderful? Do you think we’ll be in the war soon, Mr. Walters? My husband doesn’t think so.”
“Kinsella,” corrected Ray. “I don’t know. I go in the Army anyway when the cruise is over.”
Mrs. Woodruff put a hand to her mouth. . “Oh!” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry!”
“Oh, It won’t be too bad,” Ray explained.” I have a commission in the artillery from R.O.T.C. I’ll have my own battery and all. I mean  I won’t have to take anybody’s guff.”
As the tender bumped gently into port, Ray put his arm around Barbara’s waist to steady her.
“She has no waist at all,” said Mrs. Woodruff and looked gently at Ray. “How perfect it must be for you to be out on a night like this with somebody who has absolutely no waist at all.”


Ray, who had recommended it, led the way into Viva Havana. It was chiefly a tourist spot, but with money and highhandedness behind it. There was nothing inside except the waiters. The owner was Irish, the menu was French, the headwaiter was Swiss, the orchestra was mostly Brooklyn, the chorus girls were former citizens of Shubert’s alley, and Scotch sold better than any other drink.
The jai alai games over, the crowd from the ship had already arrived at Viva Havana and were distributed sunburntly around the vast, noisy room. Ray immediately noticed the young lady whom he and the other Junior Committeemen had intimately voted Miss Latex Bathing Suit of 1941. She was swaying, half in and half out of her partner’s arms, near the orchestra stand, talking to the leader, probably asking him to play Stardust. Ray also spotted the governor-elect - the ship’s celebrity - on his way to the game room, wearing a white dinner jacket, not his usual man-of-the-people skimpy black suit. The Masterson Twins, Ray also noticed, were at a table with - in the parlance of the ship’s employees - the Chicago Catch and the Cleveland Outfumbler, was just unquestionably tight.
Mr. Woodruff attended to the ordering when they were all seated. Then he and Mrs. Woodruff pried their way to the dance floor.
“Would you like to dance?” Ray asked Barbara.
“Not right away. I don’t know how to rumba. I need something very slow, anyway. Look at Mrs. Woodruff. She’s very good.”
“She’s not bad,” conceded Ray.
Barbara said excitedly, “Isn’t she nice? Isn’t she beautiful? She’s so - so I don’t know what. Golly!”
“She certainly talks a lot,” Ray said, stirring his highball.
“You must meet a lot of people, going on these cruises all the time,” Barbara said.
“This is only the second time. I just quit college. Yale. I was going in the army anyway, so I figured I might as well have a little fun.” He lit a cigarette. “What do you do?” he asked.
“I used to work. I don’t do anything now. I didn’t go to college.”
I haven’t seen your mother anywheres around tonight,” said the Yale man.
“The lady traveling with me?” said Barbara. “She isn’t my mother.”
“She isn’t?”
“No. My mother’s dead. She’s my mother-in-law-to-be.”
“Oh.”
Barbara reached forward for the centerpiece matchbox. She struck a match, blew it out, struck another, blew it out and drew back her hands to her lap. “I was sick for a while,” she said, “and my fiancé wanted me to go away for a rest. Mrs. Odenhearn said she’d take me on a cruise or something. So we went.”
“Well!” said Ray, who was watching Miss Latex Bathing Suit of 1941 perform on the dance floor.
“It’s like being with a girl my own age, almost,” Barbara said. “She’s very nice. She was a great athlete when she was young.”
“She seems very nice. Drink your drink, why don’t you?”
Barbara picked up her drink and sipped a sixteenth of an inch of it. “I can dance to what they’re playing now,” she said
“Fine.”
They stood up and worked their way to the dance floor.
Barbara danced rigidly and without any perceptible feeling for rhythm. In her nervousness she got Ray’s arm into a peculiar position, locked it just enough to give him trouble leading her.
“I’m an awful dancer.”
“You certainly are not,” said Ray.
“My brother tried to teach me when I was little.”
“Oh?”
“He’s about your size. He used to play football in high school. Only he hurt his knee and had to stop. He could’ve had a scholarship to almost any college if he hadn’t hurt himself.”
The floor was so crowded that it mattered relatively little how poorly they danced together. Ray suddenly noticed how blond, how corn yellow, Barbara’s hair was. “What’s your fiancé like?” he asked.
“Carl? Oh, he’s very nice . He sounds lovely over the telephone. He’s very - very considerate about stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Oh…stuff. I don’t know. I don’t understand boys. I never know what their talking about.”
Ray suddenly lowered his head and kissed Barbara on the forehead. It tasted sweet and left him feeling unsteady.
“Why did you do that?” Barbara said, not looking up at him.
“I don’t know. Are you sore?”
“It’s so warm in here,” Barbara said. “Golly.”
“How old are you, Barbara?”
“Eighteen. How old are you?”
“Well, actually I’m twenty-two.”
They went on dancing.
“My father had a cerebral hemorrhage and died last summer,” Barbara said.
“Oh! That’s tough.”
“I live with my aunt. She’s a teacher at Coopersburg High. Did you ever read Green Light by Lloyd C. Douglas?”
“I don’t get much time for books. Why? Is it good?”
“I didn’t read it. My aunt wants me to read it. I’m stepping all over your feet.”
“No, you’re not.”
“My aunt’s very nice,” Barbara said.
You know,” said Ray, “it’s very hard to follow your conversation sometimes.”
She didn’t answer, and for a moment he was afraid he had offended her. He felt a slight panic rise in his head at the thought: he still tasted her forehead on his lips. But, below his chin, Barbara’s voice spoke up again.
“My brother had a car accident just before I left.”
It was a great relief to hear.


The Woodruffs were already seated at the table. Their shot glasses of bourbon were empty and their chasers barely sipped. “I waved to you,” Mrs. Woodruff lightly accused Barbara. “You didn’t even wave back.”
“Why, I certainly did wave back to you,” Barbara said.
“Did you watch us rumba?” asked Mrs. Woodruff. “Weren’t we marvelous? Fielding’s a Latin at heart. We’re both Latins. I’m going to the powder room …Barbara?”
“Not just now. I’m watching a drunken man,” Barbara said.
As Mrs. Woodruff left the table, almost simultaneously her husband leaned forward and addressed the two young people.
“I’m trying to keep something from her. Our son’s going to join the Army while we’re gone, I think. He wants to be a flier. It would kill Mrs. Woodruff if she knew.” Mr. Woodruff then sat back, sighed heavily and catching the waiter’s eye, he signaled for another round of drinks. Then he stood up, used his handkerchief forcibly and wandered away from the table. Barbara watched him until he disappeared: then she turned and spoke to Ray:
“Do you like clams and oysters and stuff?”
Ray started slightly. “Well, yes. Sort of.”
“I don’t like any kinds of shell food,” Barbara said nervously. “Do you know what I heard today? I heard the ship may not make any more cruises till after the war.”
“It’s just a rumor,” said Ray casually. “Don’t look so sad about it. You and what’s-his-name - Carl - can take this same cruise after the war,” Ray said, watching her.
“He’s going in the Navy.”
“After the war, I said.”
“I know,” said Barbara, nodding, “but - everything’s so funny. I feel so funny.” She stopped short, unable or unwilling to express herself.
Ray moved a little closer to her. “You have nice hands, Barbara,” he said.
She removed them from the table. “They’re terrible now. I couldn’t get the right polish.”
“They’re not terrible.’ Ray picked up one of her hands - and immediately let go of it. He stood up and drew Mrs. Woodruff’s chair for her.
Mrs. Woodruff smiled, lit a cigarette and looked alertly at them both. “I want you both to leave very shortly,” she said smiling. “This place isn’t at all right for you.”
“Why?” asked Barbara, with wide eyes.
“Really. This is the sort of place to go when the very best things are over and there’s mostly money left. We don’t even belong here - Fielding and I. Please. Take a lovely walk somewhere.” Mrs. Woodruff appealed to Ray. “Mr. Walters,” she said, “aren’t there any not-to-well-organized clambakes or hayrides tonight?”
“Kinsella,” corrected Ray, rather curtly. “Afraid not.”
“I’ve never been to a clambake or a hayride,” Barbara said.
“Oh! Oh, what bad news! They’re so nice. Oh, how I hate 1941.”
Mr. Woodruff sat down. “What’s that, dear?” he asked.
I said I hate 1941,” said his wife peculiarly. And without moving she broke into tears, smiling at all of them. “I do,” she said. “I detest it. It’s full of armies waiting to fill up with boys, and girls and mothers waiting to live in mailboxes and smirking old headwaiters who don’t have to go anywhere. I detest it. It’s a rotten year.”
“We’re not even in the war yet, dear,” said Mr. Woodruff. Then he said: “Boys have always had to go to war. I went. Your brothers went.”
“It’s not the same. It’s not rotten in the same way. Time isn’t any good anymore. You and Paul and Freddy left relatively nice things behind you. Dear God. Bobby won’t even go on a date if he hasn’t any money. It’s entirely different. It’s entirely rotten.”
“Well,” said Ray awkwardly. He looked at his wrist watch: then at Barbara. “Like to take in a few sights?” he asked her.
“I don’t know,” said Barbara, still staring at Mrs. Woodruff. Mr. Woodruff leaned forward toward his wife. “Like to play a little roulette, honey?”
“Yes. Yes, of course, darling.” Mrs. Woodruff looked up. “Oh, are you leaving, children?” she asked.


It was a little after four in the morning. At one o’clock the portside deck steward had set up some of his deck chairs to accommodate the nondissipating crowd who would, a few hours later, use the post-breakfast sunshine
There are many things you can do in a deck chair: eat hot hors d'oeuvres when a man passes with them on a tray, read a magazine or a book, show snapshots of your grandchildren, knit, worry about money, worry about a man, worry about a woman, get seasick, watch the girls on their way to the swimming pool, watch for flying fish…But two people in the deck chairs, drawn however closely together, can’t kiss each other vary comfortably. Either the arms of a deck chair are too high or the persons involved are seated too deeply.
	Ray was seated on Barbara’s left. His right arm, resting on the hard wood of her chair, was sore from pressure.
	Both of their voices had struck four.
	“How’re you feeling now?” Ray asked.
	“Me? I feel fine.”
	“No, I mean do you still feel a little tight? Maybe we shouldn’t have gone to that last place.”
	“Me? I wasn’t tight.” Barbara thought a minute, then asked: “Were you?”
	“Heck no, I never get tight.” This inaccurate piece of intelligence seemed automatically to renew Ray’s visa to advance over the unguarded frontier of Barbara’s deck chair.
	After two hours of kissing, Barbara’s lips were a little chapped, but still tender and earnest and interested. Ray could not have remembered, even if he had tried, when he had been comparably affected by another girl’s kiss. As he kissed her again now, he was reupset by the sweetness, the generously qualified and requalified innocence of her kiss.
	When the kiss ended - he could never unconditionally concede to the ending of one of Barbara’s kisses - he drew back a very little and began to speak with a hoarseness unnatural even to the hours and the highballs and cigarettes consumed. “Barbara. No kidding. We’ll do it, huh? We’ll get married, huh?”
	Barbara, beside him in the dark, was still.
	“No, really,” Ray begged, as though he had been contradicted. “We’ll be damn happy. Even if we get in the war I’ll probably never be sent overseas or anything. I’m lucky that way. We’d - we’d have a swell time.” He searched her still face in the moonlight. “Wouldn’t we?”
	“I don’t know,” said Barbara.
	“Sure you know! Sure you know! I mean, hell. We’re right for each other.”
	“I keep even forgetting your name,” Barbara said practically. “Golly. We hardly know each other.”
	“Listen. We know each other a lot better than most people that know each other for months!” Ray informed recklessly.
	“I don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to tell Mrs. Odenhearn.”
	“His mother? Just tell her the truth, is all!” was Ray’s advice.
	Barbara made no reply. She bit nervously at the cuticle of her thumb. Finally she spoke. “Do you think I’m dumb?”
	“Do I what? Do I think you’re dumb? I certainly don’t!”
	“I’m considered dumb,” said Barbara slowly. “I am a little dumb. I guess.”
	“Now stop that talk. I mean, stop it. You’re not dumb. You’re - smart. Who said you’re dumb? That guy Carl?”
	Barbara was vague about it. “Oh, not exactly. Girls, more. Girls I went to school with and go around with.”
	“They’re crazy.”
	“How am I smart?” Barbara wanted to know. “You said I was smart.”
	“Well, you - you just are, that’s all!” said Ray. “Please.” And equipped only for the most primary kind of eloquence, he leaned over and kissed her at great length - persuasively, he hoped.
	At last Barbara gently interrupted him by removing her lips from his. Her face in the moonlight was troubled, but slackly, with her mouth slightly open, without consciousness of being watched.
	“I wish I weren’t dumb,” she said to the night.
	Ray was impatient - but careful.
	“Barbara. I told you. You’re not dumb.. Please. You’re not at all dumb. You’re very -  intelligent.” He looked at her very possessively, jealously. “What are you thinking about?” he demanded. “That Carl guy?”
	She shook her head.
	“Barbara. Listen. We’ll be happy as anything. No kidding. I know we haven’t known each other very long. That’s probably what you’re thinking about. But this is a lousy time. I mean with the Army and all, and everybody upside down. In other words, if two people love each other they oughtta stick together.” He searched her face, less desperately, bolstered by what he considered to be his sudden insight and eloquence. “Don’t you think so?” he asked moderately.
	“I don’t know,” said Barbara and began to cry.
	She cried painfully, with double-edged gulps from the diaphragm. Alarmed by the violence of her sorrow and by being a witness to it, but impatient with the sorrow itself, Ray was a poor pacifier. Barbara finally emerged from the private accident entirely on her own.
	I’m all right,” she said. “I think I better go to bed.” She stood up unsteadily.
	Ray jumped up and took her arm.
	I’ll see you in the morning, won’t I?” he asked. “You’re playing off the finals in the doubles tournament, aren’t you? The deck tennis tournament?”
	“Yes,” said Barbara. “Well, good night.”
	“Don’t say it like that,” said Ray, reprovingly.
	“I don’t know how I said it,” said Barbara.
	“Well. I mean, heck. You said it as though you didn’t even know me or anything. Gosh, I’ve asked you to marry me about twenty times.”
	“I told you I was dumb,” Barbara explained simply.
	“I wish you’d stop saying that.”
	“Good night,” said Barbara. “Thank you for a lovely time. Really.” She extended her hand.



The Woodruffs were the only passengers on the last tender from shore to ship. Mrs. Woodruff was in her stockinged feet, having given her shoes to the taxi driver for his lovely driving. They were now ascending the narrow, steep ladder which stretched flimsily between the tender platform and the B deck port door. Mrs. Woodruff preceded her husband, several times swinging precariously around to see if her husband was obeying the rules she had imposed on them both.
“You’re holding the thing. The rope,” she accused, looking down now at her husband.
“Not,” denied Mr. Woodruff indignantly. His bow tie was undone. The collar of his dinner jacket was half turned up in the back. 
“I distinctly said no one was to hold on to the rope,” pronounced Mrs. Woodruff. Wavering she took another step.
Mr. Woodruff stared back at her, his face teetering between confusion and abysmal melancholy. Abruptly, he turned his back on his wife and sat down where he was. He was almost precisely at the middle of the ladder. The drop to the water was at least thirty feet.
“Fielding! Fielding, you come up here instantly!”
For answer, Mr. Woodruff placed his chin on his hands.
Mrs. Woodruff weaved dangerously, then she lifted her skirts and successful, if inexplicably, made the descent to the rung just above her husband’s seat. She embraced him with a half Nelson which nearly capsized them both. “Oh, my baby,” she said. “Are you angry with me?”
“You said I was using the rope,” said Mr. Woodruff, his voice breaking slightly.
“But, baby mouse, you were!”
“Was not,” said Mr. Woodruff.
Mrs. Woodruff kissed the top of her husband’s head, where the hair was thinnest. “Of course you weren’t,” she said She locked her hands ecstatically around Mr. Woodruff’s throat. “Do you love me mouse?” she asked, practically cutting off his respiration. His reply was unintelligible. “Too tight?” asked Mrs. Woodruff. She relaxed her hold, looked out over the shimmering water and answered her own question. “Of course you love me. It would be unforgivable of you not to love me. Sweet boy, please don’t fall; put both feet on the rung. How did you get so tight dear? I wonder why our marriage has been such a joy. We’re so stinking rich. We should have, by all the rules, drifted continents apart. You do love me so much it’s almost unbearable, don’t you? Sweet, put both feet on the rung, like a good boy. Isn’t it nice here? We’re defying Magellan’s law. Darling, put your arms around me - no, don’t move! You can’t where you’re sitting. I’ll make believe your arms are around me. What did you think of that little boy and that little girl? Barbara and Eddie. They were - unequipped. Didn’t you think? She was lovely. He was full of baloney. I do hope she behaves sensibly. Oh, this crazy year. It’s a devil. I pray the child uses her head. Dear God, make all the children use their heads now - You’re making the years so horrible now, dear God.” Mrs. Woodruff poked her husband in the back. “Fielding, you pray, too.”
“Pray what?”
“Pray that the children use their heads now.”
“What children?”
“All of them darling. Bobby. Our little gorgeous Bobby. The Freemont girls with their candy ears. Betty and Donald Mercer. The Croft children. All of them. Especially that little girl who was with us tonight. Barbara. I can’t get her out of my mind. Pray, darling boy.”
“All right.”
“Oh, you’re so sweet.” Mrs. Woodruff stroked the back of her husband’s neck. Suddenly, but slowly, she said: “ ‘I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, By the roes, and by the hinds of the field, That ye stir not up, nor awaken love, Until it please.’ “
Mr. Woodruff had heard her.
“What’s ‘at from?” he asked.
“The Song of songs. The Bible. Darling, don’t turn around. I’m so afraid you’ll fall.”
“You know everything,” said Mr. Woodruff solemnly. “You know everything.”
“Oh, you sweet! Pray a little for the children, my sweet boy. Oh, what a detestable year!”



“Barbara? Is that you dear?”
“Yes, it is , Mrs. Odenhearn.”
“You can turn on the light, dear. I’m awake.”
“I can undress in the dark. Really.”
Of course you can’t. Turn them on dear.” Mrs. Odenhearn had been a deadly serious tennis player in her day, had even once opposed Helen Wills in an exhibition match. She still had two rackets restrung annually, in New York, by a “perfect little man” who happened to be six feet tall. Even now, in bed at 4:45 A.M., a “Yours, partner!” quality rang in her voice.
“I’m wide awake,” she announced. “Been awake for hours. They’ve been so many drunken people passing the cabin. Absolutely no consideration for others. Turn on the light, dear.”
Barbara turned on the lights. Mrs. Odenhearn, to shield herself from the glare, put thumb and forefinger to her eyes, then dropped her hand away and smiled strongly. Her hair was in curlers, and Barbara didn’t look at her very directly.
“There’s a different class of people, these days,” Mrs. Odenhearn observed. “This ship really used to be quite nice. Did you have a nice time, dear?”
“Yes, I did, thank you. It’s too bad you didn’t go. Is your foot any better?”
Mrs. Odenhearn, with mock seriousness, raised an index finger and wagged it at Barbara. “Now listen to me, young lady. If we lose our match today it’s not going to be on my account. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. So there!”
Barbara smiled and slid her suitcase out from under the unoccupied twin bed - her bed. She placed it on the bed and began to look for something in it. 
Mrs. Odenhearn was thinking.
“I saw Mrs. Helger and Mrs. Ebers in the lounge after you left tonight.”
“Oh?” said Barbara.
“They’re out for our blood tomorrow, I don’t mind telling you. You must play just a little closer to the net when I’m serving, dear.”
“I’ll try to,” Barbara said, and went on looking through her suitcase, turning over soft things.
“Hurry to bed, dear. Hippity Hop,” said Mrs. Odenhearn.
“I can’t find my - oh, here they are.” Barbara withdrew a pair of pajamas.
“Peter Rabbit,” said Mrs. Odenhearn warmly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Carl used to love Peter when he was a child.” Mrs. Odenhearn raised her voice an octave or so: “ ‘Mummy, wead me Peatie Wabbit,’ he used to say. Over and over again. I just wish I had a penny for every time that child had to have Peter read to him.”
Barbara smiled again and started for the adjoining bathroom with her pajamas under her arm. She was briefly arrested by Mrs. Odenhearn’s raised voice.
“Someday you’ll be reading Peter to your little boy.”
Barbara didn’t have to smile, as she was already in the bathroom. She closed the door. When she came out in her pajamas a moment later, Mrs. Odenhearn, who didn’t inhale, was smoking a cigarette through her holder - one of the kind advertised to be a denicotinizer. She was also in the act of reaching for her ship’s library novel, which stood on the night table.
“All ready for bed, dear? I just thought I’d read one little chapter of my book. It may just make me sleepy. So many, many things running through my poor old head.”
Barbara smiled and got into bed.
“Will the light bother you, dear?”
“Not at all. I’m awfully tired.” Barbara turned over on her side, away from the light and Mrs. Odenhearn. “Good night,” she said.
“Sleep tight, dear…Oh, I think I’ll try to sleep too! It’s a very silly book, anyway. Honestly, I never read charming books anymore. The authors nowadays seem to try to write about unattractive things. I think if I could read just one more book by Sarah Milford Pease I’d be happy. She’s dead, poor soul, though. Cancer.” Mrs. Odenhearn snapped off the table light.
Barbara lay several minutes in the darkness. She knew she ought to wait until next week or next month or next - something. But her heart was nearly pounding her out of bed. “Mrs. Odenhearn.” The name was out. It stood upright in the darkness.
“Yes, dear?”
“I don’t want to get married.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want to get married.”
Mrs. Odenhearn sat up in bed. She fished competently for the table light switch. Barbara shut her eyes before the room could be lighted and prayed without words and without thoughts. She felt Mrs. Odenhearn speak to the back of her head.
“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."
   	"Yes, Miss Ellumdorf," chanted the child nasally.



It took Elaine nine and a half years to be graduated from the eighth grade. She had entered grammar school when she was seven, and she was graduated when she was sixteen.
  	At her graduation she wore lipstick, as did only one other child: an Italian girl named Theresa Torrini, who was eighteen and the mother of an illegitimate child by a taxi driver named Hugo Munster. At graduation, Phyllis Jackson, aged twelve, delivered the valedictory; Mildred Horgand, also twelve, played "Elegie" and "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place" on her violin; Lindsay Feurstein, just turned thirteen, recited "Gunga Din" and "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud"; Thelma Ackerman, thirteen-and-a-half, tap-danced with maximum intricacy, and gave her impressions of Eddie Cantor and Red Skelton. And there were others whose names featured prominently in the mimeographed programs: Piano Selections-Babs Wasserman; Bird Calls Dolores Strovak; What America Means to Me-an original essay, by Mary Frances Leland. None of the latter group was over thirteen, and Dolores Strovak, who knew and could repeat the calls of thirty-six different birds, was only eleven.
 	These individual accomplishments were followed by a pageant, entitled "The Blood of Democracy," which included in its cast the entire graduating class.
  	Elaine Cooney enacted the part of the Statue of Liberty. Hers was the only nonspeaking part in the pageant. She was required simply to stand with her arm raised for nearly fifty minutes, supporting a torch made of solid lead, painted bronze-a piece of property conceived and wrought by Marjorie Briganza’s brother, Felix, a young pill. Elaine never dropped the heavy thing. She never relaxed under the weight of solid lead and, something heavier, unsung responsibility. Neither seemed to weigh heavily upon her. Nor did she once furtively scratch her golden head, which was adorned with a light, tight cardboard crown. It didn't even seem to itch.
  	Twice during the pageant of "The Blood of Democraq," Elaine's left foot, unbelievably small for a girl of her height, was tramped upon with all the ruthlessness of accident by both Estelle Lipschutz and Marjorie Briganza. At neither time did Elaine even wince. She lost a little color, temporarily.
  	After the graduation exercises Elaine went with her mother, her grandmother, and Mr. Freedlander (the "super"), to see a film her mother had particularly wanted to see all week, at the neighborhood movie. Elaine seemed to find the occasion unbearably festive, the fourth-rate feature picture exceptionally engrossing, happy-making. The Mickey Mouse cartoon made her laugh so hard that her almost-violet, great eyes wept ecstatic tears, and Mrs. Hoover had to slap and half-punch her on her lovely back to shock her out of hysteria, reminding her irritably that it was only a picture, and there wasn't any sense crying about it. During the entire show Mr. Freedlander pressed his leg against Elaine's. She made no attempt to move her leg away from his. She simply was unaware of the imposed intimacy. She was sixteen years old and mature enough physically to like or dislike leg pressure from a man in the dark, but she was
totally unqualified to accommodate sex and Mickey Mouse simultaneously. There was room for Mickey; no more.



The summer following her graduation from elementary school Elaine chiefly spent attending the movies with her mother, and listening to afternoon dramatic serials on the little, faulty-toned radio in their living room. She had no girl friends of her own age, and she knew no boys. Boys whistled at her, boys wrote clean or dirty notes to her, boys said "Hiya, beautiful" to her in hallways, in drugstores, on street corners; but she didn't go out with any of them, or even know any of them. If they asked her to go for a walk; or to a movie, she said she couldn't, that her mother wouldn't let her. This was not true. The question had never even come up at home. Elaine was not unwilling to go out with boys, but she was unwilling to be confused by unfamiliar, evadable issues.
  	So Elaine went through July and August of the summer of her graduation from elementary school, living in a Hollywood- and radio-promoted world peopled pled with star newspaper reporters, crackerjack young city editors, young brain surgeons, intrepid young detectives, all of whom crusaded or operated or detected brilliantly when they were not being sidetracked by their own incorrigible charm. Everybody in Elaine's world combed his hair beautifully, or had it tousled attractively by an expensive makeup man. All of her men spoke in deep, trained voices that sometimes swooped pleasantly through a sixteen-year-old girl's legs. On and on Elaine and her mother drove on foot, from one soap opera to the next, from one movie house to the next. They presented a strange picture, walking together on hot Bronx streets. Mrs. Cooney, and sometimes Mrs. Hoover, ever looking like centuries of literary Nurses, Elaine ever looking like centuries of Juliets and Ophelias and Helens. The troll-like servants and the beautiful mistress. Bound for a rendezvous with Romeo, with Hamlet, with Paris . . . bound for a rendezvous with the Warner Brothers, with Republic, with M.G.M., with Monogram, with R.K.O.... there were thousands of Bronx people who saw them on their way. There was never one to cry out, to wonder, to intercept....



Early in September, shortly before high schools opened, there was an irregularity in the program. One of the ushers at the neighborhood R.K.O. theater, a slight, pale, blond boy who carried a white comb in his hip pocket and was constantly running it through his hair, invited Elaine to the beach over Sunday, and his invitation was accepted. The invitation was made while Elaine's mother, who chronically suffered with head colts, saw ht before seating herself to retire to the ladies' room to administer nose drops. Elaine waited in the front lobby of the theater, examining the release photographs of scenes from next week's film. The usher, whose name was Teddy Schmidt, spoke to her. "Hey. Your name's Elaine, ain't it?"
  	"Yeah! How'dja know?" Elaine asked.
  	"I heard ya mother call ya around a million times," said Schmidt. "Listen. I mean wuddaya doin' Sunday ? You wanna go to the beach? This friend of mine, Frank Vitrelli, he has this Pontiac convert. I and he and his girl friend, were all driving out to the beach, Sunday. You wanna come ? I mean you wanna come?"
  	"I don't know," said the recent graduate of P.S. 332, watching him, liking his wavy, effeminate hair.
  	"It'll be fun. I mean you'll have a good time. This friend of mine, Frank Vitrelli, is a panic. I mean you'll get a good sunburn and all. How 'bout it.
"I hafta ask my mother," Elaine said. 
      	"Swell !" said Teddy Schmidt. "Swell !  I'll pick ya up at nine, Sunday morning. Where d'ya live?"
''Four fifty-two Sansom," Elaine sing-songed.
"Swell ! Be downstairs !"
  	Mrs. Cooney, snuffing back nose drops, interrupted the conversation. Teddy Schmidt's white, white hands tore her tickets in two, and Elaine followed her mother into the familiar darkness.
  	When the names of the personnel responsible for the film flashed on the screen, Elaine whispered to her mother, "Mama."
  	"What?" said Mrs. Cooney, watching the screen.
  	"Can I go to the beach on Sunday?"
  	"What beach ?"
  	"The beach. The usher wants me to go. He's going and I can go with him."
  	"I don't know. We'll see."
  	A man's figure appeared on the screen, and Elaine gave it her immediate interest biting her fingernails. The film progressed for ten minutes, then suddenly Mrs. Cooney addressed her daughter. "You don't have no bathing suit."
  	"What ?" said Elaine, watching the screen.
  	"You don't have no bathing suit."
  	"I can get one, can't I ?" Elaine asked.
  	Mrs. Cooney nodded in the dark, and the subject was closed indefinitely. The screen was becoming involved with a condition which promised the Cooneys a sudden lurch of romance.



The following Saturday night, when Elaine ant her mother were walking home from another film at another theater, Mrs. Cooney gave her daughter certain motherly advice.
  	"Don't let nobody get wise with ya tomorrow."
  	"What?" Elaine said.
  	"Don't let nobody get wise with ya tomorrow. In this man's car or anything. Don't let nobody get funny."
  	Elaine walked with her beautiful mouth slightly open, listening to her mother.
  	"Just watch your P's and Q's," Mrs. Cooney advised.
  	"What?" said Elaine.
  	"Watch your P's and Q's tomorrow," Mrs. Cooney said, and added somewhat more vehemently, "I hope ya grandma's picked up the papers after her in the livin' room. I'm sick an' tired of pickin' up after her. Pickin' up, pickin' up, pickin’ up."
  	At ten minutes before nine the next morning, Elaine stood in front of the house, with a Kresge dime-store valise containing a cheap royal-blue bathing suit, a thin, easily tearable bathing cap, and a face towel. She set down the valise at her small feet, and waited. It was a stunning, bright day, with special little breezes doing justice to Elaine's hair. At least three cars with men in them passed by her slowly, tooting their horns. One man went so far as to draw up to the curb, reach over and open his front door. "Going my way, kid ?"
  	"No. This boy's coming for me," Elaine explained.
  	The man shook his head. "He's not coming," he said. "I got a hot tip."
  	Elaine was suspicious. "How do you know?" she wanted to know.
  	The man stared at her. "What's your name, kid?" he asked.
  	"Elaine. Elaine Coooo-ney."
  	But just at that moment Teddy Schmidt's party pulled up behind the masher's car. Elaine recognized Teddy in the back of the car, and smiled. The masher drove off.
  	It was twenty minutes to eleven. Teddy got out of the back of the car. "Sorry I'm late!" he said, without a jot of regret in his voice. "Frank couldn't find the keys!" It was a great joke. He ushered the young girl into the back of the car, and got in beside her. The two people in the front were turned around and staring.
  	"Elaine, meet Monny Monahan. Monny, meet Elaine. Elaine, meet Frank," introduced Teddy.
  	Frank Vitrelli acknowledged his introduction by issuing a long, low whistle.
  	"Hello, kid," Monny said to Elaine, staring.
  	"Hello," said Elaine.
  	"Drive on, McGinsberg," ordered Teddy. Frank Vitrelli shifted gears, and the car moved off. "How ya been, Elaine?" Teddy inquired, affecting a casualness for the information of Frank and Monny.
  	"O.K.," said Elaine, sitting straight in her seat.
  	"Not bad lookin', eh, Monny?" Teddy asked Monny, who was still staring.
  	"What do you do, kid?" Monny asked Elaine. "You go to school?"
  	"I graduated."
  	"From high school ?"
  	"No, from 8-B. I'm going to high school next week. George Washington High."
  	"That's co-ed, isn't it?" Monny said.
  	"No. Boys and girls," Elaine informed her.

      	When the gorgeous sun was descending that day, Frank Vitrelli suddenly sprang to his feet, brushing off sand from his hairy legs. "Well," he announced, "I don't care what others want to do, but as for me, give me liberty or give me paddle tennis." He reached down, and with only the slightest exertion of his powerful arm, yanked Monny Monahan to her feet.
 	"Let's play doubles," Monny suggested. "You play paddle tennis, Elaine?"
"What?" said Elaine.
“You play paddle tennis?"
Elaine shook her head.
  	"Well, c'mon along, anyway," Monny said to her, glancing at Teddy Schmidt. "It's fun to watch."
  	"Naa, we'll stay here," said Teddy casually.
  	Frank Vitrelli abruptly made a little fullback-like movement, lunging his huge shoulders at the lower quarters of Monny Monahan, and in an instant Monny was sitting on his shoulders. She made a painful little grimace, replaced it with a smile, and said, "Oh, you!" to Frank Vitrelli. The latter turned around for the benefit of the others, with his hands so placed and gripped on Monny's thighs to show off best his deltoid muscles. Then, sharply, he twisted about, as though to ward off a sudden and formidable opponent, and galloped off, with his burden bouncing high and painfully on his shoulders.
  	"He's a panic," commented Teddy.
  	"He's strong," Elaine observed, basically.
  	Teddy shook his head. ''Muscle-bound," he said briefly. "See him in the water ?"
  	"No."
  	"Muscle-bound.- I mean he's all muscle-bound." Teddy changed the subject.
"Listen. This sand is killing my feet. I mean it's shady under the boardwalk. Let's take a walk."
  	"Okay," said Elaine, and they both stood up.
  	For the first time Elaine noticed that the beach was fast becoming deserted. There were a few city die-hards like the Schmidt-Vitrelli party, but it seemed as though all the "regulars" had suddenly folded a single, great, green-and-orange umbrella, and plodded across the scorched sand toward the parking lots. Standing up, Elaine was almost instantly involved in a private, terrible panic. She had never been to a beach before, but she had seen hordes of Coney Islanders in newsreel shots taken annually on the Fourth of July or Labor Day, and the occasion of being on a crowded beach all day had not estranged her violently from the dimensions of her own world. But now - the sudden vast, lonely expanse of a deserted public beach at dusk came as a terrible visitation upon her. The beach itself, which before had been only a fair-sized manifestation of tiny handfuls of hot sand which could slip with petty ecstasy through the fingers, was now a great monster sprawled across infinity, prejudiced personally against Elaine, ready to swallow her up - or cast her, with an ogreish laugh, into the sea. And with the sudden exodus of the beach people, Teddy Schmidt took on a new meaning for her. He was no longer Teddy Schmidt, pretty, wavy-haired, male; he was Teddy Schmidt, not her mother, not her grandmother, not movie star, not a voice on the radio, not-
    	"What's the matter?" Teddy demanded, but softly. Elaine had snatched her hand away from his as they walked, as though it had been charged with high voltage. She did not answer him. As they walked along, everything he said was unintelligible to her. There was only her heart clomping. There was only a frightened prayer that the beach and ocean change into a Bronx street, with tooting horns and clanking trolleys and jostling clothed people. She listened only for the beach to move, to spring, to swallow up.
The sand and air under the board walk was cool and clammy, and there were smells of sea things and picnic. But it was dark and, abruptly, retreatful for Elaine, and the farther she walked under the boardwalk with Teddy, the more intelligible his conversation became, the less her heart clomped.
"Too cold here?" Teddy asked, in a peculiar voice.
"No !" Elaine almost shouted. Like a child with its head under blankets, afraid to look at the panic-making silhouettes of objects in the room, she wanted to stay under the boardwalk until the transition to her own familiar world could be made instantaneously.
 	"Let's sit down," Teddy said, at the right moment. His mediocre heart had begun to pound excitedly, because with the eternal rake's despicable but seldom faulty intuition, he knew it was going to be easy ... so easy....
  	At that moment, on the paddle tennis courts Monny Monahan walked up to net and said to Frank Vitrelli, "Let's go back, huh? My feet hurt."
  	"One more set."
  	"I don't like that guy there with that kid."
  	"What guy?" Vitrelli said, turning to look at the players in the next court.
  	"No. I mean Schmidt."
  	"Teddy ? Oh, he's a good guy. C'mon. You serve," said Vitrelli, and jogged back to his own base line.
  	Monny served, - hating Vitrelli, but aware that he made sixty-five dollars a week, aware of the great potential security of him.



When she came in from that first night under the boardwalk with Teddy Schmidt, Elaine was required to relate very few details of the day. Her mother was washing her hair, her soapy
head bent over the hand bowl in the bathroom. Her grandmother was asleep.
"That you, Elaine?"
  	"Yes, Mama." Elaine walked into the bathroom, and watched her mother wash her hair.
  	"Have a good time?"
  	"Yes."
  	"The suit shrink?" her mother wanted
"I don't know," Elaine said.
  	"You eat anything?"
  	"We had hot dogs. With relish."
  	"That's nice," said her mother.
  	Elaine stood there. She was almost ready to say something.
  	"Anybody get wise with you ?" her mother asked suddenly.
  	"No," Elaine said.
  	"That's good. Hand me the towel, dolly."
  	Elaine handed her a towel.
  	"Go look and see in the papers what's at the Capitol. Maybe we'll go in the morning."
  	"I can't," Elaine said. "Teddy doesn't work in the mornings. He's going to learn me how to play bridge.''
  	"Oh, that's nice! You can play with me and your Uncle Mort and your grandmother when you know how. See once what's playing for me, though, like a dolly."
  	A month later-two weeks before her seventeenth birthday-Elaine was married to Teddy Schmidt. The marriage was performed at the Schmidts' home, and was attended by Teddy's large family and several of his friends. Mrs. Cooney, Mrs. Hoover, and Mr. Freedlander represented Elaine. It was a cold, rainy October day, with threat of intenser chills and more rain in the late afternoon. Elaine wore a cheap, thin "traveling" suit and a dreary gladioli corsage which Teddy's sister, Bertha Louise, had selected for her. But no Grade-B Hollywood film had ever seemed to make Elaine as happy as she looked on her wedding day. No last-reel film kiss would have stirred her heart so tenderly, if objectively she could have witnessed herself raising her own lips to meet the thin, effeminate mouth of her new husband.
  	Teddy was nervous throughout the ceremony, and at the wedding table following the ceremony he was irritable with his bride. Elaine was too happy to cut the wedding cake effectually, and he had to take the knife away from her. He was thoroughly disgusted with her
incompetence.
  	Teddy's mother and Mrs. Cooney began to argue with guarded politeness concerning the virility of a certain popular male movie star, Mrs. Schmidt questioning it, Mrs. Cooney swearing by it. It took them very little time to drop their guards, to raise their voices; and when Mr. Freedlander had responded to Mrs. Cooney's request to "stay out of it," Mrs. Cooney thoughtfully, effectively, struck her daughter's mother-in-law full in the mouth with her open hand. Teddy's mother screamed and rushed forward, but met with the interference of Frank Vitrelli. Freedlander grabbed Mrs. Cooney. The groom stayed in the background, frightened, avoiding active participation by pretending to comfort his bride. Elaine wept like a small child, all the happiness wrenched away from her, like a broken film in a projector. Monny Monahan came up to Teddy. "Get her out of here," she told Teddy. 
Teddy nodded nervously, and looked around, as though selection of a proper exit was questionable. But he stood there, panicky.
  	"Get her out, you dope"' Monny Monahan grated at him.
  	Teddy grabbed his wife's arm roughly. "C'mon," he said.
  	"No !" said Elaine. ''Mama !" She broke away from Teddy, and rushed over to her mother, who was being pacified somewhat inadequately by Mr. Freedlander and Mrs. Hoover.
  	"Mama," Elaine begged. "Me and Teddy are goin'."
  	"I'll kill her," threatened Mrs. Cooney, ferociously.
  	"Mama. Mama. Me and Teddy are goin'," Elaine said.
  	"Go ahead, kid," Freedlander advised. "Your mother don't feel so good. Have a good time. Don't do nothing I wouldn't do."
  	"Mama," begged Elaine.
  	Mrs. Cooney suddenly looked up at her daughter. And something strange happened. A great tenderness crossed Mrs. Cooney's face, and she took her daughter's beautiful face between her two hands and drew it down to her own. "Good-by, dolly," she said, and fervently kissed Elaine on the mouth several times.
  	"Good-by, Grandma," Elaine said to Mrs. Hoover.
  	Mrs. Hoover gathered her granddaughter in her arms, and sobbed over her. Teddy prodded his wife to make the embrace short. The newlyweds started to leave the house. But there was a change of plans.
  	"Elaine!" Mrs. Cooney suddenly called, shrilly.
  	Elaine turned, her big eyes wide. Her husband swung around, too, with his mouth open.
  	"You ain't goin' nowhere," said Mrs. Cooney. And the entire gathering of wedding guests snapped their attention her way; even the sobbing of the groom's mother was abruptly suspended.
"What, Mama?" said the bride.
  	"You come back, you beautiful," ordered Mrs. Cooney, crying. "You ain't goin' nowhere with that sissy boy."
  	"Listen," Teddy started to bluster, "we're leaving right-"
  	"Keep quiet, you," commanded Mrs. Cooney, and turned to Mrs. Hoover. "C'mon, Ma."
  	Mrs. Hoover stood up painfully, but readily, on her swollen legs. She followed her daughter across the room toward her granddaughter.
  	Teddy's lower jaw trembled violently. "Listen," he told his mother-in-law, nervously, as the latter put her arm around the bride's waist, "she's my wife, see. I mean she's my wife. If she don't come with me, I can get it annulled, the marriage."
  	"Good. C'mon, dolly," said Mrs. Cooney, and led the way out.
  	"G'by, Teddy," Elaine said in a friendly way, over her shoulder.
  	"Listen," began Teddy again, trying to imply imminent danger to the Cooney party.
Let ‘em go! shrieked his mother. “Let the riffraff go!”
When they were outside in the street, Mrs. Cooney dismissed Freedlander with a minimum of tact. "You go ahead, Mort," she said. And Freedlander, looking hurt, went ahead.
Bride, mother, and grandmother moved up the street. They turned the corner in silence, moved half way up the next block, then Mrs. Cooney made a little announcement which seemed to please all three.
  	"We'll go to a movie. A nice movie," she said.
  	They walked on.
  	"Henry Fonda's playing at the Troc,” commented Mrs. Hoover, who didn't like to walk too far.
  	"Let Elaine say where she wants to go," snapped Mrs. Cooney.
  	Elaine was looking down at her gladioli corsage. "Gee," she said. “They're
all dying. They were so beautiful." She looked up. "Who's at the Troc, Grandma?"
  	"Henry Fonda."
  	"Ooh, I like him," said Elaine, skipping ecstatically.


Go See Eddie
 By J.D.  Salinger



Helen's bedroom was always straightened while she bathed so that when
she came out of the bathroom her dressing table was free of last night's cream jars and soiled tissues, and there were glimpses in her mirror of flat bedspreads and patted chair cushions.  When it was sunny, as it was now, there were bright warm blotches to bring out the pastels chosen from the decorator's little book.
She was brushing  her thick red hair when Elsie, the maid,  came in.  
"Mr.  Bobby's here, ma'am," said Elsie.
     	"Bobby?"  asked Helen, "I though he was in Chicago.  Hand me my robe, Elsie.  Then show him in."
     	Arranging her royal-blue robe to cover her long bare legs, Helen went on brushing her hair.  then abruptly a tall sandy-haired man in a polo coat brushed behind and past her, snapping his index finger  against the back of her neck.  He walked directly to the chaise-lounge on the other side of the room and stretched himself out, coat  and all.  Helen could see him in the mirror.
"Hello, you," she said.  "Hey.  that thing was straightened.  I thought you were in Chicago."
     	"Got back last night,"  Bobby said, yawning.  "God, I'm tired."
     	"Successful?" asked Helen.  "Didn't you  go to hear some girl sing or something?"
     	"Uh,"  Bobby affirmed.
     	"Was she any good, the girl?"
     	"Lot of breast-work.  No voice."
     	Helen sat down her brush, got up, and seated herself in the peach-colored straight chair at Bobby's feet.  From her robe pocket she took an Emory board and proceeded to apply it to her long, flesh-pink nails.  "What else do you  know?"  she inquired.
     	"Not much ,"  Said Bobby.  He sat up with a grunt, took a  package of cigarettes from his
overcoat.  pocket, stuck them back, then stood up and removed the overcoat. He tossed the heavy thing on Helen's bed, scattering a colony of sunbeams.  Helen continued filing her nails.  Bobby sat on the edge of the chaise-lounge, lighted a cigarette, and leaned forward. The sun was on them both,  lashing her milky skin, and doing nothing for Bobby but showing up his dandruff and the pockets under his eyes.
     	"How would you like a job?"  Bobby asked.
     	"A job?"  Helen said, filing.  "What kind of job?"
     	"Eddie Jackson's going into rehearsals with a new show.  I saw him last night.  Y'oughtta see how gray that guy's getting.  I said to him, have you got a spot for my sister?  He said maybe, and I told him that you might be around."  
     	"It's a good thing you said might,"  Helen said, looking up at him. "What kind of a spot?  Third from the left or something?"
     	"I  didn't ask him what kind of spot.  But it's better than nothing, isn't it?"
     	Helen didn't answer him, went on attending to her nails.
     	"Why don't you want the job?"
     	"I didn't say I didn't want one."
     	"Well then what's the matter with seeing Jackson?"
     	"I don't want any more chorus work.  Besides, I hate Eddie Jackson's guts."  
     	"Yeah," said Bobby.  He got up and went to the door. "Elsie!" he called. "Bring me a cup of coffee!"  Then he sat down again.
     	"I want you to see Eddie,"  he told her
     	"I don't want to see Eddie."
"I want you to see him.  Put that god damn file a minute."
     	She went on filing.
     	"I want you to go up there this afternoon, hear?"
     	"I'm not going up there this afternoon," Helen told him, crossing her legs.  "Who do you think you're ordering around?"
     	Bobby's hand was half fist when he knocked the Emory board from her fingers.  She neither looked at him nor picked up the Emory board from the  carpet.  She just got up  and went back to her dressing table to resume brushing her hair, her thick red hair.  Bobby followed to stand behind her, to look for her eyes in the mirror.
     	"I want you to see Eddie this afternoon.  Hear me, Helen?"
     	Helen brushed her hair.   "And what'll you do if I don't go up there, tough guy?"
     	He picked that up.  "Would you like me to tell you?  Would you like me to tell you what I'll do if you don't go up there?"
     	"Yes, I'd like you to tell me what you'll do if I don't go up there," Helen mimicked.
     	"Don't do that.  I'll push that glamour kisser of yours.  So help me, " Bobby warned.  " I want you to go up there.  I want you to see Eddie and I want you to take that god damn job." 
     	"No, I want you to tell me what you'll do if I don't go up there," Helen said in her natural
voice.
     	"I'll tell you what I'll do,"  Bobby said, watching her eyes in the mirror.  "I'll ring up your
greasy boy  friend's wife and tell her what's what."
     	Helen horse-laughed. "Go ahead!" she told him.  "Go right ahead, wise guy!  She knows all about it."
     	Bobby said, "She knows, eh?"
     	"Yes, she knows! And don't cal Phil greasy!  you wish you were half as good looking as he is!"
     	"He's a greaser.  A greasy lousy cheat,"  Bobby pronounced.  "Two for a lousy dime.  That's your boy friend."
     	"Coming from you that's good."
     	"Have you ever seen his wife?"  Bobby asked.
     	"Yes-I've-seen-his-wife.  What about her?"
     	"Have you ever seen her face?"
     	"Nothing's so marvelous about it.  She hasn't go a glamour kisser like yours.  It's just a nice
face.  Why the hell don't you leave her dumb husband alone?"
     	"None of your business why!"  Snapped Helen.
     	The fingers of his right hand suddenly dug into the hollow of her shoulder.  She yelled out in pain, turned, and from an awkward position but with all her might, slammed his hand with the flat of her hairbrush.  He sucked in his breath, pivoted swiftly so that his back was both to Helen and to Elsie, the maid, who had come in with his coffee.  Elsie set the tray on the window seat next to the chair where Helen had filed her nails, then slipped out of the room.
     	Bobby sat down, and with the use of his other hand, sipped his coffee black.  Helen, at the dressing table, had begun to place her hair.  She wore it in a heavy old-fashioned bun.
     	He had long finished his coffee when the last hairpin was in its place. Then she went over to where he sat smoking and looked out the window.  Drawing the lapels of her robe closer to her breast, she sat down with a little oop sound of unbalance on the floor at his feet. She placed a hand on his ankle, stroked it, and addressed him in a different voice.
     	"Bobby, I'm sorry .  But you made me loose my temper, darling.  Did I hurt your hand?"
     	"Never mind my hand," he said, keeping it ion his pocket.
     	"Bobby, I love Phil.  On  my word of honor.  I don't want you to think I'm playing around, trying to hurt people?"
     	Bobby made no reply.
     	"My word of honor, Bob.  You don't know Phil.  He's really a grand person."  
     	Bobby looked at her.  "You and your grand persons.  You know more god damn grand persons.  The guy from Cleveland.  What the hell was his name?  Bothwell.  Harry Bothwell.  And how 'bout that blond kid used to sing at Bill Cassidy's?  Two of the goddamndest grandest
persons you ever met."  He looked out the window again.  "Oh for Christsake, Helen," he said finally.
     	"Bob," said Helen, "you know how old I was.  I was terribly young.  You know that.  But Bob, this is the real thing.  Honestly.  I know it is.  I've never felt this was before.  Bob, you don't really in your heart think I'm taking all this from Phil just for the hell of it?"
     	Bobby looked at her again, lifted his eyebrows, thinned his lips. "You know what I hear in Chicago?" he asked her.
     	"What, Bob?"  Helen asked gently, the tips of her fingers rubbing his ankle.
     	"I heard two guys talking.  You don't know 'em.  They were talking about you.  You and this horsy-set guy, Hanson Carpenter.  they crummied the thing inside and out." He paused.  "You with him, too, Helen?"
     	"That's a goddamn lie, Bob," Helen told him softly.  "Bob, I hardly know Hanson Carpenter well enough to say hello to him."
     	"Maybe so!  But it's a wonderful thing for a brother to have to listen to, isn't it?  Everybody in town gives me the horse-laugh when they see me comin' around the corner!"
     	"Bobby.  If you believe that slop it's your own damn fault.  What do you care what they say?  You're bigger than they are.  You don't have to pay any attention to their dirty minds."
     	"I didn't say I believed it.  I said it was what I heard.  That's bad enough, isn't it?"
     	"Well, it's not so," Helen told him. "Toss me a cigarette there, hmm?"
     	He flipped the package of cigarettes into her lap; then the matches. She lighted up, inhaled, and removed a piece of tobacco from her tongue with the tips of her fingers.
     	"You used to be such a swell kid,"  Bobby stated briefly.
     	"Oh!  And I ain't no more?"  Helen little-girl'd.
     	He was silent.
    	"Listen, Helen.  I'll tell ya.  I had lunch the other day, before I went to Chicago, with Phil's wife."
     	"Yeah?"
     	"She's a swell kid.  Class,"  Bobby told her.
     	"Class, huh?" said Helen.
     	"Yeah.  Listen go see Eddie this afternoon.  It can't do any harm.  Go see him."
     	Helen smoked.  "I hate Eddie Jackson.  he always makes a play for me."
     	"Listen," said Bobby, standing up. "You know how to turn on the ice when you want to."  He stood over her.  "I have to go.  I haven't gone to the office yet."
     	"Helen stood up and watched him put on his polo coat.
     	"Go see Eddie,"  Bobby said, putting on his pigskin gloves.  "hear me?" He buttoned his
overcoat.  "I'll give you a ring soon."
     	Helen chided, "Oh, you'll give me a ring soon! When?  the Fourth of July?"
     	"No, soon. I've been busy as hell lately.  Where's my hat? oh, I didn't have one."
     	She walked with him to the front door, stood in the doorway until the elevator came. Then she shut the door and walked quickly back to her room.  She went to the telephone and dialed swiftly but precisely.
     	"Hello?" she said into the mouthpiece.  "Let me speak to Mr.  Stone, please.  This is Miss Mason."  In a moment his voice came through. "Phil?" she said.  "Listen.  My brother Bobby was just here.  And do you know why?  Because that adorable little Vassarfaced wife of yours told him about you and I.  Yes!  Listen, Phil.  Listen to me.  I don't like it.  I don't care if you had anything to do with it or not.  I don't like it.  I don't care.  No, I can't.  I have a previous engagement.  I can't tonight either.  You can call me tomorrow, Phil.  No.  I said no, Phil. Goodbye."
     	She set down the receiver, crossed her legs, and bit thoughtfully at the cuticle of her thumb.  then she turned and yelled loudly:  "Elsie!"
     	Elsie moused into the room.
     	"Take away Mr. Bobby's tray."
     	When Elsie was out of the room, Helen dialed again.
     	"Hanson?"  she said.  "This is me.  Us.  We.  You dog."


I'm Crazy
J. D. Salinger



	It was about eight o'clock at night, and dark, and raining, and freezing, and the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered.  I stood by the cannon on the top of Thomsen Hill, freezing to death, watching the big south windows of the gym--shining big and bright and dumb, like the windows of a gymnasium, and nothing else (but maybe you never went to a boarding school).
	I just had on my reversible and no gloves.  Somebody had swiped my camel's hair the week before, and my gloves were in the pocket.  Boy, I was cold.  Only a crazy guy would have stood there.  That's me.  Crazy.  No kidding, I have a screw loose.  But I had to stand there to feel the goodbye to the youngness of the  lace, as though I were an old man.  The whole school was down below in the gym for the basketball game with the Saxon Charter slobs, and I was standing there to feel the goodbye.
	I stood there--boy, I was freezing to death--and I kept saying goodbye to myself.  "Goodbye, Caulfield.  Goodbye, you slob.""  I kept seeing myself throwing a football around, with Buhler and Jackson, just before it got dark on the September evenings, and I knew I'd never throw a football around ever again with the same guys at the same time.  It was as though Buhler and Jackson and I had done something that had died and been buried, and only I knew about it, and no one was at the funeral but me.  So I stood there, freezing.
	The game with the Saxon Charter slobs was in the second half, and you could hear everybody yelling:  deep and terrific on the Pentey side of the gym, and scrawny and faggoty on the Saxon Charter side, because the Saxon bunch never brought more than the team with them and a few substitutes and managers.  You could tell all right when Schutz or Kinsella or Tuttle had sunk one on the slobs, because then the Pentey side of the gym went crazy.  But I only half cared who was winning.  I was freezing and I was only there anyway to feel the goodbye, to be at the funeral of me and Buhler and Jackson throwing a football around in the September evenings--and finally on one of the cheers I felt the goodbye like a real knife.  I was strictly at the funeral.
	So all of a sudden, after it happened, I started running down Thomsen Hill, with my suitcases banging the devil out of my legs.  I ran all the way down to the Gate;  then I stopped and got my breath; then I ran across Route 202--it was icy and I fell and nearly broke my knee--and then I disappeared into Hessey Avenue.  Disappeared.  You disappeared every time you crossed a street that night.  No kidding.
	When I got to old Spencer's house--that's where I was going--I put down my bags on the porch, rang the bell hard and fast and put my hands on my ears--boy, they hurt.  I started talking to the door.  "C'mon, c'mon!" I said.  "Open up.  I'm freezing."  Finally Mrs. Spencer came.
	"Holden!" she said.  "Come in, dear!"  She was a nice woman.  Her hot chocolate on Sundays was strictly lousy, but you never minded.
	I got inside the house fast.
	"Are you frozen to death?  You must be soaking wet," Mrs. Spencer said.  She wasn't the kind of woman that you could just be a little wet around:  you were either real dry or soaking.  But she didn't ask me what I was doing out of bounds, so I figured old Spencer had told her what happened.
	I put down my bags in the hall and took off my hat--boy, I could hardly work my fingers enough to grab my hat.  I said, "How are you, Mrs. Spencer?  How's Mr. Spencer's grippe?  He over it okay?"
	"Over it!" Mrs. Spencer said.  "Let me take your coat, dear.  Holden he's behaving like a perfect I-don't-know-what.  Go right in, dear.  He's in his room."
	Old Spencer had his own room next to the kitchen.  He was about sixty years old, maybe even older, but he got a kick out of things in a half-shot way.  If you though about old Spencer you wondered what he was living for, everything about over for him and all.  But if you though about him that way, you were thinking about him the wrong way:  you were thinking too much.  If you thought about him just enough, not too much, you knew he was doing all right for himself.  In a half-shot was he enjoyed almost everything all the time.  I enjoy thing terrifically, but just once in a while.  Sometimes it makes you think maybe old people get a better deal.  But I wouldn't trade places.  I wouldn't want to enjoy almost everything all the time if it had to be in just a half-shot way.  
	Old Spencer was sitting in the big easy chair in his bedroom, all wrapped up in the Navajo blanket he and Mrs. Spencer bought in Yellowstone Park about eighty years ago.  They probably got a big bang out of buying it off the Indians.
	"Come in, Caulfield!" old Spencer yelled at me.  "Come in, boy!"
	I went in.

There was an opened copy of the Atlantic Monthly face down on his lap, and pills all over the place and bottles and a hot-water bottle.  I hate seeing a hot-water bottle, especially an old guy's.  That isn't nice, but that's the way I feel. . . . Old Spencer certainly looked beat out.  He certainly didn't look like a guy who ever behaved like a perfect I-don't-know-what.  Probably Mrs. Spencer just like to think he was acting that way, as if she wanted to think maybe the old guy was still full of beans.
	"I got your note, sir," I told him.  "I would have come over anyway before I left.  How's your grippe?"
	"If I felt any better, boy, I'd have to send for the doctor,," old Spencer said.  That really knocked him out.  "Sit down, boy," he said, still laughing.  "Why in the name of Jupiter aren't you down at the game?"
	I sat down on the edge of the bed.  It sort of looked like an old guy's bed.  I said, "Well, I was at the game a while, sir.  But I'm going home tonight instead of tomorrow.  Dr. Thurmer said I could go tonight if I really wanted to.  So I'm going."
	"Well, you certainly picked a honey of a night," old Spencer said.  He really thought that over.  "Going home tonight, eh?" he said.
	"Yes, sir," I said.
	He said to me, "What did Dr. Thurmer say to you, boy?"
	"Well, he was pretty nice in his way, sir," I said.  "He said about life being a game.  You know.  How you should play it by the rules and all.  Stuff like that.  He wished me a lot of luck.  In the future and all.  That kind of stuff."
	I guess Thurmer really was pretty nice to me in his slobby way, so I told old Spencer a few other things Thurmer had said to me.  About applying myself in life if I wanted to get ahead and all.  I even made up some stuff, old Spencer was listening so hard and nodding all the while.
	Then old Spencer asked me,  "Have you  communicated with your parents yet?"
	"No, sir," I said.  "I haven't communicated with them because I'll see them tonight."
	Old Spencer nodded again.  He asked me, "How will they take the news?"
	"Well," I said, "they hate this kind of stuff.  This is the third school I've been kicked out of.  Boy!  No kidding," I told him.
	Old Spencer didn't nod this time.  I was bothering him, poor guy.  He suddenly lifted the Atlantic Monthly off his lap, as though it had got too heavy for him, and chucked it towards the bed.  He missed.  I got up and picked it up and laid it on the bed.  All of  a sudden I wanted to get the heck out of there.
	Old Spencer said, "What's the matter with you, boy?  How many subjects did you carry this term?"
	"Four," I said.
	"And how many did you flunk?" he said.
	"Four," I said.
	Old Spencer started staring at the spot on the rug where the Atlantic Monthly had fallen when he tried to chuck it on the bed.  He said, "I flunked you in history because you knew absolutely nothing.  You were never once prepared, either for examinations or for daily recitations.  Not once.  I doubt if you opened your textbook once during the term; did you?"
	I told him I'd glanced through it a couple of times, so's not to hurt his feelings.  He thought history was really hot.  It was all right with me if he thought I was a real dumb guy, but I didn't want him to think I'd given his book the freeze.
	"Your exam paper is on my chiffonier over there," he said.  "Bring it over here."
	I went over and got it and handed it to him and sat down on the edge of the bed again.
	Old Spencer handled my exam paper as though it were something catching that he had to handle for the good of science or something, like Pasteur or one of those guys. 
	He said.  "We studied the Egyptians from November 3d to December 4th.  You chose to write about them for the essay question, from a selection of twenty-five topics.  This is what you had to say:
	"' The Egyptians were an ancient race of people living in one of the northernmost sections of North Africa, which is one of the largest continents in the Eastern Hemisphere as we all know.  The Egyptians are also interesting to us today for numerous reasons.  Also, you read about them frequently in the Bible.  The Bible is full of amusing anecdotes about the old Pharaohs.  They were all Egyptians as we all know.'"
	Old Spencer looked up at me.  "New paragraph," he  said.  "'What is most interesting about the Egyptians was their habits.  The Egyptians had many interesting ways of doing things.  Their religion was also very interesting.  They buried their dead in tombs in a very interesting way.  The dead Pharaohs had their faces wrapped up in specially treated cloths to prevent their features from rotting.  Even to this day physicians don't know what that chemical formula was, thus all our faces rot when we are dead for a certain length of time.'"  Old Spencer looked over the paper at me again.  I stopped looking at him.  If he was going to look up at me every time he hit the end of a paragraph, I wasn't going to look at him.
	"Do  you blame me for flunking you, boy?" old Spencer asked me.  "What would you have done in my place?"
	"The same thing," I said.  "Down with the morons."  But I wasn't giving it much thought at the minute.  I was sort of wondering if the lagoon in Central Park would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was frozen over would everybody be ice skating when you looked out the window in the morning, and where did the ducks go, what happened to the ducks when the lagoon was frozen over.  But I couldn't have told all that to old Spencer.
	He asked me, "How do you feel about all this, boy?"
	"You mean my flunking out and all, sir?" I said.
	"Yes," he said.
	Well, I tried to give it some thought because he was a nice guy and because he kept missing the bed all the time when he shucked something at it.
	"Well, I'm sorry I'm flunking out, for lots of reasons," I said.  I knew I could never really get it over to him.  Not about standing on Thomsen Hill and thinking about Buhler and Jackson and me.  "Some of the reasons would be hard to explain right off, sir," I told him.  "But tonight, for instance, "I said.  "Tonight I had to pack my bags and put my ski boots in them.  The ski boots made me sorry I'm leaving.  I could see my mother chasing around stores, asking the salesmen a million dumb questions.  Then she bought me the wrong kind anyway.  Boy, she's nice, though.  No kidding.  That's mostly why I'm sorry I'm flunking out.  On account of my mother and the wrong ski boots."  That's all I said.  I had to quit.


	Old Spencer was nodding the whole time, as though he understood it all, but you couldn't tell whether he was nodding because he was going to understand anything I might tell him, or if he was only nodding because he was just a nice old guy with the grippe and a screwball on his hands.
	"You'll miss the school, boy," he said to me. 
	He was a nice guy.  No kidding.  I tried to tell him some more.  I said, "Not exactly, sir.  I'll miss some stuff.  I'll miss going and coming to Pentey on the train; going back to the dining car and ordering a chicken sandwich and a Coke, and reading five new magazines with all the pages slick and new.  And I'll miss the Pentey stickers on my bag.  Once a lady saw them and asked me if I knew Andrew Warbach.  She was Warbach's mother, and you know Warbach, sir.  Strictly a louse.  He's the kind of a guy, when you were a little kid, that twisted your wrist to get the marbles out of your hand.  But his mother was all right.  She should have been in a nut house, like most mothers, but she loved Warbach.  You could see in her nutty eyes that she thought he was hot stuff.  So I spent nearly an hour on the train telling her what a hot shot Warbach is at school, how none of the guys ever make a move and all without going to Warbach first.  It knocked Mrs. Warbach out.  She nearly rolled in the aisl