Eyes in the Fishbowl Read online

  Chapter 2

  OUR HOUSE IS AN old Victorian brownshingle in the Cathedral Street district. Matt Ralston, who studies sociology and lives in our attic, says the whole district is in what is called a “changing neighborhood,” but I don’t know what that means, because what neighborhood isn’t? I mean, as long as there’s people in it? But as far as our street is concerned, the change seems to be towards more kids on the sidewalks and less paint on the houses. And our house is no exception.

  It must have been quite the thing when my dad’s family built it, but it’s pretty beat up now, and getting worse all the time. It has so many missing or crooked shingles that it looks like a moulting chicken, and the yard is bare except for clumps of mangy grass and broken toys and an iron pole with a sign that says James Music School—Second Floor. The toys belong to the Grovers who live on the first floor, and James is my father.

  My dad is Arnold Valentine James, music teacher and neighborhood philosopher, known as Val to his many friends and students. He is also sometimes known as Prince Val. The “Prince” is as in “he’s a Prince of a guy.” He is also the world’s worst business man and the most famous soft touch in this part of town. He really is a great music teacher, but he doesn’t charge enough to make people think he’s any good, and half the time he doesn’t collect even what he does charge. He’s always letting people give him some worthless piece of junk instead of money. As a matter of fact, when I was younger, I used to wonder sometimes if that was how he got me. I couldn’t remember my mother and I’d never heard much about her, so it occurred to me that maybe somebody with kids to spare got a little behind on his lesson payments and talked my dad into a trade. It wouldn’t be the first time he got the worst of a deal.

  Anyway, Dad and I live on only the second floor of the old house, now. The downstairs is rented to this family with three noisy little kids, and three university students live in the attic. The Grovers pay their rent most of the time, but the college guys only paid for four months last year; and so far this year they’re still working on November—on the installment plan. Anybody but my dad would have kicked them all out a long time ago.

  And besides not paying their rent, the whole bunch of them, at least the students and the kids, spend half their time in our apartment. The students come down to get away from the cold—there’s not much heat in the attic; and the kids come up to get away from their mother who is the nervous type.

  That day, the first day I saw Sara, was typical. When I got home, there were seven people, two cats and a dog cluttering up our apartment. My dad and Matt, the sociology student, were playing chess on the kitchen table. Phil and Duncan, the other two so-called collegians, were sitting in front of the fireplace playing a banjo and a guitar; two of the Grover kids were tearing around shooting each other with cap pistols; and in the studio somebody was trying to play a march on the piano. Tiger, the Grover’s mutt, was leaning against the kitchen door and whining because somebody had just fed our cats, Prudence and Charity, and they wouldn’t let him have any. Everybody was suspiciously glad to see me.

  “Dion! Welcome home.”

  “Here’s Dion.”

  “It’s Dion.”

  “Hey look. It’s the teen-age tycoon of Palm Street.”

  I looked around and just as I thought—even though it was almost six o’clock, there wasn’t a sign of anything to eat around the place; unless you wanted to count the cat food. That probably meant it was up to me if there was going to be any dinner.

  “Look Dad,” I said, “I thought you were going to collect from the Clements for sure, today.”

  “I tried, Dion. I went over there. But they’ve had a lot of illness—”

  I slammed out of the room without waiting to hear the rest. It was a very old story. Every now and then towards the end of the month, I had to chip in with some of my money to buy stuff for dinner—or else go hungry. I didn’t mind so much for Dad and me, but when it included everybody in the neighborhood who happened to be broke, it burned me up. Strictly speaking, it was usually just one or more of the guys from upstairs—but not always. My Dad would invite a perfect stranger with six inch fangs and three eyes up for dinner if he found him on the corner looking like he needed a square meal.

  Out in the hall I let off a little steam by chasing the Grover kids and Tiger downstairs. The noise level went down several decibels right away. The kid in the studio kept forgetting to flat the same note. It was enough to drive you out of your skull, so I went in and chased him home, too. He wasn’t there for a lesson anyway. My dad lets several neighborhood kids who don’t have their own pianos at home come over to practice whenever they feel like it. Prudence and Charity weren’t making any noise, but they’d finished their cat food so I threw them out, too—just for a finishing touch. By then I was feeling better so I went back into the kitchen.

  “Look, Di,” Matt said. (If you can picture Abraham Lincoln with a curly blond beard, you’ve got Matt to a T.) “We have some spaghetti and a fairly youthful head of lettuce upstairs. If you could chip in enough for some odds and ends for a meat sauce, etcetera, we’d be in business. And I’ll finance a real feast next week when my check comes.”

  “Sure you will,” I said. “If you don’t find some girl to spend it on first.”

  “Not a chance. I’ve reformed.” He grinned at me coaxingly. “I’ll shop, and we’ll make Phil and Dunc do the dirty work.”

  I weakened. I was tired and hungry, and Phil really was a good cook. So I handed over a couple of dollars and went in my room to rest and wait for dinner. I kicked off my shoes and flopped down on the bed. My room is way at the back of our floor. It’s little and dark, but I keep it sort of neat and peaceful looking, and no one ever goes in there but me. I’d been saving money for over a year to buy a Danish modern desk like one I saw at Alcott-Simpson’s, but I still needed about thirty dollars. It was an executive type desk, big and solid looking, and long enough to fill up all one end of my room. I’d spent a lot of time lying there picturing how great it would look, right at the end of my bed—big and smooth and shiny; and I couldn’t help thinking that it might already be there if I didn’t have to feed so many scrounging renters.

  But thinking of Alcott-Simpson’s reminded me of Rogers and the girl, and I went over that whole thing again. But no matter how I looked at it, it just didn’t make much sense. About the only explanation I could come up with was that the girl had unlocked the storeroom door earlier, or else someone did it for her. But even that didn’t explain why Rogers didn’t go on into the storeroom after her. Finally, I’d gone over it so much that I was beginning to think in circles, so I decided to think about something else. That was when I remembered about the papers that Madame Stregovitch had given me.

  It was a few pages from the magazine section of the Sunday Times, with an article about Alcott-Simpson’s. A long time ago I’d started a scrapbook about the store, and of course I’d told Madame about it. Actually it had been quite a while since I’d added anything to the book, but since Madame had gone to the trouble to save it for me, I decided to tape it in. So I got the book out of my closet and opened it to the first empty page.

  It was one of those five-and-dime store scrapbooks with the picture of a collie dog’s head stamped on the front. Inside, there were no pictures on the first page—only some big careful printing that said: ALCOTT-SIMPSON’S THE GREATEST STORE ON EARTH—by Dion James. It was pretty stupid and childish, but I’d started it when I was only eight. After the fancy title page there were dozens of pages of pictures—some with corny comments written under them in green ink. They were mostly newspaper pictures, like a spread the Times did when Alcott’s opened the remodeled mezzanine; plus some advertisements that I happened to think were particularly interesting. There was a magazine story that came out when the store had a big fiftieth anniversary and some nice slicks of display windows that Madame got for me from the art department. It was all put together very carefully and neatly and I could remember how muc
h time I used to spend working on it or just looking over the pictures.

  Actually, a lot of kids make scrapbooks—particularly a certain type of kid, like I was, who gets a kick out of saving and organizing stuff. The only difference is that most kids make books about airplanes or sports heroes or that kind of thing; I just happened to make one about a store. It’s not as if Alcott-Simpson’s was just any big city department store. I’ve been around quite a bit in the last few years and I’ve seen a lot more than I had when I was eight years old; and there just wasn’t anything anywhere quite like it. It seems the original Alcott and Simpson were a couple of old millionaires who decided to build the world’s most beautiful and luxurious commercial palace. The ground floor was divided into a lot of fancy little shops connected by a walk called The Mall. Then in the center there was a kind of indoor garden with a fountain and statues. The building covered an entire block and I used to think there wasn’t anything in the world, worth having, that you couldn’t buy there. After I’d been around for a while and looked at everything, I think that impressed me even more than the building itself—how many things you could buy there. Just about anything you could possibly want from diamond rings to motorcycles. Everybody who saw it for the first time was kind of overwhelmed, so you can imagine what it did for a kid who’d never had anything that cost more than five bucks—except for operations. As a matter of fact, I even used to dream about it.

  It wasn’t a dream, exactly. That is, I wasn’t exactly asleep. It was that half-awake kind of dream—awake enough to start it on purpose, but near enough asleep not to know where it’s going. It usually started out about how eight-year-old Dion James, shoeshine boy, had inherited the fabulous Alcott-Simpson department store from some kind old gentleman. Sometimes I thought it all out, how I’d done this old gentleman a favor, like pushing him out from in front of a bus, so he put it all down in his will about the whole store and everything in it going to me when he died. In my dream I never operated the store. I mean, I never sold anything. I just owned it and sort of lived in it. Sometimes, I brought in all my special friends and gave them stuff, like a new seven-foot Steinway grand for my father; but other times I was just there in the store all by myself, looking around and playing with the toys and stuff like that.

  Of course, that was all in the past. I’d pretty much outgrown the daydreams along with scrapbooks. But I couldn’t help being interested in the article that Madame Stregovitch had been saving for me. It really belonged in my scrapbook—it was so—kind of typical of Alcott-Simpson’s. It was a feature article on some special luxury gifts that the store had been selling for the Christmas season.

  The article started off humorously about how Alcott-Simpson’s had opened a special department for people who wanted to buy a gift for the “Friend Who Has Everything” or even for the “Friend You Want to Flatter by Pretending to Think He Has Everything.” There was a list of very expensive, very kookie gifts, and colored photographs of a few of the most spectacular. There were things like a diamond studded thimble, a solid gold toothbrush and a silver-mink bathmat. The last page had a big picture of the craziest of all, a mink-lined fishbowl.

  That’s what they called it, but of course, it wasn’t meant for real fish. Some little golden fish and some imitation water plants were imbedded right in the glass walls of the bowl, and because the glass was thick and wavy, they were supposed to seem to be moving. You couldn’t tell it from the outside at all; but if you looked in the top, you could see that the inside of the bowl really was lined with fur. The blurb under the picture called it a conversation piece and said that it cost seventy-five dollars.

  I was starting to cut out the picture and thinking you’d have to be pretty desperate for something to talk about to buy a thing like that, when suddenly I saw this weird thing. Right in the center of the fishbowl there was a pair of eyes. The eyes were shadowy—but clear enough so I knew I couldn’t be imagining them. I stared for a minute, and the eyes seemed to stare right back, vague and dim and sad-looking. And then suddenly I realized what I was seeing. The eyes were part of something on the other side of the paper.

  I turned the page over and, sure enough, right on the back was a picture of a girl with great big eyes and stringy dark hair. When I had started to cut out the picture, I’d held it up so that the light from my lamp was right behind it and it made the eyes seem to come right through. I’d just had time to notice that it was a part of an article about some foreign country, when I heard Phil yelling at me that the spaghetti was ready. I taped it into the scrapbook in a hurry—and that was that.

  I don’t think I thought much more about it then, but I do remember feeling more relieved than seemed to make sense under the circumstances. I mean, what other reason could there be for a pair of eyes in the midst of a mink-lined fish bowl?

  Chapter 3

  I STARTED OUT dinner that night not speaking to my father. I was pretty burned up at him, not that there was anything particularly unusual about that. It seemed like I spent half the time not speaking to him, not that it ever did any good. As a matter of fact, I doubt if he even noticed most of the time. At least, if he did he was careful not to make an issue of it. That’s one of his peculiarities. I doubt if he has ever made an issue out of anything in his life.

  My dad is tall and blond, and if he weren’t so unwarlike he’d look a lot like an old Viking warrior—and not a whole lot better groomed either. He’s been kind of a neighborhood landmark in the Cathedral Street district for years and years. As a matter of fact, he was born right here in this house way back when this was a fashionable part of town; and he’s always lived right here, except for some years he spent in Europe, studying music and drifting around, when he was young. His father was a professor at the university, and Dad still has some friends on the faculty. Actually, he has friends all over everywhere, but most of his students come from our neighborhood—and that’s part of the problem. Nobody in our neighborhood has much money.

  Just that morning before I left for school Dad and I had had a talk about finances; and he’d absolutely promised that he was going to collect some of the money that his students owed him. It was obvious what had happened. As usual, he’d listened to some sob stories and let himself be talked out of collecting. There was almost nothing he did that frustrated me more.

  So, for a while I just stared at my plate and shoveled up the spaghetti, but before too long I had to thaw a little. For one thing the spaghetti sauce was really good, and for another our kitchen is a great place to eat dinner on a cold January night. It used to be the master bedroom once, when the house was a one family affair, so it has a big fireplace and a nice comfortable atmosphere. Besides, Phil and Duncan were clowning around as usual, and keeping a straight face got to be too much of an effort. Those two could make a corpse laugh.

  Phil and Dunc came from the same little town somewhere out in the boondocks, and I guess they’ve been friends since they were practically babies. Their families don’t have much money, so they’re working their way through college by scholarships and odd jobs, and scrounging—like they do off my father. They’re both nineteen years old and in their second year at the university; but they’re not studying the same things. Dunc is taking art courses, and I’m not sure what Phil is doing. I asked him once, and he said he was studying to be rich. But as far as I can see, they both spend most of their time thinking up things to laugh at. That night they were doing something they called nationalistic spaghetti eating.

  The way it worked, they took turns acting out how someone from a particular country would eat spaghetti and the rest of us were supposed to guess what nationality. First, Phil was a super-polite Englishman, whose monocle kept falling out and getting lost in the spaghetti. Then Dunc did a Chinese trying to eat spaghetti with chopsticks. Next Phil chopped up some spaghetti, mashed it all to pieces and finally put his plate on the floor and pretended to march back and forth across it. That was supposed to be a German. Another one was the efficient American tr
ying to tie all the pieces of spaghetti together end to end so he could suck up the whole plate without stopping. It was all pretty corny, but the way Phil and Dunc throw themselves into a thing like that—you just can’t help laughing. I had forgotten all about being mad, until Dad brought out the doughnuts.

  When the spaghetti was all gone, my father got up and went over to this great big bread box we have and opened it up, and it was absolutely packed full of doughnuts. There must have been six or eight dozen—a lot more than we could possibly eat before they spoiled. All of a sudden I knew exactly where they came from.

  Mr. Clements, who just happens to have two kids who take piano from Dad, and who just happens to owe us more money than anybody else, just happens to work at a big doughnut factory. And Joannie Clements just happened to tell me once that her father gets to take home any doughnuts that get a little old before anyone buys them.

  Dad put about a dozen doughnuts on a plate and passed it around the table. I could tell that he was trying to keep from catching my eye, so at last I said, “How much did you knock off for this junk?”

  Dad smiled in that vague way of his. “Just a little,” he said. “But I did tell Dan that we might be able to use a few more from time to time.”

  That did it. I stood up and threw my half-eaten doughnut at Prudence, who was sitting in front of the fireplace washing her feet. I missed, but it was close enough to make her jump. She gave me a dirty look and then she sniffed at the doughnut, looked disgusted, and went back to washing her feet. Even the cat wouldn’t eat them. “Good Lord, Dad,” I said. “You don’t even like doughnuts!” And I stormed out of the kitchen and back to my room.

  That was the way it had been between my father and me for a year or two. Before that we got along pretty well. As a matter of fact, when I was a real little kid I used to think he was just about perfect. Of course, he was as easygoing with me as he is with everybody, and at that age you don’t notice much else. He almost never got mad or ordered me around, but I wasn’t so awfully spoiled, either. I think I sort of had the feeling that he expected me to act like some kind of small-sized adult and I just couldn’t bear to let him down. He seems to have that effect on the little kids he teaches, too. It’s only older people who take advantage of people like him.