Eyes in the Fishbowl Read online

  Anyway, when I was little we used to have a lot of good times. I was only four when I had polio, and after that there were three operations a year or two apart, so I never did go to elementary school very regularly. I was home in bed or in a wheel chair a lot, and having the house always full of people seemed like a great thing to me, then. There were my Dad’s students and his musician friends and his neighborhood friends and his chess friends and his political-enemy friends—not to mention the ones who showed up regularly just for a square meal or for someone to listen to their troubles. People were always drifting in for an hour or a day—or even a month or two if they happened to feel like it. Not many of them were kids, but in those days that didn’t matter very much. There was always a lot of music going on, and I was right in the middle of it all the time. Dad had started me on the violin when I was almost a baby, and I took up the guitar, too, a few years later. When I was about six, I started thinking up lyrics and tunes to go with them, and Dad would write them down. All his friends were always carrying on about what a lot of talent I had.

  That part of my life was okay in those days—school was the bad part. During the spells, in between operations, when I was well enough to go to Lincoln Elementary, I began to realize that I didn’t exactly fit in. I couldn’t play any sports, which was terribly important at Lincoln, and I didn’t know how to make the right kind of conversation. And besides that I didn’t dress right. A lot of the time Dad wouldn’t even notice my clothes, and I’d go for days in outgrown, worn-out stuff. Then he’d decide to dress me all up in some out-of-date sissy suit that some old family friend had donated, and that was even worse. It got so I hated to go to school; and the more I hated it, the worse it got. But I never blamed anyone. Little kids are apt to be pretty fatalistic. You just take what comes, and it doesn’t even occur to you to wonder if things are the way they ought to be or if you could do anything to make them better. It was in between my second and third operation that I started shining shoes and hanging around Alcott-Simpson’s, and not too long after that I began to quit just accepting things and started making plans for the future—all sort of plans.

  That night, after the doughnut episode, I shut myself in my room again and started in on my homework. I’d nearly finished my English assignment when there was a knock on the door. I didn’t even answer at first, but then I heard Matt’s voice saying, “Di, it’s Matt. Let me in.”

  Matt is a graduate student and he’s older than Phil and Dunc—around twenty-three or four. He’s been staying with us off and on for years. But being around for a few years doesn’t really make him part of the family—even though he acts like he thinks he is at times. When I opened the door that night, he came on real casual-like, but I knew him too well to be fooled. I could tell he had something on his mind. He stretched out on my bed with his heels up on the footboard and started out like he’d just come to chat.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, nodding at my homework.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s just English. I got my algebra done in study hall.” Sometimes Matt helped me out with my algebra when I hit a snag. I’m not too good at that sort of thing, and Dad’s not much better.

  Matt asked some more questions about the English assignment and we kicked that around for a while, but I had the feeling that he was looking for an opening for something in particular. Finally he looked around my room and said, “Very cozy. Sure is a nice pad, you’ve got here.”

  “Nothing special,” I said. “It just looks good in contrast to the rest of the house.”

  Matt didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he asked, “What’s the matter with the rest of the house?”

  “Oh, not a thing,” I said. “If you like living in a disaster area.”

  Matt just raised one of his curly blond eyebrows at me and said, “Hmmm.”

  “Hmmm?” I asked. “Like, hmmm—as in what?” The way I said it was kind of sharp and sarcastic, because I was thinking to myself, “Here we go again with the ‘big-brother’ bit.” Matt seems to think that just because he’s known Dad and me for such a long time it gives him the right to tell me what to do. It always makes me angry, but at the same time I think I kind of like it—maybe because nobody else ever tries to tell me what to do very much and it sort of makes you feel somebody cares. Anyway, whenever Matt starts preaching I always get this, “Oh boy! Am I going to get mad this time” feeling.

  Matt just grinned. “Hmmm as in—so that’s it. So that’s what’s behind all this not-so-happily-ever-after-bit. You may not have noticed it, but lately you’ve been operating as if you were trying to set the whole togetherness program back by about one hundred years.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said very coldly. And I didn’t either, at least not entirely.

  Matt stopped grinning. “All right,” he said. “I’ll draw you a picture. I happen to think you have a very nice old man, and I don’t think much of the way you’ve been treating him.”

  “You’re sure someone to talk,” I said, and I was so mad I couldn’t keep my voice from wobbling. “At least I don’t owe him three hundred dollars rent.”

  Matt nodded. “Right you are,” he said, “you don’t, and I do. However, there’s nothing I can do about that right now except move out, and I don’t think that would make matters any better for anybody. And, believe me Di, I am going to pay him back, and with interest. Money’s a lot easier to pay back than some other things.”

  I walked over to the window and stood looking out at the brick wall two feet away across the air vent. “You can leave anytime,” I said.

  But he just sat there on the edge of my bed. He sat there and I stood there and looked out the window and waited, and finally he started talking again. “Look Di. I know how you feel.”

  That really burned me. I knew enough about Matt to know that he couldn’t have a clue about how I felt. His father was a rich doctor and he’d been brought up with servants and everything. His folks were mad at him right at the moment because he wouldn’t live like they wanted him to and study to be a doctor like his father. But he sure as hell didn’t know what it was like to grow up in a sort of neighborhood soup kitchen and have to shine shoes so that you could have the kind of things most kids have handed to them on a silver platter.

  “A lot of people want the kinds of things you’re wanting.” Matt went on. “As a matter of fact, a whole lot of people never discover there’s anything else in life to want. So I’m sure not going to knock you for it. It’s just that I don’t think you’re appreciating what a rare bird your father really is.”

  Suddenly I wasn’t so mad anymore. I came over and sat down. “I know it,” I said. “I know what he’s like. But you can’t count on him for anything. And it isn’t as if he couldn’t. He could get a steady job teaching at a high school or even a college if he wanted to. But he just likes it here. He likes it where he can go around looking as if he’s slept in his suit all the time and nobody cares. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Why isn’t he more like—other people?”

  Matt rubbed his beard. “I don’t know, Di. I don’t know why he’s the way he is. I suppose it’s probably some ignoble human reason, just like the ones that bug all the rest of us. It’s just that his kind of reaction is in considerably shorter supply than most.” He grinned at me. “Let’s just say he’s a natural born lame-duck hunter, and Cathedral Street just happens to be one of the best lame-duck covers in this part of the country.”

  Matt’s crooked sorrowful grin can cool just about anybody. I didn’t really mean to, but I smiled, too. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s for sure.”

  “And personally,” Matt said, getting ready to go out the door, “personally, I feel pretty lucky to be one of your father’s walking wounded.”

  I laughed. “I know what you mean. But you and Phil and Dunc aren’t walking wounded.”

  “Sure I am. The lamest of the lame. I don’t know about Phil and Dunc, though. They have their problems all right, but as
far as I can see most of them are spelled Y O U T H.”

  “You’re always talking like that—like you were about a hundred years older than Phil and Dunc.”

  “I am,” Matt said. “I am. That’s another myth this country believes in—that chronological age has anything to do with how old you are. Phil and Dunc aren’t just young, they are young-young. I was older than that before I started kindergarten.” Matt went out the door and stuck his head back in. “And so were you,” he said.

  I knocked off the rest of the English assignment and sat there for a while staring at nothing. I kept thinking about what Matt had said. It was true all right, particularly about the lame-ducks. People with serious problems just seemed to take one look at my father and say, “This is it!”

  It hadn’t occurred to me before, but I suddenly realized that that was what my mother must have been. I really didn’t know too much about her or what her problems were, because Dad never seemed to want to talk about it; but from the little he had told me, I could imagine the whole story. She had been just another one of his lame-ducks, only she had married him; but when she found out he couldn’t really help her very much, she walked out. And she left me behind, and I turned out to be the biggest lame-duck of all.

  All of a sudden I was mad again, for some reason. All the time I was getting ready for bed I was fuming, throwing things around and slamming them down. In the bathroom, I kicked some dirty towels that were lying on the floor clear out into the hall. Then I clumped back to my room limping hard—I really don’t have to limp at all anymore, except when I run. And after I was in bed I stared into the darkness, waiting angrily, as if sleep were somebody who had promised to be on time and then wasn’t.

  Chapter 4

  EVEN THOUGH I lay awake fuming for a long time, I got up very early the next morning. As a matter of fact I got up early nearly every week day so I could spend an hour or so on my various jobs before I went to school. I had certain places I was expected on certain mornings, and I always showed up. I had to. Most of my jobs were the kinds of things that the people who hired me could have done themselves or gotten along without, if they’d wanted to. So all I had to do was miss a few times and they’d get out of the habit of leaving it for me. Like, for instance, every Monday and Thursday mornings I swept out the workroom at Jayne Anne’s Hat Shop and carried all the trash out to the alley. The Hat Shop was too small to hire a janitor, and Jayne Anne hated sweeping out—and I was always handy, so she left it for me. But she really had plenty of time to do it herself if she’d felt like it.

  Anyway, it was three, four days later, the next Monday after I first saw Sara, when I was on my way to Jayne Anne’s Hat Shop, that I saw the police dogs. I was walking up Eighth Avenue on my way to the corner, and as I was passing the alley where the trucks unload into Alcott-Simpson’s storerooms, I noticed a commotion at one of the alley exits. I stopped and watched while two guys with big German Shepherds on leashes came out and got into a police car. When I got to the flower stand, I told José about it.

  “Sure,” he said. “Cop-dogs every night. Tree, four nights, now. Big store got big trouble.” José grinned happily. The big shots at Alcott-Simpson’s had tried to make him move his flower stand once, and he’d had it in for the whole store ever since. But I couldn’t get much more out of him about what was going on, so that afternoon I paid another visit to Madame Stregovitch to find out what she knew.

  But even before I talked to Madame, as a matter of fact almost as soon as I got inside the big brass and glass doors of the east entrance, I began to get that feeling of something strange again. There was a difference in pitch, like before—but there was something else, too. Right at first I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

  Everything looked just the same as always. There was a pretty fair sized crowd of shoppers for a Monday afternoon, the floors gleamed, the fountain sparkled, and the air was full of that special Alcott-Simpson perfume—Essence of New-and-Expensive. The clerks stood around like always, looking neat and dressy and superior, except—It was just about then that I noticed that there was something different about them—they were noticing me. Except for a few friends, and now and then someone who’d been told to keep an eye on me, most of the clerks never seemed to notice that I was around at all. I didn’t take it personally. Nearly everyone who just walked in cold got the old invisible treatment, unless they were dripping with mink or some other kind of wearable bank statement. It wasn’t anything to get touchy about. The clerks just didn’t want to get tied up with some sightseer and maybe miss a live one. Actually, you couldn’t blame them.

  But that day things were different. As I walked down the Mall towards Cosmetics, every clerk I passed who wasn’t busy with a customer gave me her full attention until I got by. And not just me, either. That day the clerks were noticing everybody—and the way they were doing it sort of gave you the feeling that someone had just told them that Jack the Ripper was coming in disguise.

  When Madame Stregovitch saw me, her eyebrows flared up and she went off into one of her fancy greetings. “Ahhh! The shadows are lifting. It is the Golden One, the Adonis of Eighth Avenue.”

  “Hey, I like it,” I said. I got out my little notebook that I kept track of my job money in and pretended to write it down. “Let’s see. How did that go? Adonis, A—D—” But as soon as we got through kidding around, I got right down to what I’d come to ask. “By the way, how about letting me in on the big mystery. I mean, what’s going on around here anyway?”

  Madame had been looking down at a tray of lipsticks she was arranging, but when I said that her eyes whipped around to me so hard and fast that for a minute I started to stammer. It happened to me all the time with kids, particularly girls, but hardly ever with adults—especially Madame. But when she wanted to, she had a look that could really nail you—like a bug on a pin.

  “I—I mean, the police and dogs and everything. José’s been saying the store has some kind of big trouble. I just wondered if you’d heard anything.”

  After a minute Madame nodded and went back to fixing the lipsticks. “Yes,” she said.” I have heard a little. There have been extra detectives hired and more guards at night. There is always some trouble in a big store like this. Perhaps it is the guards themselves. They say most of the damage has been done at night.”

  “You mean stuff has been stolen more than once at night, and no one can find out how anyone’s getting in? Sounds like it must be the guards, or someone who’s working with them. What are they taking? And how come it hasn’t all been in the paper?”

  Madame shrugged. When Madame shrugged, everything got in on the act—her eyebrows, her chin, her hands and even her nose; and her shrugs said a lot more than other people’s. This one said that the store officials were idiots, that the whole thing was a big joke, that there was nothing to worry about—but then right at the end her eyes came back to me and sharpened, and the shrug ended up saying something like, “Too many questions can get you in trouble.” It felt almost like a threat. But out loud all she said was, “I think, actually, very little has been stolen.” She reached under the counter and brought out some fudge. “See, your favorite from the Sweet Shop. Just like old times.”

  It was obvious that for some reason Madame didn’t want to talk about it any more, but I was still curious; so when she went back to her customers, I decided to cruise around a bit just to get the feel of things. I happened to be wearing some of my best stuff, so I didn’t figure I’d attract any special attention, unless I ran into Rogers or Priestly or one or two of the others who knew me.

  I toured the main floor first. I walked all the way around the Mall, which was just a wide aisle lined with potted plants. On the inside was the indoor garden and fountain and some lounging areas where shoppers could sit down to rest their feet. And all around the outside were the different departments—some of them fixed up like separate little shops. There were dozens of them—Gifts and Notions and Cosmetics and Books and Jewelry a
nd Silver and Stationery and Hobbies and Hosiery and the Travel Shop and the Gourmet Shop and the Import Shop and the Music Shop and the Art Shop and the Sweet Shop and the Flower Shop, and a lot of others. Then all along the south side there was the Alcott Tea Room, which was indoors, like everything else, but was designed to look like some kind of lawn party, with umbrella tables and potted trees.

  I went all the way around the floor without seeing anything out of the ordinary, except for the way the clerks were acting. There did seem to be a few more men shoppers than usual; they may or may not have been extra store detectives.

  Next I got on the elevator and went to the second floor. I didn’t get off at the mezzanine because it was absolutely impossible not to be conspicuous there. It was where they had the best ladies’ clothing and there was nothing on the whole floor but some chairs and couches sitting around on a practically knee-deep rug, plus a few artistic objects like pictures and statues. The idea was, you were supposed to tell the clerks—a bunch of dowager types in black dresses—what you had in mind and they trotted out some models wearing things you might like. I never could see just how it worked because the models were all nearly skin and bones and most of the customers weren’t, but that wasn’t my problem.

  The second floor was clothing, too, only not quite so exclusive, and the third floor was one of my favorites—boys’ and mens’ clothing and the sporting goods department. I strolled around for a while on each floor, but I didn’t see anything else that looked fishy. So I went up to the toy department on the fourth floor.