“S?” Harve says uncertainly, “T? L?”
“No, Harve, the number. You’re spelling St. Louis. The number’s what we want here. Jeanne, help him.”
His kid sister whispers the number to him and Harve brokenly begins to relay it back to Messenger, checking the numbers she gives him against those he can find on the screen. Then the number goes off and Harve calls out numbers indiscriminately. He gives Messenger an Illinois exchange.
“Damn it, Jeanne, you give me the number.”
The delay has cost muscular dystrophy ten bucks. Grief leaks through Messenger’s inconvenience. A cure for this scourge will forever be ten dollars behind itself.
The announcer is complaining that less than half the phones are ringing, that Kansas City, with less population, has already pledged forty thousand dollars more than St. Louis. Not that it’s a contest, he says, the important thing is to get the job done, but he won’t put his jacket on until we go over the top. It doesn’t make any difference what happens nationally, we don’t meet our goal he won’t wear his jacket. He’s referring to a spectacularly loud jacket he wears only during MD campaigns. Messenger, who’s been with the telethon years, wants to see him put it on. It’s a dumb ploy. Messenger knows this. So unprofessional that just by itself it explains why he’s in St. Louis and Ed McMahon is out there in Vegas with Jerry and Frank and Dean, but no form of Show Business is alien to him and Messenger hopes he gets to see the announcer put on his sports coat.
His grown son picks up an extension. “Get off,” Messenger says, “I’m making a call.”
“This will take a minute.”
“So will this. Get off.”
“Jesus.”
Why don’t they answer? He carries the phone as far as it will reach and sits down on the bed. It’s true. Most of the volunteers have nothing to do. They know the camera is on them, and those who aren’t actually speaking to callers try to look busy. They stare at the phones, make notes on pieces of paper. His son picks up the phone again, replaces it fiercely.
“Do you want to break the damn thing?” Messenger shouts. “What’s wrong with you?”
There are three banks of telephones, eight volunteers in each bank. Though he’s never seen one, they remind him of a grand jury. The phone has rung perhaps twenty times.
“Jeanne, did you give me the right number?”
“727-2700.”
It’s on the screen. Messenger hangs up and dials again. This time someone answers on the third ring.
“The bitch gave you the wrong number,” Harve says.
“I did not,” Jeanne says.
“That’s baloney-o. That’s shit,” Harve says.
“Please,” Messenger says.
He says his name to the volunteer and gives his address. Speaking slowly and clearly, he reads the dozen or so numbers off his charge card. He volunteers its expiration date, his voice low with dignity and reserve, the voice of a man with eleven months to go on his Master Card.
“Are you going to give them three million dollars, Daddy?” Harve asks. Messenger frowns at him.
“What do you want to pledge, sir?”
“Twenty dollars,” he says, splitting the difference between anger and conscience.
“Challenge your friends,” his daughter says. “Challenge the English department. Challenge everyone left-handed. Make her wave, Daddy.”
What the hell, he asks if she will wave to his daughter and, remarkably, from the very center of the volunteers, a hand actually shoots up.
“Ooh,” Jeanne says, “she’s pretty.”
“Dumbshit thinks she can see us,” Harve says. “Can she, Daddy?”
“Are you almost through?” his other son asks on the extension. “Mike wants me to find out when the movie starts.”
“Goddamn it,” Messenger roars into the phone.
“Will the little boys walk now?” Harve asks. “Will they run and read?”
“Tell your brother I’m off the phone.”
Harve hangs back. “What if there’s a fire? How would the crippled children excape from a fire?”
“Escape, Harve,” Messenger says.
“Excape,” Harve says.
“There’s not going to be any fire. Stop thinking about fire.” The griefs were all about. The griefs were leaking. Harve’s third-degree-burned by them.
“They should take all the money and get the cripples fire stingishers.”
“Cut it out. Stop with the fucking fire shit.”
“They should.”
“Do what I tell you!”
His son leaves the bedroom, his fine blond hair suddenly incendiary as it catches the light from the window.
The horror, the horror, he thinks absently.
Once he’s phoned in his pledge he loses interest. It’s what always happens, but he takes a last look at the telethon before he dresses. The entertainers sweated griefs and plugged records. It was all right. Messenger forgave them. This was only the world.
Of course they’d reach their goal, Messenger thought. Everybody was watching the telethon. Besides, the fix was in. Eleventh-hour operetta was ready to put them over the top. Soft drink, ballpoint pen, timepiece, fast food, twenty-four-hour Mom and Pop shops, roller skating and dancing school cartels were already in the wings. An afflicted airlines executive and a backyard carnival representative stood by. Why, his own kids had dropped three or four bucks at a neighbor kid’s carnival two months before. Then what was the telethon for anyway? TV time that Messenger’s twenty bucks and the fifty or sixty the kids had raised and the perhaps half-dozen million or so of other private grievers all across the country might not even cover, make up? What was it for?
Why, the griefs, the griefs, of course — remotest mourning’s thrill-a-minute patriotics, its brazen, spectacular top hat, high-strutting, rim shot sympathies.
Cornell was high. For three years now it was the only way he would see people. His friends knew he smoked grass, as they thought they knew — as even his acquaintances and some of his students did — almost everything about him. He was contemptuous of whatever quality it was, not sincerity, not candor, not even truthfulness finally, that compelled his arias and put his words in his mouth. It was as if he had felt obliged to take the stand from the time he had first learned to talk, there to sing, turn state’s evidence, endlessly offer testimony, information, confession, proofs, an eyewitness to his own life who badgered his juries not only with the facts but with the hearsay too.
“Anybody see the telethon?” he asked the group around the pool. “I pledged twenty dollars. I was going to give twenty-five but at the last minute I welched because I got sore at my kids.”
They were his closest friends. One — Audrey — was having a nervous breakdown and cringed like a monkey in the shade of a big sun umbrella that bloomed from a hole in Losey’s summer furniture. Losey was the proprietor of this big house with its flourish of rose and sculpture gardens, tennis court, swimming pool, potting sheds, patio, and large paved area outside the garage like the parking lot at an Italian restaurant. There was even a dish antenna on the grounds like a giant mushroom. Losey was having an affair and had hinted he might even be in love. Nora Pat, Losey’s wife, was a second-year architecture student in the university and was probably going to flunk out. Thirty-one years old and the wife of a successful surgeon, she was on academic probation. Messenger’s wife, Paula, had her own sensible troubles. Victor Binder, Audrey’s husband, did. What the hell, they all did, some of them with griefs so bad they had had to stay home.