“I’d like to be able to sing like that,” he said. “You know?”
“Yeah, you’ve told me on the average of I would estimate once a day. So what I’d like to know, Dan, is why don’t you ever sing? All you have to do is open your mouth and yell.”
“I will. When I’m ready.”
“Dan, you’re a nice guy, but you’re as bad as I am for putting things off to tomorrow. You’re worse — you’re as bad as Julie.”
Daniel grinned, uncapped another Grain Belt, and held it up in a salute. “Here’s to tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Bob agreed, “and may it take its own sweet time in coming.”
The subject of Gus had never rearisen.
When Daniel had left Worry it was six-thirty, but already it had seemed the dead of night. By the time he was home, after the slow drive through the snowstorm, he had expected no more than left-overs heated up. But in fact his mother had waited dinner. The table was set and everyone was watching a panel discussion about the new fertilizers in the living room. They had not waited, the twins in particular, with much good grace, and before Daniel was out of his windbreaker and had given his hands a symbolic splash in the wash basin (saving the water for the toilet tank), they were all of them sitting down and his mother was spooning out servings of tuna fish casserole. Aurelia passed the plate of sliced bread with a look of malevolence. Cecelia giggled.
“You didn’t have to wait dinner for me, you know. I said I’d be home late.”
“Fifteen after seven is not an unthinkable hour for dinner,” Milly said, more for the sake of the twins than for him. “In New York City, for instance, people often don’t have anything to eat before nine, even ten o’clock.”
“Uh-huh,” said Cecelia sarcastically.
“Did you have a nice time?” his father asked. It was rare nowadays that his father asked even so much as that, for Daniel had become protective of his privacy.
Daniel tapped a finger to his mouth, full of the tuna and noodles. The casserole had cooked too long, and the noodles were dry and hard to swallow. “Terrific,” he finally brought out. “You wouldn’t believe their piano. It’s as big as a pingpong table practically.”
“That’s all you did, all afternoon?” Cecelia asked. “Played a piano?”
“And a harpsichord. And an electric organ. There was even a cello, but I couldn’t really do anything with that. Except touch it.”
“Didn’t you even look at the horses?” Aurelia asked. She turned to Milly plaintively. “The horses out there are so famous.”
“Perhaps Daniel isn’t interested in horses,” Milly suggested.
“I didn’t see the horses, but I did see Grandison Whiting.”
“Did you,” said Milly.
Daniel took a meditative sip of milky tea.
“Well?” said Cecelia.
“Was he nice to you?” Aurelia asked, coming right to the point.
“I wouldn’t say nice exactly. He was friendly. He has a big bushy red beard, and a ring on his finger with a diamond on it as big as a strawberry.” He measured the approximate size of the strawberry between finger and thumb. “A small strawberry,” he conceded.
“I knew he had a beard,” said Cecelia. “I saw that on tv.”
“What did you say to him?” Aurelia asked.
“Oh, we talked about a lot of things. Mostly politics, I guess you’d say.”
Milly set down her fork judgementally. “Oh, Daniel — don’t you have a grain of sense?”
“It was an interesting conversation,” he said defensively. “I think he enjoyed it. Anyhow he did most of the talking, and Boa got her licks in, as usual. I was what you’re always saying I should be — an intelligent listener.”
“I’d like to know what’s wrong with talking about politics,” his father demanded. It was Mr. Weinreb’s stated conviction that Daniel’s friendship with the daughter of the richest man in Iowa was not to be regarded as an exceptional occurrence and did not require special handling.
“Nothing,” said Milly, “nothing at all.” She didn’t agree with her husband about this but wasn’t prepared, yet, to make an issue of it. “Cecelia, you eat the peas too.”
“Peas have vitamins,” said Aurelia smugly. She was already on her second helping.
“How’d you get home?” his father asked.
“There was a pick-up coming in to town. They stopped it at the gate. If that hadn’t come along, they were going to send me back in a limousine.”
“Are you going back next Saturday?” Aurelia asked.
“Probably.”
“You shouldn’t overdo it, Daniel,” Milly said.
“She’s my girlfriend, Mom. She can come here. I can go there. It’s that simple. Right?”
“Nothing’s that simple.”
“Why don’t you ask her to dinner with us?” Aurelia suggested.
“Don’t be silly, Aurelia,” Milly scolded. “You’re all acting like Daniel’s never been out of the house before. And by the way, Daniel, there was a phone call for you.”
“I answered,” said Cecelia. “It was a girl.” She turned Daniel’s own ploy against him and waited to be asked.
“So? Who?”
“She wouldn’t say what her name was. But it sounded like Old Wiremouth to me.”
“Don’t make fun of people with braces,” said her father sharply. “Someday you’ll probably have them too.”
“And eat your peas,” Milly added.
“They’re burnt.”
“They’re not burnt. Eat them.”
“They’ll make me throw up.”
“I don’t care. Eat them.”
“What did she want, the girl who called?”
Cecelia stared balefully at a teaspoon-size mound of peas sticky with white sauce. “She wanted to know where you were. I said you were out, but I didn’t know where. Now I wish I’d told her.”
Daniel reached over with his spoon and scooped up all but three of the peas. Before Milly could say a word he’d eaten them.
Cecelia gave him a grateful smile.
Down in his own room he had to decide whether his futzing around with the instruments at Worry counted as practice and whether, therefore, he was at liberty to omit his hour of Hanon’s Virtuoso Pianist. He decided it didn’t count and he wasn’t at liberty.
With the first fifteen exercises behind him, which was as much as he could get through in an hour, the next decision was easier. He wouldn’t do his homework for chemistry, and he wouldn’t read the Willa Cather novel for Eng. Lit. He would read the paperback that Boa had given him. It was really more of a pamphlet then a paperback, printed on pulp so recycled it was a wonder that it had got through the presses intact.
The white letters of the title shone through a ground of ink, so:
No author’s name appeared on the cover or the title page. The publisher was The Develop-Mental Corporation of Portland, Oregon.
Boa had got the book from her brother Serjeant, who had got it in turn from a college roommate. The book had convinced Serjeant to drop out of college and take (briefly) boxing lessons. It had convinced Boa to have her hair cut short (it had since grown out again) and to get up every morning at six to study Italian (which to her own and everyone’s amazement she was still doing). Daniel thought that he was already doing approximately his utmost by way of advancing slowly and steadily toward his major life goals, but he wasn’t so sure that his personality couldn’t bear improvement. In any case Boa had been insistent that he should read it.
Daniel was a naturally fast reader. He’d finished the book by ten o’clock. Generally he didn’t think that much of it. It was self-help at a pretty simple-minded level, with lots of mottoes you were supposed to whisper to yourself in order to get motivated. But he understood why Boa had wanted him to read it. It was for the sake of the Second Law of Develop-Mental Mechanics, which appeared first on page 12 (where it was heavily underscored by a ballpoint pen), and was then repeated many times throughout.