And we offer instruction in courage and indifference. I take them with me to restaurants and have them return their steak or their soup while I sit by silently. Or we’ll go to waiting rooms in lawyers’ offices and when no one is looking they’ll take a tin of condoms from their purse and ask aloud, “Excuse me, who dropped this?” We—
MEL SON: Dick, she’s got to be one of your sponsors. This is the longest plug I’ve ever heard.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Be quiet.
MEL SON: I … I …
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on, Miss Steep. I want to hear about the memory expert now.
PEPPER STEEP: The memory expert. Yes. Arnold. He wrote me a letter. He wanted to enroll in the Charm School. I had been thinking for some time of admitting boys. They do in the dancing classes. Isn’t all the terror sexual, anyway? I agreed to see him and we set up an appointment for the following week. He came on a bus from Springfield. As soon as I saw him I knew it couldn’t work. I had expected a young man, a teen-ager, but he was older than me, in his early forties.
“Won’t the charm schools in Springfield have you?” I asked. “There’s Miss Doris’s, and a branch of Lovely Young Thing.”
“I never looked into them.”
“Let’s be frank with each other, shall we, Mr. — what is it? — Menchman?”
“Ma’am?”
“Are you straight? Or are you looking for some kind of … well—thrill?”
“Oh, no, ma’am.”
“Well, then?”
“I saw your presentation on television.”
Sometimes I’m asked to bring over some of the younger girls to one of the local stations. They act out social situations, do tea parties, that sort of thing. You remember this, Mel; you were on one of those shows.
MEL SON: I–I—
PEPPER STEEP: “You saw my presentation on television. Yes?”
“They were so poised. They were just children, but they were so poised.”
“Well, that’s very nice. Thank you, but I don’t—”
“Mignonne Gumbs, 13, Sheila Smith, 12, Pamela Fairfife, 14—I never saw composure like that in such young children. When Pamela Fairfife spilled tea on Mignonne Gumbs — that wasn’t planned, was it?”
“No. The tea was too hot. She couldn’t hold the handle.”
“I thought not. It looked too real. The way Mignonne Gumbs reassured her — telling her that the fabric was stain-resistant, and that she needn’t worry about having scalded her because the tea had landed on old scar tissue. She made up that part about the scar tissue, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
“Miss Gumbs had a lot of confidence by the time she graduated.”
“I could see that.”
“Those three particular students — that program was more than a year ago. How do you remember their names?”
“Oh, well, I remember.”
“I see,” I told him. “I really don’t think there’d be much for you in our school. You don’t want to learn to pour tea or come down steps.”
“From behind curtains.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“From behind curtains … onto a stage. Down into the audience. I — um … to talk … in front of people.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand.”
“I’m clumsy, Miss Steep. Your secretary, Miss Ganchi, let me into your office before you arrived or you would have seen. I tripped. I can’t even walk into a room. It’s as hard for me to cross a threshold as it might be for someone else to step from one car to another in a moving train. I don’t know how to stand, what to do with my hands — anything. People laugh.”
“I’m sorry. Your presence would be disruptive in our classes. You’d embarrass the girls.”
“They were wonderful.”
“Yes, well—”
“If it’s a question of money …”
“It’s not.”
“I need the training.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m — I’m a memory expert. I’m in show business. Or rather, I would be if I weren’t so clumsy. Listen, my act is the greatest in the world. I know that sounds very bold, but it’s true. I … I’m a freak, you see.”
“Please, Mr. Menchman.”
“No, it’s so. I am. I mean, there’s no trick to what I do. I do it. It’s not even talent. I have an eidetic imagination.”
“An eidetic—?”
“It’s called that. There are only about a hundred of us in the whole world. Maybe three — I’m one — are true eidetics.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s very simple. You’ve heard of a photographic mind?”
“Yes, of course.”
“There is such a thing. Nobody understands how it works, really, but it’s visual. Somehow, whatever I look at registers on the retina and on the mind simultaneously. In other people the mind receives the impression a zillionth of a fraction of a moment late, but with an eidetic there’s no lag. At least that’s what the theory is now. Anyway, when an eidetic tries to recall something he sees this picture. All he has to do is look at it. He can even close his eyes — as a matter of fact, he has to close his eyes or it would be like a double exposure — and the picture is right there on the eyelids.”
“Fascinating.”
“Oh, I’m a freak is all.”
“Do you remember things forever?”
“No. The pictures fade after a time. Just as a photographic proof will. They even turn that same murky purple. But it lasts for a couple of years at least. Even then I don’t forget everything; I just remember the way normal people do.”
“Well, I must say … Still, I don’t see how I’m the person to help you.”
“Oh, you are, Miss Steep. I’ll never forget how grand those children were. Sheila Smith lived next door to me before her family moved to Hartford. She was the sloppiest little girl I’d ever seen. There wasn’t a time when her nose wasn’t running. When I saw her on television … she’s so changed. Change me, Miss Steep. Teach me my body. I know I could be great — my act—but my body … People laugh. They don’t even pay attention to the feats I do; they think I’m a comic. You have to be in control of your body to be in the show business.”
“All I could teach you is to move like a woman. They’d still laugh.”
“No. You’d teach me grace.”
“It’s impossible, Mr. Menchman. The girls would be too embarrassed.”
“Then take me as a special student. I have money. Charge what you want. … Maybe you don’t believe me. Is that it? This is what is behind me in this room: To the right of the door as one enters — eidetics see from right to left, thus giving substance to the speculation that the idiosyncrasy is passed on through a Semitic gene; my grandfather on my father’s side was Jewish — are three blue bookshelves about five feet wide and held on the wall by twelve brackets, four brackets to a shelf, with three screws in each bracket. One bracket, the second from the right on the highest shelf, has Phillips head screws. On the top shelf are seventeen books, on the middle twelve, on the bottom fourteen. If you pick a shelf I will give you the titles, authors, publishers and colors of the spines or book jackets.”
“This isn’t necessary.”
“You think it’s a trick. I work with no assistant. Your trickster has an assistant.”
“I don’t think it’s a trick. It simply isn’t necessary.”