“I don’t have any use for it right now,” said he to Jamie as he clamped the Tetzlar to the window sill. “I thought you might get a kick out of it.” Not for one second did he, as he fiddled with the telescope, lose sight of Kitty, who was unwrapping the little jewel box. She held up the slipper, gave him her dry sideways Lippo Lippi look, tucked in the corner of her mouth, and nodded half a millimeter. His knee leapt out of joint. What was it about this splendid but by no means extraordinary girl which knocked him in the head and crossed his eyes like Woody Woodpecker?
Jamie’s bed was strewn with neckties and books — three people had given him the same funny book entitled So You’re a Crock. The nurses bought a Merita cake and spelled out “Happy Birthday” in chart paper. The internes made a drink of laboratory alcohol and frozen grapefruit juice, as if they were all castaways and had to make do with what they had. From an upper Broadway novelty shop Mr. Vaught had obtained a realistic papier-mâché dogturd which he slipped onto the bed under the very noses of the nurses. As the latter spied it and let out their screams of dismay, the old man charged fiercely about the room, peering under appliances. “I saw him in here, a little feist dog!”
Screwing in the terrestrial ocular fitted with a prism, and focusing quickly on the Englewood cliffs, the engineer stepped aside. The patient had only to prop himself on an elbow and look down into the prism. A little disc of light played about his pupil. The engineer watched him watch: now he, Jamie, would be seeing it, the brilliant theater bigger and better than life. Picnickers they were, a family deployed on a shelf of granite above the Hudson. The father held a can of beer.
Once Jamie looked up for a second, searched his face for a sign: did he really see what he saw? The engineer nodded. Yes, he saw.
“What kind of beer is he drinking?” he asked Jamie.
“Rheingold,” said Jamie.
The others took their turn, all but Rita, then Moon Mullins, who swung the Tetzlar around to the nurses’ dormitory. There was no talking to Jamie this morning. He must watch the tugs on the river, the roller coaster at Palisades Park, the tollhouse on the George Washington, Bridge, two housewives back-fencing in Weehawken. Now it was Jamie who became the technician, focusing on some bit of New Jersey and leaning away to let the doctors look.
Mrs. Vaught elder couldn’t get over it. Her pince-nez flashed in the light and she took the engineer’s arm. “Would you look at the color in that child’s face!” She made her husband take a look through the telescope, but he pretended he couldn’t see.
“I can’t see a thing!” he cried irritably, jostling his eye around the ocular.
Presently Kitty left with Rita, giving him as she left a queer hooded brown-eyed-susan look. He sat down dizzily and blew out his lips. Why couldn’t he leave with them? But when he jumped up, Mr. Vaught took him high by the arm and steered him out into the hall. He faced the younger man into a corner and for a long time did not speak but stood with his head down, nodding. The engineer thought the other was going to tell him a joke.
“Bill.” The nodding went on.
“Yes sir.”
“How much did that thing cost you?”
“The telescope? Nineteen hundred and eight dollars.”
“How much do you make a week?”
“I take home one forty-eight.”
“Did your father leave you anything?”
“Not much. An old house and two hundred acres of buckshot.”
The engineer was sure he was in for a scolding — all at once the telescope seemed folly itself. But Mr. Vaught only took out his fried-up ball of a handkerchief and knocked it against his nose.
“Bill”
“Yes sir.”
“How would you like to work for me?”
“I’d like it fine, sir, but—”
“We have a garage apartment, which Mrs. Vaught did over completely. You’d be independent.”
“Well, I really appreciate it, but—”
“You’re Ed Barrett’s boy,” began Mr. Vaught in an enumerating voice.
“Yes sir.”
“Dolly knew your mother and said she was the sweetest little lady in the world.”
“Yes sir.”
“Your mother and daddy are dead and here you are up here fooling around and not knowing what in the hail you are doing. Isn’t that so?”
“Well, sir, I’m a humidification engineer.”
“What in the woerrrld is that?” asked the other, his mouth gone quirky and comic.
The engineer explained.
“Why, hailfire, man, you mean you’re the janitor,” cried Mr. Vaught, falling back and doing a jaunty little step. For the first time the engineer caught a glimpse of the shrewdness behind the old man’s buffoonery.
“I guess I am, in a way.”
“Tell me the truth now. You don’t know what — in — the— woerrrld you are doing up here, do you?”
“Well now—” began the engineer, intending to say something about his scientific theories. But instead he fell silent.
“Where did you go to college?”
“Princeton.”
“What’s your religion?”
“Episcopalian,” said the engineer absently, though he had never given the matter a single thought in his entire life.
“Man, there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“No sir.”
But if there is nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all. “However, I do have a nervous condition—”
“Nervous! Hell, I’d be nervous too if I lived up here with all these folks.” He nodded down at the moraine of Washington Heights. “All huddled up in the Y in the daytime and way up under a store all night. And peeping at folks through a spyglass. Shoot, man!”
The engineer had to laugh. Moreover, suggestible as he was, he began to think it mightn’t be a bad idea to return to the South and discover his identity, to use Dr. Gamow’s expression. “What would you want me to do, Mr. Vaught?”
“All right. Here’s what you do. You come on down with us. Spend a year with Jamie. This will give you time to finish school if that’s what you want to do, or look around for what kind of work you want. Whatever you want to do.”
“I still don’t exactly know what it is you want—”
“Bill, I’m going to tell you something.” Mr. Vaught drew him close enough to smell his old man’s sourness and the ironing-board smell of seersucker. “I need somebody to help me out. I’m taking Jamie home”—somebody didn’t want him to! — “and I want you to come down with me.”
“Yes sir. And then?”
“Jamie likes you. He dudn’t like anybody else at home but he likes you. (He likes Sutter, but that sapsucker — never mind.) He’s been up here four years and he’s smart as a whip about some things but he doesn’t know enough to come out of the rain about some others. He can’t drive a car or shoot a gun! You know what he and Kitty do at home? Nothing! Sit in the pantry and pick their noses.”
“How do you know I won’t do the same thing?” asked the engineer, smiling.
“Do it! But also show him how folks act. I just saw what effect you had on him. That’s the first time I’ve seen that boy perk up since I been up here. Can you drive?”