And—Lenore when she’d won the first beauty contest—slender but mature-bodied, proud but vaguely ashamed, walking a runway at the Swan Island Amusement Park Beach, head high, breasts high, her dark, almost black hair perfectly curled down her back between tan shoulder blades, her blue eyes straight ahead, her smile too fixed—winning the cup and beginning to move away from him, not meaning or wanting to….
Her college years. She knew a little about the trouble with herself, by then; nobody, no intent professor or research graduate, expected to look up from some glass maze and see a dream girl working at the bench opposite; nobody could quite believe glamour and brains could live together. And her family: a mother openly outraged that she’d birthed a brainy daughter, publicly maintaining that beauty, by which she meant a body, was a woman’s one useful asset and brains were the certain road to inconspicuous poverty; Beau, the indulgent father, scared of his wife, happily awed by his child-scared and awed first by his own mother—indulging Lenore when he could but never making any assertion of family values, never leading, always either following Netta or pursuing Lenore like a nervous secretary….
It was a dilemma all right, and Chuck was accustomed to it. He didn’t exactly blame Lenore for reaching no decision, for drifting along, a lovely college girl, “back at home,” awaiting events, like myriads of other girls. Maybe she was spoiled. Maybe she was really lacking in initiative like her dad. Maybe she shared, deep beneath the intelligent mind, the realism and pert but warm aliveness that appeared to be her whole self, some taint of her mother’s infinite cupidity; perhaps she had caught some contagion from her mother’s striving to escape an inferior background. Maybe Lenore wasn’t the woman the girl had been. But maybe she was.
“I think she still loves you,” Chuck’s mother murmured across her sewing.
His brown eyes gleamed. ‘Wish I thought so.”
“If you’d only…” Beth Conner broke off. No use telling Charles to take any “bull by the horns,” any ‘‘bit in his teeth”; it wasn’t his way. He went at life, even when everything he valued was involved, slowly, quietly, in his steady fashion.
“If I’d only what?”
She bit a thread. “Lenore hasn’t changed a particle—so far,” she said. “But she’s getting worried about herself. Restless.”
“Keep quiet!” Nora expostulated. “I’m studying!” She sank her teeth into an apple, glued her eyes to a geography.
Concealed behind its brown covers was a paper-backed novel with a near-naked, huge-bosomed young woman printed on its sleek exterior and the title Sins in Seven Streets. A period of perhaps five minutes passed while Nora “studied,” Ted completed a math problem and Mrs.
Conner read. Charles turned the pages of the paper unseeingly, his mind steadfast on Lenore. But even he was startled when the alarm went off.
“What’s that?” he exclaimed. Mrs. Conner glanced swiftly at her two younger children, Nora first. Then she said drily, “What is it, Ted?”
“You’ll see.” Pride was commingled with misgiving in his tone. The room was suddenly flooded with hollow-sounding din as the TV set switched itself on. “Invention,” Ted explained modestly. “So we wouldn’t miss Tootlin’ Tim.”
Tootlin’ Tim was apparently on the air, for a studio audience laughed and the Conner household was filled with the lunging, sepulchral explosion which represents the combined efforts of hundreds of persons, with nothing to do· and no sense of humor, to express what they regard as amusement.
The same sound from the same source—radio laughter—was surging through millions of Middle Western homes at the same instant. It is an utterly savage sound, mirthless and cruel, usually inspired by the sadisms which constitute most popular humor. It is a sound that would stun to silence the predatory night noises of the wildest jungle, a sound of madness, more frightful than screaming.
2
The same sound from the same TV program intermittently belched through the Bailey living room where Beau, the evening paper in his lap, now slept. He snored lightly and he stirred from time to time. But whenever the TV set gave forth its collective guffaw, its mechanical replica of the mechanical mirth of morons who opened their mouths and chortled every time the emcee made sucking motions with his hands (and who slammed their mouths shut when the same all-pimple showed them his palms), whenever this rock-slide cacophony struck his ears, Beau’s belly jiggled in cadence, his snoring ceased and a miniature replica of the audience noise escaped him.
Indeed, in many homes and public places, where people had no idea what program was on the air or what jest occasioned the brickbat risibility of the unseen audience, the mere sound elicted that response—a chuckle, cackle or snort. For they were so slavishly conditioned to this style of diversion, so inertly used to, the inanities which push-buttoned their sport, that the mere noise of other nitwits being tickled elicited the reflex. They laughed without knowing why, or even that they laughed. They laughed while drying dishes and emptying garbage and adding columns of figures and shaving and defecating and picking their noses and reading Sunday-school lessons and swallowing pork pies and custards and beer. They chortled.
Beau, among them, though asleep and patently troubled in his slumber, nonetheless snored and snickered, tittered, nickered, nasalized and woke up with a start because Netta had spoken to him-yelled, rather, since her first words had been overridden by a fresh, oblong block of guffaw, and she detested above all else to be outshouted. All Beau heard, or needed to hear, was “Telephone!”
He got out of his chair and buttoned the top of his fly as if the telephone were going to be able to see. Then, as if it had the additional power to do harm to him, he snatched up his highball and gulped it down protectively.
He picked up the instrument and cleared his throat. His tone was suddenly buoyant and friendly, “Howard Bailey speaking.”
“This is Jake.”
If Netta had been in the hall she would have seen that Beau’s face lost all its color. The whisky, too, went out of his brain. Nothing was left but a pallid and wobbling man’s body, frantic eyes—but the voice intact, for Beau knew his wife would be listening though she could not look. She always listened.
He said, after a pause, “Oh, yes. How are you?”
A businessman, Netta decided upstairs. Somebody of whom Beau was slightly afraid, which didn’t mean much, since he was somewhat afraid of everybody. She looked down bitterly at the bedroom floor as if she could see through it and watch her husband standing below. She would have liked to listen in on an upstairs phone but Beau, six months before, with a remarkable show of determination had had the second-floor extension removed. It was an “economy measure” he had said, but she had known his true motive: to prevent her from eavesdropping on his calls.
The voice that reached Beau was level, a little too level and, though not foreign, it used English in a fashion alien to Green Prairie—in a way which anyone familiar with American dialects would have identified as related to Chicago, to the South Side, to the period of 1920-1930. “Shallcot Rove ran fifth today, Mr. Bailey.”
“Yes, I know. Of course.”
“It puts the total up to five thousand, even.”
Beau gave a little laugh. “As much as that, eh? I wouldn’t worry. I expect the market will take a turn for the better—”