Look at the Birdie (3 page)

“Aaaaaaaaah,” said Confido. “Her whole life is trying to make other women feel like two cents.”

“All right—say that
is
so,” said Ellen, “it’s all the poor thing’s got, and she’s harmless.”

“Harmless, harmless,” said Confido. “Sure, she’s harmless, her crooked husband’s harmless and a poor thing, everybody’s harmless. And, after arriving at that bighearted conclusion, what have you got left for yourself? What does that leave you to think about anything?”

“Now, I’m simply not going to put up with you anymore,” said Ellen, reaching for the earpiece.

“Why not?” said Confido. “We’re having the time of your life.” It chuckled. “Saaaay, listen—won’t the stuffy old biddies around here like the Duchess Fink curl up and die
with envy when the Bowerses put on a little dog for a change. Eh? That’ll show ’em the good and honest win out in the long run.”

“The good and honest?”

“You
—you and Henry, by God,” said Confido. “That’s who. Who else?”

Ellen’s hand came down from the earpiece. It started up again, but as a not very threatening gesture, ending in her grasping a broom.

“That’s just a nasty neighborhood rumor about Mr. Fink and his secretary,” she thought.

“Heah?” said Confido. “Where there’s smoke—”

“And he’s not a crook.”

“Look into those shifty, weak blue eyes, look at those fat lips made for cigars and tell me that,” said Confido.

“Now, now,” thought Ellen. “That’s enough. There’s been absolutely no proof—”

“Still waters run deep,” said Confido. It was silent for a moment. “And I don’t mean just the Finks. This whole neighborhood is still water. Honest to God, somebody ought to write a book about it. Just take this block alone, starting at the corner with the Kramers. Why, to look at her, you’d think she was the quietest, most proper …”

“Ma, Ma—hey, Ma,” said her son several hours later. “Ma—you sick? Hey, Ma!”

“And
that
brings us to the Fitzgibbonses,” Confido was saying. “That poor little, dried-up, sawed-off, henpecked—”

“Ma!” cried Paul.

“Oh!” said Ellen, opening her eyes. “You startled me.
What are you children doing home from school?” She was sitting in her kitchen rocker, half-dazed.

“It’s after three, Ma. Whuddya think?”

“Oh, dear—is it that late? Where on earth has the day gone?”

“Can I listen, Ma—can I listen to Confido?”

“It’s not for children to listen to,” said Ellen, shocked. “I should say not. It’s strictly for grown-ups.”

“Can’t we just look at it?”

With cruel feat of will, Ellen disengaged Confido from her ear and blouse, and laid it on the table. “There—you see? That’s all there is to it.”

“Boy—a billion dollars lying right there,” said Paul softly. “Sure doesn’t look like much, does it? A cool billion.” He was giving an expert imitation of his father on the night before. “Can I have a motorcycle?”

“Everything takes time, Paul,” said Ellen.

“What are you doing with your housecoat on so late?” said her daughter.

“I was
just
going to change it,” said Ellen.

She had been in the bedroom just a moment, her mind seething with neighborhood scandal, half-heard in the past, now refreshed and ornamented by Confido, when there were bitter shouts in the kitchen.

She rushed into the kitchen to find Susan crying, and Paul red and defiant. Confido’s earpiece in his ear.

“Paul!” said Ellen.

“I don’t care,” said Paul. “I’m
glad
I listened. Now I know the truth—I know the whole secret.”

“He pushed me,” sobbed Susan.

“Confido said to,” said Paul.

“Paul,” said Ellen, horrified. “What secret are you talking about? What secret, dear?”

“I’m not your son,” he said sullenly.

“Of
course
you are!”

“Confido says I’m not,” said Paul. “Confido says I’m adopted. Susan’s the one you love, and that’s why I get a raw deal around here.”

“Paul—darling, darling. It simply isn’t true. I promise. I swear it. And I don’t know what on earth you mean by raw deals—”

“Confido says it’s true all right,” said Paul stoutly.

Ellen leaned against the kitchen table and rubbed her temples. Suddenly, she leaned forward and snatched Confido from Paul.

“Give me that filthy little beast!” she said. She strode angrily out of the back door with it.

“Hey!” said Henry, doing a buck-and-wing through his front door, and sailing his hat, as he had never done before, onto the coatrack in the hall. “Guess what? The breadwinner’s home!”

Ellen appeared in the kitchen doorway and gave him a sickly smile. “Hi.”

“There’s my girl,” said Henry, “and have I got good news for you. This is a great day! I haven’t got a job anymore. Isn’t that swell? They’ll take me back any time I want a job, and that’ll be when Hell freezes over.”

“Um,” said Ellen.

“The Lord helps those who help themselves,” said Henry, “and here’s one man who just got both hands free.”

“Huh,” said Ellen.

Young Paul and Susan appeared on either side of her to peer bleakly at their father.

“What is this?” said Henry. “It’s like a funeral parlor.”

“Mom buried it, Pop,” said Paul hoarsely. “She buried Confido.”

“She did—she really did,” said Susan wonderingly. “Under the hydrangeas.”

“Henry, I had to,” said Ellen desolately, throwing her arms around him. “It was us or it.”

Henry pushed her away. “Buried it,” he murmured, shaking his head. “Buried it? All you had to do was turn it off.”

Slowly, he walked through the house and into the backyard, his family watching in awe. He hunted for the grave under the shrubs without asking for directions.

He opened the grave, wiped the dirt from Confido with his handkerchief, and put the earpiece in his ear, cocking his head and listening intently.

“It’s all right, it’s O.K.,” he said softly. He turned to Ellen. “What on earth got into you?”

“What did it say?” said Ellen. “What did it just say to you, Henry?”

He sighed and looked awfully tired. “It said somebody else would cash in on it sooner or later, if we didn’t.”

“Let them,” said Ellen.

“Why?” demanded Henry. He looked at her challengingly, but his firmness decayed quickly, and he looked away.

“If you’ve talked to Confido, you
know
why,” said Ellen. “Don’t you?”

Henry kept his eyes down. “It’ll sell, it’ll sell, it’ll sell,” he murmured. “My God, how it’ll sell.”

“It’s a direct wire to the worst in us, Henry,” said Ellen. She burst into tears. “Nobody should have that, Henry, nobody! That little voice is loud enough as it is.”

An autumn silence, muffled in moldering leaves, settled over the yard, broken only by Henry’s faint whistling through his teeth. “Yeah,” he said at last. “I know.”

He removed Confido from his ear, and laid it gently in its grave once more. He kicked dirt in on top of it.

“What’s the last thing it said, Pop?” said Paul.

Henry grinned wistfully. “‘I’ll be seeing you, sucker. I’ll be seeing you.’”

The word
snafu
, derived from the initials of
situation normal, all fouled up
, was welcomed into the American language during World War II, and remains a useful part of the language today.
Fubar
, a closely related word, was coined at about the same time, and is now all but forgotten.
Fubar
is worthy of a better fate, meaning as it does
fouled up beyond all recognition
. It is a particularly useful and interesting word in that it describes a misfortune brought about not by malice but by administrative accidents in some large and complex organization.

Fuzz Littler, for instance, was fubar in the General Forge and Foundry Company. He was familiar with the word
fubar
—had to hear it only once to know it fit him like a pair of stretch nylon bikini shorts. He was fubar in the Ilium Works of GF&F, which consisted of five hundred and twenty-seven numbered buildings. He became fubar in the classic way, which is to say that he was the victim of a temporary arrangement that became permanent.

Fuzz Littler belonged to the Public Relations Department, and all the public relations people were supposed to be in Building 22. But Building 22 was full up when Fuzz came to work, so they found a temporary desk for Fuzz in an office by the elevator machinery on the top floor of Building 181.

Building 181 had nothing to do with public relations. With the exception of Fuzz’s one-man operation, it was devoted entirely to research into semiconductors. Fuzz shared the office and a typist with a crystallographer named Dr. Lomar Horthy. Fuzz stayed there for eight years, a freak to those he was among, a ghost to those he should have been among. His superiors bore him no malice. They simply kept forgetting about him.

Fuzz did not quit for the simple and honorable reason that he was the sole support of his very sick mother. But the price of being passively fubar was high. Inevitably, Fuzz became listless, cynical, and profoundly introverted.

And then, at the start of Fuzz’s ninth year with the company, when Fuzz himself was twenty-nine, Fate took a hand. Fate sent grease from the Building 181 cafeteria up the elevator shaft. The grease collected on the elevator machinery, caught fire, and Building 181 burned to the ground.

But there still wasn’t any room for Fuzz in Building 22, where he belonged, so they fixed him up a temporary office in the basement of Building 523, clear at the end of the company bus line.

Building 523 was the company gym.

One nice thing, anyway—nobody could use the gym facilities except on weekends and after five in the afternoon, so Fuzz didn’t have to put up with people swimming and bowling and dancing and playing basketball around him while he was trying to work. Sounds of playfulness would have been not only distracting but almost too mocking to bear. Fuzz, caring for his sick mother, had never had time to play in all his fubar days.

Another nice thing was that Fuzz had finally achieved the rank of supervisor. He was so isolated out in the gym that he couldn’t borrow anybody else’s typist. Fuzz had to have a girl all his own.

Now Fuzz was sitting in his new office, listening to the showerheads dribble on the other side of the wall and waiting for the new girl to arrive.

It was nine o’clock in the morning.

Fuzz jumped. He heard the great, echoing
ka-boom
of the entrance door slamming shut upstairs. He assumed that the new girl had entered the building, since not another soul in the world had any business there.

It was not necessary for Fuzz to guide the new girl across the basketball court, past the bowling alleys, down the iron stairway, and over the duckboards to his office door. The buildings and grounds people had marked the way with arrows, each arrow bearing the legend
GENERAL COMPANY RESPONSE SECTION, PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPARTMENT
.

Fuzz had been the General Company Response Section of the Public Relations Department during his entire fubar career with the company. As that section he wrote replies to letters that were addressed simply to the General Forge and Foundry Company at large, letters that couldn’t logically be referred to any company operation in particular. Half the letters didn’t even make sense. But no matter how foolish and rambling the letters might be, it was Fuzz’s duty to reply to them warmly, to prove what the Public Relations Department proved tirelessly—that the General Forge and Foundry Company had a heart as big as all outdoors.

Now the footsteps of Fuzz’s new girl were coming down the stairway cautiously. She didn’t have much faith in what
the arrows said, apparently. Her steps were hesitant, were sometimes light enough to be on tiptoe.

There was the sound of a door opening, and the open door loosed a swarm of tinny, nightmarish little echoes. The girl had made a false turn, then, had mistakenly opened the door to the swimming pool.

She let the door fall shut with a
blam
.

On she came again, back on the right path. The duckboards creaked and squished under her. She knocked on the door of the General Company Response Section of the Public Relations Department.

Fuzz opened the office door.

Fuzz was thunderstruck. Smiling up at him was the merriest, prettiest little girl he’d ever seen. She was a flawless little trinket, a freshly minted woman, surely not a day older than eighteen.

“Mr. Littler?” she said.

“Yes?” said Fuzz.

“I’m Francine Pefko.” She inclined her sweet head in enchanting humility. “You’re my new supervisor.”

Fuzz was almost speechless with embarrassment, for here was infinitely more girl than the General Company Response Section could handle with any grace. Fuzz had assumed that he would be sent a dispirited and drab woman, an unimaginative drudge who could be glumly content with a fubar supervisor in fubar surroundings. He had not taken into account the Personnel Department’s card machines, to whom a girl was simply a girl.

“Come in—come in,” said Fuzz emptily.

Francine entered the miserable little office, still smiling, vibrant with optimism and good health. She had obviously
just joined the company, for she carried all the pamphlets that new employees were given on their first day.

And, like so many girls on their first day, Francine was what one of her pamphlets would call
overdressed for work
. The heels of her shoes were much too slender and high. Her dress was frivolous and provocative, and she was a twinkling constellation of costume jewels.

“This is nice,” she said.

“It is?” said Fuzz.

“Is this my desk?” she said.

“Yes,” said Fuzz. “That’s it.”

She sat down springily in the revolving posture chair that was hers, stripped the cover from her typewriter, twittered her fingers over the keys. “I’m ready to go to work any time you are, Mr. Littler,” she said.

“Yes—all righty,” said Fuzz. He dreaded setting to work, for there was no way in which he could glamorize it. In showing this pert creature what his work was, he was going to display to her the monumental pointlessness of himself and his job.