The Broom of the System (36 page)

“Look, R.V., does Lenore remember me or not? Like I said, I’m just positive it was her I met that night I met my wife. I was a little bit trashed, but still.”

“She hasn’t said anything to me. An appropriate context for discussing the issue didn’t arise, last night. She fell asleep almost immediately.”

“Those Howard Johnson’s beds are comfortable all right. Howard Johnson’s kicks ass. I appreciated the room, and the dinner, and the use of the razor. The Flange just about cleaned me out. I can’t believe I was too stupid to bring more money up with me.”

“Not a problem at all. Stonecipheco will absorb it. Consider it an advance.”

“Except the thing is, I’ve been thinkin’ about it ... hey, thanks, looks great. The beer, too. Heh-heh.”

“....”

“Thank you, miss. I believe that will be all for now.”

“Just ring if you want anything.”

“Thank you.”

“Just ring, she says. She’s a tease, ain’t she? Lord, though, look at that. That’s a first-rate pooper, under that skirt.”

“Crusts, again. The girl seems incapable of removing crusts.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Please go on with what you were saying.”

“Well, I was thinkin’ about the night I think I met Lenore, the night I met Melinda-Sue, and what happened was me and this other guy, who turned out later on to be a real loser, we went over to Mount Holyoke, and kind of barged on into these girls’ rooms, for a kind of fraternity thing. I don’t quite remember what.”

“....”

“And I remember I think Lenore got pissed off. She was real young and I don’t think she knew the whole story. I remember she threw a shoe at the guy I was with.”

“A shoe?”

“Yup. And she told Melinda-Sue she had ugly feet.”

“Shoes and feet, again.”

“Yup. So I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to act, if I should just pretend like I don’t know her, either, or what. I can’t tell if she’s still pissed off after all these years or not.”

“Real, sustained anger in Lenore is quite rare, I’ve found. Embarrassment, though, is not. I would be willing to bet that Lenore is simply embarrassed. When she’s embarrassed about something, she tends to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

“You think that’s why she sort of acts like she don’t remember me, from that night, or Melinda-Sue?”

“It’s very possible.”

“You say she works at Frequent and Vigorous too? So I’ll be workin’ with her?”

“Not directly. As of before we left, she answered telephones, at the Frequent and Vigorous switchboard, in the lobby, downstairs. But on this trip I’ve had a bit of an inspiration, I think.”

“An inspiration?”

“Yes. I think I’ve come to see that the switchboard is not a full-time place for a woman of Lenore’s capacities. She is chafing, I’m almost certain.”

“Chafing?”

“Yes. I’ve come to see that it all adds up. The context is right. Lenore is chafing. She likes stories. To the extent that she understands herself, it’s as having something like a literary sensibility. And you and I, here most significantly I, will at least for a while be occupied with the Stonecipheco project account. The crux is that I plan to put Lenore on my personal staff, part-time, as a reader.”

“A reader?”

“Yes, of pieces submitted to the high-quality literary review of which I am editor, the
Frequent Review.
She can weed out the more obviously pathetic or inappropriate submissions, and save me valuable weeding-time, which you and I can spend on the Corfu project.”

“Hell of an idea, R.V.”

“I rather think so myself.”

“Yes indeedy.”

“Of course I’ll have to make sure that her sensibilities are keened to precisely the right pitch for the Review ...”

“So we’ll be workin’ with her, but not exactly with her.”

“As far as you go, that is right.”

“Which works out good, because I’m not supposed to say what it is I’m workin’ on, to her.”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“And if she asks, I have to say I’m ... let me look at this ... I’m supposed to say I’m translating this thing called ‘Norslan: The Third-World Herbicide That Likes People’ into idiomatic modern Greek.”

“Correct.”

“But except we still haven’t come to why exactly I have to say all this shit if she asks. If she’s just an employee, how come it matters? And what does she care if we’re tryin’ to sell nuclear baby food on Corfu?”

“This is unfortunately not entirely clear to me, Andrew, and just let me say I’m far from qualmless about the whole situation.”

“....”

“You are of course already aware that Stonecipheco is controlled by the Beadsman family, to a nearly exhaustive extent, and I’ll now inform you that Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman has stipulated in our contract that Lenore not know what is up in terms of Frequent and Vigorous involvement in the project until he wishes her to.”

“And you don’t find that just a tinch unusual?”

“Charitable speculation about Mr. Beadsman’s reasoning might suggest that he doesn’t want to involve Lenore in any more unpleasantness than is necessary. Suffice to say that the whole Corfu marketing venture is bound up with some family turbulence that’s worrying Lenore a lot, right now. Which turbulence is the main reason she and I came to Amherst, at all, so that Lenore might speak with her brother ...”

“The kid we had dinner with at Aqua Vitae.”

“Yes. Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman.”

“He was pretty goddamn wild, I thought. ‘Course I have to admit I was kind of wasted. We drank all that in the Flange, and then you dragged me all over hell’s half acre through those crowds in the forest. Shit I drank went to my head and roosted. He was wild, though, I could tell.”

“He’s had rather a rough time of it.”

“Satanic little dung beetle, too.”

“Dung beetle?”

“Little dude looked like the devil. And what was all that about talkin’ about his leg like it was another person? He would like address comments to his fucking leg. What was all that about?”

“Lenore’s brother has only one leg. One of LaVache’s legs is artificial.”

“No shit.”

“None whatsoever. Couldn’t you tell?”

“He limped some, and he sat weird, but no.”

“He was wearing slacks at dinner. But he was wearing shorts when we first met him, on the hill. You didn’t see his leg then?”

“R.V., that hill got blacker than a panther’s ass when we got up top. The sun went right the hell down. It was darker than shit. I was wasted, too. I wouldn’t have been able to even see Lenore, if she hadn’t had that white dress on. And plus then I had to run right down to get my car over to Coach‘s, so I never really saw the sucker in shorts. I sure am sorry, though.”

“No need to be sorry. I was simply informing you of a fact.”

“Christ. What happened to his leg, then? How come they chopped it off?”

“No one chopped his leg off. LaVache was minus a leg from birth.”

“No shit. What, like a birth defect or something?”

“Not exactly.”

“What, then?”

“God, we’re over Lake Erie, now. This is my least favorite part of the trip, by far. My ears are also hurting like hell.”

“Too bad. That’s Lake Erie, huh?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Water’s kind of a funny color.”

“I’m sure whatever percentage of the lake is water is a perfectly lovely color. The percentage is however unfortunately quite small.”

“How come there’s no waves? How come the water doesn’t move?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“So what’s this about the kid’s leg, then? Legs don’t just disappear for no reason.”

“That’s obviously true.”

“....”

“Lenore is still asleep, isn’t she?”

“Fnoof.”

“Yup.”

“Lenore hates to be told about.”

“The leg story isn’t about her, though, is it?”

“What happened was that after the first three Beadsman children were born, Mrs. Beadsman’s health apparently got a bit ticklish. Nothing physically major—just a touch of anemia, or something like that. Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman III, Lenore’s father, however, through a troublingly ambiguous process of reasoning, came to the conclusion that Mrs. Beadsman was no longer entirely able to care for her children adequately, so at a certain point he hired a governess, a Miss Malig, a stunningly beautiful woman—she’s now an unbelievable battle-ax, with calves like chums, but back then she was apparently stunningly beautiful—which hiring itself represented a significant corporate coup, because Miss Malig had only the year before been named Miss Gerber in the annual Gerber Quality Brands beauty pageant, and Mr. Robert Gerber, Mr. Beadsman’s old college friend—Amherst, by the way, ‘61—and sworn corporate enemy, had been wild about her, and there had been rumors that he was going to divorce his striking Brazilian wife Paquita to devote all his time to the pursuit of Nancy Malig, but Mr. Beadsman, somehow, through maneuvers to this day unclear, spirited her away, and installed her in his home, at an exorbitant salary, ostensibly to take care of Clarice and John and Lenore.”

“What does all this have to do with legs?”

“What happened was that this hiring of Nancy Malig—with whom by the way Mr. Beadsman almost certainly began having an immoderate sexual affair that may very well continue to this day— and the at least partial separation from her children such a hiring represented and entailed, made Mrs. Beadsman, who had always been naturally rather melancholy, intensely sad. And the intense sadness had further non-good consequences for her health, now by implication emotional health, as well as physical. And so Mr. Beadsman, by now inarguably to some extent under Miss Malig’s erotic spell, and in any event naturally disposed to be very weird indeed about his children, and obsessed with the future of the family, and of Stonecipheco, Inc., even though at that point he was still only a vice president, since his father had not yet died in a Jell-O accident, and in any event disposed to be constantly giving his three children all sorts of specially developed standardized tests, academic and psychological, to begin the process of determining on whom the mantle of corporate power would someday devolve, became convinced somehow that Mrs. Beadsman’s mere presence was a harmful thing for the children, and thus the family, and thus the Company, and he began to take active steps to keep the children away from her altogether, which steps consisted of, a, expanding and combining the three children’s rooms into an immense impregnable combination nursery and playroom and bedroom and dining room, et cetera, with a heavy boltable iron door, and its own restroom facilities, and a dumbwaiter link to the kitchen, and so on, a maneuver which in intended effect isolated the children and Miss Malig in one wing of the Beadsman home in Shaker Heights, the east wing, an almost tower-ish extension of the house, with a lovely white trellis draped with dusky green vines running up the outer wall to the windows, a wing I’ve obviously personally seen, given this description. So the children, under Miss Malig’s malevolent eye, were isolated from the rest of the house, through which the now more than a little troubled Mrs. Beadsman would roam, in a flowing white cotton dress, often in the company of Mrs. Lenore Beadsman, Mr. Beadsman’s grandmother, who usually as a rule kept to her study, poring over meaningless tomes she’d been exposed to in her days as a student, which she still in effect was, a student, that is Mrs. Lenore Beadsman kept to her study until the mother-separated-from-children situation began really to assert itself, and old Lenore began to perceive the evilness of the Stonecipher-Malig liaison, and so would roam the house with Mrs. Beadsman, Patrice, also in a flowing white dress, trying to help Patrice think of ways to get in to see the children.”

“....”

“That is they roamed until Mr. Beadsman took step
b,
which consisted of demanding that Patrice Beadsman become a world-class contract bridge player—she’d been quite a spectacular bridge player in college—so as to get her out of the house and away from the children and him and Miss Malig. And so he arranges to have built a special little bungalow in the back of the house, for Patrice to by and large live in, and to practice bridge in, every moment, and he enters her in all sorts of world-class bridge tournaments, and hires a coach and partner for her, Blanchard Foamwhistle, a world-class contract bridge player, and, interestingly enough, the father of the man who is now Mr. Beadsman’s executive secretary at Stonecipheco. And Foamwhistle is paid an exorbitant salary, and he and Patrice are confined for days at a time to the bridge bungalow, ostensibly working on bridge strategy and bridge theory, and soon Patrice becomes mysteriously once again pregnant, and it is to me unclear whether she became pregnant by Foamwhistle or by Mr. Beadsman, although Mr. Beadsman gave no indication that he suspected anything sexually amiss, and in any event announced his intention to name the baby—which baby would without a doubt, he maintained, be a boy—Stonecipher, and he instructs Miss Malig to set up another crib in the impregnable east wing fortress.”

“You got this shit down, don’t you?”

“You want your question answered or not?”

“I guess.”

“Well that’s what I’m attempting.”

“....”

“And so by this time Mrs. Beadsman’s pregnancy, with its attendant hormonal and general chemical consequences, together with the original unhappiness and troubles, together with the continued isolation of the children, who are as a matter of routine hustled right up to the east wing tower after school, while Foamwhistle, on Mr. Beadsman’s high-paid instructions, keeps Patrice confined as best he can in the bridge bungalow, together with the obviously planned additional isolation of the baby, too, when it’s born, all combine to make Mrs. Beadsman understandably even more intensely unhappy, and frantic, and disoriented, and emotionally not a little unwell. And this has truly disastrous consequences for her contract bridge, a game which you may or may not know demands a clear undistracted mind and nerves of steel and absolute emotional soundness, and Patrice and Foamwhistle lose in the first round of every single world-class bridge tournament they enter, even though Foamwhistle is acknowledged to be one of the world’s very finest contract bridge players, which gives you some idea of the truly pathetic state of Patrice’s bridge, and soon they no longer even legitimately qualify for the world-class tournaments, because they get annihilated all the time, but Stonecipher Beadsman persistently bribes and coerces various tournament officials into continuing to admit Patrice and Foamwhistle to the tournaments, which the already frazzled Patrice finds excruciatingly embarrassing, and so becomes even more frazzled, and so on.”