The Broom of the System (37 page)

“....”

“And this goes on until about the eighth or ninth month of Patrice’s pregnancy, and finally she and Foamwhistle get absolutely demolished in the preliminary round of a marginally world-class tournament in Dayton, by two eight-year-old contract bridge prodigies who wear matching beanies with propellers on top, and who deny Patrice and Foamwhistle even one trick, which represents a true thumping of ass, in bridge, and Patrice comes home, huge with child, and wildly frazzled, and deeply humiliated, and immediately on her arrival she runs into the east wing and up the tower stairs and pounds on the iron door of the children’s impregnable ward, pleading for entry, and apparently little Lenore on the other side pounds back, but Stonecipher Beadsman appears at the door and says that Patrice is obviously in no condition to have anything but a bad effect on the children, who are at this point undergoing a battery of intricate standardized psychological tests administered by Miss Malig to help see which one is best suited to assume control of Stonecipheco one day, and the tests are at the final and most critical stage, Stonecipher says, and so he demands that Patrice return to the bridge bungalow with Foamwhistle, to practice, and he orders Foamwhistle to keep her confined as best he can, and so she’s installed back in the bungalow with only a card table and some decks of cards, and of course Foamwhistle.

“And to Foamwhistle’s enormous consternation and pity Patrice begins beating her head against the edge of the card table, crying out that if she can’t see the children she’s going to die, and she’s totally hysterical, and in a very bad way, and Foamwhistle’s heart almost breaks—that there is some sort of ambiguous emotional connection between Patrice and Foamwhistle is by this time hardly open to doubt—and his heart is breaking, and he decides to do his best to help Patrice see the children, at least for a moment, and he asks her what he can do to help. And Patrice looks at him with doe-like gratitude and trust, and tells him that she’s been thinking, and that if he can just somehow arrange to get one of the outside windows of the children’s east-wing nursery fortress unlocked, she can scale the white trellis running up the outer wall of the east wing and pop in to see the children, and touch them, if only briefly, before anyone can stop her. A really bad idea, for a woman huge with child, and actually, you are probably beginning to intuit, an ominous and disastrous idea. But Foamwhistle, who is vicariously frazzled by Patrice’s clear emotional distress, unwisely agrees to do it. And so he waits until the children’s nap time, and then goes to the nursery fortress and shouts through the door to Miss Malig that Patrice is asleep, too, and that he wants to come in and give Miss Malig a contract bridge lesson, and also maybe fool around, a bit—who knows what all was going on by that time—and Miss Malig lets him in, and at some point, when her attention is diverted, Foamwhistle goes to the window and unlocks it and opens it ever so slightly—this was in May, by the way, of ‘72, just as I was moving to Scarsdale—and but anyhow Foamwhistle slips out of the ever-so-slightly opened window a card—the Queen of Spades—which is the pre-arranged signal to Patrice that all is set, and the card flutters down through the soft May air to Patrice, there in her white dress at the bottom of the trellis.”

“Are you bullshitting me, here, R.V.? I mean come on.”

“Since I sense impatience on your part, I’ll make a long story short by saying that Patrice attempts to scale the trellis to the open window, and that, near the top, her pregnant weight pulls the troublingly weak and unsteady trellis away from the tower wall, and the trellis breaks, and, with a shriek, Patrice falls a significantly and disastrously long way to the ground, and lands on her pregnant belly, and spontaneously gives explosive birth to LaVache, which is to say Stonecipher, who lands several yards away in a flowerbed, minus a leg, the leg in question, which was tom off in LaVache’s explosive ejaculation from Patrice’s womb, and both infant and mother are grievously hurt, and in a horrible way, but Foamwhistle hears Patrice’s shriek and runs to the window and looks down and bites his knuckle in grief and relocks the window and calls ambulances and fire engines and rushes down to administer the appropriate sustaining first-aid, and Patrice and LaVache are rushed to the hospital, and both survive, but Patrice is now hopelessly emotionally troubled, out of her head, to be more exact, and she has to be institutionalized, and spends the rest of the time between then and now in and out of institutions, and is as a matter of fact in one now, in Wisconsin.”

“Shit on fire.”

“In any event, hence LaVache’s leglessness.”

“Holy shit.”

“And once Patrice is psychologically out of the picture—about which Stonecipher the father apparently feels little guilt, since he, presumably through the filter of Miss Malig’s erotic spell, had already perceived Patrice as off her nut for some time—once she’s out of the house, more or less for good, the physical and emotional isolation of the children gradually stops, and Miss Malig eventually lets them live semi-normal, childish lives, including Little League and Brown ies and slumber parties, et cetera, when they’re not busy being tested, but in all events by this time all sorts of damage has been done, to the family and the individual family-members.”

“Not to mention the poor little satanic sucker’s leg.”

“Right.”

“Christ on a Kawasaki.”

“Fnoof.”

“....”

“Lenore tell you all that?”

“I think we’re getting close. I sense the closeness of Cleveland. Can you smell that? A smell like removing the lid from a pot of something that’s been left in one’s refrigerator just a little too long?”

“Can’t say as I smell anything but beer and Wrigley’s Spearmint, R.V.”

“I’m just acutely sensitive to the odor of Cleveland, I suppose. I have a monstrously sensitive sense of smell.”

“....”

“Though not as sensitive as some people I could name.”

“So what books have y‘all published? Have I likely read some books you put out?”

“We’re definitely getting close. See all the dead fish? The density of the fish goes up significantly as we approach shore. It looks as if I’m to be spared a sludge-death yet again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“....”

“So you think I can get a temporary room at this house Lenore lives at, right?”

“I’m practically positive. The young lady who lives directly below Lenore and her roommate Ms. Mandible will be involuntarily out of her apartment for at least three months, guaranteed. Mrs. Tissaw will be predictably anxious to ensure occupancy and so rent payment for that period.”

“How come you know for sure the little lady’s gone for three months?”

“She works for Lenore’s sister, Clarice, who now owns a chain of tanning parlors in the area. There was a horrible accident. The girl will be all right, but will require at least three months of hospitalization and continual Noxzema treatments.”

“You mean ... ?”

“Yes. Tanning accident.”

“Bad news.”

“Yes. But at least an available apartment, cheap. And your assignment with the firm cannot possibly last for more than three months, barring utter disaster.”

“OK by me.”

“Andrew, listen, may I ask a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Will Mindy be coming out to join you? You have told her the developments—she does know where you’re going to be, doesn’t she? What exactly is the Mindy situation?”

“R.V., look and listen. It’s like I told you, I just felt like I had to get out for a while. Breathe some temporarily Melinda-Sue-free air. She and I had a bit of a tiff before I drove up to school, I make no bones. But it’s more’n that. To my mind there’s just this temporary lack of wonderfulness about our whole relationship.”

“....”

“So things are just temporarily up in the air.”

“....”

“And no, I didn’t exactly call her from school, I didn’t tell her I’d run into y‘all and was coming out here to do some work. But she’ll be able to find out when she wants. I had to leave my car with Coach Zandagnio, who was my lacrosse coach, and sort of my mentor, at school, and I told him the whole story. And Melinda-Sue knows that if anybody knows where I would have gone from school, it’s old Stenetore, ’cause she knew him too, he went to our wedding when she got out of school; he gave us a gravy boat.”

“You played lacrosse at Amherst?”

“I was a lacrosse-playing fool.”

“Always struck me as a staggeringly savage game.”

“A truly and completely kick-ass game. A game that kicks ass.”

“I see.”

“....”

“Lenore darling, are you awake?”

“Fnoof.”

“Girl can do some serious sleeping.”

“May I be explicit, here, for a moment, Wang-Dang?”

“Draw and fire, R. V.”

“I am passionately, fiercely, and completely in love with Lenore. She is not quite as explicitly my fiancée as I may have inadvertently led you to believe in the Flange, but she is nevertheless mine. I have a bit of a jealousy problem, I’m told. My setting in motion the process of your possibly temporarily sharing a building with Lenore, actually, to be honest, my inviting you to come and temporarily enter our lives and work for Frequent and Vigorous, at all, was predicated on the understandable assumption that you were emotionally involved with and attached to Mindy Metalman, a woman who, just let me say in all candor, strikes me as the sort of woman an attachment to whom on, for example, my part would leave me completely uninterested in any and all of the world’s other females. Do you get my drift?”

“Go on.”

“Then the drift now becomes a tide, and I say that, in light of what I now know, given what seems to be at least a partial and temporary unattachment to your wife, Mindy, a past that includes an acquaintance with Lenore, under whatever circumstances, prior to my own, and at least clear verbal evidence of vigorous hormonal activity on your part, I feel I can be truly comfortable only in the context of an explicit recognition on your part of the fact that Lenore is mine, and thus out of bounds, that as I am to be regarded as a sort of brother, or uncle, whatever you will, so Lenore is to be regarded by you as a sort of sister, or aunt, with whom any sort of attempted romantic involvement is and would be entirely unthinkable.”

“....”

“There.”

“Damned if you’re not the most articulate little rooster I ever heard crow.”

“....”

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a tiny bit hurt by the idea that I might do something like what you’re afraid of to a Psi Phi brother, to an Amherst uncle. But to put your mind at rest ... your mind isn’t quite at rest, here, is it?”

“It can be put so with utter ease, by you.”

“OK, then let me just say, right here, that I give you my word of honor as an alumni of the single finest undergraduate institution in the land that I will not harbor any but the most honorable of thoughts toward your woman.”

“I’m all too aware that it’s silly, but could you promise not to take her away?”

“R.V., I promise not to take her away.”

“Thank you. Well there. That’s out of the way.”

“You all right? Your forehead’s wet as hell. You want to use my hankie?”

“No thank you. I have my own.”

“Gentlemen, the captain asks that you please refasten your seat belts for landing.”

“My ears are rumbling like mad.”

“You wouldn’t by any chance want to help me with my particular belt, here, ma‘am, would you?”

“Ixnay—ilotpay.”

“....”

“Fnoof.”

“Lenore.”

“Fnoof. What?”

“Damned if you can’t sleep up a storm, Lenore.”

“What time is it?”

“We’re apparently preparing to land.”

“Boy am I tired.”

“Sweet dreams?”

“I’m not sure. My mouth tastes like a barn. I would kill for a shower. ”

“Have some gum.”

“Want to try some Skoal?”

“Not for anything in the world.”

“Lenore, my ears are in their own private hell.”

“Poor Rick. What can I do to help?”

“Perhaps a bit of a temple massage ...”

“Let me just get my big old carcass out of the way, here ...”

By the time Rick dropped Lenore and Wang-Dang Lang off near the Tissaws’ it was almost four, and beginning to mist a little, so that even though it wasn’t very cold Lenore could see her breath, and Lang’s. Rick dashed off to attend to some affairs at Frequent and Vigorous, but promised, as he dropped them a few hundred yards from the oral surgeon’s big gray house, to be back as soon as possible to take them both to dinner.

“Super,” said Lenore.

“Straight up,” said Lang.

The reason Rick had to drop Lenore and Lang off near, rather than at, the Tissaws’ was that the street all around the house was totally clogged with cars, and especially vans. A lot of the vans were white, with the ornate letters P.W.G. on the sides, in red. Lenore had never seen the street so crowded.

“I’ve just never seen the street so crowded,” Lenore said.

“Don’t suppose all these folks are here to try to sublet Misty Schwartz’s room, do you?” said Lang.

“Not a chance.”

“Must be a really bitching party going on around here, then,” said Lang.

“On a Tuesday afternoon?”

“My kind of neighborhood.”

As they went up the walk, Lenore saw that the Tissaws’ front door was propped partly open by a network of thick black cables that led out from the backs of two of the white P.W.G. vans—vans parked halfway onto the grass of the Tissaws’ lawn—and disappeared into the house. Lenore all of a sudden heard what was unmistakably Candy Mandible shout something from her third-story window, a window that looked strangely lit up, right now, and actually had a bit of a tiny rainbow-doughnut around it in the cool wet air, and then from the front porch Lenore heard Candy running down the stairs of the house to meet them at the door.