Franny and Zooey (16 page)

    Zooey abruptly placed his hands over his now quite damp face, left them there for an instant, then removed them. He refolded them. His voice picked up again, almost perfectly conversational in tone. "The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can't see why anybody--unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim--would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls --but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that-- but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God." Zooey here clapped his hands together-- only once, and not loud, and very probably in spite of himself. His hands were refolded across his chest almost, as it were, before the clap was out. "Oh, my God, what a mind!" he said. "Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don't say Solomon. Solomon would have had a few pithy words for the occasion. I'm not sure Socrates wouldn't have, for that matter. Crito, or somebody, would have managed to pull him aside just long enough to get a couple of well-chosen words for the record. But most of all, above everything else, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff. Why don't you think of these things? I mean it, Franny, I'm being serious. When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer--you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission. This was no St. Francis, with enough time to knock out a few canticles, or to preach to the birds, or to do any of the other endearing things so close to Franny Glass's heart. I'm being serious now, God damn it. How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou tryst-ing place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that--and you do--and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers." He suddenly sat up, shot forward, with an almost calisthenic-like swiftness, to look at Franny. His shirt was, in the familiar phrase, wringing wet. "If Jesus had intended the prayer to be used for--"

    Zooey broke off. He stared over at Franny's prostrate, face-down position on the couch, and heard, probably for the first time, the only partly stifled sounds of anguish coming from her. In an instant, he turned pale--pale with anxiety for Franny's condition, and pale, presumably, because failure had suddenly filled the room with its invariably sickening smell. The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white --unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favorite, bunny-loving sister's expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her--a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied in an awkward bow around its neck.

    He stared at Franny for a full minute, then got to his feet, with a little, uncharacteristically awkward movement of imbalance. He went, very slowly, over to his mother's writing table, on the other side of the room. And it was clear, on arrival, that he had no idea why he'd gone over to it. He seemed unfamiliar with the things on the table surface--the blotter with his filled-in "o"s, the ashtray with his cigar end in it-- and he turned around and looked at Franny again. Her sobbing had let up a bit, or seemed to have, but her body was in the same wretched, prostrate, face-down position. One arm was bent under her, caught under her, in a way that must have been acutely uncomfortable, if not rather painful. Zooey looked away from her, and then, not unbravely, back at her. He wiped his brow briefly with the palm of his hand, put the hand into his hip pocket to dry it, and said, "I'm sorry, Franny. I'm very sorry." But this formal apology only reactivated, reamplified, Franny's sobbing. He looked at her, fixedly, for another fifteen or twenty seconds. Then he left the room, via the hall, closing the doors behind him.

THE fresh-paint smell was now quite strong just outside the living room. The hall itself had not yet been painted, but newspapers had been strewn the entire length of the hardwood floor, and Zooey's first step--an indecisive, almost dazed one--left the imprint of his rubber heel on a sports-section photograph of Stan Musial holding up a fourteen-inch brook trout. On his fifth or sixth step, he barely missed colliding with his mother, who had just come out of her bedroom. "I thought you'd gone!" she said. She was carrying two laundered and folded cotton bedspreads. "I thought I heard the front--" She broke off to take in Zooey's general appearance. "What is that? Prespiration?" she asked. Without waiting for a reply, she took Zooey by the arm and led him--almost swept him, as if he were as light as a broom--into the daylight coming out of her freshly painted bedroom. "It is prespiration." Her tone couldn't have held more wonder and censure if Zooey's pores had been exuding crude oil. "What in the world have you been doing? You just had a bath. What have you been doing?"

    "I'm late now, Fatty. C'mon. One side," Zooey said. A Philadelphia highboy had been moved out into the hall, and, together with Mrs. Glass's person, it blocked Zooey's passage. "Who put this monstrosity out here?" he said, glancing at it.

    "Why are you perspiring like that?" Mrs. Glass demanded, staring first at the shirt, then at him. "Did you talk to Franny? Where've you just been? The living room?"

    "Yes, yes, the living room. And if I were you, incidentally, I'd go look in there for a second. She's crying. Or was when I left." He tapped his mother on the shoulder. "C'mon, now. I mean it. Get out of the--"

    "She's crying? Again? Why? What happened?"

    "I don't know, for Chrissake--I hid her Pooh books. Come on, Bessie, step aside, please. I'm in a hurry."

    Mrs. Glass, still staring at him, let him pass. Then, almost at once, she made for the living room, at a clip that scarcely gave her leave to call back over her shoulder, "Change that shirt, young man!"

    If Zooey heard this, he gave no sign. At the far end of the hall, he went into the bedroom he had once shared with his twin brothers, which now, in 1955, was his alone. But he stayed in his room for not more than two minutes. When he came out, he had on the same sweaty shirt. There was, however, a slight but fairly distinct change in his appearance. He had acquired a cigar, and lighted it. And for some reason he had an unfolded white handkerchief draped over his head, possibly to ward off rain, or hail, or brimstone.

    He went directly across the hall and into the room his two eldest brothers had shared.

    This was the first time in almost seven years that Zooey had, in the ready-made dramatic idiom, "set foot" in Seymour's and Buddy's old room. Discounting a totally negligible incident a couple of years earlier, when he had methodically dragged the entire apartment for a mislaid or "stolen" tennis-racket press.

    He closed the door behind him as tightly as possible, and with an expression implying that the absence of a key in the lock met with his disapproval. He gave the room itself scarcely a glance, once he was inside it. Instead, he turned around and deliberately faced a sheet of what had once been snow-white beaverboard that was nailed uncompromisingly to the back of the door. It was a mammoth specimen, very nearly as long and as wide as the door itself. One could have believed that its whiteness, smoothness, and expanse had at one time cried out rather plaintively for India ink and block lettering. Certainly not in vain, if so. Every inch of visible surface of the board had been decorated, with four somewhat gorgeous-looking columns of quotations from a variety of the world's literatures. The lettering was minute, but jet-black and passionately legible, if just a trifle fancy in spots, and without blots or erasures. The workmanship was no less fastidious even at the bottom of the board, near the doorsill, where the two penmen, each in his turn, had obviously lain on their stomachs. No attempt whatever had been made to assign quotations or authors to categories or groups of any kind. So that to read the quotations from top to bottom, column by column, was rather like walking through an emergency station set up in a flood area, where, for example, Pascal had been unribaldly bedded down with Emily Dickinson, and where, so to speak, Baudelaire's and Thomas a Kempis's toothbrushes were hanging side by side.

    Zooey, standing in just close enough, read the top entry in the left-hand column, then went on reading downward. From his expression, or lack of it, he might have been killing time on a railway platform reading a billboard advertisement for Dr. Scholl's foot pads.

    You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.

    Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered [underlined by one of the cal-ligraphers] in success and failure; for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.

    Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahman. They who work selfishly for results are miserable. --"Bhagavad Gita."

    It loved to happen. --Marcus Aurelius.

    O snail Climb Mount Fuji,

    But slowly, slowly! --Issa.

    Concerning the Gods, there are those who deny the very existence of the Godhead; others say that it exists, but neither bestirs nor concerns itself nor has forethought for anything. A third party attribute to it existence and forethought, but only for great and heavenly matters, not for anything that is on earth. A fourth party admit things on earth as well as in heaven, but only in general, and not with respect to each individual. A fifth, of whom were Ulysses and Socrates, are those that cry: -- "I move not without Thy knowledge!" --Epictetus.

    The love interest and climax would come when a man and a lady, both strangers, got to talking together on the train going back east.

    "Well," said Mrs. Croot, for it was she, "what did you think of the Canyon?"

    "Some cave," replied her escort.

    "What a funny way to put it!" replied Mrs. Croot. "And now play me something." --Ring Lardner ("How to Write Short Stories").

    God instructs the heart, not by ideas but by pains and contradictions. --De Caussade.

    "Papa!" shrieked Kitty, and shut his mouth with her hands.

    "Well, I won't . . ." he said. "I'm very, very pleased. . . . Oh, what a fool I am. . . ."

    He embraced Kitty, kissed her face, her hand, her face again, and made the sign of the cross over her.

    And there came over Levin a new feeling of love for this man, till then so little known to him, when he saw how slowly and tenderly Kitty kissed his muscular hand. --"Anna Karenina."

    "Sir, we ought to teach the people that they are doing wrong in worshipping the images and pictures in the temple."

    Ramakrishna: "That's the way with you Calcutta people: you want to teach and preach. You want to give millions when you are beggars yourselves. . . . Do you think God does not know that he is being worshipped in the images and pictures? If a worshipper should make a mistake, do you not think God will know his intent?" --"The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna."

    "Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said. --Kafka.

    The happiness of being with people. --Kakfa.

    St. Francis de Sales' prayer: "Yes, Father! Yes, and always, Yes!"

    Zui-Gan called out to himself every day, "Master."

    Then he answered himself, "Yes, sir."

    And then he added, "Become sober."

    Again he answered, "Yes, sir."

    "And after that," he continued, "do not be deceived by others."

    "Yes, sir; yes, sir," he replied. --Mu-Mon-Kwan.

    The lettering on the beaverboard being as small as it was, this last entry appeared well in the upper fifth of its column, and Zooey could have gone on reading for another five minutes or so, staying in the same column, without having to bend his knees. He didn't choose to. He turned around, not abruptly, and walked over and sat down at his brother Seymour's desk-- pulling out the little straight chair as though it were something he did every day. He placed his cigar on the right-hand edge of the desk, bum-ing end out, leaned forward on his elbows, and covered his face with his hands.