play,” she said. Her voice sounded funny when she said it.
“Yes, I will. I won’t go way before that. You think I wanna miss the play?” I said. “What I’ll do, I’ll probably stay at Mr. Antolini’s house till maybe Tuesday night. Then I’ll come home. If I get a chance, I’ll phone ya.”
“Here,” old Phoebe said. She was trying to give me the dough, but she couldn’t find my hand.
“Where?”
She put the dough in my hand.
“Hey, I don’t need all this,” I said. “Just give me two bucks, is all. No kidding — Here.” I tried to give it back to her, but she wouldn’t take it.
“You can take it all. You can pay me back. Bring it to the play.”
“How much is it, for God’s sake?”
“Eight dollars and eighty-five cents. Sixty-five cents. I spent some.”
Then, all of a sudden, I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. I did it so nobody could hear me, but I did it. It scared hell out of old Phoebe when I started doing it, and she came over and tried to make me stop, but once you get started, you can’t just stop on a goddam dime. I was still sitting on the edge of the bed when I did it, and she put her old arm around my neck, and I put my arm around her, too, but I still couldn’t stop for a long time. I thought I was going to choke to death or something. Boy, I scared hell out of poor old Phoebe. The damn window was open and everything, and I could feel her shivering and all, because all she had on was her pajamas. I tried to make her get back in bed, but she wouldn’t go. Finally I stopped. But it certainly took me a long, long time. Then I finished buttoning my coat and all. I told her I’d keep in touch with her. She told me I could sleep with her if I wanted to, but I said no, that I’d better beat it, that Mr. Antolini was waiting for me and all. Then I took my hunting hat out of my coat pocket and gave it to her. She likes those kind of crazy hats. She didn’t want to take it, but I made her. I’ll bet she slept with it on. She really likes those kind of hats. Then I told her again I’d give her a buzz if I got a chance, and then I left.
It was a helluva lot easier getting out of the house than it was getting in, for some reason. For one thing, I didn’t give much of a damn any more if they caught me. I really didn’t. I figured if they caught me, they caught me. I almost wished they did, in a way.
I walked all the way downstairs, instead of taking the elevator. I went down the back stairs. I nearly broke my neck on about ten million garbage pails, but I got out all right. The elevator boy didn’t even see me. He probably still thinks I’m up at the Dicksteins’.
24
Mr. and Mrs. Antolini had this very swanky apartment over on Sutton Place, with two steps that you go down to get in the living room, and a bar and all. I’d been there quite a few times, because after I left Elkton Hills Mr. Antoilni came up to our house for dinner quite frequently to find out how I was getting along. He wasn’t married then. Then when he got married, I used to play tennis with he and Mrs. Antolini quite frequently, out at the West Side Tennis Club, in Forest Hills, Long Island. Mrs. Antolini, belonged there. She was lousy with dough. She was about sixty years older than Mr. Antolini, but they seemed to get along quite well. For one thing, they were both very intellectual, especially Mr. Antolini except that he was more witty than intellectual when you were with him, sort of like D.B. Mrs. Antolini was mostly serious. She had asthma pretty bad. They both read all D.B.’s stories — Mrs. Antolini, too — and when D.B. went to Hollywood, Mr. Antolini phoned him up and told him not to go. He went anyway, though. Mr. Antolini said that anybody that could write like D.B. had no business going out to Hollywood. That’s exactly what I said, practically.
I would have walked down to their house, because I didn’t want to spend any of Phoebe’s Christmas dough that I didn’t have to, but I felt funny when I got outside. Sort of dizzy. So I took a cab. I didn’t want to, but I did. I had a helluva time even finding a cab.
Old Mr. Antolini answered the door when I rang the bell — after the elevator boy finally let me up, the bastard. He had on his bathrobe and slippers, and he had a highball in one hand. He was a pretty sophisticated guy, and he was a pretty heavy drinker. “Holden, m’boy!” he said. “My God, he’s grown another twenty inches. Fine to see you.”
“How are you, Mr. Antolini? How’s Mrs. Antolini?”
“We’re both just dandy. Let’s have that coat.” He took my coat off me and hung it up. “I expected to see a day-old infant in your arms. Nowhere to turn. Snowflakes in your eyelashes.” He’s a very witty guy sometimes. He turned around and yelled out to the kitchen, “Lillian! How’s the coffee coming?” Lillian was Mrs. Antolini’s first name.
“It’s all ready,” she yelled back. “Is that Holden? Hello, Holden!”
“Hello, Mrs. Antolini!”
You were always yelling when you were there. That’s because the both of them were never in the same room at the same time. It was sort of funny.
“Sit down, Holden,” Mr. Antolini said. You could tell he was a little oiled up. The room looked like they’d just had a party. Glasses were all over the place, and dishes with peanuts in them. “Excuse the appearance of the place,” he said. “We’ve been entertaining some Buffalo friends of Mrs. Antolini’s… Some buffaloes, as a matter of fact.”
I laughed, and Mrs. Antolini yelled something in to me from the kitchen, but I couldn’t hear her. “What’d she say?” I asked Mr. Antolini.
“She said not to look at her when she comes in. She just arose from the sack. Have a cigarette. Are you smoking now?”
“Thanks,” I said. I took a cigarette from the box he offered me. “Just once in a while. I’m a moderate smoker.”
“I’ll bet you are,” he said. He gave me a light from this big lighter off the table. “So. You and Pencey are no longer one,” he said. He always said things that way. Sometimes it amused me a lot and sometimes it didn’t. He sort of did it a little bit too much. I don’t mean he wasn’t witty or anything — he was — but sometimes it gets on your nerves when somebody’s always saying things like “So you and Pencey are no longer one.” D.B. does it too much sometimes, too.
“What was the trouble?” Mr. Antolini asked me. “How’d you do in English? I’ll show you the door in short order if you flunked English, you little ace composition writer.”
“Oh, I passed English all right. It was mostly literature, though. I only wrote about two compositions the whole term,” I said. “I flunked Oral Expression, though. They had this course you had to take, Oral Expression. That I flunked.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I didn’t feel much like going into It. I was still feeling sort of dizzy or something, and I had a helluva headache all of a sudden. I really did. But you could tell he was interested, so I told him a little bit about it. “It’s this course where each boy in class has to get up in class and make a speech. You know. Spontaneous and all. And if the boy digresses at all, you’re supposed to yell ‘Digression!’ at him as fast as you can. It just about drove me crazy. I got an F in it.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don’t know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all.”
“You don’t care to have somebody stick to the point when he tells you something?”
“Oh, sure! I like somebody to stick to the point and all. But I don’t like them to stick too much to the point. I don’t know. I guess I don’t like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. The boys that got the best marks in Oral Expression were the ones that stuck to the point all the time — I admit it. But there was this one boy, Richard Kinsella. He didn’t stick to the point too much, and they were always yelling ‘Digression!’ at him. It was terrible, because in the first place, he was a very nervous guy — I mean he was a very nervous guy — and his lips were always shaking whenever it was his time to make a speech, and you could hardly hear him if you were sitting way in the back of the room. When his lips sort of quit shaking a little bit, though, I liked his speeches better than anybody else’s. He practically flunked the course, though, too. He got a D plus because they kept yelling
