Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

Angela called. Dick asked after Robert and the baby. They were both asleep, Angela said, but Robert would be getting up soon. If he wanted she could wake him now. Dick told her to let him sleep.

He asked if she’d be working in the fall — she taught third grade in an all-black Tallahassee public school — but Angela was vague about it. It was very difficult, she said, to get someone really reliable to come in, and the baby was on a schedule which it might not be a good idea to upset just now.

Dick asked if Robert, who was on the Attorney General’s staff, was involved in that Ft. Myers business. (Recently there had been a ghetto revolt in the Gulf Coast town, and the local authorities had been pressing for the death sentence under Florida’s Anti-Sedition Act.) Angela told him they were both so busy now they didn’t discuss each other’s work much. In fact, she said, she didn’t really know what had happened in Ft. Myers because she hadn’t been reading the papers. Dick started to explain, but Angela broke in to say that she thought she heard a sound from the baby’s room. He held on while she went in to check.

The Sohnshilds were New Yorkers who had come to Florida in a spirit of missionary zeal, Robert believing it was more to the point to guarantee due process in the South than in New York. From the occasional references to him in the newspapers Dick knew that Robert was highly respected and very effective.

Oddly enough Dick Gibson had heard of the couple even before they became Mail Baggers; he had read an article about the Sohnshilds in Esquire in the early sixties. Angela, the article said, had graduated from Smith with a Magna in Philosophy and had met Robert when both were graduate students at Harvard. By the time the article appeared each of them had already been through a number of successful careers. Angela had given piano recitals at Carnegie Hall and had appeared as a soloist with the London Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall. Her essays on the New Left, written in the fifties while she was still a graduate student, were said to be the best philosophic justification that radical politics had ever had. She had even been — though this had not been publicized because of her associations with the left — a speech writer for the Kennedys. Robert Sohnshild, as illustrious as his wife, had given up a successful private practice and an inherited seat on the New York Stock Exchange to become the first major news analyst on National Educational Televison, and, as an adviser to SCLC, had helped develop the principle of the Mississippi Freedom Schools. Somewhere he had also found time to establish the first successful, nationally distributed underground newspaper.

The article in Esquire had been entitled “The Silver Spoon Set,” and in it four immensely successful young couples had posed, grinning, in full color in their lovely New York, Washington and Boston apartments, with silver spoons dangling from their mouths like cigarettes. In the text Robert was quoted as wanting to extricate himself from the tangled skein of personal success. “Cut your winnings,” he had said. “It’s a Thoreauvian thing. I refuse to be a great man. There are too many great men already. They explode on the world like bombs. What I want, and Angela agrees, is for men of talent and judgment and imagination — for men of success — to turn their backs on the ‘world’ and begin to pay some attention to the community.”

The Sohnshilds had come to Florida at about the same time Dick started his show, and had called the program as a sort of lark the first week it was on the air. Robert, slightly tipsy and evidently very happy, had taken the phone away from Angela to announce his wife’s pregnancy. Though they had been married twelve years, it was to be their first child. Excited by their celebrity, Dick said that the unborn child would be the program’s mascot, and he invited the couple to become regular callers. Though they stopped phoning after the baby came, Angela had begun to call the program again about five months before.

Angela returned to the phone.

“It was nothing,” she said, “she probably just stirred in her sleep.”

The baby was born with irises white as shirt buttons. It was blind.

One of them was always awake when the baby was asleep. They had not been out of the house together since its birth and kept a constant vigil over its crib, convinced that its odd eyes were the signal of a crippled chemistry. When Angela called now she often sounded wild, offering an incredible picture of their grief. One night Dick had had to cut her off the air when she went into the details of her fifty-five hour labor.

“You know,” Angela said, “Robert thinks I’m foolish, but I really think her irises are beginning to darken.”

“That would be wonderful.”

“Oh they’ll never be black, of course, but many people have gray eyes and see perfectly well. Robert’s eyes are grayish.”

“Why don’t you get some sleep, Angela?” Dick said gently.

“You know,” she said, “when Carol’s sleeping and her eyes are closed, she’s so beautiful. You can’t tell there’s a thing wrong with her. She’s just like anyone else. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind staying up half the night. So I can watch her and see how lovely she is with her eyes shut. Is that disloyal? Do you think it’s selfish?”

“No, Angela, of course not.” Then he asked if she still kept up her piano.

“Oh, yes,” Angela said. “Carol loves to hear me play.” She paused, and added fiercely, “Her hearing sense is no more acute than any child’s her age. I consider it a plus that she hasn’t begun to compensate. Perhaps she perceives light; perhaps that’s why. She’s no more tactile than another child. She’s hardly ticklish.”

The baby would be two years old soon. The quality of their resistance seemed awful to him, worse even than their luck.

“I still have them,” Angela said, and laughed bitterly.

“I’m sorry, Angela, what was that?”

“The silver spoons,” she said. “I still have them. I feed Carol her cereal from them.”

Now whenever he picked up the phone he expected the caller to be Behr-Bleibtreau.

He picked up the phone.

“Hi,” a woman said, “this is Ingrid.” It was not a good connection. A baby, crying in the background, further impaired his understanding. “I called once before. On the occasion of my divorce. You probably don’t remember.” Offhand, he didn’t.

“How are you, Ingrid?”

“Never better,” she said glumly.

“What have you been doing with yourself, Ingrid?”

“Well, I’m a gay divorcee, the merry widow.” He hoped she wasn’t drinking; he didn’t want anything to happen to the baby.

“Hey, you want to hear something wild? I bought this ’69 Buick hard-top and it’s got this gadget on it, a sort of memory device. It buzzes when you leave the key in the ignition and the door is open or the engine isn’t running. It’s optional, but I’m queer for inventions — autronic eyes that dim your headlights at the approach of oncoming cars, remote control TV sets, garage doors that open at the sound of a horn, timers that turn things on and off. I’ve got tortoise-shell prisms. I wear them like glasses and watch TV while I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. There’s a spigot for ice water on the door of my refrigerator. I have a ten-speed blender. I dissolve frozen orange juice in it. Oh, the things I’ve bought — there are Magic Fingers in my beds, great underwater lights in my swimming pool, water softeners, FM stereos, tape decks, rheostats, garbage compressors — you name it. Last month my electric bill was one hundred and seventy-eight dollars and fourteen cents. And I’ll tell you something — my life’s no emptier than the next one’s. I can take electricity or leave it alone. Things don’t corrupt you; they barely distract you.