Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“Well, of all the cheap, chiseling suh-lugs, my overgrown friend, you certainly take the hand-whittled potato masher!”

“Sit down and speak when I speak to you.”

“Even gypping little chee- yildren!”

“Little hoodlums, more like.”

“And for a measly five bucks!”

Hanging under some prints was a riding crop my father had had when he had chased the deer around Tara Hill, and I took it down and whacked her with it. Then we had some light scrimmaging around the study until Sheila came in with some cookies for the new pupil, when Helen turned from a brat into an angel, which was something she could do at the drop of a hat. “Oh, you darling! Cookies! I just love them!” She ran over and kissed Sheila, who didn’t quite know what her cue was, so I took over: “Nothing to get alarmed at, Sheila. Just inculcating a little discipline around the classroom, but she’s got a hide like a rhinoceros, so it’s a little noisy.”

“But, Jack! You could injure her!”

“Any change would be an improvement.”

When we were alone again, she draped herself over my chair and told me what she thought of me for a while and I did the same for her and then I got out my big inspiration. It was an abacus, that I had got at a bazaar, as they call it in Baltimore, out on East Baltimore Street. They’re a Chinese adding machine, with little red and green and blue and yellow and purple and black balls that slide on wires in a frame. I figured that with her eyes telling her how to add and subtract and multiply and divide it would be easier. “What is it, Mr. Loathsome?”

“You use it to count.”

“You think I’m weak in the mind?”

“Yes, only more so.”

“Well, I’ll be—”

“So far, I figure the trouble has been that nobody, anyway nobody on the arithmetic assignment, has any idea how dumb you are. But I have. By dint of this hard application your mother keeps talking about, I have finally worked down to it, that alongside of you, a backward tree toad would look like a glee club of Einsteins, so—”

“Cookie?”

“O.K.”

She stuck a cake in my mouth, picked up the abacus, shook it, smelled it, and tried it sidewise. “Cute.”

“Listen, stupid, I have an idea.”

“Then let’s have it.”

“That teacher of yours—”

“Lamson? She’s a dope.”

“However—”

“I owe it to her to do something with the subject. But why? Tell me that.”

“You could harpoon her.”

“... I don’t get this at all.”

“I don’t say, Miss Legg, that she’s not a dope. If you ask me, they’re all dopes. If they weren’t dopes they wouldn’t be teachers in the Sarah Read School. If you ask me the arithmetic’s no good to you and you’ll never have any use for it that a third assistant bank clerk couldn’t straighten out for you in five minutes and no charge for the service. Just the same, there it is. The rule book says you’ve got to learn it. And if, all at the same time you could learn it and give this Lamson a nice kick in the teeth—”

“You mean, with this thing, I could learn?”

“Well, you could try.”

Her face lit up the way it had when she was a little thing and you’d stuff lemon ice cream into her. She wasn’t that little any more, but she certainly wasn’t big. She was about medium, on height, but awful slim, even in the plaid skirt and red sweater she wore to make herself look thicker, and with the yellow curls hanging down her back in thick snakes. They had a little gold in them, and were soft and glossy and silky. Her eyes were blue, and right now they were dancing. Pretty soon she was cackling out loud, and I was. Putting one over on Miss Lamson seemed to be the funniest thing we could think of. I knew that if she, I, and the abacus could do it, Miss Lamson was due to have a surprise.

That, as well as I remember, was early in 1930, the end of my sophomore year, when I was twenty and she was ten. I held her on the abacus three or four weeks, to make sure she had things straight, but then she began doing it with a pencil. And then one day, as she was starting on the stuff I had waiting for her, she half closed her eyes, stared at the pencil, and said: “... Wait a minute.”

“Take your time.”

“Jack.”

“Yes?”

“... I can see that abacus.”

“And?”

“I believe — I can do it in my head.”

She read off the first problem, looked out the window for a few seconds, and gave me the answer. I figured it up. It was right. She zipped through the next problem and the next and the next after that, and had the answer before I could work it out on paper. Then we both said it at the same time: “Miss Lamson!”

Because she hadn’t pulled any of her stuff for Miss Lamson yet, being regarded as kind of a hopeless member of the awkward squad, so she didn’t get called on any more. We both had a sudden idea of what it was going to be like if she could do the stuff quicker than Miss Lamson could.

And then we had a perfectly hellish idea. At that time, on WFBR, there was an awful kid named Willie Saunders they found in the Roland Park School, that could do stuff in his head for some kind of a cereal program they had Friday evenings. So our idea was that Helen would challenge him. The station was pretty leery of it, for fear she’d flop, and wouldn’t give it any build-up at all, but after we thought it over that suited us fine, because that way we could spring it as a surprise. So the night she was to go on, it wasn’t much trouble to get myself invited to the hotel for dinner. She got permission to go to a movie, and around five forty-five I slid by in the car and picked her up and hauled her to the station, which was only a few blocks away. So around six fifteen I showed up for dinner and put on a big act that I didn’t want to miss Willie Saunders. None of them had ever heard of Willie, but they brought me in the Colonial Room where there was a radio and all of them kind of kept me company, Margaret, and Mr. Legg, and Mrs. Legg, none of them quite knowing what it was for, but taking my word for it Willie was pretty terrific. So it wasn’t long before the announcer gave one of those jolly statements, and asked Willie if he minded a little competition, and Willie, who had a wind-up so slow it took him a minute to say anything at all, said: “If if if if if anybody thinks they can figure faster than I I I I I can they’re perfectly welcome to to to to to to try.” So then the announcer introduced Helen.

What she said I can’t tell you because Mrs. Legg jumped up like she’d been hit by a thousand-volt wire, and then Margaret did and Mr. Legg did, and then they all turned to me. I shrugged and spread out my hands, like I was just as buffaloed as they were. Then we all closed in on the machine.

“Now, Willie and Helen, the government reports that coal production for last week, final week of the month just closed, was up one and one tenth per cent above production for the preceding week, which in turn was up one and two tenths per cent for the week before that, which in turn was up one per cent for the week before that. If production last week was eight million, eighty thousand, six hundred and forty tons, what was production the first week of the month?”

Willie began to sing it back at him: “The government reports that coal coal coal coal production for last week, final final final final final final—” She said nothing, but I could feel her eyes close and her mind focus on that abacus, while her finger tips played little tunes on her thumbs. Then, before Willie had even finished his song, she cut in with a bunch of figures.

“Right!”

The announcer fairly yelled it and from then on she mowed Willie down like a field of hay. By the end of the third question, he couldn’t even talk, but sat there blubbering so bad you heard somebody mutter: “Better take him out,” and that was the end of him. Then, when the announcer got chummy and said: “Well — well — well — Helen, you are a surprise. Quite a surprise! And where did you learn all this higher mathematics?” she shot it just like we had rehearsed it up: “All that I have learned or achieved I owe to my beloved teacher Miss Josephine Lamson of the Sarah Read School, East Read Street.” But I could hear the shake in her voice that said she would explode if they would all kindly step out of the way so she wouldn’t injure anybody.