We Can Build You (19 page)

“What the hell is that? Another kids’ book?”

“That’s right, buddy,” Maury said. “So go on down there.”

I did so, feeling a little cheered up. But nothing would
bring me back to life, not really, except for Pris. I had to deal with that fact and face it with greater force every moment of the day.

The first item which we found in the Seattle papers having to do with Pris almost got by us, because it did not seem to be about Pris at all. We had to read the item again and again until we were certain.

It told about Sam K. Barrows—that was what had caught our eye. And a stunning young artist he had been seen at nightclubs with. The girl’s name, according to the columnist, was Pristine Womankind.

“Jeezus!” Maury screeched, his face black. ‘That’s her name; that’s a translation of Frauenzimmer. But it isn’t. Listen, buddy; I always put everybody on about that, you and Pris and my ex-wife. Frauenzimmer doesn’t mean womankind; it means ladies of pleasure. You know. Streetwalkers.” He reread the item incredulously. “She’s changed her name but she doesn’t know; hell, it ought to be Pristine Streetwalkers. What a farce, I mean, it’s insane. You know what it is? That
Marjorie Morningstar;
her name was Morgenstern, and it meant Morningstar; Pris got the idea from that, too. And Priscilla to Pristine. I’m going mad.” He paced frantically around the office, rereading the newspaper item again and again. “I know it’s Pris; it has to be. Listen to the description. You tell me if this isn’t Pris:

“God, what rubbish,” Maury said, tossing the paper down. “How can those gossip columnists write like that? They’re demented. But you can tell it’s Pris anyhow. What’s that mean about her going to turn up as a TV actress?”

I said, “Barrows must own a TV station or a piece of one.”

“He owns a dogfood company that cans whale blubber,” Maury said. “And it sponsors a TV show once a week, a sort of circus and variety piece of business. He’s probably putting the bite on them to give Pris a couple of minutes. But doing what? She can’t act! She has no talents! I think I will call the police. Get Lincoln in here; I want an attorney’s advice.”

I tried to calm him down; he was in a state of wild agitation.

“He’s sleeping with her! That beast is sleeping with my daughter Pris! He’s corruption itself!” Maury began calling the airfield at Boise, trying to get a rocket flight to Seattle. “I’m going down there and arrest him,” he told me between calls. “I’m taking a gun along; the hell with going to the police. That girl’s only eighteen; it’s a felony. We’ve got a prima facie case against him—I’ll wreck his life. He’ll be in the can for twenty-five years.”

“Listen,” I said. “Barrows has absolutely thought it through, as we’ve said time and again; he’s got that lawyer Blunk tagging along. They’re covered; don’t ask me how, but they’ve thought of everything there is. Just because some gossip columnist chose to write that your daughter is—”

“I’ll kill her, then,” Maury said.

“Wait. For god’s sake shut up and listen. Whether she’s sleeping, as you put it, with him or not I don’t know. Probably she is his mistress. I think you’re right. But proving it is another matter altogether. Now, you can force her to return here to Ontario, but there’s even a way he can eventually get around that.”

“I wish she was back in Kansas City; I wish she had never
left the mental health clinic. She’s just a poor ex-psychotic child!” He calmed a little. “How could he get her back?”

“Barrows can have some punk in his organization marry her. And once that happens no one has authority over her. Do you want that?” I had talked to the Lincoln and I knew; the Lincoln had already shown me how difficult it was to force a man like Barrows who knew the law to do
anything
. Barrows could bend the law like a pipe-cleaner. For him it was not a rule or a hindrance; it was a convenience.

“That would be terrible,” Maury said. “I see what you mean. As a legal pretext to permit him to keep her in Seattle.” His face was gray.

“And then you’ll never get her back.”

“And she’ll be sleeping with two men, her punk husband, some goddam messenger boy from some factory Barrows owns, and—Barrows, too.” He stared at me wild-eyed.

“Maury,” I said, “we have to face facts. Pris probably slept with boys already, for instance in school.”

His expression became more distorted.

“I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but the way she talked to me one night—”

“Okay,” Maury said. “We’ll let it go.”

“Sleeping with Barrows won’t kill her, and it won’t kill you. At least she won’t become pregnant, he’s smart enough to make sure of that. He’ll see she takes her shots.”

Maury nodded. “I wish I was dead,” he said.

“I feel the same way. But remember what you told me not more than two days ago? That we had to go on, no matter how badly we felt? Now I’m telling you the same thing. No matter how much Pris meant to either of us—isn’t that so?”

“Yeah,” he said at last.

We went ahead, then, and picked up where we had left off. At the Board meeting the Stanton had objected to any of the Nannies wearing the Rebel gray; it was willing to go along with the Civil War theme, but the soldiers had to be loyal Union lads. Who, the Stanton demanded, would trust their child with a Reb? We gave in, and Jerome was told to
begin tooling up the Rosen factory; meanwhile we at Ontario, at the R & R ASSOCIATES business office, began making the layouts, conferring with a Japanese electronics engineer whom we had called in on a part-time basis.

Several days later a second item appeared in a Seattle newspaper. This one I saw before Maury did.

So Sam K. Barrows had a press agent at work, as well as Dave Blunk and all the others. Barrows was giving Pris what she had long wanted; he was keeping his end of whatever bargain they had made—no doubt of that. And I had no doubt that she was keeping her end as well.

She’s in good hands, I said to myself. Probably there isn’t a human being in North America more qualified to give Pris what she wants out of life.

The article was titled BIG LEAGUE AWARDS GOLD BASEBALL TO LITTLE LEAGUERS, Pris being “big league,” now. A further study of it told me that Mr. Sam K. Barrows had paid for the uniforms of the Little League club expected to win the gold baseball—needless to say, Barrows was providing the gold baseball—and on their backs appeared the words:

BARROWS ORGANIZATION

On the front, of course, appeared the name of their team, whatever area or school it was the boys came from.

I had no doubt that she was very happy. After all Jayne Mansfield had begun by being Miss Straight Spine, picked by the chiropractors of America back in the ‘fifties; that had
been her first publicity break. She had been one of those health food addicts in those days.

So look what may lie ahead for Pris, I said to myself. First she hands out a gold baseball to a kids’ ballteam and from there she goes rapidly to the top. Maybe Barrows can get a spread of nude shots of her into
Life;
it’s not out of the question, they do have their nude spread each week. That way her fame would be great. All she would have to do is take off her clothes in public, before an expert color photographer, instead of merely in private before the eyes of Sam K. Barrows.

Then she can briefly marry President Mendoza. He’s been married, what is it, forty-one times already, sometimes for no longer than a week. Or at least get invited to one of the stag gatherings at the White House or out on the high seas in the Presidential yacht, or for a weekend at the President’s luxurious vacation satellite. Especially those stag gatherings; the girls who are invited to perform there are never the same again—their fame is assured and all sorts of careers are open to them, especially in the entertainment field. For if President Mendoza wants them, every man in the U.S. wants them, too, because as everybody knows the President of the United States has incredibly high taste as well as having the first choice of—

I was driving myself insane with these thoughts.

How long will it take? I wondered. Weeks? Months? Can he do this right away or does it take a lot of time?

A week later, while browsing through the TV guide, I discovered Pris listed in the weekly show sponsored by Barrows’ dogfood company. According to the ad and the listing she played the girl in a knife-throwing act; flaming knives were thrown at her while she danced the Lunar Fling wearing one of the new transparent bathing suits. The scene had been shot in Sweden, such a bathing suit still being illegal at beaches in the United States.

I did not show the listing to Maury, but he came across it on his own anyhow. A day before the program he called me
over to his place and showed me the listing. In the magazine there was a small shot of Pris, too, just her head and shoulders. It had, however, been taken in such a way as to indicate that she wore nothing at all. We both gazed at it with ferocity and despair. And yet, she certainly looked happy. Probably she was.

Behind her in the picture one could see green hills and water. The natural, healthy wonders of Earth. And against that this laughing black-haired slender girl, full of life and excitement and vitality. Full of—the future.

The future belongs to her, I realized as I examined the picture. Whether she appears nude on a goat-hair, vegetable-dye rug in
Life
or becomes the President’s mistress for a weekend or dances madly, naked from the waist up, while flaming knives are hurled at her during a kiddies’ TV program—she is still real, still beautiful and wonderful, like the hills and the ocean, and no one can destroy that or spoil that, however angry and wretched they feel. What do Maury and I have? What can we offer her? Only something moldy. Something that reeks—not of tomorrow—but of yesterday, the past. Of age, sorrow, and old death.

“Buddy,” I said to Maury, “I think I’m going to Seattle.”

He said nothing; he continued reading the text in the TV guide.

“I frankly don’t care anymore about simulacra,” I said. “I’m sorry to say it but it’s the truth; I just want to go to Seattle and see how she is. Maybe afterward—”

“You won’t come back. Either of you.”

“Maybe we will.”

“Want to bet?”

I bet him ten bucks. That was all I could do; there was no use making him a promise which I probably could not—and would not—keep.

“It’ll wreck R & R ASSOCIATES,” Maury said.

“Maybe so, but I still have to go.”

That night I began packing my clothes. I made a reservation on a TWA Boeing 900 rocket flight for Seattle; it left
the following morning at ten-forty. Now there was no stopping me; I did not even bother to telephone Maury and tell him anything more. Why waste my time? He could do nothing. Could I? That remained to be seen.

My Service .45 was too large, so instead of it I packed a smaller pistol, a .38, wrapped in a towel with a box of shells. I had never been much of a shot but I could hit another human being within the confines of an ordinary-sized room, and possibly across the space of a public hall such as a nightclub or theater. And if worst came to worst I could use it on myself; surely I could hit that—my own head.

There being nothing else to do until the next morning I settled down with a copy of
Marjorie Morningstar
which Maury had loaned me. It was his own, and quite possibly it was the identical copy which Pris had read years ago. By reading it I hoped to get more of an insight into Pris; I was not reading it for pleasure.

The next morning I rose early, shaved and washed, ate a light breakfast, and started for Boise and the airfield.

If you wonder what San Francisco would have looked like had there been no earthquake and fire, you can find out by going to Seattle. It’s an old seaport town built on hills, with windy, canyon type streets; nothing is modern except the public library, and in the slum part you’ll see cobblestone and red brick, like parts of Pocatello, Idaho. The slums extend for miles and are rat-infested. In the center of Seattle there is a prosperous genuine city-like shopping area built near one or two great old hotels such as the Olympus. The wind blows in from Canada, and when the Boeing 900 sets down at the Sea-Tac Airfield you catch a glimpse of the mountains of origin. They’re frightening.

I took a limousine into Seattle proper from the airport, since it cost only five dollars. The lady driver crept at snail’s pace through traffic for miles until at last we had reached the Olympus Hotel. It’s much like any good big-city hotel, with its arcade of shops below ground level; it has all services which a hotel must have, and the service is excellent. There’re several dining rooms; in fact you’re in a dark, yellow-lit world of your own at a big city hotel, a world made up of carpets and ancient varnished wood, people well-dressed and always
talking, corridors and elevators, plus maids cleaning constantly.

In my room I turned on the wired music in preference to the TV set, peeped out the window at the street far below, adjusted the ventilation and the heat, took off my shoes and padded about on the wall-to-wall carpeting, then opened my suitcase and began to unpack. Only an hour ago I had been in Boise; now here I was on the West Coast almost at the Canadian border. It beat driving. I had gone from one large city directly to another without having to endure the countryside in between. Nothing could have pleased me more.