Part 48 (1/2)

”I can't say it to you.”

”Can I say it to you?”

”What you are? You wouldn't!”

”If it's Over Your Years maybe I shouldn't.”

”I know it anyhow!” he shouted. ”They said it confidentially but I know it anyhow!-Hey! There's the beach, see it?” There it was; I saw it-a faded string before the green began, like one of those sacred threads Brahmin boys are given to wear across their chests until they die; the beach was initiation. A woman knelt there. She seemed to knead with her hands. Objects littered the sand, some mobile, some not From afar, it was a view of the pristine and the not-yet-corrupted: Eve in Paradise on the world's sixth day, surrounded by the forms of nature.

Then the mobile objects began to dance and wave.

”There's Sonny,” said Throw. ”There's Manny. Look at Al! The other one's Foxy. See Dee? Dee's the one that's digging. The one with the bangs, that's Harriet Beecher.”

”I can't see bangs at this distance,” I said.

”But you can see her waving, can't you?”

”I can see them all waving.”

”Except Dee. Dee's digging to China. Dee doesn't know anything anyhow, he's too little. But Harriet Beecher and Foxy and Al and Sonny and Manny, they've all been waiting. They're practically purple from waiting.”

”Waiting for you? They feel the pinch of an absent Purse?” I dared him.

”Waiting for you. It's what you are,” he said apologetically.

”Whatever I am I'm nothing to turn purple for.”

”What you are to him,” he amended.

”The most unlikely people have daughters,” I a.s.sured him coolly. ”Daughters turn up everywhere.”

”Sonny said we ought to call you the missing link,” he reported; his voice fled falteringly upward, but he strained to keep his look down, as though an earnest appreciation of respectability had to be centered in nether parts only. ”Sonny's a sort of humorist. He's supposed to take after my mother.”

”There's nothing funny in that,” I said with gravity.

Desperately he emptied a cyclone from his lung. ”It's not the part about missing that's humorous. You're not missing any more. I mean you're here.”

I acknowledged I was where I was; it was the least I could do to relieve him.

He was not relieved. ”Sonny said you're a link because my father said something that sounded almost like that.”

”Sounded like a link?”

He a.s.sented with a kind of shamefacedness. ”What a link does,” he explained.

”Let's see,” I said. ”It's a s.h.i.+pboard game, is that it? All right. A link does what?”-I considered. ”What does a link usually do? A link connects. All right? Is that it?”

”It's what you are,” he miserably repeated.

”Dense is what I am,” I said. ”A link connects, whatever you want to say about it. I'm not a connection?”

”No.”

”Well, that's where you're wrong. A connection is a relative. I told you daughter. So did Tilbeck.”

”It's not the way my father said it.”

”Oh, your father! Isn't he simply expecting a Neanderthal dressed in dinosaur teeth if he said missing link-”

”Sonny said missing link.”

”Then what did your father say?”

He sighed until the whole Purse of him swelled; he blurted air, and in the air a word like the chug of a far-away locomotive. ”Attachment he said.”

I took it alertly: ”Is that it? What you couldn't say?”

”It's what you are,” he brought out in vindication. Then: ”Well I said it.”

This left me meek though pugnacious. ”That's it really? It's what they think?”

”It's why they can't wait to see you. Foxy said it's like a Bible story-”

”You never heard of the Scopes trial,” I halted him. ”There aren't any missing links in the Bible.”

”-like when King David was old and cold and they wanted to warm him up in his bed-”

”Oh, that story. And your mother and father too? They think I'm coming for that? They're convinced?”

”They don't blame you. I told you.”

”You told me,” I agreed. But the Purses' false coinage rang out against reality with a stroke euphoric, frenetic, lunatic, marveling, credulous, mad-I laughed, in short. ”Because they're liberal!”

”Because they think you must be doing it for the money,” he improved it.

”Then they're not Purse-spicacious after all,” I said with satisfaction. ”Unless Tilbeck's old and cold like King David?”

But he was undeflected. ”He isn't paying you to come?”

”I came of my own free will. Because he wanted me to. So then I wanted to.”

This made him blow out hard on his working fists. ”I suppose that makes it worse.”