had no
understanding of music, poetry — and yet when you got right down toot, Dick’s literalness, his
pragmatic approach to every subject, was the primary reason Perry had been attracted to him, for
it made Dick seem, compared to himself, so authentically tough, invulnerable, «totally
masculine.»)
Nevertheless, pleasant as this Las Vegas reverie was, it paled beside another of his visions. Since childhood, for more than half his thirty-one years, he had been sending off for literature
(«fortunes in diving! Train at Home in Your Spare Time. Make Big Money Fast in Skin and Lung
Diving. free booklets . . .») answering advertisements («sunken treasure! Fifty Genuine Maps!
Amazing Offer . . .») that stoked a longing to realize an adventure his imagination swiftly and over
and over enabled him to experience: the dream of drifting downward through strange waters, of
plunging toward a green sea-dusk, sliding past the scaly, savage-eyed protectors of a ship’s hulk
that loomed ahead, a Spanish galleon — a drowned cargo of diamonds and pearls, heaping
caskets of gold. A car horn honked. At last — Dick.
«Good grief, Kenyon! I hear you.»
As usual, the devil was in Kenyon. His shouts kept coming up the stairs: «Nancy! Telephone!»
Barefoot, pajama-clad, Nancy scampered down the stairs. There were two telephones in the
house — one in the room her father used as an office, another in the kitchen. She picked up the
kitchen extension: «Hello? Oh, yes, good morning, Mrs. Katz.»
And Mrs. Clarence Katz, the wife of a farmer who lived on the highway, said, «I told your daddy
not to wake you up. I said Nancy must be tired after all that wonderful acting she did last night.
You were lovely, dear. Those white ribbons in your hair! And that part when you thought Tom
Sawyer was dead — you had real tears in your eyes. Good as anything on TV. But your daddy said
it was time you got up; well, it is going on for nine. Now, what I wanted, dear — my little girl, my
little Jolene, she’s just dying to bake a cherry pie, and seeing how you’re a champion’ cherry-pie
maker, always winning prizes, I wondered could I bring her over there this morning and you show
her?»
Normally, Nancy would willingly have taught Jolene to prepare an entire turkey dinner; she felt it
her duty to be available when younger girls came to her wanting help with their cooking, their
sewing, or their music lessons — or, as often happened, to confide. Where she found the time, and
still managed to practically run that big house» and be a straight-A student, the president of her
class, a leader in the 4-H program and the Young Methodists League, a skilled rider, an excellent
musician (piano, clarinet), an annual winner at the county fair (pastry, preserves, needlework,
flower arrangement) — how a girl not yet seventeen could haul such a wagonload, and do so
without «brag,» with, rather, merely a radiant jauntiness, was an enigma the community pondered,
and solved by saying, «She’s got character. Gets it from her old man.» Certainly her strongest
trait, the talent that gave support to all the others, derived from her father: a fine-honed sense of
organization. Each moment was assigned; she knew precisely, at any hour, what she would be
doing, how long it would require. And that was the trouble with today: she had overscheduled it.
She had committed herself to helping another neighbor’s child, Roxie Lee Smith, with a trumpet
solo that Roxie Lee planned to play at a school concert; had promised to run three complicated
errands for her mother; and had arranged to attend a 4-H meeting in Garden City with her father.
And then there was lunch to make and, after lunch, work to be done on the bridesmaids’ dresses
for Beverly’s wedding, which she had designed and was sewing herself. As matters stood, there
was no room for Jolene’s cherry-pie lesson. Unless something could be canceled.
«Mrs. Katz? Will you hold the line a moment, please?» She walked the length of the house to her
father’s office. The office, which had an outside entrance for ordinary visitors, was separated from
the parlor by a sliding door; though Mr. Clutter occasionally shared the office with Gerald Van
Vleet, a young man who assisted him with the management of the farm, it was fundamentally his
retreat — an orderly sanctuary, paneled in walnut veneer, where, surrounded by weather
barometers, rain charts, a pair of binoculars, he sat like a captain in his cabin, a navigator piloting
River Valley’s sometimes risky passage through the seasons.
«Never mind,» he said, responding to Nancy’s problem, «Skip 4-H. I’ll take Kenyon instead.»
And so, lifting the office phone, Nancy told Mrs. Katz yes, fine, bring Jolene right on over. But she
hung up with a frown. «It’s peculiar,» she said as she looked around the room and saw in it her
father helping Kenyon add a column of figures, and, at his desk by the window, Mr. Van Vleet,
who had a kind of brooding, tugged good looks that led her to call him Heathcliff behind hit back.
«But I keep smelling cigarette smoke.» «On your breath?» inquired Kenyon.
«No, funny one. Yours.» That quieted him, for Kenyon, as he knew she knew, did once in a while
sneak a puff — but, then, so did Nancy. Mr. Clutter clapped his hands. «That’s all. This is an office.»
Now, upstairs, she changed into faded Levis and a green sweater, and fastened round her wrist her third most valued belonging, a gold watch; her closest cat friend, Evinrude, ranked above it,
and surmounting even Evinrude was Bobby’s signet ring, cumbersome proof of her «goingsteady» status, which she wore (when she wore it; the least flare-up and off it came) on a thumb,
for even with the use of adhesive tape its man-size girth could not, be made to fit a more suitable
finger. Nancy was a pretty girl, lean and boyishly agile, and the prettiest things about her were her
short-bobbed, shining chestnut hair (brushed a hundred strokes each morning, the same number
at night) and her soap-polished complexion, still faintly freckled and rose-brown from last
summer’s sun. But it was her eyes, wide apart, darkly translucent, like ale held to the light, that
made her immediately likable, that at once announced her lack of suspicion, her considered and
yet so easily triggered kindliness. «Nancy!» Kenyon called. «Susan on the phone.»
Susan Kidwell, her confidante. Again she answered in the kitchen.
«Tell,» said Susan, who invariably launched a telephone session this command. «And, to begin,
tell why you were flirting with Jerry Roth.» Like Bobby, Jerry Roth was a school basket-ball star.
«Last night? Good grief, I wasn’t flirting. You mean because we were holding hands? He just
came backstage during the show. And I was so nervous. So he held my hand. To give me
courage.»
«Very sweet. Then what?»
«Bobby took me to the spook movie. And we held hands.»
«Was it scary? Not Bobby. The movie.»
«He didn’t think so; he just laughed. But you know me. Boo! — and I fall off the seat.»
«What are you eating?»
«Nothing.»
«I know — your fingernails,» said Susan, guessing correctly. Much as Nancy tried, she could not
break the habit of nibbling her nails, and, whenever she was troubled, chewing them right to the
quick. «Tell. Something wrong?»
«No.»
«Nancy. Cest moi . . .» Susan was studying French. «Well — Daddy. He’s been in an awful mood
the last three weeks. Awful. At least, around me. And when I got home last night he started that
again.»
«That needed no amplification; it was a subject that the two friends had discussed completely,
and upon which they agreed. Susan, summarizing the problem from Nancy’s viewpoint, had once
said, «You love Bobby now, and you need him. But deep down even Bobby knows there isn’t any
future in it. Later on, when we go off to Manhattan, everything will seem a new world.» Kansas
State University is in Manhattan, and the two girls planned to enroll there as art students, and to
room together. «Everything will change, whether you want it to or not. But you can’t change it
now, living here in Holcomb, seeing Bobby everyday, sitting in the same classes — and there’s no
reason to. Because you and Bobby are a very happy thing. And it will be something happy to
think back about — if you’re left alone. Can’t you make your father understand that?» No, she could
not. «Because,» as he explained it to Susan, «whenever I start to say something, he looks at me
as though I must not love him. Or as though I loved him less. And suddenly I’m tongue-tied; I just
want to be his daughter and do as he wishes.» To this Susan had no reply it embodied emotions,
a relationship, beyond her experience. She lived alone with her mother, who taught music at the
Holcomb School, and she did not remember her own father very clearly, for years ago, in their
native California, Mr. Kidwell had one day left home and not come back.
«And, anyway,» Nancy continued now, «I’m not sure it’s me. That’s making him grouchy.
Something else — he’s really worried about something.» «Your mother?»
No other friend of Nancy’s would have presumed to make such suggestion. Susan, however, was
privileged. When she had first appeared in Holcomb, a melancholy, imaginative child, willowy,
wan and sensitive, then eight, a year younger than Nancy, the Clutters had so ardently adopted
her that the fatherless little girl California soon came to seem a member of the family. For years
the two friends had been inseparable, each, by virtue the rarity of similar and equal sensibilities,
irreplaceable to the other. But then, this past September, Susan had transferred from local
school to the vaster, supposedly superior one in Garden City. It was the usual procedure for
Holcomb students who intended going on to college, but Mr. Clutter, a die-hard community
booster, considered such defections an affront to community spirit; the Holcomb School was good
enough for his children, and there they would remain.