“A nasty old woman to begin with.” This was Ralph’s usual line, but Annabel slipped it in.
“Right! Now, to the subject at hand. If Clinton wants to speak to me, I want it to be his glands, his environment, et cetera, and not because his mother shoved him down the stairs feet first. Ditto when it comes to going to a psychiatrist.”
“Are you proud,” Annabel said, “that your thinking on the subject is forty years behind? Are you proud of your open mind?”
“Oh, keep still.” A pause. “I have got an open mind.”
“This cigarette is bone dry.”
“What’s wrong with Clinton?” Ralph said. “Point A, as you well know, he quit school. Blithely.”
“Well, if you’re gonna do a thing, you might as well do it blithely.”
“I assume you do not care that he’s quit school.”
“Doesn’t faze me.”
“Without your permission?”
“All the better, show’s independence. What’s point B?”
“Point B. Now listen, Ralph, this is very serious and very difficult to put over. You’ll have to meet me halfway. I know that’s a strain, but . . . Ralph, listen, all those days he wasn’t in school he was sitting in the Aloha Sweet Shop.”
“Where’s that?”
“On Mound Road, but that’s not the point. The point is, he was doing conversations. He filled twenty-five notebooks. Now don’t say anything silly, because Ralph, this is serious. You remember those very intelligent kids that used to be on the radio? Well, one of them grew up to be insane. He went around memorizing streetcar transfers and they finally put him away. No, Ralph, this isn’t just normal or anything like that. Say he wanted to be a newspaper reporter and was practicing; well, it’s not like that at all. It’s more like a very very terrible form of nail-biting and he can’t help himself. When he was in the sixth grade, I thought he was going through a stage, but those teachers at John Marshall were driven crazy. Ralph, last year at Central he failed every single subject except shorthand. Normal? I should say not!”
“I thought he’d quit that notebook business.”
“Ha-ha, he quit doing it in front of us, that’s all. What do you think he did this morning? I said something about blankets, some trivial thing, and he couldn’t wait to get it into his notebook.”
“Listen, Annabel,” Ralph spoke quietly. “How do you suppose Upton Sinclair spent his boyhood, looking at a blackboard? And listening to a gang of old maids?”
“Ralph, how do we know that Upton Sinclair was sane?”
This was the first time I’d ever heard Ralph let somebody take a jab at Upton Sinclair without defending him. He wrote all about immigrant labor being oppressed in the Chicago stockyards, and so Ralph used to give away copies as presents to people. Usually, in a case like this, he’d raise his voice and say that The Jungle was the finest book ever written in the English language. But I suppose he thought Annabel was hopeless.