Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Read Free Book Online
Authors: J. D. Salinger
Tags: Literature/Poetry
most consistently "rewarding." After Seymour, Zooey, the youngest boy in the family, is generally placed second in order of preference, or appeal. And since we have a singularly workaday interest in Zooey here, it may be appended that, as an ex-panelist on "It's a Wise Child," he had one almanaclike distinction among (or over) his brothers and sisters. Off and on, during their broadcasting years, all seven of the children had been fair game for the kind of child psychologist or professional educator who takes a special interest in extra-precocious children. In this cause, or service, Zooey had been, of all the Glasses, hands down, the most voraciously examined, interviewed, and poked at. Very notably, with no exceptions that I know of, his experiences in the apparently divergent fields of clinical, social, and newsstand psychology had been costly for him, as though the places where he was examined had been uniformly alive with either highly contagious traumas or just plain old-fashioned germs. For example, in 1942 (with the everlasting disapproval of his two eldest brothers, both of whom were in the Army at the time) he had been tested by one research group alone, in Boston, on five separate occasions. (He was twelve during most of the sessions, and it's possible that the train rides--ten of them--held some attraction for him, at least in the beginning.) The main purpose of the five tests, one gathered, was to isolate and study, if possible, the source of Zooey's precocious wit and fancy. At the end of the fifth test, the subject was sent home to New York with three or four aspirins in an engraved envelope for his sniffles, which turned out to be bronchial pneumonia. Some six weeks later, a long-distance call came through from Boston at eleven-thirty at night, with much dropping of small coins in an ordinary pay phone, and an unidentified voice--with no intention, presumably, of sounding pedantically waggish--informed Mr. and Mrs. Glass that their son Zooey, at twelve, had an English vocabulary on an exact par with Mary Baker Eddy's, if he could be urged to use it.
     
        To resume: The long, typewritten, four-year-old letter that Zooey had checked into the bathtub with, on this Monday morning in November, 1955, had obviously been taken out of its envelope and unfolded and refolded on too many private occasions during the four years, so that now it not only had an over-all unappetit-lich appearance but was actually torn in several places, mostly along the creases. The author of the letter, as stated earlier, was Zooey's eldest living brother, Buddy. The letter itself was virtually endless in length, overwritten, teaching, repetitious, opinionated, remonstrative, condescending, embarrassing--and filled, to a surfeit, with affection. In short, it was exactly the kind of letter that a recipient, whether he wants to or not, carries around for some time in his hip pocket. And that professional writers of a type love to reproduce verbatim:
     
        3/18/51
     
        DEAR ZOOEY,
     
        I've just finished decoding a long letter that came from Mother this morning, all about you and General Eisenhower's smile and small boys in the Daily News who fall down elevator shafts and when am I going to have my phone in New York taken out and get one installed up here in the country, where I really need it. Surely the only woman in the world who can write a letter in invisible italics. Dear Bessie. I get five hundred words of copy from her like clockwork every three months on the subject of my poor old private phone and how stupid it is to pay Good Money every month for something nobody's ever even around to use any more. Which is really a big fat lie. When I'm in town, I invariably sit talking by the hour with my old friend Yama, the God of Death, and a private phone's a must for our little chats. Anyway, please tell her I haven't changed my mind. I love that old phone with a passion. It was the only really private property

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