Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy Read Free Book Online

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    D ONAHUE: Okay. So you mean you didn’t know about taking precautions—
    D R. J.F. (breaking in) :Now, that’s what I mean, Phil.
    D ONAHUE: What’s that, Doc?
    D R. J.F.: About the crying need for sex education in our schools. Now if this child—
    P ENNY: Oh, I had all that stuff at Ben Franklin.
    D ONAHUE: You mean you knew about the pill and the other, ah—
    P ENNY: I had been on the pill for a year.
    D ONAHUE (scratching head) :I don’t get it. Oh, you mean you slipped up, got careless?
    P ENNY: NO, I did it on purpose.
    D ONAHUE: Did what on purpose? You mean—
    P ENNY: I mean I wanted to get pregnant.
    D ONAHUE: Why was that, Penny?
    P ENNY: My best friend was pregnant.
    A UDIENCE: (Groans, laughter)
    D R. J.F.: You see, Phil, that’s just what I mean. This girl is no more equipped with parenting skills than a child. She is a child. I hope she realizes she still has viable options.
    D ONAHUE: How about it, Penny?
    P ENNY: No , I want to have my baby.
    D ONAHUE: Why?
    P ENNY: I think babies are neat.
    D ONAHUE: Oh boy.
    D R. J.F.: Studies have shown that unwanted babies suffer 85 percent more child abuse and 150 percent more neuroses later in life.
    D ONAHUE (striding): Okay, now what have we got here? Wait. What’s going on?
    There is an interruption. Confusion at the rear of the studio. Heads turn. Three strangers, dressed outlandishly, stride down the aisle.
    D ONAHUE (smacks his forehead) :What’s this? What’s this? Holy smoke!
    Already the audience is smiling, reassured both by Donahue’s comic consternation and by the exoticness of the visitors. Clearly, the audience thinks, they are part of the act.
    The three strangers are indeed outlandish.
    One is a tall, thin, bearded man dressed like a sixteenth-century reformer. Indeed, he could be John Calvin, in his black cloak, black cap with short bill, and snug earflaps.
    The second wears the full-dress uniform of a Confederate officer. Though he is a colonel, he is quite young, surely no more than twenty-five. Clean-shaven and extremely handsome, he looks for all the world like Colonel John Pelham, Jeb Stuart’s legendary artillerist. Renowned both for his gallantry in battle and for his chivalry toward women, the beau ideal of the South, he engaged in sixty artillery duels, won them all, lost not a single piece. With a single Napoleon, he held off three of Burnside’s divisions in front of Fredericksburg before being ordered by Stuart to retreat.
    The third is at once the most ordinary-looking and yet the strangest of all. His dress is both modern and out-of-date. In his light-colored double-breasted suit and bow tie, his two-tone shoes of the sort known in the 1940s as “perforated wing-tips,” his neat above-the-ears haircut, he looks a bit like the clean old man in the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night, a bit like Lowell Thomas or perhaps Harry Truman. It is as if he were a visitor from the Cosmos, from a planet ten or so light-years distant, who had formed his notion of earthlings from belated transmissions of 1950 TV, from watching the Ed Sullivan Show, old Chester Morris movies, and Morey Amsterdam. Or, to judge from his speaking voice, he could have been an inveterate listener during the Golden Age of radio and modeled his speech on that of Harry Von Zell.
    D ONAHUE (backpedaling, smacking his head again) :Holy smoke! Who are these guys? (Beseeching the audience with a slow comic pan around)
    The audience laughs, not believing for a moment that these latecomers are not one of Donahue’s surprises. And yet—
    D ONAHUE (snapping his fingers) :I got it. Wait’ll I get that guy. It’s Steve Allen, right? Refugees from the Steve Allen Show, Great Conversations? Famous historical figures? You know, folks, they do that show in the studio down the hall. Wait’ll I get that guy.
    General laughter. Everybody remembers it’s been done before, an old show-biz trick, like Carson barging in on Rickles during the C.P.O. Sharkey taping.
    D ONAHUE: