Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger Read Free Book Online Page B

about that."
    "But
you said that because I didn't have to pay for them--"
    "Walk
me to the door," Ginnie said, leading the way, without saying
goodbye to Eric.
    "But
I thought you said you were going to the movies tonight and you
needed the money and all!" Selena said in the foyer.
    "I'm
too tired," Ginnie said. She bent over and picked up her tennis
paraphernalia. "Listen. I'll give you a ring after dinner. Are
you doing anything special tonight? Maybe I can come over."
    Selena
stared and said, "O.K."
    Ginnie
opened the front door and walked to the elevator. She rang the bell.
"I met your brother," she said.
    "You
did? Isn't he a character?"
    "What's
he do, anyway?" Ginnie asked casually. "Does he work or
something?"
    "He
just quit. Daddy wants him to go back to college, but he won't go."
    "Why
won't he?"
    "I
don't know. He says he's too old and all."
    "How
old is he?"
    "I
don't know. Twenty-four."
    The
elevator doors opened. "I'll call you laterl" Ginnie said.
    Outside
the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus.
Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her
purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to
bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead
she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her
three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the
sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.

    The Laughing Man

    IN
1928, when I was nine, I belonged, with maximum esprit de corps, to
an organization known as the Comanche Club. Every schoolday afternoon
at three o'clock, twenty-five of us Comanches were picked up by our
Chief outside the boys' exit of P. S. 165, on 109th Street near
Amsterdam Avenue. We then pushed and punched our way into the Chief's
reconverted commercial bus, and he drove us (according to his
financial arrangement with our parents) over to Central Park. The
rest of the afternoon, weather permitting, we played football or
soccer or baseball, depending (very loosely) on the season. Rainy
afternoons, the Chief invariably took us either to the Museum of
Natural History or to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Saturdays
and most national holidays, the Chief picked us up early in the
morning at our various apartment houses and, in his condemned-looking
bus, drove us out of Manhattan into the comparatively wide open
spaces of Van Cortlandt Park or the Palisades. If we had straight
athletics on our minds, we went to Van Cortlandt, where the playing
fields were regulation size and where the opposing team didn't
include a baby carriage or an irate old lady with a cane. If our
Comanche hearts were set on camping, we went over to the Palisades
and roughed it. (I remember getting lost one Saturday somewhere on
that tricky stretch of terrain between the Linit sign and the site of
the western end of the George Washington Bridge. I kept my head,
though. I just sat down in the majestic shadow of a giant billboard
and, however tearfully, opened my lunchbox for business,
semi-confident that the Chief would find me. The Chief always found
us.)
    In
his hours of liberation from the Comanches, the Chief was John
Gedsudski, of Staten Island. He was an extremely shy, gentle young
man of twenty-two or -three, a law student at N.Y.U., and altogether
a very memorable person. I won't attempt to assemble his many
achievements and virtues here. Just in passing, he was an Eagle
Scout, an almost-All-America tackle of 1926, and it was known that he
had been most cordially invited to try out for the New York Giants'
baseball team. He was an impartial and unexcitable umpire at all our
bedlam sporting events, a master fire builder and extinguisher, and
an expert, uncontemptuous first-aid man. Every one of us, from the
smallest hoodlum to the biggest, loved and respected him.
    The
Chief's physical appearance in 1928 is still clear in my mind. If
wishes were inches, all of us Comanches would have had him a giant in
no time.