Lemon in the Basket Page 8

  In the privacy of the suite on the fifth floor at the hospital, that same Thursday morning, while elsewhere Dr. Mitchel Tyler applied himself to his delicate work, the women sat waiting. There was Jaylia, the patient’s mother; Inga, his nurse; Tamsen, his playmate; and Maggie.

  It was Maggie who kept talking, rambling in a gentle voice over many inconsequential topics. The two guards sat on the floor, their fierce eyes frustrated; yet they listened now and then. Maggie kept on talking.

  At noon there was a news special on TV, a so-called roundup. Lurlene and Rufus, eating their sandwiches and drinking their glasses of beer, sat before the little window to the world.

  “Before this broadcast is over, we hope to be able to bring you a bulletin from the hospital, where an American surgeon is now …” The situation was rehashed.

  Then all the rumors were repeated, and a few added. There was a rumor that a bomb may have been thrown at an apartment house where Mrs. Alice Foster, the Little Prince’s American grandmother, was alleged to be staying. The bomb had been a dud. Or, no dud, but little damage. Or, guards on the building had made the bomb ineffective. All these rumors were unconfirmed.

  When the supply of rumors ran out, the commentators began on the boy’s family tree. When that ran out, they began on his doctor’s. And, by now, time was running out of the allotted hour.

  “Dr. Mitchel Tyler is the brilliant son of Judge William Rufus Tyler, who is well-known all over this country as …” and so on and so on.

  “Dr. Tyler’s mother is the incomparable Maggie Mitchel, the famous actress, who …” and so on and so on.

  Time was running as fast as the last grains of salt. The commentator was reaching. “Dr. Tyler is married to Phillida Tyler, prominent directress of many charitable …” and so on.

  “Dr. Tyler’s brother, Duncan, will be one of the youngest men …” and so on.

  “Duncan Tyler’s wife is Tamsen Tyler, voted by some to be the West’s most promising young artist of our time …” and so on.

  “For those who tuned in late, we are awaiting some news from St. Genevieve’s Hospital, where the eleven-year-old Prince of Alalaf …” and so on and so on. Then staccato—“Just a minute!”

  The commentator put a hand out of the picture and plucked a strip of paper from unseen regions.

  “The operation has been performed,” he announced, “and was successful! The Little Prince is in the recovery room and will be in intensive care for some time. He is doing well! Doing well! This is good news. Ladies and gentlemen, this is good news! The Little Prince is doing well!”

  In the hospital, Jaylia was on the phone to the Palace in Alalaf.

  In the other room, Maggie was on the phone, calling the family. The Judge at home. Phillida at her office. Duncan at the University.

  Lurlene answered the telephone.

  “Oh, Maggie,” she said, rolling her eyes around to signal Rufus. “We just now heard it on TV. But thanks for calling. Um … I’m sure glad. We … we felt awful. I mean, Rufus didn’t mean a thing, you know? But we both felt just awful about it.”

  “I thought you would be glad to hear,” said Maggie. “It has been a long morning.”

  “Oh, it sure has! I’m real glad. I think it’s just wonderful!”

  “Yes. Give my love to Rufus.”

  “Oh, I sure will!”

  But she did not. Lurlene hung up and went over to the couch and flung herself face down. The special on TV was over. She never paid much attention to commercials.

  Rufus said, “Was that Maggie?”

  “Calling up to tell us the good news,” said Lurlene. “Nice of her, I guess. Only I thought they weren’t going to tell us the time of day anymore.”

  “She was upset the other day,” he said vaguely.

  “Yah, sure. Me, too. But nobody wants to know how I feel.”

  “Lurlene,” he said earnestly. He must have moved. He was standing over her. “You were always the girl for me. You’re Mrs. Rufus Tyler, and don’t you forget that.”

  “I’m not going to,” she snuffled.

  “And I promised you …”

  “Don’t bother. Just don’t bother.” She turned her face into the upholstery.

  “Honey-Lu?”

  “I notice how they said ‘and the doctor’s brother, Rufus Tyler.’ I notice that, all right.”

  “Don’t worry, hon.”

  “What have I got to worry about?” Lurlene was bawling. “Your father pays on the mortgage. That’s all I need, in this world.”

  “Don’t worry,” he kept saying dully.

  At the hospital Maggie, having announced that there were too many people here, stepped with Tamsen out of the building into a pack of newsmen. Maggie handled them with an awesome grace.

  She had come with Jaylia, in a chauffeur-driven car, accompanied by a Secret Service man, so Tamsen got into it with her to be taken to where Tamsen had hidden her own Volkswagen, some blocks away.

  “He isn’t perfectly safe yet,” said Tamsen, “is he?”

  “He never will be, and who ever is?” said Maggie with an exhausted sigh. “We must give thanks and rejoice for so much, so far.”

  “And Mrs. Foster is all right, too. Alice Foster?”

  “So far,” said Maggie. “She sounded happy on the telephone.”

  “You were wonderful,” said Tamsen. “And his mother was wonderful, I thought.”

  “What was so wonderful?” said Maggie musingly. “He might have died. He still may. Any of us may, at any moment.”

  “Though true,” said Tamsen dryly, “that never did comfort me much.”

  Maggie was cheered immediately, and she laughed. “Then don’t you let it,” she said gaily. “Don’t you let fate keep kicking you in the teeth, without making some human protest. Otherwise, what’s the fun of it all?”

  “Mitch protested,” said Tamsen, “didn’t he?”

  “Yes, my dear. He did, indeed.” Maggie kissed her a fond farewell and announced that she was going home to interfere with the destiny of one clump of iris. Maggie was going to thin it out, because she was alive and, for the duration, she chose to consider her garden her garden.

  That evening Judge Tyler spoke calmly about brinkmanship in human affairs which, being the art of sensitive, quick and bold response to whatever should happen to happen next, could never be explained to the general populace because it never stood still long enough. His mellow discourse made Jaylia nod, and Maggie smile.

  That evening Phillida Tyler paced her apartment and used some unladylike words. Her husband had done damn brilliantly well but, alas, the shame of publicity was upon him, and now he must live that down, damn and blast! Her explosions made the Doctor chuckle.

  That evening Duncan Tyler lectured to his wife on the subject of news columnists. “You’ve heard that the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose? Likewise, whatever somebody wants to ‘see by the papers’ that ‘they say’ (or, in other words, whatever he needs to reinforce his original prejudice), he can find it, in one column or another. The fact that those boys are working stiffs and must turn out the daily stint, who thinks of that?” It pleased Tamsen to hear him holding forth in his old vein.

  That evening Rufus Tyler entertained Ed Duveen and his wife with boastful accounts of the prowess of the members of his remarkable family, and how their names were destined for the history books, all right. It made Lurlene nervous for some reason.

  10

  Over the weekend the news broke that the coup, or whatever it had been intended to be, had failed in Alalaf. But—mild sensation—Dhanab had not been seen for forty-eight hours. He had vanished. Nobody knew whether he was dead or alive or, in either case, where. The old King rode high. But the little country was rumored to be on a brink, from which it must tilt onward or fall back. The great holes in its fabric, between jet plane and donkey, between howling wilderness and air-conditioned office building, must be filled in and smoothed over. But with whose help?

  Meantime, the
American professors still languished in their cells, for reasons unknown but guessed at. The guesses were then analyzed, as if they were not guesses at all. The East accused the West, and the West the East, as usual, of some dirty fingers in the small, but “significant” pie.

  “Jaylia, dear,” read Maggie aloud, on the following Tuesday morning. “Share this with Maggie and William, and tell them, all over again, how I am rejoicing over Saiph and how I bless them and theirs.

  “I am happy to tell you that the foreign press is beginning to be believed around these parts. After all, fifty million Frenchmen, Britishers, Italians, Egyptians, Israelis, Indians, and who-have-we can’t all be wrong. So it is getting through, in spite of a great deal of nonsense to the contrary, that Saiph is not only alive and well, but in better health than he has been.

  “For the rest, don’t worry too much. The Lion is the King of Beasts, as usual. However, the aforesaid nonsense was (for nonsense) too consistent and too evenly spread to have sprung up spontaneously. Somebody was trying to use your secret departure. But who, ah, who?

  “The one out front may have seemed to be that which drags behind. But right from my little webby nest I could a tale unfold. Although I won’t, until time untangles.

  “Meanwhile, there, take care, let him heal, and when he is perfectly strong, bring him home.

  “Love. And love to all Tylers. Your devoted Alice.”

  “Now really!” said Maggie in exasperation. “What on earth is to be made of most of that?”

  “Oh, Mother loves to be cryptic.” Jaylia was smiling. She hesitated and then added, “I suppose you may not know that Al Asad means The Lion?”

  “Oh?” said Maggie. “Well, that was clear enough anyhow.”

  “Anything else, meaning what we may not know?” drawled the Judge, cheerfully suspicious.

  “Oh,” said Jaylia, “not much.” She laughed aloud. “My mother is priceless. She is really priceless.”

  “So she is, but does she know what she’s talking about? Or, I should say, not talking about, so that a lay person such as I am can figure it out?” Maggie was sputtering.

  “She has her methods,” said Jaylia mirthfully, “as she keeps saying.”

  “Spiders it up, eh?” said Maggie, beginning to smile, too.

  But the Judge thought that some news had been conveyed to Jaylia in the letter that Jaylia considered none of their business. Still, whatever it was, it was making Jaylia merry, so he fell in with the mood of gaiety here at the breakfast table, intending later to do his duty and pass along, for what they were worth, what on-the-spot observations he had gleaned from Alice Foster’s letter. And so he did.

  But the Judge was a shrewd old party, and inclined to persist. He settled in his leather chair, with the fat unabridged dictionary before him, and through its pages he pursued this and that. When referred, he pursued the reference. At last he came to a certain definition and he, too, laughed aloud.

  He didn’t understand the news entirely, but the way it was put was certainly amusing.

  Tamsen had not been allowed in the hospital for several days. When she appeared, on Wednesday, she found her little friend pale and obviously still weak from the ordeal, but in good spirits, accepting life as easily as death, and glad to see her. She sat beside him and, in order to ask no effort of him, told him stories. When her hour was up, Saiph promised her that he would be thinking up questions for tomorrow.

  “And tomorrow and tomorrow,” she said, rejoicing.

  “And when I am strong, I may go and see?” he said wistfully to the window.

  “I don’t know, Butch. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “O.K., old-timer,” Saiph said. “It’s a date.”

  The guard on the door to the suite said to her urgently, “Mrs. Tyler, maybe you better get on down there.”

  She looked toward the elevators and recognized that there was an argument of some sort going on. So she hurried.

  “Mrs. Tyler,” said one of the guards, “is this man a Mr. Tyler? He refuses to show identification.”

  “Oh, yes,” she gasped. “Rufus, what are you doing here?”

  “Just thought I’d come by and be neighborly,” said Rufus. “I don’t get all this, believe me.” His face was red and his eyes were rolling. He seemed to have a candy box under his arm.

  “This is the Doctor’s brother,” Tamsen said.

  “We have no instructions to let him pass,” the guard said, at the same time.

  “Oh, Rufus, you should have phoned,” she said. “You can’t see Saiph today, I’m afraid. No visitors allowed.”

  “What are you doing here?” he said truculently.

  “Let’s go down to the coffee shop and I’ll tell you.”

  “I brought him a little present,” Rufus grumbled. “Just trying to be …”

  “No gifts,” said the guard sharply.

  “That was awfully kind of you,” said Tamsen, “but please …”

  “Well, we wanted to pay a little attention—being family.” Rufus looked haughtily at the guard.

  “Of course you did.” Tamsen was anxious to get him away. He had been in enough trouble. The guards were bristling. “Come on downstairs with me, Rufus, please?”

  Rufus got into the elevator with her. “Say, who are these men?” he demanded.

  “Oh, they are guards. Government people.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, that’s a very important little boy,” she said. “They can’t have people bothering him.”

  “No visitors?” He looked angry and suspicious. “Not a soul, eh?”

  “Well, of course, when his mother comes, every morning and every evening, sometimes Maggie or the Judge comes with her. But even Phillida comes by only once in a long while, and she never stays.”

  “Duncan?”

  “No, he never comes.” (Duncan was minding his own business these days.)

  “But you can get in, eh, Tamsen? You were in there with him?”

  “Come on. Let’s have a coffee break and I’ll tell you. And you can tell me how you’ve been, too. I haven’t seen you for so long.”

  She led him into the coffee shop, where they took a small table. “You see,” she said, when the coffee cups were before them, “Mitch asked me, long ago, to come by and play with the little boy for an hour every day. I’ve been doing that, ever since he got here. Today’s the first time I’ve come, since surgery—but that’s my job. So that’s all about it. How have you been? But first, tell me, how is Lurlene?”

  Tamsen hated coffee breaks, but she had settled herself to seem cozy, and to please and comfort him, if possible.

  “She’s fine.” Rufus had a changed look. Perhaps he had not been feeling well. Tamsen dimly remembered Lurlene having said something to this effect. His face looked thinner. Now that the flush of anger had receded, he looked pale.

  “And you’ve been keeping well and busy?” she said.

  “Oh, yes. I’ve been fairly busy.” He smiled, not at her, but at the table top. “Doing some homework. Research, you could say.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Yes, it … uh … keeps me busy. So that’s a very important little boy, eh?” He sucked in coffee. “I guess so.”

  “All little boys are very important,” said Tamsen sentimentally. “This one happens to be—well, you could say—in the spotlight of history, poor child.”

  “We … uh … This happens to be homemade candy.” Rufus smacked the pound box he had before him on the table. “All kids like candy, we thought.”

  “Wasn’t it good of Lurlene to go to the trouble,” said Tamsen in her soft voice.

  Rufus was staring at her as if she had startled him.

  “Oh, I’m sure you will meet Saiph, before he goes home again,” she comforted.

  “How soon will that be?” He pulled himself up.

  “The Doctor hasn’t told us. I suppose it depends on lots of things.”

  “They’d have blamed me, you know,”
said Rufus in tones curiously too flat and dull for the meaning of his words.

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s all been forgotten.” Tamsen, who herself had forgiven and almost forgotten, was quick to cast backwards. “Don’t you agree, it is obvious now that something was going to be troublesome in Alalaf, sooner or later, no matter what?”

  “The old King should step down,” Rufus said, eyeing her craftily.

  “Do you think so?” she murmured. “I don’t know very much about Al Asad.”

  “But a little kid can’t rule the country,” Rufus continued didactically. “This Dhanab might. He’s got modern ideas.”

  “Has he?” Tamsen kept her eyes lowered, because she couldn’t believe that Rufus was an authority. Yet she felt he needed her respectful attention. “You don’t think he is dead, then?”

  “No, no,” said Rufus, expanding. “No, no, he’s lying low, choosing the right time, consolidating his support.”

  “I see,” she said softly. “I didn’t know.”

  But when he said no more, she looked up and caught the anger on his face.

  “You have made a study of it, haven’t you?” she said. “More than I have, surely.” She forced herself to a belief in what she was saying. It might be so.

  He said, “Say, Tamsen, you go up and see this boy every day? Your job, you say? Why couldn’t you take him his present?”

  “Oh, I wish I could,” she said, “but it wouldn’t be permitted, really.” Tamsen tried to soften this. “He has to keep to a very strict diet, for one thing. It would have to be doctor’s orders. Why don’t you talk to Mitch, and see when he thinks you could come by and meet Saiph? Next week, possibly?”

  He was moving his jaw in an odd way from side to side, without opening his mouth at all.

  “I might do that,” he said in a moment. “Say, uh …” His brows rode up, his eyes popped. “Why don’t you take the candy home, then, Tamsen? Somebody might as well enjoy it.” Bright idea? his expression was asking.

  She thought, I simply must not reject him again. He has been rejected just too many times. “Why, thank you very much, Rufus,” she said, summoning enthusiasm. “That’s awfully kind. May I, really?”