Free The Plot by Evelyn Piper Page B

handwriting, she knew what that meant to him. Only Jamey didn’t seem to know. He didn’t watch, or listen; he talked. He talked about himself all through three-o’clock dinner. Louis, wiping his forehead on his sleeve, asked Jamey if he could do that interview now, but Jamey said, not yet, not yet, and went to take his nap. When Jamey’s door had closed behind him, Ethel stood up and invited Louis to follow her, her hand to her lips as they passed the closed bedroom door. It had become more difficult every day for Jamey to get to sleep; the pills Dr. Jedway prescribed seemed to be losing their effect. Jamey had had Ethel write to the doctor about this, and the doctor said that Jamey could now take three of the pills since he had apparently acquired a tolerance for them. Ethel, opening the door to her own room, told this to Louis. “I thought of your mother—the pain——You told me they were giving her morphine for it … but if she acquires a tolerance for morphine? Like Jamey?” This was a good time to remind him about his mother. She had seen that he wanted his mother to eat the delicious meal Jamey had just had. She had noticed how he looked at the sleek silver in Jamey’s old hand. She asked, “And, talking about tolerance, how is your tolerance for Jamey these days, Louis?”
    He hitched his jeans, which were sticking to his hot body. “The next time he asks me how his spiritual son is, I’m going to tell him how his spiritual son is! Sweating here watching my mother’s days go by without being able to help; sweating here, dry at the mouth and getting drier——And it isn’t just my mother.” He kept his eyes off Ethel, who looked particularly unattractive in the heat. “I’m not seventy-nine, Ethel; I’m twenty-five. I don’t want the beauty of the world in music, in pictures, in scenery. I want to dance with it, to hold it in my arms, to caress it——What’s the matter, Ethel?”
    To dance with Louis, to be held in his arms, to be caressed … “Nothing is the matter.” She went to her desk, large and tidy in the corner of the room where the windows were. “I want to show you a letter from Dwight Waterbury, head of Waterbury and Sloan, the publishers, you know.”
    â€œI know who Dwight Waterbury is.” A chill of anticipation made his sweat clammy.
    â€œI’ll summarize the letter, Louis. Mr. Waterbury is Jamey’s publisher. He admits that Jamey told him, when he retired to Charleston, that all he wanted to do was vegetate and add up what he had learned, but Mr. Waterbury is certain that by this time a good mathematician like Jamey has done the sum. (Jamey was always good at figures; don’t kid yourself he wasn’t! Jamey only began to philosophize about money when he had his own salted away.) Then comes the proposition: Dwight Waterbury offers Jamey one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars’ advance for his autobiography. One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, Louis!” Her tongue flicked out. “Mr. Waterbury says that unless Jamey carefully omits all the hot stuff and ‘igh lif’ intrigues, it is almost certain that the movies will give him at least that to make a picture of his life.
    â€œCan you add, Louis? Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Can you divide, Louis? It makes one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars for each of us!”
    â€œI thought it was something like this. I thought something like this was coming.” He heard his own sentence with astonishment because he had not “thought” it, he had known something was coming deep in him, below conscious thought. “When I told you about the stuff I was writing, you wrote Waterbury and Sloan.”
    Ethel banged both her hands down on the desk for emphasis. “No! I swear I didn’t, I swear I didn’t, Louis! This letter from Dwight Waterbury came