Read Online Eagle Eye by Hortense Calisher - Free Book Online

ones. He knew that look, from the PS before PS 6. They were afraid they weren’t to be trusted. There was always such a progression of them; that was the trouble. One had lasted long enough in his grandfather’s esteem for the boy to be given a job, but it hadn’t worked out.
    “How’d it work out down there? With Maeve?”
    “So-so. No, not good, why should I lie to you? She looked beautiful, absolutely. Your mother’s still a—” His father smeared two fingers over an eye and stretched his mouth. “But it doesn’t seem to help. Sit down, boy. Sit down.”
    He sat on a satin bergère, on the edge.
    Through his father’s account, he saw the whole scene: the reception line, the photographer’s fireworks.
    “She hostessed it all just fine, just as if she hadn’t walked in cold on the arrangements, but had done it all herself. Cool she was, like born to it. And I thought, now I’ve got it for her, it’s all turned out right. She even posed with Mrs. Blum.”
    His father’s secretary, from way back when. Whom Maeve had displaced. Who had again taken Maeve’s place. What a continuity, now that one thought of it.
    “Then some confounded girl reporter—big tall girl with a shiv in her purse instead of a pen—asked her if she hadn’t been my secretary, once. And I could see it begin to fall apart.” His father leaned into one of the mirrors as if he was seeing it there. “Once again.” Buddy smoothed his shave, clenched a fist and rested his chin on it, wide-eyeing himself in the glass—there was a picture of him in that posture as a newsboy, in knickers and shouldersack. “I shouldn’t have started that secretary joke with her, years ago. When a person hurts, and you keep rubbing it in—maybe it all started with that secretary joke.”
    “I don’t buy that.”
    “You don’t? Bunty, wanna know something? Neither do I. But the psychiatrist does.”
    “She going to one?”
    “No. Mine.”
    “You? What do you need a—”
    “Thanks, pal. Because she wouldn’t. Better than nothing, they said. She’s in a bad state of equilibrium.”
    He hung back, then. Why was his father hanging back? “Will I find her—changed?”
    “No, son.” His father said it mildly. “Just the same.” He got up suddenly. “Say Bunt, take a look through here.”
    His father was applying his left eye to what looked like a metal-rimmed hole in one of the mirrors.
    “What is it?”
    “No secrets, no more secrets.” Buddy applied the other eye to the hole. “Came with the house. A spyglass. From room-to-room. The public ones. First I thought I’d block them off; now I can’t do without. Who’s ever at the party I wanna bypass, I can. Right up to my room. Take a look.”
    He saw a room in reverse opera-glass scale, at first only the floor. The device had a swivel, and a lens adjuster, very clever. There was nobody in the next room.
    “Your room’s on the same line as mine. Next to the armory.”
    “Armory?”
    “The guy was a military buff. Wanna wash up?”
    “No thanks.” He couldn’t resist though. “What’s it like?”
    “Living like this? Aren’t I used?”
    “My room.”
    “Not so bad, you know. She gave a lotta thought.”
    “Hell. I won’t be staying, Buddy.”
    “She knew that, Bunty. She knew that. I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like a room in an Italian hotel.”
    His father closed the little round door of the spyhole, wiped its mirror with a handkerchief. You could hardly see it was there. “Smart, always so smart, isn’t she?” Buddy said. “When I pushed about the doctor. ‘What’ll he tell me—’ she says. ‘That I’m a quick learner? Who learns only dreck?’ … Excuse me, Bunty—you understand that language?”
    He’d forgotten his father’s delicacy with a son’s other half. “Why not? She does.”
    “Dreck. That an Irish girl should learn only that from us. From New York.”
    “Why New York?” It burst from him. “Why not from Amenia?”
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