Read Online Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger - Free Book Online

suddenly hit me at the meat counter, and it seemed a matter of life and death to drive home at seventy miles an hour to get a letter off to you. Oh, God, how I wish I'd grabbed a pencil right there in the supermarket and not trusted the roads home. Maybe it's just as well, though. There are times when I think you've forgiven S. more completely than any of us have. Waker once said something very interesting to me on that subject--in fact, I'm merely parroting what he said to me. He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving. That may be truer than true. How can I know? All I do know for certain is that I had something happy and exciting to tell you--and on just one side of the paper, doublespaced--and I knew when I got home that it was mostly gone, or all gone, and there was nothing left to do but go through the motions. Lecture you on Ph.D.s and the actor's life. How messy, how funny, and how Seymour himself would have smiled and smiled--and probably assured me, and all of us, not to worry about it.
     
        Enough. Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might. If you do anything at all beautiful on a stage, anything nameless and joy-making, anything above and beyond the call of theatrical ingenuity, S. and I will both rent tuxedos and rhinestone hats and solemnly come around to the stage door with bouquets of snapdragons. In any case, for what little it's worth, please count on my affection and support, at whatever distance.
     
        --BUDDY
     
        As always, my passes at omniscience are absurd, but you, of all people, should be polite to the part of me that comes out merely clever. Years ago, in my earliest and pastiest days as a would-be writer, I once read a new story aloud to S. and Boo Boo. When I was finished, Boo Boo said flatly (but looking over at Seymour) that the story was "too clever." S. shook his head, beaming away at me, and said cleverness was my permanent affliction, my wooden leg, and that it was in the worst possible taste to draw the group's attention to it. As one limping man to another, old Zooey, let's be courteous and kind to each other.
     
        Much love, B.
     
    THE last, the under, page of the four-year-old letter was stained a sort of off-cordovan color, and it was torn in two places along the folds. Zooey, finished reading, treated it with some little care as he put the letter back into page-one order. He tapped the pages, to even them out, against his dry knees. He frowned. Then, mercurially, as though he'd read the letter, by God, for the last time in his life, he stuffed it like so much excelsior into its envelope. He placed the thick envelope on the side of the tub and began to play a little game with it. With one finger he tapped the loaded envelope back and forth along the tub edge, seeing, apparently, if he could keep it in motion without letting it fall into the tub water. After a good five minutes of this, he gave the envelope a faulty tap and had to reach out quickly and grab it. Which ended the game. Keeping the retrieved envelope in his hand, he sat lower, deeper, in the water, letting his knees submerge. He stared abstractedly for a minute or two at the tiled wall beyond the foot of the tub, then glanced at his cigarette on the soapcatch, picked it off, and took a couple of test drags on it, but it had gone out. He sat up again, very abruptly, with a great slosh of tub water, and dropped his dry left hand over the side of the tub. A typewritten manuscript was lying, face up, on the bathmat. He picked it up and brought it aboard, as it were. He stared at it briefly, then inserted his four-year-old letter in the middle pages, where the stapling in a manuscript is tightest. He then propped the manuscript against his now wet knees, an inch or so above the waterline,