Baby Is Three (42 page)

“S
HE WAS BRAZEN
, of course,” said Lucinda, passing the marmalade, “but the brass was beautifully polished. The whole thing made me quite angry, though at the same time I was delighted.”

Meticulously Dr. Lefferts closed the newly-arrived
Journal of the Microbiological Institute
, placed it on the copy of
Strength of Materials in Various Radioisotopic Alloys
which lay beside his plate, and carefully removed his pince-nez. “You begin in mid-sequence,” he said, picking up a butter knife. “Your thought is a predicate without a stated subject. Finally, your description of your reactions contains parts which appear mutually exclusive.” He attacked the marmalade. “Will you elucidate?”

Lucinda laughed good-naturedly. “Of course, darling. Where would you like me to begin?”

“Oh.…” Dr. Lefferts made a vague gesture. “Practically anywhere. Anywhere at all. Simply supply more relative data in order that I may extrapolate the entire episode and thereby dispose of it. Otherwise I shall certainly keep returning to it all day long. Lucinda, why do you continually do this to me?”

“Do what, dear?”

“Present me with colorful trivialities in just such amounts as will make me demand to hear you out. I have a trained mind, Lucinda; a fine-honed, logical mind. It must think things through. You know that. Why do you continually
do
this to me?”

“Because,” said Lucinda placidly, “if I started at the beginning and went right through to the end, you wouldn’t listen.”

“I most certainly … eh. Perhaps you’re right.” He laid marmalade onto an English muffin in three parallel bands, and began smoothing them together at right angles to their original lay. “You
are right, my dear. That must be rather difficult for you from time to time … yes?”

“No indeed,” said Lucinda, and smiled. “Not as long as I can get your full attention when I want it. And I can.”

Dr. Lefferts chewed her statement with his muffin. At last he said, “I admit that in your inimitable—uh—I think one calls it
female
way, you can. At least in regard to small issues. Now do me the kindness to explain to me what stimuli could cause you to”—his voice supplied the punctuation—“feel ‘quite angry’ and ‘delighted’ simultaneously.”

Lucinda leaned forward to pour fresh coffee into his cooling cup. She was an ample woman, with an almost tailored combination of svelteness and relaxation. Her voice was like sofa-pillows and her eyes like blued steel. “It was on the Boulevard,” she said. “I was waiting to cross when this girl drove through a red light under the nose of a policeman. It was like watching a magazine illustration come to life—the bright yellow convertible and the blazing blonde in the bright yellow dress … darling, I do think you should call this year’s bra manufacturers for consultation in your Anti-Gravity Research division. They achieve the most baffling effects … anyway, there she was and there by the car was the traffic cop, as red-faced and Hibernian a piece of typecasting as you could wish. He came blustering over to her demanding to know begorry—I think he actually did say begorry—was she color-blind now, or did she perhaps not give a care this marnin’?”

“In albinos,” said Dr. Lefferts, “color perception is—”

Lucinda raised her smooth voice just sufficiently to override him without a break in continuity. “Now, here was an errant violation of the law, flagrantly committed under the eyes of an enforcement officer. I don’t have to tell you what should have happened. What
did
happen was that the girl kept her head turned away from him until his hands were on the car door. In the sun that hair of hers was positively dazzling. When he was close enough—within range, that is—she tossed her hair back and was face to face with him. You could see that great lump of bog-peat turn to putty. And she said to him (and if I’d had a musical notebook with me I could have jotted
down her voice in sharps and flats)—she said, ‘Why, officer, I did it on purpose just so I could see you up close.’ ”

Dr. Lefferts made a slight, disgusted sound. “He arrested her.”

“He did not,” said Lucinda. “He shook a big thick finger at her as if she were a naughty but beloved child, and the push-button blarney that oozed out of him was as easy to see as the wink he gave her. That’s what made me mad.”

“And well it should.” He folded his napkin. “Violations of the law should be immediately pun—”

“The law had little to do with it,” Lucinda said warmly. “I was angry because I know what would have happened to you or to me in that same situation. We’re just not equipped.”

“I begin to see.” He put his pince-nez back on and peered at her. “And what was it that delighted you?”

She stretched easily and half-closed her eyes. “The—what you have called the
femaleness
of it. It’s good to be a woman, darling, and to watch another woman be female skillfully.”

“I quarrel with your use of the term ‘skillfully,’ ” he said, folding his napkin. “Her ‘skill’ is analogous to an odor of musk or other such exudation in the lower animals.”

“It is
not,”
she said flatly. “With the lower animals, bait of that kind means one thing and one thing only, complete and final. With a woman, it means nothing of the kind. Never mind what it
might
mean; consider what it
does
mean. Do you think for a moment that the blonde in the convertible was making herself available to the policeman?”

“She was hypothesizing a situation in which—”

“She was hypothesizing nothing of the kind. She was blatantly and brazenly getting out of paying a traffic fine, and that was absolutely all. And you can carry it one step further; do you think that for one split second the policeman actually believed that she was inviting him? Of course he didn’t! And yet that situation is one that has obtained through the ages. Women have always been able to get what they wanted from men by pretending to promise a thing which they know men want but will not or cannot take. Mind you, I’m not talking about situations where this yielding is the main issue.
I’m talking about the infinitely greater number of occasions where yielding has nothing to do with it. Like weaseling out of traffic tickets.”

“Or skillfully gaining your husband’s reluctant attention over the breakfast table.”

Her sudden laughter was like a shower of sparks. “You’d better get down to the Institute,” she said. “You’ll be late.”

He arose, picked up his book and pamphlet, and walked slowly to the door. Lucinda came with him, hooking her arm through his. Suddenly he stopped, and without looking at her, asked quietly, “That policeman was a manipulated, undignified fool, wasn’t he?”

“Of course he was, darling, and it made a man of him.”

He nodded as if accepting a statistic, and, kissing her, walked out of the house.

Darling
, she thought,
dear sweet chrome-plated, fine-drawn, high-polished blueprint … I think I’ve found where you keep your vanity
. She watched him walk with his even, efficient, unhurried stride to the gate. There he paused and looked back.

“This has been going on too long,” he called. “I shall alter it.”

Lucinda stopped smiling.

“May I come in?”

“Jenny, of course.” Lucinda went to the kitchen door and unhooked it. “Come in, come in. My, you’re prettier than ever this morning.”

“I brought you violets,” said Jenny breathlessly. “Just scads of ’em in the woods behind my place. You took your red curtains down. Is that a new apron? My! You had Canadian bacon for breakfast.”

She darted in past Lucinda, a small, wiry, vibrant girl with sunlit hair and moonlight eyes. “Can I help with the dishes?”

“Thank you, you doll.” Lucinda took down a shallow glass bowl for the violets.

Jenny busily ran hot water into the sink. “I couldn’t help seeing,” she said. “Your big picture window.… Lucinda, you
never
leave the breakfast dishes. I keep telling Bob, someday I’ll have the routines you have, everything always so neat, never running out of
anything, never in a hurry, never surprised … anyway, all the way over I could see you just sitting by the table there, and the dishes not done and all … is everything all right? I mean, don’t tell me if I shouldn’t ask, but I couldn’t help.…” Her voice trailed off into an ardent and respectful mumble.

“You’re such a sweetheart,” Lucinda said mistily. She came over to the sink carrying clean dishtowels and stood holding them, staring out past Jenny’s head to the level lawns of the village. “Actually, I did have something on my mind … something.…”

She related the whole conversation over breakfast that morning, from her abrupt and partial mentioning of the anecdote about the blonde and the policeman, to her husband’s extraordinary and unequivocal statement about women’s power over men:
This has been going on too long. I shall alter it
.

“Is that all?” Jenny asked when she had finished.

“Mm. It’s all that was said.”

“Oh, I don’t think you should worry about that.” She crinkled up her eyes, and Lucinda understood that she was putting herself and her young husband in the place of Lucinda and Dr. Lefferts, and trying to empathize a solution. “I think you might have hurt his feelings a little, maybe,” Jenny said at length. “I mean, you admitted that you handled him in much the same way as that blonde handled the policeman, and then you said the policeman was a fool.”

Lucinda smiled. “Very shrewd. And what’s your guess about that parting shot?”

Jenny turned to face her. “You’re not teasing me, asking my opinion, Lucinda? I never thought I’d see the day! Not you—you’re so wise!”

Lucinda patted her shoulder. “The older I get, the more I feel that among women there is a lowest common denominator of wisdom, and that the chief difference between them is a random scattering of blind spots. No, honey, I’m not teasing you. You may be able to see just where I can’t. Now tell me: what do you think he meant by that?”

“
‘I shall alter it,’ ”
Jenny quoted thoughtfully. “Oh, I don’t think he meant anything much. You showed him how you could make
him do things, and he didn’t like it. He’s decided not to let you do it any more, but—but.…”

“But what?”

“Well, it’s like with Bob. When he gets masterful and lays down the law I just agree with him. He forgets about it soon enough. If you agree with men all the time they can’t get stubborn about anything.”

Lucinda laughed aloud. “There’s the wisdom!” she cried. Sobering, she shook her head. “You don’t know the doctor the way I do. He’s a great man—a truly great one, with a great mind. It’s great in a way no other mind has ever been. He’s—different. Jenny, I know how people talk, and what a lot of them say. People wonder why I married him, why I’ve stayed with him all these years. They say he’s stuffy and didactic and that he has no sense of humor. Well, to them he may be; but to me he is a continual challenge. The rules-of-thumb that keep most men in line don’t apply to him.

“And if he says he can do something, he can. If he says he will do something, he will.”

Jenny dried her hands and sat down slowly. “He meant,” she said positively, “that he would alter your ability to make him do things. Because the only other thing he could have meant was that he was going to alter the thing that makes it possible for any woman to handle any man. And that just couldn’t be. How could he change human nature?”

“How? How? He’s the scientist. I’m not. I simply eliminate that ‘how’ from my thinking. The worrisome thing about it is that he doesn’t think in small ways about small issues. I’m afraid that’s just what he meant—that he was going to change some factor in humanity that is responsible for this power we have over men.”

“Oh … really,” said Jenny. She looked up at Lucinda, moved her hands uneasily. “Lucinda, I know how great the doctor is, and how much you think of him, but—no one man could do such a thing! Not outside of his own home.” She grinned fleetingly. “Probably not inside of it, for very long.… I never understood just what sort of a scientist he is. Can you tell me, I mean, aside from any secret projects he might be on? Like Bob, now; Bob’s a high-temperature metallurgist. What is the doctor, exactly?”

“That’s the right question to ask,” Lucinda said, and her voice was shadowed. “Dr. Lefferts is a—well, the closest you could get to it would be to call him a specializing non-specialist. You see, science has reached the point where each branch of it continually branches into specialties, and each specialty has its own crop of experts. Most experts live in the confines of their own work. The doctor was saying just the other day that he’d discovered a fluorine-boron step-reaction in mineralogy that had been known for so long that the mineralogists had forgotten about it—yet it was unknown to metallurgy. Just as I said a moment ago, his mind is great, and—different. His job is to draw together the chemists and the biologists, the pure mathematicians and the practical physicists, the clinical psychologists and the engineers and all the other -ists and -ologies. His speciality is scientific thought as applied to all the sciences. He has no assignments except to survey all the fields and transfer needed information from one to the other. There has never been such a position in the Institute before, nor a man to fill it. And there is no other institute like this one on earth.

“He has entrée into every shop and lab and library in this Institute. He can do anything or get anything done in any of them.

“And when he said ‘I shall alter it,’ he meant what he said!”

“I never knew that’s what he did,” breathed Jenny. “I never knew that’s what … 
who
he is.”

“That’s who he is.”

“But what can he change?” Jenny burst out. “What can he change in us, in all men, in all women? What is the power he’s talking about, and where does it come from, and what would … will … happen if it’s changed?”

“I don’t know,” Lucinda said thoughtfully, “I—do—not—know. The blonde in the convertible … that sort of thing is just one of the things a woman naturally does, because she is a woman, without thinking of it.”

Unexpectedly, Jenny giggled. “You don’t plan those things. You just do them. It’s nice when it works. A better roast from the butcher. A reminder from one of the men at the bank that a cheque’s overdrawn, in time to cover it.”