Nine Stories

by J.D. Salinger

They had an even stronger bond between them; neither of them had graduated.

At six-thirty, M. Yoshoto knocked on my door and advised me that breakfast would be served at six-forty-five. He asked me, through the door, if I’d slept well, and I answered, “Oui!” I then dressed—putting on my blue suit, which I thought appropriate for an instructor on the opening day of school, and a red Sulka tie my mother had given me

A tacit but iron-bound procedure covered all evening meals at Les Amis Des Vieux Maîtres. Mme. Yoshoto got up from her desk promptly at five-thirty and went upstairs to prepare dinner, and M. Yoshoto and I followed—fell into single file, as it were—at six sharp. There were no side trips, however essential or hygienic. That evening, however, with Sister Irma’s envelope warm against my chest, I had never felt more relaxed.

I’ve been as saving as an exceptionally neurotic magpie all my life, and I still have the next-to-the-last draft of the letter I wrote to Sister Irma that June night in 1939.

I asked her to please tell me how old she was, and assured her, at great length, that the information, if given, wouldn’t go beyond myself. I said the only reason that I was asking was that the information would help me to instruct her more efficiently. Virtually in the same breath, I asked if she were allowed to have visitors at her convent.

I hope you will consider me entirely at your disposal as long as you are a student at Les Amis Des Vieux Maîtres. Frankly, I think you are greatly talented and would not even be slightly startled if you developed into a genius before many years have gone by.

As a last thought, please do not forget to advise me as to your visiting hours, as my weekends are free as far as I know and I may happen to be in your environs some Saturday by chance.

I pictured both Yoshotos coming to me in the morning and asking me, begging me, to hear their secret problem out, to the last, terrible detail. I saw exactly how it would be. I would sit down between them at the kitchen table and listen to each of them. I would listen, listen, listen, with my head in my hands—till finally, unable to stand it any longer, I would reach down into Mme. Yoshoto’s throat, take up her heart in my hand and warm it as I would a bird. Then, when all was put right, I would show Sister Irma’s work to the Yoshotos, and they would share my joy.

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid. Mine started to seep through its container as early as the next morning, when M. Yoshoto dropped by at my desk with the envelopes of two new students.

As I was returning from wherever I’d spent the evening—and I do remember that it was after dark—I stopped on the sidewalk outside the school and looked into the lighted display window of the orthopedic appliances shop. Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss.

I lay awake for hours, shivering. I listened to the moaning in the next room and I thought, forcibly, of my star pupil. I tried to visualize the day I would visit her at her convent. I saw her coming to meet me—near a high, wire fence—a shy, beautiful girl of eighteen who had not yet taken her final vows and was still free to go out into the world with the Peter Abelard-type man of her choice.

It was just then that I had my Experience. Suddenly (and I say this, I believe, with all due self-consciousness), the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. Blinded and very frightened—I had to put my hand on the glass to keep my balance. The thing lasted for no more than a few seconds. When I got my sight back, the girl had gone from the window, leaving behind her a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers.

It seems altogether anticlimactic to mention it, but Les Amis Des Vieux Maîtres closed down less than a week later, for being improperly licensed (for not being licensed at all, as a matter of fact). I packed up and joined Bobby, my stepfather, in Rhode Island, where I spent the next six or eight weeks, till art school reopened, investigating that most interesting of all summer-active animals, the American Girl in Shorts. Right or wrong, I never again got in touch with Sister Irma. Occasionally, I still hear from Bambi Kramer, though. The last I heard, she’d branched over into designing her own Christmas cards. They’ll be something to see, if she hasn’t lost her touch.