. give it to them to do that. There are, well, families, sort of. They eat together, but usually the babies, the children, move around to get what they can from whoever’s handing it out. Later . . .”
“What are you doing?” Johnny interrupted John-John’s voice, his sixteen-year-old tenor overriding his ten-year-old boy soprano.
Jeannette started, gasped, dropped her ballpoint pen. She was wearing a white dressing gown embroidered about the collar and hem with an Egyptian motif (King Tut’s treasure had come through town during the nation’s Bicentennial celebration, inflicting jackal hieroglyphs and golden cobra rings on the devotees of haute couture), and her hair was clasped at her nape in a way that made her look like a girl. Recovering slightly, she gave a mighty sigh and stabbed the cassette recorder to a standstill.
“What are you doing?” Johnny demanded again.
“Having the huckleberries scared out of me. What are you doing, Master Monegal?”
“You’ve taken my tapes out of their shoebox and copied them, haven’t you? You’ve made your own cassettes. Why?”
Instead of answering, Jeannette shuffled the long galley sheets together. Johnny glided across the room and took them from her hands.
EDEN IN HIS DREAMS
The Past Through Oneiromancy, A True Story
Jeannette R. Monegal
A VIREO PRESS BOOK * * New York
This book was about him, and Jeannette had neither informed nor consulted him. She had put his skin on a typewriter platen, rolled it into place, and, if he knew anything about her literary inclinations, banged out one of those “inspirational” tomes that lay waste subject and author alike. The lares of candor and the penates of depth analysis were the tutelary deities of such writers, and Jeannette had sacrificed him to these gods.
Angrily riffling the galley proofs, Johnny picked out words like allopatric, endocranial, speciation, and collective unconscious. His own name was on nearly every page, with passing or extended references to Seville, Spain; Van Luna, Kansas; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Fort Walton Beach, Florida; and New York City. At last he let the pages go and watched them sideslip to the carpet in a random scatter.
“It’s scheduled to appear this fall, isn’t it?”
“I was going to tell you.”
“When?”
“As soon as everything was set. I’d intended it as a surprise, a tribute to what you’ve suffered, John-John.”
“Oh, I’m surprised. Yes, ma’am, one thing I am is surprised. Goddamn! am I surprised.”
“Johnny—”
“I was going to see it when it came out. I’d be strolling along Sixth Avenue past the goddamn Vireo Press bookstore, and pow!—like a karate chop to the windpipe—I’d see Eden in His Dreams by my very own mamma. That’s when I was going to see it, that would’ve been the surprise. Lord, Mamma, I feel like throwing you out the window without even opening it. How’d that be for a surprise?”
“Johnny, please.”
“I like your title, though. It’s a helluva lot classier than your last one. It’s a rip-off, too, of course—but a subtle rip-off.”
Jeannette had called last year’s book for the Vireo Press I Couldn’t Put It Down, and I Was Sorry When It Ended. It had been a collection of whimsically philosophical essays about American reading habits since the advent of commercial television in the late 1940s. At least three different reviewers, working on three different urban newspapers in three different cities, had independently arrived at the same five-word notice for Jeannette’s book (“I could, and I wasn’t”), but it had sold nearly forty thousand copies in hardcover and ten times that in paperback. The success of this book, her second, had enabled Jeannette to pioneer a totally independent life without taking Anna out of college or putting John-John to work evenings as a busboy or carhop. She undoubtedly believed that a little gratitude was in order.
“Listen,” she began, calmly enough. “Listen, Johnny—”
“If you go ahead and publish this, Mamma, I’m going to . . . I can’t believe you’ve done this, I really really can’t—”
“Johnny, two-thirds of my advance money is spent. I’ve missed my deadline twice.”
“You said you were doing a book on Dust Bowl days in de heart ob de heart ob de country.”
“Stop it. I was. I am. But this took me over, John-John, it took precedence, I intended it as a—”
“Yeah, I know. A tribute.”
It was a “tribute” that marked a rupture in their relationship as vast and unbridgeable as the Great Rift Valley itself. Jeannette, he told himself, was not really his mother; she had never viewed him as anything other than a social experiment, as some people might gingerly indulge a proclivity for