Franny and Zooey by Jerome D. Salinger

Author:Jerome D. Salinger
Language: it
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-08-06T22:00:00+00:00

THE Glasses’ living room was about as unready to have its walls repainted as a room can be. Franny Glass lay asleep on the couch, with an afghan over her; the “wall-to-wall”

carpet had been neither taken up nor folded in at the borders; and the furniture - seemingly, a small warehouse of it - was in its usual static-dynamic distribution. The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla. There was a Steinway grand piano (invariably kept open), three radios (a 1927

Freshman, a 1932 Stromberg-Carlson, and a 1941 R.C.A.), a twenty-one-inch-screen television set, four table-model phonographs (including a 1920 Victrola, with its speaker still mounted intact, topside), cigarette and magazine tables galore, a regulation-size ping-pong table (mercifully collapsed and stored behind the piano), four comfortable chairs, eight uncomfortable chairs, a twelve-gallon tropical-fish tank (filled to capacity, in every sense of the word, and illuminated by two forty-watt bulbs), a love seat, the couch Franny was occupying, two empty bird cages, a cherrywood writing table, and an assortment of floor lamps, table lamps, and “bridge” lamps that sprang up all over the congested inscape like sumac. A cordon of waist-high bookcases lined three walls, their shelves cram-jammed and literally sagging with books - children’s books, textbooks, second-hand books, Book Club books, plus an even more heterogeneous overflow from less communal “annexes” of the apartment. (“Dracula” now stood next to “Elementary Pali,”

“The Boy Allies at the Somme” stood next to “Bolts of Melody,” “The Scarab Murder Case” and “The Idiot” were together, “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” lay on top of “Fear and Trembling.”) Even if a resolute and unusually stout-hearted team of painters had been able to deal with the bookcases, the walls themselves, directly behind them, might well have made any self-respecting artisan turn in his union card. From the top of the bookcases to within less than a foot of the ceiling, the plaster - a blistery Wedgwood blue, where visible - was almost completely covered with what may very loosely be called “hangings,” meaning a collection of framed photographs, yellowing personal and Presidential correspondence, bronze and silver plaques, and a sprawling miscellany of vaguely citational-looking documents and trophy like objects of various shapes and sizes, all attesting, one way or another, to the redoubtable fact that from 1927 through most of 1943 the network radio program called “It’s a Wise Child” had very rarely gone on the air without one (and, more often, two) of the seven Glass children among its panelists.

(Buddy Glass, who, at thirty-six, was the program’s oldest living ex-panelist, not infrequently referred to the walls of his parents’ apartment as being a kind of visual hymn to commercial American childhood and early puberty. He often expressed regret that his visits in from the country were so few and far between, and pointed out, usually at enormous length, how much luckier his brothers and sisters were, most of whom still lived in or around New York City.

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