The Talisman

phone.’
    ‘Of course he did.’
    Jack’s heart had stopped some seconds earlier.
    ‘Get off the line, kid,’ Morgan Sloat’s voice said to him.
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sloat,’ his mother said.
    ‘I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous, lady. You holing up in some seedy resort when you ought to be in the hospital, that’s ridiculous. Jesus, don’t you know we have about a million business decisions to make? I care about your son’s education too, and it’s a damn good thing I do. You seem to have given up on that.’
    ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore,’ Lily said.
    ‘You don’t want to, but you have to. I’ll come up there and put you in a hospital by force if I have to. We gotta make arrangements , Lily. You own half of the company I’m trying to run – and Jack gets your half after you’re gone. I want to make sure Jack’s taken care of. And if you think that taking care of Jack is what you’re doing up there in goddam New Hampshire, then you’re a lot sicker than you know.’
    ‘What do you want, Sloat?’ Lily asked in a tired voice.
    ‘You know what I want – I want everybody taken care of. I want what’s fair. I’ll take care of Jack, Lily. I’ll give him fifty thousand dollars a year – you think about that, Lily. I’ll see he goes to a good college. You can’t even keep him in school.’
    ‘Noble Sloat,’ his mother said.
    ‘Do you think that’s an answer? Lily, you need help and I’m the only one offering.’
    ‘What’s your cut, Sloat?’ his mother asked.
    ‘You know damn well. I get what’s fair. I get what’s coming to me. Your interest in Sawyer and Sloat – I worked my ass off for that company, and it ought to be mine. We could get the paperwork done in a morning, Lily, and then concentrate on getting you taken care of.’
    ‘Like Tommy Woodbine was taken care of,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think you and Phil were too successful, Morgan. Sawyer and Sloat was more manageable before you got into real-estate investments and production deals. Remember when you had only a couple of deadbeat comics and a half-dozen hopeful actors and screenwriters as clients? I liked life better before the megabucks.’
    ‘Manageable, who are you kidding?’ Uncle Morgan yelled. ‘You can’t even manage yourself!’ Then he made an effort to calm himself. ‘And I’ll forget you mentioned Tom Woodbine. That was beneath even you, Lily.’
    ‘I’m going to hang up now, Sloat. Stay away from here. And stay away from Jack.’
    ‘You are going into a hospital, Lily, and this running around is going to—’
    His mother hung up in the middle of Uncle Morgan’s sentence; Jack gently put down his own receiver. Then he took a couple of steps closer to the window, as if not to be seen anywhere near the living-room phone. Only silence came from the closed bedroom.
    ‘Mom?’ he said.
    ‘Yes, Jacky?’ He heard a slight wobble in her voice.
    ‘You okay? Is everything all right?’
    ‘Me? Sure.’ Her footsteps came softly to the door, which cracked open. Their eyes met, his blue to her blue. Lily swung the door all the way open. Again their eyes met, for a moment of uncomfortable intensity. ‘Of course everything’s all right. Why shouldn’t it be?’ Their eyes disengaged. Knowledge of some kind had passed between them, but what? Jack wondered if she knew that he had listened to her conversation; then he thought that the knowledge they had just shared was – for the first time – the fact of her illness.
    ‘Well,’ he said, embarrassed now. His mother’s disease, that great unspeakable subject, grew obscenely large between them. ‘I don’t know, exactly. Uncle Morgan seemed . . .’ He shrugged.
    Lily shivered, and Jack came to another great recognition. His mother was afraid – at least as afraid as he was.
    She plugged a cigarette in her mouth and snapped open her lighter. Another stabbing look from her deep eyes. ‘Don’t pay any attention to that pest, Jack. I’m just irritated because it really doesn’t seem that I’ll ever be able to get away from him. Your Uncle Morgan likes to bully me.’ She exhaled gray smoke. ‘I’m afraid that I don’t have much appetite for breakfast anymore. Why don’t you take yourself downstairs and have a real breakfast this time?’
    ‘Come with me,’ he said.
    ‘I’d like to be alone for a while, Jack. Try to understand that.’
    Try to understand that.
    Trust me.
    These things that grown-ups said, meaning