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- Old Mr. Antolini answered the door when I rang the bell--after the elevator boy
finally let me up, the bastard. He had on his bathrobe and slippers, and he had a highball
in one hand. He was a pretty sophisticated guy, and he was a pretty heavy drinker.
"Holden, m'boy!" he said. "My God, he's grown another twenty inches. Fine to see you."
"How are you, Mr. Antolini? How's Mrs. Antolini?"
"We're both just dandy. Let's have that coat." He took my coat off me and hung it
up. "I expected to see a day-old infant in your arms. Nowhere to turn. Snowflakes in your
eyelashes." He's a very witty guy sometimes. He turned around and yelled out to the
kitchen, "Lillian! How's the coffee coming?" Lillian was Mrs. Antolini's first name.
"It's all ready," she yelled back. "Is that Holden? Hello, Holden!"
"Hello, Mrs. Antolini!"
You were always yelling when you were there. That's because the both of them
were never in the same room at the same time. It was sort of funny.
"Sit down, Holden," Mr. Antolini said. You could tell he was a little oiled up. The
room looked like they'd just had a party. Glasses were all over the place, and dishes with
peanuts in them. "Excuse the appearance of the place," he said. "We've been entertaining
some Buffalo friends of Mrs. Antolini's . . . Some buffaloes, as a matter of fact."
I laughed, and Mrs. Antolini yelled something in to me from the kitchen, but I
couldn't hear her. "What'd she say?" I asked Mr. Antolini.
"She said not to look at her when she comes in. She just arose from the sack.
Have a cigarette. Are you smoking now?"
"Thanks," I said. I took a cigarette from the box he offered me. "Just once in a
while. I'm a moderate smoker."
"I'll bet you are," he said. He gave me a light from this big lighter off the table.
"So. You and Pencey are no longer one," he said. He always said things that way.
Sometimes it amused me a lot and sometimes it didn't. He sort of did it a little bit too
much. I don't mean he wasn't witty or anything--he was--but sometimes it gets on your
nerves when somebody's always saying things like "So you and Pencey are no longer
one." D.B. does it too much sometimes, too.
"What was the trouble?" Mr. Antolini asked me. "How'd you do in English? I'll
show you the door in short order if you flunked English, you little ace composition
writer."
"Oh, I passed English all right. It was mostly literature, though. I only wrote about
two compositions the whole term," I said. "I flunked Oral Expression, though. They had
this course you had to take, Oral Expression. That I flunked."
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know." I didn't feel much like going into It. I was still feeling sort of
dizzy or something, and I had a helluva headache all of a sudden. I really did. But you
could tell he was interested, so I told him a little bit about it. "It's this course where each
boy in class has to get up in class and make a speech. You know. Spontaneous and all.
And if the boy digresses at all, you're supposed to yell 'Digression!' at him as fast as you
can. It just about drove me crazy. I got an F in it."
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don't know. The
trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all."
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