Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [159]
Mrs. Levy yawned and said, “Can I fight what you’ve been leading up to all your life? This really proves to the girls that what I’ve said about you all along was right. The more I think about Abelman’s suit, the more I realize that the whole thing is inevitable, Gus. Thank goodness my mother has some money. I always knew I’d have to go back to her someday. She’ll probably have to give up San Juan, though. You can’t keep Susan and Sandra alive for peanuts.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You’re telling me to shut up?” Mrs. Levy bounced up and down, up and down. “I’m supposed to watch your smashup in silence? I have to make plans for myself and my daughters. I mean, life goes on, Gus. I can’t end up on skid row with you. We can only be grateful that your father has left us. If he had lived to see Levy Pants lost because of some practical joke, you’d really pay. Believe me. Leon Levy would have you run out of the country. That man had courage, determination. And whatever happens, the Leon Levy Foundation goes through. Even if Mother and I have to do without, I’m making those awards. I’m going to honor and reward people who have the kind of courage and bravery that I saw in your father. I won’t let you drag his name down with you on your journey to skid row. After Abelman’s finished, you’ll be lucky to get hired as a water boy on one of those teams you love so much. Boy, will you have to work then, running around with a bucket and a sponge like a bum. But don’t feel sorry for yourself. You had it coming.”
Now Mr. Levy knew that his wife’s strange logic made it necessary for him to be ruined. She wanted to see Abelman victorious; she would see in the victory some peculiar justification. Since his wife had read the letter from Abelman, her mind must have been working over the matter from every angle. Every minute that she was pedaling the exercycle or bouncing on the board, her system of logic was probably telling her more and more convincingly that Abelman must win the suit. It would be not only Abelman’s victory, but hers, also. Every conversational and epistolary roadsign and guidepost that she had held up before the girls pointed to their father’s final, terrible failure. Mrs. Levy couldn’t afford to be disproved. She needed the $500 thousand libel suit. She wasn’t even interested in his speaking with Reilly. The Abelman case had passed from a purely material and physical plane to an ideological and spiritual one where universal and cosmic forces decreed that Gus Levy must lose, that a childless and desolate Gus Levy must wander endlessly with bucket and sponge.
“Well, I’m going after Reilly,” Mr. Levy said finally.
“Such determination. I can hardly believe it. Don’t worry, you won’t be able to pin anything on the young idealist. He’s too clever. He’ll play another joke on you. Just watch. Another wild-goose chase. Back to Mandeville. This time they’ll keep you there, a middle-aged man driving a little toy of a collegian’s sports car.”
“I’m going right to his house.”
Mrs. Levy folded her Foundation notes and turned off her board, saying, “Well, if you’re going to town, take me with you. I’m worried about Miss Trixie since Gonzalez reported that she bit that gangster’s hand. I must see her. Her old hostility toward Levy Pants is out in the open again.”
“Do you still want to play around with that senile bag? Haven’t you tormented her enough already?”
“Even a little good deed you don’t want me to do. Your type isn’t even in the psychology books. You should at least go to Lenny’s doctor for his sake. Once your case was in the psychiatric journals, they’d be inviting him to Vienna to speak. You’d make him a famous man just like that crippled girl or whoever it was put Freud on the map.”
While Mrs. Levy was blinding herself with layers of aquamarine eyeshadow in preparation for her errand of mercy, he got the sports car out of the monumental three-car garage, built like a substantial rustic carriage