J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [165]
Inevitably, it dawns on Franny that she is actually speaking to Zooey. What then transpires between brother and sister is remarkably similar to the confrontation between Holden and Phoebe at the end of The Catcher in the Rye. Although he is found out, Zooey is determined to continue the conversation despite Franny’s irritation. Franny reluctantly agrees to listen to him make one last point, but she demands that he do it quickly and then leave her alone. Franny’s words “leave me alone” cut into Zooey just as Phoebe’s demand that her brother “shut up” struck Holden. There is a heavy silence on the line, and Franny realizes that she has overstepped her bounds.
Zooey’s reaction to Franny’s words is to release his own ego and submit to the needs of his sister. His attitude is transformed. In a tone brimming with compromise, Zooey tells Franny to continue with the Jesus Prayer, but he implores her to say it properly, asking that she first recognize the holiness in a simple bowl of chicken soup that is offered with unconditional love. Painfully, he encourages Franny to continue her acting career. His pain comes from his confession that acting is a direct result of desire, the desire for acclamation and the fruits of one’s labor. The religious life, he laments, is dependent upon detachment—the very opposite of desire. He cannot see that Franny has a choice. She must act because that is the gift that God has given her. And she must act with all her might, striving to attain balance in the process. “The only religious thing you can do, is act,” he tells Franny. “Act for God, if you want to—be God’s actress.”
Zooey, of course, is speaking as much to himself and his own struggle as he is to Franny. Zooey does not instruct Franny or lead her to the place of revelation. They reach that place together. What had been missing in Zooey’s logic and in the Jesus Prayer itself was not spiritual truth but the divine enlightenment offered through human connection. The holiness inherent in a mother’s bowl of chicken soup and the joy shared between a little girl and her dog are not mundane banalities of everyday life. They are miracles that display the face of God. Zooey then relays the story of the Fat Lady, a tale that has become one of Salinger’s most inspiring and famous images. When very young, Zooey appeared on the radio quiz show It’s a Wise Child. One evening, as he was about to go onstage, his brother Seymour approached him and told him to shine his shoes first. Zooey was incensed. He thought the studio audience imbeciles. He thought the producers imbeciles. And he was not going to shine his shoes for them, especially since his feet would be hidden onstage anyway. But Seymour sternly rejected this argument. He told his brother to shine his shoes “for the Fat Lady.” Seymour never explained who the Fat Lady was, and Zooey developed an imaginary image of a cancer-ridden woman sitting on her porch and playing the radio. With this image and Seymour’s insistence in mind, Zooey shined his shoes each night before going out on stage. Franny too had developed a similar concept of her own Fat Lady, for whom Seymour had encouraged her to be funny.
This was Seymour’s encouragement to both Franny and Zooey to be their best with all of their might. But exactly who this “Fat Lady” was, or what she represented, had been unclear to them for all of these years—until the moment of epiphany, the moment when the connection between brother and sister allowed them Christ-Consciousness and the ability to glimpse the face of God. “Don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?” Zooey asks. “… Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”28
The tale of the Fat Lady is a parable. It is an acknowledgment of the presence of God within us all. For Zooey it is a path away from the clutches of his ego as he is forced to recognize the holiness within all people.