The Catcher in the Rye

Holden decides to head to the Lavender Room, which is the nightclub in the Edmont. While he gets ready, he thinks about calling his little sister Phoebe; Holden thinks very highly of Phoebe, who is bright and precocious and reminds him a little bit of Allie. He decides against calling her because he’s afraid his parents will answer, but he spends some time thinking about her, particularly remembering times when Allie was alive, and they spent time together.

Holden heads downstairs to the Lavender Room, where he’s seated at a table next to three women who appear to be around 30. Holden finds the music corny, and he’s denied alcohol when he orders it, so he turns his attention to one of the women, the blond one, whom he finds attractive. The women giggle in response to his staring, which annoys him, but he feels like dancing, so he asks them if they each want to dance. The blonde woman agrees.

She turns out to be an excellent dancer, but she ignores all his attempts at conversation, and Holden keeps thinking of her as dopey or dimwitted. While they’re dancing, she says she saw Peter Lorre (a famous actor) the night before. Holden asks her where they’re all from, and she says Seattle; Holden is making fun of her throughout this conversation, but she either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care, though she does take offense at his swearing.

Holden joins the women back at their table, where he learns their names: the blond one is Bernice, and the other two are Marty and Laverne. He dances with all three of them, and when he’s dancing with Marty, he tells her he just saw Gary Cooper (another famous actor) in the crowd. She believes him and shares it with the other two. Holden doesn’t have a good time talking to the women—he thinks they’re all corny tourists—but he stays at their table until they say they have to get to bed to see the first show at Radio City Music Hall. They leave him with the check, and he thinks about how depressing it would be to come to New York from Seattle just to do things that tourists would do.

Holden sits down in the hotel lobby and thinks about Jane Gallagher. They met because Jane’s family dog was relieving itself on the Caulfields’s lawn, which upset Holden’s mother. They began spending a lot of time together after that, playing checkers and golfing, and Holden found her attractive, though their relationship was chaste; during that time, they became close enough that Holden showed her Allie’s baseball mitt.

Holden recalls when Jane’s stepfather, who has an addiction to alcohol, came out on the porch when the two of them were hanging out and asked Jane where his cigarettes were. She ignored him until he left, but then a single tear rolled down her cheek. Holden got up and sat by her, which caused her to start crying fully; he began kissing her face then, which was the closest they ever got to making out. Holden never learned what caused this incident, and when he asked her if her stepfather ever abused her, she said no.

Though he and Jane never kissed except for that one incident, they often held hands, which made him very happy, and he felt like their relationship was intimate. Sitting in the lobby, he thinks about all these memories to distract himself from her date with Stradlater, which is occupying his thoughts. Finally, he gets up and heads outside to take a cab to Ernie’s, which is a nightclub he used to go to with D. B. that he knows will have good music.