LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 14

     Matt was late for work the next morning, for which he blamed Ada Silberwetter.  It was not her fault; he knew that.  He was so exhausted after an evening of conversational combat that he should have taken to his bed as soon as he and his mother got safely back to the apartment.  Instead, he had sat up until four, plotting the next section of “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers” so as to fit in all the notes he’d taken during dinner.

     And he wasn’t technically late: just the last one to reach Down.  Walter Prince, watching the last duckling rush in, had seemed about to comment.  There had been a change of mind for some reason, and, after a nod to Matt, had slammed his cubicle door shut in place of bellowing.

     Just as well, Matt thought, barging into his own little box.  He had enough to occupy his mind, with crazy women, murderers, AND plot devices, that being civil to Walter Prince might have been beyond his capacity.  He flipped his briefcase up onto the desktop and sent his desk calendar flying off the other side.

     Snarling, he stormed around to retrieve the calendar and, stooping, watched the pens and pencils slip from his shirt pocket to clatter next to the skinny cardboard with December facing out.  That sailed from his foot to the wall.  No sense trying to kick pencils, so Matt threw himself back into his chair and nearly toppled over backward.

     As usual, fury was followed by remorse and then despair.  Leave the pencils!  What difference did it make?  All this fuss and bother just t stay alive and make a mark on the world, so it would not forget you when you died.  Why?  Matt knew no one would forget him when he was gone.  No one thought about him all that much NOW.

     From death, his thoughts turned lightly to those of tombstones, and the box of pictures inside his briefcase again.  He decided not to bother with them, either.  He’d looked at them twenty-seven times during Ada Silberwetter’s little game of Clue in the restaurant.  He was sick of them.

     Still….  He got up and collected his pens, pencils, and calendars, and then walked over to look out the door of his cubicle.  Maryann was on the phone.

     “Open for business in a moment,” she told Matt, who reached her command center just after she hung up and was reaching for her memo pad.

     “N rush.”  He attached the teddy bear pin to his lapel.  “Just need some more, er, paper clips.”

     “That I can get you,” she said, kicking her chair back toward the supply cabinets,  She leaned over in her seat, her blouse riding up just far enough above her belt to expose one quarter inch of skin.

     Matt cleared his throat.  “Er, what do you know about tombstones?”

     Maryann paused, blinked, and caught up a box of paper clips.  “They’re expensive,” she said, coming forward again.

     “What’s expensive?” asked Linda, on her way past the combination supply depot and staff lounge.

     “What do you know about tombstones?” Maryann demanded, before Matt could head her off.

     Linda shuddered.  “I know it’s too early in the morning to be talking about them.  Why?”

     “Just morbid small talk.”  Maryann shook out her hair in back with one hand while surreptitiously pulling her blouse back into place with the other.  “Matt was asking about tombstones.”

     Matt shrugged a response to raised eyebrows. “And skulls,” he said.  Might as well take it from snout to curly tail.

     “Halloween’s over, you now,” said Carleton Nairn, clipping some pages into his clipboard as he walked up.

     “Halloween?” Maryann demanded, placing one index finger in the center of her chin.  “Oh, I remember!  That’s the holiday when they start putting up the Christmas decorations.”

     “Skulls.”  Linda shuddered again.  “We had enough of that yesterday, with that mystery writer and her Miss Skull.”

     Something hit the floor.  “Oh!”

     Holly was dressed conservatively.  For Holly, for Friday.  True the blue tights obviously deserved their name, but a little silver skirt covered part of them.  When she bent over to retrieve the thick folder that had escaped her grip, Matt found the window which had been cut in the back of the skirt to display the tights.  Everyone turned back to Maryann’s desk at the same moment.

     “Skulls, eh?” said Carleton Nairn.  “And gravestones?”

     “What about Miss Skull?” Holly demanded.

     Matt hadn’t intended to set up a panel discussion, but before he could say anything else, a booming “Good morning!” turned everyone’s minds from graveyards to a less pleasant subject.

     Walter Prince advanced on the conference, shaking a sheaf of paper.  “The latest studies of office procedure, people, proves that jobs take longer if you stop in the middle.”

     Heads turned in the direction  feet were taking them to the shelter of the cubicles.  Everyone at Down was habitually in the middle of something at any given time.  It was better to move out of range while Walter Prince was still dealing in general terms and hadn’t gotten down to specifics.

     Matt stood his ground; it was his job to take the brunt while others took shelter.  But Carleton Nairn didn’t know this, and the papers now rattled in the rookie’s direction.  “Did you read this report after you wrote it?” demanded Walter Prince.  “Or even while you were writing it?  I’m only asking, Nairn, in hopes of uncovering some reason that any sane individual would report these figures on page six.”

     Carleton Nairn was none too large to begin with, and seemed to shrink.  But he swallowed hard and replied, manfully, “I take full responsibility, sir.”

     Matt’s heart sank as that “Oh, do you?” expression spread across Walter Prince’s face.  But Carleton Nairn went on, “I should have double-checked the data Mr. Benz gave me.”

     Matt tried to recall any data he’d given Carleton Nairn.  Yesterday morning: elementary data Nairn would have found without aid had Nairn worked at Down a whole week.  Straightforward stuff, as far as he could remember: names and phone numbers.  He tried to angle around to get a look at the report.

     But this was twisted now between Walter Prince’s hands.  “Benz gave you these figures?”

     “Well, yes, sir.”  Carleton Nairn’s head drew a little between his shoulders.  “But I certainly should have taken time to be sure….”

     Walter Prince waved a hand at him, just missing his nose.  “Never mind, then.  They’re probably okay.”  His eyes flicked toward Matt and then away.

     Now Carleton Nairn frowned.  “Oh, sir, I really ought to….”

     Brows came down and forward.  “When I want more out of you, Nairn, I’ll light a match!”  Walter Prince’s voice was so fierce that the usually unflappable Maryann looked up in wonder.  Her eyes went rounder as the chief went on, “You may trust anything Mr. Benz comes up with, Nairn.  He looks slow, but he is diligent, hardheaded, and thorough.  If you have any aspirations to competence, you would do well to take a lesson from him.”

     Linda was leaning out of her cubicle, her mouth hanging open.  Carleton Nairn backed away, his hands raised in  a “Hey, hey” position.  Walter Prince stalked away, detouring around Matt with a grumble and a mutter.

     Even allowing for “He looks slow”, the attack was not Walter Prince’s style at all.  It lacked sarcasm, it lacked bite.  If Matt hadn’t known his superior better, he would have suspected Walter Prince of trying to inflict a compliment instead of an injury.

     “Um.”  He leaned toward Carleton Nairn.  “Do you have another copy of that report.  I could….”

      A Prince-like glare stabbed at him from the rookie’s eyes.  Matt gave up and hurried back to his cubicle to take shelter with the box of paper clips.

He Called For His Pipe

     As we have, in this space, considered the place held in postcard cartoons by cigarettes and cigars, it is only logical to move to the pipe.  (I dislike to throw spoilers into my text, but those of you who were planning to come around next Wednesday to read about snuff, snoose, or other similar products can cancel those pipe dreams right now.  Despite being stalwarts of humor in their various roles, their role in society had been so sidelined during the golden age of postcards that I have found no hint of them.  Oh, and, by the by, the phrase “pipe dreams” has nothing to do with tobacco, despite the best efforts of advertisers.  While as for vaping, this, of course, comes…where were we?)

     In some postcards, we see the pipe smoker as a man of leisure, as unhurried in comparison to the cigar smoker as the cigar smoker was when compared to a cigarette fiend.  The cigar box, humidor, and cigar cutter could not compete with all the machinery and accessories used by the pipe smoker, while the whole process of loading, lighting, and drawing on the tobacco in the pipe was not intended for men of haste.  (Part of the reason so many go-getters and live wires in twentieth century movies were shown as cigarette folk.)

     Somebody who sits down and lights up a pipe is someone who is planning to hang out for a while.  This kind of leisure has nothing to do with their financial status: like cigars, pipes could be exceedingly expensive or amazingly cheap.

     That being said, the postcard cartoonists largely gave us pipe smokers who were socially and ethnically outside the mainstream.  Folk from way back in the hills frequently had their corncob pipes clenched in their teeth.  Note that women, absent entirely from our cigar postcards, have returned.  This adds to the comic effect; loke the chamberpot, the housewife’s pipe was something mid-century Americans liked to forget ever had anything to do with THEIR families.

     Oh, and the outhouse.  Nearly forgot.

     Mid-century America’s fascination and glorification of the hillbilly, which existed before Li’l Abner really spread it across the comics pages and continued even after the cancellation of The Beverly Hillbillies, does not seem to have been studied properly, and what with needing to get to the store this afternoon for chicken nuggets shaped like the numerals 6 and 7, I don’t have time to go into it now.  Suffice it to say that postcard cartoonists certainly played along with the trend.

      But the hillfolk are not the only ones who found their cultural identity tied up with pipes on postcards.

     Are these postcards evidence of ancestral recollections of the migration of the Scotch-Irish to the hills and valleys of America?  Let’s move along; that way lies dissertations.

     And in any case, there are OTHER groups which found themselves identified by their pipes.  Yes, we are back among our friends from the Dutch postcard craze of the early twentieth century.  Their accessories ranged from the small, cheap clay pipes of common commerce….

     To elaborate and luxurious Meerschaumery.  (How DID he get that across the ocean unbroken?  Another example of Dutch ingenuity.)

     However, none of these groups were consistent in the typecasting of their tobacco.  Like the Scotsman with the cheap cigars in our last thrilling adventure, the Dutch could not be tied down.  (Anyone else thinking of Dutch Masters Cigars right now?)  The hillbilly is sometimes seen with a cigarette, but the reliance on pipes in their case may be related to their use of other tobacco forms which have been largely, by postcard cartoonists at least, been snuffed out.

But a Good Cigar is a Smoke

     Last week, in this space, we considered what the cartoonists who worked on postcards had to say about the smoking of cigarettes.  The subject is a little larger than we could cover in one column (which gives us an excuse to return to it later) but we did see how often a woman who waved a cigarette in one hand (especially if that cigarette was in a holder) was available for, um, romance.  (One unpaid advisor said I should have pointed out that a cigarette holder, ironically, hides her butt.  I do not dignify such jokes with a reply.)

     Cigars carry a similar weight in postcard cartoons.  A rich man, for much of the twentieth century, was hardly ever depicted without one.  A generation passed between the card at the top of this column and the next one, and yet the implication is clear.  This is someone who can afford to buy the good tobacco.

     As well as the attention of a good-looking young woman.

     AND, apparently, trousers with loud checks.

     But the cartoon cigar is versatile (as are the pants.)  Tough lowlife characters in cartoons and comic strips frequently sported cheroots.  The cigar was available in all qualities at all prices.  Vice President Thomas Marshall’s remark that what this country needs is a good five cent cigar is frequently taken as an observation on the rising cost of commercial goods, but ALSO refers to the wide availability of really bad five cent cigars.

     Of course, the tramp, hobo or bum of popular cartoons (see our long-distant blog discussing the differences between these chaps) depended on luck (the rich man tossing a half-smoked stogie away), charity (that nickel didn’t necessarily go for beer), or, er, other happenstance for what he smoked.  He sort of had to take things as he found them.

     For cartoon purposes, a bum without a cigar would have been as unrecognizable as one without stubble and a snub nose.

     So was the cigar always a sign of one extreme of wealth or the other?  Did no one in the middle class smoke cigars?  Postcards don’t give us enough evidence here.  THIS chap might be in a typical mid-century bungalow living room.  On the other hand, he is wearing a smoking jacket.  WITH a checkered collar.

     The best we can do is admit that occasionally someone with an actual workaday job can be seen smoking a cigar.  However, again, this gets us back into the line of tough guys who inhale robustos.

     The hard-working man was felt to be capable of dealing with the labor of cigar smoking, a more elaborate process than simply lighting a cigarette.

     As well as being tough enough to cope with the fact that the cheapness of tobacco was immediately detectable in the aroma and flavor.

     A man who smoked cigars was tough, a man who had proved he could take it, whether he wore a top hat,  a derby, checkered trousers, or overalls with his name on them.  A man, we must say, with a certain air about him.  (No, I MUST say that: it’s in the joketeller’s handbook.)

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter Thirteen

      Three meals had been spoken for; the bonbon in the gold wrapper had departed, perhaps to return one day.  Ada announced there would be tie enough to solve five murders before anything like food arrived.  The dim light of a candle and gold-shaded globes in the ceiling fell now upon the body of evidence: ten letters and the box of tombstone photographs.

     “Gracious!” said Mrs. Benz, holding one letter almost to her nose.  “I’ve never seen my eyes in this condition!”

     “It isn’t your eyes,” Matt told her.  He sipped a watery Diet Coke and deciphered one letter on a tombstone at a time.  This brought him no more satisfaction than reading the extortion letters, but he had to blush less.  The descriptions of Ada Silberwetter showed fine range and creativity, but concrete details about the threatened murder were sparse.

      “I suppose you’re sure it was murder,” Matt said, glancing over the top of a tombstone.  “And not coincidence?”

     Ada shifted in her seat and adjusted cloth that clung to one hip.  “I’d want to be pretty sure it was coincidence,” she said, reaching for her glass.

     Matt nodded.  So far, she’d been pretty cool about it all, considering the obvious vituperation and offered violence.  In her place, he’d have arranged for a bodyguard and cowered in his bedroom until the police had taken care of things.  But he had pretty solidly decided that he had very little in common with Ada Silberwetter.

     “They’re all signed ‘Miss Skull’,” he said next.  “So the picture of that skull must mean something.  There are skulls on most of the tombstones, too.  Does that tell you anything?”

     Ada shrugged.  “I know people with all kinds of nicknames.  But no ‘Miss Skull”.  That would be too easy.”

     “Oh, yes,” said Matt’s mother, most of her attention still on the letter at the end of her nose.  “The reviewers would jump on something like that in a story in no time.  Even an editor would notice.”

     Matt picked up one of the letters again.  “The envelope isn’t much help.  If the postmark showed the whole ZIP code we could tell what part of the city it came from, but otherwise….”

     Mrs. Benz looked around the page she held.  “Well,” she said.  “There’s a coil.”

     She had the envelope of the letter she held tucked behind the page, pointing at it while trying to pick up another. “That’s a stamp,” Matt told her.  “A flag stamp.”

     His mother blinked at him.  Yes, dear.  But see how it’s flat along the top and bottom, and perforated on the sides.  That means it came from a coil of stamps, and not a sheet or book.  This one’s a coil, too.”

     Each envelope featured a coil stamp.  “And they only sell whole coils,” said Ada, softly clapping her hands at thus feat of detection.  “So it could be some guy who swipes his stamps at the office, or just buys them a hundred at a time.”

     “Or one at a time at stamp machines,” Matt put in.

     Both women frowned at him, but he went on, “If he stole them at the office, he probably did the letters there, too.  So that eliminates our chance of identifying him by his typewriter at home.”

     “Maybe,” said his mother, adding another letter to her handful.  “But whoever did this typed the letters on one machine and the envelopes on another.  See?  The w in Silberwetter is tilted in the letters but not one the envelopes.  On the envelopes, the b drops a little below the line.”

     “Great!” Ada smoothed her hair without much effect.  “So the guy types the letters at home and then sneaks them to the office to swipe the stamps and envelopes.” She paused for an ovation and failed to get one.  “Are you listening over there?” she asked Matt.

     “Didn’t you see me yawn?”

     “Well, let’s not outline the plot before we get our notes in order,” said Mrs. Benz, briskly.  “You didn’t tell me much about the victim yet, except how he was just sitting at the table and fell into his soup.”

     “Facefirst,” said Ada, nodding.  “He wasn’t much of anyone.  His name was Nathaniel DiName and he was a high school volleyball coach until he married one of Marshall’s nieces or grandnieces and got into government.  He was, oh, sixty or so.  I don’t think he got picked for any particular reason.”

     Mrs. Benz took out a little notebook Matt had seen thousands of times.  “Well, that’s one of the things we need to find out.  First you need to figure out what you know already, and then you decide what you need to find out.  Now then.”  She straightened in her seat, released the handful of letters, and reached for a pen.  “Do you have any personal enemies?”

     Ada dimpled.  “I hope I don’t have any impersonal enemies.”

     Mrs. Benz, nodding, wrote down “Enemies”.  “Any ex-boyfriends who might still be upset?”

     Matt listened as his mother pursued this line of questioning, despite an absolute lack of straight answers to her inquiries.  Her persistence and method impressed him. She was lifting her method bodily, even to the line about what you already knew and what you needed to know, from her 1978 Barbara Chang mystery Palmer’s Guitar.

     Her subject, utterly and eternally self-possessed, insisted she had no enemies who would bother with threats.  “When I make somebody mad,” she said, “I make them mad enough to take action.”  Matt believed this.

     It seemed as though what they had to work with were these documents.  Matt looked through them again as the women continued their game of cat-and-mouse.

     There were nine letters with envelopes, one letter that had been folded into the box of photographs, and the brown paper that had been wrapped around the box.  These were postmarked at roughly one week intervals: September 30, October 9, October 13, October 21, October 28, November 2, November 10, November 17, November 24, and December 2.  The envelopes were plain white business envelopes with no return address, and one stamp each.  The brown paper had four stamps on it, but had arrived postage due, to Ada’s annoyance.  “This was a bit too much,” she had said, when she brought it out.  “An extortionist should show a little more class.”

     The letters had been typed on onionskin paper which had had some kind of letterhead cut away.  All ran to just one page, and each was signed “Moss Skull” in a broad, florid style with swirls and decorative dingbats.  Not until the November letters was there any mention of money, with rather specific anatomical suggestions of how Ada could raise these amounts.  Matt wondered if these were the reason she hadn’t gone to the police at once: until her stepgrandnephew died, she’d been having too much fun reading the correspondence.

     After the Thanksgiving demise, threats ad warnings were replaced by specific arrangements about payment.  Mrs. Silberwetter was enjoined to place one of three messages in the Personals column of the Reader.  Message A—“Miss Skull’s got no teeth”—meant Ada didn’t believe a word of it and would risk the consequences of nonpayment.   Message C—“Will pay to pull Miss Skull’s teeth”—indicated that Ada would pay a reasonable amount if Miss Skull sent am invoice.  Message B—“Let’s have a look at Miss Skull’s teeth”—meant Ada wanted more proof that Miss Skull was the person responsible for the accident at Thanksgiving.

     Limited light made all of this hard to read, but single-spaced lines crammed together on onionskin paper made things all but impossible.  It wasn’t until his hostess noted, “I knew all along he did it.  He’s trying to burn the evidence” that Matt realized how close the letter had come to the candle.

     “Ack!” he exclaimed.  But a genuine crisis never flustered him as much as mere awkwardness.  He dipped the flaming corner of the letter into his Diet Coke.

     “That might improve the flavor,” he said, checking to be sure he hadn’t destroyed any of the text.  “It looks….”

     He glanced up into the white bottoms of a pair of rolled eyes.  The head with the eyes in it turned away, and the body underneath hurried away.

    Matt reached out for Ada’s hand, nodding at the retreating figure.  “Oh, him,” she sniffed.

     The departing visitor was more worrisome to Matt than the brief fire, but it did his heart good to hear Walter Prince dismissed as “Oh, him! In just that tone.

     “Should he be on the enemies list?” he inquired.

     Ada shrugged.  “I never liked him and he never liked anybody.  But I wouldn’t say we’re enemies.  Besides, I don’t believe he’d be able to spell ‘voluptuary’.”  She pointed to one of the letters in front of Mrs. Benz.  “Not to mention ‘autofornication’.”

     Matt took up a dry letter.  “Well, if you hold it up to the light, you can see all the corrections.”

     Mrs. Benz, meanwhile, had finished writing up her notes and raised these, squinting at the large text.  “There.  With a list of what we know and what we don’t know, all we need to do is figure out the best way to learn everything on the second list.”

     “What do we do?”  Ada bounced forward in her seat.  Matt winced, disapproving of such active enthusiasm.

     “Never start unless you’re sure you can stop,” he muttered.

     Neither woman paid any attention.  His mother stuck her pen between her lips and then took it out again, waving it like a cigarette holder. “We need data.  A detective can’t detect without data.”

    Ada nodded.  “We just want the facts, Ma’am.”

     “Not necessarily facts.”  Mrs. Benz shrugged.  “But we do need data.  And that takes good, solid legwork.”

     “And for that,” Matt injected, “You need good, solid legs.”

     His mother admitted that with a rueful sigh.  “Let’s see.”  She pulled the letters together.  “Let me take these.  Maybe I’ll see something more when there’s enough light.  Matt, this weekend you need to go to the library and look up tombstones.  For now, dear, you work on the list of possible suspects.  Put down everything; I won’t tell.  It’ll be the Antisocial Register.”

     “Sure!”  Ada wriggled back in her seat.  “I’ll list all my ex-boyfriends in alphabetical ardor.”

     Matt winced.  Ada reached out to pat his hand.  “You’re allowed to applaud,” she whispered.

And Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women

     This Seventies poster showing off a postcard from the Nineteen Twenties shows one of the matters of social history made obvious when one watches mid-century television programs. Everybody smoked.  This can be explained only partially by observing that many shows were sponsored by tobacco companies.  Those same companies had worked hard to make their product essential to social interaction.  Plenty of people declined the nicotine habit, of course, for reasons of religious prohibition or health concerns.  (One bygone social commentator noted that people of his generation knew the health risks decades before the government took an interest: “Why do you think we called ‘em coffin nails?”)

     On the screen, though, heroes and villains, damsels and femme fatales were always lighting each other’s cigarettes.  But postcard cartoons did not follow the trend.  This was a matter of economy of energy: if it didn’t matter to the joke, you didn’t need to spend time drawing it.  Smoking was limited, unless there was a joke to be made about ‘pipe dreams”, to drawing a character.  SOME characters HAD to be smoking, or the audience would miss the joke.

     One common reason for a character enjoying a cigarette was to hint at that person’s sex life.  (This was also popular onscreen.  The morality code imposed on motion pictures in the U.S. in the 1930s, for example, had guidelines about exactly how a woman smoked, as doing it the wrong way would imply too much.)

     A woman with a cigarette in her mouth was not necessarily on the make: context mattered.  However, once she had that cigarette in a holder, she was essentially hanging a red letter around her own neck.

     The gloves just make matters worse.

     The combination of a cigarette in a holder with a bottle of something presumed intoxicating PLUS the latest fashions clearly indicated what our ancestors called, among other things, a vamp, a predatory female whose luxurious tastes in tobacco, alcohol, and clothing were satisfied by draining the bank accounts of her foolish victims.

     Of the three warning signs, the most essential was that cigarette holder.  The rest could be dispensed with if her schedule was full.

     Now, here, we surely have no more than a joke about “baby”, not a scene reflective of what these two might get up to in their spare time.  On the other hand, you will note that they EACH have a cigarette, which gives us permission to assume whatever we will.

     In fact, around the turn of the last century, the cigarette was considered primarily a woman’s smoke.  Until World War I made it obvious that the cigarette was more convenient for soldiers on the battlefield, our ancestors regarded the sex lives of MEN who smoked anything but a pipe or cigar highly suspect.  At least this chap’s not using a holder.

How To. Or Not

     I’m  used to hearing that the things I spent time learning in school are now obsolete, irrelevant or offensive.  I was proud of my ability to identify British Guiana, French Guiana, and Dutch Guiana on the map of South America (they were in alphabetical order from left to right) but that’s a little less than useless with Guyana and Suriname now in the picture.

     I still put two spaces after the period in all my manuscripts.  Twenty years ago or thereabouts, someone told me “You know you don’t need to do that any more, right?  The reason for it no longer exists.”

     Reason?  Nobody told me there was a reason beyond the typing teacher taking off points if we didn’t do it.

       AND my instructors fought hard to teach us how to write.  It is with sorrow that I compare what I write now with what I wrote, say, thirty years ago.  The older I get, the more I slip back into those inviolable rules I was taught and had sense enough to ignore when I was young and adventurous.

      “Don’t be dramatic.”  This started with “Never use exclamation points” and went on with an admonition never to put a scene in a story or a report on the Battle of Bunker Hill that was designed to frighten, alarm, or indeed, excite the reader in any way.  This MAY have been an attempt to discourage stealing scenes from, say, an episode of Batman, or it might have been a nod to a literary style which involved detachment and neutrality in working literature out of mundane events.

     “Don’t be predictable in your dialogue.”  I remember the sneer with which one teacher warned us “Don’t just said ‘he said’ or ‘she said’.  Say ‘he chuckled”, or ‘she hissed’.  It makes the scene more interesting.”  Assignments were handed in typed, and one day I finished a story and noticed I had mistyped the line “’Of course,’ he laughed” as “he kaughed.”  I decided I did not want to redo the whole story for one mistake and landed it in.

     When the teacher failed to mark this as an error, I was encouraged.  As the year went by, my characters maughed, naughed, paughed, raughed, saughed, and taughed, with never a complaint from the long-suffering young woman.  Later, I checked up on authors I read for pleasure, and got no farther than The Lord of the Rings, in which J.R.R. Tolkien almost NEVER used anything but “he said”, even when “he asked” would have been permissible.  It wasn’t so much that I decided Tolkien was the be-all and end-all of writing technique as that I had never noticed this until I checked.  I now think it possible that the only people who notice what you do in this regard are editors.  Years later, I began to see articles in which editors wrote with sneering typewriters of rookie writers who thought their work was improved with the “said substitute”, wasting time thinking of ways their heroes could cough a sentence, chortle a sentence, or snarl a sentence when they COULD just say something and get on with it.  (They reserved such scorn for people who wrote “Get out’,” she hissed,” explaining that you cannot hiss a sentence which has no s sounds in it that I was tempted to…but I always was that way.)

     “Explain everything in detail so the reader doesn’t get confused.”  Of all the advice I was given….  Even at the time I would seethe as one more instructor explained what was wrong with “As she left, she turned and waved her hand.”  The reader would get quite the wrong idea from so stupid a remark.  Waved her hand, did she?  Were we writing about a one-handed heroine?  “Her hand” implies that she has no more than that one: MUCH better to clarify by writing “She waved her left hand”, or even, “She waved one of her hands.”  This way the reader will not rear in indignation when the heroine is using both hands to steer the steamroller.

     In fact, we were directed to describe everything about our characters fully the first time each appeared.  Quality unconfusing narrative required “John Smith, six foot two, with brown hair and blue eyes, weighing about two hundred thirty pounds, was dressed in a brown suit with a white shirt and blue socks over black shoes.  His complexion was tanned and thick bristling eyebrows contracted to point at a wrinkled snub nose.”  In the next paragraph, we should meet “Juliet Jones, four foot two, with red hair and green eyes, weighing about ninety-three pounds, was dressed in a shiny silver gown, with sheer blue stockings and shining red slippers.  Her complexion showed heavy use of powder and rouge, and plucked eyebrows rose far from a nose pale and aquiline.”  I read, in a real live magazine, a story in which every single character, from the lead to the woman who appeared briefly to lead the dancing bear through the library, was introduced in exactly this format.  And the editor published it that way.  Of course, this chap rejected everything I sent him, so, who, in the end, was the silly kitten?

     And I find that the older I get, the more I remember all these things and write stuff like “John ‘Jumping Jack’ Nimblestick was a serious three foot tall second grader with bright blue eyes, ash blond hair, and a double major in Dodgeball and Dinsoaurs.  On a bright warm, but not humid summer’s day, he met Juliana ‘Jill’ Gildensturm, who, being one month and nine days older than Jack, was some two inches taller and, at seventy-nine and one half pounds, a good deal heavier than her small neighbor.  She wore pink dungarees with orange tulips over the pockets, in contrast to Jack’s (much smaller) blue denim equivalent.  She carried a very large grey bucket of zinc which belonged to her grandmother, Gloria Gildensturm, a sixty-eight year old woman who stood five foot ten when she stood up, which was almost never, due to the muscle pains attendant on age and a general disinclination to get out of bed and face the realities of living in a wolf-infested forest where her only visitor, on a busy day, might be her granddaughter by her second son, Jacob, ‘Jake’, Gildensturm, a six foot seven woodcutter who generally wore buckskin and scuffed black boots, and had sired a daughter Gloria, whom everyone in the neighborhood called ‘Red Riding Hood”, because she favored that garment above all others, though, to be sure, sometimes she wore yellow chintz and sometimes blue and silver organdy.”

     “’This bucket,’ Jill snorted, watching Jack get both hands on the handle to lift the dark brown wooden utensil bound with black iron bands, ‘Will be too heavy for me to carry alone once we have filled it, not too full, of course, since we have to carry it back down Hefty Hill, the third hill from the left once we turn north by northwest at the dry run,  where your grandfather, John ‘Little John” Johnson, a man of short stature but long dreams who also wore a black frock coat over his orange trousers, for some reason dug the well up at the highest elevation, a matter of some sixty-eight meters.”

     “You’re right,” mumbled Jack, his two pale hands gripping more tightly on the seven-inch long wooden handle as he directed size two black shoes with bronze buckles in the shape of….”

     I’m exhausted.  I need to rest up before I figure out how these two can tumble down a hill without seeming dramatic, and make sure Mom can complain about using up her vinegar and brown, but not too brown, paper on what is obviously not REALLY a broken crown without giving way to exclamation points.  And, looking over the story, I think it would do with some local color.  I may set it in French Guiana.

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 12

     The crisp, bright host led them to a table by a window.  Matt stayed way back, damp and sagging in a suit which had already seen a full day’s work.  Fog drifted past, outside the window.  He was glad that it was outside and he, at last, was inside.  Warm and damp was better than cold and damp.

     His personal humidity was a result not of the fog but of the speed with which Ada Silberwetter sent her little purple, bullet flying through it.  The last time Matt had driven over thirty was the time the billboard truck rearended him and his car skidded half a block.  And that had been by daylight.

     The flight through the fog, which he had spent, cramped and sweating, in a back seat suitabke for nothing larger than a spare pair of shoes, was bad enough, even leaving out the blackmail that had brought him.  On arrival, he was further enraged by the “little spot” Ada had decided was the proper setting for a murder investigation.  A step or two down from a crystal-and-headwaiter type of place, it was nonetheless about nine steps too high for Matt, who was more used to establishments with a toothpick dispenser by the cash register and a dark spot in the entryway to show where the cigarette machine used to be.

      On arrival, as token male in the trio, he had summoned the courage to face the sparkling host behind the lectern and murmur a desire for a table, preferably with chairs.  Luck smiled upon him, and he returned to the ladies with relief rolling through his muscles.  “He says it should be ninety minutes, at least, before there’s a space.  We could try….”

     Ada, patting his hand on the way had ambled over for a private chat with the gold-suited master of the house.  Ninety minutes became three.  The host apologized for making them wait THAT long.

     “My, this place seems to be popular,” Mrs. Benz remarked, as the host evaporated.  “However did we get a table?”

     Ada was checking her stockings to make sure she hadn’t damaged them while switching out of her Santa ensemble in the car.  “Hmmm?  I just mentioned the name of one of Marshall’s friends.”

     Mrs. Benz nodded, and turned to look over the artwork stretching above her on the wall.  Matt ran his tongue over his remaining wisdom teeth.  “Marshall’s name wouldn’t have done it?”

     A warm smile turned full radiance on him.  “No.”

     Matt, though he fought the impulse, leaned a little forward.  “But his friend’s name did.”

     The smile barely moved, but dimples at each side deepened.  “Yes.”

     Matt sat back and said no more.  He had decided he didn’t really want to know.

     “It’s warm in here,” said Mrs. Benz, turning to the younger woman.  “It’s cold enough outside.  Don’t you go south for the winter, or have you gone and come back already?”

     Matt actually felt the smile move from him to his mother.  “Oh, some years we’re snowbirds,” Ada told her.  “But it’s one of those things about working for the City: you can’t always leave town when you want to.  Besides, I love snow, and Christmas, and Marshall humors me.”

     “Poor old toad.”  Mts. Benz nodded.  “Mine was just the same.  It’s a good thing they don’t know what they’re getting into when they get married.

     “Oh, but Marshall did,” Ada assured her, smoothing a nonexistent wrinkle in the silken blouse.  “They’d had my current husband’s phone tapped for months, and after Marshall listened to the tapes, he came and told me Rodney might be on the skids and it might be a good idea for me to take up a similar position with a different concern.  So I was able to leave before Rodney was indicted, and avoid the rush.”

     Matt glanced at his mother, expecting shock and disapproval, or at least surprise.  But Mrs. Benz nodded fierce assent.  “Now, that’s what I don’t like about government work.  I keep telling Matt he should have taken that job at the bar.”

    It was Ada who raised one eyebrow in surprise.  “I never wanted to work for the city, myself.  I wanted to grow up to be a centerfold in Playboy.  They seemed to wear such nice clothes and visit such interesting places.”

     A deep smile spread across Mrs. Benz’s features.  “We didn’t have Playboy in my day.  We had all the Hollywood fan magazines, though.  I was going to be a tap dancer and dance on a battleship with all the sailors, the way it happened in the movies.”

     “Oh, I had taps, too!”  Ada’s voice vibrated with the joyful recognition of one who has just found somebody who could play the other half of “Heart and Soul”.  “That’s how I got my first job.   Was six; they needed a whole herd of kids who could dance around a big cardboard candy bar in a commercial.  We had to go round it twice and, on cue, lean way over and go into raptures.  Sixteen kids, no air conditioning, and thirty-five retakes.  For that we got four candy bars apiece.  That’s when I learned how artists are exploited.”

     She paused as the appreciative author chortled and then added, thoughtfully: “That’s when I learned to fake orgasm, too: it was a crummy candy bar.”

     Mrs. Benz laughed, but Ada’s eyes were fixed on Matt.  He hoped the candlelight was too dim for people at the nearest tables to see he was blushing.  He knew Mrs. Silberwetter could tell, of course.

     He was saved from further conversation along those lines by the arrival of a pal, frightened waitress.  “Hi!” she said almost in a whisper, and blinked at them.  “Is everything all right?”

     Like the other visible staff, she was clad in cloth of antique gold, with a matching choker of large gold beads.  Her neckline was cut in a rectangle, wider than it was deep, to present a pair of soft white shoulders.  The gown was not otherwise revealing, but it was not remarkably tight, either, as Matt observed when she leaned over the table to adjust unnecessarily the little golden candle on the table.  She was angled so Matt could see as far as he wanted, and then some.

     Passing around the menus, she leaned for display a second time.  Perhaps, Matt thought, she had orders, for the better entertainment of whoever Ada Silberwetter had claimed he was.  He filed the thought away in his writing file.  Rather startlingly large breasts, not offensively firm, combined with the charm of the choker and quaintly cut dress and, above all, her appealing silence, to make of her a magical creature, an otherworldly and unhappy servant of an eldritch power.  Just right for a spot in the novel, despite the fact that from her utterly formless chin upward, she was one of the most pallid and uninterestingly homely creatures he had ever beheld.

     He opened the gold-bound food list and frowned, not at the prices.  How was it he could peer down a woman’s dress and rakes notes for a book but start blushing the moment he looked at another woman’s face?  He peeked over the top of the menu.  Never, he thought, had he glanced at somebody and been so aware of the location of her tongue.

     Ada happened to raise her eyes at the same moment, and discovered his eyes.  The tongue came out and slipped gently along her upper lip.

     “Matt?”  His mother had her nose virtually against the price list, trying to read the elegant lettering.  “Matt, do you see anything?”

     “Um,” he replied, hiding his face behind his own menu again.

FICTION FRIDAY: Storybook Romance

     “I’m doomed to live single forever.”

     “Oh, I don’t know.  If Your Highness fixed up that haircut, and showered a little more often.”

     “That’s not the problem, My Lady.  My parents offended my fairy godmother, Ashsiaix….”

     “Ashsiaix?”

     “Yes, the fairy godmother with white streaks in her purple eyebrows.  My parents ran out of those miniature eclairs before she got to the buffet, and she cursed me with romantic bad luck.  I went out to rescue Rapunzel once, asked her to let down her hair, and she misunderstood.”

     “Well, that tower was really tall.”

     “Yes, so it broke my nose when she dropped a rabbit on me.”

     “You think that’s bad.  MY mom and dad tried to cut her off after her fortieth glass of champagne.”

     “Ashsiaix was your godmother too?”

     “Oh, you betcha.  She turned me into a worthless princess.”

     “I wouldn’t say that.  I could give you the name of the doctor who fixed MY nose.”

     “I walked into a fairy ring once and was given the power to spin straws into gold.”

     “Kings and dukes should be rushing to woo you!”

     “That’s what I thought.  Turns out they meant plastic drinking straws, and those haven’t been invented yet.”

     “I tried picking up the slippers the ladies lost at the big royal ball, and all I got out of it was athlete’s hand.”

     “When I took a bite of a poisoned apple, I couldn’t leave the bathroom for three days.”

     “I tried trading a cow for magic beans and lost my part-time job on the Royal Ranch.”

     “Oh, dear.  And they have the BEST salad dressing.  I thought I was going to be a legendary heroine when I found a ring that turned me invisible, but my parents just couldn’t see me going on a quest.”

     “My parents are just about as bad.  I offered to go on a road trip to rescue damsels from dragons, and they made me take a sidekick with a price list.  They said I’d never make a living as a freelancer.”

     “Well, I took a basket of goodies to my grandma and all I got was scolded for forgetting the pickles.”

     “Think that’s bad?  I gave my cat a pair of boots and he just hides his catnip dragons inside.”

     “Hey, I went looking in the haunted forest for a hut that walked on giant chicken legs, and it turned out to be a fast food place.”

     “Oh, I’ve eaten there.  Great fries, but they never give you enough ketchup.  Better than the time I made a big pot of soup using a stone and had to drink leftover mud for eight days.”

     “Yeah?  I asked around town for a magic goose and you wouldn’t believe how people acted!”

     “I bought a flute that would attract rats and couldn’t figure out how to make them go away once they showed up.”

     “Well….  Wait.  Look at me: fighting to prove I’m unluckier than you.”

     “Let’s face it: we were meant for each other.  Kiss me!”

     “I…oh!  That was….”

     “Ribald!”

     “Oh, dear!  Was that your fault or mine?  Now we’ll never know which of us is unluckier.  Here comes the king!  Hide behind the rhododendron. Dad said if he found me talking to one more frog he’d send me to therapy.”

Gee Whiz

     I was just standing there minding my own business, when the thought struck me.  Just what IS the deal with that dog?  Or horse?  And exactly who’s the shady figure behind the deal?

     The Interwebs took some convincing before it would help at all.  I KNOW the computer has done a lot to speed up research, but I still resent all the time I spend explaining to AI that I really wanted to look up something entirely other.  Information on how James Abram Garfield got involved in the question was simply hopeless.

     What I NEEDED was a simple Dictionary of Euphemisms, so I could track down a few phrases I had run into over the years for having to leave the room to pee.  Okay, to urinate.  (Talk about uphemisms.)  The whole business, in one form or another, has been confusing me since I was a child and read Gulliver’s Travels, wherein there is a highly important turn of the plot in which Lemuel Gulliver saves the day by “making water”.  This was NOT a phrase used in the Midwest in the 1960s, and the whole thing went over my head (as, indeed, it did for the Lilliputians.)  My brain also somehow failed to make a connection of similar import when one of the boys in A Child’s Christmas In Wales suggests writing something in the snow.

      But I had no desire to track every single expression for going wee-wee.  NOR did I need synonyms for the potty itself.  ALL I wanted to know was the story behind certain phrases which signified “’Scuse me.  Gots to go to the Little Boys’ Room and moisten the necessary.”  And this simple inquiry…never mind.  Let us hurry, like the gentleman who just spoke, to the desired denouement.

     “I’m going to go shed a tear for Garfield”:  This came at me from a book published in the 1950s, so it has nothing to do with large orange cats.  I was able to find “shed a tear” as a popular phrase for the function, but data stopped right there.  The author of the book lived in southern California and Texas, so perhaps the 20th President had some special significance there.

     “I want to spend a penny”: Correctly used, in its native Britain, this should be employed only by women, as it relates to Victorian pay toilets, which required a big copper coin to use.  MEN did not have this expense, which is less a matter of evil patriarchy as a matter of form following function.  As pointed out by literary scholar Gail Kern Paster’s “Leaky Vessels”, men do have a simpler time of it: any handy wall will do.  Ladies, requiring a door due to a more vulnerable position…you get eh idea, don’t you?  And I complain because I have to pay for television programs I used to watch free.

     “I’ve got to go see a man about a dog” (or horse):  Or even a duck, according to a couple of Online Oexperts.  This is not as specific as other phrases, as it is usually translated as “I’m going someplace for reasons I don’t care to explain”, and MAY have originally meant you were leaving to pay the money you lost on a horse race or a dog race.  (But then why a duck?  Why a no chicken?)  Wikipedia claims that in some parts of the United States, the phrase varies depending on what you are going to do in the restroom, with seeing a man about a dog taking less time than seeing a man about a horse.

     That was about where I decided there were other things I could be doing with my time (no, oddly enough, not for THAT reason.)  And, anyway, I was not all that curious about the fairly simple stories behind “I need to powder my nose”, “I must answer the call of nature”, Percy and the porcelain, the wife’s best friend.  I will lift my mind from the, um, gutter, and go peruse Ogden Nash’s romance about the young lady whose life changed when she was visiting a nobleman’s castle, asked for the Little Girl’s Room, and was directed by a hard-of-hearing servant to the Earl’s Room.  There are plot points in that one which have always worried me.

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 11

     Matt took a fraction of a second, standing on the bottom step of the bus, to look for Marshall Silberwetter, or, more likely, one of his aides.  Marshall himself would probably not bother to venture out into the thighbiting wind just to witness another of his wife’s assignations.

     That fraction of a second was all Matt got before he was pushed out onto the sidewalk by the passengers behind him.  He stumbled, and twisted to the right, veering away from the north-south current so he wasn’t sucked into the mainstream.  Why were all those mounted polcemen out in the street?  A horse or two on the sidewalks would do wonders for navigation.  Or would that be cruelty to the horses?  A tank might do better.

     He took his bearings, braced himself, and plunged through the mob, using his briefcase as both shield and spear.  Pulling left, he made his way to a peaceful eddy between the traffic charging into Water Tower Place and the crush pushing past it.  He paused in the moment’s calm to study the herd instinct in his fellow pedestrians.  Everyone was even aiming for the same revolving door, while those to the left and right sat quietly unrevolved.

     Matt felt the doors to the right looked calmest, far from the main torrent.  No one stood anywhere near it, even, save for a lone Santa Claus, sheltered by a jog in the wall grom the prevailing winds.

     He swung to the side, blinking into that wind, to check the big Salvation Army tree across the street.  Their sign showed that a few  million had been dropped in the Santa pots so far.  Matt recalled he hadn’t dropped in anything so far this year; he didn’t recall dropping anything in last year.  His left hand snaked through his coat pocket, under his jacket, and down into the change that clumped in the depths of his pants pocket.  Lurching still against the wind, he noticed that Santa had no pot.  In fact, it was a remarkably unplump Santa.

     Santa’s eyes met his and Santa’s rosy cheeks dimpled encouragement.  Then  Santa’s hands gripped Santa’s red suit, and flipped it open.

     Matt could still remember his older brother Pete, coming upon a puzzled ten year-old flipping through some magazines that had been tucked under a mattress, and snarling, “Not a breast man, uh?”  Matt was rivetted nonetheless.  His eyes froze on target, despite an inner voice reminding him that when his eyes were stuck in one place that was the time he most desperately needed to turn them elsewhere.

     No comment rose from the crowd pushing to get into Water Tower; Matt was the only one who had noticed anything besides that one popular revolving door.  This kind of thing surely happened only in books and dreams!  He refused to believe a moment of this.  Steam curled away where frigid air hit rosy warm skin.  Matt understood who had to be under that triangle of thick white curls.

      He believed everything now.  He started forward again.  Santa closed her jacket and braced her feet shoulder-width apart.

     Assert yourself, Matt advised Matt.  Be strong, be calm.  He came to a halt a few feet from the impudent Claus.

     “You know,” he said, his voice cracking only a little. “This is getting to be a habit with you.”

     She replied, dimples blazing, “How did you guess who it was?”

     Telling the truth—that he had recognized her between beard and belt buckle—would send the conversation spiraling into the gutter.  “You’re the only person I know who’d go to the trouble,” he napped.  “Have you tried therapy?”

     Ada took off the Sata hat and ran one hand through her hair.  “I do wish so many great people weren’t deranged,” she said.  “It sometimes gives me doubts about myself.”

     Matt turned and pushed into the nearest revolving door.  Not until he reached the escalator and saw bustling shoppers turn to stare behind him did he look back.  And even then he asked himself if he really wanted to know.

     She had removed her beard and was now slipping off the jacket.  He started to lunge, but his briefcase caught him just below the right knee and nearly sent him toppling down the moving stairs on top of her.

     “Don’t fret.”  She smiled kindly.  “I closed cover before striking.”

     A shiny white blouse had been pulled up somehow over the offending frontal features.  Matt watched, burning, as she turned the jacket around, pulled the sleeves inside out, and produced, stepping off at the top of the escalator, a perfectly serviceable black down jacket.  Some of the escalator crowd applauded and she bowed, dimpling in all directions.

     Then she held the coat out.  Matt automatically took it from her and held it up for her.  “I designed this myself,” she told him, slipping her arms into it.  “For December.  Most people don’t get all psychiatric on me when I wear it.”

     She was almost pouting.  Matt would have felt triumph at scoring a point, but he was sure she had already plotted her next four moves with revenge in mind.

     They rode escalator after escalator to the level of the bakery.  “Um, wait here,” he told her at the door, without much hope.

     To Matt’s surprise, she stopped outside the door.  He felt her eyes on him as he gave Beth the latest rejection slips and took back the little yellow box.  There was no opportunity for conversation.  The manager was helping up front today, and was duly suspicious of the transfer of documents.  Matt nought a pair of macadamia brownies to mitigate his crime.

     “You have strange tastes,” Ada told him as he came out again.  “She looks like the kind of kid who hides under tables and waits to bite people.”

     Matt held out the box of photos.  He was not going to argue with such a perfect description.

     She shrugged, glancing toward the escalator.  “Whatever bumps your busy.  What’s she like about pictures of tombstones?”

     “Well,” Matt ventured.  “Well, she’s a poet.”

     This sounded lame to him, but Ada nodded as if it explained all.  “Do you like poetry?”

     “Um, er, ah, yes.”  He tried to push the yellow box into her hands again.

     She tucked them out of the way.  “You must come over to the house some time.  I’ll recite limericks.”

     Matt resisted an impulse to jam the box square into her midsection: the down jacket would have spoiled the effect.  She didn’t appear even to notice the yellow rectangle.  “What kind of poetry does the feral cookie chef write?”

     “Oh, ah, well, er….have you heard of Jinx Bottym?”  Ada shook her head; he supposed it had been a long shot.  “Well, all kinds, you know: free verse, haiku….”  He punctuated this catalog with a shrug as his voice trailed off.

     Her eyes rolled wide.  “And she gets money for that?  What a racket!”

     Matt pursed his lips, but could think of no retort.  Beth herself had said accepting money for haiku was like getting paid to wash your toes.  He cleared his throat.

     “Here,” he said, waving the box at her one more time.  “I’ve got to be getting home.”

     “Aw.”  She finally slipped her hands under the collection of photographs.  “And I thought you’d join me for supper.”

     Matt’s head shook fiercely enough that his glasses nearly flew off.  “My mother’ll be waiting.”

     “True,” said Ada.  She tucked the box somewhere under the big black jacket.  “Let’s go down to the third floor.”

     Matt had been heading for the big glass elevator anyhow, but glanced back.  “Why?”

     She smiled.  She let her jaw drop a little when she smiled, accenting the cheeks and letting her soft lips plump out.  “That’s where your mother’s waiting,” those soft lips whispered.

     Matt stared at them, and they went up.  “I thought the three of us could sit and discuss our case over dinner.  So I told her I’d fetch you while she looked at the travel books in Rizzoli’s.”

     “I…I…you left my mother…she’s alone…the crowds….”  Matt ;et three scalding breaths out through his nostrils before he felt cool enough to go on.

     “There is no ‘case’,” he growled, marching up in front of Ada Silberwetter.  “We are not going to supper.  We are going home.  Each of us to our own home.  Don’t you ever talk to my mother again.”

     Ada smiled some more, and her lips didn’t look so soft.  She reached up and pinched his cheek.  “Whatever you say.  You can explain that all to Mom, then.  Rizzoli’s.  In the travel books.”

     She turned and strolled for the elevator, each bounce daring him to follow.  Matt closed his lips and gritted his teeth.