Life goes on teaching me things when I least expect it, which is Life’s normal teaching method. A couple of days ago I encountered the phrase “beverage sauce”.
This is not a new phrase; perhaps you knew about it. This is a serum, or potion, or what-have-you, which can, in this case, be stirred into any beverage to give it that special seasonal Pumpkin Spice flavor. I also learned that we call these two months in autumn “Spooky Season” because pumpkin spice sneaks up on you wherever you least expect it.
I suppose this is preferable to the old word “creamer” because Americans tend to put creamer only in coffee, whereas a beverage sauce can be tossed into your milk, your 7-Up, your Smart Water, or whatever you please. (I have suddenly experienced a desire to find out what it would taste like to add pumpkin spice beverage sauce to one of those banana flavored smart milks. Spooky Season, indeed: didn’t even see that one coming.)
HOWEVER, as a card-carrying member of the Irrelevant Generation, I should like to point out that the whole ‘beverage sauce’ concept is not new. We ALSO had something we had around the house that would instantly change the flavor of any beverage if we just managed to sneak it past our parents (and since we had to stir using a metal spoon in a drinking glass made of glass, this was fraught with suspense.)
We called it Hershey’s Syrup.
Hershey’s Syrup, in those antediluvian days, was available only in small tin cans, which had to be opened with a can opener: the type otherwise used, as far as I can recall, only for cans of evaporated milk or beer. This was NOT a problem for the experimental youngster: once a can of Hershey’s Syrup had the two openings in the top (one to let the air in so the syrup could pour out the other: we learned our science in them days without having to read our textbooks by the firelight) the can sat forever in the refrigerator, open to anyone who wanted to bother. The only deterrent was the fact that sitting in the fridge made the syrup get thicker and harder to pour.
Some other time I will tell the sad story of the hot fudge sundae in our house. These were rare treats because to make hot fudge, the can of Hershey’s Syrup had to be heated in a saucepan of water on the stove. Too much trouble. So was the plastic package of Hershey’s Syrup that could be heated in the pan of hot water. And, later, the plastic package that had to be heated in the microwave. At this point, the world owes me something like a hundred hot fudge sundaes.
COLD Hershey’s Syrup, however, could be poured into milk and then stirred ferociously until the milk was a creamy chocolate. But was this enough for the scientifically intrigued grade schooler who had pioneered the concept of pouring maple syrup from the little pitcher onto vanilla ice cream? NAY! It merely raised the curtain.
There is no time to go through ALL the experiments which resulted (or the maternal exclamations). To summarize: mixing Hershey’s Syrup in water is pointless. Mixing Hershey’s Syrup AND a healthy heap of Tang into milk was amazing. Hershey’s Syrup and Grape Kool-Aid would never catch on. Mixing Hershey’s Syrup into water with a handful of those individually wrapped blue mints did very little good. (Nothing improved the flavor of those blue mints, which dominated the Candy Drawer those last few days before payday. Who made those things? Translucent blue, shaped like elongated Werther’s Originals, and as pretty as they were uninteresting to consume.)
But the world moves along, and my parents were lured into purchasing Nestle’s Quik (now Nesquik). This was MUCH easier to mix in, but, as a powder, does not belong in the category of beverage sauce. And, as mentioned, Hershey’s Syrup was replaced in our refrigerator by chocolate in jars or plastic packets. I do not know what year my parents finally discarded that last can, its triangular gouges still decorated with driblets of petrified chocolate. It may have lasted until the current century, or maybe it still exists, still fastened to the old discarded refrigerator by hard chocolate paste on the shelf.
Anyway, the whole point is that we DID have beverage sauces in my day, and it was a boon to the scientific impulses of small children. If only we had had the backing of our elders (and a billion dollar ad campaign) WE might have come up with our own seasonal flavors and retired before we reached the point of having to study long division. (I still think there’s a place in modern commerce for my brother’s lemon-lime chocolate flavor. This was a springtime sensation, and, instead of Hershey’s syrup, used Lemon-Lime Shasta as a sauce for hollow chocolate Easter eggs. I don’t recall what this tasted like, but the resulting mess made a few squiggles of Hershey’s Syrup on the kitchen floor pale in comparison.)
Matt was still worrying about it when he reached the bus stop. “It’s not that I don’t want to eat with you,” he said to himself and/or Carleton Nairn. “But I have an appointment.”
People eased out of the bus shelter as he walked in. They did not hurry, nor did they dawdle. Tall men talking to themselves were unnerving, but not uncommon, sights at bus stops.
Matt clamped his lips shut and watched his breath float up from his nose into the ice-blue sky. Would that he had just one ounce of Ada Silberwetter’s confidence, her self-satisfaction. Not that this would give him a way out. He would very likely be dead soon, his novel unfinished, his life just lines in City records, a footnote in a biography of Felicia Lowe.
A 151 pulled up; Matt forced himself forward. It would not have been his first choice, but it was pointed in the right direction, and anything was better than standing here, frozen with fear, until he froze for real.
It was a mistake, of course. This far north on its route, the 151 was packed full. Matt had expected to have to stand, but hadn’t reckoned on having to stand so close to everybody else. The people along the aisles bobbed back and forth as the bus started up again while a pack of small boys, completely uninhibited by the crush, the approach of the holiday, or anything else, pushed and shoved each other, pointing to things they spotted outside.
“Looka at Ka’alak limo!”
“Assa grayun!”
“Limosant gray!”
“Too! M’relatiff has un!”
“Y’reltiff!”
“Duss!”
“Dussen!”
Duss abet! Ruddinut wunsen dennay cubberdim up!”
A slightly older girl in charge tried to shush them in a dignified manner, but none of the boys even looked at her and she was trying too hard to look sophisticated to deal with the in coin they understood.
Matt did not precisely relax. He was still watching for the knife he fully expected to slide into him at any moment. But Matt-the-Writer was thinking of a boy named Georgia O’Malley, who figured prominently in “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers”. Always unhelpful, Matt-the-Writer was blending the boys with Matt’s terror for Georgia’s activities in the “Green” section of the book. The boy saw a forest for the first time and got lost immediately, not being able to tell one tree from another. The dialogue might make a page of the book. If “Ascent” remained that sort of book. He had been giving serious consideration to adapting it into a comic book script and marketing it as a graphic novel.
“Hey, Matt! Hold this just a second?”
A large square box, not a little heavy, practically jumped into his arms. Peering over it, Matt saw the top of Maryann’s head. She shifted to one side, smiling at him and the driver impartialy, and letting people who had their tokens or dollars ready pass around her while she found her transfer.
Matt hadn’t thought of Maryann as a suspect. But she’d been at Down in Jerry Silberwetter’s day too. Surely she was born at Down, wearing some neat, immaculate suit, sitting behind that neat immaculate desk. Silly to leave her lout of consideration just because she was a secretary, and above all the political backstabbing. But Geegee had been a womanizer, of course, and no doubt always took his camera along.
And while Matt was considering all this, he was also realizing that his hands and arms were completely occupied with the big box, with no way to avoid that knife. Maryann’s purse could hold, besides a bus transfer, a good-sized knife.
“Thanks!” Maryann held up her transfer as the driver clicked something below the fare bx.
Matt pushed past her to the door, releasing the box onto her at the same time. “Sorry,” he said, as she got her arms under it just in time. “Er, my stop. Apartment. See you!”
The closing doors nipped at his heels. The bus roared off. Looking around, Matt found that he had traveled four blocks for his dollar. “Just as well have bought the chestnuts,” he growled.
He checked the Fannie Mae bag to make sure no sweet-toothed pickpocket had passed. Chocolates were hard to hide until Christmas: they had to go somewhere they wouldn’t be squashed or melted. Not that his mother would come hunting; good hiding places were traditional in the Benz household. Sometimes she hid presents so well she didn’t find them again until the following April. This was not a side effect of advancing age; she’d always been like that.
A 3 came by. Matt didn’t want a 3; this time he was holding out for a good old 11, if he froze for it.
Stamping his feet to warm them, he stamped them a second time in fury. The Number 11 didn’t run this far south on the weekend; how much of his life had he wasted on Saturdays and Sundays waiting for it? It would have to be another 151, and then a 66, and probably a 22. He kicked at the corner of the bus shelter. Three people eased away down the sidewalk.
For all he knew, his mother had tried to cook something for lunch. Mat wouldn’t mind so much if it weren’t for Mrs. Andrews, down the hall, who was always frightened by the sound and called the police. Of course, there was Miss Skull: either the case or the novel based on it might be preoccupying her to the point that she skipped lunch. She wouldn’t even answer the phone when she was intent on her work. She wouldn’t even come to the door when Matt….
What if someone else had come to the door? Someone who found out about Felicia Lowe and tracked her real name to the apartment, someone who wanted to know why an author was looking into the secrets of civic government? She wouldn’t understand the questions. They’d apply pressure. The strength drained from Matt’s arms; he nearly dropped his chocolates. He shook himself and cleared his throat, covering it by walking to the curb as if looking down the street for the next bus. He could walk to the next bus shelter: better than standing here amid paranoid scenarios. It would drive him mad, if he wasn’t already….
He spotted a miracle in the traffic. Bracing his backbone, he threw an arm in the air. “Taxi!”
Mere minutes and more dollars than he liked to think about later, he unlocked all the locks, swung inside, and went limp against the door to shut it. He was home, he was safe, and the weary world could be locked out for another day.
“I like chocolate Easter bunnies myself. Palmer.”
“You eat the ears first, of course.”
“Oh, of course. Well now. Sometimes I start with the feet. You wouldn’t want him running away from you.”
Matt unsagged, and marched down the hall, pausing only a moment to toss the Fannie Mae bag into his room. He stalked into the dining nook.
“Well, golly Jehosapaht,” drawled Ada Silberwetter. “Look who’s here!”
“My mother didn’t give you a key to this place, did she?”
Ada’s nose went down and she peered up at him through long lashes. “And don’t lower your eyes to me!” he snapped.
“Matt?” His mother leaned forward to peer at him. “Are you home?”
“No,” he said.
“Then you’d better go see who was at the door,” she told him.
“This is the shop with the magic devices and legendary weapons for heroes of quests?”
“I don’t insist on heroes, sir. Just customers.”
“You would give magic weapons to a grim lord of evil?”
“No, sir, Sell them.”
“Well, that’s your business. Do you have time travel rings?”
“Well, sir, I….”
“Come now. Every two-bit sorcerer claims he can make one.”
“I have time travel rings, sir. I also stock time travel bracelets, tiaras, and even a pair of time travel fishnet stockings if you so desire, sir. But I don’t like to sell time travel devices. People DO cause such horrible problems for themselves.”
“I quite understand. But I am not planning anything terribly earth-changing. Perhaps I will do no more than go back and reassure certain historical characters that everything will be all right.”
“Presumably according to your own definition of ‘all right’.”
“You have heard the story of the sorcerer who cast a fireball spell incorrectly and burned the entire left side of his body?”
“Not so far today, sir.”
“He’s all right now.”
“A sense of humor is another danger of time travel. Lady Lertigua suffered her sad fate when she donned this time travel tiara. Her husband said he’d believe in it when pigs fly and she asked to be transported to THAT distant day.”
“What happened?”
“She was hit in the head with a flying pig.”
“My main errand is to go back to the early days of Kakstraw, the Demon Lord of Evil Fates, and ask why he did certain things.”
“His attempt to take over the cosmos missed by a narrow margin. Your questions might give him hints that help him succeed. Still, evil overlords aren’t very quick to pick up on ideas not their own.”
“I think I can avoid any danger.”
“Everyone does, sir. Traveling in time can alter your present and future. You won’t even notice the difference.”
“Nonetheless, I wish to buy that ring. What I do with it, as you mention, is not your concern.”
“Very well. How are you willing to pay, sir? Coins, gemstones, that gold ring on your ring finger?”
“This?”
“Yes, the one with the emblem of Kakstraw.”
“Here. Certainly. I can get another.”
“I thought so, My Lord.”
“I can…. You said…ah, you recognized me?”
“You also have your emblem on your collar, your belt buckle, and the toes of your boots, Lord Kakstraw.”
“Well, you will see them all again. When I have corrected my mistakes and control the cosmos, I shall come back and thank you…as you deserve.”
“I’m sure you will, sir. Best of luck avoiding the eagle’s nest at the peak of the Mountain of Dark Despair.”
“Ha! This time I shall…how did you know about that?”
“Well, this is the seventeenth time you’ve come in to buy that ring, sir.”
Along about 1904, that is, just before the first Golden Age of postcards, an author published a novel featuring a heroine who was looking for a man. The book gained some notoriety (and sales) because she was not looking for a good husband, a good provider, or a good father for her children. The heroine was really looking for a good…time.
It was an unusual trait; to this day, we do not associate the young ladies of bygone generations as looking for a good time. A postcard like this one simply meant the young lady was looking for a bit of romance. Nothing that involved removing so much as a glove was implied.
Or so we like to assume. But in this card, for example, there is no joke at all if she’s simply talking about that pot of Spam and noodles, and only slightly more if you assume she is referring to a place in her heart.
Sometimes a lady just has to come right out with it. See, occasionally the gentlemen of the era (even at this advanced point somewhere in the 1930s) assumed the same thing about young ladies and needed instructions.
Here the young lady we saw earlier is accompanied by a man who has just gotten the hint. (Both phrases used here refer to running out for a bucket of beer, and what the ice cream pail has to do with it I don’t know, but HE gets it and she will probably…I forget what I was going to say.)
This artist has made it difficult to know which partner in this scene is making the leading remark, but the expression on her face tells us she’s interested, in either case. (And where is she looking?)
Our “Sit Up” lady, meanwhile, is making her intentions even more clear than she did with the beer and ice cream.
Was it really chivalry, in days bygone, that forced a demure young thing to give little hints like this before she could get any…attention?
Demure shyness was not, after all, restricted to her side of the couch.
It is clear that this young lady has gone to great efforts to find what she’s looking for. This all seems a bit extreme to me, and I wonder what it will mean to the small man with the long stick, but I am not here to lament someone’s l’amours.
We can believe, if we work at it, that our “Sit Up” lady knew what she was asking for. She wrote the caption.
But it’s easy to understand why sometimes a sweet young thing will swear off forever, at least until next week. She needs to catch her breath.
A gust of wind tried to blast a hole through the back of Matt’s coat as he pushed along, perusing animated displays in the store windows. He was moving the wrong direction; the story of the windows progressed from north to south. But he was nowhere near close enough to see the activity well enough to get a gist of the plot, it didn’t matter.
People were every which where, laughing, kicking, whining, pushing, dawdling, howling, shushing, pushing in and around anyone who paused to swear at a bus or stare at a window. Shoppers darted across the street in the middle of the block, confident that they could beat a bus before it reached them and forgetting that during peak shopping hours, this street was also open to cars. There was much honking, much shouting, and a wholesome air of confusion.
Matt knew that pickpockets, if nothing worse, waited among the crowd. Stories had it that South American pickpockets made annual pilgrimages to this very street to join the shopping crowds. He kept one hand near his wallet and he kept moving.
Ahead of him, two women recognized each other and mashed together in a muffled hug. He eased around them, just failing to be run down by three teenagers trying to catch up with a fourth who had snatched a friend’s hat. When he was about that age, he had dreamed about being one of the lucky ducks who worked in the Loop, and got to come here every day, instead of waiting for Christas or special weekends. He glanced back in the direction of his office and hunched his shoulders.
His progress had brought him up to a hot pretzel wagon. He thought about it, but George and Joe weren’t here to fight with about the proper way to eat a hot pretzel. The vendor had added the usual seasonal offering and Matt did pause long enough to read the sign. A dollar was a lot to spend, at Christmas, on hot chestnuts if you’d never bought any before and didn’t even know how to eat them. He moved on to the corner, shivering as the wind swirled in off aside street and slapped him in the face.
Down the street he could spy the high aqua fence with the big ad for the nifty new building of boutiques and office space to be opening next fall. There had been a semi-decent bookstore there once. Not very classy, to be sure, with its rows of porn paperbacks and little counter of martial arts guides and weapons, but its remainder bins sometimes held good books, not the same as those remaindered at every different chain bookstore in the city.
Not far beyond stood a dingy shop advertising any kind of lingerie except that suited for a day like today. A short dark woman was headed inside. From here it looked like Beth. Matt turned to cross to that side of the street but the light turned yellow just as he decided the woman was too tall to be Beth. Even if it was Beth he had no particular business following her around while she bought lingerie.
The light turned green in front of him and he started forward, thinking less about the ice against the curb than Beth’s underwear. Ge envisioned her in everything from feed sacks to Frederick’s without reaching any convincing conclusion. There would be no such trouble imagining Ada Silberwetter; she presumably wore none at all. Matt decided he would not think about Ada Silberwetter.
A small boy stopped short right in front of him. “Are these all houses?”
“No, dear,” said his mother, giving his arm a yank and glaring at Matt. “Just buildings.”
The sidewalk preachers were out in force despite the weather, to exhort the crowds to stop doing whatever they were doing and do something better. Explosions of “JEE-sus!” cut across the recorded music of the window displays and the jazz carols blasted out by brave street musicians. The nearest right reverend was expounding to everyone and sundry that the answer was to kill all government officials when they hit the age of fifty. Paying those pensions would destroy government budgets, which would in turn cripple the economy, which led everyone down the fruitless path of materialistic moneygrubbing. “The Money Race” could be ended on;y if the unholy civil servants had a mandatory death sentence.
Several people cheered. Matt turned up his collar and walked faster, afraid they might see the brand of the City on his forehead. He worked his way past this audience and joined another mob on the far side.
It hit him that this was the perfect setting to sneak up on a victim. You’d never know they were coming, never be able to tell them from the rest of the crowd that jostled and shoved. They had only to come up behind you and grab your scarf and then….
The El thundered overhead and he jumped. His scarf was tucked inside his coat as always, wasn’t it? He checked the ends to make sure no one could get a hold on them, and tucked them right back where they’d been. Then, in case someone had been watching, he shoved his hands through the pockets opening and rearranged the ends again.
“Ayackatoury!”
Aman with a load of boxes stepped wrong and went down, part sideways and part backward. Matt stepped out of the way of a flying box and kept going. After three steps, he glanced back. Should he be helping? But this might be a decoy, fronting for pickpockets. Or stranglers.
He turned back, but by now four other people were pulling the man to his feet, while three others collected his packages. No need for Matt to shove in with his two cents. Anyway, the man was probably embarrassed by the whole incident. Matt would have felt that way about it.
The sudden violence of the fall and flying packages, though, gave him a feeling the crowded sidewalk was no place for a man who expected to be strangled at the first opportunity. So when he hit a line waiting to get in through a revolving door, he joined it and set to his shopping.
“Joy to the World” came from a quartet of trumpeters on a staircase landing. A spring entered his step; Matt liked Christmas music, from cheap piped-in Bing to this Baroque touch. Sometimes he wondered if he would be doing the world any service if he counted every Christmas song he heard in December, to find out which was played most.
The crush inside was as bad as outside, worsened by congestion where people paused to consider trinkets which defied ordinary wallets and Teddy bears offered as premiums. Matt had no aversion to crowds (if unarmed) and did not suffer from claustrophobia, so nothing marred his sudden peaceful goodwill save on trumpeter who hit a note one octave higher than really necessary. If his progress was thwarted, frustration might set in. But as he had no particular plan or destination, progress was not a part of the equation.
People all around him were shopping as cheerfully as if they had forgotten the existence of tombstones. A little girl not far away kept shrugging her jacket on. Five times her mother bent down to flip it away from one shoulder, in accordance with current fashion.
Matt sheared off as he realized this particular crowd was lining up to wait for the express elevator to take them zooming to the seventh floor where they could line up anew for a traditional cup of nog under the great Christmas tree. People would wait four hours to get a table near the tree; it was tradition. The Benzes had never been that dedicated. Matt had always vowed he’d do it himself one day, but so far he had not indulged. Today might be the right day. Who would come looking for him there? And if they did, how would they get in?
Instead, he wheeled around the line and kept moving. There was the book department, of course. But ever since they’d squeezed it into that tiny cubicle in the basement it wasn’t much fun.
The aisle he found himself in seemed to be devoted to keychain doodaddery and overflow from the candy department. He steered to the right to avoid a furred cluster of shoppers.
“Ted wants one, but there are hardly any good ones left.”
“Oh, I hear those are really big with the upper-ups: Mayor’s office types.”
Matt glanced back toward the pen display but his eye landed instead on what appeared to be a row of ping pong balls with skulls painted on them. There was no room to recoil, so he looked closer and found these were a sort of bon-bon with what was really the head of that premium bear done in chocolate icing.
“Vanilla cream, hey? Coconut, hey?”
”Yes sir. I….”
Matt turned slowly toward the voices.
“Now, my basic position,” Walter Prince informed the clerk confined within the square of counters, “Is that vanilla cream is not chocolate. Nor is coconut. Yet, you sell these things under the heading ‘chocolates’. Can you explain to me any way in which vanilla cream or coconut constitutes ‘a chocolate’?”
Keeping both eyes on his boss, Matt backed away. He might have done better to spare one eye for the display of pens.
“Oh, look out!” cried a despairing clerk.
The display hit the floor and pens with little bears attached to them leapt in all directions. Walter Prince glanced back at the noise, met Matt eye-to-eye, and headed for a escalator.
Matt dove to retrieve bears and pens, his fingers taking their place beneath the crushing heels of grimy boots. Had Walter Prince been at this counter a moment before, replacing the pen lost at the party? Who else wore pens? Did Holly? Matt couldn’t remember now. He recalled, eventually, that he had decided the pen could have been dropped at any time, by anybody and not necessarily Miss Skull. Carleton Nairn wore a pen, didn’t he? Matt hadn’t seen him at the party. Maybe he didn’t go Maybe he did go, but went in a ski mask and long coat. DID Holly wear a pen?
Having collected most of the debris, Matt thrust them and the little display box back onto the counter and turned to consider any handy revolving door. The less-packed exits would be quicker, but also perfect for an ambush. “Shopping City Employee Cut to Ribbons”: the papers would love it. That was the kind of holiday story they lived for.
A very tall man loomed dangerously near. Matt shied away, and so did his reflection. Had that mirror been there all along, or was it Mirror Man, the store detective who wore a box made of two-way mirrors, the better to watch for shoplifters on their way out? Matt checked his hands to make sure he wasn’t inadvertently still carrying any VIP pens with teddy bears, and then waved feebly at the man, or men, in the mirror.
He plunged for the door. Everyone at Down knew he’d be at the party: they’d all offered him rides. Anyone who had been there before and knew about the terrace could have planned a mortal meeting. Had Holly bee there before? She must have, with Marshall Silberwetter as a grandfather. AND a blackmailer for an uncle. Had Jerry Silberwetter ever blackmailed his stepfather? Odd omission, if not.
Two or three people outside were looking up at the El tracks. Matt glanced up, and then hurried on, ashamed at having been caught that way. At the corner he turned east into a slightly less traveled sidewalk, and crossed to the other side of the street. Here the dusty glass of an emptied storefront displayed nothing but a big CLOSED sign and a lonely dummy. Did the mannequin mind, particularly, standing naked in the window, without her arms or hair? She looked as slim and superior as ever, but she mainly had her back to passersby, and her eyes seemed to be closed. But perhaps she was just being coy.
Had Ada killed Jerry Silberwetter? It seemed a reasonable thing for a blackmail victim to do, but Matt felt utterly lost trying to decide what would seem reasonable to Ada Silberwetter. She didn’t at all have the proper attitude toward her traumatic tryst. Why was HE the one who looked at the pictures and felt embarrassed, guilty, persecuted? He wasn’t the one who had gone down on all fours to….
He turned sharply north again. There was real Christmas shopping to be done, important things to concern a mind too full of Ada Silberwetter. Like why did the owner of this shop think any human being needed a life-sized portrait of Tiny Tim on black velvet?
He pressed on. It was getting on to lunchtime according to his stomach. But though he was passing any number of feeding stalls he didn’t stop. Matt ate out so seldom he could never make up his mind where to go. And even if he did choose, he knew he did not have the force of character to push his way into any of the fast food crowds. Besides, any of those people could be one of Them.
Ada and Marshall might be parts of a much larger conspiracy. Marshall, anyhow. Ada might be making trouble for the plan, with her little investigation: one knife thrust could finish off her partner and serve as a wanting. Unless they really wanted to frighten her, in which case something more elaborate would be called for.
Or, if they were in it together, the Silberwetters could have arranged for…. Not even that. They could have given orders to the chauffeur, who could have changed jackets and be mingling with the burger-hunters. Very nice: he had tipped his murderer. Matt-the-writer liked that idea. He drafted a paragraph in which the chauffeur, a man of honor, tucked the money inside the corpse’s coat.
Matt shook himself fiercely, and several people near him made detours or walked faster. “You’re a victim of disorganized thinking,” his father had always told him. “If you’d train your brain to do one thing at a time, you wouldn’t be running from one thing to another and getting all worked up.”
Dad was right. The idea of a citywide conspiracy, in a city where the Council couldn’t even get together on buying new chairs for the Council Chamber, was not a fruiful one. Concentrate on Christmas shopping: that was the thing. There was that little Fanny Mae just this side of the river, where they had a self-serve section with all the prices posted so you didn’t have to ask. Candy was a dependable present.
His stride lengthened, now that he had a specific end in view. He could even buy a box for Ada Silberwetter, he thought, and mail it anonymously. What was she: Truffes or Trinidads? Nah. Pixies. Definitely the Pixie type.
“Hey!”
Matt didn’t particularly notice the voice at first, with all the other voices around him. The person who caught hold of his coat was dragged a foot and a half down the slick sidewalk.
“Hey, Matt! Mr. Benz!”
Matt paused, and looked down into the watery etes of Carleton Nairn. “Had lunch yet.”
“Um, no,” Matt replied. “I, uh….”
“Come on. Let me get you something.” Carleton Nairn, reversing direction, was able to pull Matt back. Matt’s mouth opened but the older man went on, “It’s no problem, hey: just MacDonalds. It’ll give me a chance to cadge something off you some other time. Come on, a Christas present. You like a Big Mac? Wait here.”
By now Matt was actually in the vestibule; looking around he would have bet good money there was no way to get any farther inside, but Carleton Nairn dodged among and around prospective diners util he was out of sight.
All Matt’s previous resolution was gone. Now what? He was standing here waiting to eat with a man who might have tried to kill hi the night before. What would George do in this situation? What would Joe be doing? What would his father have said? Would any of them be standing here wondering what to do?
He was not exactly handcuffed to the door; he could just leave. But that might hurt Carleton Nairn’s feelings, and he did have to work with the man, particularly if Nairn turned out not to be a murderer. In fact, he probably was not: like Linda Szarkowski, he had no connection to the SIlberwetter clan.
“Here you go,” said his benefactor, returning with a laden tray. He was extending this toward Matt when a short golden-hared woman pushed past him, sending one bag of fries a wrapped burger, and a cup flying. Matt decided to concentrate on one thing at a time, and captured the cup, spilling only a little. Fries scattered underfoot and Styrofoam hit the floor, exploded, and sent pickle shrapnel around the vestibule.
“Here, take mine.” Carleton Nairn shoved the tray with the remaining food on it at att. “I can get more.”
Matt pushed it back with one palm. “No. Uh, thanks. I…my mother….” Wait: don’t let any prospective murderers know his mother lived with him. “My mother’s coming into town and we’re meeting at uh, Berghoff’s. Gotta run.”
Hand toward the door, he looked back to see Carleton Nairn’s frown, and added, “Um, some other time. Um thanks.”
Carleton Nairn shrugged. “Sure, sure. Don’t worry about it.” Matt pushed on out. Did the man realize who he was talking to?
I am seeing an uptick in the number of articles the Interwebs has to offer on the True Story Behind various works of literature, and it is obviously time to take advantage of the trend. I shall therefore indulge in a pastime which has obsessed people since the early nineteenth century, and enlighten you with the True Story Behind Common Nursery Rhymes. As with any other True Stories you find on the Interwebs any actual facts which creep into these accounts are purely coincidental.
It is now largely forgotten that one nursery rhyme you probably partially recall was not a poem for children but a recipe for fish stew. Mary, Mary Quite Contrary grows her garden with “cockle shells” (the shells of scallops) and “Pretty Maids All in a Row” (Fair Maids is a term used in parts of England for pilchards, or sardines.) Reputable scholars (putting in their names would just weigh the article down) suggest the “Silver Bells” are either lilies of the valley tossed in for flavoring, or the recommendation of a song to sing to time the cooking process.
Polly, Put the Kettle On was originally a scathing satire on a buxom coffee shop owner in eighteenth century London, who lured in customers with her abundant charm but wasn’t much of a cook. The ORIGINAL text was “Polly put the coffee on. Polly put the coffee on. Polly put the coffee on. Let’s all have tea.”
Where Have You Been, Billy Boy Billy Boy is a summary of a dark Australian detective novel about private eye William “Billy Boy” Billabong, who is working a missing children case and traces it to an apparently charming femme fatale whose crimes against children are revealed in a devastating final chapter (You will never sing the lines “Can she bake a cherub pie?” quite the same way again.)
Mary Had a Little Lamb is actually an ancient verse from a Renaissance elementary textbook, in which rhymes were written to help students learn proper spelling. Mary represented the letter Q, and the poem helped children remember that in writing, Q must always be followed by a little ewe.
Sing a Song of Sixpence was a protest by the old-fashioned against clock adjustment. The four and twenty blackbirds represent the hours in a day, which are disarranged when Daylight Savings Time comes along. So the king and queen were at work or having tea when they should have been eating the amazing pie, and the maid, representing the working classes, was the one most damaged.
Here We Go Looby Loo was originally a drinking song. “All on a Saturday night”, each of “we” becomes a looby (a synonym for “doofus”). I have been trying to establish that this was an inspiration for the Bay City Rollers song “Saturday Night”, but, as it happens, more people on the Interwebs remember Looby Loo than the old pop rock single, which turned fifty this year. (Just looking up “Bay City Rollers” probably made the algorithm label me as some kind of OLD person.)
There is more to the world of nursery rhymes (I could fill a couple of blogs with the True Story of “Eeny Meeney Miney Moe”) but this will do to go on. When you inevitably pass along some of these stories, please remember to leave out my name. There are nosy people out there who seem to resent the creativity some of us put into our True Facts.
Labor Day no longer means an end to the vacation season, of course. Like wearing white or buying watermelon, vacations are available at any time of year. In fact, we are moving right into the season when the snowbirds will start their annual migration away from snowy parts of the world to those with sun and surf. (Of course, we have apparently also made snow in Miami possible: nothing is beyond the reach of our aspirations.)
So it is not unseasonal for us to discuss one of the themes in what we could call Public Service Announcement postcards. These are postcards which remind us of the perils and dangers of taking a vacation. We have stacks of postcards which cartoonists prepared to make sure we understand one thing about going away for a week or so for R&R.
If no one is biting your butt, are you even ON vacation?
Context makes it obvious that vacationers are not PLANNING to be bitten where they’re sittin’. Most react with shock, or at least surprise, kind of like those of us who go out into the open air for a week of sunshine and are amazed to find ourselves sunburnt.
Even creatures without noticeable teeth join in the fun. Is this just a manifestation of the resentment the locals feel about the Summer Folk? Of course, the creatures involved in recreational nipping are not those who benefit from the tourist dollar.
Perhaps it all stems from a Puritanical vestige in our brains which not only disapproves of taking time off but also those scandalous bathing suits which put so much tempting flesh on display. Perhaps, it is hinted, the vacationer DESERVED that sore situpon.
See, if some people were at home sewing samplers and shelling peas instead of venturing outdoors offering a target, they would feel better sitting down to that well-earned dish of gruel come dinnertime.
It could be simple slapstick. I have a certain number of tourists in canoes unaware that they are about to paddle themselves right over a waterfall. MORE cartoonists prefer to pile disaster upon disaster, suggesting that out of every two canoers, at least one will have his belt break at a dangerous point in the proceedings.
But, comedy or commentary, we are given to understand that all of this is unavoidable. A vacation will always bite you in the behind. At the beach it’s the fish and crabs, on the river it’s bees. And, as noted hereintofore, the forest brings its own danger to the derriere.
Perhaps it’s no more than the circle of life. Bared fangs, bared bottoms: Nature observes a balance.
I retract my previous statement. These postcards are NOT a reproof to those workers who take time off. They are a tribute to the human spirit. We KNOW, because we have seen it in postcards (our greatest expression of truth and reality before electronic social media came along) that if we go on vacation, Fate will make us pay. And still we have the courage to take the risk. We’ll manage this by the seat of our pants.
He wanted to call a cab, but this was not allowed. “We do have a car or two around the place,” Ada pointed out. Within seconds of her summons, one of the numerous Silberwetter relatives/employees brought around a modest brown vehicle probably used only for driving past taxpayers.
Still in slippers and robe, Ada waved farewell to her Watson from the front door. “Don’t forget to write if you find work!” she called, as Matt crunched through snow to the car. “Oh, and one other thing!”
She didn’t say what the thing was. Matt turned around. His head rocked back as the world exploded.
Whipping off his glasses to shake away the snowball, he could see Ada bent nearly double with laughter, one hand pressed against her robe to hold it sort of shut. The glasses were jammed into a coat pocket and Matt’s free hand scooped up ammunition.
“Yaaaaah!” she jeered. “You couldn’t hit the barn side of a broad!”
Nonetheless, she shrieked and fled inside as the snowball flew and landed well wide. Matt wasn’t watching it; he had already bent to scoop and pack a good snowball, one a man could control. The front door was closed, but Ada was certainly just inside, peering through a window, or a spyhole in the door. He reached for his glasses.
Ada didn’t show. The chauffeur, in the driveway, cleared his throat. Matt’s feet were cold, and the hand filled with snow was colder. He turned toward the car.
But when his ear caught the click of a door, he spun and fired. With a decent snowball, and a clear view of the target, his throw was a dead bullseye.
Matt was still new to the detective business. But he needed only two clues—the sight of Ada clinging to the doorframe, vibrating with mirth, and the brown leather slippers of whoever he had just pasted, to bring him the proper deduction and send him diving through the open rear door of the waiting automobile. Five solid snowballs hit the side of the car as it rolled out of the driveway.
The chauffeur made no comment whatsoever, and, after giving it long serious thought, Matt got up off the floor and settled into the back seat. He wiped off his hands and then looked the chauffeur over for any hint to his fate. He knew the man slightly, one of Marshall’s more muscular grandsons, generally used as an escort if reporters crowded too gregariously around the office, but on occasion sent out to hint away anyone Marshall Silberwetter felt was too interested in Mrs. Marshall Silberwetter.
If the man also recognized Matt from that cautionary ride over the summer he did not say so. In fact, he said nothing at all until the car was sailing swiftly along the weekend-quick expressway to the city limits.
Then he said in a voice lacking any curiosity or interest at all, “What’s going on?”
“Going on?” Matt inquired, voice a little too high.
The chauffeur nodded as if he had expected exactly that reply. ‘Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t orders or anything, and I’m not paid to spy on anybody. It’s just that if Mrs. Silberwetter is planning anything bigger than, say, a surprise party, Mr. Silberwetter’s going to want to know what it is and maybe it’s worth my time to be the one to tell him.”
Matt shrugged. Too fast, much too fast. He swallowed before he spoke, and forced his voice into the bass register. “Well, she wanted some information.”
“What kind?” The voice held complete disinterest now, absolute apathy.
Government work had left its mark on Matt: you never told a lie when a tiny bit of truth would do the same job. ‘She’s curious about who killed Jerry Silberwetter.”
The chauffeur glanced in the rearview; his face now showed interest. “Uncle Geegee? What for? That was years ago, and she never liked him much, as far as I knew.”
Just as well, Matt thought, with a profound desire to share that ignorance. “Oh, you know. She gets bored.”
“Oh.” The man nodded. “Figures.”
Matt nodded back. “Some people need a project to keep them going in winter. They should try working for a living.”
The driver smiled. It was none of his job to insult the boss’s wife, but he was disinclined to correct anybody else who did.
Having thrown himself waistdeep into trouble already, Matt felt he might as well wade in farther. “You knew him? Got a couple of fiendish suspects you want to add to her list?”
This was taken in the spirit intended. “I don’t hand out with a lot of fiends.” The man at the steering wheel raised a hand from it to wave at the ceiling. “Uncle Geegee made a t of bad friends—you do that if you try to get somewhere in politics—but nobody knew that until he was dead. But they never proved anything on any of them…or Aunt Liz, who got all his money and stuff.”
Matt nodded. The man had more to say, but he didn’t want to spoil his air of amused disinterest by asking questions. He could always get Ada to explain “Aunt Liz”.
“And she…is this where you said?”
Matt, looking around, realized a whole new crisis had sneaked in while he was conducting a highly professional investigative interview. How much did you tip the grandson of a politician who made more in a week than you did in a decade? Particularly if the driver was also related to, oh, two or three people who might have recently tried to kill you?
He did not look at the bill he slipped from his wallet pocket and passed it over the seat. The chauffeur also did not look at it before putting it away. “Thank you, sir.” Matt mumbled something and moved out and up toward the glass doors of the library.
Tombstone research seemed the less likely gambit, and also the quickest. What he really wanted to consult were the microfilm copies of back issues of the newspapers. Concrete data was needed here, and everything about Ada Silberwetter was too slippery to….
Matt shook several thoughts from his head and moved toward the card catalog.
Minutes later, he was seething. He always seethed in the Public Library building, which was an insult to his professional training and his personal feet: there was so far to walk to find nothing. He hadn’t expected a million books on tombstones, but he also hadn’t expected a conspiracy to hide what there was. The use of two different systems of classification numbers, a general lack of accurate labels, and a building whose form demanded that function follow at a respectful distance all worked in league against anybody trying to resolve a murder.
So tombstones were a dead loss. (He paused. He jotted that down.) In the Microforms Department, things were held in little cardboard boxes in little rows, all with nice labels. In a very little time, he was settled into a tiny cubicle with all the newspapers of approximately the right vintage.
On the way, he had picked up a publicity flier called “Under the Picasso” in case he needed more paper for notes. At the top of this, in bold curlicued numbers, he put the date of the newspaper that first mentioned the demise of Gerald G. “Jerry” Silberwetter. He smiled at this date: not only was it a solid fact, but it also suggested, from what he recalled of the story, that Ada Silberwetter was older than he was. Though she didn’t look it. He put a hand toward his ever expanding bald spot. Then, returning to the microfilm, he scrolled on.
By the time he was finished, he had covered both sides of the Picasso flyer with notes, but he had to admit he was none the wiser. He had followed the story from headlines to brief mentions on the editorial page. (His experience over the summer following accounts of Gus Thacter’s murder and Richard Watanabe’s death had taught him how it worked) but no clues had popped off the page.
The city government was always, at least in the papers, being struck by crisis after crisis: the murder of Jerry Silberwetter was big enough to hold a spot for three days before the arrest of Carleton Nairn for being “less than candid” to investigators from the latest fraud-and-waste committee. But it sprang back into large type with the Shoebox Papers. A shoebox found by police in Silberwetter’s closet has disgorged documents incriminating a score of civil servants with previously spotless reputations. Matt jotted down the names: MacTaggart, Westhoff, Hosier, Zimmerman, Medina, Underwood, Herrig, Hunnicutt…. The papers were overwhelmed to think that this tireless undercover investigator had been killed by one of the fiends he sought to expose.
They showed not a hint that Silberwetter might not have intended these papers for a grand jury. Matt had heard the stories of some of these people when he started, but not much: “Out of office, out of mind”. He should probably look into some and try to estimate how much the “martyr detective” was into them for.
He was drawing little stars next to their names when his eye fell upon the name MacTaggart for perhaps the sixth time and he finally made the connection.
That reel of microfilm was out of the box and scrolled into view in no time. MacTaggart: Wilson MacTaggart. “Thank God I’m beautiful,” he muttered, “I’ll never make it on brains.” One editorial was especially proud of Jerry Silberwetter for that: the man had selflessly investigated even his own brother-in-law, the husband of his sister Elisabeth.
In the time it took him to find a clean space to scribble “Aunt Liz?”, Holly had moved to the top of his suspect list and fallen back down again. Revenge was a nice motive in a book, but how far did it go in real life? Wilson MacTaggart hadn’t gone to prison; he hadn’t even lost his job. The Shoebox papers had not produced anything hot enough to bring anyone to trial, even, except for Zimmerman and Underwood, whom he’d never heard of. There had been a few reprimands, but MacTaggart was not among those reported as receiving one. Anyway, considering her remarks about her parents, Holly Luya MacTaggart made an unlikely angel of vengeance.
Still, it was something to think about, something to report to Ada to show he could do detecting on his own.
He returned all the reels of film to the front desk and sauntered along the hallways to the exit. On the way out, he paused at a display of cheap little literary magazines stacked for passersby to carry off. One was a title he’d read in market listings, though he’d never actually seen the magazine.
He chuckled as he picked it up. If this were one of his mother’s books, Barbara Chang would see some chance item which would make the whole mystery clear.
The name “Jinx Bottym” caught his eye on the Contributors age. THAT was how he knew the name of the magazine. He flipped to her contribution.
HEARTBEAT OF HYSTERIA
Reading poltergeists at 3 A.M.
It’s dark.
He looks around quick.
Just a branch against the screen:
Nothing to Worry About.
He sets down his book
And takes a long look around the room.
He has just decided there is
NOTHING TO FEAR
When the hand reaches from under his pillow.
A passing patron dropped a book. Matt leapt two feet into the air. Then, licking his lips, he set the little magazine into a coat pocket. The poem made one thing clear, certainly.
He never should have given up that job at the bar.
“It sounded urgent, Vincent. You have located your creature?”
“The reports must be about him: eight feet tall, wearing a lab coat too small for him, and still dragging one of the electrodes that was attached when he broke out of my lab.”
“So we have a chance of ending his reign of terror.”
“Yes. And it must be today.”
“So. We have until midnight.”
“Well, at least until five.”
“I thought you were too much of a scientist to put faith in the alignments of the stars.”
It’s not the stars…well, it’s kind of the calendar. This is, after all, Labor Day.”
“Tell me about it. What I had to pay for a ticket here on a Holiday weekend….”
“I assembled him from bits and pieces in the cemetery of company town. But I had to time which parts of him I borrowed with when I could fit them in AND when suitable people died to provide fresh….”
“Yes, yes. But what does that have to do with our timing?”
“Well, both his arms and one leg came from working stiffs, so they won’t be working today.”
“I see. So we can take him while he’s on holiday. What about his eyes and ears?”
“I believe those belonged to someone from Security, so they’ll be open.”
“He’ll see us coming.”
“Yes, but he won’t know what to do.”
“Ah. His brain is from a laborer as well?”
“No, it was actually from the old CEO’s son, the one he left the company to. That brain never worked at all.”
“I wondered why he broke into the Reptile House at the zoo.”
If you have been following along, and why would you not, you will recall we have recently looked over the lives of dogs in postcards. We spent one column looking over recent additions to inventory which covered the relation between dogs and their pet humans, and then another on the number one activity of dogs on postcards, which is, as noted, “number one”. But we have not yet considered what dogs do with their lives when not accompanied by a biped or a call of nature.
Dogs have rich, full lives, with or without us. Some postcard publishers have attempted to use them as an example to the rest of us, showing that opportunities are all around us if we greet the morning properly.
The everyday world is filled with fun and exercise if we simply look around us. Everythng around us is to play with….
And everyone is a potential playmate.
HOWEVER, dogs do not buy postcards. (It’s one of their few social flaws…along with that every place is a potential potty business.) So unhappy dogs are a major theme in the world of postcard art as well. The mournful expression of a dog missing a human companion animal has always been a big seller.
When humans want to express the sorrow of a loved one’s absence, a dog is the obvious choice. Nobody and nothing is sadder than a sad puppy.
When you tie this to a dog’s well-known loyalty (isn’t that a scene in the Odyssey?) those puppy eyes make an excellent substitute for the “Wish You Were Here” postcard cliché.
Could YOU resist a card like this? Well, shame on you. (We are still taking explanations for the abbreviation the sender added to the lower right corner of this message. “Sealed With a Hot and Heavy Kiss” is running highest in the voting, but it does seem a little…powerful for 1909.)
Still, a happy dog is what people want to see (that is, of course, why the poor, depressed doggies create such an “Awww!”.) So they have been used to express hope for a new location, and…what? No, of course not. This is about the excitement of being in a new place and enjoying the chance to make it all your own by…well, yeah, by marking out your territory. But, as they say, “Doggies is as doggies do.” (Wait. No, let’s move on. Next time we’ll do something more tasteful, like, say, all those cards about stray cats having sex on the back fence.)
