LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 15

     Not only had Matt had the joy of getting up late this morning, but in rushing to make a lunch, he had realized he had not picked up anything to replace the turkey he’d finally finished.  Today he had to make do with dry rye bread and even drier cheese.  The apple turned out to be mushy instead of crisp.  None of this would have happened to his brother George, who kept his refrigerator under in strict ranks, each package of cold cuts stacked in its proper pile according to meat.

     No notes for “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers” came out of lunch either, but this was only to be expected.  He was tired, and a bit jumpy about the way everyone called “Have a nice lunch, Matt” as he made his way out of Down.  Not every meal gave birth to deathless prose.  Sometimes he just sat with his chin on his fist, remembering that Danny Kaye was dead.  Anyway, Friday was always a bad day for productivity.

     With no reason to linger, lunch was over five minutes after he sat down.  He finished his Diet Coke and was pushing it and his sandwich wrapper into the trash when a voice called “Hi, Neighbor!”

     He turned to find himself being addressed by one of the two elderly regulars, the one everybody called “the Judge”.  The Judge called everybody “Neighbor”; he couldn’t remember names.

     Matt ambled back to where the man stood at one of the vending machines.  Yes, sir?”

     “This machine of yours isn’t worth shit,” the judge replied, with the easy familiarity of equals, one expert to another.  “I put my money in and nothing came out.”

     Matt came a little closer to study the machine.  “Put my money right there and punched this button,” the Judge told him.

     “What?  Nothing came out?” called his partner, already seated.

     “I’ll be right there,” the Judge called back.  “I put my money in here and nothing came out.”

     The machine was a new one, with a digital readout above the coin slot to indicate the item called for and the total amount paid.  The Judge was a dime short.  Matt shrugged, took a dime from his pocket, and dropped it in.  It was easier than explaining things and, with everything else going on, being out a dime didn’t add much.

     The Judge heard the sound and leaned in.  “Can you tell what’s wrong?”

     “I think that’s got it, sir,” Matt said.  “Try the button again.”

     The Judge punched the button with the second joints of two fingers.  A little envelope of maple-flavored Crunch-and-Munch dropped into the drawer below.

     “Say, you’re good, Neighbor,” he said, spanking Matt on the shoulder.  “You’re really good.”

     “No problem, sir.”  Turning to go, Matt nearly walked into Maryann, who had been waiting behind him for her turn at vendoland.

     “Sure,” she said.  “Sure.  Just run over me.  You’re too big to even see us little people, the way you run around with judges and famous authors.”

     Her smile was one of amusement, but Matt hastened to apologize anyhow.  “I didn’t see…authors?”  he frowned.  “Oh, Felicia Lowe: that’s right.  Heh.”

     “You probably go out with her so often you don’t think it’s even special these days,” she said, scanning the selection.  “She must like you pretty well for someone she just met yesterday.”

     Not knowing what else to do, Matt laughed, pretending he had entered into the spirit of this.  Besides, it was okay to head for the exit if you were laughing.

     “Hi, Judge.”

     “Hey, it’s Maryann!”

     Matt spent the afternoon mostly on chores that allowed him to hunker in the safety of his cubicle.  This strategy gave him no satisfaction whatsoever.  Hardly ten minutes could go by without Holly or Linda or Carleton Nairn accidentally walking past his door.  They had done this many times in the past, but today it struck them as perfectly normal to stop and chat: little innocuous Friday afternoon conversational fluff.  Had Matt had a good lunch?  How formal did Matt think dress would be for tonight’s party?  Was Matt sure he didn’t need a ride?  And how was old Matt these days, anyhow?

     Matt was not a social creature, but he was not unfriendly either.  So he tried to answer all these inquiries with a jocular remark and a chuckle.  That was not easy.  They were never looking at him, exactly, and he could tell they weren’t listening.  They were searching for something; there was an air of expectation about them.  It was like being back in high school, he thought, walking from class to class and you were the only one who didn’t know about the “Kick Me” sign.

     Not even half as stupid as Walter Prince thought him, Matt knew what the problem was.  Holly might say “Oh, I hope they’re wrong about mixed snow and rain tonight” or Linda could remark, “No, I don’t go out much at night myself these days”.  But they were really saying, “You were out with Marshall Silberwetter’s wife last night.  What are you up to?”

     At first, Matt was just annoyed.  Linda Szarkowski, at least, should have worked with him long enough to know he was never up to anything.  Then he recalled the possibility that someone at Down was Miss Skull: an extortionist at least, and possibly a killer, and might have serious reasons for wanting to know why he was dining with Ada Silberwetter, especially when she was flaunting that mystery author.

     He wiped his palms on his pants legs and checked his watch.  Two?  Hours more of this.

     Rummaging on his desk, he found half a dozen sheets of statistics he had meant to put in Maryann’s copy box.  There was no reason not to take them to the photocopy center himself.  That would get him out of the reach of prospective Miss Skulls for a while.  Maybe he’d have to wait to get to a machine: always a good bet on a Friday, with people restless and glad to get out of their cubicles for a while.  Maybe this could stretch to half an hour.

     Papers in hand, he tiptoed to the door of his cubicle and checked for obstacles.  The sight of two women at Maryann’s desk made him pull back at once; a second peek showed it was not investigating guests but Holly and Linda.  And they had their backs to him.  If he hurried, he could be out before they noticed him.  Especially if he was studying these pages as he walked.  That was it: preoccupied, busy.  He hadn’t even seen them, wouldn’t notice if they said something.  Busy, busy: work to do, you know.

     “And what do we get?” Linda was demanding.  “A poke in the pants!”

     Here came the tricky part.  Matt had to step lightly around, behind, just beyond peripheral vision, but not bumping into file cabinets either, and all while reading through these stats.  Fortunately, Holly seemed to be paying attention to whatever Linda was expounding.

     “I don’t see why seniority….”

     There!  Past the desk!  With his back to them, he had a clear shot at the door.

     “Going for a break, Matt?” Maryann called.

     The diatribe broke off; Holly and Linda turned to look.

     Matt couldn’t help himself.  Escape was right in front of him.  He could march on, pretending he hadn’t heard.  But he HAD heard, and a painful passion for accuracy made him want to explain this was not at all his motive.  Even as he slid up his sleeve to check his watch, preparatory to a reply, he knew he was lost.

   “Oh, ah, no.”  he fluttered the pages in his hand.  “Just, er, needed some copies.”

     Holly MacTaggart was closer than he’d thought.  She plucked the papers from his hand and folded an arm around them.  “I’ll do that, Matt.  How many do you need?”

     Maryann snorted.  Matt let his glasses slip to the end of his nose to study Holly while Linda grumbled, “Her grandfather.”

     “I was just headed out that way,” Holly went on, shrugging one shoulder just an inch too high.

     No one there believed this.  One of the signs of innate superiority at Down was the ability to have someone else make copies for you.  If nothing else, you dumped your documents in Maryann’s copy box before Walter Prince could catch you and remind you that Ms. Hoxey’s time, unlike yours, was of value.  Those who absolutely had to go make copies tended to do so by stuffing the pages under a garment and slipping out as if to the restroom.  Otherwise, the fiends lurking in the darkness, would intercept you, drawling, “As long as you’re going to the copy center, just make me a hundred of these, would you?”

     Holly MacTaggart knew this, but gave no sign of this as she repeated, “How many?” and added, without even blushing, “Maybe I could bring you back a cup of coffee as long as I’m out.”

     Matt’s face was burning.  “Um, no thanks.  That’s all right.  Just, er, one copy of reach.  No, er, rush.”

     “Oh, I’ll be back before you can say ‘knife,’ she replied, gaily waving the pages, more at Linda than at him.

     Shoulders sagging, he turned back toward his cell.  But Linda said, “Oh, by the way, Matt.”

     He clenched his teeth, unclenched them, and turned her direction.  She was smiling.  He had known she would be.  Holly, meanwhile, had reached the door of Down, but paused to look back.

     “I was just going to ask, Matt….” Linda rippled two fingernails along the edge of Maryann’s desk.  “Do you like music?”

     “Um,” said Matt.

     Linda blinked and went on, “I have two tickets to that concert next Saturday, in the afternoon, by the Early Music Consortium.  But now Tim says he can’t come.  Would you like his ticket?”

     Out of the corner of one eye Matt saw Holly’s knuckles whiten as she gripped the doorknob.  Her gaze spoke to Linda of death in its most protracted forms.  He tried to think of any possible excuse, any reasonable previous engagement he could plead for Saturday afternoon.

     “Oh.”  What a time to come up against writer’s block.  “I’m not sure….”

     “Why don’t I just give you the ticket?  Then if you can’t come, you could pass it along to one of your…friends.”  Linda took a step toward him.

     Matt took two steps back.  “Oh.  Okay.  Why not?  Thanks.”  A brittle little laugh came from the direction of the door before it slammed.  Maryann grinned.

     Matt wanted more than ever to creep back to his cubicle and hide under the desk.  He turned, and recoiled in terror.

     “Sure you don’t need a ride to that party, Benz?”

     Matt’s starting eyes were not on Walter Prince’s fixed smile but on the little pink pipe cleaner poodle attached to the pen in his boss’s lapel.

Blowing a Cloud, Taking a Puff

     Considering that the original premise of this series of columns was the relative scarcity of postcards showing people indulging in tobacco, compared to movies and TV shows of the same era, we have been showing off examples for a while now.  But I maintain my original opinion.  Joe Friday or Paul Drake probably lit up more times in one episode of their respective shows than I have postcards showing a similar scene.  If we had studied, say, drinking during the same era, the number of postcards might well have rivaled the examples on screen.  (My earliest cocktail joke on a postcard, for example, goes back to about 1907, and the…no, we will not start what would probably develop into a twenty-part series.)

     Smoking, in these scenes from bygone days, was a part of other experiences.  Men enjoyed a cigar after a meal, for example.  (Hey, remember when people smoked in restaurants?  How about when you could eat lunch in a joint with waiters and tablecloths and satisfy the waiter afterward with a single silver coin?  Yeah, me neither.)

     Even at home, a man might settle in after dinner with tobacco and something to read.  This was before we had phones where you could scroll to a saucy picture without your spouse noticing.

     And there is one part of the daily routine even more associated with a quick smoke.

     Maybe this was a remnant of places and times when smoking in public was outlawed.  Or perhaps it deals with what was sometimes the only moment of peace during a long workday.

     Certainly, a fellow could smoke all the time while on vacation.  (Hey, are these the same two chaps who were second and third in line at the outhouse, after they retired and headed for the beach?)

     Children did not have the same nine to five jobs, so one is a little startled to find them pausing for a puff.  In this case, of course, it’s a cultural thing, as mentioned hereintofore.  The Dutch (and/or Germans; American didn’t always distinguish) had to have their pipes.

     The cultural disposition to tobacco might even apply in this case, where the protagonist is much younger.  A cigar just went with a top hat in the minds of many cartoonists.

     But, as we shall see in our next (and possibly final) column on the subject, not everybody was a supporter of the “Nicotine Fiends”.  Why does this postcard demonstrate our point?  Well, you remember the old joke about the locomotive who denied up and down that HE smoked tobacco.  “I choo,” he insisted.

Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That CIgarette

     Now, as you’ll recall, in a blog titled “And Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women,” we examined the use od cigarettes on postcards.  Although cigarettes are everywhere in mid-century movies and television, we argued, on postcards they were primarily used to indicate a young woman who, like the one shown on this Seventies poster of a Twenties postcard, was advertising availability.  If you don’t remember all this, do not go back and read it (June 12) right now.  I just summarized it for you so we can move on.  I need to get this taken care of so I can set out to find a UPS store where I can return a garment which, like a lot of modern clothing, was advertised as being the same size I usually wear and turned out to be much smaller, somehow, than I expected.  The twentieth century’s dependence on AI is no doubt to blame.  That and maybe the metric system and the modern inclination to…where were we?

     But the cigarette does appear, less frequently, in other roles on postcards.  This, from a dozen decades ago, may seem at first to be the same old plication about the young lady with the cigarette.  But if you can tear your eyes from her, look at HIM.  (No, I don’t know why there’s a paper lantern on his cane.)  And check out the little birdie.

     A cigarette could also, for a couple of generations, be seen as part of a dreamy utopian scene.  In a perfect world, it is suggested, life is low on responsibilities and high on harmless pleasures.  (That’s the catch.  Your pleasures are harmless ONLY in a perfect world, which we ain’t got.  But this “illegal, immoral, or fattening” philosophy does not sell postcards.)

     Advertising of the time, of course, said the same thing more overtly.  REAL fun required nicotine, calories, and alcohol (or caffeine.  Or both.  Kahlua was still largely in the future during mid-century, but there was Irish coffee.)

     Any sort of joy could be enhanced by lighting up a slim shaft of tar and nicotine.  These travelling men who, by tradition, should be smoking cigars (one of LAST week’s blogs; are you keeping up?) but here have added cigarettes to their enjoyment of the beauty of a sunset.

     True, this cowboy is not getting the same enjoyment out of dusk, but the cowboy life was known for its freedom and excitement, often augmented by a hand-rolled smoke stick.

     When over-indulgence is depicted on postcards, it almost always involves the alcohol part of the equation.  This chap did not wind up sleeping in a crate because of his excesses in the tobacco line.  (There are plenty of postcards dealing with people over=indulging in FOOD, but besides being a whole nother blog, they are always shown enjoying it very much.  And over-indulgence in caffeine also came much later in the century, starting roughly at the same time Kahlua hit the U.S. market.  Coincidence?)

     So were there NO postcards exhibiting a negative side to all this nicotine?  Well, yes, but I need to get this box to UPS while I can still exchange for a much larger size.  (Maybe it’s social media; maybe social media makes your clothes—even the ones you just bought—get smaller when you’re not looking.  Another nother blog.)

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.