LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter Thirteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     “Didn’t you see me yawn?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women

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

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

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

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

     The gloves just make matters worse.

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

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

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

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

How To. Or Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FICTION FRIDAY: Storybook Romance

     “I’m doomed to live single forever.”

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

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

     “Ashsiaix?”

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

     “Well, that tower was really tall.”

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

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

     “Ashsiaix was your godmother too?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     “I…oh!  That was….”

     “Ribald!”

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

Gee Whiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See More Sea Shore

    “Shall I sell you something, sir?”

     “Yer kinda cute.  Whatcha got fer sale?”

     “Seashells.”

     “Seashells?  We’s at da beach!”

     “Yes, sir.  I sell seashells by the seashore.”

    “What the hey?  I can walk all over and pick up my own seashells!  Ya can’t make much doing ‘at?”

     “Well, sir, I am able to pick up things besides seashells.”

     “’At’s what I thought.  Tryin’ ta pick ME up, are ya?”

     “You flatter yourself, sir.  I pick up information.”

     “Say what?”

     “People come here to soothe their senses, sir.  And when the senses are soothed, secrets are said.  I got the reward for telling authorities who put pussy in the well, and who got away with Lucy Locket’s pocket.”

     “Ah, I getcha.  Information.  Yeah.”

     “I tipped off the woodcutter about what the Big Bad Wolf was planning for Red Riding Hood, and the wicked witch….  Did you know that apple was only poison rightside up?  She could turn it upside down and take a bite out of it to show Snow White it was safe.”

     “Never hoid that.”

     “No, Snow was so sweetly unsuspicious the sorceress skipped it.  Waste of time.”

     “And guys just talk about this stuff where you can hear it?”

     “Who sees a short shy sweetheart selling shells?  So I sold the suits stories about Tom Tom the Piper’s Son’s hideout.”

     “And ya gets big scores like that often enough ta pay the rent?”

     “There are stories I shan’t sell, sir.  I save such for emergencies.  So far I haven’t even hinted that I heard from one of the men who pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall.”

     “You did, hey?”

     “Yes, but a seashell seller should set something aside.  For a rainy day, you see, sir.  I know a reporter who’d get mighty busy if I told her what I heard about who REALLY killed Cock Robin.  Silly so-and-so’s sure suspect someone else, so….”

     “Um, just ‘cause I’m curious, how much are them seashells?”

    “Sixty simoleons for shiny sizeable shells.  Seven less for simple sandy shells showing souvenir sayings.”

     “Sixty….  That’s seaway robbery!”

     “Suit yourself, sly city slicker.  At six I see Sue from the Sin City Citizen-Circuit to see….”

     “I’ll take five of the fancy ones, okay?”

     “It’s a pleasure doing business, sir.  See you Saturday?  I sell seashells summer Saturdays and Sundays in the shallows from seven to seven.”

     “Nah.  I’ll relax better in a cabin the mountains.”

     “Say, my silly sister Sally sells snowshoes at the summit of Shasta.”

Finding a Good Seat

     Last week, we looked into the role played on postcards of couches, sofas, davenports, and settees, concentrated on postcards which showed the usefulness of this type of furniture for courting couples.  However, postcard artists were also alive to the possibilities of the couch as a setting for women sitting by themselves.

     The word we’re looking for here is “display”.  Painters were aware for centuries of the potential for long furniture to let a model stretch out and offer broader vistas (so to speak) to the viewer.  Of course, you and I are really more interested in the evolution of the sofa itself, from this sort of Empire Style….

     To this mid-century sectional sofa, similar to the one seen in the arcade car at the top of this column.  (This may or may not be the place to tip our hats to the small joke of that day where any characters inclined to get their words wrong would refer to this as a “sexual sofa”.  This would, depending on whether the censors were listening, might lead to a designer suggesting that the proper accent to a sexual sofa would be an end table or “an occasional piece”.  The world of off-color furniture jokes has not really been studied.  For good reason.)

     The major era of humorous postcards preferred to focus on the solid state sofa, like this one, which MAY be a settee, or couch designed for just two people at a time.  We could simply be dealing with a very tall model.

     This card from a generation earlier shows the settee at its best and most characteristic.  Like a hammock, a settee sort of dictated that two people could not sit very far from each other, which could be convenient in a strait-laced society.

     More homes at mid-century favored a longer sofa which could accommodate more people.  (Or, again, one very tall model.  Compare the wife’s apparent seat width against that of the couch, and her obvious height with the maid’s dimensions.)

     Yes, mid-century designers frequently went for something less cushiony.  A whole-hearted determination to do away with the comfy arm at each end did not sit well with pin-up cartoonists, who largely ignored this  trend or threw in a lot of souvenir pillows from Funicello Beach to make up for it.  But take note of that other piece of furniture at the lower right.

     This comes very close to becoming another favorite of the pin-up cartoonist, the chaise longue.  (Yes, I KNOW your family always called it a chaise lounge, because you lounged in it but trust me, it’s a chaise longue: just think “long chair” and all becomes clear.  Just because everybody says it the other way doesn’t make it right, like “safety deposit box” instead of “safe deposit box”.  And who decided that “concerning” was an adjective?  The….  Where were we?)

     I would have to hunt around among the experts to learn whether the chaise lounge…longue is considered a couch or a chair.  This brings us dangerously close to discussing the role of CHAIRS in pinup postcards.  This is a whole nother problem, not to mention w hole nother series of blogs.  The chair, see, has a LOT more different parts to play on postcards: not only a place for underclad females but also the place where tacks can be set for the unsuspecting sitter.  Chairs can swivel, or recline, or fly through the air in a bar or living room, or be tied on the top of the moving van.  Couches have a more relaxed life.  (And there: I got through two blogs about couches without even mentioning the French verb ‘coucher’ and its possible connection with cootchy-coo.)

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 10

     Holly had worked herself into a fine froth over the narrowmindedness of parents, the nosiness of aunts, and, particularly, the wholly unsatisfactory qualities of stepgrandmothers.  “I mean, like she’s tried it!  Huh!  I bet she’s the villain in the book.  Miss Skull would be a good name for her all right: she’s deadly.  That Mr. Thaxter—but he was a jerk—and Uncle Geegee!”

     “Mm,” Matt agreed, looking down at his nails.  They needed work.  His father had always used a pocket knife for that.

     A moment of silence fell between them.  Matt looked up, hoping another genial “Mm” and the way he had chuckled at all her anti-Ada remarks had given her to know she had nothing to dread.  But Holly’s face was unreadable.

     With one sweep of the hand, she swept the cookie crumbs from the table.  “Well, I can’t complain,” she lied, standing up.  “I guess it’s the season for fruitcakes.”

     She marched from the lounge, tassels bouncing, leaving Matt to wonder whether this had been aimed at him or another.

    Studying his scratch pad, he scribbled his name—Matthew Benz—and stared at the autograph, wondering whether it would ever be worth anything.  A genuine page of Matthew Benz notes….  He glanced up with foreboding as two shadows approached the table, but these ignored him and passed on.

     “Thought you’d’ve gone out of town for the winter,” said one to the other.  Matt recognized the voice.  These two men had grown old in the service of the city, and had now risen so high, and had memories so long, that no on dared risk offending them by suggesting retirement.

     “Well, we generally go to Arizona,” said the second man.

     “We generally go west.”  Matt heard a chair being pulled away from a table.

    “We have a….  Arizona’s west.”

     “Is it?  We generally go west.”

     “Oh, well.  Most years we go to Arizona.  Out west.”

     Matt wondered whether he wished both of them had gone west years ago.    He decided he could not possibly hold anything against them when there was an apple waiting.  Anyhow, there were people he could loathe with better reason.  These two were the only headline-makers who ever wandered into the lounge, and whose acquaintance he could boast of.  (Though they always mistook him, when they perceived him at all, for the vending machine servicer.)

     He reached for the apple, slumping down in the chair a bit.  A new shadow fell across the table.

     Matt looked up.   The shadow was Walter Prince.  Matt let go of the apple and sat up again.  Walter Prince had never, in his memory, ever set toe inside the lounge.

     Vicious little eyes narrowed.  “You’ll be going to that party, I suppose,” growled the top man of Down.

     “Well, we, yes,” said Matt.  “I was, er, planning to.”

     Walter Prince nodded.  :Good.  The Department needs the exposure.”  He turned away to clear his throat and looked again at Natt.  “Got a ride?”

     “Mm, oh, yes.”

     Water Prince grunted, and pulled back on the much-occupied guest chair.  Sitting down, he set the fingertips of one hand against the fingertips of the other hand, and considered the effect.

     “I suppose the Silberwetters will be there,” he noted, giving most of his attention to the fingertips.

     “Um,” said Matt, taking a chance on reaching the apple again.  His fingers brushed it just as Walter Prince looked up and then looked away, shrugging.

     “Everybody’s up for parties, this time of the year.  Just when we ought to be concentrating on the work to finish off the calendar year.  Makes our A game impossible.”

     “Um,” Matt replied.  Was this a hit?  Would Walter Prince prefer him to skip the party?  He looked from his apple to the boss’s face, only to find Walter Prince’s eyes resting on him with impatient expectation.

     This always happened.  Whenever there was a pause in a conversation and Matt knew it was his turn to say something, he came down with writer’s block.  “Um, ah.  Well.”

     Another furrow appeared between Walter Prince’s eyebrows. That wasn’t going to suffice.

    Matt heard brainstorm thunder.  Walter Prince had brought up parties, so why not do a little detective work?  It wouldn’t do any good, probably, but it would bridge an awkward conversational gap.

  “Oh, parties!”  He tried to make it sound spontaneous.  “Say, did you go to the Thanksgiving party at the Silberwetters’?”

     The other man’s head rocked back and his eyes rolled up as if only the bottoms of them would do to gaze at Matt.  “No,” he said.  “No, no.  No time.”

    His head came down and, after an unconvincing chuckle, he went on, “I could make time, to be sure.  Lots of things I need to make time for.  I keep panning to make a day to go around the Department, asking around, just to find out what people think about…things in general.  After all, communication is what makes the Department essential to City government.”

     This was news to Matt. The way he’d heard it from Walter Prince at least four hundred times, Down had become indispensable due to the excellent filing system set up by Walter Prince’s predecessor, maintained by Walter Prince’s unceasing efforts in spite of the stubborn stupidity and uncooperative attitude of the staff.

     “People get to feeling confined, of course, this time of year,” Walter Prince went on.  “But even if we have disagreements now and then, communication keeps the Department running smoothly.  We know what everyone’s doing, how they feel, and so forth.  It’s not for Our Department, all the scheming and backstabbing that goes on in the other divisions.   We can talk to each other instead of going over someone’s head to annoy somebody higher up.”

     “Ah!” Matt observed.  He shifted his apple from one hand to the other.

     “That Holly…MacTaggart, you know…she threatens, but she’s just letting off steam, you know.  Just sort of a joke.  She’s an asset to Our Department, with that sense of humor, a fine worker.”  Walter Prince swallowed and put both hands out flat, palm up.  “To be sure, she’s young, but that’s to be expected at her age.”

     Matt wondered if there was an unobtrusive way to bite into an apple.  Walter Prince was apparently not here to deal out commands or reprimands, apparently: he was just concerned about his loaves and fishes.

     There ought to be a way to put the boss at ease.  After all, if Walter Prince started to consider him as a serious threat, the next budget cut might serve as a signal that certain high-paid positions would need to be terminated, just in self-defense.

     “Um.”  Matt rubbed one sleeve across the apple.  “Really strange, wasn’t it, Mrs. Silberwetter turning up this morning.  Why did she come to see us with that mystery author, talking about skulls?  Miss Skull, was it?”

     Those eyes, never very attractive at their best, rolled back again.  Walter Prince cleared his throat. “I had…no idea they were coming.”  This came out of the left side of his mouth.  A quick nod followed.  “Did you?”

     “No, I….”

     Matt fumbled the apple while passing it hand to hand.  Shoving a foot under it averted serious bruising, at least to the apple.  He stooped quickly to retrieve it, launching a cascade of pens and pencils from his pocket across the table.

     “Well, you’ll want to finish lunch,” said his supervisor, a smoothness in the voice suggesting Matt’s innate grace had been a better testament to his harmlessness than anything he might have said.  “Don’t dawdle.  We have work to do, parties or not.”

     He seemed content as he left the lounge.  But as Matt crunched through the apple, their conversation ran on a loop through his brain, each word with a different intonation for every rerun.  He hoped that no remark of his could be taken as evidence that he was planning a coup.  But could he be sure?

     He wondered if there was still time to head for Arizona.  Out west.