Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction Read online

Mrs. Hellbrunner liked the Peckhams immediately. For one thing, they were, I’m pretty sure, the first people in several generations to admire the place. More to the point, they gave every indication of being about to buy it.

  “It would cost about a half-million to replace,” said Mrs. Hellbrunner.

  “Yes,” said the Colonel. “They don’t build houses like this anymore.”

  “Oh!” gasped Mrs. Peckham, and the Colonel caught her as she headed for the floor.

  “Quick! Brandy! Anything!” cried Colonel Peckham.

  When I drove the Peckhams back to the center of town, they were in splendid spirits.

  “Why on earth didn’t you show us this place first?” said the Colonel.

  “Just came on the market yesterday,” I said, “and priced the way it is, I don’t expect it’ll be on the market very long.”

  The Colonel squeezed his wife’s hand. “I don’t expect so, do you, dear?”

  Mrs. Hellbrunner still called me every day, but now her tone was cheery and flattering. She reported that the Peckhams arrived shortly after noon each day, and that they seemed more in love with the house on each visit.

  “I’m treating them just like Hellbrunners,” she said craftily.

  “That’s the ticket.”

  “I even got cigars for him.”

  “Pour it on. It’s all tax-deductible,” I cheered.

  Four nights later, she called me again to say that the Peckhams were coming to dinner. “Why don’t you sort of casually drop in afterward, and just happen to have an offer form with you?”

  “Have they mentioned any figures?”

  “Only that it’s perfectly astonishing what you can get for a hundred thousand.”

  I set my briefcase down in the Hellbrunner music room after dinner that evening. I said, “Greetings.”

  The Colonel, on the piano bench, rattled the ice in his drink.

  “And how are you, Mrs. Hellbrunner?” I said. One glance told me she had never in all her life been worse.

  “I’m fine,” she said hoarsely. “The Colonel has just been speaking very interestingly. The State Department wants him to do some troubleshooting in Bangkok.”

  The Colonel shrugged sadly. “Once more to the colors, as a civilian this time.”

  “We leave tomorrow,” said Mrs. Peckham, “to close our place in Philadelphia—”

  “And finish up at National Steel Foundry,” said the Colonel.

  “Then off to Bangkok they go,” quavered Mrs. Hellbrunner.

  “Men must work, and women must weep,” said Mrs. Peckham.

  “Yup,” I said.

  The next morning, the telephone was ringing when I unlocked my office door.

  It was Mrs. Hellbrunner. Shrill. Not like old family at all. “I don’t believe he’s going to Bangkok,” she raged. “It was the price. He was too polite to bargain.”

  “You’ll take less?” Up to now, she’d been very firm about the hundred-thousand figure.

  “Less?” Her voice became prayerful. “Lord—I’d take fifty to get rid of the monster!” She was silent for a moment. “Forty. Thirty. Sell it!”

  So I sent a telegram to the Colonel, care of National Steel Foundry, Philadelphia.

  There was no reply, and then I tried the telephone.

  “National Steel Foundry,” said a woman in Philadelphia.

  “Colonel Peckham, please.”

  “Who?”

  “Peckham. Colonel Bradley Peckham. The Peckham.”

  “We have a Peckham, B. C., in Drafting.”

  “Is he an executive?”

  “I don’t know, sir. You can ask him.”

  There was a click in my ear as she switched my call to Drafting.

  “Drafting,” said a woman.

  The first operator broke in: “This gentleman wishes to speak to Mr. Peckham.”

  “Colonel Peckham,” I specified.

  “Mr. Melrose,” called the second woman, “is Peckham back yet?”

  “Peckham!” Mr. Melrose shouted. “Shag your tail. Telephone!”

  Above the sound of room noises, I heard someone ask, “Have a good time?”

  “So-so,” said a vaguely familiar, faraway voice. “Think we’ll try Newport next time. Looked pretty good from the bus.”

  “How the hell do you manage tony places like that on your salary?”

  “Takes a bit of doing.” And then the voice became loud, and terribly familiar. “Peckham speaking. Drafting.”

  I let the receiver fall into its cradle.

  I was awfully tired. I realized that I hadn’t had a vacation since the end of the war. I had to get away from it all for a little while, or I would go mad. But Delahanty hadn’t come through yet, so I was stone broke.

  And then I thought about what Colonel Bradley Peckham had said about Newport. There were a lot of nice houses there—all beautifully staffed, furnished, stocked, overlooking the sea, and for sale.

  For instance, take this place—the Van Tuyl estate. It has almost everything: private beach and swimming pool, polo field, two grass tennis courts, nine-hole golf course, stables, paddocks, French chef, at least three exceptionally attractive Irish parlor maids, English butler, cellar full of vintage stuff—

  The labyrinth is an interesting feature, too. I get lost in it almost every day. Then the real estate agent comes looking for me, and he gets lost just as I find my way out. Believe me, the property is worth every penny of the asking price. I’m not going to haggle about it, not for a minute. When the time comes, I’ll either take it or leave it.

  But I’ve got to live with the place a little longer—to get the newness out—before I tell the agent what I’m going to do. Meanwhile, I’m having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.

  The Package

  What do you know about that?” said Earl Fenton. He unslung his stereoscopic camera, took off his coat, and laid the coat and the camera on top of the television-radio-phonograph console. “Here we go on a trip clean around the world, Maude, and two minutes after we come back to our new house, the telephone rings. That’s civilization.”

  “For you, Mr. Fenton,” said the maid.

  “Earl Fenton speaking … Who? … You got the right Fenton? There’s a Brudd Fenton on San Bonito Boulevard…. Yes, that’s right, I did. Class of 1910 … Wait! No! Sure I do! Listen, you tell the hotel to go to hell, Charley, you’re my guest…. Have we got room?”

  Earl covered the mouthpiece and grinned at his wife. “He wants to know if we’ve got room!” He spoke into the telephone again. “Listen, Charley, we’ve got rooms I’ve never been in. No kidding. We just moved in today—five minutes ago…. No, it’s all fixed up. Decorator furnished the place nice as you please weeks ago, and the servants got everything going like a dollar watch, so we’re ready. Catch you a cab, you hear? …

  “No, I sold the plant last year. Kids are grown up and on their own and all—young Earl’s a doctor now, got a big house in Santa Monica, and Ted’s just passed his bar exams and gone in with his Uncle George—Yeah, and Maude and I, we’ve just decided to sit back and take a well-earned—But the hell with talking on the phone. You come right on out. Boy! Have we got a lot of catching up to do!” Earl hung up and made clucking sounds with his tongue.

  Maude was examining a switch panel in the hallway. “I don’t know if this thingamajig works the air-conditioning or the garage doors or the windows or what,” she said.

  “We’ll get Lou Converse out here to show us how everything works,” said Earl. Converse was the contractor who had put up the rambling, many-leveled “machine for living” during their trip abroad.

  Earl’s expression became thoughtful as he gazed through a picture window at the flagstone terrace and grill, flooded with California sunshine, and at the cartwheel gate that opened onto the macadam driveway, and at the garage, with its martin house, weathercock, and two Cadillacs. “By golly, Maude,” he said, “I just finished talking to a ghost.”

  “Um?” said Maude. “Aha! S
ee, the picture window goes up, and down comes the screen. Ghost? Who on earth?”

  “Freeman, Charley Freeman. A name from the past, Maude. I couldn’t believe it at first. Charley was a fraternity brother and just about the biggest man in the whole class of 1910. Track star, president of the fraternity, editor of the paper, Phi Beta Kappa.”

  “Goodness! What’s he doing coming here to see poor little us?” said Maude.

  Earl was witnessing a troubling tableau that had been in the back of his mind for years: Charley Freeman, urbane, tastefully clothed, was having a plate set before him by Earl, who wore a waiter’s jacket. When he’d invited Charley to come on out, Earl’s enthusiasm had been automatic, the reflex of a man who prided himself on being a plain, ordinary, friendly fellow, for all of his success. Now, remembering their college relationship, Earl found that the prospect of Charley’s arrival was making him uncomfortable. “He was a rich kid,” Earl said. “One of those guys”—and his voice was tinged with bitterness—”who had everything. You know?”

  “Well, hon,” said Maude, “you weren’t exactly behind the door when they passed out the looks and brains.”

  “No—but when they passed out the money, they handed me a waiter’s jacket and a mop.” She looked at him sympathetically, and he was encouraged to pour out his heart on the subject. “By golly, Maude, it does something to a man to go around having to wait on guys his same age, cleaning up after ’em, and seeing them with nice clothes and all the money in the world, going off to some resort in the summer when I had to go to work to pay next year’s tuition.” Earl was surprised at the emotion in his voice. “And all the time they’re looking down on you, like there was something wrong with people who weren’t handed their money on a silver platter.”

  “Well, that makes me good and mad!” Maude said, squaring her shoulders indignantly, as though to protect Earl from those who’d humiliated him in college. “If this great Charley Freeman snooted you in the old days, I don’t see why we should have him in the house now.”

  “Oh, heck—forgive and forget,” Earl said gloomily. “Doesn’t throw me anymore. He seemed to want to come out, and I try to be a good fellow, no matter what.”

  “So what’s the high-and-mighty Freeman doing now?”

  “Don’t know. Something big, I guess. He went to med school, and I came back here, and we kind of lost touch.” Experimentally, Earl pressed a button on the wall. From the basement came muffled whirs and clicks, as machines took control of the temperature and humidity and purity of the atmosphere about him. “But I don’t expect Charley’s doing a bit better than this.”

  “What were some of the things he did to you?” Maude pursued, still indignant.

  Earl waved the subject away with his hand. There weren’t any specific incidents that he could tell Maude about. People like Charley Freeman hadn’t come right out and said anything to humiliate Earl when he’d waited on them. But just the same, Earl was sure that he’d been looked down on, and he was willing to bet that when he’d been out of earshot, they’d talked about him, and …

  He shook his head in an effort to get rid of his dour mood, and he smiled. “Well, Mama, what say we have a little drinkie, and then take a tour of the place? If I’m going to show it to Charley, I’d better find out how a few of these gimcracks work, or he’ll think old Earl is about as at home in a setup like this as a retired janitor or waiter or something. By golly, there goes the phone again! That’s civilization for you.”

  “Mr. Fenton,” the maid said, “it’s Mr. Converse.”

  “Hello, Lou, you old horse thief. Just looking over your handiwork. Maude and I are going to have to go back to college for a course in electrical engineering, ha ha…. Eh? Who? … No kidding. They really want to? … Well, I guess that’s the kind of thing you have to expect to go through. If they’ve got their heart set on it, okay. Maude and I go clean around the world, and two minutes after we’re home, it’s like the middle of Grand Central Station.”

  Earl hung up and scratched his head in mock wonderment and weariness. In reality, he was pleased with the activity, with the bell-ringing proof that his life, unlike his ownership of the plant and the raising of his kids and the world cruise, was barely begun.

  “What now?” said Maude.

  “Aw, Converse says some fool home magazine wants to do a story on the place, and they want to get the pictures this afternoon.”

  “What fun!”

  “Yeah—I guess. I dunno. I don’t want to be standing around in all the pictures like some stuffed shirt.” To show how little he cared, he interested himself in another matter. “I don’t know why she wouldn’t, considering what we paid her, but that decorator really thought of everything, you know?” He’d opened a closet next to the terrace doors and found an apron, a chef’s hat, and asbestos gloves inside. “By golly, you know, that’s pretty rich. See what it says on the apron, Maude?”

  “Cute,” said Maude, and she read the legend aloud: “‘Don’t shoot the cook, he’s doing the best he can.’ Why, you look like a regular Oscar of the Waldorf, Earl. Now let me see you in the hat.”

  He grinned bashfully and fussed with the hat. “Don’t know exactly how one of the fool things is supposed to go. Feel kind of like a man from Mars.”

  “Well, you look wonderful to me, and I wouldn’t trade you for a hundred stuck-up Charley Freemans.”

  They wandered arm in arm over the flagstone terrace to the grill, a stone edifice that might have been mistaken from a distance for a branch post office. They kissed, as they had kissed beside the Great Pyramid, the Colosseum, and the Taj Mahal.

  “You know something, Maude?” said Earl, a great emotion ballooning in his breast. “You know, I used to wish my old man was rich, so you and I could have had a place like this right off—bing!—the minute I got out of college and we got married. But you know, we couldn’t have had this moment looking back and knowing, by God, we made every inch of the way on our own. And we understand the little guy, Maude, because we were little guys once. By gosh, nobody born with a silver spoon in their mouth can buy that understanding. A lot of people on the cruise didn’t want to look at all that terrible poverty in Asia, like their consciences bothered them. But us—well, seeing as how we’d come up the hard way, I don’t guess we had much on our consciences, and we could look out at those poor people and kind of understand.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Maude.

  Earl worked his fingers in the thick gloves. “And tonight I’m going to broil you and me and Charley a sirloin steak as thick as a Manhattan phone book, and deserve every ounce of it, if I do say so myself.”

  “We aren’t even unpacked.”

  “So what? I’m not tired. Got a lot of living to do, and the quicker I get at it, the more I’ll get done.”

  Earl and Maude were in the living room, Earl still in his chef’s outfit, when Charley Freeman was ushered in by the maid.

  “By golly!” said Earl. “If it isn’t Charley!”

  Charley was still thin and erect, and the chief mark of age upon him was the graying of his thick hair. While his face was lined, it was still confident and wise-looking, was still, in Earl’s opinion, subtly mocking. There was so much left of the old Charley, in fact, that the college relationship, dead for forty years, came alive again in Earl’s mind. In spite of himself, Earl felt resentfully servile, felt crude and dull. His only defense was the old one—hidden resentment, with a promise that things would be very different before long.

  “Been a long time, hasn’t it, Earl?” Charley said, his voice still deep and virile. “You’re looking fine.”

  “Lot of water can go under the bridge in forty years,” said Earl. He was running his finger nervously over the rich fabric of the sofa. And then he remembered Maude, who was standing rigid, thin-lipped behind him. “Oh, excuse me, Charley, this is my wife, Maude.”

  “This is a pleasure I’ve had to put off for a long time,” said Charley. “I feel I know you, Earl spoke of you so muc
h in college.”

  “How do you do?” said Maude.

  “Far better than I had any reason to expect six months ago,” said Charley. “What a handsome house!” He laid his hand on the television-radio-phonograph console. “Now, what the devil do you call this?”

  “Huh?” said Earl. “TV set. What’s it look like?”

  “TV?” said Charley, frowning. “TV? Oh—abbreviation for ‘television.’ That it?”

  “You kidding me, Charley?”

  “No, really. There must be more than a billion and a half poor souls who’ve never seen one of the things, and I’m one of them. Does it hurt to touch the glass part?”

  “The tube?” Earl laughed uneasily. “Hell, no—go ahead.”

  “Mr. Freeman’s probably got a tube five times as big as this one at home,” said Maude, smiling coldly, “and he’s kidding us along like he doesn’t even know this is a TV set, the tube’s so small.”

  “Well, Charley,” said Earl, cutting briskly into the silence that followed Maude’s comment, “and to what do we owe the honor of this visit?”

  “For old times’ sake,” said Charley. “I happened to be in town, and I remem—”

  Before Charley could elaborate, he was interrupted by a party composed of Lou Converse, a photographer from Home Beautiful, and a young, pretty woman writer.

  The photographer, who introduced himself simply as Slotkin, took command of the household, and as he was to do for the whole of his stay, he quashed all talk and activities not related to getting the magazine pictures taken. “Zo,” said Slotkin, “und de gimmick is de pagatch, eh?”

  “Baggage?” said Earl.

  “Package,” said the writer. “See, the angle on the story is that you come home from a world cruise to a complete package for living—everything anybody could possibly want for a full life.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s complete,” said Lou Converse, “complete right down to a fully stocked wine cellar and a pantry filled with gourmet specialties. Brand-new cars, brand-new everything but wine.”

  “Aha! Dey vin a condezt.”

  “He sold his factory and retired,” said Converse.