[Dorothy Parker 03] - Mystic Mah Jong

by Agata Stanford

  Ross was working on a bag of peanuts, and it wasn’t pretty, let me tell you; shells flying this way and that all over his sad togs. He kept jumping up whenever something was going on down on the diamond, along with the other sixty-thousand or so spectators at Yankee Stadium. The peanut shells that had collected on his clothes would fly about, and Jane, who was lucky enough to be sitting next to him, would get knocked in the elbow or knee at his violent rise, while shucks landed in her hair and lap. Edna Ferber was immune to the ravages of Woodrow and the men. She’d packed a picnic basket, with watercress, crab salad, and cucumber sandwiches and hot coffee in a Thermos for us girls. Woodrow and the men craved salt and fat, so our meal was safe.

  Huddled in my curly gray lamb winter coat, its wide mink collar up against the chill, I sipped my coffee, a warm pleasure on this cold, overcast day, and firmly instructed Woodrow to sit still. He sidled up to Lord Wildly, who sat at my side, with hopes for future rewards. But it was Tallulah, on the other side of Lord Wildly in our lineup, who hoped for another kind of future reward from the Englishman, with whom she was smitten. “My God, Dottie, darling,” she drawled a few days later. “Why, he’s better endowed than Harvard!”

  It was bottom of the ninth in the seventh and deciding game of the World Series and the score was St. Louis, three to two. New York was up at bat, and if something, anything would break the tie, I was all for it. We’d been sitting here for hours with a lot of noisy, screaming men, and Mr. Benchley’s flask was empty.

  “So this ‘Caroline’ person, she was a criminal type took the identity of the dead daughter of the Madame’s long-lost friend, that it?” asked Jane, out of the loop of our adventures because of her head-cold.

  “It’s complicated, but Lee Pigeon and Bette Booth met at Erasmus Hall high school in Brooklyn. The girls never really knew one another very well while in school. But when they met in Europe, Lee’s new identity was compromised. She’d assumed the life of a dead girl she had known as a child, from days when her family spent their summers in Maine. The real Caroline Mead and Lee Pigeon looked remarkably alike.

  “Now, when Lee’s father died, and her mother remarried, life at home with her new, overly affectionate stepfather became unbearable. She left home, and that’s when Lee embarked on a life of petty crime—embezzlement, shoplifting, forgery. At some point she went to Maine, hoping to renew her relationship with her friend from summers past, but discovered that Caroline and her mother had died only weeks before in a motor accident. Somehow she got into their home, and discovered a link between Caroline’s mother, Myra, and a spiritualist in New York City. It was unlikely that the woman, Madame Annabelle Olenska, would have heard of the deaths of the Meads, at least, that’s what Lee presumed, and she was right, for when she showed up on Madame’s doorstep with the tale of a dead mother, the woman bought her story, lock, stock, and barrel. What Lee did not know was that Madame Olenska was the real mother of Caroline Mead, whom she had never seen since the child’s birth, and that Caroline’s father was Luther Pendragon, two facts that the real Caroline had never been privy to, but that would have served Lee very well, indeed. So, both Madame and the little imposter lived with secrets and lies.

  “So, Lee, posing as Caroline, meets up with old school chum, Bette Booth, while on the grand tour, and Bette, with larceny in her heart, threatens to expose Lee’s real identity, that it?”

  “I suppose that’s the way it started, but Lee leveled the playing field when she learned all about the suspicious death of Bette’s first husband, Johnny, and suspected there was more to the story than suicide, even though Bette never actually killed Johnny. She probably overheard something, and then dug up all she could from the newspapers. However the scheme got started, whoever held the winning cards, doesn’t matter. They both lost. They struck a deal to bilk Benny and Madame O. When things escalated into murder by design, only they know. But I guess it all got out of hand when “Caroline” was confronted by Madame Olenska, and she had to act fast. I don’t think she planned to kill Madame Olenska that night. As she had Benny’s gun, I think “Caroline” had planned to shoot him when he arrived with the payoff, ready to tell the police she thought he was a burglar breaking in in the middle of the night. But when Madame listened in to the telephone call, everything changed. Now three people are dead, and the young women who schemed to gain fortunes will be lucky to get away with keeping their lives after they’ve been tried.”

  The stadium rocked, and I looked out to see Cardinals pitcher Jesse Haines on the mound, tall and lean and ready for a fight. From his seat beside me, Mr. Benchley leaned across Jane and me to shout at Lord Wildly that the game was at a critical juncture: The Babe was “up at bat” and it was “up to the Bambino to strike a homer and bring the Yankees home with a win.”

  While Wildly tried to decipher the lingo—most problematic was “strike a homer,” explained earlier as not a reference to the famous Greek, but increasing the score—Ruth sauntered up to the plate, cradled his bat between his knees, set his cap, hiked-up his trousers, powdered his hands, and retrieved the bat. Wiggling into form, he positioned the bat at his shoulder. As the crowd suddenly hushed to a buzzing murmur, Jesse Haines took his signal from the catcher and drove in the pitch.

  “Ball one!”

  Electricity sparked in the stands, and from where we sat I could see friends in the pressbox, including Heywood Broun sitting motionlessly with his fellow sports columnists from the Times, Journal, Daily News, and dozens of other publications, ready to report the highlights of the game. And a highlight was about to occur in only a few seconds.

  “Ball two!”

  I was enthralled by the suspense, and as the crowd’s anticipation grew louder, I lifted Woodrow onto my lap and held him firmly. The Babe shuffled his feet and shifted his hips into striking position.

  “Strike one!”

  Was the Babe going to walk the bases again, or was he just displaying showmanship before the Big One, the drive out of the park? The suspense of seeing it happen, of watching another Yankee miracle, was too much for people stuck in stands, and a nervous stomping began, thousands of feet beating out the seconds as the pitch came flying.

  “Strike two!”

  Hey! How many homeruns was he expected to hit, for cry’n’outloud? He’d already hit one in the third inning; nobody else had bothered to do it in this game.

  “Ball three!”

  “Allrightalready! Give the man some room! Let him breath! Come on, you son-of-a-bitch, hit that sucker out of the park! Two fucking strikes already! Holy crap, don’t give the game away! Walk it, don’t be a hero, walk it, fat boy!”

  “Foul ball!”

  “Shit! The suspense is killing me!”

  Everybody rose to their feet, and if you weren’t standing you didn’t see nothin’. If you were yellin’, there were guys behind and beside you yellin’ louder, gettin’ madder, eggin’ for a fight!

  “Here it comes, here it comes, there it goes!”

  “Come on, fat boy, slug it out!” I yelled, and Woodrow whimpered, and Wildly’s eyes widened.

  “Ball four!”

  Disappointing, but safe, was the prevailing sentiment in the murmur from the stands as Ruth made his eleventh walk of the series to first base, his usual swagger lessened a bit by the failure to hit a homer.

  With no time to waste and to keep up the momentum, Yankees cleanup man, Bob Meusel, sauntered out of the dugout.

  Bottom of the ninth, Cardinals leading three to two, Yankees up with two outs, man on first—Babe Ruth—time to tie the score, or it’s “Say goodnight, Sadie.”

  Catcher Bob O’Farrell stared through his cage at Cardinals pitcher Jesse Haines. Meusel said a silent prayer as he dug in his heels and found a grip on his bat.

  The spectators ended their appeals and quieted down to a hush.

  And there it goes! The pitch to Meusel—but what fresh hell! What the fuck does he think he’s doing!

  Before Meusel ever has the chance to take
a swing at the ball, all eyes are turned to the fat man on first, chugging off on his way to steal second!

  “Pull your finger out, Ruth!” yelled Lord Wildly. We watched in horror as the Babe, slower on the uptake than a beached whale, lumbered along toward second base, as catcher O’Farrell threw the ball to baseman Rogers Hornsby, who nailed the Slugger, handing the 1926 World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals!

  I wasn’t sure if the crowd was going to kill Ruth or just let him walk out of the stadium with his tail between his legs! Why, the invincible Babe Ruth just made the biggest blunder of his career while trying to be a hero!

  “Buggers! It’s all gone tits up!” shouted Wildly, and although we spoke different languages, the sentiment was universal.

  Crying, cursing, screaming, gesturing wildly, tossing paper cups and wrappers all over the stands in all-and-all deflated misery, the crowds stormed out of their seats. We joined the slow, painful journey out of the stadium.

  “Even though I’m a Red Sox fan, I do hate to see a massacre,” said Mr. Benchley, taking my arm, “but it looks like Lord Whimsy will make it to third base as far as Tallulah is concerned.” I turned to see the nauseating sight of a drooling, drawling Tallulah hanging on the arm of Lord Wildly.

  “So I guess we’re back to where we started, Dottie,” said Jane, with woeful wistfulness.

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “We’ve no spiritualists, witches, warlocks, or mentalists for the Equity Halloween Ball. We’ll just have to start where we left off on the list.”

  “Whaddaya mean, we’ll have to start? I’m through with the occult. I’m lousy at Mah Jong, and I’ll never play again. You’re all better now—wait, let me rephrase that: You’re over your cold, and you have no entertainment for the ball. Keep me out of the vetting process.”

  She wasn’t an easy one to discourage. “What about that . . . holy man?”

  “Rabindranath?”

  “Do you think—”

  “No! And anyway, he’ll be too busy.”

  Mr. Benchley elaborated: “Madame Olenska changed her will leaving everything to Rabindranath Tagore. Last year, Madame had loaned her sister, Ada, seven thousand dollars cash for a stock investment. The collateral was Ada’s share of the house. So, in fact, Madame owned it all until the loan was repaid, and that’s not going to happen, so Ada’s estate doesn’t include the Washington Square house. Rabindranath has a small fortune and a residence in which he plans to open an institute of spiritual learning.”

  “Bully for him!” chimed in Lord Wildly. “Top-drawer fellow!”

  “Yaaeess,” drawled Tallulah, “Top drauwar.”

  “So he won’t be available.”

  “What about—”

  “No! Not another word about it. You’re on your own,” I said.

  “What happens with Miss Ada’s fortune, do you know?” asked Wildly.

  “Goes to the pussycats,” I said. The three Siamese. They get a fifteen-room apartment in the Dakota with pâté and caviar in their gold-plated food dishes.”

  We slogged our way up with the crowd and toward the gates. My attention was drawn by a flash of white, like a flag waving retreat. It was Rabindranath Tagore. And as he approached, a shaft of sun broke through the heavy cloud cover to brighten and clear a path up the long stretch of steps.

  “Rabindranath!” I called out to him. The others looked up, and Mr. Benchley asked, “Where?”

  I turned to him. “There, ya old fool,” and when I turned and pointed he was gone, no one else having spotted him as the crowd tightened before us.

  Many a time over the years, when I had fallen into a funk, a deep black mood from which I thought there was no reprieve, I’d seen him walking along the street, coming toward me through the traffic, or seen the fleeting white of his flowing scarf as it passed like a whisper at my cheek, only to find when I looked again that he was gone, nowhere to be found. The veil of hopelessness would lift, and I’d remember his words to me the day I visited his Greenwich Village flat, the day he told me that—well, I would remember his words . . . . Perhaps one day . . . .

  “What time is it, Fred?”

  “Time for cocktails, of course.”

  “Why, that could be most of the day and night. There are house seats for us to see Maggie Brent’s Metropolitan Opera debut in Carmen tonight. Want to come, Jane? Ross? Tristan, ’Lulla?”

  “Had enough drama for one day,” said Ross. “Anyway, I feel Jane’s cold coming on.”

  “Frank, you want to join us?”

  “Sure, why not. Aleck going?”

  “Yes, he loves all the color and drama of opera. Groucho? How about you?”

  “What? A night at the opera? Not a good idea. You know how crazy Harpo gets around opera singers.”

  Night was falling on this autumn day in New York, and in spite of the Yankees’ loss, I felt suddenly glad to be alive, with my friends, traipsing about the greatest city in the world. Tonight we’d drink and dine and go to the opera, and laugh and play and go who-knows-where from there! Three murders and the sad consequences for two bright and beautiful young women had not dashed my spirits.

  Gin and guns—either one will get you in a dickens of a mess.

  Tomorrow, when I feel down in the dumps, as undoubtedly I will, I’ll remember this feeling of convivial joy and safety with my companions; I’ll think back on the words of wisdom spoken that day by Rabindranath Tagore when he served me a cup of coffee in his rooms; and I’ll smile at the grammatically contorted statement that Mr. Benchley made to me now: “You know, my dear Mrs. Parker, it might have saved everyone a lot of trouble if everyone had just listened to me when I first said: ‘Madame Olenska was found dead, shot in her bed by her assistant Caroline.’ ”

  The End

  Glossary of British Slang

  Not a sausage Nothing.

  Cock a hoop! What a thrill!

  “More tea, Vicar?” Response to a public release of gas—fart.

  Oh, my giddy aunt! My goodness! I’m so delighted!

  Strike a light! You’ve got to be kidding! Wow! Holy mackerel! What a surprise.

  Chin wag Chat.

  A rum do Bad luck.

  Lost the rag Lost one’s temper.

  Top hole! Hit the jackpot; you did it!

  Gordon Bennett! He was an outrageous playboy of the nineteenth century, whose behavior was shocking to the Victorians. The use of his name is on par with the exclamation, “Christopher Columbus!”

  Pull my plonker You may think you know what it means, but it doesn’t refer to that male body part. It means, “You’re pulling my leg.”

  Collywobbles Indigestion.

  Up the duff Pregnant.

  In the pudding Pregnant.

  Slapped arse Red, mottled, really unattractive.

  Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire Gone to bed.

  Bang out of order! Out of line; to say something that is insulting or inappropriate.

  “Boiling hatch of beastliness” A Shakespearean insult.

  Carry the can Admit fault; be to blame.

  Fred Karno’s army Shoddy work; incompetency. Fred Karno was a British Music Hall comedian, not a soldier.

  Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs When someone who knows nothing attempts to give advice to an expert.

  Toodle pip! A ridiculous term for saying “Goodbye.” The kind of nonsense Bertie Wooster would say to Jeeves.

  That sod gets on my wick! A sod is : (1) an annoying person, (2) a pathetic person—“poor sod,” or (3) a quandary. In this usage: “That idiot makes me burn!”

  Who’s he when he’s at home? “He’s full of himself.”

  Popped their clogs Died.

  What? Thrown onto the end of a sentence, this British affectation is the equivalent to Americans’ “you know?”

  As the actress said to the bishop . . . Sexual innuendo referring to a dialogue between one of questionable chastity and one of monastic celibacy.

  Bob’s your uncle! Unquestionab
ly! Not to be argued with!

  The great unwashed The masses.

  All fur coat and no knickers All style, no substance—and no panties.

  A slap-up meal A great dinner.

  All dressed up like a dog’s dinner Clothes do not always make the man. A person of low breeding.

  Nose out of joint To be upset; to feel insulted.

  Don’t get your knickers in a twist Or your panties in a bunch (American); don’t get upset.

  Throw a wobbler Have a fit, throw a tantrum.

  Hands off cocks, on with socks! Exactly what you think it means; a wakeup call in a military tradition; let’s get going!

  On the razzle Having a good time.

  That’s hard cheese Bad luck.

  Crickey! Yikes! Really? What a surprise!

  That takes the biscuit! Now I’ve heard everything! You’ve got to be kidding! That takes the cake!

  Keep your peckers up Means exactly what it sounds like; be happy (don’t cry), keep a stiff—upper lip.

  Go like the clappers ASAP.

  Fit for the knackers’ yard So tired, like an old horse about to be sent to the glue factory.

  Poxy time Hard time, bad experience.

  You’re off Queer Street Out of harm’s way, out of trouble.

  You’re all over the shop You’re a mess. Having a bad day? Tuck in your shirt!

  Pull your finger out It’s all right, now; a funny way of saying: get going, hop to it, go like the clappers!

  It’s all gone tits up! Reversed course, flipped over, ended badly, all gone awry.

  Glossary of American Slang

  Trip the light fantastic toe Dance.

  Hunky-dory Everything is great; feeling good.

  Holy moly! Holy cow! Oh, my giddy aunt! Crickey! Wow!

  Fly-by-night pippin Con artist; flash-in-the-pan fast operator.

  My goose is cooked I’m in trouble, in hot water, the game is up!