Scoring Bertram Wiggly

by Man Martin

  Scoring Bertram Wiggly, A Musical Novella

  Copyright 2010 Man Martin

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Acknowledgements

  My good friend and fellow author, Jamie Iredell, had a great idea one time. “Wouldn’t it be hilarious,” he asked, “if people just broke into song the way they do in musicals?” And then he sang a note, “Ohhh!” to demonstrate. Jamie’s kind of a big guy, he looks a little like a biker, and when he struck a note, he sounded like an opera singer. Not a very good opera singer, but you get the idea. It was a really funny concept, and Jamie set to work on it. Unfortunately he told me about it first. Sometimes Jamie has good ideas, and sometimes he has really dumb ones. Telling me was a dumb idea. I never intended to take advantage of Jamie’s trust, but I began working on his concept one night just for the heck of it, and the words just came. I knew exactly what the story would be about, and who the characters would be. Jamie was nice enough to read it, critique it, and even praise it. The result you see before you. Jamie is still my friend. He hopes if he hangs around me long enough, eventually I’ll give him one of my ideas.

  Good luck with that, Jamie.

  Prologue

  Every day it’s the same: a sunrise like a lemon cookie over the green hills, and a swallow cheeps at my windowsill.

  It’s impossible all this has anything to do with the rezoning, isn’t it? But still.

  I’m not sure how far this thing reaches. Take my bedroom window, for example. I could swear I close it every night before I go to sleep. Since a child, I have always been susceptible to chest colds, so it’s something I’m careful about. And yet, the next morning my window’s wide open again, letting in who knows what manner of spores and miasmas, not to mention lemon-cookie sunlight, twittering birds, and the rest.

  But I get ahead of myself perhaps.

  When I left my job of thirty-one and a half years at Amalgamated Diversified as a major appliance actuary – my job was to calibrate the precise life expectancy of iceboxes, electric stoves and the like, so that their warranties expire precisely one day before they implode – I chose Medville as the ideal setting to savor my golden years. For all my current difficulties, Medville is a lovely place. The town square, which is circled by brick-cobbled streets and quaint shops with bright red and white awnings, faces a beautiful green park, Morning Glory Downs, which stretches out for acres and acres with pathways that wind between rolling hills and picturesque foot bridges crossing pools where ducks paddle and frogs croak contentedly and plash in clear water. Beyond that are charming cottages with white picket fences and deep front porches on which the newspaper boy plops The Daily Bugle each day with a perfect overhead lob, announcing the delivery with a ding-ding from the bell on his blue bicycle. While it would be a lie to say the weather is ideal, the inclement weather that we do have is invariably scenic. Rain, when it falls, comes down hard and is so exhilarating, that many times townsfolk deliberately go out and walk in it, lifting their faces as if the pelting drops were sunshine. In winter, snow piles the ground and fence rails like cream-cheese icing, not a muddy or slushy patch to be seen. The local pond hard-freezes so ice skaters can twirl and pirouette for one another. When the thaw comes, the snow melts clean away and it’s back to swallows, lemon-yellow sunrises, and the rest. Fall is breathtaking. Spring, a delight.

  But then this year, the city voted to rezone us for musicals.

  Medville conducts its political business through old-fashioned town hall meetings where everyone convenes while the mayor or some other noteworthy pontificates and bangs a wooden gavel on the podium. Usually at these discussions, I keep mum and let democracy run its course. Sundry citizens stand up and opine: there’s always wizened farmer Barnes in his cleanest dirty overalls who’d like to put his two cents in, then some disgruntled frump in colorless duds who has a bunch of booger-hunting runts punching one another and one more nameless lump in a bundle, rises on her stumps to grump about nothing, until Jim Hansom, a fresh-faced young man with a jaw-line so sharp it could slice tomatoes, gets up and in a homespunly inarticulate way says what needs to be said, at which the neighbors look at one another and nod, and a murmur of approbation runs through the room.

  On this occasion, however, I could not forbear from speaking; it soon became manifest that the vote was going the wrong way; someone had to do something. At first everyone laid great stress on the orchestra’s ability to stay concealed.

  “I’d have to be certain they’d be completely out of sight,” spoke the over-alled farmer whom I mentioned earlier. I have never been clear what Zeke Barnes grows, be it chickens, alfalfa, or sugar beets; still less am I sure where he comes from. At some meetings, he has a Midwestern accent; other times he talks like a Kentucky colonel. Today he seemed to hale from somewhere in upstate Connecticut. “It’s very important they can’t be seen.”

  “Quite right,” confirmed Miss Terwilliger, the prune-faced spinster who is the town librarian and the organist at First Presbyterian. “That would spoil the reality of the whole thing.”

  Thitherto I had always been favorably impressed by Eugenia Terwilliger’s evident good sense, but on this occasion I did a double-take. What did she mean reality? This is our lives.

  Then Jim Hansom the clean-jawed young man stood up, and I leaned forward to listen. I’ve learned from previous town hall meetings there’s no need to pay attention until Jim talks. After a sufficient amount of windbaggery from the rest, Jim always gets up and herds the townsfolk in one direction or the other. One time, for example, they were on the cusp of routing the trolley line through the park until Jim addressed them. Later, a bond to repaint the schoolhouse was on the brink of being voted down until Jim shyly raised his hand and asked to say a few words. The measure was defeated in the first case and passed in the second. Unanimous both times.

  The shocking thing is that Jim is so transparently a huckster. Even when he’s on the side of Truth, Justice, and the American Way – words he actually uses, which from his mouth come out like a cat extolling universal brotherhood to a chipmunk – he manages to sound like a cross between a used-car salesman and the worst kind of revival-tent charlatan. It must be a law of nature; luring yokels into playing three-card Monte or buying the Brooklyn Bridge requires sounding as guileless as a newborn babe, but when it comes to getting them to act in concert with their better angels, you need to talk like a carny barker offering to show you Fatima and the Seven Veils for the price of one thin dime, just one thin dime. However he does it, he unfailingly persuades the rubes with his hayseed eloquence, so when Jim rose to speak, I was understandably curious; I knew on his words would hang the outcome.

  “Don’t you see, folks,” he said, pushing a curl of his thick dark hair from his forehead. The eyes of Carmello the barber gleamed with professional interest, and he twirled his black moustache. Jim always seems exactly two weeks overdue for a haircut. “Don’t you see, folks,” Jim said. He actually says doncha; if you had wrung all the boyish charm and naïve earnestness out of him, you could have filled a bathtub. “Doncha see folks,” Jim said, “this is the biggest thing that ever hit this little town.”

  “For t’e love of Mike,” said our police chief, Patrick O’Malley, “we aren’t after having a bunch of horn blowers and pee-ah-nists lollygagging around town getting in t’e way and being an eyesore.”

  Several people said, “That’s right,” and I began to feel somewhat cheered

  “But doncha see,” Jim said, “the orchestra’s right here among you. They’ve been here the whole time!” The townsfolk murmured incredulous rhurbarbs at each other, and Jim waved his arms expansively and said, “Show yourselves, fellas!”

  The next moment I felt a tickling in my ear and tried to brush it a
way, only to rap my knuckles against something cool and metallic. A trombonist was sitting behind me, his slide resting against my face. Miss Terwilliger shrieked to discover a flautist in her lap. Everywhere stunned people realized they had been sharing the room with a veritable army of Sousaphonists and French Horn players. The mayor recoiled and nearly knocked over a set of chimes, sending a discordant tinkling up to the rafters.

  “It’s okay, folks, it’s okay,” Jim said, calming us with a gesture. He showed no amusement at our consternation; except for cracks he makes himself, Jim never laughs at anything. “It’s just a demonstration of what they can do. Let’s let the conductor talk to us. Come on out, Sam.”

  As people settled back in their seats, exchanging polite nods and handshakes with the musicians around them, the orchestra leader stepped forward from a corner. By some trick of lighting, his white uniform with its gold epaulets and shiny brass buttons had blended into the dark wood paneling behind him, so he seemed to materialize from nowhere like a white cat sauntering out of the fog.

  The flabbergasted mayor stood aside, and Sam the conductor took the stage. “We’re a municipal contractor,” Sam explained. “We’ve provided many towns just like yours with – well, sort of a musical backdrop to their lives. People seem to like it. It makes life more interesting. It adds – ” Sam hesitated, at a loss for words.

  “Oomph?” suggested Bernie Goldstein, the owner of the dry goods store, looking over his bifocals and raising his finger modestly in front of his white apron for attention.

  “Oomph, yes, that’s it exactly,” Sam said with a smile.

  Someone had to put a stop to this dangerous nonsense. “If you’re so good,” I said, standing up without waiting to be called on. “Why did you come here? Why don’t you already have a job somewhere?”

  “We did,” Sam said. His face, which had worn an affable smile, became grim. The various band members shuffled uncomfortably in their crisp white uniforms and looked at their shoes. “A city. A city with a million souls but not one neighbor. Where it’s always crowded, yet you’re always alone. A city that never sleeps because it’s too busy trying to forget what it never can.” The conductor’s voice was weary with regret. He sounded like a person who associated with no-good dames. No-good dames with secrets to hide and gams. At the back of the room, a saxophone player put his instrument to his lips, and a melody oiled out that reminded me of merciless summer nights, wet asphalt, slow-turning ceiling fans, and long, poorly-lit corridors. I hadn’t realized until that moment that Sam was smoking a cigarette. He took the butt from his mouth and flicked it with his forefinger over the podium into a trashcan. “We didn’t like it there. You could say we couldn’t take it.”

  “Too many shadows,” said a clarinetist under Carmello the barber’s chair.

  “And rain,” said someone holding a pair of cymbals over Zeke’s head.

  “And neon signs flashing through Venetian blinds,” added the trombonist behind me.

  “When we heard about Medville, we knew this was the town for us,” Sam said. A moment ago I could have sworn his face wore a five-o’clock shadow, but now I saw it was shaven as smooth as a windowpane. “You should know we are fully bonded and insured, and have a facility for, well, disappearing.” Sam made a gesture of dismissal, and before we could look around, they were gone. The flautist had left Miss Terwilliger’s lap, the cymbal player in back of Zeke seemed to evaporate, the clarinetist under Carmello’s chair vanished, and when I turned, the trombonist was likewise not to be seen. Sam stepped backward – the xylophone and chimes were no longer behind him – and faded once more into the paneling. I strained my eyes to pick out his contour against the wall and could not. A band of stealthy Apaches waiting to ambush a wagon train could not have concealed themselves more neatly.

  There was a chorus of amazed approval at this magic trick, as if the only consideration to take into account when banishing silence in favor of tweedlings, oom-pahs, or ta-ra-ras, were whether you could see where the noise was coming from. I knew the time had come to speak.

  I do not claim the sort of vulgar good looks Jim Hansom has, but without being immodest, I think I can say I cut a distinguished figure. I have narrow sloping shoulders and a pot belly which I think add elegance to a man who is not overly tall, don’t you? Except when indoors, I wear an unostentatiously short hat of the sort called a porkpie. My hair is dark and thin and lies flat against my skull. My eyes are large and sad – somewhat baggy underneath – and my ears are longer than most people’s, suggesting an almost rabbit-like intelligence. My chin is not as strong as I might wish, but it is compensated for by an unusually prominent and virile Adam’s apple. I do not speak often, but when I do, my voice is a low croak alternating with sudden high-pitched squeaks, like a bullfrog delivering a funeral oration who in moments of stress is possessed by the spirit of a perturbed gerbil.

  I wish I could remember the exact words I said on this occasion so you could judge for yourself my eloquence. I flatter myself that Jim Hansom’s smarmy appeal and the band’s now-you-see-us-now-you-don’t capers notwithstanding, I had fairly persuaded the town to scrap this silly motion, but as I sat, someone, I don’t know who – the invisible trombonist behind me perhaps – had pulled my chair away, so instead of sitting, I fell to the floor, legs shooting out in front. This was greeted with a droll bwah-bwah-bwaaah from the unseen trombone and those assembled obliged with a hearty laugh at my expense.

  Needless to say, thanks to this bit of cruel buffoonery, nothing I’d said was given any weight and when the matter was put to a vote, it passed. At least it was not unanimous. Not quite.

  288 to 1.

  Mary and Me

  I awoke next day to sunlight pouring in the room and an unaccustomed twitter from the direction of my window. I sat up in alarm to see a swallow on the sill, cheeping away like gangbusters. I am not fond of being observed in any state of dishabille, particularly by feathered voyeurs, but I bolted from the bed in my nightshirt and stocking cap, and shooed the beast away before it brought whatever parasitic vermin it no doubt harbored into the room. Bold, I know, to address a potentially diseased creature with such dispatch – his manic chirping suggested some form of avian rabies – but the thought of nature’s minions streaming unchecked into my chamber provoked me to rapid action.

  Careless, I thought, to have left the window open that way. I shut it, shaking my head at my forgetfulness. I surmised the swallow’s origin at once; my niece doted on a nest of them lodged in the eaves outside her bedroom window. One of these had gained entry to my room.

  I realize at this point you would probably like to know something about my living conditions. With the sunrise, the swallow, and the rest you are conversant already; however, I do not live alone. I share my house with my niece, Mary.

  She is not really my niece, but our actual relationship, even were I sure what it is, is too complicated to explain. Shortly before I came to Medville, I got a telegram informing me that a distant family member, or a close family friend, or possibly the close friend of a distant family member, had expired and that I was to receive a bequest. If I am somewhat vague on the details, it is owing to the fact the telegram was very poorly worded – as even the best of telegrams are likely to be given the extreme economy of words typical in such missives. If I recall correctly, it ran something like this:

  COUSIN EDGAR LAWYER AUNT MABEL DECEASED IN WILL BEQUEST ENROUTE DEWITT

  As far as I could ascertain, either an Aunt Mabel or else a Cousin Edgar had died and I was being notified by the lawyer of the other one, unless the other one was a lawyer, that there was a will in which I was mentioned. I could not parse out if Dewitt was the name of the lawyer or yet another relative. In any case, none of these names were the least familiar to me; I assumed they were the sort of people one intersects at weddings and other family gatherings, whom one pretends to know, adopting a manner of coolish cordiality. It even occurs to me there could have been a colossal misunderstanding: that this
Dewitt person, not I, was to receive the bequest and that I was merely to take charge of it until he could come to claim it, but that being in transit from my former address to Medville, that branch of the family tree lost track of me, and Dewitt had never tracked me down, and perhaps never even tried.

  Another reason that I am less than clear on the entire transaction is that I had scarcely finished perusing this perplexing parchment, standing in my foyer as I was in the midst of my assorted steamer trunks and portmanteaux, when there came a knock upon the door, and the first part of my bequest arrived in the form of Mary.

  I cannot say I was altogether pleased. The word “bequest” brings to mind oil well deeds and diamonds as big as glass doorknobs. Finding I was to look after a young lady – she was nearly seventeen at the time – did not sit well. I have been a bachelor most of my life and have developed fastidious habits. I foresaw years of finding nylons draped across the shower rod and various tubes and tubs unguents deposited thither and yon about the bathroom sink.

  To be candid, there has been the odd pair of nylons to pass between en route to my ablutions, and she does keep a blue container of lavender-scented cold cream by the sink, but these inconveniences she more than makes up for in other ways. I have never inquired about her family or how we are related, nor has she ever volunteered to say. I gather from her silence that she is a sort of a professional – no, the word professional is too harsh; it implies a cold-blooded mercenary streak which Mary lacks – she is not a professional orphan, but one by avocation, like certain people you run across in Dickens whose lot in life it is to be bereft of parents and endure with a cheerful mien.

  The second half of my bequest was a large block of stock in the family’s grocery concern, which I hold in trust for Mary until my death, the dividends from which add a lovely – and lately I have realized, necessary – supplement to my pension. This, however, lest you think my joy in Mary is purely pecuniary, is not the reason I so delight in having her around.