Scoring Bertram Wiggly

by Man Martin

  He didn’t match. He not only didn’t match the others; he didn’t match himself. His unruly hair was the color of polished copper, and the tail of his stained yellow shirt hung over his green trousers on one side. The cover of his orange textbook was torn. What’s more, either because of congenital deafness or an absolute inability to keep time, he wasn’t even close to being in rhythm.

  He knelt in the crosswalk to tie a shoelace. In spite of the delay – the random notes had coagulated into an up-tempo melody – I silently cheered my little misfit. I thought, yes! Good boy! The little brat was wrecking all of Sam’s careful orchestration. It was too good to be true.

  Then I realized. His little pink tongue sticking out in infantile concentration, a slingshot with a red elastic band peeking out from his back pocket, as the crossing guard looked on indulgently, red stop sign held aloft. It was an Americana nightmare straight from the cover of Boy’s Life or The Saturday Evening Post. The precious imp hadn’t wrecked the tableau; he was the centerpiece. If this were a talkie, it would be the moment some flabby matron in the audience, whom Mother Nature in her wisdom had denied offspring, would laugh and say, “Awww,” her fingers itching for cheeks to pinch.

  Unable to endure the sight any longer, and forbidden by law from running the child down, I backed up and executed a U-turn to try my luck in a different direction. In my Model T’s rearview, I saw the child finish his shoelace and start off to rejoin the others, only to run back for the textbook he’d left behind.

  I hadn’t gone far before being held up again by two men who had chosen the middle of the street to hold a gabfest. Eerily, as I observed more closely, I saw they were not talking at all. Their mouths opened and closed, and they gestured and posed as if in lively chat; but they weren’t speaking. Nor were their words drowned out by music, which admittedly had reached an almost deafening pitch; they simply weren’t talking. I looked right and left and saw the sidewalks crowded with Medville citizens engaged in similar pantomimes of animated conversation. I realized too late that the parade of children had been a diversion to keep me from leaving town until I fulfilled whatever hideous design Sam had in store. That’s when the whole town broke out in song.

  Since that first dreadful morning I have beheld many things, the lightest word of which would harrow up thy very soul, but no matter what fresh shocks I’ve been subjected to, I can never remember of that day without a fresh shudder of horror.

  Commotion filled the town square like a stirred anthill. People waved at one another as if hailing rescue ships; they crossed against the light to embrace or shake hands; Carmello came from his shop, his arm around a customer wearing a cape, or drape, or whatever you call it, one of those things barbers put around your neck, his face generously lathered in anticipation of a shave. No one was dancing – not exactly – but it was evident that this had been choreographed. Even in my stunned condition, I couldn’t help but wonder, when did they find the time to rehearse? I saw Jim Hansom leer and doff his hat to Mary as she walked her bike across the intersection and was mollified to see how she raised her chin and went right on by without even giving him a look. Three of the local beauties, wearing sweaters a size too small, the better to display their bovine charms, simpered in unison, but rebuffed by Mary, Jim did not attend them.

  Meanwhile everyone else sang:

  “If you see us on the street,

  “Be sure to stop and say hello,

  “To everyone that you meet

  “And everywhere that you go.

  “We’re busy folks just like yoo-hoo

  “With important things to doo-hoo

  “We’ve got our own problems, too-hoo –

  “Tooo.”

  As ghastly as these lyrics appear in print, I assure you they are immeasurably worse when accompanied by people charging around in a manic square-dance greeting and shaking hands and Sam’s orchestra sawing away on strings and blowing horns like mad.

  A man in a black-and-white striped shirt and a billed cap pulled low over his brow, taking advantage of the din from Sam’s orchestra and the town’s derangement, stole up behind Miss Terwilliger and snatched her handbag. I half rose from my seat in dismay. Miss Terwilliger turned and raised the umbrella she carries even on cloudless days, but too late. The thief had scampered off among townsfolk too preoccupied singing to notice him. Just as I thought I had witnessed the town’s foolhardy rezoning lead to an outbreak of lawlessness, a foot appeared from an alleyway, and down the culprit went. At the other end of the foot emerged Officer O’Malley, seizing the culprit by the collar, singing as he shook his nightstick warningly at him,

  “But the neighborly thing we say,

  “When you greet your fellow man,

  “Stop and pass the time of day,

  “’Cause he’s doing the best he can.”

  Meanwhile Ms. Terwilleger came up and retrieved her stolen handbag, admonishing the thief in verse,

  “It takes just a little why-hile

  “To give folks a friendly smy-hile

  “That’s the Medville sty-hile

  “Stiiile.”

  At the restoration of Ms. Terwilliger’s property, the entire populace rose in chorus, raising their arms to the clouds as if inviting the Almighty to sing with them.

  “If you see us on the street

  “Be sure to stop and say hello

  “To everyone you meet

  “And every, every, every, every, every, oh—”

  I found Mr. Goldstein leaning an elbow in my window, his straw hat perched jauntily back on his head and his apron looking as if he had just unpacked it from the apron store. He looked benignly over the tops of his bifocals and sang in an accent thicker than sour cream dolloped on borscht,

  “If we want to stop and chah-hat,

  “Is that such an awful cry-hime?”

  I hated to be rude to a gentleman who had never shown me anything but courtesy, but if I allowed myself to be drawn into this asinine performance I would be late for my appointment. Besides, unlike the others who had apparently been up half the night rehearsing their routines, I didn’t even know the words.

  “When neighbors chew the fah-hat,” Mr. Goldstein continued, and I saw I had to put a stop to it.

  “I really don’t have the time,” I said, gently but firmly pushing his elbow out of my window and slipping the car into gear.

  He shook his face, making his jowls quiver like – one hates to say jelly, but that is exactly how they quivered – jelly, gave a disappointed frown and turned away. Fortunately, just at that moment a gap formed among the townsfolk, and like Moses having parted the Red Sea, I safely made my getaway just as the song rose to a lunatic crescendo:

  “If. You. See. Us. On. The. Street.

  “Stop and stop and stop and stop and stop and stop and stop

  “And say hello! Hello!

  “Hello! Hello! Hello!”

  Big News

  As I motored out of town, I went through a series of emotions. Relief, obviously, at having emerged from such a bedlam relatively unscathed. Then, regret at having snubbed a harmless old muffin like Mr. Goldstein, accompanied with gratitude that he had not taken it worse than he had. Then something resembling dismay that bloomed by swift gradations into righteous indignation and shock as I realized that when I said, “I really don’t have the time,” I had not, as I had supposed, interrupted the song, but provided the necessary rhyming line to Mr. Goldstein’s “Is it such an awful cry-hime?”

  So great was my fury at having been imposed upon this way – never mind the mystery of how Sam contrived to make me say the very thing required as if on cue – that I nearly turned my Model T around and drove right back to Medville to locate Sam and give him a piece of my mind. But, I reflected, angry though I was, I had bigger cats to skin. Sure enough, what I learned from my lawyer in Nexton put the rezoning, music, Sam the orchestra leader and all the rest out of my mind. Temporarily at least.

  As you know, my kinsman’s grocery store r
ose to its pinnacle of success due to an innovation known as “self-service.” Instead of telling the grocer what you require and waiting for him to fetch it from the shelf, you walk through aisles a basket on your arm and select from products conveniently displayed. Not only does this system immeasurably increase efficiency, it means customers suddenly have choices. Shopping is no longer a matter of asking for coffee, soap, or scouring powder and accepting whatever anonymous scoop, slab, or granules the grocer deigns to shove across the counter; now, you can see for yourself what you were getting – a new world of options opened before the customer. Who would have thought, there were different brands! Some might be good to the last drop, some ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure, others that haven’t scratched yet!

  What my lawyer Pennyfeather now informed me, was that the grocery chain was contemplating a new scheme that would once again revolutionize retail: a prototype of an entirely new kind of store, a Super-Duper Mart, in Medville.

  “It’s going to be stupendous,” Pennyfeather told me, gesturing with his hands to delineate a beach-ball-sized region of air, “you’ll be able to purchase everything there from snow skis to cantaloupe at low, low discount prices in one convenient center with plenty of free parking just outside.”

  As Pennyfeather filled in the details, I learned how every now and anon, the manager would come over a public address system, speaking like the kindly voice of Jehovah announcing a fresh shipment of manna in the wilderness, saying that if shoppers stop by aisle one-hundred-four, the flashing blue light would lead them to an unadvertised sale on vats of oleo or engine lubricant. In the intervals between such announcements, music would play, the mention of which made me blanch, but as Pennyfeather described it, it would not be the overwhelming, consciousness-sapping cacophony of Sam’s orchestra, which twitches and jerks the whole body in time like a carp on the end of a line. No, it would not even be music, properly considered, but music’s innocuous slack-jawed cousin, a new innovation from a company in Fort Mill, South Carolina called “Muzak.” Unless one made a special effort to listen, one would not even notice it. It was no more designed to be listened to than wallpaper is to be stared at.

  “This Super-Duper Mart will offer virtually everything needed for existence,” Pennyfeather said. “Indeed, if all goes according to plan, it will one day be possible for a customer to spend his entire life within the confines of the store, born in the on-site maternity ward between the pharmacy and the greeting cards, departing only on that day when he gets in line for the final checkout, and a cashier bows her head as he passes to ring up his silk-lined, brass-handled Algamated Diversified Coffin.”

  Apart from my understandable pleasure at having such a money-saving, handy, and hygienic shopping center nearby, was the even more delightful consideration of what such a comprehensive and strategically-located facility would do for the price of the company’s common stock, a large block of which, I believe I have mentioned, I hold in trust for Mary and receive dividends from until the time of my death.

  It was on this pecuniary aspect that my lawyer, Larson Pennyfeather, laid considerable stress as he described the Medville enterprise. From Pennyfeather’s voice, I gathered I was not the only one in the room sitting on a hunk of stock.

  Pennyfeather is a walrus of a man who looks somewhat as if he had been constructed out of two smaller lawyers, one of whom is sitting on the other’s shoulders. He lit a Corona Corona for himself, and presented me with another from a humidor on his desk. I do not smoke, but accepted the cigar and put it in my pocket against unforeseen eventualities.

  “It looks very promising. Ve-ry promising,” Pennyfeather said. He removed the cigar from his lips and opened his mouth; a large trembly smoke ring emanated, and then puckering his lips he shot a smaller, tighter ring through the first. “There is, however, one variable.”

  When discussing windfalls, one does not like to hear talk of variables. Nor do tricks with smoke rings allay one’s concerns. When variables are afoot, a prudent man claps his attention on them like flypaper and leaves the enjoyment of smoke rings for an idle hour.

  I asked him in no uncertain terms to elucidate.

  “Well,” Pennyfeather said, leaning back in his leather chair and exhaling another indolent smoke ring, “technically the fait is not accompli until the Medville city council approves it. That, however, should be no obstacle given that you yourself live in Medville. You pull considerable weight there, I imagine.”

  I suppressed an impatient gesture. I pull about as much weight in Medville as a butterfly with a hernia. My ignominious defeat in the matter of our recent rezoning still rankled freshly the Wiggly bosom. “And you want me to do what I can to get Medville’s approval.”

  “You seem to grasp the general outlines,” Pennyfeather said.

  “The outlines I have. The outlines I could not grasp better were I equipped with a pair of tongs. Doing the thing itself, however, is out of the question.”

  Pennyfeather’s face fell as if it had been dropped, and smoke ring production ceased. It is impossible that he should actually have inhaled the smoke ring he had just blown, sucking it back in as if it were tied to his tongue by an elastic string, but that is what I recollect his doing.

  “Are you saying you can’t do this?”

  “You are pretty good at grasping outlines, yourself.”

  “Have I laid stress on the pecuniary aspects of this enterprise?”

  “Considerable stress.”

  “Good Lord, man, use your powers of persuasion, your silver tongue.”

  “Silver tongues don’t come into it. The town is against me to a man.”

  “A hefty pile of money is at stake in this.”

  I filled Pennyfeather in on the town hall meeting and my humiliation at the hands of Sam the conductor. Throughout my bitter narrative, Pennyfeather stroked his walrus moustaches and gave occasional grunts of comprehension and surprise.

  “So you say – these musicians – are apt to break into roundelays or mazurkas at any moment? And yet no one can see them?” I complimented him again on outline-grasping. “At first I thought you were talking about strolling street performers, like gypsies playing bandoliers or something.” A bandolier is not a musical instrument, of course, but an ammunition belt, and as such, is not played by gypsies but by Mexican revolutionaries; I, however, did not trouble myself to correct him. “That would be bad enough,” Pennyfeather said dolefully, looking down at his desktop, and no doubt imagining bands of colorful gypsies strolling the streets strumming their bandoliers, “but this. And there’s also singing?” A nod from yours truly. Pennyfeather considered. “It seems to me, the best course for you to do is to go to Jim Hansom and talk up the benefits up the Super-Duper Mart to him. Convince him, and everything else will fall into place. Then, when the next town hall meeting is convened, they will be sure to vote on your side.”

  “That might work,” I conceded, beginning to brighten.

  “It cannot fail. This man Hansom seems to be the linchpin, if linchpin is the word I want, of the whole situation. Divide and conquer, that’s your course. It should be easy to convince him, I take it?”

  “Easy as taking candy from a baby,” I said. “Easier. Like giving candy to a baby.”

  “Excellent,” said Pennyfeather. A fresh smoke ring took shape from his lips and rose aloft. “I also recommend you see to it there is a wide distance between you and this orchestra when you discuss matters,” he said. “Music – in my experience – and business don’t mix.”

  Discovery

  in a Junk Store

  I left Pennyfeather in very high spirits, anticipating a neighborly chat with Jim Hansom back in Medville – the Medvillians are big ones for neighborly chats; they even have a song about it – and I would have the deal sewn up.

  Pennyfeather’s office on the second story above a row of shops overlooks Main Street, so I after I left, I spent the next few hours perusing the windows of Nexton, reflecting on my scheme t
o win over Medville. In addition to wishing to pursue my private thoughts, I had another reason for loitering. As I explained to Pennyfeather, Mary’s twenty-second birthday was approaching and I needed to find an appropriate gift.

  “Really?” said Pennyfeather. “Her twenty-second? Time flies. Time f… hat reminds me of something.” Then he seemed to lose himself in thought and I quietly let myself out.

  The shops in Nexton, while offering a wider variety of merchandise than Medville, had slim pickings indeed. (Yet another reason to bring in a Super-Duper Mart.)

  It was difficult selecting a gift, because I needed something to mark our transition from Uncle/Niece to Husband/Wife. Even before Mary’s return from Idlewood, she hinted at this next stage in our relationship in her letters. She wrote often, sometimes as much as once a week, and I saved all her correspondence in a box which I keep in the bottom drawer of my dresser. One letter in particular brought a flush of eager hope to my face, and I reread it so many times, I have it memorized. The letter runs as follows:

  Dear Wiggly,

  HERE IS THE LATEST UPDATE FROM THE FRONT: The Helvetii, having burned their own homes, have joined forces with Rauraci, and the Tulingi, and the Latobrigi and set out to pillage as much of Gaul as can be conveniently got to. Caesar’s too smart for them though, and knows they will pass through the Allobrogres’ territory because the Sequani Pass is too narrow, and he knows the Sequani are no friends of the Helvetti anyways. So Caesar’s marching out to meet them, gathering reinforcements from the countryside as he goes along.

  In addition to Latin, I am learning Calculus, Biological Science, and the plays of William Shakespeare. At this rate, I shall soon be TERRIBLY EDUCATED and not fit to talk to anybody.