Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
“There’s one!”
“There’s one!”
Bang! Bang!
Two gun-toting Papagenos, they’d potshot the cuckoos as they sang, utilizing their best German accents – as taught to them by Mama – cramming their kills into the cages on their backs. What did you need with a Magic Flute when you had an Allen’s Improved Cuckoo Caller, used in the field by all the best cuckoo shooters in America? Max’s soprano reached eye-watering heights of piercing shrillness, and all listening men winced sympathetically, discreetly adjusting their garments with pained and thoughtful expressions.
“Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja,
Stets lustig, heisa hopsasa!
Der Vogelfänger ist bekannt
Bei alt und jung im ganzen Land …”
The cuckoo catchers, that’s what they were, always merry and cheerful, known to old and young throughout the land. They blew into their cuckoo callers intermittently, at appropriate moments, as if making knowing cultural cross-references to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. The Websters had culture at their well-clotted fingertips. Musical instruments were picturesquely positioned about their parlor, as if awaiting the attentions of a still-life artist.
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
“There’s one!”
“There’s one!”
Bang! Bang!
It was a great shame that Serenity’s family had set her up as the big rival of Max – she and he had a great deal in common – but this was the position in which they found themselves, the Romeo and Juliet of Longfellow Park.
“What’s in a name?” Serenity should be bawling peevishly on a well-reinforced balcony, fists clenched, in characteristically belligerent mood. “That which we call a nose …” – she was generally recognized as having become somewhat obsessed with noses since Mabel Peartree had become her Sunday-school teacher – “… /By any other name would – er – smell your feet” (Serenity, like her Grandmama, had a way with words), and Max – both feet primed (Phew!) to illustrate her epigram – would leap out to astonish her. Ahhhhhh!
“Cooee!” Alice would call in the echoing hall of 11 Park Place – Cooee! not Cuckoo! – adapting the call of the Australian natives. “Cooee!”
She still felt – after all this time – oddly out of place and estranged in the realms of psychology, as if she didn’t belong there, as if she had inadvertently wandered into hidden rooms, private quarters, a Masonic hall, a place where only men should be, men holding special implements, men arranged in strenuous symbolic positions like meaningful statuary. She’d plunge confidently into the center of the room – if it could be so called – that clouded antechamber to other rooms, where the secrets would be uncovered to the elected few. It was a world in which most of the vocabulary – these rooms possessed their own language, spoken like a private code to the initiated – had the sound of words not yet fully accepted into common usage. They were words to be spoken in the same way as Mrs. Alexander Diddecott employed the latest slang she conscientiously learned from her nephew, Valentine, not certain that she’d got it right. Implied quotation marks hovered in the air like fluttering wings not strong enough to remain upright. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster dispensed with quotation marks. He was writing the book for the first time, and he quoted no one. He just adapted other people’s words a little, tweaking the nouns, and shuffling the phrases, rattling off what he had to say like Dr. Wycherley in Hard Cash as he studied Alfred Hardie.
“Therefore” – Dr. Wycherley asserted, with emphatic italicized certainty – “dissection of your talented son would doubtless reveal at this moment either steatomatous or atheromatous deposits in the cerebral blood-vessels, or an encysted abscess, probably of no very recent origin, or, at the least, considerable inspissation, and opacity, of the membranes of the encephalon, or more or less pulpy disorganization of one or other hemispheres of the brain …”
Dr. Wycherley, like Andrew Jackson Davis – well, when you were a celebrated Seer (particularly one from Poughkeepsie) you could make up your own rules – was clearly (not, perhaps, the best choice of word in view of this speech) a man who made up his own words because those that already existed were inadequate to express the wonder of what he had to say. Richard Hardie, Alfred’s father, had understood “talented son would doubtless reveal at this moment”; he had understood “probably of no very recent origin, or, at the least” and “or more or less,” and that – er – more or less, was it. Above all, however – and this was all that really mattered – Richard Hardie had understood “dissection.” This was the word at which he grabbed with considerable alacrity. He’d be all in favor of dissection, he’d wield the scalpel himself then and there, anything to get Alfred out of the way, and his hands on his money. “Hold him down whilst I hack!” that would be the order, all keen to get cleaving, a Mr. Bones, the Butcher keeping the cutting within the family, gleefully gutting Master Bones. He’d chop away, like Albert Comstock unleashed on a freshly killed cow.
(Mr. Bones, the Butcher!
(She’d remembered another Happy Family.
(Mr. Spade, the Gardener, Mr. Chip, the Carpenter, Mr. Dip, the Dyer, Mr. Soot, the Sweep, Mr. Bun, the Baker, Mr. Tape, the Tailor, and Mr. Bones, the Butcher.
(She could remember seven Happy Families.
(Six left to remember.
(How could she ever have forgotten the Bones family?
(They were the ones who’d always scared her the most.
(This was …
(This was probably why …
(This, of course, was why she’d forgotten them.
(Thought she’d forgotten them.
(All Happy Families resembled one another.
(Allegra simpered behind her fanned-out cards, hiding her face so that only her eyes showed.
(“Master Tape is not at home.”
(Slam!
(“Mrs. Bun is not at home.”
(Slam!
(Mr. Spade is not at home.”
(Slam!
(“Mr. Bones is not at home.”
(Slam!
(They were there. They were all there, hidden away within the inner rooms, whispering, plotting what to do.
(Allegra had used that same teasing expression with Bayard Guilfoyle, and now she was Mrs. Bayard Guilfoyle, away playing Happy Families for real.
(“Mrs. Guilfoyle is not at home.”
(Slam!
(“Mrs. Guilfoyle is not at home.”
(Slam!
(She was very good at it. She had had years of practice, and she always won.)
“Mad!” Richard Hardie exulted. “Mad!”
He’d barely understood a word of what Dr. Wycherley had said, but “mad, mad” was the underlying meaning, and “mad, mad” was precisely what he wanted to hear. Dr. Wycherley knew where the money was, and knew what words would please. These were the words he was paid to speak. These were the words to lock Alfred into a lunatic asylum. These were the words to get him out of the way.
“Cooee! Max!”
Siren-like, she’d lure Max into her clutches with a series of seductive cooees, all the weaponry of aboriginal allure. She should be hurling a boomerang around the curve of the staircase to stun him into submission. She should be gesturing suggestively with a comatose kangaroo, drawing him toward her with an attractive duck-billed platypus.
“Cooee! Max!”
Alice would sound delighted to see him, and he’d back away, whimpering for Theodore, forgetting to point in his panic. He was very thin, but taller than she was, with lips and ears that seemed poised for flight, plucked up and fastidiously angled.
How old was he?
How old was he, exactly?
“Hmmmmmm …”
(“It’s the madwoman. It’s the madwoman.”)
“Cooee! Max!”
“Hmmmmmm …”
(It was Lizzie Borden, with the ax and the forty whacks, and “ax” rhymed with “Max.”)
He’d not so much moved toward her as
allowed her to approach closer to him, as he backed into a corner, up against a photograph of himself and Theodore holding well-polished trumpets triumphantly aloft, as if having just discovered a new method of secret signaling. Dopey, dangly-wristed, some wild creature half concealed in the dimness, he whimpered wetly at the approach of this unfettered loony.
“Max, it’s Mrs. Albert Comstock’s birthday on April the fifteenth …”
(What better, more symbolic time than this for Mrs. Albert Comstock to have been born, the time of the beginning of spring, the shy green shoots appearing through the earth after the bitter cold of winter? It was a theme that would undoubtedly have inspired Christina Rossetti. There, amidst the gamboling lambs, the tender buds, the first falterings of growth, would be Mrs. Albert Comstock clad in diamonds and daisies, smiling like a goddess of new life.)
“… and it has occurred to me and numerous others that it would add to the happiness of the occasion …”
– She was such a hypocrite! –
“… if you were able to perform for us on the day. It would be a special treat for her.”
– And so good at it! –
Max was instantly all alert.
She half expected him to produce his little red-backed notebook. Max Webster liked to give the impression that he performed – he liked the sound of “performed,” her chosen verb was a well-sprung trap – for the sheer joy of his art, the glorious sounds he produced, and the delight he gave to others being all the reward he sought. Money, however, always – always – changed hands. Papa handled the unpleasant money side of it – it was Papa who insisted on the money, because Max was, after all, a professional in his approach, and in his standards – and it was Papa who organized his engagements. (This last was another word that deeply appealed to Max, and he said it with deeply serious professionalism. This consisted of not smiling, and nodding his head twice.) The italics and the theatrical gestures sprang into action, as Max eagerly demonstrated his capabilities. In just such a way Mary Benedict once illustrated first position, second position, third position, pirouettes, and pliés, and with considerably less grace.
“I might possibly be available on that day. I shall need to consult my book of engagements.” – He’d got that word in again – “What day of the week is it?”
He was hooked.
Might.
Possibly.
He never forgot his rôle as a professional, with thousands clamoring for his services. On “engagements” – ever a word to animate him – he grinned an automatic smile, and gold glinted from the suddenly exposed side teeth, canines and premolars like a rich vein in a deep mine. She must be careful not to let the glint from these hypnotize her, lull her into unprepared-for sleepiness, and ruin her Machiavellian machinations.
“We …”
– We: a carefully selected pronoun this time, a hint of those jealously competing crowds –
“… were thinking that you might recite one or two pieces, as well – of course – as singing.”
Then, casually, she’d produce the first of the poems she had copied out from An American Anthology.
“This is a very short one, only four lines, but we thought it might be a good one with which to begin. It’s by John James Piatt.”
She’d hand over “To a Lady on Her Art of Growing Old Gracefully,” with wide-eyed enthusiasm. The very title would have Mrs. Albert Comstock spontaneously combusting, and blazing like a destroyed civilization. Sibyl would sizzle and spin like the most colossal of all Catherine wheels, a pinwheel whooping and exploding with hissing fire and color. The very title would spell an end to Max Webster’s career at 5 Hampshire Square.
Max Webster wouldn’t be able to resist.
He always began by repeating the opening words several times, like a singer finding the right pitch.
“You ask …”
He cleared his throat, and began again.
“You ask …”
He was demonstrating his professionalism.
If you wanted professionalism, you hired Max Webster. That was the message. And if you hired Max Webster, you paid an appropriate fee. (“Fee” would be another word that Max would enjoy employing.) You got what you paid for. In an appropriate mingling of themes, Max was a living embodiment of one of Mrs. Albert Comstock’s favorite – er – maxims.
“You ask …”
He’d got it now.
He was such a professional.
He – he’d studied the statues in The Forum – struck an artistic pose, and started. He was away.
“‘To a Lady on Her Art of Growing Old Gracefully’ by John James Piatt.”
“Could you stress the word ‘Old’ a little more forcefully?” Alice asked. Her eyes were at their widest.
As a professional, Max was not accustomed to having suggestions made to him. He gave a little professional sigh to demonstrate this point, and then tried again.
“… Growing Old …” he said. He made it sound like a death sentence. Aeons stretched away, a desert landscape mistily merging into a distant horizon.
“Infinitely better, Max. You seem to know instinctively what is required.”
“… Growing Old …”
The sentence was carried out. The guillotine descended with a well-oiled whumpf.
The most celebrated of the Sibyls lived at Cumæ. Apollo fell in love with her, and said that he would give her whatever she wished. She asked to live for as many years as there were grains of sand in her hand, clutching as many as she could hold. She forgot to ask for eternal youth to accompany the passing of the centuries. She forgot to ask for eternal health and beauty. And the years began to pass.
“You ask a verse, to sing (ah, laughing face!)
Your happy art of growing old with grace?
O Muse, begin, and let the truth – but hold!
First let me see that you are growing old.”
All Max could see in the poem was the unctuous flattery, and – in consequence – the pleasure he assumed it would give Mrs. Albert Comstock, and the gratifying consequences for himself. There might be a free Comstock steak pie in it for him, a Monumental, or a Gargantuan, possibly even a Colossus. He was salivating slightly at the prospect. This was not the way this poem would be seen by Mrs. Albert Comstock. After that title – Old! Old! – “ah, laughing face!” would not be the most appropriate of phrases to employ in the circumstances.
A similar choice of verse had destroyed the blossoming career of Sobriety Goodchild twenty-five years ago when he had been trundled on to perform for Mrs. Albert Comstock’s fortieth birthday. (Everyone knew it was her fortieth birthday – Mrs. Goodchild had been busy, busy, busy – but no one dared to mention this unpalatable fact. No one volunteered to administer the forty whacks, though you could see Mrs. Goodchild’s fingers twitching. She used the expression “It’s not quite my forte” more than was strictly necessary.) Alice had a – er – faint recollection that she might possibly have suggested the offending piece to Sobriety.
Sobriety strode into the music room dressed as Enobarbus, an Ancient Roman in Egypt, a sight that unnerved hieroglyphics would have struggled in vain to convey. Alice had persuaded Sobriety that he would create a sensation – pleased smirk on his face as he visualized this – if he dressed in an appropriate costume for his performance. She had not lied. Her ideas were on a far more epic and ambitious scale than Max Webster’s were today. A little cloak, a few ruffles and frills, and Max appeared to be under the impression that he was lavishly recreating the vanished glamour of the days of yore. “Sandals!” she’d whispered to Sobriety with serpent-like seductiveness. “Bare legs, and a short tunic that comes halfway down the area between your waist and your knees!” She’d avoided saying “thighs.” “Thighs” would have caused panic in the lumpish dolt, though he still went slightly pink. (“Bare legs!” she could see him thinking, and he’d tugged unconsciously at the edge of his Norfolk jacket like an imperiled spinster.) “Bare arms!” Increased pinkness. Ambition had
won through, however, and all pinkness was ruthlessly expunged from his glowering countenance. It was either ambition or the lure of a Comstock steak pie as reward for the sensation he’d been guaranteed to create, but – whichever it was – the sandals, the bare legs, the short tunic (even shorter than she’d thought possible, or – for that matter – advisable), and the bare arms had all appeared for the delectation of the beefy birthday girl. The guaranteed sensation was duly delivered. “Anyone but me would look like a Charlotte Anne dressed like this.” That was what Sobriety had misguidedly persuaded himself. Perhaps, come to think of it, the startling change in Carlo Fiorelli’s style of statuary may very well have been caused not by Ben-Hur, but by the vision of Sobriety as he had appeared that day at Mrs. Albert Comstock’s, Alice’s contribution to the history of art. She’d been thinking of Jane Eyre’s words to John Reed. She’d been thinking of a wicked and cruel boy, who was like a murderer, a slave driver, the Roman emperors. And – even though Enobarbus wasn’t an emperor – she’d persuaded Sobriety to dress like a Roman emperor, or, at the least, in an approximation of Roman dress, a garb peculiarly unsuited to his distinctly unæsthetic anatomy. Anesthetics, not æsthetics! That was the urgent strangled cry on April 15, 1878, as the appalled audience caught its first glimpse of Sobriety Goodchild, rather too much of Sobriety Goodchild.
Sobriety had very thin legs and very thin arms. He had very large knees. Mrs. Albert Comstock (astounded, not at all enthusiastic) found herself being addressed as Cleopatra – Alice had just finished reading Antony and Cleopatra – as he stretched his very thin arms up toward her, a suppliant begging for alms. He went down on one of the very large knees, his perilously short tunic gaping in a way that made your eyes water, giving Mrs. Albert Comstock an extensive view of his Boys’ Camel’s Hair Color Drawers With Very Warm Extra Heavy Wool Fleece On Inside. It had been a very cold day, but you had to admit that the touch of camel’s hair had shown a regard for detailed research that was distinctly impressive. He and his mama must have ransacked Oldermann & Oldermann’s in search of drawers constructed of just the right material for historical authenticity. “By th’ mass,” Sobriety must have shouted in triumph, flourishing the drawers like a flag of victory, and demonstrating an unexpected knowledge of Hamlet, “and ’tis like a camel indeed.” Oldermann & Oldermann (Particularly To Be Recommended For Unanachronistic Underwear!). What was brazenly displayed to the audience’s disbelieving eyes – “You saw what?” Charlotte would be shrieking, when she told her – did, however, look far too warm for the banks of the Nile, far too comprehensively buttoned and overlapped for comfort and coolness. The embarrassing solecism of unsuitable sweatiness was an ever-present possibility for those thus clad. (“… From many an ancient river,” they’d be singing in All Saints’, ever after seeing the Nile, seeing – shudder! – Cleopatra, seeing – another shudder – Sobriety’s camel-colored sartorial sauciness vividly in front of them, “/From many a palmy plain …”)
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