The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

  “Zo, your name is Humdinger?” I say when he arrives and tells us his name. “Sit. How long have you a butler vanted to be, Mr. Humdinger?”

  “How long have I, have I what, Mrs. Mendelbaum?”

  All of them bad ears. Repeating, repeating, I spend all day repeating to them. So I repeat again.

  “Well, never,” says Humdinger.

  So this answer is new. All of them before tell me they wanted at birth butlers to be. So, where do I go from here, I think? Should I ask him what he means by such an answer? Should I go on with questions? “Zo the next question, then. I zee you arrive mit out the hat?”

  “I don’t believe I own a hat, Mrs. Mendelbaum,” says Humdinger.

  “No hat? No hat?” Now I am confused. What should I say to such a person?

  “I find a collar much more satisfactory,” says this Humdinger, smiling even. “How are you, Mrs. Mendelbaum? How is it working out for you in this gentleman’s employ?”

  “How is … how is it for me, ahzes ponim?”

  I look at this man. Yes, he looks very neat. A nice black suit, a little old maybe, a little threadbare, but this I don’t mind, he has worked, this man, and almost a collar like the kind they call mandarin. What is with such a collar and no tie? Maybe I think he is more up to date with butler fashion. Maybe they wear collars and no hats now. This is practical. Hats can fall in soup when you make it. A hat on such a tall man can be knocked off in doorways. And it is a good question, how do I enjoy working for Mr. Knockers? He should only know. But still, how else can he find out what kind of man will maybe employ him? He is thinking of himself, this one, smart fellow.

  “Of course, you are thinking of it from your end. But still, no résumé, no appointment, what am I to think?” I ask him.

  “Well, no résumé, no, but I did call Mr. Knockers to say I’d be stopping in for a brief visit, but he just said, Another one, and hung up. Is he about?”

  “Feh, him!” I say. “Bal toyreh! He is not in charge. I am in charge. He tells me you are coming. A Humdinger. He cannot make out why. He does not say it is a person who wants the butler job. But does he remember from one day to the next? Well, perhaps you will see.”

  “I think maybe there has been a misunderstanding about my arrival,” says Humdinger.

  “Yes, yes, but we will overlook it. You should have sent a résumé. But you have not. And you have not the hat, but at least you have the collar. And you do not seem so afraid of me as these pansy boys who came before.”

  “No, but you see, Mrs. Mendelbaum,” he begins again, but I will not let him. No, this one will not himself do in with silly prattle. So I stop him. He is the last chance. And he is not so bad, after all. He does not seem too much one for the fancy things. The types who come before, movies, books, the fashion plates they make of themselves. Don’t think I don’t know the type. This one looks as if he could worry.

  “SO!” I make the sudden decision. My hands they slam down on the table to show this is final and I get up. “You are hired. No, not another wort! Ich hob es in drerd! I am exhausted. Ganz farmutshet. I am taking a nap.”

  MELINE

  MRS. MENDELBAUM left a bemused Humdinger watching her disappear upstairs. Then he did a strange thing. He was putting his teacup by the sink, which was always stopped up, and he rolled up his sleeves, took the whole thing apart, fixed it, and then went upstairs to introduce himself to Uncle as the new butler.

  “At least,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum to us later with the least scorn she had expressed about any of them, “he wasn’t a QUITTER.” But we suspected she was willing to be more forgiving with him than the others because he was the last applicant.

  “Best for last perhaps,” said Jocelyn.

  “Best or worst, him I was hiring. Your uncle never talks to me and not even a phone to use whenever I like. Just his radio phone, which I have to go up to that LAIR to ask for. No television. And how long can I listen to the radio?”

  Mrs. Mendelbaum had tried for a week to convince Uncle Marten to buy a television set, but this he stood firmly against. “I won’t have it. They’re evil. Nothing kills off brain cells faster. They’re noisy and they bring the entire world into your home. I’ve a good mind to throw that radio into the sea as well, and I will if I hear one more word about it.” After that, Mrs. Mendelbaum was afraid to even talk to him for several days, and Jocelyn and I speculated that she hired Humdinger out of pure spite because every time Uncle Marten ran into him in the hallway, he jumped with fright. Humdinger did look like something that someone had dug up.

  Humdinger didn’t walk so much as he padded around like the cat he brought with him. He appeared suddenly behind you when you least expected. When he smiled, it was always at his own no doubt strange thoughts, barely a movement in his lips as if he had the neat trick of containing the smile within his eyes. As if even his smile was silent.

  Because Humdinger insisted on slithering about so, we tended to forget about him, which seemed to suit him fine. When he spoke at all, it was to correct the pronunciation of his name, which none of us seemed to be able to get right either once we saw it spelled. He would correct and we would forget and he would correct again. It was Humdinger, “din” as in “dinner,” “ger” as in “German.” But the tendency was to want to call him Humdinger as in wasn’t he just a real one. Eventually, though, we caught on, all except Uncle Marten, who never called him anything but Humdinger to rhyme with “ringer.” Humdinger, after the first time, seemed to give up on him and never corrected Uncle. Jocelyn felt this was very bad for Uncle. She said she could see that he had been coddled and indulged, and that he didn’t adhere to the manners the rest of us were supposed to. I guessed by that she meant me and her and Mrs. Mendelbaum, but she might as easily have meant the rest of the world. Jocelyn seemed to live by some pretty absolute standards.

  Uncle Marten, once Humdinger arrived and succeeded in keeping Mrs. Mendelbaum busy and out of his hair, forgot all of us. He seemed to find it harder and harder to accept that the people who were on the island with him were not a temporary condition like houseguests or fleas but were going to be here for good. There would be no reprieve. So he locked himself more and more in his room, coming down only for meals and often working right through them, so that he wasn’t really present for those either. It didn’t matter to me and Jocelyn; we were up nights looking for airplane parts and, even though we slept late in the morning, were always tired. Our clothes never seemed to quite dry out, and I was afraid to use the dryer because it would attract Mrs. Mendelbaum’s attention to how often we went out and how wet we got. So far no one seemed to have noticed we were going out at night.

  MARTEN KNOCKERS

  ONCE THIS FELLOW HUMDINGER ARRIVED, things seemed more orderly in the house, and Mrs. Mendelbaum began leaving me alone for more periods of time. Although I didn’t like having people around, I oddly enough did begin to develop a certain fledgling affection for Humdinger’s cat, who had been delivered by helicopter after Humdinger was hired. The cat, for some catlike reason of her own, decided that my hermitic temperament made me a soul mate and took to hanging out in my room with me, lying at my feet as I worked, or curling up on my desk or my bookcase. Once she tried to curl up on top of my head, perhaps because my bald head was so shiny and attractive. I always did think that a bald head, from a certain perspective, must be enticing. And now I had found out whose perspective it was. It was a cat’s! Perhaps she thought she could be my missing hair. But, of course, it didn’t work and the cat slid down my back, clawing for her life all the way, leaving huge scratch marks in my shirt, which made Mrs. Mendelbaum make caustic comments about my private life when she did the the laundry. She’d seen plenty when she was a girl in Vienna. Nothing would surprise her, she grumbled. Really, sometimes I did wonder about her past, but everyone has secrets and I had no desire to find out Mrs. Mendelbaum’s. That I could hardly have much of a private life, living as I did, was of no matter to her. She knew mankind and its slippery practices
. I seldom tried to change Mrs. Mendelbaum’s mind about anything once she had taken a notion, which for her was apparently a process akin to pouring cement.

  After the cat had scratched my back, whenever she came anywhere near my head, I would say, “Get away from me, you evil feline scratchy thing.” Then I would open a tin of pull-top tuna I kept just for the kitty in my room. Imagine, I thought! Now I’m preparing meals for a cat! I supposed I would be making her her own goose for Christmas. Christmas!

  I suddenly realized that Christmas would be in several weeks and I began to plan for it. Despite the fact that to most people the celebration of Christmas, if it involves anything, involves other people, and I, I must admit, don’t like other people, I have a deep and abiding affection for Christmas. Every little Dickensian thing about it is splendid. I’m partial to plum puddings and deep Victorian purples and gold angels and Christmas tablecloths with red-and-green plaids and those candelabra where the reindeer antlers hold a dozen votive candles. Give me port and roasting chestnuts and spiced cider and gaily wrapped packages and stockings hung by the chimney with care and girls in velvet dresses and shiny patent leather Mary Janes and Handel’s Messiah and Christmas carols and church music booming majestically through cathedrals. And bad weather and snuggling by the fire and unwrapping new books and eating too much candy and homemade cookies and old bad movies that I remember vaguely from my youth, since I’d never owned a television myself. I was very fond of all of it. Unfortunately, I never had any of this because you just don’t do it when you live alone.

  However, keeping one jaundiced eye on the cat that rainy windy November afternoon when the fire was crackling and I watched out the window as Jocelyn and Meline tripped about the island peering into trees and bushes, which seemed to be their daily demented pursuit—you wouldn’t catch me out on such a blustery day—it occurred to me that I now had a houseful of people, all of whom, presumably, would be wanting Christmas. Later it was pointed out to me that Mrs. Mendelbaum was Jewish and might prefer Hanukkah. It was the type of detail that often escaped me.

  I was unusually happy and excited at the thought that I could finally have a nice old-fashioned Victorian Christmas. I would be indulging not just myself but the entire household. Perhaps my nieces wouldn’t want green and red velvet bows attached to their heads, but there was always the cat … Yes, the cat. Perhaps we should get more cats. A … a flock of cats. All with velvet bows.

  Christmas was the first upside to having a household that I had come across. And, of course, it is so nice to find an upside to anything, I always think. So every time I got stuck on the paper I was writing, and I seemed to get stuck quite a lot, perhaps because my mind would keep drifting back to Christmas, I would go on the Internet, which later would prove to be a thing of the Devil, so tempting was it, and order things. “I’ll keep old Sam busy,” I said to myself, ordering six velvet stockings, one for the cat (well, she was really an exceptionally nice cat), tree decorations, and a box of petits fours. As I really got in gear, the helicopter started dropping packages all over the place constantly, but unfortunately the wind carried many away or they got stuck in trees and rocky crevices and sometimes floated out to sea and were never seen again, and I would think months later, I wonder what happened to that box of popcorn balls I ordered, and where are the snowmen candles?

  Meline and Jocelyn found quite a few boxes on their walks and would give them to Humdinger, who delivered them to me, and I would be forced to complain to Humdinger about the stupidity of companies sending me boxes of broken tree ornaments.

  “You can’t get good help anymore,” agreed Humdinger.

  It was becoming perfectly clear that Humdinger was the only person in the house besides myself with any sense. In fact, I really felt quite lucky to have found Humdinger. When I could remember who he was. Unfortunately, I did seem to run up against him in dark hallways quite a bit, and you really couldn’t blame me for shrieking. The man does look like he walked straight out of one of those horror movies. What was the name of them, they were all alike, and they all seemed to have Boris Karloff in them somewhere. At any rate, it clearly never bothered him, although the girls seemed to think I might control myself, and you don’t want to hear what Mrs. Mendelbaum had to say on the matter; after all, for years I had run into no one in my halls, so I could hardly be blamed for reacting when I seemed suddenly to be transported into The Night of the Living Dead. “Anyhow, go on now, keep Mrs. Mendelbaum out of trouble,” I urged him.

  “Very good,” said Humdinger and padded back downstairs in his size-twelve Frankenstein shoes, which he nonetheless managed to make soundless.

  Who is that man? I thought, already back to work on negative density. Oh, and I must remember to order a dozen crystal punch cups. There was, after all, a great deal to be done in the universe, and matter to be rearranged by ordering it from one place to another via the Internet. Our lives are full, only we never think about it, busy displacing matter from one place to the next, constantly rearranging the order of the cosmos with computers and mailboxes and money and little blips, making contact with people who fill these orders without ever knowing it, changing the shape of their days, changing the shape of warehouses, we are constantly affecting everything around us in the most mundane ways. We are all part of everything that moves, and most of it is so trivial. We think a sand dollar’s life is trivial or a fly’s, but look at our own. Why, it’s all completely ridiculous. Oooo, I wonder if I remembered to order the marzipan fruits? They say there’s a limited supply. Order soon. Why don’t they just make more? People are extraordinary.

  MELINE

  AS THE SOGGY DAYS went on and no airplane parts were found, I could see that Jocelyn was getting discouraged. She traipsed back into the house at 5 a.m. one morning, covered in twigs, and said, “Honestly, Meline, if we don’t find an airplane part soon I’m going to stop this. It’s too cold and I get too tired.”

  “What else are you going to do with your time?” I asked. “What are you saving your energy for? We’ll just have to look harder!”

  We didn’t speak all day after that. She tired me with her languid negativity. She drooped about. I felt I constantly had to prod her to keep her on track. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the important thing was to BUILD THE AIRPLANE. And I was certain there were airplane parts out there. After dinner that night, which was silent because Uncle Marten was working on negative density, Humdinger never spoke unless spoken to, and Mrs. Mendelbaum had gone to bed early with a cold, Jocelyn and I had our dessert in the wing chairs by the fire.

  Uncle Marten had suggested it as a way of getting rid of us in the oblique way he suggested things, saying, “Dessert together in the wing chairs before the fire. Now, that’s what I’d do if I had a cousin and nothing better to do with my time,” and had taken his up to his room, and now we sat there three feet apart but not speaking. I could have put my feet up on her chair, it was that close. I longed to do it if just to exasperate her. How could she sit so close to me and yet pretend so convincingly I wasn’t even there? I wasn’t looking for any kind of profound connection, but I didn’t want her to act like I didn’t exist. That was just weird. She ate her rice pudding methodically, and by the expression on her face she could have been sitting in a bus terminal, creating boundaries and fences around herself with the set of her body. You had the sense that if you tried to move in within three feet you would be zapped by invisible force fields.

  “Have you noticed there seems to be a lot of new stuff around lately?” I asked suddenly, as my eyes moved away from her to the wing chair. “These chairs, for instance.”

  “These chairs were always here,” she said calmly, wiping her mouth with the napkin she had brought from the table and placed upon her lap.

  “Chairs were always here. These are new. The old ones were black or blue or something. These are cranberry and green and they match all those new candles on the mantel. And look, the bottom of the chairs still have leaves and twi
gs on them. These chairs have been dropped by helicopter.”

  “So Uncle Marten got some new chairs. So what?” asked Jocelyn.

  “It’s part of it all. There’s new Christmas crap everywhere.”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t use that word. My father really disliked it.”

  “My father used it all the time. You know, I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that our fathers were brothers.”

  “Or that Uncle Marten was brother to either of them,” said Jocelyn.

  This was true and opened up a whole new line of speculation for me. “Why do you suppose our fathers became pilots and Uncle Marten didn’t?” I asked her. “And don’t you think it’s strange, now that you think of it, that Uncle Marten would move to an island where the chief thing that happened was that pilots crashed their planes there? Doesn’t that seem a little odd to you when his own brothers were pilots? Doesn’t that sound like it might be wishful thinking? Doesn’t that say something about him?”

  “Like what?” she asked. Sometimes it was like talking to a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

  “Well, I don’t know. Like maybe he liked the idea of pilots crashing.”

  “Why would he like that?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Jocelyn. People like strange things,” I said vaguely because I didn’t know either.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. He already told us he bought the island because it was convenient and for sale. I’m sure the fact that pilots crashed on it was neither here nor there as far as he was concerned.”

  “And another thing I’d like to know is why Uncle Marten keeps filling up the house with Christmas crap!”

  “There’s that word again,” said Jocelyn.

  I was suddenly overcome with curiosity for the first time since the accident. And Jocelyn didn’t seem to care at all. Sometimes I had the almost irresistible urge to take a crowbar and pry open the closed doors to her brain. “Well, think about it, Jocelyn. Why do you think he would do such a thing?”