Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  Walter said, ‘Gimme back that paper.’

  ‘You can have it,’ said Elsie. She handed him the paper. ‘Go ahead, read it till you get a stroke. You oughta see yourself.’

  Walter began to read aloud. ‘Is your husband as attentive to you now that you are married as when he was when he was courting you? Answer: Mrs Elsie Jenssen, West 174th Street, housewife: “Yes, in fact more so. Before we were married my husband was not exactly what would be called the romantic type. He was definitely shy. However, since our marriage he has become the ideal man from the romantic point of view. None of your Tyrone Powers or Clark Gables for me.” For God’s sake!’

  ‘Well, so what?’ said Elsie.

  ‘So what? Do you think that’s funny or something? What the hell kind of a thing is that you’re putting in the paper? Go around blabbing private matters. I guess all the neighbors know how much we owe on the car. I suppose you tell everyone how much I get. How do you think a person’s going to have any self-respect if you go running around and shooting off your face to newspaper reporters?’

  ‘I didn’t go around anywhere. He stopped me.’

  ‘Who stopped you?’

  ‘The reporter. On Columbus Circle. I was just coming around the corner and he came up and tipped his hat like a gentleman and asked me. It says so there.’

  Walter wasn’t listening. ‘The office,’ he said. ‘Oh, God. What they’re going to do to me at that office. McGonigle. Jeffries. Hall. Wait’ll they see it. They prob’ly read it already. I can just see them waiting till I get in. I go to my desk and then they all start calling me Tyrone Power and Clark Gable.’ He stared at her. ‘You know what’s gonna happen, don’t you? They’ll start kidding till they get too loud, and the boss’ll want to know what it’s all about, and he’ll find out. Maybe they won’t come right out and snitch, but he’ll find out. And he’ll call me in his office and say I’m fired, and he’ll be right. I oughta be fired. Listen, when you work for a finance corporation you don’t want your employees going around getting a lot of silly publicity. What happens to the public confidence if—’

  ‘It doesn’t say a word about you. It says Elsie Jenssen. It doesn’t say where you work or anything else. You look in the phone book and there’s any number of Walter Jenssens.’

  ‘Three, including Queens, too.’

  ‘Well, it could be another one.’

  ‘Not living on 174th Street. Even if the public doesn’t know, they’ll know it at the office. What if they don’t care about the publicity part? All the boss’ll want to know is I have a wife that – that goes blabbing around, and believe you me, they don’t want employees with wives that go blabbing around. The public—’

  ‘Oh, you and the public.’

  ‘Yes, me and the public. This paper has a circulation of two million.’

  ‘Oh, hooey,’ said Elsie, and began to stack the breakfast dishes.

  ‘Hooey. All right, hooey, but I’m not going to that office today. You call up and tell them I have a cold.’

  ‘You big baby. If you want to stay home, call them up yourself,’ said Elsie.

  ‘I said you call them up. I’m not going to that office.’

  ‘You go to the office or I’ll – who do you think you are, anyway? The time you had off this year. Your uncle’s funeral and your brother’s wedding. Go ahead, take the day off, take the week off. Let’s take a trip around the world. Just quit your job and I’ll go back and ask Mr Fenton to give me back my old job. I’ll support you. I’ll support you while you sit here, you big baboon.’ She put down the dishes and put her apron to her eyes and ran out the room.

  Walter took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth but did not light it. He took it out of his mouth and tapped it on the table and lit it. He got up and looked out the window. He stood there a rather long time, with one foot on the radiator and his chin in hand, looking at the wall across the court. Then he went back to his chair and picked the paper off the floor and began to read.

  First he reread his wife’s interview, and then for the first time he read the other interviews. There were five others. The first, a laughing Mrs Bloomberg, Columbus Avenue, housewife, said her husband was so tired when he came home nights that as far as she was concerned romance was only a word in the dictionary.

  A Mrs Petrucelli, East 123rd Street, housewife, said she hadn’t noticed any difference between her husband’s premarital and present attentiveness. But she had only been married five weeks.

  There were three more. The husband of one woman was more attentive, but she did not compare him with Tyrone Power and Clark Gable. The husband of another woman was less attentive, but she did not get sarcastic like Mrs Bloomberg. The last woman said her husband was radio operator on a ship and she didn’t really have much way of telling because she only saw him about every five weeks.

  Jenssen studied their photographs, and one thing you had to say for Elsie: she was the prettiest. He read the interviews once more, and he reluctantly admitted that – well, if you had to give an interview, Elsie’s was the best. Mrs Bloomberg’s was the worst. He certainly would hate to be Bloomberg when his friends saw that one.

  He put down the paper and lit another cigarette and stared at his shoes. He began feeling sorry for Mr Bloomberg, who was probably a hard-working guy who really did come home tired. He ended – he ended by beginning to plan what retorts he would have when the gang at the office began to kid him. He began to feel pretty good about it.

  He put on his coat and hat and overcoat and then he went to the bedroom. Elsie was lying there, her face deep in the pillow, sobbing.

  ‘Well, I guess I’ll go to the office now,’ he said. She stopped sobbing.

  ‘What?’ she said, but did not let him see her face.

  ‘Going downtown now,’ he said.

  ‘What if they start kidding you?’

  ‘Well, what if they do?’ he said.

  She sat up. ‘Are you cross at me any more?’ she said.

  ‘Nah, what the hell?’ he said.

  She smiled and got up and put her arm around his waist and walked down the hall with him to the door. It wasn’t a very wide hall, but she kept her arm around him. He opened the door and set his hat on his head. She kissed his cheek and his mouth. He rearranged his hat again. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘See you tonight.’ It was the first thing that came into his head. He hadn’t said that in years.

  (1939)

  ★

  Stealing Up

  by Bernard O’Donoghue

  I’ve always hated gardening: the way

  The earth gets under your nails

  And in the chevrons of your shoes.

  So I don’t plan it; I steal up on it,

  Casually, until I find—

  Hey presto! – the whole lawn’s cut

  Or the sycamore’s wand suddenly

  Sports an ungainly, foal-like leaf.

  Similarly, I’d have written to you

  Sooner, if I’d had the choice.

  But morning after morning I woke up

  To find the same clouds in the sky,

  Disabling the heart. But tomorrow

  Maybe I’ll get up to find an envelope,

  Sealed, addressed to you, propped against

  My cup, lit by a slanting sun.

  (1995)

  ★

  ‘Many bad events originate from just an inch away from the everyday,’ observed novelist Richard Ford. Such sentiment can be found also in the work of Ford’s direct antecedent in American letters, Richard Yates.

  Here, in Yates’s story, ‘Bells in the Morning’, the balance of the future tips into the present. The possibilities of a new dawn bristle bravely amid the lavender mist.

  Bells in the Morning

  by Richard Yates

  At first they were grotesque shapes, nothing more. Then they became drops of acid, cutting the scum of his thick, dreamless sleep. Finally he knew they were words, but they carried no meaning.

  ‘Cramer,’ Murp
hy was saying. ‘Let’s go, Cramer, wake up. Let’s go, Cramer.’

  Through sleepy paste in his mouth he swore at Murphy. Then the wind hit him, blue-cold as Murphy pulled the raincoat away from his face and chest.

  ‘You sure like to sleep, don’t you, kid.’ Murphy was looking at him in that faintly derisive way.

  Cramer was awake, moistening the roof of his mouth. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, I’m all right now.’ Squirming, he sat up against the dirt wall of the hole slowly, like an old man. His cold legs sprawled out, cramped in their mud-caked pants. He pressed his eyes, then lifted the helmet and scratched his scalp, and the roots of his matted hair were sore. Everything was blue and gray. Cramer dug for a cigarette, embarrassed at having been hard to wake up again. ‘Go ahead and get some sleep, Murphy,’ he said. ‘I’m awake now.’

  ‘No, I’ll stay awake too,’ Murphy said. ‘Six o’clock. Light.’

  Cramer wanted to say, ‘All right, then, you stay awake and I’ll go back to sleep.’ Instead he let his shivering come out in a shuddering noise and said, ‘Christ, it’s cold.’

  It was in Germany, in the Ruhr. It was spring, and warm enough to make you sweat as you walked in the afternoon, but still cold at night and in the early morning. Still too cold for a raincoat in a hole.

  They stared toward where the enemy was supposed to be. Nothing to see; only a dark area that was the plowed field and then a light one that was the mist.

  ‘They threw in a couple about a half hour ago,’ Murphy was saying. ‘Way the hell off, over to the left. Ours have been going over right along; don’t know why they’ve quit now. You slept through the whole works.’ Then he said, ‘Don’t you ever clean that?’ and he was looking, in the pale light, at Cramer’s rifle. ‘Bet the son of a bitch won’t fire.’

  Cramer said he would clean it, and he almost said for Christ’s sake lay off. It was better that he didn’t, for Murphy would have answered something about only trying to help you, kid. And anyway, Murphy was right.

  ‘Might as well make some coffee,’ Murphy said, cramming dirty hands into his pockets. ‘Smoke won’t show in this mist.’

  Cramer found a can of coffee powder, and they both fumbled with clammy web-equipment for their cups and canteens. Murphy scraped out a hollow in the dirt between his boots and put a K-ration box there. He lit it, and they held their cups over the slow, crawling flame.

  In a little while they were comfortable, swallowing coffee and smoking, shivering when fingers of the first yellow sunlight caressed their shoulders and necks. The grayness had gone now; things had color. Trees were pencil sketches on the lavender mist. Murphy said he hoped they wouldn’t have to move out right away, and Cramer agreed. That was when they heard the bells; church bells, thin and feminine in tone, quavering as the wind changed. A mile, maybe two miles to the rear.

  ‘Listen,’ Murphy said quietly. ‘Don’t that sound nice?’ That was the word. Nice. Round and dirty, Murphy’s face was relaxed now. His lips bore two black parallel lines, marking the place where the mouth closed when Murphy made it firm. Between the lines the skin was pink and moist; and these inner lips, Cramer had noticed, were the only part of a face that always stayed clean. Except the eyes.

  ‘My brother and me used to pull the bells every Sunday at home,’ Murphy said. ‘When we was kids, I mean. Used to get half a dollar apiece for it. Son of a bitch, if that don’t sound just the same.’

  Listening, they sat smiling shyly at each other. Church bells on misty mornings were things you forgot sometimes, like fragile china cups and women’s hands. When you remembered them you smiled shyly, mostly because you didn’t know what else to do.

  ‘Must be back in that town we came through yesterday,’ Cramer said. ‘Seems funny they’d be ringing church bells there.’

  Murphy said it did seem funny, and then it happened. The eyes got big, and when the voice came it was small, intense, not Murphy’s voice at all. ‘Reckon the war’s over?’ Something fluttered down Cramer’s spine. ‘By God, Murphy. By God, it makes sense. It makes sense, all right.’

  ‘Damned if it don’t,’ Murphy said, and they gaped at each other, starting to grin; wanting to laugh and shout, to get out and run.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ Murphy said.

  Cramer heard his own voice, high and babbling: ‘That could be why the artillery stopped.’

  Could it be this easy? Could it happen this way? Would the message come down from headquarters? Would Battalion get it from Regiment? Would Francetti, the platoon runner, come stumbling out across the plowed field with the news? Francetti, waving his pudgy arms and screaming. ‘Hey, you guys! Come on back! It’s all over! It’s all over, you guys!’ Crazy. Crazy. But why not?

  ‘By God, Murphy, do you think so?’

  ‘Watch for flares,’ Murphy said. ‘They might shoot flares.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s an idea, they might shoot flares.’

  They could see nothing, hear nothing except the faint, silver monotony of the bells. Remember this. Remember every second of it. Remember Murphy’s face and the hole and the canteens and the mist. Keep it all.

  Watch for flares.

  Remember the date. March something. No, April. April something, 1945. What did Meyers say the other day? Day before yesterday? Meyers told you the date then. He said, ‘What do you know, this is Good—’

  Cramer swallowed, then looked at Murphy quickly. ‘Wait a minute wait a minute. We’re wrong.’ He watched Murphy’s smile grow limp as he told him. ‘Meyers. Remember what Meyers said about Good Friday? This is Easter Sunday, Murph.’

  Murphy eased himself back against the side of the hole. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Oh yeah, sure. That’s right.’

  Cramer swallowed again and said, ‘Kraut civilians probably going to church back there.’

  Murphy’s lips came together in a single black line, and he was quiet for a while. Then, stubbing his cigarette in the dirt, he said, ‘Son of a bitch. Easter Sunday.’

  (2004)

  ★

  Summer Dawn

  by William Morris

  Pray but one prayer for me ’twixt thy closed lips,

  Think but one thought of me up in the stars.

  The summer night waneth, the morning light slips

  Faint and grey ’twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud-bars,

  That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:

  Patient and colourless, though Heaven’s gold

  Waits to float through them along with the sun.

  Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,

  The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold

  The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;

  Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn,

  Round the lone house in the midst of the corn,

  Speak but one word to me over the corn,

  Over the tender, bow’d locks of the corn.

  (1856)

  ★

  KEN FOLLETT

  I always have a P. G. Wodehouse novel on the bedside table. He is one of those authors whose books you can open at any page, knowing that within a few lines you will be enchanted, regardless of where you happen to have entered the story. The same is true of Dickens and Proust, though not of all great novelists. With George Eliot, you have to know the beginning to love the end, as with a Beethoven symphony; and if you tried it with Tolstoy, you would be even more than usually confused.

  It’s partly the sheer exuberance of Wodehouse’s prose: the absurd imagery, the verbal cleverness, the barmy hyperbole of the dialogue. There’s wit on every page and a couple of hearty chuckles in every chapter. But there is something else, a quality not so often noticed: his plotting is consummate.

  Popular fiction is fractal. Not only does the novel have a beginning, a middle and an end; so do every chapter, every scene, and even the longer paragraphs. The dramatic question is posed, the suspense is drawn out, and the resolution suggests a new question. The warp and woof of Wodehous
e’s storytelling are so closely woven that it rarely takes more than a page for the reader to grasp what is at issue and to engage with the hopes and fears of the characters.

  The opening chapter of The Code of the Woosters is exceptional even by his standards. In the first two or three thousand words of light-hearted banter, he establishes an astonishing number of story points, including:

  • Gussie Fink-Nottle is going to marry Madeline Bassett;

  • Bertie Wooster loathes Madeline;

  • Madeline believes Bertie is hopelessly in love with her;

  • Madeline’s father, Sir Watkyn Bassett, is the magistrate who jailed Bertie for stealing a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race night;

  • Sir Watkyn and Uncle Tom are rival collectors of antique silver;

  • Uncle Tom wants to buy a valuable old cream jug in the shape of a cow;

  • Aunt Dahlia is hoping to persuade the novelist Pomona Grindle to write a serial for Milady’s Boudoir;

  • Bertie will do anything for an invitation to a meal cooked by Aunt Dahlia’s French chef, Anatole;

  • Jeeves wants to take Bertie on a world cruise.

  Each of these is essential to the plot, but the reader does not actually need to remember them, for Wodehouse the craftsman will meticulously remind us whenever it’s important.

  The climax of chapter one is a farcical scene of broad comedy into which Wodehouse manages somehow to insert a strain of satire on Fascism (the book was first published in 1938).

  Like the mechanism of an Edwardian clock, Wodehouse’s plot will whirr and click faultlessly, while the reader notices nothing but the elegance of the dial and the charm of the chime.

  Wodehouse himself often said that he is not the man for a reader who wants a book to plumb the depths of human despair. He compared his novels to musical comedy. They are delightful, spellbinding and quite unreal, and just the thing to put me in the frame of mind to slip into dreamland.

  Chapter One of The Code of the Woosters

  by P. G. Wodehouse

  I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves.

  ‘Good evening, Jeeves.’