Chapter 16. Margaret’s ruminations re. telephones. Back when I first wrote The Standard Murder Mystery, cell phones were barely a blip on the horizon. My attempts at prognostication clearly goofed in putting their development farther in the future than it turned out to be. I am interested, though, to notice that, although in 2011 I re-imagined the R.S.A. without consulting my earlier work (except the “Computer Wizard” stories) at all, the landline telephones of the new version—even in a stage of technological development more or less equivalent to our own timeline’s 1950s—also “chime” instead of “ringing.”
Chapter 25. For my own auctorial information, I drafted a longer end for this chapter than I ever intended to use. Considering that it may help elucidate certain puzzling points, including the perennial question, “But why doesn’t the bad guy just finish the good guy off right away?” I include what I originally left (and always intended to leave) on the cutting-room floor:
Surely visible agitation at this point would not be too undignified. Expecting momently to feel the shot, Corwin lifted his glass and took a swallow, too fast. He choked, coughed, took another sip, and got his hand once more to the chair’s arm, breathed deeply and looked at the Harlequin again.
White was smiling, as if in some amusement. Or it might have been a trick of the shadows.
“Conscience, White? The Furies?” Corwin said. “One murder—heavy enough. How they’d lash you for two!”
Harlequin shook his head. “I would feel very little compunction at disposing of a blackmailer.”
Corwin took another deep breath and determined not to babble. “Neither would you care to give a vile blackmailer too quick an end, is that it?”
“Finish your drink, Poe. I’ll give any man time for that.”
“Cruel-kind.” Corwin leaned against the back of the chair. “It might be silent only in your own perception, of course. It might prove a dueling pistol, and not so silent.”
“Or you might scream. In that case, you will not finish your drink, and I will still have time, before anyone comes, to wipe the gun and throw it into the garden. It was obtained through devious channels,” White added boastingly. “It will not be traced to my possession.”
Corwin swallowed down the scream that threatened to burst out for sheer perverseness. “Interesting, then, that you did not use it for the original murder.”
“And have to discard it, when there was a more anonymous weapon at hand, just as effective?”
“And it might not be a silent weapon,” Corwin found himself repeating.
White smiled. “Keep my secret, Poe. For years, for probably most of my life, I have been a reality-perceiver. It’s a silent.”
Closing his eyes, Corwin remarked against the rising panic, “You’ve been devilishly clever at hiding it.”
“Yes, haven’t I?” White began to expound on his cleverness. The scream began to rise again, and again Corwin swallowed it down. It’s time for the deadly calm to descend on me, he thought. Deadly calm, why this delay? The victim of the Inquisition fell calm, and smeared the highly-spiced meat over his bonds, and the rats chewed them away to set him free, but had the torture been less prolonged ... “Would you be equally clever,” he said, as White ceased speaking, “at hiding a body?”
“No doubt I would. But I’ll have little need to hide yours.”
“Unless by burial alive. The condemned felon’s last request, White. I conceive a blackmailer no less than a murderer may be granted a last request.”
White hesitated. “It would be more convenient for me to kill you at once. As well as safer.” Yet he looked vaguely wistful. (Or was that the Harlequin make-up?)
“Safer? With your cleverness, White? Aided by your perception of reality?” Corwin took another drink of brandy—not all, he was careful to leave as much as possible in the snifter, for when it was visibly emptied, Harlequin might wait no longer. “And then, you’ll be able to keep your gun.”
White drained his wineglass and set it on the mantel. “They’ll make a search for you.”
“No more turmoil, surely, than a new murder would cause. Longer, perhaps—more extended, but eventually you’ll have proved too clever. They’ll have to give it up.” Corwin glanced at his left hand and saw it had a tight talon grip on the arm of the chair. With a conscious effort, he uncurled the fingers and let them hang loose.
“And meanwhile, the search for you will take some of their attention from young Standard’s case. As your silly spat with Angela Garvey took their attention from that bad joke about my clothing.”
Corwin thought, Angela! If you knew ... But he said, in quite a detached tone, “Yes. Yes, I think it may.”
White rubbed his chin. “And you actually suppose you would prefer a slow death to a quick one?”
“Humor me. Recollect my personal fancies.”
A sort of chuckle from the lips painted black. “After the way you shrieked at a simple fingerprinting, you think you would enjoy some sort of burial alive?
At the reminder, his fingertips ached. They had been clawing up on the chair again. He loosened them by drumming them softly on the velvet, sighed, and stared into the glowing embers. A few thin blue flames darted from a length of slow-to-burn log. “Not enjoy. It would be suitable. For me. A part of the mind—that part which during life ponders one’s grave-site with a view to pleasant shade trees and a green prospect from a pretty knoll—recognizes the appropriateness, weighs this against the terrors, and chooses it. And them. I—” He said no more, feeling a few tears starting to his eyes. He drained off his brandy.
“Very good,” said White. “I see you’ve finished your drink. Shall we investigate the squire’s cellars for ... Amontillado, wasn’t it?”
And Corwin pondered that the wrong one of them was wearing the Harlequin costume.
* * * *
VARIETY’S NAME
A Sampler
While I cannot remember when I first drafted “Variety’s Name,” it seems a good bridge between The Standard Murder Mystery and The Monday after Murder, which novel concentrates heavily on school days and juvenile characters.
Editors returned rejection comments on “Variety’s Name” that perplex me to this day—of which more after the story. As for me, I remain confident on rereading it years later that I accomplished exactly what I set out to do: examine a girl coming to grips with her own character and the grown-up world around her, while along the way, in a sort of homage to The Pooh Perplex by Frederick Crews, offering an overview of the fanciers/realizers alternate-history timeline.
Variety Hepworth Ames hated her name.
There wasn’t anything she could do about “Hepworth.” She was stuck with that for life, just as any son she might have in ten or twenty years was going to be stuck with it. She loved her father, but she wished he had exercised the option for people born before 2007 and stuck with his father’s family name, Tibawi, instead of going over to his mother’s original one.
Things could have been worse. Variety’s parents could just have doubled it, the way so many people did, and registered her as Variety Hepworth Hepworth. Instead of giving her the other parent’s family name for her own final one, the way so many other people did. Variety loved her mother, too, but ... “Hepworth Ames” sounded so jazzy Pureblood Vanilla. Besides everything else that was wrong with it, it just didn’t go with Variety’s Butterscotch epicanthic eyes, Milk Chocolate skin, and straight black Amerind Cinnamon hair.
She carried pretty well all the flavors of humanity except maybe Caramel and Olive, and with those two it might be hard to prove anything either way. “Variety” was the only part of her name that fit her, and it wasn’t really a name, just a provisional tag, a promise from Mom and Dad that she was going to get to register exactly whatever first and final names she picked out for herself, as soon as she reregistered with Names and Prints after taking her first Perception T
est.
Other kids acted more concerned about whether they’d Test out reality perceiver or fantasy perceiver. Variety Hepworth Ames didn’t care all that much whether she turned out to be a realizer or a fancier—perceive the world around her the way most people did or the way her own mind liked it better, taste milk as milk or as cola, feel her pajamas as real cotton or as imaginary satin. Heck, whichever she was, she was it already, and the Test wasn’t going to change that, only let her and other people know whether she was perceiving Standard Reality or her own fantasy world right now.
What Variety Hepworth Ames was concerned about was choosing the name she’d be wearing for the next several years, until if and when she decided to reregister it. She was so busy with her name that her schoolwork was suffering a little. Mom and Dad didn’t care how many bookchips she checked out of libraries, but they were fussy about keeping comp charges down, and if they caught her patching into a pay databank for anything else than schoolwork, they made her pay for it out of her own allowance.
Fortunately, with a report due anyway on one of the Founding Reformers—any one, her choice—she had a perfect excuse to patch into Historybank and do some personal name research at the same time. She’d always idolized Winifred Hapgood Hapgood, ever since seeing the screenshow Winnie H. Hapgood sounded a little like Hepworth, too. She keyed in the great woman’s name and kept the first grown-up study with a screentext that wasn’t full of footnote numbers: Doubling the H, A Nonfiction Novel about Winifred H. Hapgood, by Carter T. Tanaka.
Scrolling to the chapter titled “Names, Names, and More Names,” Variety read:
* * * *
When J. David Goldblum knocked at the Great Lady’s hotel room that November night in 1997, he must have known that his proposal would look as distorted to her through the prism of her midcentury Back to the Kitchen upbringing, as his very youthful face no doubt looked to her through the prism of the security peephole in her door.
At that time, the New Administration was still trying to do its work in a series of Amendments to the Original Constitution. It was not to be until Juanita Redpath’s second term that the Founding Reformers would be in a position to reincarnate the old United States as the new Reformed States of North America. The Nomenclature Provision of the Reformed Constitution began life as a rider to the proposed Fantasy Perceivers’ Rights Amendment. In that form, its earliest known wording gave citizens the privileges only of changing their first or given names and adding extra last names at will, a reform justifiable on grounds that name-changing had already been a straightforward and readily available legal practice for many years. Even so, such political diehards as Miss Winifred Hapgood feared that the rider would encourage too many people of both perceptional persuasions to change their names wildly and continually—that social anarchy would ensue.
The Grand Old Lady of the G.O.P. had not yet committed herself to voting for Fantasy Perceivers’ Rights in any form. She had never accepted the “feminist” title “Ms.”—the title his own mother swore by, rejecting all others—and she had already spoken out vehemently in public against the proposed leveler “M.” for everyone regardless of age, gender, or marital status. How would she react to Dave Goldblum’s vision of a world in which the sexes remembered and symbolized their mutual indebtedness through a system that combined patrilinealism and matrilinealism—a system that passed the mother’s family name on to her sons and the father’s to his daughters? Dave could surely guess, and the guess must have filled him with nervous tension.
Yet somehow he prevailed. Somehow, when he left the great duenna’s suite that night—or, rather, before dawn of the following day—he brought with him the germ of our present system, the document that, with the blessing of Miss Winifred Hapgood, who on that occasion and ever afterward signed her name with an extra “H.” in the middle, was to finally become Paragraphs 4 and 18—the Fantasy Perceivers’ Rights and Personal Names provisions respectively—of our own Reformed Constitution.
How did he prevail? Speculations have ranged from the ultra-philosophical to the scandalous. The following scene, based in part on my play “David and Miss Hapgood,” pretends to be nothing more than a sample, vastly condensed, of some of the things that might have been said over a point in time of several hours:
DAVID. Mother Hapgood—mind if I call you “Mother”?”
HAPGOOD. Yes, in fact, I do mind, very much. My title is “Miss.”
DAVID. The problem is, you see, my own mother’s ghost won’t let me use that one.
HAPGOOD. I have never been anyone’s mother in my life.
DAVID. And I know your feelings about “Ms.” How about “Mrs.”?
HAPGOOD. (Still in her own train of thought) Motherhood is for wives. Legitimate wives.
DAVID. (Very softly) What about childhood? Is that only for legitimate offspring?
HAPGOOD. (Regarding him intently, her face softening a little) Forgive me. ... Very well, Mr. Goldblum, you may call me ... uh ... Winifred. Just for this evening.
DAVID. Only if you call me Dave. Just for this evening.
HAPGOOD. (Clears her throat and nods slightly) But if you have come to me about the clause that wants to reduce every man, woman, and child to the same meaningless gray status of “M.”—
DAVID. Oh, no! In fact, my idea is to kick that clause into a whole separate amendment of its own.
HAPGOOD. Divide and conquer, Mr. ... uh ... David? I thought you favored the universal M.
DAVID. I favor letting every proposal stand or fall on its own merits. My whole idea is to knock the F.P.R. into three separate amendments. We all know Fanciers’ Rights will go through anyway. Let’s make sure both Personal Names and the Universal M. have to fight their own way through.
HAPGOOD. I repeat, I thought you favored the universal M.
DAVID. I think it’s coming anyway. It’s the kind of thing that a society adopts or rejects regardless of laws and legislation. In fact, I’m willing to gamble that Americans would be more likely to trade off “Mr.” and “Mrs.” for “M.,” if it isn’t the official law of the land. Personal names, on the other hand—
HAPGOOD. Are also a matter of social custom and convenience.
DAVID. Well, not entirely. Austria, I think it was, didn’t start requiring everybody to adopt a permanent family surname until the middle of the nineteenth century. Iceland still doesn’t. So name legislation can work.
HAPGOOD. Yes, and we’ve already got a very good system. Haven’t you ever heard the expression, “If it works, don’t fix it”?
DAVID. It works, sure. But not without a lot of grumbling. Didn’t you ever once, in all your life, wish you had some other name?
HAPGOOD. Never. The name my parents gave me is—
DAVID. “Freddie”?
HAPGOOD. (Clearing her throat) If that many people were really that dissatisfied, the courts would be clogged with name-change petitions.
DAVID. They’re going to be clogged anyway, once fantasy perceivers start openly matching their legal names to their personal worlds. Why not save our court system the extra wear and tear by knocking it over to the Census Bureau and opening the privilege to everybody?
HAPGOOD. Would you care for some coffee?
DAVID. In Iceland, you’d be Winifred Alfredsdatter.
* * * *
Variety stopped reading. She could guess it was going to end up in some kind of compromise, and who was it who said that a compromise was a solution that just made both sides angry? One of the social awareness heroes of the 1960s? Or was it old Mark Twain? Anyway, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to do her paper on Winifred H. anymore, let alone name herself after her. Now, she almost liked J. David Goldblum better.
With a shock, she figured out that he was still alive. He had reregistered his name to Jaydavid G. Goldblum, and been the Speaker of the House just about forever.
There was ano
ther old floater who had been around just about forever—Michael Amber, one of the last “heartthrobs” of the old Reeltime movies, who was still turning up as characters like God and Merlin and Old Man Winter in screenshows today. He had been Grandma Tibawi’s top favorite, and when Variety watched his old movies, she understood why. It was a real mindlump to believe he was the same one who had been the best Santa Claus ever, in the classic Santa Meets Frankenstein screenshow Variety watched every Christmas of her life. Michaela Hepworth Amber might be a pretty name, or Michaelea, or Mica, or Amber ... Amberina Hepworth Michols ...
She had a Cinematic Lit assignment to suggest three old movies for a vote on which ones to watch in class. That made a little research on old movie stars fair use of Historybank. She keyed an index search on Amber, Michael, and—because it was getting kind of late—called up the first listing that appeared for him, in a chapter called “‘Life Was the Encore’: The Making of the One Hit Miniseries of 1995,” from Rise and Fall of the TV Miniseries, by Ada A. Aaronstadt.
* * * *
Michael Amber, who was riding the crest of his first wave of popularity, was the original choice to play Harry Goldberg. Producer Leslie Applebaum, director Morey Soderstrum, and casting director Nan Yossarian had all agreed with author Ace Jefferson’s vision; Amber had actually been lined up and fired with eagerness for the part; and advance publicity releases had been put out highlighting his name, when Abraham Epstein, on whom the character of Harry Goldberg was so openly and publicly patterned, objected on grounds that Amber supported the pro-Palestinian movement.
Director Soderstrum made the first phone call in response to Epstein’s angry statement to the news media. It has been suggested that this phone call was a tactical error; that of all the personalities involved, Soderstrum’s was the best calculated to grate instantly on Epstein’s. Soderstrum was a twenty-six-year-old rich boy who had gone into the profession, many suggested, as a hobby—his popular nickname among colleagues was “our playboy director”—while Epstein was an eighty-five-year-old survivor of the Nazi death camps and the struggle for pure economic and emotional survival in postwar London, which has been called a tragically unsympathetic climate for refugees. Epstein had become a fiercely political conscience; Soderstrum had for years boasted openly of his “total” lack of political awareness. In some opinions worst of all, their various approaches to dramatic art were in almost diametric opposition, Epstein being an actor who had come out of the old European stage tradition in which “the actors ruled,” Soderstrum a director of the modern screen tradition in which “the director rules.” The phone call was not recorded, but if Soderstrum harped on the same theme that appears in his follow-up letter—”... within the drama, the performer becomes the character. Whatever the performer’s private-life opinions may or may not be in the political world outside, within the drama, only what is best for the sake of the art form can possibly apply ...”—then Epstein’s angry return telegram probably repeats the comment with which he may have hung up on Soderstrum:
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 28
