Anyone Got a Match?

by Max Shulman

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  Anyone Got a Match?

  A Novel

  Max Shulman

  TO WALTER L. BRADBURY

  Chapter 1

  Never mind what they tell you on Madison Avenue. It was not one of those thin-lapelled Ivy League copywriters who composed the immortal jingle. Oh, they will wink and look wise, but do not be deceived. It was not one of them. It was Jefferson Tatum himself. Yes, Jefferson Tatum, who came barefoot off a burley patch at the age of twelve and worked and gouged and scrabbled and finally built the great Tatum Cigarette Company with his own two callused hands, who caused people the world over to step up to tobacco counters and ask for Tatums as often as they ask for Camels or Marlboros—Jefferson Tatum, unlettered and unschooled, who was magically touched by the Muse in his office late one night and wrote the jingle—he, himself—on the back of a bill of lading:

  Tatums smoke mild,

  Like an innocent child.

  “Land’s sake!” said the late Mrs. Tatum to Jefferson when he brought the jingle home. “How ever did you think of it?”

  “Love,” he replied simply.

  Well, there it is. Nobody ever loved the cigarette business as Jefferson Tatum did—not Buck Duke, not R. J. Reynolds, not Pierre Lorillard—nobody. And hence the jingle. If love can make the world go round, why can it not make a poet of a hard-fisted brawler like Jefferson?

  A brawler he is, and always was. To illustrate, take what happened in the town of Owens Mill, headquarters and home of the Tatum Cigarette Company, on last March 24th. It was the date of Jefferson’s seventy-fifth birthday, but he was far from festive. For one thing, he was cutting a wisdom tooth. For another, he had a thrombosed hemorrhoid. For still another—and this was the most painful of all—the annual fiscal statement of the Tatum Cigarette Company, issued that day, showed sales running a full 3 percent behind the previous year.

  But age and distress notwithstanding, Jefferson arrived at his desk at his usual hour of seven A.M. and put in his customary twelve hours of work, and then later at the birthday party the employees gave him in the company cafeteria he drank an entire Mason jar of white mule and danced the two-step with every lady worker present, bar none, and then he hand-wrestled the shredding-room foreman, Will Watson, a 235-pound Negro who almost went the distance in the Golden Gloves a few years ago. Then Jefferson cut his birthday cake and ate a chunk the size of your head and then went home with Millie and Esther McCabe, the twins from packaging. True, he only made it with Millie, but even so—seventy-five years old!

  And after such a night he arose before dawn the next day—it was a Saturday—and set out with Virgil, his son, to climb the ridge and have another try at Old Slewfoot, a large and cunning black bear which Jefferson hated as Ahab had hated the whale. For twelve full years Jefferson had stalked Old Slewfoot without so much as one clean shot, but this year he felt it was going to be different; he felt it in his bones.

  Jefferson and Virgil, guns ready to hand, squatted about a hundred yards from a cave sunk in the wooded hill. “He’s in there, I know it,” Jefferson said to Virgil. “That’s got to be where he winters. I figured it out. And I figured out something else. He always comes out exactly the same time—just three days after the sweet William buds. And that’s today, boy. I been keeping track. You watch. You watch. Before you know it, he’ll drag himself out of there blinking and yawning and rubbing his old pelt on them rocks, and then I get him. Then!”

  “Pa,” said Virgil mildly, “I hate to mention it, but the bear hunting season isn’t open.”

  “Don’t I know that?” snapped Jefferson. “Ain’t I the game warden?”

  Virgil smiled. “Yes, Pa,” he said. Virgil was forty-three years old, a large rugged man, yet scholarly in appearance. He had a gimpy leg, the result of another bear hunt long ago, but the limp was so slight that a stranger would fail to notice it.

  The old man suddenly grabbed Virgil’s arm. There was a stirring in the cave, dim but definite. “I told you, didn’t I?” whispered Jefferson. He raised his gun and waited.

  And while he waited, spring betrayed him. Without warning, a north wind howled over the ridge and thick white flakes of snow came pelting down. Inside the cave—for Jefferson had rightly diagnosed the bear’s whereabouts—Old Slewfoot opened one gummy eye, regarded the snow, and decided to resume his long winter’s nap.

  Jefferson cussed, and it was a thing to hear because Jefferson, by common consent, was one of the three or four truly great cussers of the Border South. He could cuss lengthily, pithily, chromatically, and even creatively. He did not, however, cuss often. Knowing the awesome power of his profanity, he saved it for occasions when it was unquestionably indicated—like when a black bear refused to come out and be killed, or when some fool suggested cigarettes could cause lung cancer.

  Virgil laid a soothing hand on his father. “Let’s go to the lodge, Pa,” he said. “Nobody will be there yet.”

  A half-hour’s climb to the top of the ridge brought them to the Tatum hunting lodge—or, as people insisted on calling it, the Owens hunting lodge. The Owens family, founders and gentry of Owens Mill, had in fact built the lodge originally, but along with everything else in Owens Mill the lodge had eventually accrued to Jefferson. Still, habit dies hard, and people, including the surviving Owenses, continued to think of it as the Owens hunting lodge.

  It was a big, handsome, comfortably furnished place commanding a magnificent view of the valley below. In the beginning there had been only a single building, sixty feet by thirty, made of varnished logs and fieldstone. Now this structure was surrounded by a colony of small cabins, rude but not without plumbing and innerspring mattresses. Every weekend a group of Owenses, plus guests, arrived to enjoy a healthful two days of alcohol and sex. The drinking was done in the main lodge; the other was accomplished in the cabins, generally in pairs.

  Regarding the Owens family, Jefferson had curiously mixed feelings—loathing and respect. The ratio was roughly 96 percent loathing and 4 percent respect. He hated them for their spanking-new Abercrombie and Fitch woodsmen’s outfits, for their costly and unfired guns, for their Princeton educations, for the outlandish guests they brought to the lodge, many of them Yankees and some almost certainly Jews.

  But mostly Jefferson hated the Owenses because they were rich, and it was all his fault. In the early precarious years of the Tatum Cigarette Company, Jefferson had had to borrow heavily to stay in business, and in Owens Mill nobody had had money to lend except the Owenses. As a financial risk, Jefferson had been spectacularly unsafe, but as a borrower, he had been a veritable Demosthenes. The Owenses, spellbound, had granted the loans and accepted stock in the Tatum Cigarette Company as security. When Jefferson had defaulted—and he could do no other in those first bruising years—the Owenses, willy-nilly, had wound up owning big blocks of Tatum stock—par value, $1.00. Today, after three splits, the stock stood at $96.50, and the Owenses, to Jefferson’s everlasting chagrin, were all rich. They were not as rich as Jefferson—even in his worst days Jefferson had taken care to keep control of his company—but they were rich nonetheless.

  Yet in spite of all of his grousing at the Owenses, Jefferson retained a sneaky respect for them. He could never quite forget that he was a backwoods boy of uncertain lineage, while they were what the South calls quality. So he made them executives of his company—naturally in posts where they could do no harm—and he allowed them to gambol each weekend at his lodge.

  It was only ten o’clock in the morning when Virgil and Jefferson reached the lodge, and, as Virgil had predicted, the Owenses had not yet arrived. Jeffer
son sank into a big leather chair. Virgil touched a match to the logs in the fireplace, fetched the Jack Daniel’s, a pitcher of water, and two glasses. He poured three fingers for his father, two for himself, and added a finger of water to each. Then he sat down across from Jefferson, filled a pipe, and lit it.

  “Do you have to smoke a goddam pipe?” said Jefferson irritably. “I happen to make cigarettes, remember?”

  Virgil grinned and puffed.

  “You’re a disappointment to me, boy,” said Jefferson. “You always been.”

  “Drink your drink, Pa,” said Virgil.

  Jefferson sipped, but his melancholy did not abate. “Disappointments,” he said lugubriously. “That’s all life is. Disappointments. There’s you. There’s Old Slewfoot. There’s that last statement of the cigarette company with sales down three percent in a single year. There’s them pantywaist Owenses with their lifted pinkies. There’s my wisdom tooth and my piles.… Disappointments, disappointments. And yet folks are all the time saying, ‘That Jefferson Tatum—man, has he got the world by the short hairs!’ Ha! That’s all they know about it. What have I got, boy? Will you please tell me?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Virgil. “You’ve got eighty or ninety million dollars. You’ve got the biggest cigarette plant in the world. You’ve got the town of Owens Mill and everything in it. You’ve got two churches, one cemetery, one public park, one country club, one hunting preserve, one skyscraper, one—”

  “You damn right, boy!” interrupted the old man, banging down his glass. “And nobody gave me one stick of it. I made it all. Me! All alone. Me!”

  He leaped to his feet, waving a finger, but before he could begin to declaim, Virgil rose quickly. “Pa, if you’re about to do the speech about how you came to Owens Mill barefoot and fought your way to the top—and let me make it clear, sir, I do enjoy that speech thoroughly; I mean it’s right up there with Mark Antony and Patrick Henry and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural—all I’m saying is if you’re going to do that particular address, you always get terrible thirsty, it being so long and all, so how about if I fix a drink first?”

  “I have nursed a viper in my bosom,” said Jefferson with a resentful glare at Virgil. But the glare abruptly turned to a laugh, and the father embraced the son and clapped his back with hard, noisy, painful thumps to prove that the emotions flooding his breast were not, Heaven forfend, less than manly.

  Jefferson, a shameless melodramatist, complained loud and often of the many disappointments in his life, but the truth is he had only one: Virgil. Everything else had broken Jefferson’s way, not easily, but ultimately. There had been hungry years in the beginning, precarious years of battling the tobacco trust, but he had prevailed. He had seen his Tatum Cigarettes zoom to the top and stay there. He had, against all counsel, courted and won Miss Hallie Owens, a genuine Owens of Owens Mill. (The acquisition of Miss Hallie, it must be said, was not an unflawed triumph. She was a bustly, cheery, gossipy, homey little creature, a compulsive preserver of preserves and quilter of quilts, who bored Jefferson almost to the edge of shrieking. Still, she was an Owens, and she did bring forth a fine, intelligent son, and she had had the grace to die quickly and young. Viewed judiciously, she could not, on balance, be called a disappointment.)

  No, the sole clear disappointment was Virgil. An only son, strong, smart, determined, a son on whom Jefferson lavished all the pent-up, unused, untapped, and even unsuspected love within his heart, and who, in his turn, repaid Jefferson’s love in the same honest coin—such a son, such a logical successor to the stewardship of the Tatum Cigarette Company and to the personal barony Jefferson had made of Owens Mill, such a gratifying, satisfying, totally qualified heir said no.

  Virgil had nothing against the cigarette business: he just did not want to be in it. Nor did he want to own the town of Owens Mill. He wanted—and this stabbed Jefferson like a knife—to devote his life to the pursuit of learning.

  “Where do you get such nutty ideas?” Jefferson had yelled when Virgil, then aged eighteen, had first announced the dread news. “Not from me, that’s for sure. And not from your mother, up there making piccalilli with the angels. So where?”

  “I don’t know, Pa,” Virgil had replied. “I’ve always liked books and plays and school and stuff like that.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jefferson had said, honestly bewildered. “I know you’re not a pansy, not the way you’re leaving pecker tracks all over town. I know you’re in a fist fight behind the drugstore at least once a week, gimpy leg and all. I’ve seen you hunt and fish. I just don’t understand.”

  “Well, maybe you will someday. Now, Pa, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to pack.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I haven’t quite decided. Harvard, maybe. Or else Yale.”

  “Like hell!” Jefferson had thundered. “If your hard head is set on college—which I will never understand—you’ll damn well go to Acanthus!”

  Like any other tobacco tycoon, Jefferson naturally owned a college. It was a denominational school, staffed by elders of the Don’t-Fiddle-With-The-Gospel Brotherhood, and the campus was located right in Owens Mill where Jefferson could keep a watchful eye on it.

  “Aw, Pa,” Virgil had groaned.

  “Aw, balls!” Jefferson had retorted. “It ain’t going to be all your way, boy. If I give, you give. You won’t go into the business, okay, I guess I got to accept it even if it breaks my heart. But you’re not running away and leaving me here alone. You’re my family, boy, my only family. What’s the matter with you? Don’t blood count for nothing?”

  To this argument there was no answer, so Virgil had enrolled at Acanthus College. And today, twenty-five years later, as he sat with his father before the fire in the hunting lodge, Virgil was still at Acanthus. He was, of course, no longer a student; he was, in fact, president of the college, having advanced in two and a half decades from undergraduate to teacher to dean to provost and, finally, to prexy.

  “Here, let me freshen your drink, Pa,” Virgil was saying.

  The old man shook his head morosely.

  Virgil shrugged. “All right. You want to pout, go ahead and pout.”

  “Ain’t I got a right to?” demanded Jefferson. “Ain’t I got miseries enough? Cigarette sales down three percent in one single year!”

  “So what? Tatums are still the leading brand in the country.”

  “That ain’t the point!” cried Jefferson in a righteous rage. “Point is that so-called Surgeon General is scaring people off cigarettes, and it’s getting worse all the time.”

  “You’ll handle it,” said Virgil lightly.

  “Yeah? How? I been studying this thing day and night, and I swear I don’t know how to stop it.”

  “Don’t fret, Pa. You’ll find a way.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe after your nap,” said Virgil.

  “Nap?” cried Jefferson incredulously. “Are you unhinged, boy? Do you imagine I could sleep with all this trouble on my mind?”

  “Try,” urged Virgil.

  “Won’t do no good,” declared Jefferson. Nevertheless he walked into the bedroom, removed his boots, stretched out, closed his eyes, and fell asleep—elapsed time: 31 seconds.

  Virgil meanwhile made ready for the arrival of the Owenses and their guests. It was a fairly involved procedure. For example, preparing the bar was not a simple matter of setting out bourbon and branch water, as might be assumed from this rustic Southern locale. One of the Owenses wintered in Italy and drank nothing but Strega. Another summered in France, and for him Virgil had to break out a bottle of Amer Picon. A third lived half the year in Galway and required numerous bottles of stout, room temperature.

  After he finished at the bar, Virgil went to the piano and rummaged through the sheet music in the bench. Late or soon, the Owenses always got musical. First in their recitals came nostalgic tunes of the 1930’s. These were followed by traditional airs in the manner of Joan Baez. Then, as the alcoh
ol began to take hold, they switched to Ivy League hymns. Finally, good and gassed, they finished with Confederate marches. Virgil chose a substantial number in each category and arranged them in order on the piano desk.

  As he headed for the kitchen to make a selection of hors d’oeuvres, Virgil heard a groaning from Jefferson’s bedroom. He opened the door and looked in. The old man was threshing and rolling in his sleep. “Disappointments,” he kept mumbling, “disappointments.”

  Virgil closed the door and smiled wryly. “He thinks he’s got disappointments,” he said to himself and continued toward the kitchen.

  Virgil was a man who shunned self-pity as unproductive and unvirile. Yet, being human, he could not avoid it altogether. Now as he prowled the kitchen gathering cheeses and biscuits, he allowed himself one of his infrequent lapses. Yes, he thought, embracing dolor, I know a thing or two about disappointments.

  He did. There was the death of his mother when Virgil had been twelve. There was the gimpy leg, caused by one swipe of a black bear’s paw when Virgil had been fifteen. And there was Acanthus College when Virgil had been eighteen, and today, with Virgil forty-three years old, there was still Acanthus College.

  Acanthus was a small place, only twelve hundred students, but it was renowned throughout the nation for two reasons: first, because credits and degrees earned at Acanthus were recognized by no other American college; and second, because the Acanthus football team had not lost a game since Nineteen Meyers—called Nineteen because that was the size of his collar—took over as head coach.

  There were other noteworthy aspects of Acanthus College. For example, it led the entire country in the age of its faculty, the weight of its undergraduates, and the slenderness of its catalogue. For further example, the largest building on the Acanthus campus, a neo-Gothic edifice with two spires and three stained-glass windows, was not, as a visitor might suppose, the chapel; it was the residence of Nineteen Meyers. The three stained-glass windows, made in Augsburg, depicted the wing-T formation, pass interference, and the red dog.