The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

by Max Shulman

  “Why, the very idea—me going into the Jollity Theater,” scoffed Bonnie. “We were nowhere near the Jollity Theater, were we, Bill?”

  “No,” I replied with a hollow chuckle. “Why, the very idea!”

  “Where did you have lunch, Mr. Johnson?” inquired Mrs. Willet.

  “At Charlie’s,” said Bonnie.

  “At Charlie’s,” said I.

  “I see,” said Mrs. Willet. She pointed to a petit-point love seat. “Sit down, Mr. Johnson, and tell me about yourself. Bonnie has, of course, told me a few things, but I want to hear more.”

  The heart within me sank. What could I say? If Bonnie had told her nothing about the fictitious Bill Johnson, maybe I could have bluffed it through. But now how could I know whether my lies would check with Bonnie’s? I had to change the subject; somehow I had to keep the conversation away from myself until I could gracefully flee this place.

  “What a beautiful house!” I said brightly. “May I look around?”

  “If you like,” said Mrs. Willet. She followed me as I started through the rooms. Behind her came Bonnie, biting her knuckles nervously.

  “Charming!” I said, examining an escritoire. “Splendid!” I said, stooping over a coffee table. “Capital!” I said, peering at a credenza. “Jolly!” I said, perusing an ottoman.

  “Are you related to the Johnsons on Crocus Hill?” asked Mrs. Willet.

  “What a magnificent portrait!” I cried, racing to a painting that hung over the mantel.

  “Sir Joshua Reynolds,” said Mrs. Willet.

  “Excellent likeness,” I declared. “Excellent!”

  “Sir Joshua Reynolds is the one who painted it,” said Mrs. Willet, casting me a curious look.

  “I will have my little joke,” I replied, giggling wildly. “But now I must see the dining room.”

  I ran into the dining room with Mrs. Willet close at my heels. Bonnie, quite ashen by now, brought up the rear.

  “Where did you meet Bonnie, Mr. Johnson?” asked my inquisitor.

  “By George, they don’t make tables like this any more,” I shouted, pounding the fumed oak dining board.

  “You haven’t answered my questions, Mr. Johnson,” said Mrs. Willet, fixing me with two flinty eyes.

  “Wow, what a candelabra!” I cried, brandishing it aloft.

  “Mr. Johnson—”

  “And what is in here?” I asked, springing toward a door.

  “Only the kitchen, Mr. Johnson. You can see it some other time.”

  “But I must see it now,” I insisted and flung open the door.

  “What a darling sink!” I said desperately as Mrs. Willet closed in on me. “What a fetching drainboard! What a tall refrigerator! What a short wastebasket!”

  She had me backed against the electric range now. Her face was hard with suspicion. She reached out and placed one hand on the edge of the electric range to my right, the other to my left, penning me in completely. Short of kneeing her in the stomach, there was no escape for me. “Now, Mr. Johnson,” she said in a relentless tone, “you will please answer my questions.”

  And all of a sudden, like the cavalry arriving in the nick of time to rescue a wagon train from the Indians, there came a knock on the back door. “Groceries!” shouted a voice. The door swung open and a man entered the kitchen.

  Mrs. Willet released me and turned to face the newcomer. A sigh of relief started from my lungs. It retreated before it could even reach my trachea. There was no cause for relief. Now I was really cooked. The thin ice was finally broken and the walls were tumbling down and it was Armageddon. For the grocer who had arrived so opportunely was none other than Herman Gillis—my father.

  But he had not seen me yet; his attention was on the heavy box of groceries that he was laying on the kitchen table. I grabbed Mrs. Willet by the arm. I clutched her to me and plunged my face into her collarbone for concealment. “Come into the living room,” I muttered, dragging her from the kitchen.

  “Mr. Johnson!” she screamed in terror. “Mr. Johnson!”

  Heedless, I lugged her out of the kitchen, across the dining room, and into the living room, she uttering piercing shrieks and pounding me on both sides of the head.

  “Dobie!” roared my father’s voice.

  I loosed my struggling hostess. Broken and bowed I stood. There was no use fighting any more. This just wasn’t my day, that’s all.

  My father clumped into the living room in his muddy boots. “Dobie, what are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Hello, Pa,” I said wanly.

  “Where is my car?” he bellowed. “I didn’t see my car outside. What happened to my car?”

  Bonnie leaned against the mantel, moaning audibly. Mrs. Willet surveyed us in wide-eyed astonishment. “Dobie? Pa?” she said weakly. “What is all this, Mr. Johnson?”

  “Mr. Johnson?” yelled my father. “What kind of a Mr. Johnson? This is my kid, lady—Dobie Gillis.”

  Mrs. Willet staggered to the mantel and joined her daughter in moaning.

  My father seized my shirt bosom in his great, hairy hand. “What are you doing here?” he thundered. “What is this Mr. Johnson business? Why aren’t you in school? Where is my car? WHAT HAPPENED TO MY CAR?”

  “You lied,” said Mrs. Willet to her daughter in a heartbroken whisper. “You lied.”

  Bonnie stood erect. She set her jaw. Her eyes flashed. “Yes, I lied,” she declared stoutly.

  “How could you?” whimpered Mrs. Willet. “How could you?”

  My father stopped shaking me and turned to stare, open-mouthed, at the drama in front of the fireplace. To tell the truth, I was pretty interested myself, in spite of the fact that I had plenty of trouble of my own.

  “I’m sorry I lied,” said Bonnie, looking unwaveringly at her mother. “I wish I didn’t have to. But you just won’t understand, Mother.”

  “But the Jollity Theater!” cried Mrs. Willet distraughtly.

  “I know it’s a dive,” said Bonnie, “but I’ve got to start somewhere. When I heard they were auditioning chorus girls at noon today, I bought some dancing shoes and went over. And what’s more,” she added defiantly, “I got a job.”

  “No!” gasped her mother.

  “Yes!” replied Bonnie. “I’m going to be a dancer, Mother. I’m not going back to Bryn Mawr. I don’t care if you went to Bryn Mawr and Grandmother went to Bryn Mawr and all the other women in our family went to Bryn Mawr. I don’t want to go to Bryn Mawr. I want to be a dancer, and I’m going to be! If you send me back to Bryn Mawr, I’ll just run away and get a job dancing someplace. So there!” she concluded and folded her pretty round arms over her pretty round bosom.

  Mrs. Willet made her way unsteadily across the room to the petit-point love seat. Carefully she sat down. Valiantly she tried to maintain her composure. But it was too much for her. The tears came cascading down her cheeks. “All the plans I made for you,” she sobbed. “Your debut—your graduation—your trip to Europe—all the plans—all the plans—” She threw her hands over her face and cried piteously.

  My father patted her clumsily on top of her head. “Don’t cry, lady,” he murmured. “Don’t cry.”

  Her weeping accelerated.

  He lowered his bulk into the love seat beside her. He took her hand and patted it ponderously. There they sat: she the patrician woman clad in silk, alumna of Bryn Mawr, daughter and granddaughter of alumnae of Bryn Mawr; he the gross grocer with a huge, beetling mustache, with muddy boots and leather jacket and corduroy trousers; the two of them hand in hand on an elegant little seat that might have come from Marie Antoinette’s play palace at Versailles.

  “Listen to me, lady,” said my father. “You think you got trouble? Just listen to me. All my life I worked and sweated and slaved—morning till night, day after day, work and sweat and slave. For who, lady? I ask you—for who?”

  “For whom, Mr. Gillis?” she said between sobs.

  “For him,” replied my father with an angry toss of his head in
my direction. “For my son. You seen my store, lady. It’s a nice little business. I don’t get rich, but I don’t do bad. And it’s all for him. I figured when he grows up he can take over the store and he’ll make a good living. But he don’t want to be a grocer. You know what he wants to be? An Egyptologist, that’s what.”

  “Not really,” said Mrs. Willet with no little amazement.

  “Honest to God,” he swore, slapping Mrs. Willet on the knee. “An Egyptologist! You ever hear such a crazy thing in your life? All my work, all my hopes—nothing. He won’t go in the store. What can I do? Can I tie him to the counter? Can I chain him to the fruit stand? No. I got to let him be an Egyptologist.”

  “You poor man,” said Mrs. Willet, taking her free hand and stroking my father’s which, in turn, was stroking hers.

  “It’s the same with you, lady. You got plans for your girl, you got hopes, but you think she cares? She don’t care. What does she care? She wants to be a dancer. How you gonna stop her?”

  “I don’t know,” confessed Mrs. Willet mournfully.

  “You can’t,” he said. “I tell you, lady, it’s no use. Kids are all the same—your kids, my kids, everybody’s kids. You work for them, you make plans for them, you hope, you dream, you pray, and then what happens? They turn around and do exactly what they wanna.”

  Mrs. Willet nodded sadly. “Yes,” she breathed.

  “So what’s the answer?” he continued. “The answer is you’re licked. That’s all—you’re licked. You can’t stop ’em. You just gotta let ’em do what they wanna and hope for the best. You and I, lady, it ain’t our world no more. It’s theirs. We’ve lived our life.”

  “True, true,” she agreed, and then they fell into a long silence, broken only by an occasional sigh from one or the other. At length Mrs. Willet stirred. “Goodness!” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “I’ve quite forgotten my manners. Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Gillis?”

  “Why not?” said my father.

  She rose. “Would you children care for something?” she asked Bonnie and me.

  “No, thanks,” I replied quickly. I took Bonnie’s arm. “We have to go on an errand, don’t we, Bonnie?”

  “But there are still several things I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Willet.

  “Me, too,” cried my father, leaping up. “Number one: where is my car?”

  “No time for explanations now,” I called, propelling Bonnie rapidly toward the door. “Hope you enjoy your tea.”

  We bounded across the porch and into the Cadillac and sped away, leaving our respective parents with their respective perplexments.

  “When you have children,” asked Bonnie as we drove toward the campus, “do you think you’ll try to prevent them from being what they want to be?”

  “Certainly not,” I replied with vehemence. “Any child of mine who wants to be an Egyptologist has my blessing—or a dancer,” I added hastily.

  “That’s exactly the way I feel. Honestly, things would be so much pleasanter if parents stopped fighting their children. They never win, and they’re such poor losers.”

  “I’m one of the most sportsmanlike losers in Minnesota,” I confessed modestly.

  “I’m sure you are,” said Bonnie. “You strike me as a very gallant man.”

  “You are too kind,” I protested, reddening.

  “Not at all. It was certainly decent of you to try to help me out the way you did.”

  “Well, it’s mighty decent of you to help me out the way you’re doing now.”

  “It’s nothing, really. I only wish there was something more I could do for you.”

  “As a matter of fact, there is.”

  “Just name it.”

  “Could you lend me forty dollars? I have to buy some oranges for my father.”

  “But of course.”

  “I may not be able to pay you back for some time.”

  “No hurry.”

  “You know, you’re a very admirable girl.”

  “Oh, pshaw.”

  “No, really. You’re generous and kind and helpful, and you’ve got a lot of spunk too. I mean it takes a lot of spunk to be a dancer when your mother wants you to go to Bryn Mawr.”

  “I think it takes even more spunk to be an Egyptologist when your father wants you to work in a grocery store.”

  “No question about it; we’ve both got plenty of spunk.”

  She drove along spunkily, and I sat and thought some spunky thoughts.

  “I sure hope,” I said, mustering up all my spunk, “that we see each other again.”

  “Such things are possible,” she replied.

  I detected no encouragement in this answer. My spunk ebbed away. “If you’re ever dancing in Egypt,” I said lamely, “be sure to look me up.”

  “Couldn’t we,” she asked with a maidenly blush, “make it sooner?”

  My spunk came running back. “How about tonight?” said I.

  “Solid,” said she.

  I leaned back, tingling pleasantly, and thought, not irrelevantly, what a wise man Shakespeare was. All’s well, he said, that ends well.

  About the Author

  Max Shulman (1919–1988) was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer best known as the author of Rally Round the Flag, Boys! (1957), The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1951), and the popular television series of the same name. The son of Russian immigrants, Shulman was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended the University of Minnesota, where he wrote a celebrated column for the campus newspaper and edited the humor magazine. His bestselling debut novel, Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943), was followed by two books written while he served in the Army during World War II: The Feather Merchants (1944) and The Zebra Derby (1946). The Tender Trap (1954), a Broadway play co-written with Robert Paul Smith, was adapted into a movie starring Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds. His acclaimed novel Rally Round the Flag, Boys! became a film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Shulman’s other books include Sleep till Noon (1950), a hilarious reinvention of the rags-to-riches tale; I Was a Teenage Dwarf (1959), which chronicles the further adventures of Dobie Gillis; Anyone Got a Match? (1964), a prescient satire of the tobacco, television, and food industries; and Potatoes Are Cheaper (1971), the tale of a romantic Jewish college student in depression-era St. Paul. His movies include The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (with Debbie Reynolds and Bob Fosse) and House Calls (with Walter Mathau and Glenda Jackson). One of America’s premier humorists, he greatly influenced the comedy of Woody Allen and Bob Newhart, among many others.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1945, 1946, 1948, 1950, 1951 by Max Shulman

  Copyright © 1946 by the Curtis Publishing Company

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2782-3

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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