The Thurber Carnival

by James Thurber

  We hurried him to a hospital, where, in two days, he was on his feet again; he left the hospital without a word to anybody, and we all chipped in to pay the bill. Vereker had some money at the time which his mother had given him but, as he said, he needed it. ‘I am glad he is up and out,’ I said to the nurse who had taken care of him. ‘So am I,’ she said. Vereker affected everybody the same way.

  Some time after this we all decided to make up a fund and send Vereker to Europe to write. His entire output, I had discovered, consisted of only twenty or thirty pages, most of them bearing the round stain of liquor glasses; one page was the beginning of a play done more or less in the style of Gertrude Stein. It seemed to me as brilliant as anything of its kind.

  We got together about fifteen hundred dollars and I was delegated to approach Vereker, as tactfully as possible. We knew that it was folly for him to go on the way he was, dissipating his talent; for weeks he had been in one of his blackest moods: he would call on people, drink up their rye, wrench light-brackets off the walls, hurl scintillating gibes at his friends and at the accepted literary masters of all time, through whose superficiality Vereker saw more clearly, I think, than anybody else I have ever known. He would end up by bursting into tears. ‘Here, but for the gracelessness of God,’ he would shout, ‘stands the greatest writer in the history of the world!’ We felt that, despite Vereker’s drunken exaggeration, there was more than a grain of truth in what he said: certainly nobody else we ever met had, so utterly, the fire of genius that blazed in Vereker, if outward manifestations meant anything.

  He would never try for a Guggenheim fellowship. ‘Guggenheim follow-sheep!’ he would snarl. ‘Fall in line, all you little men! Don’t talk to me about Good-in-time fellowships!’ He would go on that way, sparklingly, for an hour, his tirade finally culminating in one of those remarkable fits of temper in which he could rip up any apartment at all, no matter whose, in less than fifteen minutes.

  Vereker, much to my surprise and gratification, took the fifteen hundred dollars without making a scene. I had suspected that he might denounce us all, that he might go into one of his brilliant philippics against Money, that he might even threaten again to take his life, for it had been several months since he had attempted suicide. But no; he snarled a bit, it is true, but he accepted the money. ‘I’m cheap at twice the price,’ he said.

  It was the most money Vereker had ever had in his life and of course we should have known better than to let him have it all at once. The night of the day I gave it to him he cut a wide swath in the cheaper West Side night clubs and in Harlem, spent three hundred dollars, insulted several women, and figured in fist fights with a policeman, two taxi-drivers, and two husbands, all of whom won. We instantly decided to arrange his passage on a ship that was sailing for Cherbourg three nights later. Somehow or other we kept him out of trouble until the night of the sailing, when we gave a going-away party for him at Marvin Deane’s house. Everybody was there: Gene Tunney, Sir Hubert Wilkins, Count von Luckner, Edward Bernays, and the literary and artistic crowd generally. Vereker got frightfully drunk. He denounced everybody at the party and also Hugh Walpole, Joseph Conrad, Crane, Henry James, Hardy and Meredith. He dwelt on the subject of Jude the Obscure. ‘Jude the Obscure,’ he would shout, ‘Jude the Obscene, June the Obscude, Obs the June Moon.’ He combined with his penetrating critical evaluations and his rare creative powers a certain unique fantasy not unlike that of Lewis Carroll. I once told him so. ‘Not unlike your goddam grandmother!’ he screamed. He was sensitive; he hated to be praised to his face; and then of course he held the works of Carroll in a certain disesteem.

  Thus the party went on. Everybody was speechless, spell-bound, listening to Elliot Vereker. You could not miss his force. He was always the one person in a room. When it got to be eleven o’clock, I felt that we had better round up Vereker and start for the docks, for the boat sailed at midnight. He was nowhere to be found. We were alarmed. We searched every room, looked under beds, and into closets, but he was gone. Some of us ran downstairs and out into the street, asking cab-drivers and passers-by if they had seen him, a gaunt, tall, wild man with his hair in his eyes. Nobody had. It was almost eleven-thirty when somebody thought to look on the roof, to which there was access by a ladder through a trapdoor. Vereker was there. He lay sprawled on his face, the back of his head crushed in by a blow from some heavy instrument, probably a bottle. He was quite dead. ‘The world’s loss,’ murmured Deane, as he looked down at the pitiful dust so lately the most burning genius we had ever been privileged to know, ‘is Hell’s gain.’

  I think we all felt that way.

  The Kerb in the Sky

  When Charlie Deshler announced that he was going to marry Dorothy, someone said he would lose his mind posthaste. ‘No,’ said a wit who knew them both, ‘post hoc.’ Dorothy had begun, when she was quite young, to finish sentences for people. Sometimes she finished them wrongly, which annoyed the person who was speaking, and sometimes she finished them correctly, which annoyed the speaker even more.

  ‘When William Howard Taft was – ’ some guest in Dorothy’s family’s home would begin.

  ‘President!’ Dorothy would pipe up. The speaker may have meant to say ‘President’ or he may have meant to say ‘young’, or ‘Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States’. In any case, he would shortly put on his hat and go home. Like most parents, Dorothy’s parents did not seem to be conscious that her mannerism was a nuisance. Very likely they thought that it was cute, or even bright. It is even probable that when Dorothy’s mother first said ‘Come, Dorothy, eat your – ’ and Dorothy said ‘Spinach, dear,’ the former telephoned Dorothy’s father at the office and told him about it, and he told everybody he met that day about it – and the next day and the day after.

  When Dorothy grew up she became quite pretty and so even more of a menace. Gentlemen became attracted to her and then attached to her. Emotionally she stirred them, but mentally she soon began to wear them down. Even in her late teens she began correcting their English. ‘Not “was”, Arthur,’ she would say, ‘“were”. “Were prepared.” See?’ Most of her admirers tolerated this habit because of their interest in her lovely person, but as time went on and her interest in them remained more instructive than sentimental, they slowly drifted away to less captious, if dumber, girls.

  Charlie Deshler, however, was an impetuous man, of the sweep-them-off-their-feet persuasion, and he became engaged to Dorothy so quickly and married her in so short a time that, being deaf to the warnings of friends, whose concern he regarded as mere jealousy, he really didn’t know anything about Dorothy except that she was pretty and bright-eyed and (to him) desirable.

  Dorothy as a wife came, of course, into her great flowering: she took to correcting Charlie’s stories. He had travelled widely and experienced greatly and was a truly excellent raconteur. Dorothy was, during their courtship, genuinely interested in him and in his stories, and since she had never shared any of the adventures he told about, she could not know when he made mistakes in time or in place or in identities. Beyond suggesting a change here and there in the number of a verb, she more or less let him alone. Charlie spoke rather good English, anyway – he knew when to say ‘were’ and when to say ‘was’ after ‘if’ – and this was another reason he didn’t find Dorothy out.

  I didn’t call on them for quite a while after they were married, because I liked Charlie and I knew I would feel low if I saw him coming out of the anaesthetic of her charms and beginning to feel the first pains of reality. When I did finally call, conditions were, of course, all that I had feared. Charlie began to tell, at dinner, about a motor trip the two had made to this town and that – I never found out for sure what towns, because Dorothy denied almost everything that Charlie said. ‘The next day,’ he would say, ‘we got an early start and drove two hundred miles to Fairview – ’ ‘Well,’ Dorothy would say, ‘I wouldn’t call it early. It wasn’t as early as the first day we set out, when we got up
about seven. And we only drove a hundred and eighty miles, because I remember looking at that mileage thing when we started.’

  ‘Anyway, when we got to Fairview – ’ Charlie would go on. But Dorothy would stop him. ‘Was it Fairview that day, darling?’ she would ask. Dorothy often interrupted Charlie by asking him if he were right, instead of telling him that he was wrong, but it amounted to the same thing, for if he would reply: ‘Yes, I’m sure it was Fairview,’ she would say: ‘But it wasn’t, darling,’ and then go on with the story herself. (She called everybody that she differed from ‘darling’.)

  Once or twice, when I called on them or they called on me, Dorothy would let Charlie get almost to the climax of some interesting account of a happening and then, like a tackler from behind, throw him just as he was about to cross the goal-line. There is nothing in life more shocking to the nerves and to the mind than this. Some husbands will sit back amiably – almost it seems, proudly – when their wives interrupt, and let them go on with the story, but these are beaten husbands. Charlie did not become beaten. But his wife’s tackles knocked the wind out of him, and he began to realize that he would have to do something. What he did was rather ingenious. At the end of the second year of their marriage, when you visited the Deshlers, Charlie would begin some outlandish story about a dream he had had, knowing that Dorothy could not correct him on his own dreams. They became the only life he had that was his own.

  ‘I thought I was running an airplane,’ he would say, ‘made out of telephone wires and pieces of old leather. I was trying to make it fly to the moon, taking off from my bedroom. About half-way up to the moon, however, a man who looked like Santa Claus, only he was dressed in the uniform of a customs officer, waved at me to stop – he was in a plane made of telephone wires, too. So I pulled over to a cloud. “Here,” he said to me, “You can’t go to the moon, if you are the man who invented these wedding cookies.” Then he showed me a cookie made in the shape of a man and woman being married – little images of a man and a woman and a minister, made of dough and fastened firmly to a round, crisp cookie base.’ So he would go on.

  Any psychiatrist will tell you that at the end of the way Charlie was going lies madness in the form of monomania. You can’t live in a fantastic dream world, night in and night out and then day in and day out, and remain sane. The substance began to die slowly out of Charlie’s life, and he began to live entirely in shadow. And since monomania of this sort is likely to lead in the end to the reiteration of one particular story, Charlie’s invention began to grow thin and he eventually took to telling, over and over again, the first dream he had ever described – the story of his curious flight toward the moon in an airplane made of telephone wires. It was extremely painful. It saddened us all.

  After a month or two, Charlie finally had to be sent to an asylum. I was out of town when they took him away, but Joe Fultz, who went with him, wrote me about it. ‘He seemed to like it up here right away,’ Joe wrote. ‘He’s calmer and his eyes look better.’ (Charlie had developed a wild, hunted look.) ‘Of course,’ concluded Joe, ‘he’s finally got away from that woman.’

  It was a couple of weeks later that I drove up to the asylum to see Charlie. He was lying on a cot on a big screened-in porch, looking wan and thin. Dorothy was sitting on a chair beside his bed, bright-eyed and eager. I was somehow surprised to see her there, having figured that Charlie had, at least, won sanctuary from his wife. He looked quite mad. He began at once to tell me the story of his trip to the moon. He got to the part where the man who looked like Santa Claus waved at him to stop. ‘He was in a plane made of telephone wires, too,’ said Charlie. ‘So I pulled over to a kerb – ’

  ‘No. You pulled over to a cloud,’ said Dorothy. ‘There aren’t any kerbs in the sky. There couldn’t be. You pulled over to a cloud.’

  Charlie sighed and turned slightly in his bed and looked at me. Dorothy looked at me, too, with her pretty smile.

  ‘He always gets that story wrong,’ she said.

  The Black Magic of Barney Haller

  It was one of those hot days on which the earth is uninhabitable; even as early as ten o’clock in the morning, even on the hill where I live under the dark maples. The long porch was hot and the wicker chair I sat in complained hotly. My coffee was beginning to wear off and with it the momentary illusion it gives that things are Right and life is Good. There were sultry mutterings of thunder. I had a quick feeling that if I looked up from my book I would see Barney Haller. I looked up, and there he was, coming along the road, lightning playing about his shoulders, thunder following him like a dog.

  Barney is (or was) my hired man. He is strong and amiable, sweaty and dependable, slowly and heavily competent. But he is also eerie: he trafficks with the devil. His ears twitch when he talks, but it isn’t so much that as the things he says. Once in late June, when all of a moment sabres began to flash brightly in the heavens and bowling balls rumbled, I took refuge in the barn. I always have a feeling that I am going to be struck by lightning and either riven like an old apple tree or left with a foot that aches in rainy weather and a habit of fainting. Those things happen. Barney came in, not to escape the storm to which he is, or pretends to be, indifferent, but to put the scythe away. Suddenly he said the first of those things that made me, when I was with him, faintly creepy. He pointed at the house. ‘Once I see dis boat come down de rock,’ he said. It is phenomena like that of which I stand in constant dread: boats coming down rocks, people being teleported, statues dripping blood, old regrets and dreams in the form of Luna moths fluttering against the windows at midnight.

  Of course I finally figured out what Barney meant – or what I comforted myself with believing he meant; something about a bolt coming down the lightning rod on the house; a common-place, an utterly natural thing. I should have dismissed it, but it had its effect on me. Here was a stolid man, smelling of hay and leather, who talked like somebody out of Charles Fort’s books, or like a traveller back from Oz. And all the time the lightning was zigging and zagging around him.

  On this hot morning when I saw Barney coming along with his faithful storm trudging behind him, I went back frowningly to my copy of Swann’s Way. I hoped that Barney, seeing me absorbed in a book, would pass by without saying anything. I read: ‘… I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V …’ I could feel Barney standing looking at me, but I didn’t look at him.

  ‘Dis morning bime by,’ said Barney, ‘I go hunt grotches in de voods.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, and turned a page and pretended to be engrossed in what I was reading. Barney walked on; he had wanted to talk some more, but he walked on. After a paragraph or two, his words began to come between me and the words in the book. ‘Bime by I go hunt grotches in de voods.’ If you are susceptible to such things, it is not difficult to visualize grotches. They fluttered into my mind: ugly little creatures, about the size of whippoorwills, only covered with blood and honey and the scrapings of church bells. Grotches … Who and what, I wondered, really was this thing in the form of a hired man that kept anointing me ominously, in passing, with abracadabra?

  Barney didn’t go toward the woods at once; he weeded the corn, he picked apple boughs up off the lawn, he knocked a yellow jacket’s nest down out of a plum tree. It was raining now, but he didn’t seem to notice it. He kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye, and I kept looking at him out of the corner of my eye. ‘Vot dime is it, blease?’ he called to me finally. I put down my book and sauntered out to him. ‘When you go for those grotches,’ I said, firmly, ‘I’ll go with you.’ I was sure he wouldn’t want me to go. I was right; he protested that he could get the grotches himself. ‘I’ll go with you,’ I said stubbornly. We stood looking at each other. And then, abruptly, just to give him something to ponder over, I quoted:

  ‘I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

  I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

/>   (And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

  I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.’

  It wasn’t, I realized, very good abracadabra, but it served: Barney looked at me in a puzzled way. ‘Yes,’ he said, vaguely.

  ‘It’s five minutes of twelve,’ I said, remembering he had asked.

  ‘Den we go,’ he said, and we trudged through the rain over to the orchard fence and climbed that, and opened a gate and went out into the meadow that slopes up to the woods. I had a prefiguring of Barney, at some proper spot deep in the woods, prancing around like a goat, casting off his false nature, shedding his hired man’s garments, dropping his Teutonic accent, repeating diabolical phrases, conjuring up grotches.

  There was a great slash of lightning and a long bumping of thunder as we reached the edge of the woods.

  I turned and fled. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Barney standing and staring after me….

  It turned out (on the face of it) to be as simple as the boat that came down the rock. Grotches were ‘crotches’; crotched saplings which he cut down to use as supports under the peach boughs, because in bearing time they became so heavy with fruit that there was danger of the branches snapping off. I saw Barney later, putting the crotches in place. We didn’t have much to say to each other. I can see now that he was beginning to suspect me too.