The Thurber Carnival

by James Thurber

  After another week of skulking about, starting at every noise, and once almost fainting when an automobile backfired near him, Samuel Bruhl began to take on a remarkable new appearance. He talked out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes grew shifty. He looked more and more like Shoescar Clinigan. He snarled at his wife. Once he called her ‘Babe’, and he had never called her anything but Minnie. He kissed her in a strange, new way, acting rough, almost brutal. At the office he was mean and overbearing. He used peculiar language. One night when the Bruhls had friends in for bridge – old Mr Creegan and his wife – Bruhl suddenly appeared from upstairs with a pair of scarlet pyjamas on, smoking a cigarette, and gripping his revolver. After a few loud and incoherent remarks of a boastful nature, he let fly at a clock on the mantel, and hit it squarely in the middle. Mrs Bruhl screamed. Mr Creegan fainted. Bert, who was in the kitchen, howled. ‘What’s the matta you?’ snarled Bruhl. ‘Ya bunch of softies.’

  Quite by accident, Mrs Bruhl discovered, hidden away in a closet, eight or ten books on gangs and gangsters, which Bruhl had put there. They included Al Capone, You Can’t Win, 10,000 Public Enemies, and a lot of others; and they were all well thumbed. Mrs Bruhl realized that it was high time something was done, and she determined to have a doctor for her husband. For two or three days Bruhl had not gone to work. He lay around in his bedroom, in his red pyjamas, smoking cigarettes. The office phoned once or twice. When Mrs Bruhl urged him to get up and dress and go to work, he laughed and patted her roughly on the head. ‘It’s a knockover, kid,’ he said. ‘We’ll be sitting pretty. To hell with it.’

  The doctor who finally came and slipped into Bruhl’s bedroom was very grave when he emerged. ‘This is a psychosis,’ he said, ‘a definite psychosis. Your husband is living in a world of fantasy. He has built up a curious defence mechanism against something or other.’ The Doctor suggested that a psychiatrist be called in, but after he had gone Mrs Bruhl decided to take her husband out of town on a trip. The Maskonsett Syrup & Fondant Company, Inc., was very fine about it. Mr Scully said of course. ‘Sam is very valuable to us, Mrs Bruhl,’ said Mr Scully, ‘and we all hope he’ll be all right.’ Just the same he had Mr Bruhl’s accounts examined, when Mrs Bruhl had gone.

  Oddly enough, Samuel Bruhl was amenable to the idea of going away. ‘I need a rest,’ he said. ‘You’re right. Let’s get the hell out of here.’ He seemed normal up to the time they set out for the Grand Central and then he insisted on leaving from the 125th Street station. Mrs Bruhl took exception to this, as being ridiculous, whereupon her doting husband snarled at her. ‘God, what a dumb moll I picked,’ he said to Minnie Bruhl, and he added bitterly that if the heat was put on him it would be his own babe who was to blame. ‘And what do you think of that?’ he said, pushing her to the floor of the cab.

  They went to a little inn in the mountains. It wasn’t a very nice place, but the rooms were clean and the meals were good. There was no form of entertainment, except a Tom Thumb golf course and an uneven tennis court, but Mr Bruhl didn’t mind. He said it was too cold outdoors, anyway. He stayed indoors, reading and smoking. In the evening he played the mechanical piano in the dining-room. He liked to play ‘More Than You Know’ over and over again. One night, about nine o’clock, he was putting in his seventh or eighth nickel when four men walked into the dining-room. They were silent men, wearing overcoats, and carrying what appeared to be cases for musical instruments. They took out various kinds of guns from their cases, quickly, expertly, and walked over toward Bruhl, keeping step. He turned just in time to see them line up four abreast and aim at him. Nobody else was in the room. There was a cumulative roar and a series of flashes. Mr Bruhl fell and the men walked out in single file, rapidly, nobody having said a word.

  Mrs Bruhl, state police, and the hotel manager tried to get the wounded man to talk. Chief Witznitz of the nearest town’s police force tried it. It was no good. Bruhl only snarled and told them to go away and let him alone. Finally, Commissioner O’Donnell of the New York City Police Department arrived at the hospital. He asked Bruhl what the men looked like. ‘I don’t know what they looked like,’ snarled Bruhl, ‘and if I did know I wouldn’t tell you.’ He was silent for a moment, then: ‘Cop!’ he added, bitterly. The Commissioner sighed and turned away. ‘They’re all like that,’ he said to the others in the room. ‘They never talk.’ Hearing this, Mr Bruhl smiled, a pleased smile, and closed his eyes.

  The Luck of Jad Peters

  Aunt Emma Peters, at eighty-three – the year she died – still kept in her unused front parlour, on the table with Jad Peters’ collection of lucky souvenirs, a large rough fragment of rock weighing perhaps twenty pounds. The rock stood in the centre of a curious array of odds and ends: a piece of tent canvas, a chip of pine wood, a yellowed telegram, some old newspaper clippings, the cork from a bottle, a bill from a surgeon. Aunt Emma never talked about the strange collection except once, during her last days, when somebody asked her if she wouldn’t feel better if the rock were thrown away. ‘Let it stay where Lisbeth put it,’ she said. All that I know about the souvenirs I have got from other members of the family. A few of them didn’t think it was ‘decent’ that the rock should have been part of the collection, but Aunt Lisbeth, Emma’s sister, had insisted that it should be. In fact, it was Aunt Lisbeth Banks who hired a man to lug it to the house and put it on the table with the rest of the things. ‘It’s as much God’s doing as that other clutter-trap,’ she would say. And she would rock back and forth in her rocking chair with a grim look. ‘You can’t taunt the Lord,’ she would add. She was a very religious woman. I used to see her now and again at funerals, tall, gaunt, grim, but I never talked to her if I could help it. She liked funerals and she liked to look at corpses, and that made me afraid of her.

  Just back of the souvenir table at Aunt Emma’s, on the wall, hung a heavy-framed, full-length photograph of Aunt Emma’s husband, Jad Peters. It showed him wearing a hat and overcoat and carrying a suitcase. When I was a little boy in the early nineteen-hundreds and was taken to Aunt Emma’s house near Sugar Grove, Ohio, I used to wonder about that photograph (I didn’t wonder about the rock and the other objects, because they weren’t put there till much later). It seemed so funny for anyone to be photographed in a hat and overcoat and carrying a suitcase, and even funnier to have the photograph enlarged to almost life size and put inside so elaborate a frame. When we children would sneak into the front parlour to look at the picture, Aunt Emma would hurry us out again. When we asked her about the picture, she would say, ‘Never you mind.’ But when I grew up, I learned the story of the big photograph and of how Jad Peters came to be known as Lucky Jad. As a matter of fact, it was Jad who began calling himself that; once when he ran for a county office (and lost) he had ‘Lucky Jad Peters’ printed on his campaign cards. Nobody else took the name up except in a scoffing way.

  It seems that back in 1888, when Jad Peters was about thirty-five, he had a pretty good business of some kind or other which caused him to travel around quite a lot. One week he went to New York with the intention of going on to Newport, later, by ship. Something turned up back home, however, and one of his employees sent him a telegram reading ‘Don’t go to Newport. Urgent you return here.’ Jad’s story was that he was on the ship, ready to sail, when the telegram was delivered; it had been sent to his hotel, he said, a few minutes after he had checked out, and an obliging clerk had hustled the messenger boy on down to the dock. That was Jad’s story. Most people believed, when they heard the story, that Jad had got the wire at his hotel, probably hours before the ship sailed, for he was a great one at adorning a tale. At any rate, whether or not he rushed off the ship just before the gangplank was hauled up, it sailed without him and some eight or nine hours out of the harbour sank in a storm with the loss of everybody on board. That’s why he had the photograph taken and enlarged: it showed him just as he was when he got off the ship, he said. And that is how he came to start his collection of lucky souvenirs. For a few years he kept th
e telegram, and newspaper clippings of the ship disaster, tucked away in the family Bible, but one day he got them out and put them on the parlour table under a big glass bell.

  From 1888 up until 1920, when Jad died, nothing much happened to him. He is remembered in his later years as a garrulous, boring old fellow whose business slowly went to pieces because of his lack of industry and who finally settled down on a small farm near Sugar Grove and barely scraped out an existence. He took to drinking in his sixties, and from then on made Aunt Emma’s life miserable. I don’t know how she managed to keep up the payments on his life-insurance policy, but some way or other she did. Some of her relatives said among themselves that it would be a blessing if Jad died in one of his frequent fits of nausea. It was pretty well known that Aunt Emma had never liked him very much – she married him because he asked her to twice a week for seven years and because there had been nobody else she cared about; she stayed married to him on account of their children and because her people always stayed married. She grew, in spite of Jad, to be a quiet, kindly old lady as the years went on, although her mouth would take on a strained, tight look when Jad showed up at dinner time from wherever he had been during the day – usually from down at Prentice’s store in the village, where he liked to sit around telling about the time he just barely got off the doomed boat in New York harbour in ’88 and adding tales, more or less fantastic, of more recent close escapes he had had. There was his appendicitis operation, for one thing: he had come out of the ether, he would say, just when they had given him up. Dr Benham, who had performed the operation, was annoyed when he heard this, and once met Jad in the street and asked him to quit repeating the preposterous story, but Jad added the doctor’s bill to his collection of talismans, anyway. And there was the time when he had got up in the night to take a swig of stomach bitters for a bad case of heartburn and had got hold of the carbolic-acid bottle by mistake. Something told him, he would say, to take a look at the bottle before he uncorked it, so he carried it to a lamp, lighted the lamp, and he’d be god-dam if it wasn’t carbolic acid! It was then that he added the cork to his collection.

  Old Jad got so that he could figure out lucky escapes for himself in almost every disaster and calamity that happened in and around Sugar Grove. Once, for example, a tent blew down during a wind storm at the Fairfield County Fair, killing two people and injuring a dozen others. Jad hadn’t gone to the fair that year for the first time in nine or ten years. Something told him, he would say, to stay away from the fair that year. The fact that he always went to the fair, when he did go, on a Thursday and that the tent blew down on a Saturday didn’t make any difference to Jad. He hadn’t been there and the tent blew down and two people were killed. After the accident, he went to the fair grounds and cut a piece of canvas from the tent and put it on the parlour table next to the cork from the carbolic-acid bottle. Lucky Jad Peters!

  I think Aunt Emma got so that she didn’t hear Jad when he was talking, except on evenings when neighbours dropped in, and then she would have to take hold of the conversation and steer it away from any opening that might give Jad a chance to tell of some close escape he had had. But he always got his licks in. He would bide his time, creaking back and forth in his chair, clicking his teeth, and not listening much to the talk about crops and begonias and the latest reports on the Spencers’ feeble-minded child, and then, when there was a long pause, he would clear his throat and say that that reminded him of the time he had had a mind to go down to Pullen’s lumber yard to fetch home a couple of two-by-fours to shore up the chicken house. Well, sir, he had pottered around the house a little while and was about to set out for Pullen’s when something told him not to go a step. And it was that very day that a pile of lumber in the lumber yard let go and crushed Grant Pullen’s leg so’s it had to be amputated. Well, sir, he would say – but Aunt Emma would cut in on him at this point. ‘Everybody’s heard that old chestnut,’ she would say, with a forced little laugh, fanning herself in quick strokes with an old palm-leaf fan. Jad would go sullen and rock back and forth in his chair, clicking his teeth. He wouldn’t get up when the guests rose to go – which they always did at this juncture. The memento of his close escape from the Pullen lumbar-yard disaster was, of course, the chip of pine wood.

  I think I have accounted for all of Jad’s souvenirs that I remember except the big rough fragment of rock. The story of the rock is a strange one. In August 1920, county engineers were widening the channel of the Hocking River just outside of Sugar Grove and had occasion to do considerable blasting out of river-bed rock. I have never heard Clem Warden tell the story himself, but it has been told to me by people who have. It seems that Clem was walking along the main street of Sugar Grove at about a quarter to four when he saw Jad coming along toward him. Clem was an old crony of Jad’s – one of the few men of his own generation who could tolerate Jad – and the two stopped on the sidewalk and talked. Clem figured later that they had talked for about five minutes, and then either he or Jad said something about getting on, so they separated, Jad going on toward Prentice’s store, slowly, on account of his rheumatic left hip, and Clem going in the other direction. Clem had taken about a dozen steps when suddenly he heard Jad call to him. ‘Say, Clem!’ Jad said. Clem stopped and turned around, and here was Jad walking back toward him. Jad had taken about six steps when suddenly he was flung up against the front of Matheny’s harness store ‘like a sack o’ salt’, as Clem put it. By the time Clem could reach him, he was gone. He never knew what hit him, Clem said, and for quite a few minutes nobody else knew what hit him, either. Then somebody in the crowd that gathered found the big muddy rock lying in the road by the gutter. A particularly big shot of dynamite, set off in the river bed, had hurtled the fragment through the air with terrific force. It had come flying over the four-storey Jackson Building like a cannon ball and had struck Jad Peters squarely in the chest.

  I suppose old Jad hadn’t been in his grave two days before the boys at Prentice’s quit shaking their heads solemnly over the accident and began making funny remarks about it. Cal Gregg’s was the funniest. ‘Well, sir,’ said Cal, ‘I don’t suppose none of us will ever know what it was now, but somethin’ must of told Jad to turn around.’

  The Greatest Man in the World

  Looking back on it now, from the vantage point of 1950, one can only marvel that it hadn’t happened long before it did. The United States of America had been, ever since Kitty Hawk, blindly constructing the elaborate petard by which, sooner or later, it must be hoist. It was inevitable that some day there would come roaring out of the skies a national hero of insufficient intelligence, background, and character successfully to endure the mounting orgies of glory prepared for aviators who stayed up a long time or flew a great distance. Both Lindbergh and Byrd, fortunately for national decorum and international amity, had been gentlemen; so had our other famous aviators. They wore their laurels gracefully, withstood the awful weather of publicity, married excellent women, usually of fine family, and quietly retired to private life and the enjoyment of their varying fortunes. No untoward incidents, on a worldwide scale, marred the perfection of their conduct on the perilous heights of fame. The exception to the rule was, however, bound to occur and it did, in July 1937, when Jack (‘Pal’) Smurch, erstwhile mechanic’s helper in a small garage in Westfield, Iowa, flew a second-hand, single-motored Bresthaven Dragon-Fly III monoplane all the way around the world, without stopping.

  Never before in the history of aviation had such a flight as Smurch’s ever been dreamed of. No one had ever taken seriously the weird floating auxiliary gas tanks, invention of the mad New Hampshire professor of astronomy, Dr Charles Lewis Gresham, upon which Smurch placed full reliance. When the garage worker, a slightly built, surly, unprepossessing young man of twenty-two, appeared at Roosevelt Field in early July 1937, slowly chewing a great quid of scrap tobacco, and announced ‘Nobody ain’t seen no flyin’ yet,’ the newspapers touched briefly and satirically upon his projected twenty-fi
ve-thousand-mile flight. Aeronautical and automotive experts dismissed the idea curtly, implying that it was a hoax, a publicity stunt. The rusty, battered, second-hand plane wouldn’t go. The Gresham auxiliary tanks wouldn’t work. It was simply a cheap joke.

  Smurch, however, after calling on a girl in Brooklyn who worked in the flap-folding department of a large paper-box factory, a girl whom he later described as his ‘sweet patootie’, climbed nonchalantly into his ridiculous plane at dawn of the memorable seventh of July 1937, spat a curve of tobacco juice into the still air, and took off, carrying with him only a gallon of bootleg gin and six pounds of salami.

  When the garage boy thundered out over the ocean the papers were forced to record, in all seriousness, that a mad, unknown young man – his name was variously misspelled – had actually set out upon a preposterous attempt to span the world in a rickety, one-engined contraption, trusting to the long-distance refuelling device of a crazy schoolmaster. When, nine days later, without having stopped once, the tiny plane appeared above San Francisco Bay, headed for New York, spluttering and choking, to be sure, but still magnificently and miraculously aloft, the headlines, which long since had crowded everything else off the front page – even the shooting of the Governor of Illinois by the Vileti gang – swelled to unprecedented size, and the news stories began to run to twenty-five and thirty columns. It was noticeable, however, that the accounts of the epoch-making flight touched rather lightly upon the aviator himself. This was not because facts about the hero as a man were too meagre, but because they were too complete.