14: Mr. Beaker began fiddling . . .

Little Follies, “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” Chapter 4 continues

May 31, 2021

     Mr. Beaker began fiddling with his pipe, poking and pounding at the tobacco with a complicated brass tool that my father suspected was a prop, something that Beaker used only when he had an audience. At home, my father knew, from standing on his toes and looking into Mr. Beaker’s kitchen, he smoked mentholated cigarettes and lit them with ordinary paper matches.
     My father passed his hand over his mouth, but his eyes were bright above it, and I could tell he was grinning.
     “At first,” said Mr. Beaker, leaning toward May and holding up his index finger, “I thought I knew what he was after. I figured that he wanted a little flattery, a little titillation.”
     Whitey raised both eyebrows, as my father had done earlier. I tried it myself.
     “This is a family bar,” he said. “You have to watch what you say here.”
     “I assure you,” said Mr. Beaker, “that I do not intend to say anything that will upset the hardworking folk who gather here to drink away the memory of each working day.”
     “I wouldn’t exactly say that,” said Whitey. “I mean, most of the people you see here tonight only come in on the weekends. I grant you we get a different crowd during the week, but I don’t know that I’d call them hardworking.”
     “I wonder whether Simpson goes to bars,” Mr. Beaker wondered aloud.
     “What’s the name?” asked Whitey.
     Mr. Beaker took from his pocket a brass lighter, a miniature reproduction of the sort of torch used in those days to solder copper pipe. At the back, above the little handle, was a lever that could be pumped to raise the pressure in the fuel container. From the top, a nozzle projected horizontally, terminating in a perforated sleeve, and just in front of this sleeve was a striking wheel that, when spun, produced a spark from a flint held just below the wheel in a cylindrical flint-holder. When a valve was opened, fuel was forced through the tiny nozzle under pressure, and the atomized fuel rushed through the sleeve, where it mixed with air drawn into the sleeve through the perforations. This air-and-fuel mixture was ignited by the spark and produced, with a miniature roar, a flame as long as Mr. Beaker’s index finger, a flame that Mr. Beaker could count on to capture the attention of everyone nearby. He pumped the lighter several times, opened the valve, and spun the striker, producing the desired results.
     “Jack Simpson,” he announced.
     “That’s the guy he’s having all this trouble writing a letter to,” said my father.
     “He doesn’t come in here,” said Whitey.
     “What’s the name?” asked May.
     “Simpson,” said Whitey. “Jack Simpson.”
     “What does he look like?” May pushed her glass toward Whitey and twisted on her stool so that she faced Mr. Beaker and her knee just touched his leg. Mr. Beaker looked at her for a long time before answering.
     “What does he look like? I don’t know. I’ve never seen him.”
     “Oh, I thought you knew him.”
     “I thought I knew him, too.” Mr. Beaker shook his head slowly from side to side. He rubbed his forehead with his fingers, as if he were massaging away a pain. “I even thought I knew what he looked like. I would have said, a while ago, that he was short, balding, and a little overweight, that he had in his closet a hat with a feather, a hat he had bought after a long period of hesitation, a hat that he had imagined wearing at a jaunty angle when he went to work in the morning, a hat that he had never had the nerve to wear.”
     “Oh, I know that guy,” said May. She held a cigarette to her lips and leaned toward Mr. Beaker for a light. She lost her balance on the stool and had to steady herself with a hand on his shoulder. “I think my husband, who died, used to know him.”
     Mr. Beaker sighed through his nose and lit May’s cigarette with a match from a book on the bar. “I’m not describing him as he is, only as I imagined him to be,” he explained. My father signaled to Whitey again.
     “Wait a minute,” said Whitey. “Let me get this straight. Are we talking about somebody you just made up?”
     “If I had made him up,” said Mr. Beaker, “I would not have made him so—” he paused, unable to find not only the right word, but any word that would fit reasonably well. He looked at May, who was waiting for him to finish the thought, and at Whitey and my father, also waiting. Then he looked at his drink.
     “Hard to describe?” suggested May.
     “Bald?” asked my father.
     “Fat,” said Whitey.
     “Mysterious?” asked my mother.
     “—hard to control,” said Mr. Beaker.
     My father saw the opportunity that he had been waiting for. His hand shook when he raised his glass, and he spilled a little beer on the bar, but he succeeded fairly well in making himself sound as if a small and inconsequential idea had just occurred to him. “It seems to me,” he said, “that your real problem isn’t Jack Simpson. It’s this woman he has his eye on, this what’s-her-name.”
     “Eliza.”
     “Yeah. See, with this Simpson you’ve got a problem you don’t have with those others—”
     “He writes to other men, too?” May asked my mother.
     “—you’ve got competition. Now, you should be thinking about how you’re going to match the competition.”
     “You’re competing with some woman for the attentions of this guy who wears a hat with a feather?” asked May. She drew away from Mr. Beaker.
     “It’s business, May,” said my mother, reaching between May and Mr. Beaker again to move the pretzel dish away from me and slide her glass toward Whitey.
     “It sounds like funny business to me,” said May. She reached around my mother and gave Mr. Beaker a little push on the shoulder. “Is that what you’re up to, funny business?”