5: On the morning that . . .
5: On the morning that . . .
Little Follies, “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” Chapter 1 continues
ON THE MORNING that Mr. Beaker found Eliza’s letter in his post office box, snow still covered Gumma and Guppa’s lawn.
I was sitting in a high chair in the kitchen, gumming a piece of toast, when Mr. Beaker let himself in through the back door, ending the conversation my mother and Gumma were having about the way I ate my toast.
“You see,” my mother was saying, “he doesn’t like the dry part of the toast much—I think because it hurts his pink little gums and the roof of his little mouth. But he doesn’t like the slobbered part much either—I think because it’s revolting. So what he does is turn the toast as he eats it. See that? Dudley says that—” My mother chewed on her lower lip a moment while she tried to remember just what it was that Mr. Beaker had said about the way I ate my toast. While she was ruminating, Mr. Beaker burst into the room.
“Dudley!” exclaimed my mother, breaking out in a smile. “I was just talking about you and what you said about the way Peter eats his toast. How does that go again?”
Mr. Beaker was holding an envelope in front of him, at arm’s length, dangling it between two fingers as a boy might dangle a small fish, a killifish or mummichog, say, that he had caught with an old hook and a piece of bacon, sitting on the bulkhead somewhere along the estuarial stretch of the Bolotomy River. He was wearing the same grin that he had worn when he had stood at the end of the driveway with a chocolate cake behind his back.
“It’s something about nibbling at the elusive, ever-receding twilight line of this moment, ahead of which lies an abrasive future, and behind which we leave a messy past, isn’t it?” my mother asked.
“Yes, yes, something like that,” Mr. Beaker answered impatiently. He waggled the envelope and cleared his throat. Gumma poured him a cup of coffee.
“Why, Dudley,” said my mother, her mouth falling open and her eyebrows rising, “why aren’t you at work? Are you playing hooky?”
“Ladies,” Mr. Beaker said, flapping the envelope with great vigor, “I have caught one. I have here a letter written by a shy insurance salesman in response to Mary Strong’s advertisement. My new career is launched, and so is—” He pulled the letter from the envelope, unfolded it, and read the signature. “—John Simpson’s. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to become the first of Mary Strong’s epistolary sugar daddies. I have quit my job—”
Gumma’s face fell. “You quit your job?” she asked.
“Yes, indeed.” He adopted a conspiratorial tone and put his arm around Gumma’s shoulders. “To tell the truth, I never liked that job. Every morning I would sit at my desk and ask myself, ‘Dudley, is writing advertisements for clams suitable work for an educated man, a man with imagination and taste, a man who can be struck dumb by a sunrise, transfixed by a hawthorn abloom in the spring, choked up by Venus gleaming beside the moon on a winter night?’”
I tried holding my toast by two fingers, as Mr. Beaker had held his letter, and flapping it with great vigor, but it got away from me and fell to the floor. Mr. Beaker picked it up and put it on my tray. I looked at it. Some cat hairs and a little fluff ball were stuck to it. I tried to push it disdainfully just to one side of the tray, but in those days there wasn’t much subtlety in my vocabulary of gestures; the toast flew off the tray and fell to the floor again.
Mr. Beaker picked the toast up and threw it into the trash. “Do not play with your food, Peter,” he said.
“I’ve always thought your ads were wonderful,” my mother said. She was dunking one end of half a slice of toast into her coffee; glistening discs of melted butter drifted and merged on the surface. She stared at a spot about midway between her and me, where her memory projected a retrospective show of Mr. Beaker’s advertisements for the Babbington Clam Council, each of which my mother had placed in an album that my father had given her, intending that she would use it for photographs of me. “They’re real clever,” she pronounced, the show complete.
“Really,” offered Mr. Beaker.
“Oh, yes, Dudley. I wouldn’t lie to you,” asserted my mother. “If I thought they weren’t any good, I’d tell you. That’s the way I am. I just have to say what I think, even when I shouldn’t.”
“She’s always been that way,” said Gumma. She laughed a little and settled into her chair. She dunked her toast, and a reminiscent glaze formed over her eyes. “I’ll never forget the time when Billy Whozit’s father—oh, what was his name, Ella, that Billy What’s-his-name?”
“Not the one we called Billy Lardbottom, the fat boy whose father was a butcher?”
“No, no, no. I mean that Billy Whatchamacallit. I think his father was a handyman or a painter. He was very handsome, I remember—the father, I mean. Well, anyway, one day this Billy Somebody-or-other’s father was talking about something—what was it?—he always talked as if he knew everything—and Ella suddenly said something like—”
“I’ll have to hear it another time,” said Mr. Beaker. He gave Gumma a kiss on her forehead. “I have a great deal to do.” He gave my mother a kiss just to the side of her mouth.
When Mr. Beaker got home, he dashed to the room that he had outfitted for work, a room on the second floor, facing my grandparents’ house, directly across from the room I shared with my mother and father, where I slept in the crib my mother once used.
He read and reread John Simpson’s letter, until he could begin to hear John Simpson reading it to himself to see how it would sound to the lovely unfortunate. He wrote draft after draft, trying again and again to strike just the right note in his reply. He relished this work as he never had any other, and he labored at it long and hard, working on into the night, until he began to feel the distance between him and John Simpson shrink, and began to develop the trait that would make him so successful in this line of work: an uncanny knack for echoing, in Mary Strong’s replies to her many correspondents, the tone, style, and yearnings of each of the men who wrote to her. The light from his desk lamp threw shadows of the branches of a young oak across my crib, across my parents’ bed, and onto the opposite wall. Later, Mr. Beaker would become quite facile—“a virtuoso of the heartstrings, especially adept at pizzicato,” he liked to say—but his correspondence with Eliza Foote was difficult from start to finish.
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The Personal History continues in Episode 6.
In Topical Guide 5, Mark Dorset considers Babbington; Clams: The Babbington Clam Council; Work: Labor; and Art: Play from this episode.
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.