WHEN WE ARRIVED at the Joneses’, Guppa wouldn’t let Marvin just lead him into the house. He insisted on ringing the doorbell, and he stood there at the front door with his hat in his hand, as if he’d come courting.
When the door opened, he said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Jones. I hope you remember me—I’m Herb Piper. I sold you your Champion. Down at Babbington Studebaker?”
“Why, of course, I remember you, Mr. Piper,” said Mrs. Jones. “You’re ‘Call Me Herb.’”
“That’s me,” said Guppa. “And please do. Call me Herb. I think you know my grandson—Peter.” Guppa sounded odd to me. This wasn’t the way I ever heard him talk. It was his Studebaker voice.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “Peter, le roi.” She patted me on the head.
I expected Guppa to get right down to business now that the introductions were over, but instead he sniffed with extravagant gusto the aromas of Mrs. Jones’s cooking that wafted out the open door. He rested a hand on my shoulder and said, “My, my, my, that smells good. May I ask you what that is you’re cooking?”
“That? Oh, that’s just a chicken. I’m making some chicken and dumplings.”
“Chicken and dumplings!” said Guppa, as if he’d never heard of it before. “That sounds good. That sounds very good.”
“We have that at home,” I said, astonished. “Gumma makes that, too.” Though I didn’t recognize it, Guppa was selling. I was seeing his professional behavior. Apparently, flattery was part of his technique. If Mrs. Jones had said that she was toasting a slice of white bread, Guppa would have said that that sounded good, too. What I would have found most surprising, if I’d seen it then, was the fact that Guppa was selling himself, he was working to sell himself, so that when he finally got around to suggesting collaboration, Mrs. Jones would be favorably disposed.
He tightened the hand on my shoulder and said, “My grandson Peter here has been telling me about your windflowers—but I’m surprised he didn’t tell me about your cooking.”
Now, I thought, now that he’s brought the windflowers up, he’ll get down to it, but he wasn’t ready, not yet.
“How’s that Champion running?” he asked.
“Why it’s running just fine,” said Mrs. Jones. “Mr. Piper, why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee?”
“That sounds nice,” he said. “That sounds very nice. Come on along boys.”
At least we were in the house. It couldn’t take him much longer to get to the heart of the matter now, I thought—but it did. It seemed to take him forever, and he consumed more cups of coffee than I had ever seen him drink before, but finally he set his cup down and said, “I think I mentioned that Peter has been telling me about your windflowers.”
“Yes, you did,” said Mrs. Jones. “You did mention that.”
“I wonder if I might see those?” Ah! At last!
“Of course, Mr. Piper. Come on out into the back yard, where Mr. Jones keeps his chickens.”
Then it took no time at all. As soon as Guppa saw the windflowers, he saw their value. A smile formed on his face.
“Well, now, these are really something,” he said.
“They aren’t bad—” said Mrs. Jones.
“Very far from bad, Mrs. Jones,” said Guppa. “They’re really eye-catching.”
“—but they’re very small,” she said. “Something big, now, something much bigger, as tall as a man, maybe even a little taller than that, well, that would be something.”
Guppa turned toward me and winked, and then slowly turned toward Mrs. Jones and said, “Peter has an idea about how you and I might work together. It’s an interesting idea—”
“The king has an interesting way of thinking,” Mrs. Jones said.
“That’s true,” said Guppa. “Let me tell you about my garden—”
He did, and he described his automatic waterer, and then he described it as it might be, with the trash-can lids suspended from giant versions of Mrs. Jones’s little windflowers. She was delighted. It turned out that what she’d said to Guppa about building giant windflowers was almost a confession. She considered the ones she’d made mere models for her future work. Almost from the first, she had wanted to make a leap in scale, but like so many people whose dreams seem to have no practical value she had kept them to herself. Guppa had brought with him a justification for dreaming—call it an excuse if you like.
“I have some supplies already,” she said. “In the cellar. Some lengths of cable, scrap metal, paint. When would you like to start?”
“Right away, I suppose,” said Guppa. “If that’s okay with you. You see, Peter’s really got his heart set on our getting on ‘Fantastic Contraptions,’ and he’s sure we can do it with my waterer and your windflowers if we put them together so we’ve got—what are we going to call the things?”
There was only the briefest of hesitations. It was as if Mrs. Jones had had the whole project in mind for some time, as if she already knew about Guppa’s invention.
“Waterwillows,” she said.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 615, Mark Dorset considers Projects: Practical and Impractical, Purposeful and Purposeless; Fantasy and Reality; and Dreams and Reality from this episode.
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