Complete Stories (67 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
Mrs. Crouch frequently states that she takes but little interest in the things of this world, and she dresses the part. There is a quaint style about her which lends to everything that she wears an air of its having been bequeathed to her by some dear one who went over round 1889.
There is a certain snap to her conversation, too, for which she is noted among our set. Perhaps her favorite line is the one about in the midst of life, which she has been getting off for so long that she has come to take an author’s pride in it. You never saw anyone so clever as Mrs. Crouch is at tracing resemblances to close friends of hers who passed on at what she calls, in round numbers, an early age; you would be surprised at the number of persons with whom she comes in contact who have just that same look round the eyes. In fact, you might call Mrs. Crouch the original Glad Girl, and not be much out of the way.
So the ouija-board operations have been right along in her line. Scarcely a day passes, she tells me, that she does not receive a message from at least one of her large circle of spirit friends, saying that everything is fine, and how is she getting on, herself? It has really been just like Old Home Week for Mrs. Crouch ever since she got her ouija board.
Miss Thill is another of our girls who has made good with the spirits. Spiritualism is no novelty to her; she has been a follower of it, as she says, almost all her life, and by now she has fairly well caught up with it. In her case, also, it is no surprise to find her so talented with the ouija board. She has always been of a markedly mediumistic turn of mind—there are even strong indications of clairvoyant powers. Time and time again Miss Thill has had the experience of walking along the street thinking of some friend of hers, and whom will she meet, not two hours afterward, but that very same friend! As she says, you cannot explain such things away by calling them mere coincidence. Sometimes it really almost frightens Miss Thill to think about it.
You would know that Miss Thill was of a spiritualistic trend only to look at her. She has a way of suddenly becoming oblivious of all that is going on about her and of looking far off into space, with an intent expression, as of one seeking, seeking; materialists, at their first sight of her in this condition, are apt to think that she is trying to remember whether she really did turn off the hot water before leaving home. Her very attire is suggestive of the occult influence. What she saves on corsets she lavishes on necklaces of synthetic jade, carved with mystic signs, which I’ll wager have no good meaning behind them if the truth were known.
Miss Thill is a pretty logical candidate for the head of the local branch of the Ouija Board Workers of the World. She has an appreciable edge on the other contestants in that she once attended a lecture given by Sir Oliver Lodge himself. Unfortunately she chose rather an off day; Sir Oliver was setting them right as to the family life of the atom, and it went right on over Miss Thill’s head; she couldn’t even jump for it. There were none of those little homy touches about Sir Oliver’s intimacies with the spirits which Miss Thill had been so eager to hear, and I believe that there was quite a little bitterness on her part about it. She has never felt really the same toward Sir Oliver since. So far as she is concerned he can turn right round and go back to England—back to his old haunts, as you might put it.
HARDENED HUSBANDSBy means of her ouija board Miss Thill, as might have been expected, has worked her way right into the highest intellectual circles of spirit society. As if recognizing an equal some of the greatest celebrities of the Great Beyond have taken her up. It seems that it is no uncommon occurrence for her to talk to such people as Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott on the ouija board; she has come to think scarcely anything of it. I hear that she has been receiving several messages from Shakspere only lately. His spirit is not what a person could call really chatty, as I understand it; he doesn’t seem to be one to do much talking about himself. Miss Thill has to help him out a good deal. She asks him one of her typically intellectual questions, such as what he thinks of the modern drama, and all he has to do to answer her is to guide the planchette to either “Yes” or “No”; or, at most, both. Still, his spirit is almost an entire stranger to her, when you stop to think of it, so you really cannot expect anything of a more inside nature just yet, anyway.
Unfortunately several of the husbands among our little circle have been markedly out of sympathy with the spirit movement. They have adopted a humorous attitude toward it which has seemed to be almost coarse to the more enthusiastic of the women workers. They use the ouija board only to ask it such frivolous questions as “Where is the nearest place where you can still get it?”—which is particularly trying to those who realize the true seriousness of the thing. It is small wonder that they get no answer from the spirits when they go about it that way; no spirit is going to stand for that sort of stuff. There are too many demands on the spirits’ time for them to bother about calls which are not absolutely necessary.
Attempts to convince the more hardened husbands of the supernatural powers of the ouija board have ended in nothing. Some of them when told, by way of positive proof, of the amazing messages which their own wives have received from the board, have even made open accusations of pushing, which have almost led to an even division of the children, and a parting of the ways. Not since the dance craze came in has there been so much really notable matrimonial friction as there is over this matter of spirit communication. The ouija board is not without—or, in fact, is with, if you do not mind plain speaking—its somber side.
TOO MUCH IS ENOUGHPersonally I find that I am rather out of things at the neighborhood social festivals. When the others gather round to exchange bright sayings of their ouija boards I am left nowhere as regards adding anything to the general revelry. The spirits have not done the right thing by me; I can never get any action on the ouija board. It isn’t as if I had not given the spirits a fair chance. No one was any readier than I to be one of the boys; the flesh was willing, but the spirits weakened, if you could put it that way. There I was, so anxious to make friends with them, and find out how all the folks were, and if they were still with the same people, and how they liked their work. And they would never even say so much as “Haven’t we had a poisonous winter?” to me. So if that is the way they are going to be about it—why, all right. I can take a hint as well as the next one.
As for the community ouija boards, any time the research workers want to store them away in the spare bedrooms with the rest of the bird’s-eye-maple furniture it will be quite all right for me. I am willing to call it a day and give the spirits a rest any time that the others are. I am not fanatical about the ouija board; I am perfectly able to take it or let it alone. In fact, I think that a reasonable amount of daily exercise on it is a good thing. It is not the actual manual labor that I object to—it is the unexpurgated accounts of all the messages received and their meanings, if any.
Sometimes I even feel that I could moil along through life if I never had to hear another discourse on the quaint things that some local ouija board has said. To put it in so many words—at a rough estimate—I am just about all through.
In fact, if I thought that you would stand for it I would even go so far as to say that I am ouija bored.
The Saturday Evening Post,
May 22, 1920
May 22, 1920
A Dinner Party Anthology
As hostess, Mrs. Frisbie is present at the dinner table in body only; her spirit wings afar to the unseen realms of kitchen and pantry, where she fain would be. For, as she sadly explains, only if she were there to supervise could she be assured that things would go smoothly. Un-watched by a stern eye, the cook is apt to serve the fish after the roast or, whimsically, to omit the salad altogether. True, Mrs. Frisbie’s cook, during their four years’ cooperation, has always faithfully followed the old traditions in such matters, but that, according to Mrs. Frisbie, is no proof of what she might do. It would not be the slightest surprise to Mrs. Frisbie to have her break out into the wildest unconventionalities at any moment. Servants, she avers, would do anything; they cannot be trusted to do the simplest task correctly unless you stand right over them while they are doing it.
One is inclined to wonder just why Mrs. Frisbie considers the giving of a dinner party worth while, for the wear and tear upon her nervous system which it entails must be appalling. With hawklike intensity she watches every movement of the waitress, waiting breathlessly for a mistake. A moment’s delay in the service brings her to the verge of a mental breakdown; she bursts into rapid, irrelevant discourse, while her eyes are fixed in a desperate glare and her fingers play soundless tarantellas on the tablecloth. She apologizes continually to her guests for mishaps which have not yet occurred, plaintively relating how hopeless it is for one so handicapped by her servants to attempt any form of hospitality. It is impossible for the more sensitively organized among Mrs. Frisbie’s guests not to take all this to heart and feel depressingly guilty about it.
But it is not alone at dinner parties that the behavior of her servants so affects Mrs. Frisbie. Her whole life, one gathers from her conversation, has been practically wrecked by their caprices. So heavy is the pall that they have cast over her that she can talk of nothing else. She has an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes illustrating their grotesquely unreasonable demands—how a certain one insisted upon a room to herself; how another reserved the top of the bottle for her own coffee; how still another wanted to be always running off to church. Each transitory chambermaid or fleeting laundress that passes through her employ serves as the heroine of another narrative.
With the piteous air of those whose spontaneous generosity has met only with imposition in this world, Mrs. Frisbie admits that all her trouble with servants is directly traceable to the fact that she is too good to them; she really feels, she says, that the only way to get anything out of them is to treat them as so many cattle. Sometimes, she adds wistfully, she yearns to give up her entire ménage and go to live in some little shanty in the backwoods where she could do all her own work and be freed from any effort at entertaining.
It would really amaze Mrs. Frisbie to learn how many people of her acquaintance are wholly in sympathy with the idea.
MR. CHARLES FRISBIEMr. Frisbie’s Christian name was a truly superb bit of foresight by his parents; one cannot imagine his answering to any other appellation than Charlie.
Mr. Frisbie has built up for himself quite an enviable local reputation as an amateur comedian. And, assuredly, there is no one more deserving of success in this line; it is the result of years of earnest endeavor and unflagging application. He is an inspiring example of what hard work can accomplish. Never, in the memories of those who know him, has he let slip the opportunity for a pun or a dialect story.
The real point of Mr. Frisbie’s humor lies in its expectedness. There is a soothing certainty about all his quips; one can see them coming minutes ahead. He is also unsparing of himself in his jesting; though he may have made the same joke a hundred times before, he unflinchingly goes all through it again should a chance offer. No one could estimate what a boon prohibition and a certain motor car have been to him; it would almost seem as if they had both been instituted solely to afford him a field for drolleries.
Mr. Frisbie is also adept at the playing of elfish pranks. It is at the telephone, perhaps, that this quality best asserts itself. He never prosaically gives his correct name over the wire; he invariably waggishly announces himself as some national celebrity, such as Charlie Chaplin or William Jennings Bryan. He still tells about the time when he called up Mr. Partridge at three o’clock in the morning and, having brought him stumbling sleepily down through the drafty darkness from his top-floor bedroom, roguishly told him to go back to bed again. This feat probably marked the climax of Mr. Frisbie’s career. Some people, indeed, feel that he has gone downhill since.
Naturally Mr. Frisbie revels in his opportunities as host at the dinner. Between sallies he performs quaint tricks with olives, silverware and lumps of sugar, leading the laughter on every occasion. Well may his guests remark, as they frequently do, that Charlie is a regular case.
But of what they neglect to add.
MRS. LEWIS WILCOXThe authority with which Mrs. Wilcox settles all questions of what is, or is not, the correct thing to do would lead one to believe that she must have collaborated on the drawing up of the conventions. To her it is not life that matters; it is the etiquette with which one faces it that counts. The pangs of birth mean, to her, worrying over whether the announcement cards will be correctly engraved; the fear of death is the dread that the funeral may not be conducted according to the best usage.
She is in constant terror of being forced into contact with those who are not her social equals; she must be ceaselessly on guard lest any of the bourgeoisie worm their way into her visiting list. This dread of the middle classes she feels not only for herself but for her family.
The Wilcox children lead practically cloistered lives for fear that, in the regrettable democracy of childhood, they may become acquainted with little ones less well-bred than themselves. For it is upon good breeding that Mrs. Wilcox plumes herself; it is a topic of which she seems never to tire. To the overcritical, it seems, perhaps, as if good breeding is much like a sense of humor, in that its possessor never considers it necessary to call attention to it. But any such caviling may doubtless be set down to jealousy of Mrs. Wilcox’s exalted position.
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