Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (12 page)

IT had, of course, been out of the question to arrange a modest little reception for the greatest flier in the history of the world. He was received at Roosevelt Field with such elaborate and pretentious ceremonies as rocked the world. Fortunately, however, the worn and spent hero promptly swooned, had to be removed bodily from his plane, and was spirited from the field without having opened his mouth once. Thus he did not jeopardize the dignity of this first reception, a reception illumined by the presence of the Secretaries of War and the Navy, Mayor Michael J. Moriarity of New York, the Premier of Canada, Governors Fanniman, Groves, McFeely, and Critchfield, and a brilliant array of European diplomats. Smurch did not, in fact, come to in time to take part in the gigantic hullabaloo arranged at City Hall for the next day. He was rushed to a secluded nursing home and confined in bed. It was nine days before he was able to get up, or to be more exact, before he was permitted to get up. Meanwhile the greatest minds in the country, in solemn assembly, had arranged a secret conference of city, state, and government officials, which Smurch was to attend for the purpose of being instructed in the ethics and behavior of heroism.

On the day that the little mechanic was finally allowed to get up and dress and, for the first time in two weeks, took a great chew of tobacco, he was permitted to receive the newspapermen—this by way of testing him out. Smurch did not wait for questions. “Youse guys,” he said—and the
Times
man winced—“youse guys can tell the cock-eyed world dat I put it over on Lindbergh, see? Yeh—an’ made an ass o’ them two frogs.” The “two frogs” was a reference to a pair of gallant French fliers who, in attempting a flight only halfway round the world, had, two weeks before, unhappily been lost at sea. The
Times
man was bold enough, at this point, to sketch out for Smurch the accepted formula for interviews in cases of this kind; he explained that there should be no arrogant statements belittling the achievements of other heroes, particularly heroes of foreign nations. “Ah, the hell with that,” said Smurch. “I did it, see? I did it, an’ I’m talkin’ about it.” And he did talk about it.

None of this extraordinary interview was, of course, printed. On the contrary, the newspapers, already under the disciplined direction of a secret directorate created for the occasion and composed of statesmen and editors, gave out to a panting and restless world that “Jacky,” as he had been arbitrarily nicknamed, would consent to say only that he was very happy and that anyone could have done what he did. “My achievement has been, I fear, slightly exaggerated,” the
Times
man’s article had him protest, with a modest smile. These newspaper stories were kept from the hero, a restriction which did not serve to abate the rising malevolence of his temper. The situation was, indeed, extremely grave, for Pal Smurch was, as he kept insisting, “rarin’ to go.” He could not much longer be kept from a nation clamorous to lionize him. It was the most desperate crisis the United States of America had faced since the sinking of the
Lusitania.

ON the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of July, Smurch was spirited away to a conference-room in which were gathered mayors, governors, government officials, behaviorist psychologists, and editors. He gave them each a limp, moist paw and a brief unlovely grin. “Hah ya?” he said. When Smurch was seated, the Mayor of New York arose and, with obvious pessimism, attempted to explain what he must say and how he must act when presented to the world, ending his talk with a high tribute to the hero’s courage and integrity. The Mayor was followed by Governor Fanniman of New York, who, after a touching declaration of faith, introduced Cameron Spottiswood, Second Secretary of the American Embassy in Paris, the gentleman selected to coach Smurch in the amenities of public ceremonies. Sitting in a chair, with a soiled yellow tie in his hand and his shirt open at the throat, unshaved, smoking a rolled cigarette, Jack Smurch listened with a leer on his lips. “I get ya, I get ya,” he cut in, nastily. “Ya want me to ack like a softy, huh? Ya want me to ack like that — ——— baby-face Lindbergh, huh? Well, nuts to that, see?” Everyone took in his breath sharply; it was a sigh and a hiss. “Mr. Lindbergh,” began a United States Senator, purple with rage, “and Mr. Byrd—” Smurch, who was paring his nails with a jackknife, cut in again. “Byrd!” he exclaimed. “Aw fa God’s sake,
dat
big—” Somebody shut off his blasphemies with a sharp word. A newcomer had entered the room. Everyone stood up, except Smurch, who, still busy with his nails, did not even glance up. “Mr. Smurch,” said someone, sternly, “the President of the United States!” It had been thought that the presence of the Chief Executive might have a chastening effect upon the young hero, and the former had been, thanks to the remarkable coöperation of the press, secretly brought to the obscure conference-room.

A great, painful silence fell. Smurch looked up, waved a hand at the President. “How ya comin’?” he asked, and began rolling a fresh cigarette. The silence deepened. Someone coughed in a strained way. “Geez, it’s hot, ain’t it?” said Smurch. He loosened two more shirt buttons, revealing a hairy chest and the tattooed word “Sadie” enclosed in a stencilled heart. The great and important men in the room, faced by the most serious crisis in recent American history, exchanged worried frowns. Nobody seemed to know how to proceed. “Come awn, come awn,” said Smurch. “Let’s get the hell out of here! When do I start cuttin’ in on de parties, huh? And what’s they goin’ to be
in
it?” He rubbed a thumb and forefinger together meaningly. “Money!” exclaimed a state senator, shocked, pale. “Yeh, money,” said Pal, flipping his cigarette out of a window. “An’ big money.” He began rolling a fresh cigarette. “Big money,” he repeated, frowning over the rice paper. He tilted back in his chair, and leered at each gentleman, separately, the leer of an animal that knows its power, the leer of a leopard loose in a bird-and-dog shop. “Aw fa God’s sake, let’s get some place where it’s cooler,” he said. “I been cooped up plenty for three weeks!”

Smurch stood up and walked over to an open window, where he stood staring down into the street, nine floors below. The faint shouting of newsboys floated up to him. He made out his name. “Hot dog!” he cried, grinning, ecstatic. He leaned out over the sill. “You tell ’em, babies!” he shouted down. “Hot diggity dog!” In the tense little knot of men standing behind him, a quick, mad impulse flared up. An unspoken word of appeal, of command, seemed to ring through the room. Yet it was deadly silent. Charles K. L. Brand, secretary to the Mayor of New York City, happened to be standing nearest Smurch; he looked inquiringly at the President of the United States. The President, pale, grim, nodded shortly. Brand, a tall, powerfully built man, once a tackle at Rutgers, stepped forward, seized the greatest man in the world by his left shoulder and the seat of his pants, and pushed him out the window.

“My God, he’s fallen out the window!” cried a quick-witted editor.

“Get me out of here!” cried the President. Several men sprang to his side and he was hurriedly escorted out of a door toward a side-entrance of the building. The editor of the Associated Press took charge, being used to such things. Crisply he ordered certain men to leave, others to stay; quickly he outlined a story which all the papers were to agree on, sent two men to the street to handle that end of the tragedy, commanded a Senator to sob and two Congressmen to go to pieces nervously. In a word, he skillfully set the stage for the gigantic task that was to follow, the task of breaking to a grief-stricken world the sad story of the untimely, accidental death of its most illustrious and spectacular figure.

THE funeral was, as you know, the most elaborate, the finest, the solemnest, and the saddest ever held in the United States of America. The monument in Arlington Cemetery, with its clean white shaft of marble and the simple device of a tiny plane carved on its base, is a place for pilgrims, in deep reverence, to visit. The nations of the world paid lofty tributes to little Jacky Smurch, America’s greatest hero. At a given hour there were two minutes of silence throughout the nation. Even the inhabitants of the small, bewildered town of Westfield, Iowa, observed this touching ceremony; agents of the Department of Justice saw to that. One of them was especially assigned to stand grimly in the doorway of a little shack restaurant on the edge of the tourists’ camping ground just outside the town. There, under his stern scrutiny, Mrs. Emma Smurch bowed her head above two hamburger steaks sizzling on her grill—bowed her head and turned away, so that the Secret Service man could not see the twisted, strangely familiar leer on her lips.

1931

JAMES THURBER

THE INTERVIEW

W
ONDERFUL
place you have here,” said the man from the newspaper. He stood with his host on a rise of ground from where, down a slope to the right, they could see a dead garden, killed by winter, and, off to the left, spare, grim trees stalking the ghost of a brook.

“Everybody says that,” said George Lockhorn. “Everybody says it’s a wonderful place, to which I used to reply ‘Thank you,’ or ‘I’m glad you think so,’ or ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ At fifty-eight, Price, I say what I know. I say that you and the others are, by God, debasing the word wonderful. This bleak prospect is no more wonderful than a frozen shirt. Even in full summer it’s no more wonderful than an unfrozen shirt. I will give you the synonyms for wonderful—wondrous, miraculous, prodigious, astonishing, amazing, phenomenal, unique, curious, strange. I looked them up an hour ago, because I knew you would say this is a wonderful place. Apply any of those words to that dahlia stalk down there.”

“I see what you mean,” said Price, who was embarrassed, and began looking in his pockets for something that wasn’t there.

“I have known only a few wonderful things in my fifty-eight years,” said Lockhorn. “They are easy to enumerate, since I have been practicing up to toss them off to you casually: the body of a woman, the works of a watch, the verses of Keats, the structure of the hyacinth, the devotion of the dog. Trouble is, I tossed those off casually for the Saint Louis
Post-Dispatch
man, or the Rochester
Times-Union
man. It’s cold out here. Shall we go inside?”

“Just as you say,” said the interviewer, who had reached for the copy paper and the pencil in his pocket, but didn’t bring them out. “It’s bracing out here, though.”

“You’re freezing to death, without your hat and overcoat, and you know it,” said Lockhorn. “It’s late enough for a highball— Do you drink cocktails?”

“No, sir. That is, not often,” said Price.

“You’re probably a liar,” Lockhorn said. “Everybody replies to my questions the way they think I want them to reply. You can say that I say ‘everybody-they;’ I hate ‘everybody-he.’ ‘Has everybody brought his or her slate?’ a teacher of mine, a great goat of a woman, used to ask us. There is no other tongue in the world as clumsy as ours is—with its back to certain corners. That’s been used, too—and don’t make notes, or don’t let me see you make notes. Never made a note in my life, except after a novel was finished. Plot the chapters out, outline the characters after the book has been published.”

“That is extremely interesting,” said Price. “What do you do with the notes?”

They had reached the rear of the house now. “We’ll go in the back way,” said Lockhorn. “I keep them around, tuck them away where my executor can find them if he’s on his toes. This is the woodshed. We’ll go through the kitchen. Some of my best character touches, some of the best devices, too, are in the notes. Anybody can write a novel, but it takes talent to do notes. We’ll go through this door.”

“This is wonderful,” said Price. “I’m sorry. I mean—”

“Let it stand,” said Lockhorn. “Wonderful in the sense of being astonishing, curious, and strange. Don’t take the chair by the fire,” he added as they reached the living room. “That’s mine.”

LOCKHORN dropped into the chair by the fireplace and motioned his guest into another. “Can I use that about the notes?” asked Price. “Mr. Hammer wants something new.”

“Make us both a drink,” Lockhorn said. “That’s a bar over there. I drink bourbon, but there’s Scotch and rye, too.”

“I’ll have bourbon,” said Price.

“Everybody has what I have,” Lockhorn growled. “I said Scotch, and the
Times-Union
man had Scotch; I said rye, and the
Post-Dispatch
man had rye. No, you can’t use that about the notes. Tell it to everybody. Beginning to believe it myself. Have you gained the idea in your half hour here that I am a maniac?”

Price, noisily busy with bottles and glasses, laughed uncomfortably. “Everybody knows that your methods of work are unusual,” he said. “May I ask what you are working on now?”

“Easy on the soda,” said Lockhorn. “Martha will raise hell when she finds me drinking. Just bow at her and grin.”

Price put two frightened squirts of soda in one glass and filled up the other. “Mrs. Lockhorn?” he asked, handing the strong highball to his host.

“What is this man Hammer like?” Lockhorn demanded. “No, let me tell you. He says ‘remotely resembles,’ he says ‘flashes of insight.’ He begins, by God, sentences with ‘moreover.’ I had an English teacher who began sentences with ‘too.’ ‘Too, there are other factors to be considered.’ The man says he’s read Macaulay, but he never got past page six—Hammer, that is. Should have gone into real estate—subdivisions, opening up suburbs, and so on. This English teacher started every class by saying, ‘None of us can write.’ Hadn’t been for that man, I would have gone into real estate—subdivisions, opening up suburbs, and so on. But he was a challenge. You can say my memoirs will be called ‘I Didn’t Want to Write.’ ” Lockhorn had almost finished his drink. “I’ll have to see a proof,” he said. “I’ll have to see a proof of your article. Have you noticed that everybody says everything twice? They say everything twice. ‘Yes, they do,’ you’ll say. ‘Yes, they do.’ Only contribution I’ve made to literature is the discovery of the duplicate statement. ‘How the hell are you, Bill?’ a guy will say. ‘How the hell are you, anyway?’ ‘Fine,’ Bill will say. ‘Just fine.’ ”