“Why, she ain’t but a kid!” Axel exclaimed. He glared at the mail-order bride vendor, Harvey Fu Chang. “You were supposed to get me a woman fit for marriage. This one’s young enough to be my granddaughter.”
Axel and Harvey then engaged in a heated discussion, the savvy Chinese fellow suddenly losing his grasp of the same English language he’d grasped pretty darned well a few minutes earlier. Regardless, both men seemed to fully understand one another, with Axel making clear that he didn’t appreciate being hornswoggled and Harvey conveying his No Exchange-No Return policy. The discussion came to an end when Harvey produced a windstorm of profanity in perfect English along with a pistol. James promptly grabbed his father with one hand and the girl with the other, dragging the pair of them back to his car. Minutes later they were on the way to Tesoro with old Axel in the front seat and Mei Ling in the back. Once there, they woke up Miss Lizzie. She answered the door in her bathrobe, a shotgun in one hand.
“Axel…James! What on earth are you thinking? Do you know what time it is?”
She likely had more to say but went mute when Mei Ling emerged from the back of James’s car, the young woman’s eyes dark and a trifle fierce, her face otherwise expressionless.
“Oh, my goodness,” Miss Lizzie whispered.
Like everyone else in town she had figured Axel’s impending mail-order nuptials would be a May-December arrangement. However, neither Miss Lizzie nor an obviously disappointed Axel had expected fifty years in age to separate bride and groom—the May end of the relationship well into the twentieth century while the December side was about three decades into the back end of the nineteenth.
“I ain’t gonna engage in no connubial bliss with a child,” Axel huffed.
“I should think not,” Miss Lizzie answered.
She agreed to take the girl off their hands until Axel figured out what to do. So far, suing the broker was as far as he’d gotten, hence the document Axel Throckmorton v. Harvey Fu Chang that occupied C. Herbert Judson when I joined him on the porch.
Mr. Judson set aside Axel’s petition to the court and took the newspaper I’d brought him. He glanced at the headline.
“You’re up early,” he said, at the same time turning to the sports page. “What’s going on?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” I told him.
“Me neither,” he said. “Too hot.”
We sat together. I listened to the trill and rustle of birds in the trees that populated Mr. Judson’s yard. He scanned the newspaper, leafing through its pages quickly as the last of the night crept off and morning took over. After a few minutes, he put the paper aside, then selected a new file from the stack on the porch floor. He read silently for only a few seconds before closing the folder.
“Money changes people, Connor,” he said, sighing.
I nodded.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this…attorney-client privilege and all that,” he said, gesturing with the folder, “but here’s a man suing his wife for grinding her teeth and keeping him awake. I had just about convinced him to drop the whole darned thing when she found some ambulance chaser in the city who filed a countersuit claiming that her husband is so annoying, she’s ground her teeth to nubs from the aggravation of living with him.”
He sighed again.
“What’s wrong with people?” he said.
I remained quiet. I was only ten years old but recognized a rhetorical question when it came my way. Mr. Judson looked at me and smiled. “You’re a good man, Connor O’Halloran.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I don’t know. I like newspapers. Maybe I’ll work for the Chronicle…Take over for the guy who drops off my papers at the Sinclair station.”
Mr. Judson laughed.
“I think you’ll do better than that,” he said.
I didn’t answer and was suddenly very uncomfortable as I sensed some wisdom or life lesson about to be tossed at me. I liked Mr. Judson, but he offered a lot of advice—a professional hazard, I suspect, given that he was in the advice-offering business. A good deal of what he suggested remains with me even now. However, at ten years old such perspicacity tended to remind me of how little time was left before I was thrust into the world of paystubs and taxes and mouths to feed. After all, it was my summer vacation.
“I guess I’d better go now,” I said, climbing off the porch swing. I moved toward the steps as quickly as I could, but it was too late.
“Just be a man people can count on, Connor,” Mr. Judson said.
“Okay, I will,” I answered. I kept moving.
“And find yourself a good woman,” he added.
“Yes, sir.”
The screen door to the house opened and Mrs. C. Herbert Judson appeared. She wore her husband’s huge, fuzzy bathrobe with no evidence of pajamas or a nightgown beneath it. Her feet were bare and her hair tousled in the way a woman’s hair gets tousled behind a bedroom door. She was devoid of makeup and quite beautiful, rendering me suddenly and very unexpectedly stupefied. I have no idea what expression was on my face, although the amusement on hers makes me suspect mine to have been equal parts bedazzled and electrocuted.
“Good morning, Connor,” she said, smiling. “Have you had breakfast? Would you like something?” She seemed anxious to entertain a guest, even a ten-year-old one. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
“Connor? Are you okay?”
She moved to the swing and sat next to her husband, one leg tucked beneath her, the other dangling provocatively below the edge of her robe. Her skin was smooth, her cheekbones high, her eyes alternately green and hazel. For the first time, but not the last, I was aware that Mrs. C. Herbert Judson was a knockout.
“Are you okay, Connor?” she repeated, her lips curled into the tiniest wisp of a smile—the sort a woman gets when a young fellow looks as if he’s taken too many rides on a roller coaster and can’t decide if he’s delirious with excitement or just flat-out delirious. I hastily raked fingers through hair I knew to be a tangled wad of yarn, wishing I hadn’t scrambled from bed and dashed out to deliver papers before running a comb through it.
“I’m fine,” I managed. “I have to get going.”
I stumbled down the walk, climbed onto my bicycle, and headed off, pondering mail-order brides and the case of Axel Throckmorton v. Harvey Fu Chang and Mr. Judson’s advice. Before turning the corner at the end of the block, I looked back. Mrs. C. Herbert Judson sat next to her husband on the porch swing, a hand along the back of his neck. Even now I think it one of the most intimate things I have ever seen, and I determined more than ever to someday put myself on a porch swing with Fiona Littleleaf’s hand stroking the back of my neck.
Chapter Twelve:
The Allegheny Chemicals Corporation
Mr. Sprinkles turned out to be a disappointment for Milton Garwood, displaying little interest in retrieving his newspaper, opening his beer bottles, or playing the harmonica. He preferred to urinate and defecate all over the Garwood house, repeatedly demonstrating a particular affection for the commemorative bowl Mrs. Garwood had acquired during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Prominently displayed on the dining room table, the bowl’s potpourri was now routinely mixed with less delicately scented organic material, considerably diminishing the luster of monkey ownership for Milton’s wife. Eventually, she encouraged Mr. Sprinkles to escape with a broom and an open door. He quickly turned feral, foraging for food in compost piles and overturning trashcans.
His predilection for demonstrative evacuation of his bowels continued and he took a liking to the commode on Coach Wally Buford’s front porch, expertly flipping up the jeweled seat cover in order to leave a prize selected especially for the coach and his wife. The Bufords quite reasonably were not excited to put their commode to its foreordained use before a s
eptic tank had been installed, and after they filed a lawsuit against the Garwoods, Milton used an orange to lure Mr. Sprinkles back into his cage, eventually giving the monkey to a woman who maintained an exotic animal preserve in Petaluma.
Meanwhile, the negotiating committee for our ambergris—Roger Johns the Banker, C. Herbert Judson the Lawyer, and Miss Lizzie Fryberg—had been in discussion with several perfume makers, including Chanel, Guerlain’s, Dana, and Jean Patou. All four companies had made bids—dependent on confirmation of the purity of our ambergris—although none wanted the entire specimen, and it appeared we would have to apportion it among the competitors. “The perfumers know this and their bids are a bit lower as a result,” Mr. Johns reported in a letter to the ambergris stockholders. Still, our agents anticipated a yield between $1200 and $1500 per ounce, a handsome set of offers and well above the credit limits Dinkle had established for those who signed papers for the Betty Boops. The committee was about to schedule visits for the perfumery analysts when a letter arrived at C. Herbert Judson’s office.
22 July 1934
Dear Messrs. Johns and Judson, Miss Fryberg, and Tesoro ambergris stockholders:
We are most interested in procuring your entire inventory of ambergris and wish to schedule an appointment to allow our analyst, Mr. Everson Dexter, to conduct an assay. We are prepared to pay $2845 per ounce, pending Mr. Dexter’s analysis of your specimen.
Sincerely,
J. Piedmont Bell
President, Allegheny Chemicals Corporation
“They must want it pretty bad, to bid it up like that,” Milton Garwood suggested to the boys at the Last Resort.
I was there, collecting for my paper route from the owner, James Throckmorton. Like most newsboys I didn’t like collections. My older customers forced me to come in and look over their stamp collections or family heirlooms, the younger ones had to be chased down at work, and of course, I had my share of weasels who refused to answer the door, peeking out through a crack in the blinds until sure I had given up and left. James Throckmorton always paid on time. Better yet, he let me hang out at the Last Resort and listen to the talk, so long as it wasn’t too salty. I loved the Last Resort with its massive, polished bar, dim lighting, and tantalizing odor of sizzling hamburgers, grilled onions, and spilled beer. James seemed to like having me around, too, peppering me with questions about Ma: How is she? Does she like being back at the library? Is she doing anything for fun? Back in high school he and my mother had been sewn to each other’s hips, spooning in the back seat of James’s car and making the promises teenagers make to one another. After they graduated Ma went off to college, leaving James in Tesoro, and as happens with young love, the promises burned for a time and then didn’t.
I sat at the bar and listened to Milton Garwood carry on, nursing an RC Cola I’d poured into a glass, adding salted peanuts to give it a thick foam collar like the beers James tapped off for his other customers. I liked to listen to the men talk at the Last Resort as I had been mostly raised by women to that point—Ma and Miss Lizzie and Fiona—and figured I needed to learn how to cuss and spit and authoritatively hold forth on things I knew little about. James kept the cussing and spitting to a minimum when I was around, but there was plenty of holding forth, a lot of it from regulars Milton Garwood, Angus MacCallum, and James’s father, old Axel Throckmorton. The mysterious letter and offer from the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation were the topics of that day.
“Seems to me they ain’t paying that kind of money to make perfume,” Milton speculated. “Maybe ambergris works like them rhinoceros horns.”
As you might expect there weren’t any rhinocerologists in the bar and Milton’s theory was met with blank expressions.
“It could be one of those…what do you call ‘em…marital aids,” Milton explained. “Lots of rich fellas like Injun rajahs and Arab sheiks and whatnot love them marital aids. They’ll pay a pretty penny for stuff like that, especially rhinoceros horns. They grind them into powder and take it like snuff. It makes them…you know…bigger.”
This provoked a generous round of hooting and guffawing and then some jokes so raw James made them stop.
“Sorry, Connor,” he said to me. “You’re a little young for this sort of talk.”
“I know about boners,” I said, setting off the guffawers again. I scowled at them. I was ten years old and thought I knew plenty about boners. James came out from behind the bar and steered me to the door with a hand on my shoulder.
“How’s your mother these days?” he asked, handing me a few coins to cover his Chronicle subscription. “Seems like she’s getting on better.”
“She is,” I said. “She’s been drinking this awful green stuff Miss Lizzie gave her. It’s helping.”
“Say hello for me,” he said. James hesitated and then went on. “Maybe I’ll stop by one of these days.”
I liked James and it was okay with me if he liked Ma. I just wasn’t ready for him or any man to like her. So, I sassed him.
“What for?” I asked, even though I damned well knew what for.
James’s face wrinkled into a frown, one that dads give their sons just before reaching for their belts. For a moment I thought he might give me a dressing down, but then he sighed in a way that seemed to expel his frustration. At the same time his face softened.
“For crying out loud, could you please just tell her, Connor?” he said.
All over town folks were talking about the offer from the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation. No one had heard of the company, although C. Herbert Judson—who personally knew Henry Dow and had met two of the Duponts—claimed to have read an article in the Wall Street Journal about its president, J. Piedmont Bell. I now showed up at Mr. Judson’s house around 5:30 a.m. every day so we could talk for a while before I finished my route. Not long after receiving the letter from the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation, we sat on his porch swing as the hazy gray of dawn was burned off by full-on sunrise. Mr. Judson was on his second cup of coffee, while I sipped hot chocolate Mrs. Judson had given me in a mug proclaiming its user to be the “World’s Best Husband.”
“Allegheny Chemicals isn’t a public company,” Mr. Judson told me as if I cared. “That’s why it’s hard to get their particulars.” He seemed uncharacteristically nervous, his usually steady gaze flitting from me to the front door of his house to the rose trellis and back again. “They’re not Dow or Monsanto. Those boys are chemical giants and they’re public so you can get information about them.” He went on to explain the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington D Almighty C, a body created to provide the sort of oversight sadly lacking when the stock market crashed five years earlier. “Public companies must provide regular reports to the SEC and make their businesses transparent to stockholders,” he droned as I pretended to be interested. “They’re a necessary watchdog in the fight against…”
There was more, but I stopped listening. I knew there was a lot to learn from Mr. Judson, but if there was anything more boring than a discussion of the Securities and Exchange Commission I didn’t know what it was. I still don’t. Besides, he seemed determined to paint the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation in a peachy color and it wasn’t necessary. Frankly, I no longer cared about the ambergris. No amount of money could outshine the fact that Ma was better. She had been drinking Miss Lizzie’s concoction for several weeks by then without a single day spent in bed hidden under a blanket or gadding about like a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower.
“I have to get going,” I interrupted. “Coach Buford will complain if he doesn’t get his paper pretty soon.”
I finished my route and stopped at the mercantile to see Fiona. Her adoptive twin maiden aunts, Rosie and Roxy Littleleaf, were talented bakers and Fiona kept a large selection of their delicious scones, cinnamon rolls, and croissants in a basket on the front counter. She offered me a scone along with
some warm milk that had a little coffee in it. Like Mr. Judson she was behaving suspiciously.
“Did you ride past the boathouse this morning?” she asked.
I did every morning and said so.
“Was the guard awake?”
I nodded and it suddenly occurred to me that for the past ten days the same four fellows—Roger Johns, C. Herbert Judson, Angus MacCallum, and James Throckmorton—had rotated the duty. Previously, the guard roster had numbered at least two dozen men from around town. I asked Fiona about it, but she was conveniently engrossed in her account book, something that occupied her until Mrs. C. Herbert Judson showed up to look over some new hats from Chicago.
“They’re in back. I haven’t unpacked them yet,” Fiona informed her. Her voice was affected—a bit too loud while at once both wooden and falsely expressive—reminding me not only of the amateur actors in the recent Tesoro Community Theater production of A Little Bit of Fluff but of Mr. Judson’s calculated earnestness earlier that morning.
“I could come back,” Mrs. C. Herbert Judson replied, her own delivery almost believable. She was a better actress.
“That’s okay. Follow me,” Fiona said, glancing my way. “Stay here, Connor,” she added.
They retired to the storeroom at the rear where they compounded my suspicion by speaking in whispers until Mrs. Judson came out alone.
“You take care, Connor,” she said and the way she said it and the look on her face reminded me of recently ended Prohibition days, when a fellow had to sneak into the back room of the Last Resort to enjoy a snort or two.
“What were you talking about?” I asked Fiona after Mrs. Judson was gone.
Treasure of the Blue Whale Page 8