Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Rosel G Brown

  You may question her, but I warn you that she will remember nothing of what has happened. If you insist, you can remain with me to see that I do not attempt to intimidate her—this is ridiculous—and when I (or if you prefer, the attending physician at the hospital) feel it is perfectly safe, you are welcome to question her alone.

  I have not the least hesitation. She is perfectly sane, her answers will be perfectly honest.

  There!

  O, no, Meggie, you musn’t . . .

  Yes, I know she talks reasonably, but it isn’t her. Look, she’s got both eyes open. You certainly can’t believe an insane person.

  I know I said she was sane. But see, she’s got both eyes open and she can’t see out of the right one. It’s her word against mine and surely you can’t . . . it’ll be easy to make tests on her vision.

  But that has everything to do with it, which eye she can see out of. I’ve got my notes to prove it. I can review the whole case . . .

  Meggie, you signed a release. There’s no ethical question . . . no, you were never kept prisoner. I really . . . see, she’s lapsed into unconsciousness again.

  And look, that one staring, blind eye. It’s dead. You see what’s happened. Surely you see. She killed it. She killed my Meggie and now she’s left alive. It wasn’t the blow of being pushed against the rock. All that did was stun her so she could . . .

  Can’t you see it? That one dead eye?

  I’m not doing anything to her. I’m just closing it. It’s dead.

  Get your hands off me! All right, I’ll leave it alone. I don’t know how you can stand to look at it.

  What? No, Meggie. You’re not going to get away with it. I know you can talk in a reasonable fashion. So can most schizophrenics.

  But you’re mad. You’re stark, simply mad and I know it.

  No, there can be no panel of psychiatrists. My results are unique and dependent on a comparison of the dead Meggie . . . now the tests would be invalid.

  Of course as a psychiatrist I don’t make moral judgement. But this is different.

  * * * * *

  NO, indeed you won’t give me a sedative, clear Dr. Blumenthal. This is healthy, wholesome laughter and I’ve been collecting it for twenty years.

  Don’t you understand what happened? And you a psychiatrist! Who do you think felt guilty? Who had a death wish? Who was glad, instinctively, to be a martyr?

  O, you fool

  You were going to prove your manhood by creating a new Margaret Tilden, weren’t you? And you didn’t know I was tired of being a testing ground? You’re really no better than Henry.

  O, you couldn’t know, how good my laughter is.

  Because this time I win. I’m out of the bottle and I’ll tell you something else. I’m just beginning to see out of the right eye. Just a feeling of light, so far. See, I close my left eye and I still see light, like a sensitive spot.

  * * * * *

  SEE, she’s unconscious again.

  You’ve got to believe me . . . maybe she’ll die.

  Yes, I see it moving. But it’s wide open. Maybe the other half of her mind isn’t completely . . . yes, it’s looking at me, but I can’t make out what expression. Meggie! Hang on. I’m here. Look, she’s beginning to smile. Thank God! If only she can emerge, for a moment.

  Meggie, can you try to tell these men . . . tell them what we were trying to do. Tell them.

  Look, it’s crying, that one eye. She couldn’t think I deliberately pushed her against . . . Meggie, just relax then, and we’ll talk later. It’s all a misunderstanding . . .

  It’s gone. The expression. The smile. Meggie!

  That eye, staring so! Can’t you see? Can’t you!

  No. I don’t suppose you can.

  THE END

  FRUITING BODY

  The former Rosel George, now the wife of Professor W. Burlie Brown (Tulane), is a charming and handsome gentlewoman who also happens to be a former social worker and schoolteacher, a Master of Arts in Classical Greek (Minn.), the mother of Robin, aged seven, and Jennifer, aged two; the author of LOST IN TRANSLATION (F&SF, May, 1959), OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS (F&SF, Feb., 1961) and others; and a native of New Orleans, where she now lives. Where, or how, she learned so much about mycology is not revealed. “I started writing in 1955, had my first story out in 1958. I have found that a Classical education is of great practical value . . . I make most of my clothes and Jenny’s—clothes costing what they do. Reading and sewing are my hobbies, though really they’re a necessity, like smoking. (Did you ever try to give up reading?)” No, and as long as Mrs. B. continues writing, we have no intention of even trying to give it up. And now we will keep you no longer from the story of Arthur Kelsing, who would keep away from neither fungi nor women—nor, for that matter, from sympathetic magic.

  NO ONE WHO HAS WONDERED what the Giaconda is smiling about has not also wondered what the Francesa arthura is thinking about. We are not so unsophisticated as to attempt to answer either of these questions. But we feel that some account of the author (or Arthur, as his name happens to be) of the Francesa arthura might, despite the protestations of the current generation of critics, prove illuminating. (We do not feel it incumbent upon us to say just how.)

  Arthur Kelsing collected fungi and women. He occasionally fed the former (not the poisonous variety) to the latter, and frequently wished he could feed the latter (the poisonous variety) to the former.

  But civilization is not so ordered; is not, as Arthur often ruminated, either coherent or logical.

  But rather (Arthurs father had been Absent and he was reared by a hard-pressed mother who gave die impression of being domineering) civilization seemed to have been cooked up in that intuitive and irritating fashion in which women go about things. And Arthur could only hope that there was some agreeable end in view. Because when women go about doing something in their vague, unreasonable way, they insist they are doing something and if you just wait and mind your own business, they’ll show you what it is when it’s finished.

  Arthur’s wife had been, for instance, a woman. (This was the real reason why he divorced her.) And the first thing she did was hide all his left socks. All but about three at a time.

  “I don’t know where they are,” she’d say. “But by the time you get back to the three you wore first, you’ll have those pairs matching again and isn’t that really all that matters? They should be rotated, so as to make them wear longer, and this just forces you to do something you should be doing anyhow.”

  “I don’t like to be forced,” Arthur said. You can see immediately that there was a broad principle involved, not just a matter of the socks. “It’s childish of you to hide my left socks, and you’re to get them out right now.”

  “I told you, I don’t know where they are.”

  “You’re supposed to wash all the socks at once and put away matching pairs.”

  “You’re not supposed to do anything of the kind,” Patty had snapped, unrolling a wad of hair from a brush curler and rolling it the other way with her fingers. “You don’t understand laundry. You wash white socks with the towels and colored cotton ones with the blouses and woolen type socks with my skirts and nylon socks with my underwear. And some of them get tangled up so you don’t see them and you discover the extra one later and save it to wash next time you wash the things it goes with. You can’t put one sock in the washing machine by itself. Really,” Patty had said, turning from the mirror, her curl vibrating, “I can’t go on loving you passionately if you put on your underwear and socks and shirt and tie and just stand around in your bare legs. Men look nice with bare chests but not with bare legs. Why can’t you put your pants on first?”

  “Because the crease . . . never mind,” Arthur had answered, clenching his eyelids and wondering whether he should tell her right then that she had just ruined their marriage.

  It wasn’t just that, either, or the socks. It was fungi, too. She kept filching his best specimens for her dried flower arrangements.

&n
bsp; Anyway, if Arthur Kelsing were now a bachelor, and a confirmed one, you can see there were good reasons for it. And if he were also a confirmed fungus collector, there were good reasons for that, too.

  And if he were able to combine his hobbies, there were good reasons for that, too. He found, in fact, a certain similarity, a certain sympathetic magic that took place between certain women and certain fungi.

  Most men, all perhaps, are familiar with at least some of the properties of women. Many, however, are not similarly familiar with properties of fungi.

  Arthur was lucky. As a child he had grown up in a small town in the south and was given to wandering the countryside where he could steal watermelons and cow bells and what not. And one day, when he was about twelve, he found some interesting looking mushrooms growing out of a . . . well, not everybody would have eaten them, but Arthur had eaten mushrooms before and besides, if they were toadstools he’d get sick and it would serve his mother right. (Don’t eat that kind of thing, she’d said. It might be toadstools. As if it were her business what he ate or didn’t eat.) So he broke them carefully, so as to leave the cow patty intact, washed them in the nearest creek and rushed home so he could be sick in a public place.

  Only he didn’t get sick. He had the most fascinating hallucinations you can imagine—no, you can’t imagine them unless you’ve tried it. (The mushrooms, he discovered later, were of the genus Panaeolus. Anybody can pluck them off of cow patties after a rain and after all, what do you think fertilizer is?)

  It was not long after—to be specific it was during a Halloween hay ride—that he discovered Women. This particular woman was thirteen years old and as different from his mother as certain Panaeoli are from canned button mushrooms (Agaricus campestris). So Arthur naturally assumed that just as there are different kinds of fungi, so there are different kinds of women.

  Arthur had to have his stomach pumped out six times (one of them after he should have known better) before he learned to be really careful about the toxins in mushrooms.

  It only took one marriage to make him cautious about women. But there were other disillusionments that might have discouraged a man of less passion. (Or would perhaps have led a more generous man to compromise. But had Arthur been a better person, he would have been much less interesting.)

  But to get back to Flora (the unfortunate name of the thirteen year old woman), while Flora had her attractions, when you came right down to it, her only real attraction was that she was Willing. And Arthur soon wanted more from life than he got from Flora and the chance variety of Panaeolus. Which brought him to his first experiment.

  But meanwhile Arthur had undergone a complete change that delighted his teachers and his poor old mother (who was actually quite a pretty woman of thirty-five and so discreet her employer never regretted taking her on also as his mistress.) Arthur became a junior scientist, a child genius. It is true that he still lagged in English and Social Science, but he could definitely no longer be classified as a big lout. He even stopped stealing watermelons. He stole mushrooms. He spent hours pouring over heavy books full of diagrams and long words. He was engrossed in studies of botany and anatomy.

  Some attributed this remarkable change to the fact that he was beginning to grow up (which was true) and others, particularly his mother, to the influence of little Flora (which was also true).

  But what Arthur had done was begin his search for the Silver Chalice. He had, so early, perceived if only dimly his ideal. And he glowed with a knightly glow.

  Women and fungi, you may think, are not the way.

  They are not perhaps your way. But they are a way.

  But for his experiment, Flora was not it, by a long shot, and his lower South variety of Panaeolus was not it, though the differential was less. So he tried a combination of the two. (He had to powder it and put it in her drink. She drank but she didn’t eat mushrooms, especially after he had described the effects. A girl doesn’t have to eat mushrooms, she’d said, to have a good time.)

  So that Flora became, briefly, the girl of his dreams—he and Flora both dreaming mushroom dreams, Flora merging with the dream girl produced by Panaeolus.

  But there were difficulties.

  For one thing, the dosage was wrong. As a big lout, Arthur had been able to tolerate more than Flora, and he had neglected to take this into account when preparing his Instant Dreams powder. His main objective had been to put in Plenty.

  For another—most important and key to Arthur’s entire future—the dream girl, the girl produced by the hallucinations of Panaeolus, was not quite right. She had a squint. This was due not to Arthur’s mind, which was perfect in its way, but to the type of mushroom he was using. Now, there have been men, Romantic poets particularly, who admire a little—sometimes a lot—of grotesquerie in women. (Try some of the French Decadents.) But Arthur had a classical soul, Classical and Romantic being used here in the technical sense. Anything macabre or perverted one sees in him is being read into his character by the beholder. It was amazing, later, how many dirty minded people . . .

  O, and Flora. Unfortunately (or to be honest, fortunately) she died. It was blamed not on Arthur, but on Flora’s mother, who had neglected to tell her, so everyone said, not to eat toadstools.

  It was thus that Arthur learned to experiment on small animals first, and thus that he began to be a real Scientist. Arthur was quick to perceive that he might have got himself in a whole lot of trouble and he never made the same mistake again.

  He made other mistakes instead.

  Patty, for instance.

  “Patty,” he’d said, “you’re everything I’ve ever dreamed of.” But oddly enough, she wasn’t. He just happened to fall in love with her when he was twenty-four, for no reason at all. (Actually there was a reason. Patty had his mother’s mannerism of talking with her eyebrows, but Arthur never consciously realized this. He didn’t know that what he’d missed was having a strong woman around the house.)

  It was a fine, beautiful, normal love and very boring.

  Certain varieties of Amanita he was working on, on the other hand . . .

  Arthur by the age of forty, though he was not as affluent as some mushroom farmers, was very goodlooking—tall and wide built but thin enough to look emotional—and yet slightly cruel of mouth and cynical of voice, so that women could see there was a lot beneath the surface.

  Arthur also had a curl in the front of his dark hair which, late at night, fell over his forehead in an unconsciously engaging way. Arthur didn’t exactly set the curl, but he did sort of comb through it with hair oil and wind it over his finger.

  So that he usually managed to have his friends in at home—all his friends were beautiful girls and for them he had made his apartment slightly exotic. They took well to hallucination parties for two. Mushrooms are cheaper than gin and don’t leave a hangover.

  Everyone can’t do this, you understand. The women have to be weighed, for instance, to be sure of proper dosage. They must be free of certain diseases—heart ailments and respiratory disorders, for instance—and only an expert with Arthur’s additional intuitive perception could know which fungus goes with which girl.

  Arthur became, as the years went by, something of an artist in this line and eventually came to be much sought after by society matrons.

  But he was a man of principle, and a seeker of the Silver Chalice, and he never Did It for Money.

  Besides, he had a thriving mushroom farm in Pennsylvania. He had a good foreman and there really isn’t a great deal one needs to do for mushrooms except go pick them at the right time. Arthur had no taste for button mushrooms, himself.

  Arthur had been working on a variety of Lepiota which looked very promising. Indeed, he’d been neglecting his women for several weeks and hadn’t the least desire to do anything but hover over his spores.

  But just to deny the faint suspicion that occasionally came over him that he was getting middle aged and peculiar, he accepted an invitation to Betty Rankin’s cocktail p
arty. If you are single long enough, you become an Eligible Bachelor, and if you refrain from being excessively unpleasant about not having got “caught” (or caught again), you get invited to everything there are extra women at.

  Arthur, let us add, did not have the “I was smart” complex with which most bachelors ward off implied charges of homosexuality, frigidity and unacceptability to women. He knew he was attractive to women, he knew what he wanted and hadn’t got yet, and he didn’t have to be defensive (or offensive, as I’m afraid we frequently become).

  “I just don’t seem to be lucky in love,” he’d say from under his curl, and women just loved it.

  And there, across the room, he saw her.

  Never in dreams, never in imaginings—but he knew her when he saw her.

  She had ash blond hair and heavy, straight brown eyebrows and deep grey eyes and a rounded body with apparently neither bones nor fat in it. Glaucous and firm fleshed were the words that came to Arthur’s mind. A head shining like Agaricus campester griseus. Her age might have been anywhere (with good care) from twenty-five to forty.

  She was dressed in a simple black sheath and a frilly white apron.

  She was the maid.

  Now, Arthur Kelsing was no callow youth and he knew better than to try to make love to the maid at a cocktail party. He quietly got her name and address from Betty Rankin, and became intimate with the extra debutante at the party, as he was expected to do, and watched Frances out of the corner of his eye.

  The debutante was nervous and excited and hadn’t wanted to make her debut in the first place (it was her mothers idea) and always broke out in pimples before parties. Let us put it to Arthur’s credit that she had a good time not only at that party but also at subsequent ones, where the air of being used to Older Men gave her a sophistication that eventually led to her marriage to the heir of a brass manufacturer’s fortune.

  Arthur went home that evening and looked at himself in the mirror, seeing in amazement that having found Frances made him look no different.