[Dorothy Parker 05] - A Moveable Feast of Murder

by Agata Stanford

  “You look like an idiot,” I said, turning away and back to the task of opening my present. “And you can’t hide behind those dark glasses, you know.”

  “It was worth a try,” he said taking them off. “And, no,” he said, anticipating my question. “No news from Richard, yet. I just got off the telephone with Gerald. He’s heard nothing, either. And we agreed, for everyone’s safety, it was best if we didn’t. I see that your costume has arrived.”

  My expectations were dashed when I realized that within the box was the promised Little Bo Peep costume sent over by Aleck for tonight’s Festival of Fools.

  “Oh, yes,” said Mr. Benchley retrieving the beribboned shepherd’s crook he’d left in the hallway. “This is for you, to complete your look.”

  “Don’t make me tell you where to stick it.”

  “Now, now, my dear, let’s not shoot the messenger!”

  “This is all so . . . oh, how can we pretend to be merry and enjoy ourselves with all that’s happening? I’m worried sick about Richard and the Duchess and Major Arbuthnot.”

  Inside the box was the costume of a fantasy shepherdess, for no real live herder of sheep would wear such a thing. They’d freeze to death up on the bonny highlands of Scotland, or Switzerland, or wherever the hell one walked around with sheep.

  “I ain’t goin’!” I said, knocking the box and all the silly frou-frou onto the floor, upon which Woodrow decided to nest until my temper cooled.

  “No use arguing with Aleck, my dear.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Mr. Benchley admired his luxurious black curls in the mirror. “It should be powdered . . . . So, you don’t want to go to the Festival of Fools?” he said, and then frowned at his image. “It really should be powdered.”

  “Yes, I want to go, but I don’t want to look like a fool.”

  “But that’s the point, Mrs. Parker. Look at me! I look the biggest fool of all, and I’m not complaining—mainly because I’m afraid of Aleck and I don’t want him sitting on my head like the last time I said no to him; I still have problems focusing. Anyway, in this getup I have a real chance of being named King of Fools, and as I’m representing the last Louis of the royal line, who actually was a fool, I may have a shot. This outfit could use a crown. After all, if I can’t win a Pulitzer, well it’s something, anyway . . . .” He then turned back to the mirror and with a look of disdain said, “It really should be powdered, you know. Think I need a beauty-mark on my cheek?”

  “Don’t get carried away; I won’t be able to explain it to your wife.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Telephoning Harpo,” I said.

  At noon, with still no word in reply to Mr. Benchley’s wire to Richard, Mr. Benchley and I accepted Hem’s invitation to have lunch at his favorite café, Closerie des Lilas.

  It was a pleasant little café in a nice neighborhood a few streets from the Luxembourg Gardens, just around the corner from Hem’s apartment over the sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Hem said he liked to spend a few hours each day writing over a café crème, or visiting with the usual “suspects” who frequented the café on a regular basis. He was not so happy with the new management, however, who had made all the waiters shave off their moustaches and were trying to cater to a higher class of clientele. But, it was still a “good” café, said Hem, and we had an enjoyable hour.

  Harpo telephoned from the lobby to say he was coming up to my room with a solution to my costume problem for this evening. And as Mr. Benchley had expressed concern about his wig, he had acquired a more suitable costume for him as well. Mr. Benchley arrived at my door with Harpo, who was carrying a burlap sack over his shoulder and dressed in the wild wig and old brown coat that he wore when on stage with his brothers.

  He opened the sack and pulled out my costume in sections, tossing them on the bed. Woodrow became very curious and began leaping about Harpo. The Marx Brother said, “I know what you’re after, Woodie, old dog. I’ve been carrying this around all day,” and then from his spacious coat pocket he pulled out a greasy paper bag and from it pulled a Delmonico steak, which he then presented to my pup. “Nothing but the best for my friend,” he said. “Direct from the kitchens of the Crillon!”

  Harpo’s attention returned to the task at hand, and he began pulling items of clothing from the sack. “Now, Dottie, here’s the blouse of a virgin, the vest of an Apache, the skirt of a taxi dancer, and some jewels I snatched from a dowager princess.”

  I wanted to ask how he’d gotten a virgin’s shirt, but was afraid to. And at this late hour, when we were to meet with Soledad, Aleck, Hem, and Mathew at the Murphys’ for drinks before walking on to join the crowds at the festival, I had little choice: Put on the items he’d brought, or freeze my ass as Little Bo Peep.

  “Whattcha got for me?” asked Mr. Benchley. “This wig is itchy and it really should be powdered.”

  From the sack Harpo pulled out what looked like a cotton nightshift and a tent of purple-and-white fabric embroidered with gold thread. “Not so bad, hum?”

  “It’s a vestment!” said Mr. Benchley. “Where on earth did you get a vestment?”

  “Well, there’s this little church, see, just a couple blocks down from—”

  “You stole a Catholic priest’s vestments?”

  “Borrowed, procured, snatched, what’s the difference?” said Harpo. “At least no one has to look at those bowed legs of yours.”

  “I’ll have you know that Mrs. Benchley thinks I have very shapely calves.”

  “So,” said Harpo scrutinizing my friend’s legs, “when she asks you if her outfit makes her ass look big, do you tell her the truth?”

  I came out from the bathroom where I had changed into my new attire. I looked at Mr. Benchley, robed in swaths of purple and gold. He looked at me with reproach.

  “Well,” he said, “do you have something to say about my legs, too?”

  “No, I think they’re darling, and best unseen, but I could sure use that wig you’re wearing,” When he pulled it off his head and handed it to me I said, “Well, now that you’re all covered up you look better.”

  I appraised myself in the mirror. “Who am I supposed to be, Harpo?” I asked, straightening the wig on my head and arranging the long curls over my shoulders.

  He pulled out a tambourine from the big coat pocket and rattled it. “Esmeralda!” He handed it to me.

  I liked banging and shaking it. “Esmeralda who?”

  “The gypsy girl from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.”

  I needed more baubles, so I opened my jewelry case and took out a number of beaded necklaces and a couple of bangle bracelets. I began to add more rouge to my cheeks and darkened my eyes with pencil and mascara. I looked like a floozy.

  “Who are you going as, Harpo?” asked Mr. Benchley. “Yourself? You’re famous enough.”

  “No. There’ll be too many Harpo Marxes at this party. Can I borrow that pillow, Dottie?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. He loosened his collar and jammed the chair pillow between his shoulder blades, tightened the rope he had tied around his waist so the pillow wouldn’t slip down, and pulled a face.

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. “You’re going as Quasimodo!”

  “Harpo,” said Monsignor Benchley, “didn’t your mother warn you about making faces like that?”

  “She told me not to cross my eyes, too, ’cause they might stay like that.” He crossed his eyes.

  “Oh, one more thing to complete the look, Bob,” he said, reaching back into his burlap bag of tricks and pulling out a tall, white miter bordered with an embroidered leaf motif. He ceremoniously placed it atop Mr. Benchley’s head.

  “Oh, I like it,” said Mr. Benchley. “I’ll probably go to Hell for wearing this.”

  “You’re scheduled for Hell, anyway,” said Harpo.

  “Very clever, Harpo, to do the Hunchback theme, especially since in the book Quasimodo is crowned King of Fools at the Festiva
l of Fools,” said Mr. Benchley.

  “And you, Bobby, are the crazed Archdeacon Frollo! What a trio we’ll make!”

  “May the Lord bless you, my son,” replied Mr. Benchley, making the sign of the cross.

  When we arrived at the Murphys for cocktails Hemingway and Mathew were already there, neither costumed. Gerald offered to find them something from out of a trunk. He had the makings of an Apache outfit he’d worn for a party he’d hosted a couple years back and Sara had an old Indian chief’s headdress hanging on the wall in the children’s bedroom. With a bit of war paint and a linen caftan hanging in her closet, it would serve well as a costume, but when Hemingway declined, Mathew followed his lead and, I have to say, regretfully refused to dress up with the excuse that he would go as a foreign correspondent for the Detroit Register and file a report on the Parisian Mardi Gras as his first, if only, human-interest story for the paper’s readers.

  We had a couple of drinks and then Sara and Gerald emerged from their bedroom dressed in the most peculiar and humorous costumes made of sheets of tin and silver-painted leather and wire and nuts-and-bolts fittings. While we waited for Aleck and Soledad to arrive, we tried to guess which automobile parts each represented. Rack and Pinion? Spark Plug and Cylinder?

  When Gerald answered the bell, Soledad entered as a world-weary, green-velvet-suited Oscar Wilde. She wore her trousers magnificently and walked about with the most casual of masculine strides, dropping Wilde quotes with the sanguine ease of the great man himself. I cannot understand why it is considered outlandish for women to wear pants!

  Aleck, of course, intended to arrive last—I suspected he was sitting out in a taxi waiting for all of us to arrive at the Murphys before he made his entrance. And a grand entrance it certainly was, as befitted the royal personage of Catherine the Great!

  To say he looked spectacular, in the sense of appearing as a spectacle, is precisely what he accomplished. He was all trussed up in a golden gown of silk taffeta with an off-the-shoulder bodice embellished with jewels and a wide skirt supported by wire panniers in which he had to turn sideways in order to make it through the apartment door. Of course, he never could have gotten into a taxi in that outfit, and I wondered for a second how he’d made it all the way from the Crillon to the Murphys’.

  The flamboyant Mr. Woollcott was dripping pearls—a choker to cover any razor cuts along his stubby neck, and great drapes of them to fill in where cleavage ought to have been. Above all, he was properly coiffed, noted Monsignor Benchley, with a fashionable powdered wig, atop which teetered a birdcage among plumes of ostrich feathers. He had tweezed his brows, which had the effect of giving him a startled look, and powdered his clean-shaven face ghostly white. His cheeks were rouged like a fuzzy ripe peach. A beauty-patch slapped on next to his reddened lips looked like a squashed fly. He was a spectacular spectacle, all right.

  Hemingway’s face froze and he laughed nervously, but when Aleck raised his fan and peeked over it coquettishly, he announced that he and Mathew had to be on their way. They were meeting Daphne and Ronnie for dinner and would catch up with us at midnight at the square at Notre Dame Cathedral, where the procession would end.

  “Where’s your Bo Peep dress, Dorothy?” asked Aleck.

  “I lost the flock.”

  “And your costume. Robert, what’s the meaning of this? What happened to Louis the Sixteenth?”

  “I lost my head.”

  “Enough with the puns! You two look like you’re going to a tarts-and-vicars party.”

  Sara laughed and handed Aleck a glass of his favorite Madeira.

  “And you! Court Jester! Why are you dressed—like yourself—and what’s that lump—Oh! Think you’re very clever, don’t you, boy?”

  “Trying to live up to what you always say about me, Acky.”

  “How did you get into a taxi wearing those running boards?” Sara asked as she circled Aleck, giving him wide berth.

  “You’re as wide as our dining room table, extensions and all!” said Gerald, dropping umlauts all over the place.

  “Coach-and-four.”

  “Shit! You hired a hack?” I said.

  “We will ride to the Champs de Mars in style, and then we will be met at the square at Notre Dame at midnight for the journey home.”

  “All the makings of a Cinderella story, if you ask me,” said Mr. Benchley, taking a chair and arranging his skirts.

  “I’m not asking you,” replied Aleck.

  “I think you look grand, Aleck, dear,” said Sara. “I’d offer you a chair, but I don’t know how you can possibly sit down.”

  “I’d kiss your lovely cheek, Aleck,” said Gerald with tongue in cheek, “but there’s a fortress at every approach.”

  Aleck raised a tweezed brow and took from his purse a Sherman’s cigarette, which Gerald lit for him.

  “I didn’t know Catherine the Great smoked,” I said, trying not to burst out laughing when he took out his black-rimmed eyeglasses and put them on.

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know about her.”

  “She was quite the vamp,” said Soledad.

  “You know what I always tell the girls, don’t you, Aleck, darling? Men seldom make passes at—”

  “I wouldn’t finish that sentence, if I were you! Are we bringing that dog?” said Aleck with peremptory disdain.

  “That dog versus this dog? There is only this dog,” I said pointing at Woodrow.

  “It’s not comme il faut. He’ll need a costume.”

  From his purse Aleck pulled out a pink tutu. “He must be properly attired. He’ll go as Pavlova.”

  I was not about to argue with the haughty Queen, so I fastened the little tutu around Woodrow’s waist. Gerald buttered a cracker with pâté and held it over Woodrow’s head, and, after much encouragement, Pavlova rose up on her hind legs and begged the treat, just as the Murphy kids came in to see our costumes and bid us all goodnight. Once again the children were enthralled by my Boston terrier’s charm, and paid little attention to ours. And so for the next ten minutes they were preoccupied with feeding treats to my shameless prima donna, much to the relief of Aleck, who had braced himself against a wall in fear that his gown might be thought a tent for them to make camp under.

  I don’t know why I was surprised, but when we left the apartment there was a coach-and-four awaiting us on the street, its liveried driver dressed in the costume of an eighteenth-century royal coachman. Aleck did nothing small.

  After Aleck had been helped onto the open landau, his skirt’s guardrails positioned so that he could sit alone on the rear bench of the coach, we squeezed into the carriage, Woodrow on my lap. Off we headed for the Champs de Mars for the start of l’Académie des Cinq Arts Festival of Fools.

  It was a big party with thousands of people: artists, dancers, and actors mixing with Parisians from all walks of life and droves of tourists. What had centuries ago been banned as sacrilege, when the lowly dregs of Parisian society behaved with depravity and were allowed to don bishops’ robes and conduct mock masses on the first of January, the Feast of Circumcision, was now an organized artistic event with a parade route and food stands and little bands of dancers and music at every turn. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be the usual number of pickpockets and unruly drunks along the way. It was a carnival like New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.

  As Aleck might say, many of the costumes were splendiferous and ranged from sad attempts to the fantastical. Where costumes had failed, faces were painted or masked, and more important than the display of creative attire was the revelry of the gathering. It was to be an evening of robust fun before tomorrow’s somber Ash Wednesday, marking the beginning of Lent. It was the last chance before Lenten sacrifice to dance in the streets, to abandon the commonplace drudgery of day-to-day routine. Tonight, the old could relive the lightness of youthful antics and the young could indulge in uncensored fun. Tourists would create a memory of this night of festivities in Paris to conjure up for years to come as they roc
ked on their Boise porches or sat snug by the hearths of staid Philadelphian drawing rooms. As in any parade or circus, there was the high celebratory energy that stirred the crowds. The night was mild and clear and windless, and the city shimmered with light as bright as diamonds tossed on a black velvet tray.

  The carriage let us off at a street corner leading into the great square on which stood La Tour Eiffel, glimmering and shedding its blessed light over the crowd. As we blended into the assemblage of revelers, we made a plan that in case we were separated we would meet on the rue du Cloître, the street running alongside the cathedral, at midnight.

  The Parade of Fools began its march heading east on rue de l’Université, and as we proceeded the police made their presence known to the participants as well as the onlookers crowding the sidewalks. I took Mr. Benchley’s arm and as tart and vicar we followed Soledad and Aleck out onto the street. It would be difficult to lose sight of Aleck. In his wide-angled green dress he looked like a moving Ping-Pong table. Mr. Benchley said, “No, more like the fairway to the ninth hole at St. Andrews.” Gerald and Sara were up ahead, Gerald’s sheet-metal headgear like a castle turret landmark. I had no idea what had become of Harpo. One rarely did. He is an aberration, and there is no point in trying to apply logic to his behavior.

  As we continued onto the beautiful Boulevard Saint-Germain, I had the oddest feeling that we were being followed, and I turned to look at the masked faces: a man dressed as a cowboy, a woman in a black-and-red flamenco dance dress and lace mantilla, a Musketeer sporting a white-plumed hat on his head, a brown-cowled monk. Mr. Benchley asked what was the matter, and when I told him, he said, “Followed? Why, by about ten thousand, I would say.” Still I couldn’t shake the feeling that a pair of eyes was watching me in particular.

  We had paused for a moment to watch a group of jugglers near the side of the road, performing to the peppy music of a brass trio, while keeping sight of Gerald’s “turret” ahead. I turned to look at the passing crowd, and there, behind us, was the wave of a white plume behind a trio of East Indians dressed in tunics and brightly colored turbans, their faces and eyes darkened. Mr. Benchley put Woodrow down and he pulled my friend in closer to the circle of performers. I started to follow, but my path was blocked by other bodies filling in the space between us. Being short of stature and unable to see above the heads in front of me, I felt a rush of claustrophobia as if walls of people were pressing in. And then I felt a hand at my shoulder. I figured it must be one of our friends. But when I turned it was the ruffled cuff of a white shirt and the sleeve of a velvet tunic that met my eye. I froze.