by Isaac Asimov
Gonzalo, who was daintily picking out a black mushroom in order to experience its unaccompanied savor, said, “Much as it pains me to agree with Manny—”
“Much as it pains you to be right for one rare occasion, you mean.”
“—I've got to admit there's something to what he has just said. By accident, I'm sure. The worst thing anyone can do is to put something away where he knows it will be safe from a burglar's hand. The burglar will find it right away, but the owner will never see it again. I once put a bankbook away and didn't find it for five years.”
“You hid it under the soap,” said Rubin.
“Does that work with you?” asked Gonzalo sweetly. “It doesn't with me.”
“Where was it after you found it, Mario?” asked Avalon.
“I've forgotten again,” said Gonzalo.
“Of course,” interposed Leominster agreeably, “it is possible to put something in one place, shift it to another for still safer keeping, then remember only the first place— where it isn't.”
“Has that happened to you, Mr. Leominster?” asked Trumbull.
“In a manner of speaking,” said Leominster, “but I don't really know if it happened at all.”
Henry arrived with the platter of fortune cookies and said in a low voice to Halsted, “Mrs. Halsted has just called, sir. She wants me to tell you that the cuff links were found.”
Halsted turned sharply. “Found? Did she say where?”
“Under the bed, sir. She says they had presumably fallen there.”
“I looked under the bed.”
“Mrs. Halsted says they were near one of the feet of the bed. Quite invisible, sir. She had to feel around. She said to tell you that it has happened before.”
“Open your fortune cookie, Rog,” said Avalon indulgently. “It will tell you that you are about to find something of great importance.”
Halsted did so, and said, “It says, 'Let a smile be your umbrella,'“ and chafed visibly.
Rubin said, “I'm not sure that it's proper for a Black Widower to be receiving a message from a woman while a stag meeting is actually in session.”
Gonzalo said, “Electric impulses have no sex, though I don't suspect you would know that* Manny, any more than you know anything else about the subject.”
But Henry was bringing the brandy and Drake headed off the inevitable furious (and possibly improper) response by tapping a rapid tattoo on his water glass.
Drake said, “Let me introduce Jason Leominster, a somewhat distant neighbor of mine. He's a genealogist and I don't think there's a single member of the Black Widowers —always excepting Henry—with a genealogy that would bear looking into, so let's be cautious.”
Leominster said, “Not really. No one has ever been disappointed in a genealogy. The number of ancestors increases geometrically with each generation, minus the effect of intermarriage. If we explore the siblings, the parents and their siblings, the grandparents and their siblings; all the attachments by marriage and their siblings; and the parents and grandparents that enter in with the cases of remarriage, we have hundreds of individuals to play with when we go back only a single century.
“By emphasizing the flattering connections and ignoring the others, we can't lose. To the professional genealogist, of course, there can be items of historic value uncovered, often minor, and sometimes surprisingly important. I discovered, for instance, a collateral descendant of Martha Washington who—”
Trumbull, having raised his hand uselessly in the course of these remarks, now said, “Please, Mr. Leominster— Look, Jim, this is out of order. It's got to be question-and-answer. Will you indicate a griller?”
Drake stubbed out his cigarette and said, “It sounded interesting to me as it was. But go ahead. You be the griller.”
Trumbull scowled. “I just want everything in order, Mr. Leominster, I apologize for interrupting you. It was interesting, but we must proceed according to tradition. My first question would have been that of asking you to justify your existence, but your remarks have already indicated how your answer would be framed. Let me, therefore, go on to the next question. Mr. Leominster, you said in the course of the dinner that a person might hide something in one place, switch it to another, then remember only the first. You also said that it happened to you only in a manner of speaking and may never have happened at all. Could you elaborate on this? I am curious to know what was in your mind.”
“Nothing, really. My aunt died last month,” and here Leominster raised his hand, “but spare me the formalities of regrets. She was eighty-five and bedridden. The point is that she left me her house and its contents, which had been her brother's till he died ten years ago, and Mr. Halsted's affair with the cuff links reminded me of what went on when my aunt inherited the house.”
“Good,” said Trumbull, “what went on then?”
“Why, she was convinced something was hidden in the house; something of value. It was never found and that's all there is to it.”
Trumbull said, “Then whatever it is is still there, isn't it?”
“If it was ever there in the first place, then I suppose so.”
“And it's yours now?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you intend to do about it?”
“I don't see that I can do anything. We didn't find it when we looked for it, and I probably won't find it now. Still—”
“Yes?”
“Well, I intend in time to put the house up for sale and auction off its contents. I have no use for them as things and a reasonable use for the cash equivalents. It would be, however, annoying to auction off something for a hundred dollars and find that it contains an item worth, let us say, twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Trumbull sat back and said, “With the host's permission, Mr. Leominster, I'm going to ask you to tell the story in some reasonable order. What is the thing that is lost? How did it come to be lost? And so on.”
“Hear, hear!” said Gonzalo approvingly. He had finished his sketch, making Leominster's face a triangle, point-down, without in the least losing its perfect recognizability.
Leominster looked at the sketch stoically and nodded, sipping at his brandy, while Henry noiselessly cleared the table.
Leominster said, “I am from what is called an old New England family. The family made its money two centuries ago in textile mills and, I believe, in some of the less cheerful aspects of trade in those days—slaves and rum. The family has kept its money since, investing it conservatively and so on. We're not tycoons, but we're all well off—those of us who are left: myself and a cousin. I am divorced, by the way, and have no children.
“The family history is what makes me interested in genealogy, and the family finances make it possible for me to humor myself in this respect. It is not exactly a remunerative pursuit—at least, not in the fashion in which I pursue it— but I can afford it, you see.
“My Uncle Bryce—my father's older brother—retired fairly early in life after the death of his wife. He built a rather fussy house in Connecticut and involved himself in collecting things. I myself don't see the pleasure in accumulation, but I imagine it gave rise in him to the same pleasures that are given me by genealogical research.”
“What did he collect?” asked Avalon.
“Several types of items, but nothing unusual. He was a rather plodding sort of fellow, without much imagination. He collected old books to begin with, then old coins, and finally stamps. The fever never got to him so badly that he would invest really large sums, so that his collections are not what you might call first class. They're the kind that appraisers smile condescendingly over. Still, it gave him pleasure, and his thousand-book library isn't entirely worthless. Nor is the rest. And of course even a minor collector may sometimes get his hands on a good item.”
“And your uncle had done so?” asked Trumbull.
“My Aunt Hester—she was the third child, two years younger than my Uncle Bryce and five years older than my father, who d
ied fourteen years ago— My Aunt Hester said that my uncle had a valuable item.”
“How did she know?”
“My Aunt Hester was always close to my uncle. She lived in Florida, but after my uncle was widowed she took to spending .some of the summer months with him in Connecticut each year. She had never married and they grew closer with age, since there was almost no one else. My uncle had a son but he has been in South America for a quarter century. He has married a Brazilian girl and has three children. He and his father were not on good terms at all, and neither seemed to exist as far as the other was concerned. There was myself, of course, and they entertained me often out of a sense of duty and distant liking; and I was rather fond of them.
“Aunt Hester was a prim old lady, terribly self-conscious about the family position; to a ridiculous and outmoded extent, of course. She was precise and stiff in her speech, and was convinced that she was living in a hostile world of thieves and Socialists. She never wore her jewelry, for instance. She kept it in a safe-deposit box at all times.
“It was natural, then, that my uncle would leave the house to my aunt, and that she would in turn leave it to me. I'm genealogical enough, however, to remember that my Uncle Bryce has a son who is the direct heir and more deserving, by ties of blood, to have the house. I've written to my cousin asking him if he is satisfied with the will, and I received a letter from him three days ago telling me I was welcome to the house and contents. Actually, he said, rather bitterly, that as far as he was concerned I could burn the house and contents.”
Trumbull said, “Mr. Leominster, I wonder if you could get back to the lost object.”
“Ah, I'm sorry. I had forgotten. Aunt Hester, considering her views, was not happy over my uncle's cavalier treatment of his collection. Aunt Hester had a totally exaggerated idea of its value. 'These items and sundries,' she would say to me, 'are of peerless worth.'“
“Is that what she called them? Items and sundries?” asked Avalon, smiling.
“That was a pet phrase of hers. I assure you I remember it correctly. She had an archaic way of speaking—a deliberately cultivated one, I'm sure. She felt that language was a great mark of social status—”
“Shaw thought so too,” interrupted Rubin. “Pygmalion.”
“Never mind, Manny,” said Trumbull. “Won't you please proceed, Mr. Leominster?”
“I was just going to say that Aunt Hester's fetish of verbal complication was something which she felt, I think, set her off from the lower classes. If I were to tell her that she ought to ask someone about something, she was quite certain to say something like, 'But of whom, exactly, dear, ought I to inquire?' She would never say 'ask' if she could say 'inquire'; she never ended a sentence with a preposition or split an infinitive. In fact, she was the only person I ever met who consistently used the subjunctive mood. She once said to me, 'Would you be so gracious, my dear Jason, as to ascertain whether it be raining or no,' and I almost failed to understand her.
“But I am wandering from the point again. As I said, she had an exaggerated idea of the value of my uncle's collection and she was always after him to do something about it. At her insistence, he put in an elaborate burglar alarm system and had a special signal installed that would sound in the local police station.”
“Was it ever used?” asked Halsted.
“Not as far as I know,” said Leominster. “There was never any burglary. My uncle didn't exactly live in a high-crime area—though you could never convince my aunt of that— and I wouldn't be surprised if prospective burglars had a more accurately disappointing notion of the worth of my uncle's collection than my aunt had. After my uncle's death, Aunt Hester had some of his belongings appraised. When they told her that his stamp collection was worth, perhaps, ten thousand dollars, she was horrified. 'They are thieves,’ she told me. 'Having remitted ten thousand dollars, they would then certainly proceed to retail the collection for a million at the very least.' She would allow no further appraisals, and held onto everything with an unbreakable* clutch. Fortunately, she had plenty to live on and didn't have to sell anything. To her dying day, though, I am sure she was convinced that she was leaving me possessions equivalent to an enormous fortune. —No such thing, unfortunately.
“My Uncle Bryce was hardheaded enough in this respect. He knew that the collections were of only moderate value. He said so to me on several occasions, though he also said he had a few items that were worthwhile. He did not specify. According to Aunt Hester, he went into more detail with her. When she urged him to put his stamp collection in a vault he said, 'What, and never be able to look at it? It would have no value to me at all, then. Besides, it isn't worth much, except for one item, and I've taken care of that.'“
Avalon said, 'That one item in the stamp collection that your uncle said he had taken care of—is that what is now lost? Was it some stamp or other?”
“Yes, so Aunt Hester said at the time of my uncle's death. He had left her the house and its contents, which meant that stamp too. She called me soon after the funeral to say that she could not find the stamp and was convinced it had been stolen. I had attended the funeral, of course, and was still in Connecticut, having taken the occasion to track down some old gravestones, and I came over for dinner the day after she called me.
“It was a hectic meal, for Aunt Hester was furious over not having found the stamp. She was convinced it was worth millions and that the servants had taken it—or perhaps the funeral people had. She even had a little suspicion left over for me. She said to me over dessert, ‘Your Uncle, I presume, never discoursed on the matter of its location with you, did he?'
“I said he did not—which was true. He had never done so.”
Trumbull said, “Did she have any idea at all where he hid it?”
“Yes, indeed. That was one of her grounds for annoyance. He had told her, but had not been specific enough, and she had not thought to pin him down exactly. I suppose she was satisfied that he had taken care of it and didn't think further. He told her he had placed it in one of his unabridged volumes, where he could get it easily enough to look at it whenever he wished, but where no casual thief would think to find it.”
“In one of his unabridged volumes?” said Avalon in astonishment. “Did he mean in his collection?”
“Aunt Hester quoted him as saying 'one of my unabridged volumes.' We assumed he meant in his collection.”
Rubin said, “It's a foolish place to put it. A book can be stolen as easily as a stamp. It can be stolen for itself and the stamp would go along as a side reward.”
Leominster said, “I don't suppose my uncle seriously thought of it as a place of safety; merely as a way of satisfying my aunt. In fact, if she had not nagged him, I'm sure that Uncle Bryce would have left it right in the collection, which is, was, and has always been safe and sound. Of course, I never said this to my aunt.”
Rubin said, “When people speak of 'the Unabridged,' they usually mean Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Did your uncle have one?”
“Of course. On a small stand of its own. My aunt had thought of that and had looked there and hadn't found it. That was when she called me. We went into the library after dinner and I went over the Unabridged again. My uncle kept his better stamps in small, transparent envelopes and one of them might have been placed among the pages. Still, it would have been quite noticeable. It was an onionskin edition, and there would certainly have been a tendency for the dictionary to open to that page. Aunt Hester said it would be just like Uncle Bryce to hide it in such a foolish manner as to make it easily stolen.
'That was quite impossible, however. I had used the Unabridged myself now and then in my uncle's last years and I'm sure there was nothing in it. I inspected the binding to make sure he hadn't hid it behind the back strip. I was even tempted to pull the entire volume apart, but it didn't seem likely that Uncle Bryce had gone to elaborate lengths. He had slipped it between the pages of a book—but not the Unabridged.
“I said as muc
h to Aunt Hester. I told her that it might be among the pages of another book. I pointed out that the fact that he had referred to 'one of the unabridged volumes' was a sure sign that it was not in the Unabridged.”
“I agree,” said Rubin, “but how many unabridged volumes did he have?”
Leominster shook his head. “I don't know. I know nothing about books—at least from a collector's point of view. I asked Aunt Hester if she knew whether he had any items that were unabridged—an unabridged Boswell, for instance, or an unabridged Boccaccio—but she knew less about such matters than I did.”
Gonzalo said, “Maybe ‘unabridged’ means something special to a book collector. Maybe it means having a book jacket—just as an example—and it's between the book and its jacket.”
Avalon said, “No, Mario. I know something about books, and unabridged has no meaning but the usual one of a complete version.”
“In any case,” said Leominster, “it doesn't matter, for I suggested that we ought to go through all the books.”
“A thousand of them?” asked Halsted doubtfully.
“As it turned out there were well over a thousand and it was a task indeed. I must say that Aunt Hester went about it properly. She hired half a dozen children from town—all girls, because she said girls were quieter and more reliable than boys. They were each between ten and twelve, old enough to work carefully and young enough to be honest. They came in each day for weeks and worked for four or five hours.
“Aunt Hester remained in the library at all times, handing out the books in systematic order, receiving them back, handing out another, and so on. She allowed no short cuts; no shaking the books to see if anything fell out, or flipping the pages, either. She made them turn each page individually.”