The Doorman's Repose

by The Doorman's Repose (retail) (epub)

  He would have to be ready for that.

  Jack talked to his sisters, Jumper and Jean. He asked Jean to be his manager and Jumper to be his promoter. Jean had managed Jack on a couple of previous occasions and she had been quite helpful—her insights were good. When the mole clobbered Jack in round two of their fight, it was Jean who had helped him recover. She told Jack to move his feet quickly and then go for a crippling flurry of punches. It had been a gamble, but it had worked. Jack said to Jean, “I want to have your eyes in my corner.”

  Jumper, too, had worked with Jack before. When Jack had worried that the nickname “Pumpkinseed” made him look weak, Jumper said the opposite. “Use it,” she said. “Own it. It’s colorful. It’s unusual. It stands out.” With a winning streak of fifteen knockouts and counting, if any mouse had ever thought Pumpkinseed Jack was wimpy, they didn’t anymore.

  So while Jean and Jack settled into their twice-daily training sessions, Jumper started to shape the publicity campaign. The first decision to be made was this: Did they want to inform the cat that she would be on the receiving end of a mouse fight? On the one hand, letting the cat know where and when the fight was going to take place would make sure she was prepared and present for the occasion. On the other hand the cat might invite friends—other cats—to the fight, and this could put a real damper on the resident mouse turnout. Your average mouse stays pretty far away from a room full of cats. Even if they were upstanding sports fans, they were cats, after all. That was the whole glamour of the fight. Still, one cat was enough. So in the end, the three decided to keep the great cat-mouse fight a secret from the cat.

  •

  “Remember, we’re going to have to go in hard early, like with the mole,” said Jean, “but this time even harder and earlier. Your feet have to be moving like whirligig beetles in a cup of hot coffee, and your paws should be a buzzing blur!”

  Jack continued to shadowbox as Jean coached him, grunting little mouse grunts as he swung his fists.

  Jumper deputized Jerry and Jennifer to make the posters. Jerry wrote the copy—the words—Jennifer did the design, and between two and three in the morning, they managed to print fifty-seven copies, which was all the paper that was in the paper feed on Miss Nancy’s printer.

  That night while she worked on the poster, Jumper had examined the walls of Miss Nancy’s study.

  “Wow, look at these fabulous Broadway posters!” said Jumper. Jumper couldn’t have known it, but Nancy was herself a Broadway publicist.

  “Forget Broadway,” said Jerry. “Look at this instead,” and he rolled out the eight-and-a-half-inch by eleven-inch, two-mouse-tall poster.

  Jumper read the poster.

  THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY!

  Jack “Pumpkinseed” Whitefoot vs. the Cat in apartment 11B. Weighing in at a hefty eight and a half ounces, Jack comes into the match at fifteen and zero, all knockouts, to challenge the cat, weighing who knows how much with who knows how many wins. One thing we do know is she’s a cat. And this is the first mouse-cat fight in history. The World Mouse Boxing Federation wouldn’t sanction this fight. They said it was too dangerous, but we’re bringing it to you anyway!

  Be in the living room at midnight, August 11th, for the event of da century!

  After the poster went up, hung in various nooks and crannies, the usual low hubbub within the walls of 777 Garden Avenue was a high hubbub, as mice, rats, and cockroaches from every floor got an eyeful of the poster.

  “What’s up?” said the mouse from 11A. “Some kid from the sticks is trying to make a name for himself. Wants to fight the cat in 11B.”

  “Cheese!” “He may not get what he’s looking for!” “You said it.”

  As in the above conversation, the reaction among the locals was mixed. Still, everyone was curious, everyone was talking about it, and certainly everyone planned to show up for the fight.

  It was inevitable that eventually Mrs. Whitefoot would hear of it as well.

  “Pumpkinseed Jack to fight the cat in apartment 11B,” she squeaked. “Jack! Where is that boy? When I get through with him, he really will have lived through the fight of the century. Oh!”

  “Now, honey,” said Mr. Whitefoot, “don’t be too hard on him. This means a lot to him.”

  “It’ll mean a lot to me if he gets himself eaten!”

  The ensuing family, er, discussion lasted till the gray dawn rising outside the kitchen window sent the family scurrying out from behind the toaster, where they had been arguing about the situation. Jumper, Jean, Jerry, and Jennifer had come in for a good bit of criticism from Mrs. Whitefoot as well for being aiders and abettors.

  While Mr. Whitefoot tried to stay neutral—though, undeniably, he had a soft spot for Jack—June and Jasmine took their mother’s part.

  However, badger, stamp her delicate white feet, and even howl as she did, Mrs. Whitefoot could not sway Jack from his determination to go through with the fight. Mr. Whitefoot, who secretly was looking forward to the fight and even had bet a few pieces of Muenster cheese on it, did his best to console his wife, saying that even if Jack was eaten there was always next summer’s litter to look forward to.

  At last the sun went down on the Saturday of the fight. All day long various mice had kept an eye on Carole Lombard, looking for any signs that she knew the fight was approaching or that she was off her food or in any way behaving oddly. All reports indicated that Carole Lombard was having a usual day and that she was in tip-top form. She’d had a good breakfast at seven. She had napped in various chairs and on Miss Nancy’s bed till noon. She had nibbled dry food and lapped water. At two fifteen she had gone out for her training run. Had dined again at five. She had stretched. She had cleaned her claws. She had gnawed on her feet. Ominously, she had occasionally run her rough tongue over her cruel teeth, teeth that no rodent possessed, a carnivore’s teeth. As the watchers reported to an eager public in the walls, the cat in apartment 11B was ugly and extremely dangerous. If tonight was like every other night, she would be dozing on the living-room sofa when the kitchen clock struck midnight.

  Jack had spent the day in a careful last preparation. He followed Jean’s thoughtful program exactly. He, too, napped in the morning and again in the afternoon. His workout was gentle. At five, Jean gave him a complete rubdown.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Whitefoot made one last attempt to get the fight called off.

  “Mr. Whitefoot,” she pleaded, “do something. There’s no way Jack can survive this fight! It’s never happened! Mice run from cats. That’s the way it’s been for a million million years. If you let Jack go through with this, it will be the end of him. Don’t you see?”

  Mr. Whitefoot just patted his wife’s back and gently nuzzled her whiskers.

  The rest of the evening was quiet. Miss Nancy made herself a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on rye, watched a little television, and then went to bed. When Miss Nancy let the mystery novel fall shut and turned off the light, Carole Lombard wandered to the living room and found her favorite corner of the sofa.

  It was eleven twenty.

  Half an hour later, Jack Pumpkinseed Whitefoot stepped out onto the living-room carpet—a lovely Persian one in reds and grays. It was ten minutes to midnight. Ten minutes to the Fight of the Century. All around him, behind the radiator, under the sofa, behind the cracked baseboard, hundreds of mice, a thousand cockroaches, and two interested rats waited quietly. Jack stretched his back legs one after the other, rolled his neck first clockwise and then counterclockwise. He shadowboxed silently but in a sprightly way.

  At two minutes to midnight, the crowd edged forward.

  At last the kitchen clock began to strike the hour. At the tenth stroke the multitude of four- and six-footed city folk surged out from their hiding places, forming a ring around the Persian rug. There was an odd smallish rumbling, the sound of the excited buzz in the rodent and insect household.

  With the last stroke of midnight a hush fell over the living room. Only the hum of the refrigerat
or and the gentle wheezing of the sleeping cat could be heard.

  Jack drew himself up and squeaked with a mighty voice, “Hello! Miss cat! Wake up! You are in for the Fight of the Century!”

  Carole Lombard woke up with a start. She lifted her head and looked left and right, instantly fully awake. Her hairs stood out. Her whiskers twitched. Her eyes narrowed. She got up, arched her back quickly, and took two steps to the edge of the sofa, from which she looked down at the carpet.

  Her eyes locked onto the lone mouse standing on his hind legs in the center of the carpet. Her eyes narrowed to slits. Her whiskers twitched ferociously. Everything about Carole Lombard said that she could not believe what she was seeing.

  And then she believed it. With a shriek that woke up the nine-year-old boy sleeping in the apartment below, Carole Lombard leaped from the sofa, over the head of Jack and all the assembled public, and then shot like an exploded furry balloon down the apartment hall. After a half second of frantic clawing at the door into Miss Nancy’s bedroom, she darted in, and with a practiced jump, she landed on the top of Miss Nancy’s armoire, where she crouched, hiding as well as she could behind a small vinyl suitcase. She was shivering like a blade of grass in a piping breeze.

  The truth of the matter is, as with so many of her city sisters and brothers, Carole Lombard was frightened to death of mice.

  •

  It was a bedraggled, disgruntled, and thoroughly disappointed Whitefoot family that greeted the Brownbacks a week later, who were returning to their apartment inside the walls of 777 Garden Avenue after their six weeks in the country.

  Only Mrs. Whitefoot spoke when Mrs. Brownback asked them how their time had been.

  “It was wonderful!” she said. “The shows! The food! And all the interesting people! I don’t know how you get any sleep here with all the excitement! However it’s time for us to get back home.”

  Once home, Pumpkinseed Jack hung up his boxing gloves. The whole episode kind of unnerved him, as a trip to the city so often does to country mice.

  He stopped in for a ginger ale with the mole one afternoon. “You couldn’t drag me to the city,” said the mole. “Even though I hear they have a lot of nice tunnels.”

  “Why not?” said Jack.

  “Too dangerous!”

  Jack grunted and thoughtfully sipped his ginger ale.

  Otis

  MRS. MACDOUGAL and the building manager sat opposite each other in the building manager’s office, he behind a large desk covered in papers and phones, and she in a vinyl-covered armchair, where she absentmindedly let the pages of a magazine, Today’s Bricks, fall slowly from back to front.

  “Elevator Number Two is very old,” she said.

  “It is very old,” he said, not looking up from the financial report he was reading.

  “The light is dim. The metal is scratched in places. The wood paneling is somewhat discolored. And the marble in the floor is badly cracked. Shoddy. Second-rate. Not modern. With visitors to the building, who may be of some importance . . .”

  “. . . some importance,” he said.

  “. . . this makes for a bad impression.”

  “. . . bad impression . . .”

  “What’s more,” continued Mrs. MacDougal, “Elevator Number Two seems to be possessed by a demon. I have on more than one occasion been deposited on the wrong floor. Or taken up when I pushed Down. Or held between floors for minutes at a time. It felt like hours. Horrible!”

  “. . . horrible . . .” he said.

  “It is fortunate that I live on the fifteenth floor and so may take Elevators Number One and Three as an alternative to Elevator Number Two. But some of those unfortunate enough to live above me must take Elevator Number Two, since it is, as you know, the only one that reaches the highest parts of the building.”

  “. . . highest parts . . .”

  “So it is almost painfully clear that we must rip out Elevator Number Two and replace it with something new. Something nice. Modern. With some elegant details.”

  For the first time the building manager looked up from his papers. He said, “Rip out Elevator Number Two? Rip out? Elevator Number Two? Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom’s never going to agree to that. Oh no. You can put that thought right out of your mind. Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom has a thing for Elevator Number Two. She won’t budge on that.” He closed the report. “Do you want to know why?”

  •

  It was this way.

  Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom is nearly ninety years old and so is Elevator Number Two. It is sometimes called simply “Otis” by the residents because that name, the name of the manufacturer, stares up from a wrought-iron disk in the otherwise cracked, as Mrs. MacDougal pointed out, marble floor. Before her marriage, Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom was simply Miss Rotterdam. She and Otis were installed in the building at almost the same time. Old Mr. Rotterdam, Miss Rotterdam’s grandfather, had the original elevator replaced with the new Otis just before Miss Rotterdam was born. Though the original elevator had shown no signs of age or debility, old Mr. Rotterdam wanted the newest and the best for his first grandchild. What’s more, the new Otis was one of the very first fully automatic elevators installed in the city. Being fully automatic, Otis eliminated the need for old Mr. Rotterdam to pay an elevator operator’s salary, which old Mr. Rotterdam quietly liked a lot.

  Otis arrived with a load capacity of two thousand pounds, a thirty-horsepower motor, and could do the trip from the basement to the twenty-first floor in two minutes and eight seconds. Installing Otis had gone smoothly. It took six weeks, but there were no complications.

  Likewise with little Miss Rotterdam, only in her case it required six hours and not six weeks to be born.

  Miss Rotterdam arrived weighing eight pounds, nine ounces. She had a tremendous appetite and lots of vim.

  Otis carried Mrs. Rotterdam, old Mr. Rotterdam’s daughter-in-law, to the lobby on her way to the hospital maternity ward, and took her with her new baby, Delphinia Rotterdam, up from the lobby, home to the twentieth floor.

  Everyone was well pleased.

  Nearly coincidentally, that is, about one week later, Otis performed a very similar service for Mr. and Mrs. Bottom, who lived in apartment 7C. Alexander Bottom, a healthy nine pounds, four ounces, with an even bigger appetite than Delphinia’s, came to 777 Garden Avenue to take up his position as chief joy of the Bottom family, where he was known as Sandy.

  In a way, Otis, Delphinia, and Sandy made up that year’s freshman class at 777.

  The three soon found their voices, their legs, and their call buttons.

  Right away, Delphinia announced her literary ambitions to the world by gnawing on one book after another. She could read by the time she was three and had a good chunk of Dickens under her belt by the time she was eight. She began to write occasional pieces for The Gardenia, our magazine of avenue news, illustrated with photos from the camera Delphinia, now known as Phinny, received from her mother on her ninth birthday.

  Sandy, also an early gnawer, differed from Delphinia in that, even at ages three, four, and five, he continued to gnaw, though by five it was no longer so much on non-food items. His gnawing became more refined: corn on the cob, chicken legs, apple pies. By the time he was eight, Sandy could distinguish Jonagold from Mutsu from Red Delicious in a blind taste test of apples fresh from the market.

  And Otis? Being an elevator, he matured much more rapidly. There were some misunderstandings in the first few weeks of his life, Otis not being able to distinguish between nine and six, for instance (they do look alike). Also, sometimes he got tired, especially in the late afternoon–early evening, when he was almost constantly on the go. Now and then he took a breather between floors, especially if he was at or near his weight capacity—about seven people. The shouting and hullabaloo this brought on, though, would give him such a headache that he might shut down for the rest of the evening, making everyone have to take Elevator Number One and Elevator Number Three, and then the stairs from floors seventeen to twenty.
>
  But after a few house calls by the elevator specialists, all of these minor complaints were corrected.

  By the time he was two years old, Otis was in peak form and running like a top.

  And he was beginning to develop a personality. Every once in a while, he liked his little jokes. He might close his door halfway and then open it again, and then close it, which can kind of make any rider think he or she was in a little time warp. Or Otis would slow down or speed up, especially if he had a nice long stretch to do, say from the first floor to the twentieth. Or if a lady was carrying a lot of packages he might close his door on her gently and hold her for a mere second or two, just for a lark.

  Occasionally, of course, like anyone else, he got angry. He hated dogs piddling in him. Yuck! Or when someone punched his buttons. Punched his buttons! “Punch nine for me, please.” Really! Who likes being punched? Bouncing a ball, farting, smoking, talking too loud, all got on his nerves. He never held anyone between floors to take his revenge—keeping whoever was so annoying a second longer inside him was the last thing he wanted. However he did scold in his own way. For instance, he might open and shut his door loudly and repeatedly on the floor of any obnoxious resident, sometimes at four in the morning, if he thought it might teach the offender a lesson.

  Still, that was rare. For the most part, Otis was a happy and well-adjusted elevator.

  By the time Otis was eight, he was a master elevator, one of the finest in the city and a source of some pride to 777 residents. Remember, this was a long time ago and an automatic elevator was already something pretty special. Naturally he knew every resident by name, most of their guests, and, apart from his rare moments of fun, he served them well.