The Doorman's Repose

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

  Even Styne Van Steen was not unhappy, as he had, the very next June, been able to marry the daughter of the owner of 740 Park Avenue, which was, after all, a better address.

  When they were at 777, they rested. But after a month or two of sleeping in late, taking steam baths, and watching television in the evenings, a little something began to itch in the backs of their brains, and Sandy and Phinny were once again ready to go. Sandy inevitably would have found some hitherto unnoticed reference to far-flung foods and locales as he prowled the back stacks of quiet libraries.

  “Wouldn’t you like to stay at home with us for a bit? Do a little decorating? Make some of those great home-cooked meals of yours?” pleaded Mr. Rotterdam. “I could give you a building of your very own. How about it?”

  “No, thanks, Dad,” Phinny always said. “We still haven’t eaten and seen enough of the world.” So you see, along with being fearless when it came to crossing international borders, she was no longer afraid of her father, even unafraid of hurting his feelings, which was what her trouble always had been. Perhaps to soften her refusal, she always added, “But we’ll settle down someday. I promise.”

  In their twentieth summer together, Sandy and Phinny found themselves in Rangoon, in Burma, with not much to do. They had each just posted a packet of stories and pictures to New York. And now the problem was what to do next. Sandy spent his afternoons in the Rangoon library. Then one day he came back to their hotel room to say, “I’ve found it!”

  “What have you found, dear?” said Phinny, looking up from the writing desk.

  “The most exotic food in the world! Listen to this.” Sandy began to read from a small book, bound in leather.

  “ ‘As Mount Everest is to the mountaineer, as the North Pole is to the Arctic trekker, as the Mariana Trench is to the bathysphere diver, so is the Angel’s Welcome to the culinary explorer. The Angel’s Welcome—as it is known to the monks who prepare it—can only be found at one ancient monastery standing deep in a tropical forest between the toes of the foothills of the Himalayas, and is the rarest, most elusive, and most dangerous food in the world.’ ” Sandy looked up at Phinny for a moment with large eyes and a spreading smile before he continued reading. “ ‘The Angel’s Welcome is a dish made of the fruit of the Burmese Tree of Heaven, along with coconut, mango, breadfruit, durian, mushrooms, turmeric, paprika, ginger’—and a hundred other spices and oils you’ve never heard of, which I’m skipping over—‘and including a tincture of the skin secretions of the Flamboyant Heart frog, the pureed venom sac of the Bengal viper, and the ground claws of the Sumatran skink. It is so exquisite that when it is eaten by one with a palate refined to perfection by years of study, it sometimes happens that the third bite will be fatal. However, the one tasting it will pass away with an indescribable smile of peace on his lips. Serve over rice.’ ” Sandy closed the book. “What do you think?”

  “Darling, but . . .” said Phinny, standing up quickly from her desk.

  Sandy, stepping to her in a rush, folded her in his ample arms like a friendly bear—he had added quite a few pounds over the years. “Darling,” he said, “I know what you’re thinking. What if . . . What if . . . But what if I don’t? What if I don’t try it? I’ll be a broken man, a beaten food explorer. I’ll have to hang up my combination spoon, fork, and knife. I’ll end my days on a large sofa, with a heated frozen dinner on my spindly knees, watching daytime game shows with a faraway look in my eyes, gibbering, gibbering, What if . . . What if . . .”

  Sandy hugged Phinny tighter, who squeaked a bit. “I’ve got to try it!”

  He tried it.

  And on the third bite, Sandy, with an indescribable smile of peace on his lips, was welcomed by the angels.

  Brother Walter was very helpful. All the monks, in fact, assured and reassured and re-reassured Phinny that this was the greatest possible outcome for Sandy and each of the monks themselves aspired to this end. Still, Phinny was left heartbroken without Sandy. He had passed down an avenue she was not yet prepared to take.

  “Would you like to take him home with you?” Brother Walter asked. When Phinny nodded quietly, he said, “Wait here.” Then the monks sang and chanted for seven days, at the end of which time they presented Phinny with a kind of casserole dish of Sandy’s ashes.

  It took another couple of months for Phinny and Sandy to get home. When they did, most of the residents of 777 were gathered in the lobby and Otis’s door stood open.

  When Phinny, her family around her, Sandy in her arms, stepped into Elevator Number Two, sometimes called Otis, and turned to face the door, the bell that usually rang quietly only once to announce the door’s closing rang slowly, loudly, sadly three times, once for Sandy, once for Phinny, and once for Otis himself, before the door rolled softly shut.

  The usual two-minute ride to the penthouse took four and the ceiling light stayed dim.

  Sandy’s ashes were sprinkled among the shrubbery on the north terrace. Many of the building residents had tea on the south terrace. Later, Phinny stepped into the elevator to escape the well-wishing crowd and rode up and down to have a bit of a cry with Otis.

  •

  There was a long, a very long silence in the building manager’s office.

  “So you see, Mrs. MacDougal,” said the building manager at last, rearranging a few more reports on his desk, “old Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom will never allow Elevator Number Two, sometimes called Otis, to be modernized. Not,” the building manager leaned forward, “until after she pushes her own last call button.”

  Mrs. MacDougal picked at a little pill of wool on the front of her sweater. She pressed her lips together and sniffed. However, she had nothing to say.

  Anna and Pee Wee

  WHEN ANNA Brownback was quite a young mouse, she took to sleeping in the box of tissues that always stood on a small table next to a long leather couch. The tissue box, the table, and the long leather couch were part of the furnishings of the consulting room of Dr. Otto Ackerman, the great psychoanalyst. We at 777 Garden Avenue were all proud to know that Dr. Ackerman had his consulting room on the fourth floor of our building.

  Inside the box of tissues it was warm, dark, and soft—perfect for a mouse—and the low voices that mumbled one after another in a nearly continuous ribbon of sound somewhere over Anna’s head contributed to the delicious atmosphere of the place. The tissue box always stood in the same spot each morning and was never allowed to be empty of tissues. Dr. Ackerman’s housekeeper saw to that: a full box, in the same spot, to start each day.

  True, a long-fingered hand would occasionally yank the top tissue away, sending Anna rolling, but these little interruptions were worth the luxuriousness of the thing and even added to some of the romance. If Anna had listened to what the voices said immediately after she took a tumble she might have heard something like this:

  “Oh, doctor, warmed facial tissues! That’s so nice. You are thoughtful.”

  In reply, Dr. Ackerman merely nodded, smug in the knowledge that, of course he was thoughtful, but somewhere in the back of his mind he was not entirely sure precisely what his patient was referring to.

  And Dr. Ackerman did like to be precise.

  Had he but looked, he would have found that it was precisely due to a mouse who had just been sleeping on the tissue in question, warming it with her little warm-blooded rodent’s heart, and his scientific mind would have rested easier.

  But Dr. Ackerman never did look.

  He never looked into the tissue box.

  It was Anna who looked out of the tissue box.

  It was, after all, inevitable that Anna would become curious about the owners of the voices she heard murmuring all day, and so one morning she cautiously peeked out.

  What she saw surprised her.

  A woman lay on her back on the long black couch, her head resting on a pillow near the tissue box. She spoke in a soft voice, like a large pot on a very low simmer, bubble, bubble, pop. And then she reached for a tissue and ble
w her nose loudly into it. Anna had quickly stepped out of the way into the darkness of the tissue-box corner when this happened.

  And so it went throughout the day. Each hour someone new arrived, men, women, even children. All stretched out on the couch. Some spoke loudly, others whispered, and some hardly spoke at all but merely reached for the tissues.

  Dr. Ackerman was mostly silent. Instead of speaking he nodded, or made a note in a small red notebook that he held in his lap.

  Formerly, their voices had come to Anna as she lay, tucked into a corner of the tissue box, as a river of sound. But now curious, Anna concentrated on what the voices were actually saying.

  They were telling stories.

  Sometimes one person told one, or two, or even three stories in his or her hour. Sometimes the stories lasted for hour after hour, each installment picking up where the last session ended.

  And Anna became fascinated by them.

  And then Anna began to take notes herself.

  And that’s how Anna became the first mouse psychiatrist with a practice at 777 Garden Avenue.

  When Dr. Ackerman’s last client closed the apartment door behind him, and Dr. Ackerman stood up from his chair and stretched, and then shuffled into his kitchen to make himself a cup of tea and look through the containers of leftover take-out Thai food in his refrigerator, Anna crept out of the tissue box and crawled down the electrical cord of the table lamp to the floor where she ran along the baseboard till she came to the hole next to the hot-water pipes.

  Her own office stood about a yard from the water pipes, in a cozy abscess halfway up the plaster wall. In her office the couch was made from an unwanted telephone directory, one of several she found stacked in the mail room. Anna had opened the directory to the G’s and then munched up the insides to make a lovely soft spot, almost like a nest really. She sat on an old wooden spool herself.

  Her first clients were her brothers and sisters of course (she had seven): Anton, Anastasia, Alice, Adam, Alexander, Abe, and Agnes.

  Through their own stories they told her their troubles, their worries, their hopes, and their professional goals. They described their dreams and fears. Anna did what Dr. Ackerman always did. She listened, took notes, and made a small comment now and then, saying what her clients perhaps knew already. Still, it was important that she confirmed their mousey hunches.

  Anna knew her greatest asset was her ability to sit quietly (not a natural ability for a mouse) and focus her attention on someone else’s story, only speaking when something particularly important came to her or was staring her in the face.

  Before long, rodents from as far away as the sixth floor, and even the nineteenth, and then the whole building, made appointments to visit Anna once or twice a week. One rat even came from the basement.

  So you see the human residents could have quite a strong influence on the animal population of 777 Garden Avenue.

  Something similar happened with Pee Wee Brownback, a distant cousin of Anna’s.

  Like Anna, and like all mice really, Pee Wee was a great sleeper and loved to find the perfect spot for this activity. In Anna’s case, it was Dr. Ackerman’s tissue box. In Pee Wee’s case, it was inside the double bass of the jazz musician Shadow Sorenson, who lived next door to Otto Ackerman. A double bass, more simply called a bass, is an enormous instrument made mostly of finely crafted and oiled wood. It is hollow, but with two oddly shaped holes in its front to allow the vibrations of sound to come out and resonate more strongly. They are shaped like the letter f, lowercase and fancy, and one of them is backward, and they are called “f-holes.” Now, if you are a particularly dexterous mouse and not too fat either, you can clamber up and then slide through one of these f-holes into the insides of the instrument.

  As your mouse eyes blink, quickly adjusting to the changed light inside, you’ll see light filtering dustily through the f-holes into a grand space, like the nave of a Gothic cathedral, or the hull of an upturned boat.

  Pee Wee loved this place from the instant he saw it.

  And just as he was settling down for his first nap of the day, the whole thing moved, lifting up and then standing upright and swaying slightly.

  Pee Wee had curled up in the soft roundness at what was now the bottom of the double bass. He popped his head up to see what might happen next.

  A tuneful thumping came through the wood, a vibration that made everything, including Pee Wee, shiver. The vibrations changed, rising and falling. Pee Wee trembled. Pee Wee’s big ears got bigger. The vibrations went up and down his tail and then all the way to the tip of his nose. At first, Pee Wee didn’t know what he was hearing. But as the minutes went by, and his tail started swinging, and his big ears began to lean forward, trying to guess which way the next sound would go, Pee Wee knew what it was. It was music. His sleeping spot, the double bass, was making music. And because he was inside the bass, Pee Wee felt like he was inside the music itself.

  Pee Wee wouldn’t sleep any more that day.

  Instead, he listened to the sounds, the music. As Shadow Sorenson plucked his bass, the gentle thumpings ran up or down. Pee Wee felt it all through the pads in his feet and his sensitive ears. When the thumpings ended, Pee Wee was momentarily dismayed. But then a new sound, a humming, began, much louder than the thumpings. It was smooth and the sound didn’t stop. Again, sometimes the sounds went up and sometimes down, louder, then softer. It was like a river or the sea. It was beautiful.

  Pee Wee felt like he was in heaven.

  Then he heard a distant sound, a clatter, more thumps, less tuneful though, and then voices, human voices, low and high, quite a few. Pee Wee hung on with his toenails as the whole double bass was put down on its side. He crawled back up to one of the f-holes and peeked out.

  Several people had arrived in Shadow’s apartment, all carrying oddly shaped boxes, which they set down around them, shaking hands and slapping one another’s backs.

  Soon Shadow’s friends (Pee Wee could tell they were friends) were opening the boxes and removing all kinds of oddly shaped things. Some bright and shiny full of looping metal coils, or odd holes, a couple looking like small versions of the wonderful thing Pee Wee was in, Shadow’s bass. Pee Wee began to get curious about how the sleeping might be in one of them, when his own sleeping spot lifted up, sending him scrambling again for a place to hang on to.

  Pee Wee could only hope that the thumpings would begin anew, and they did, but to Pee Wee’s astonishment, and joy, more thumpings, mewings, hummings, and liquidy shoutings began all around him until he was surrounded by a sea of sound, moving in different directions but together, swinging like a contented cat.

  That was the night Pee Wee became a jazz musician. When at last, hours later, the music had stopped, and the others had gone, and even Shadow Sorenson had brushed his teeth and gone to bed, Pee Wee crept out of the left f-hole, ran along the carpet, over the threshold to the kitchen and in behind the stove, through a hole, then down along several long tunnels, and at last to the bunch of chambers in the wall where he lived.

  All the next day, he couldn’t sleep. Instead, he brooded on the best way to make his own mouse-size double bass. He spent a couple of nights gathering the materials. His bass would be constructed out of two oatmeal boxes (which he craftily gnawed), a tongue depressor, a small shell, and some

  Anna and Pee Wee 109 broken ukulele strings—a real find. Lurking in the hall garbage closet had really paid off for Pee Wee.

  Pee Wee settled in to study jazz. Day and night, for weeks, Pee Wee Brownback sat inside Shadow Sorenson’s double bass, listening to every note and every silence, learning jazz from the inside. Sometimes Pee Wee even left 777 Garden Avenue, traveling with Shadow in his double bass to jazz clubs and restaurants, even some concert halls, getting a crazy jazz education.

  During the day, the inspiration of the night before sent Pee Wee practicing on his oatmeal-box bass, refining the instrument and his facility on it.

  After the first weeks of study and p
ractice passed, Pee Wee was showing other mice, notably his brother, Spitball, how to build and play their own instruments, with the result that, in the late fall of that year, Pee Wee had assembled a classic five-piece ensemble. They began gigging every night.

  •

  And that’s when Pee Wee got the first complaints about the noise. They came from his upstairs neighbor and distant cousin, Anna Brownback. Anna and Pee Wee lived within the wall that separated Otto Ackerman’s and Shadow Sorenson’s apartments, in chambers one above the other.

  Anna stood in Pee Wee’s doorway.

  “Excuse me,” said Anna, “but the noise is disturbing my patients.”

  “It’s not noise,” said Pee Wee, “it’s music.”

  “Whatever you call it, we can hear it upstairs, and frankly, it’s unsettling to my patients.”

  “Won’t you come in?” said Pee Wee.

  Anna hesitated at the door. “I have another session in forty-five minutes.”

  “Plenty of time for a cup of Earl Grey.”

  While Pee Wee moved about in the kitchen, Anna sat down in the living hole and looked around her. After a once-over of the perimeter, she let her eyes rest on the centerpiece of the room, Pee Wee’s double bass.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  Pee Wee, poking his head in from the kitchen, said, “That’s my double bass. I’m a jazz bassist.”

  “I see,” said Anna. “Tell me how you feel about this bass.”

  “I love it,” said Pee Wee, returning with the tea and cookie bits. “It’s my life. It’s everything to me, baby. You dig?”

  “Of course I dig. I am a mouse. I also rustle and gnaw. But why do you call me ‘baby,’ when you can see that I am a fully grown mouse? Why this infantilization?”

  “Milk? Sugar, sugar?” said Pee Wee.

  “Very interesting. Thank you for the tea, by the way. Apparently this music, this jazz, so-called, has not completely uncivilized you,” said Anna, nodding with an approving eye at the tea and cookie bits.