Husbands And Lap Dogs Breathe Their Last

by David Steven Rappoport

  Surendra strode to the podium and planted herself confidently before the microphone. She lifted her bridal veil.

  “Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Surendra Hickok. My passion is writing biographies. I’ve published two. The first, co-authored with my sister, was on the early twentieth-century astrologer, Evangeline Adams. Last year I completed a study of Wilhelm Reich, the renegade disciple of Freud and inventor of the orgone. I am now working on a biography of Ida Craddock. How many of you recognize that name?”

  A number of hands went up. This impressed Cummings, as he had no idea who Ida Craddock was. He’d never heard of Evangeline Adams either. Wilhelm Reich’s name sounded somewhat familiar, though he was sure he couldn’t have accurately identified him.

  “Ida Craddock was a nineteenth-century mystic and sexual explorer, born in Philadelphia in 1857. She would have been the first female admitted to the University of Pennsylvania, had the Trustees not blocked her admission. At around the age of thirty, she became active in the Theosophical Society. As most of you know, the Theosophical Society was founded in New York City in 1875 to investigate the nature of the universe and humanity’s place in it. In their sheltering arms Ida studied the sexual wisdom paths of various traditions, such as tantra.”

  “What’s a sexual wisdom path?” Cummings whispered to Luther.

  “I do not have any idea, but it does not sound Baptist,” Luther whispered back.

  “Ultimately she said she had married and had an active sexual life with an angel named Soph,” Hickok continued. “Of course it is difficult for most of us to imagine this, but she seemed to be insistent about it. I’m wearing this wedding dress today to acknowledge Ida’s truth, even though I can’t claim to truly understand it myself. I’m also wearing the Craddock brooch.” She indicated a pendant on a chain about her neck. “It is said to have healing properties.

  “Eventually Ida opened an office in Chicago to offer sexual counseling to married couples, a truly radical undertaking in Ida’s time. She wrote widely on the subject of marital sexuality, achieving sufficient notoriety by 1899 to run into legal persecution, notably from Anthony Comstock. He, of course, was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a ruthless public moralist.

  “She was convicted and sentenced to federal prison in 1902 and committed suicide the night before she was to begin her sentence.

  “This overview cannot capture the full range of Ms. Craddock’s contributions to ...”

  Surendra Hickok stopped and coughed. Cummings noticed that the smoke in the room seemed suddenly to have increased in density.

  “They really might cut back on the incense,” Cummings thought.

  “Craddock’s contributions to the ...” Surendra stammered, trying to continue. She couldn’t. She abruptly screamed. Her wedding dress had erupted in fire.

  Cummings scanned the room. The cause of the smoke wasn’t the incense. The velvet drapes were smoking heavily and starting to flame.

  Rutley Paik pulled off his morning coat and leapt at Surendra, attempting to smother the flames.

  Tom tossed drinks and water at Surendra and then at the drapes.

  Crandall and Sebastian called for help on their cell phones.

  Winky shrieked and stood frozen, while Tom and Otto moved at great speed for no particular reason in no particular direction, bumping into the furniture and other Mathers members.

  Anunciación ran toward the French doors in a panic and then hesitated, blocking the exit until Lolita pushed her out of the way.

  The Scottish-Jewish hobbit davenned.

  Meanwhile, the flames had begun to spread throughout the room.

  Half an hour later, from the safety of the sidewalk across the street, the group of stunned Neo-Edwardians watched the Chicago Fire Department try to save what was left of the Red and White. Many Mathers members had minor injuries, mostly smoke inhalation, and were being treated by paramedics. No one was deemed sufficiently afflicted to require a trip to the hospital. The burnt remains of the one casualty, Surendra Hickok, were loaded into an ambulance.

  Police circulated; they asked individuals what they had observed and took names and contact information. Finally they suggested that everyone go home.

  “I think we may as well leave now,” Luther stammered to Cummings, his voice tremulous. “Yes, I think we may as well,” he repeated. Cummings nodded, and they turned in the direction of Cummings’s car.

  Cummings felt a tug on his sleeve.

  “I don’t think we’ve met—not exactly.” It was Otto Verissimo.

  “I know who you are,” Cummings replied.

  “Do you? And I know who you are. I recognize your name from the article in the Tribune. You’re that accomplished amateur detective.”

  “Yes,” Cummings said.

  “I need to consult you,” Otto said, lowering his voice to a whisper, “as soon as possible. Please!” Otto thrust an elegantly printed business card into Cummings’s hand and disappeared into the crowd.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning Cummings was in the kitchen, perusing tea canisters as the summer sun rose to smother Chicago with another day of heat and humidity. Cummings and Odin were quite the tea aficionados and always kept twelve small numbered canisters of different varieties in their kitchen.

  Cummings studied the canisters, trying to decide which tea he wanted. Unsure, he retrieved a pair of dice he kept in a drawer and threw them. The winner was canister four, Irish Breakfast Tea.

  He had emailed Otto and set up an appointment for that afternoon. As his tea steeped he searched the Internet to see what he could find about Otto Verissimo.

  It seemed that Otto was a very successful author, although an article in Publishers Weekly suggested that his books, like those of any number of other genre writers, were experiencing flat sales in the economic downturn. Otto’s husband, Sebastian Grinnell, whom he had married in Provincetown the year before, owned three thriving bars on Halsted Street in Lakeview, Chicago’s historic gay neighborhood, known colloquially as Boys Town. Even in the Great Recession of the early twenty-first century, this was not a couple struggling to pay the bills.

  Next Cummings turned to the first page of The Curse of Manley Abbey, a novel by Otto Verissimo that Cummings had borrowed from Luther the previous day:

  Master Hamilton is remarkable for his good humor. Were he even ugly, one could not help being pleased with him. He is possessed of a sterling sweetness of temper, and his person is genteel, his complexion fair, and his physique delightful. He is indeed a very fit young man to be taken off the town, as he would be an agreeable companion. The God of Love seems to have intended a better fate for his charms than prostitution.”

  Such was Master Hamilton’s listing in Covent Garden Sodomites, or a man of pleasure’s calendar, for the year 1775, the London directory of gentlemen of the evening. It was this that first brought Sir Reginald Manley to seek out Master Hamilton’s acquaintance. Although Sir Manley was an esteemed and fine person, with a generous turn of mind, he was not above temptation from either the fair or the virile sex.

  Even at the first, there was considerable felicity between them. This natural affection, along with Sir Reginald’s endowment of Christian virtue, led him to manly restraint when first he met the lad. Rather than taking his pleasure with Master Hamilton, Sir Reginald called for a pot of tea and inquired as to the young man’s upbringing and education.

  “I possess a knowledge of Latin and Greek, sir,” Hamilton replied, “and of mathematics, the sciences, music, and drawing. As to my parentage, sir, this is unknown. I was taken in as a foundling and raised in a heathen land by a missionary and his wife. I would be with them still but that they were trampled by a distraught water buffalo whilst engaged in a particularly fervent baptism. After my benefactors were thus martyred, I used what little legacy they left me to return to England.”

  “A great tragedy,” Sir Reginald sa
id sympathetically. “Have you never sought a position as tutor to some well-bred family? Surely, such employment would raise you up from your present condition.”

  “Alas, sir, my penury was so extraordinary that I had no recourse but to embark upon my present path. And now, having trod this path of despond, what good family may consider me suitable?”

  “You must not despair for our Lord is just and gracious, and does not assent to the black passions of humanity. The mercy he has placed in each human bosom will, through pity, be awakened in all but the most cruel,” Sir Reginald replied, gracefully extending his patrician hand in the direction of the teapot. “I am a widower with two daughters, Pamela and Clarissa. Our home is Manley Abbey,” he continued, delicately emptying the amber liquid into porcelain cups emblazoned with the seven virtues, of which Sir Reginald most prized humility. “They are in need of instruction and guidance just now after the most unfortunate death of their late governess, a Miss Bentham, who disappeared suddenly from a cottage on the estate.”

  “Disappeared, sir?”

  “Indeed. We fear she belonged to an Irish secret society. More than that, I cannot say.”

  “Most unfortunate,” Master Hamilton replied, not presuming to enquire further.

  “I believe you to be a young man of rare quality and virtue,” Sir Reginald opined, “who wouldst well please my daughters and myself. What say you to coming into my service?” Sir Reginald proposed.

  “Oh sir, I should be delighted,” the young man replied quietly but enthusiastically, his youthful, well-formed physique shivering slightly with gratitude.

  Even though his aesthetic instincts were rudimentary, since Cummings hadn’t received the arts and culture genes seemingly so prevalent in the gay male population, he knew that this particular literary work was not destined for immortality.

  Cummings abandoned Otto’s prose and moved on to the morning’s Chicago Tribune. On page three he discovered a brief report of Surendra’s death. This led him to reach for his cell phone.

  “Rockland, it’s Cummings. I’m calling to check on Luther.”

  “Why? Has he done something naughty?”

  “He seemed quite shaken up by the Mathers fire.”

  “I know. I’m being humorous. Yes, yes, he’s a sensitive boy. I am pleased to report that he’s fine and is on his way to work. Now, what’s all this nonsense I read in the Tribune about spontaneous combustion?”

  “Don’t you think it’s possible?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I think there was an accelerant,” Cummings concurred. “I believe I smelled something suspicious.”

  “Can you be more precise?” Rockland asked.

  “It’s difficult to say because the air was full of incense and then smoke from the fire. However, I think I detected an oily undercurrent. I’m wondering if it was linseed oil. Rags soaked in it can self-combust. Of course, they’d have to be saturated and left to sit for a while, perhaps an hour or more, before they ignited. Linseed oil is sometimes used to finish wood. When I lived in Maine, someone left linseed-saturated rags on the floor in a shop in the village I lived in, and the place burned down.”

  “Of course, there are many flammable substances,” Rockland suggested.

  “Yes, there are,” Cummings agreed, “but let’s suppose someone wanted to kill Surendra. Everyone wears antique or reproduction clothes to the Mathers Society, admittedly augmented with Steampunk motifs. For women that means long dresses. If the murderer left linseed-saturated rags in the base of the lectern at which Surendra was standing, he might reasonably suppose her dress would catch on fire.”

  “Wouldn’t she notice the smell?”

  “Not necessarily. She might not have recognized the odor as a dangerous substance. Or perhaps her dress had been stored in moth balls, a very strong scent.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Rockland said, “but it seems a particularly gruesome way to kill someone and, I might add, a rather questionable strategy. The flames could easily have been put out.”

  “All of that is true,” Cummings agreed. “I’m just speculating, but I also have to say this: people like us, who tend to be rational, often assume that everyone else tends to be rational, too. We sometimes eliminate strategies as absurd because they’re illogical, but others may not view it that way. Does that seem overly cynical?”

  “What you say reminds me of the Nero responses.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A joke I heard from a philosophy professor when I was an undergrad. I can’t tell jokes properly, but the idea is that in a crisis—Rome burning, in this instance—four possible responses emerge. The first is to fiddle, which is the accommodation of the idealist. The second is to let the city burn; that’s what the fatalist does. The pragmatist, the third option, puts out the fire. And the fourth reaction, that of the nihilist, is to the kill the fiddler. You will note that any of these four might argue that he is behaving rationally, but only one reaction seems objectively rational, that of the pragmatist, because it’s the only action that minimizes harm. People will always do what makes sense to them, but that is not always what makes sense.”

  “True enough, though as jokes go, that one isn’t particularly amusing.”

  “Perhaps it is if you’re a philosophy professor.”

  “Please tell Luther I phoned.”

  “I shall,” Rockland promised. “Don’t forget to phone me if you run into something less incendiary and more biochemical. Poison—that’s what gets my blood flowing!”

  The next morning Cummings had an interview with a prospective consulting client. He put on his best dark suit and reflected on how nervous he was. Suspect interviews were one thing; selling himself was something else.

  He drove to a large, modern apartment building in Lincoln Park, Chicago’s toniest neighborhood, parked his car and announced himself to the doorman. Cummings was directed to the elevator and soon found himself seated across from Mrs. Bernice Randall in her spacious home office.

  She appeared to have the tight skin and loose thinking Cummings had come to associate with old money, along with the requisite elegant coif, tasteful tailoring, and slightly ostentatious jewelry. The apartment was on a high floor, and the room had magnificent views of Lake Michigan. There was a modern chrome and glass desk; bookcases dotted with family photographs and knick-knacks and even a few actual books; and on a nearby wall, an oil portrait of a woman in a beaded dress from the 1920s.

  “Is that your grandmother?” Cummings suggested. “She must have been an inspiration to you.”

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  “She’s wearing the same bracelet as you are. My assumption is that such an heirloom would likely pass across generations from mother to daughter. I surmise you are either your mother’s only daughter or her eldest daughter. Since you’ve given the portrait a place of prominence in your office, I imagine you admired your grandmother.”

  “Aren’t you clever?” Mrs. Randall said, pleased. “I can see why you’re highly recommended.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He wasn’t actually sure how she’d gotten his name, probably someone who knew someone who knew someone. He’d been working in philanthropy for a long time.

  “You know, we’re a small family foundation. We’re not terribly strategic. We fund health care, education, the environment, the arts—the usual areas.”

  “Yes. I’ve done a little research on you,” Cummings said.

  “We’re looking for a consultant to help us evaluate the impact of our funding.”

  “I see, and what kind of impact are you seeking to evaluate?”

  “Well, we’ve given out twelve million dollars in the last five years, and we have no idea if it’s done any good.”

  “I meant, what do you mean by ‘impact,’ and what do you mean by ‘good’? Do you mean you’d like to know if your money helped immediate circumstances or if it actually helped to solve difficult problems?”

  “Those are ex
cellent questions. That’s what we want to find out.”

  “I see. Well, it’s fairly easy to assess if giving away money has an impact on current conditions, but it’s almost impossible to say if you’re helping to conquer larger problems. The problem is trying to connect the dots with straight lines, avoiding what they call confounding variables in statistics.”

  “I assume you’re not saying that philanthropy is a waste of time?” Mrs. Randall said, a slight unease in her voice.

  “No, no. Giving money to, say, disaster relief will certainly help to ease immediate suffering, but can you really know if your donation to, say, hurricane forecasting research is critical to a breakthrough that emerges? In most cases you can’t.”

  “Then what is one to do?”

  “That’s a good question. If I may use a metaphor, I’d say it’s like your failed marriage.”

  “How did you know about that?” she said, startled.

  “The slight puffiness around the ring finger on your left hand. There was a ring there that you’ve taken off.”

  “What does hurricane forecasting have to do with my divorce?”

  “Perhaps I’m not being clear. A better analogy might be your strained relationship with your son.”

  “What?”

  “I read your biography. You have a daughter and a son. I see many pictures of her but none of him. My point is, philanthropy is like a difficult relationship; you keep making the effort because it’s important and hope that eventually things will change.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, standing suddenly. “I don’t think this will be a good fit.”

  “Oh,” Cummings said, surprised by her abruptness. “Well, thank you for your time.”

  After this debacle Cummings stopped for a quick sandwich. He reflected painfully on what had just happened with Mrs. Randall. He set the timer on his wristwatch and considered why he always seemed to say the wrong thing in such circumstances. By the time the buzzer went off, he had concluded that perhaps relaxation techniques might improve his interpersonal skills. He determined to get a book on client interviewing and see if he could improve.