The Man with the Wooden Spectacles

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “Well,” was his regretful—and even sheepish—answer, “S. Moffit won’t be in the market for any more for a good while—if not longer! For after this week’s purchases, S. Moffit will be laying low—and probably earning back the money.”

  “Earning back the money?” Elsa couldn’t quite grasp the words. But was destined, in a few minutes, to get the “explanation” of it—if “explanation” at all it really were! She was gazing critically at the pitiful object which Saul was still proudly holding off, and now shifting it slightly so that the light from the sky would favor it more fully.

  “But I’m glad,” she said, “you like such things, S. And speaking about unusual spectacles, I want to tell you about a pair of wooden—” She cut herself off shortly. She had just been about, of course, to say “wooden spectacles”—followed by the words “priced at $50.” And then the history of the same. But her heart sank. For Saul did look oh, so cheaply dressed. So—so down at heel spiritually. She even fancied, somehow, that he looked hungry. She knew collectors would starve themselves to death to buy a single item for their collections. And she figured that this fanatic, did she so much as tell him of those wooden spectacles in the Oddities Bazaar, might more than likely pawn this very outfit of clothing—plus everything else he had in the world, to get the $50 to buy them. Still worse—and this was connected with the rumor!—he might go to a woman—and ask for the money.

  Her lips closed tight.

  “What was it you were going to say?” he was asking absently, polishing gently the one uncracked lens with a silken handkerchief, spotlessly clean.

  “I had started out,” Elsa said firmly, “to tell you about a pair of historical spectacles I saw a month ago in the Chicago Historical Society’s Building—Abraham Lincoln’s own, the night he was killed by Booth—and then—then—ah-hum—changed abruptly off to say ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a pair owned by Lincoln?”

  “Naturally,” he admitted, carefully straightening out a bend in one of the ear-pieces of the pair he did have. “Of course!”

  Elsa was vastly relieved. Her near-revelation of things best left unrevealed was nicely averted. And to get away from that dangerous angle, she asked:

  “How—how many specs does your collection comprise, S?”

  “Well, in reality, 327.”

  “327, eh? Well—but come to think of it, didn’t you just a second ago tell me that pair in your hands now made No. 331?”

  “Well—yes—I did,” he admitted, again a bit sheepishly. “For rather fatuously, you see, Elsa, I counted in 4 pairs that, altogether, I have lost. We collectors—you know!” And his face was a peculiar mixture of dolor—presumably at the missing 4 pairs—and pride in the phrase “we collectors.”

  “I don’t exactly underst—”

  “Just,” he explained, “that 4 different times I’ve bought unique or historical spectacles, and—well—when I got home—I didn’t have ’em.”

  “Because you were drunk?” Elsa chided him.

  “Quite no,” he said, unperturbed. “Because each time, as it happened, I left the confounded things some place, and when I went back to the very places I thought I might have left them —”

  “Thought? But didn’t you know?”

  He shook his head helplessly. “You see, Elsa, I have a bad habit of—”

  “I get it! Aunt Linda was telling me. She doesn’t call it a ‘habit’ though. She simply says you are a rare species known as a ‘haid-fohgettah.’ ”

  He smiled friendlily. “Aunt Linda’s characterization of me is quite able, I must say.”

  “She also says,” put in Elsa, curiously and expansively, “and this may burn you up—that you inherited it from—well—from the same person who gave you your first name—that is, the name you’ve now legally dropped.”

  His face turned actually black before her eyes. “Well so help me God, I—I never thought of that. Good Christ almighty, I —”

  “But hold everything,” Elsa said, appalled by the glowering blackness of his face, and vaguely realizing she was igniting no less than a prairie fire, “Aunt says, however, that the trait actually came down to you both from Grandfather Sylvester Moffit.”

  Saul’s face became immediately the picture of pronounced relief.

  “Thank God for that,” he said. “I wouldn’t have even a trait of char—”

  “And so,” Elsa made haste to say, “you’ve got, in actuality, 327 pairs of spectacles?”

  “In actuality, 327—yes,” he admitted. “Though morally, Elsa, 331—for I really count in, you know, the 4 pairs I’ve lost and never regained.”

  “And what do those things cost you—on the average?”

  “Well,” he hedged, “some cost me as little as 5 cents a pair—”

  “While others,” Elsa scolded him frankly, “cost as much as would take you and me to the Opera. Viz. the one in your hand, there! But be that as ’tis, how much do you consider the collection worth?”

  “Nothing,” Saul Moffit frankly said, “to a practical person like you. But to an individual interested in the history, the science, the practice, the theory and the craftsmanship of spectacleology, I think my collection might be worth—well—a couple of thousand dollars.”

  “And if you died, S?” And Elsa was not just speculating.

  For she knew drunkards were relatively short-lived. “Uncle Silas would get it then, wouldn’t he?”

  But at her very inadvertent re-mention of Saul’s father—colored this time, no doubt, with the idea of that individual obtaining something precious of Saul’s, light again blazed forth from his eyes so strange—so mad—that, to herself alone, Elsa said: “Aunt Linda’s right on him, all right—though not on Uncle. Saul’s insane, as sure as you live—on the subject!”

  “That—that goddamned bastard,” he choked, eyes blazing even more. “Nothing I ever own—at least in this cycle of my many existences—will ever go to that dirty goddamned son-of-a—”

  “Sau—S. Moffit—stop! You—you shouldn’t talk like that. About your father, I mean. So far as cussing in front of me—cuss your fool head off, if it makes you feel any better—but my gosh, you shouldn’t talk that way about a blood relative—and the closest one you’ve got. And if you mean what I think you mean—about cycles of existence?—well, what in billy-hell other ‘cycles of existence’ do you think you’ve got, anyway, but this one right here?

  Or—besides, even if you have got other ‘cycles,’ your father’s going to be right in all of ’em with you—don’t forget! Unless, of course, some of ’em cover other combinations of actualizations which haven’t turned up in this one, and—but here—here—it’s me that’s getting way over my head now. The point is that nobody should talk about their own father the way you just did about yours. And your eyes—they actually blazed fire!”

  “Which I only wish,” he raged, having evidently forced himself to listen to her long peroration with a powerful effort, instead of the patient politeness she had thought it to be, “was really enough to sear his guts out. Then—then I’d go and fasten my gaze on him—and listen to him scream. And—but you asked a question—and sorry I cursed in front of you—” The mad blaze actually died out of his eyes in front of Elsa’s astounded gaze, and his eyes became dead, hollow, cavernous—”The individual you named will never inherit one penny of mine.”

  Elsa couldn’t but half giggle now. “Have you got a penny—S?—for anybody to inherit?”

  “Well, it’s quite true, of course,” he replied with dignity, “that my total estate—as I stand here right now—are the clothes I stand in! Outside, of course—the spectacle collection. Which is more than all the mere filthy money in the world. And the collection—well, I’ve willed that, Elsa—in a will already drawn up and left with a friend—to the Field Museum, so that the party you named—goddamn him to hell, the putrid rat—the—the—well, he won’
t ever get so much as—”

  “As an earpiece—or a nose-bridge screw, hey?”

  “Right,” he said, amicably. He had replaced his gold spectacles lovingly in his side coat pocket. A streetcar went roaring by northward. And Elsa, knowing that valuable time was passing—at least for her—decided not to let another do likewise.

  “Step out here, S. Moffit, will you, to the curb? I’ve got to flag the next car—or else!” And, firmly, she led the way, he following docilely, till both stood on the curb marked with the white-painted stop-post.

  No city-bound car was now in sight, so she continued, facing him.

  “And where are you living now, S. Moffit?”

  “Where.” he asked, in some surprise. “Why, my whereabouts are in the new telephone directory—out last week.

  And—” He commenced fumbling in the side coat pocket which did not contain the spectacles. “But let me give you one of my cards—but no,” he broke off, as his fingers evidently touched what he was after, “I’ve got only one with me, I note, and I may need that this afternoo—” He withdrew his fingers without withdrawing the card in question. “Any­way, Elsa, I’m in the new phone directory—so you won’t need a card. I’ve a flat—8 rooms—on Cleveland Avenue near Fullerton.”

  “On Cleveland Avenue? Why—why, that’s where—”

  “Yes, I know.” And the blaze fanned up slightly in his dead eyes. “That’s where the—the stinker of all stinkers lives. The—the Grand Llama of Whelpdom! The—the—well, I live a block down the street, to keep watch on him.”

  “Keep watch on him? But listen, S, why—why would you want to keep watch on him?”

  “Why?” Saul Moffit appeared to be quite dumbfounded by such a silly question. “Why, because, in all his free hours, day and night, he’s keeping watch on me.”

  “My God,” said Elsa to herself, heartsick, “he’s becoming paranoiacal. Is paranoiacal—poor devil. Of course—”

  And Elsa, though still speaking to herself, knew whereof she spoke! “—it could be a paranoid state—from chronic alcoholism. But just the same—oh dear!” “And how,” she asked aloud, “can you afford to pay rent for an 8-room flat? And why, anyway—8 rooms?”

  He smiled tolerantly on her.

  “Don’t you know,” he said, “that an old-fashioned 8 room flat costs no more than a modern 5-room one? Like—like the—”

  “Yes, the stinker?—rat?—whelp?—lives in?”

  “And a friend,” Saul Moffit went on, “gave me the furniture in situ—’twas in this very flat, see?—old stuff, but all okay. And oh yes—you asked why I want eight rooms. Well, one of these days I expect to lay out all the spectacles on the walls—with rough placards—in some sort of system as they will someday eventually lie in some museum.”

  “Poor Saul,” thought Elsa. “He thinks a museum has acres of space to devote—to spectacles!” Aloud she said: “Well, of course you said a mouthful when you spoke of 8-room flats costing no more than 4 or 5. But when it comes to that, old boy, how—now listen here, S. Moffit, I met up with a guy the other day—oh, I won’t mention any names—and because of his and my conversation, I’m going to ask you, point-blank, how do you pay rent for a flat—and buy spectacles like a millionai—”

  “Not like a millionaire,” he corrected her. “For I’ll be laying low—and how!—for a while. But go on?

  “All right. Well, how do you do it? You see I heard you don’t work. But a flat, even if old-fashioned, means rent to pay—and rent means income—and those nice clothes you got on—”

  “Oh dear,” Elsa broke off, to herself alone. “Can the rumor be true—some woman keeping him?—he’s still good-looking, all right—oh dear—”

  He was gazing curiously at her. “So I don’t work, eh! And the rumor-mongers are busy? Well, suppose I tell you, cousin o’ mine, that I do work—as a bookkeeper—nights—”

  “Nights? What on earth—for what—for whom—”

  “For what?” His eyes, once blazing, once dead, now held a devil-may-care defiant expression in them. “For an illicit brewery, my dear!”

  “An illicit brewery? Oh, S—come off it! There aren’t any more illicit breweries”—

  “Aren’t there?” His eyes still held that cryptic, almost contemptuous look in them. “Well you’d be surprised, little infant. Half the beer drunk in this very district you’re standing in now is forced onto the black saloonkeepers, practically at the points of guns, by racketeers—and I’m working in one of those breweries—and getting real money for it.”

  “Well, for the love o’—well, I think,” Elsa broke off, though undecidedly, “that that’s fine—that you’re working, yes. Because you know you and John Barleycorn have been a bit friendly in past years—and when a guy works he can’t drink, since—but gee whiz—to think that you, who once was an ace lawyer—and one of the best-versed men in the city on rackets, should be working for racketeers now. What a strange world.”

  “Isn’t it?” he said, his eyes still gazing cryptically at her. “But I’m not an ace lawyer, Elsa. Nor even a passably good one. And never was. I wouldn’t have made a good defender, in old days, for a chicken-thief. I lost so many cases, Elsa, in actual prosecutions, that it was a miracle I got aboard the then S. A.’s staff. But there I made good. Simply because I could smell out—you see, Elsa, I believe I’m really a paranoiac.” Elsa started. “For I could see rackets where nobody else could see ’em. Never heard, did you, how I uncovered the fact of how all the taxi-drivers in Chicago were keeping a whole set of taxi officials rich—because they, the drivers, were forced to take out their accident insurance from a company owned by the officials? That really lay under everybody’s nose—even the mayor’s—but nobody was hep. Oh, I used to uncover rackets all right!”

  “So even I understand! Listen, S. Moffit, why or why don’t you call up Lou Vann—for you know—or don’t you?—that Holoday, his rackets-assistant, is dead—and ask Vann—to try you out—as rackets-assistant once more?”

  “And how,” he queried amusedly, “would I function—when I wasn’t admitted to the bar?”

  “Why, damn it, you’re so good in that line that if you worked from your desk only, there’s plenty of striplings could go into court and handle what you worked up. And besides, I’ve heard it said that now that 10 years are passed, you could get reinstated. Without re-examination. So once again, why haven’t you called Vann up—it’s the chance of a lifetime for a man with a background like you, and—”

  “Hold it, Elsa! I have called Vann up.”

  “Oh—you did? When?”

  “This morning.”

  “And—and what did he say?” Elsa held her breath, for she genuinely liked Saul.

  “Well,” he replied bitterly, “he neatly ‘checked the bet’ by asking me why—you see, Elsa, he obviously had, in front of him, the office record of all calls made—for his office, you know, doesn’t even say ‘peep-peep’ to anybody until they’ve told who they are—well anyway, he checked the bet by asking me why I hadn’t called his office yesterday—immediately the news of Holoday’s death was in the papers.”

  “I hope you had a good answer?”

  “I had an answer, Elsa—but not the right one! I told him I’d been down in Springfield, Illinois all day, trying to get my license renewed. Without re-examination, that is! And that I didn’t catch the info about Holoday’s death till I got off in the Polk Street depot about 11 o’clock last night. And picked up a morning newspaper that somebody had left on the benches in the waiting room.”

  “But you say your not calling up—cost you the appointment?”

  “No. It was just ‘checking of the bet’ to me, Elsa. For because of his record of incoming calls, he had me where the tail was short, see! He said the re-appointment had gone, by promise, to Mayor Sweeney. So I dropped the whole matter pronto—and with disgust.”

&
nbsp; “Well maybe, S, your not calling him did cost you the—but where were you, really, yesterday?”

  “Drunk, I regret to say,” he replied coolly. “Lying like a filthy sow—all day long—in my palatial flat!”

  “But how—how on earth can you drink, and—”

  “—and work? I told you—” And his eyes looked defiantly at her again. “—that I work only nights. From midnight, in fact, till 6 a.m. Midnight being the witching hour when our green beer starts to roll out in covered trucks, to go into the back doors of presumably closed saloons—and 6 a.m. being the hour when the greasy money—a quite cash on the nail business, that!—has all come tumbling back in.”

  “I see,” was all Elsa said. “Well—maybe in time—you’ll get something—”

  “Better?” he laughed grimly. “Why?” he queried ironically, “what better could one have—than working for a lucrative brewery? And for a beegada gangster-boss who lets one draw so far ahead on salary, to buy historical spectacles—food—no, the drink is all free, Elsa!—that—well, just how far ahead I might be drawn right now would require an assistant bookkeeper to the bookkeeper himself! But anyway, what better could one desire?”

  His voice was bitter, nevertheless, and still defiant.

  “Yes, I suppose,” was all that Elsa said. And gazed at him speculatively. Torn between a desire to ask his advice—as she had just asked Aunt Linda’s. Yet realizing now that time was not as it was when she had entered Aunt Linda’s Temple of Wisdom! But nevertheless—

  “I’d sorta like,” she began, “to ask your advice on a criminological legal matt—” she stopped. For he had raised his hand.

  “Don’t! I lost all the cases I ever defended.” He gazed interestedly at her. “But of yourself, Elsa—what? I knew you’d hung out your shingle. But where on earth are you?”

  “I’m in the old Ulysses S. Grant Building,” she told him. “On the 10th floor. Room 1010.”

  He had a notebook out, and was busy putting it down.