by Lorin Stein
So Mrs. Bridge came home on those evenings when her husband did not get back from the office in time, or when he was too tired and preferred to lie in bed reading vacation advertisements. At her driveway the procession would halt, engines idling, while she drove into the garage and came back out along the driveway so as to be constantly visible, and entered by the front door. Having unlocked it she would step inside, switch on the hall lights, and call to her husband, “I’m home!” Then, after he had made a noise of some kind in reply, she would flicker the lights a few times to show the friends waiting outside that she was safe, after which they would all drive off into the night.
NEVER SPEAK TO STRANGE MEN
On a downtown street just outside a department store a man said something to her. She ignored him. But at that moment the crowd closed them in together.
“How do you do?” he said, smiling and touching his hat.
She saw that he was a man of about fifty with silvery hair and rather satanic ears.
His face became red and he laughed awkwardly. “I’m Gladys Schmidt’s husband.”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” Mrs. Bridge exclaimed. “I didn’t recognize you.”
CONRAD
While idly dusting the bookcase one morning she paused to read the titles and saw an old red-gold volume of Conrad that had stood untouched for years. She could not think how it happened to be there. Taking it down she looked at the flyleaf and found: Ex Libris Thomas Bridge.
She remembered then that they had inherited some books and charts upon the death of her husband’s brother, an odd man who had married a night club entertainer and later died of a heart attack in Mexico.
Having nothing to do that morning she began to turn the brittle, yellowed pages and slowly became fascinated. After standing beside the bookcase for about ten minutes she wandered, still reading, into the living room where she sat down and did not look up from the book until Hazel came in to announce lunch. In the midst of one of the stories she came upon a passage that had once been underlined, apparently by Tom Bridge, which remarked that some people go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain. She brooded over this fragment even while reading further, and finally turned back to it again, and was staring at the carpet with a bemused expression when Hazel entered.
Mrs. Bridge put the book on the mantel for she intended to read more of this perceptive man, but during the afternoon Hazel automatically put Conrad back on the shelf and Mrs. Bridge did not think of him again.
VOTING
She had never gone into politics the way some women did who were able to speak with masculine inflections about such affairs as farm surplus and foreign subsidies. She always listened attentively when these things came up at luncheons or circle meetings; she felt her lack of knowledge and wanted to know more, and did intend to buckle down to some serious studying. But so many things kept popping up that it was difficult to get started, and then too she did not know exactly how one began to learn. At times she would start to question her husband but he refused to say much to her, and so she would not press the matter because after all there was not much she herself could accomplish.
This was how she defended herself to Mabel Ehe after having incautiously let slip the information that her husband told her what to vote for.
Mabel Ehe was flat as an adolescent but much more sinewy. Her figure was like a bud that had never managed to open. She wore tweed coats and cropped hair and frequently stood with hands thrust deep into her side pockets as if she were a man. She spoke short positive sentences, sometimes throwing back her head to laugh with a sound that reminded people of a dry reed splintering. She had many bitter observations in regard to capitalism, relating stories she had heard from unquestionable sources about women dying in childbirth because they could not afford the high cost of proper hospitalization or even the cost of insurance plans.
“If I ever have a child—” she was fond of beginning, and would then tear into medical fees.
She demanded of Mrs. Bridge: “Don’t you have a mind of your own? Great Scott, woman, you’re an adult. Speak out! We’ve been emancipated.” Ominously she began rocking back and forth from her heels to her toes, hands clasped behind her back while she frowned at the carpet of the Auxiliary clubhouse.
“You’re right,” Mrs. Bridge apologized, discreetly avoiding the smoke Mabel Ehe blew into the space between them. “It’s just so hard to know what to think. There’s so much scandal and fraud, and I suppose the papers only print what they want us to know.” She hesitated, then, “How do you make up your mind?”
Mabel Ehe removed the cigarette holder from her small cool lips. She considered the ceiling and then the carpet, as though debating on how to answer such a naïve question, and finally suggested that Mrs. Bridge might begin to grasp the fundamentals by a deliberate reading of certain books, which she jotted down on the margin of a tally card. Mrs. Bridge had not heard of any of these books except one and this was because its author was being investigated, but she decided to read it anyway.
There was a waiting list for it at the public library but she got it at a rental library and settled down to go through it with the deliberation that Mabel Ehe had advised. The author’s name was Zokoloff, which certainly sounded threatening, and to be sure the first chapter was about bribery in the circuit courts. When Mrs. Bridge had gotten far enough along that she felt capable of speaking about it she left it quite boldly on the hall table, however Mr. Bridge did not even notice it until the third evening. He thinned his nostrils, read the first paragraph, grunted once, and dropped it back onto the hall table. This was disappointing. In fact, now that there was no danger involved, she had trouble finishing the book. She thought it would be better in a magazine digest, but at last she did get through and returned it to the rental library, saying to the owner, “I can’t honestly say I agree with it all but he’s certainly well informed.”
Certain arguments of Zokoloff remained with her and she found that the longer she thought about them the more penetrating and logical they became; surely it was time, as he insisted, for a change in government. She decided to vote liberal at the next election, and as time for it approached she became filled with such enthusiasm and anxiety that she wanted very much to discuss government with her husband. She began to feel confident that she could persuade him to change his vote also. It was all so clear to her, there was really no mystery to politics. However when she challenged him to discussion he did not seem especially interested, in fact he did not answer. He was watching a television acrobat stand on his thumb in a bottle and only glanced across at her for an instant with an annoyed expression. She let it go until the following evening when television was over, and this time, he looked at her curiously, quite intently, as if probing her mind, and then all at once he snorted.
She really intended to force a discussion on election eve. She was going to quote from the book of Zokoloff. But he came home so late, so tired, that she had not the heart to upset him. She concluded it would be best to let him vote as he always had, and she would do as she herself wished, still upon getting to the polls, which were conveniently located in the country club shopping district, she became doubtful and a little uneasy. And when the moment finally came she pulled the lever recording her wish for the world to remain as it was.
Issue 10, 1955
Joy Williams
on
Dallas Wiebe’s Night Flight to Stockholm
“Night Flight to Stockholm” appeared in Issue #73 of The Paris Review in the spring of 1978. What a frolic! It really is one of the funniest, most grotesque pieces ever written and this in the day when all manner of crazy things were going on. More than thirty years later I still remember the terms exacted for each publication and publishing honor the unnamed narrator achieved. After being hooted off the stage at an MLA convention when he attempts to present his paper “Metaphorical Thinking as
the Cause of the Collapse of British and American Literature,” he makes the fateful call to one Gabriel Ratchet, “an expert on contracts.”
“Gabe,” he says, “I’m going to be sixty-six tomorrow … and I’ve been writing fiction all my life and no one’s ever published a word of it and I’d give my left pinkie to get into The Paris Review.”
Well. Done. Ratchet, as agent, has many contacts, many of whom desire body parts for any number of frivolous reasons and who have uncanny influence in the world of publishing. It’s all who you know, after all. Thus a pinkie for The Paris Review, two testicles for TriQuarterly (surely it would be Harper’s now), a left hand for Esquire, and a pair of ears for The New Yorker, after which success is assured.
“The stumps on the sides of my head tingled in the cold air as I walked out into a new reputation as one of the finest short story writers in America.”
A left arm is exacted for a collection published by Doubleday, a left foot is taken when Knopf acquires his novel. By the time the National Book Award and the Pulitzer are won there’s very little left of our author, though canny super-agent Ratchet manages to parlay his eyes into a Nobel Prize. Thus this suppurating wad, this package in a basket, one of the Immortals, is flown to Stockholm for the biggest literary award of them all.
“I can imagine,” the package thinks, “the attendants in black knickers with the little black bows by the knees who will carry me onto the clapping stage. I can imagine the old black king squinting through his thick glasses down into the wicker basket with the two handles and the white Cannon sheets. As my snot begins to leak out over my upper lip, I can hear myself asking him to clear the ear wax out of my shallow ears so that I can hear him clearly when he extols the virtues of long-suffering, when he prattles about how some people overcome severe handicaps to go on to greatness, when he maunders about the indomitable will of the human spirit, while the old black queen gurgles and snickers down at the heady, winning lump.”
Wiebe is not content to be so cut and dried, as it were, about the Faustian arrangement, however. With each success the writer has to submit to editorial advice, all part of the contract. Erase the tear stains from the margin … no openings with dialogue … no rhetorical questions in narrative … no flashbacks … create emphasis by syntax … and so on, the very craft demands all the university writing programs were offering as they ladled out the talent. Complicate the emotional and psychological dimensions of the action … vary sentence rhythms … stop misusing “momentarily.”
Another aspect of this brilliant little tale are the preposterous names, everybody’s name save for the heady winning lump. Wiebe admits lifting them from a K. M. Briggs book, The Anatomy of Puck. For me, it’s too much sky-blue frosting on a wacky cake, but with a name like Dallas Wiebe, one might be predisposed to such playfulness in a way that Richard Ford, say, would not.
“Night Flight to Stockholm” is one of my favorite Paris Review stories ever. Wiebe also wrote a great story about mucus, about Mr. and Mrs. Mucus to be exact. But I don’t think The Paris Review published that one.
Dallas Wiebe
Night Flight to Stockholm
I owe all this to Gabriel Ratchet. It was he who arranged for the round-trip ticket, two seats side by side, on Scandinavian Airlines, got me my reservation in the King Gustaf Holiday Inn, deodorized my basket, put in the new sheets, put on my new, formal black sack with the white ribbon drawstring around the top and bathed my suppurating stumps for the journey. He even carried one end of my wicker laundry basket when I went aboard. In the darkness, I heard him instructing the stewardesses as to how to clean me, how to feed and water me and when to turn me. I heard money changing hands. I heard his stomachy laugh and the ladies’ bovine grunts. I think I heard a stewardess pat his little bald head. Then came my first lift-off. The great surge of the old Boeing 747 sliding my butt and stumps against one end of the basket and then the floating and my ears popping. Into glorious, golden dreams in my black chute. Into non-stop gliding through images of published books, careful emendations, green surgical gowns, and the rustle of paper money, the clink of prizes and the odor of immortality. It was Gabriel Ratchet who gave me this slow drifting in the darkness 50,000 feet over Iceland, the North Atlantic, Ireland, England, the North Sea and Norway as we, as I hear from the pilot, descend into our landing pattern for Stockholm and me about to meet the king of Sweden and, I assume, his wife and all the little royalties. I wonder what they’ll sound like; I wonder how they’ll smell.
I owe all this to Gabriel because he is an expert in contracts. He’s made contracts for musicians, painters, sculptors, quarterbacks, pole vaulters, jugglers, born-again Christians and presidents. He’s negotiated the careers of farmers, professors, poets, priests, baseball pitchers, terrorists and airline pilots. For the past thirty years he’s had his hand in more success than you can shake a scalpel at because of his immense number of contacts. He says he brought it with him from the womb. I can believe it.
Gabriel—his clients call him Gabe or Gabby—was born on the western slope of Muckish Mountain in Donegal in 1935, exact day unknown he says, when his mother saw some white horses hung with silver bells. He came to Chigcao, IL., he says, when the potato crop failed around Bloody Foreland in 1951. I don’t remember any potato famines in Ireland since the nineteenth century, but I’m always willing to lend him an ear and listen to his stories. He came to Chicago, he says, because he is a creature of our own flesh and blood and likes a city where every man has his price. He says his contracting business didn’t go well at first. In fact, he was on his last leg when he met Isobel Gowdie in October, 1956, in the Chicago Art Institute while he and she were standing and staring at some water lilies by Monet. According to his own account, Gabriel sighed and said, “Hell, Peg Powler can paint better than that.” Isobel, having an eye to the main chance, immediately answered, “Richard Tarlton has one foot in the grave. Can you give him a hand?” Gabe’s life as a public servant and a successful entrepreneur began with that moment because he negotiated a contract whereby for a shake and a cut Ambroise Paré became the first wealthy one-armed undertaker in Hellwaine, ME.
I first met Gabe in the lobby of the Palmer House in December of 1977 when I was there for an MLA convention. He was loitering around the packed lobby, looking, I later found out, for failures with whom he could do some business. He was sidling about, handing out, quietly and covertly, little business cards, red letters on green, that gave his name, Gabriel “Ballybofey” Ratchet, his office, 1313 Spoorne Ave., Chicago, his telephone number, 393-6996, his office hours, “At Your Convenience,” his profession, “Contractor,” and his motto, “Don’t limp in obscurity, get a leg up on this world.” He gave me his last card and said he’d never seen so many potential clients. He said he’d had his eye on me for some time and I was cut to the quick. We chatted, there in that mob, for a while and I asked him about himself. He told me that he was short because of that potato famine in his youth. His nose and ears were gnarled because his mother had been frightened by Peg O’Nell when she, his dear mother, was nursing him and her left teat had immediately dried up while in his mouth. His teeth were rotted out and his head was bald because his wife of two years, Joan Tyrrie of Creke Abbey, MT., had tried to poison him with bat slobber. He managed, he said, to overcome the poison by eating stuffed grasshoppers, roasted ants and mice roasted whole and threw her into the Chicago River. He said she’d been bad from the start and he was surprised his marriage in the year of 1955 lasted the two years that it did. Gabe said that her stepmother had given her a bottle of flat beer and some sour bread for a dowry and that after their marriage in Calkett Hall all she wanted to do was to be friendly with the goats and comb their beards. He said there was saltpeter in her heaven and gold in her hell and that her angels were sufficiently embodied to be impeded by their armor and damaged by gunpowder. I told him my problems and he said that I was too old to fool around any longer, that I would have to fight tooth and nail to make it. I said I’d ca
ll him if I needed his service.
I needed his help a lot sooner than I thought then because my paper which I presented at that MLA convention was laughed at. When I began my opening remarks I heard tittering. When I asked for silence, they guffawed. When I introduced my paper—“Metaphorical Thinking as the Cause of the Collapse of British and American Literature” by Professor Meyric Casaubon, Department of English, University of Tylwyth Teg, Wales, OR.—they hooted and snarled and shot out their lips. They waggled their beards and gnashed their teeth on their pipe stems. Even my old friend, Bock Urisk, who claimed he could hear grass growing, could run so fast when he was young that he had to keep one leg over his shoulder to stay in sight, could break stones on his thighs they were so hard and could spin a windmill by blowing through one nostril, waved his open palms past his ears and held his nose. I got the message when Richard Tynney of Gorleston, DE., the chairman of the panel, and Sir John Shepe of Wanstrowe, IA., the moderator, got up, dropped their pants and showed me their bare asses. I was mooned for metaphors and that was the end, I thought. I walked off the stage, my green suit striking among the black turtle necks, my thick black hair bobbing over the seated howlers, my hooked nose, my protuberant chin and my green eyes lifted high in disdain, even though I was without socks and my huge belly bounced and rumbled. I walked out of the room, my white Converse All-Stars squeaking on the waxed floors, my white tie and my blue shirt spotted with my sweat. I decided then to go back to what I’d always been doing anyway, writing fiction. I took out the green card with the red letters.