Please Write for Details

by John D. MacDonald

  Slow and clinical voice of Dr. Gottrell offstage: “You must recover your identify, Parker. This has been a great shock to you.”

  So in the motels he looked at all the faces in the mirrors trying to find the one that really belonged to him. But the basic face seemed to belong to Larchmont-Madison Avenue-Spectorsky-Abercrombie’s-split level-CBS-Shor’s-Cherio. Man, he thought, in the gray-flannel face. He could march twenty abreast and pass for three long hours down Madison Avenue, fifty thousand dark brush cuts, and fifty thousand pair of glasses with heavy black frames, with 263,779 holes punched in the commuter tickets, and fifty thousand briefcases, politely battered, with initials stamped in gold—lower case. One hundred thousand wary and slightly nervous eyes, myopic.

  Of course, being logical and so on, you could say there were a hell of a lot of Parker Barnums.

  Take the real ones first:

  A twelve-year-old in Columbus, who could get the pivot on the double play and was sure as hell going to the Yankees, who broke his arm jumping off the Millers’ porch roof, who could do a lot of trick stuff on his bike.

  A sixteen-year-old in a phase of calling himself P. Lewis Barnum, who painted, with a minor but obvious talent, pictures of wind-torn trees, who worried about his pimples and felt a sinking, horrible sense of guilt whenever he thought of the theory common among his comtemporaries about what caused the pimples—the white, red and purple signfications of secret evil.

  A twenty-two-year-old Park Barnum in one of the the ten thousand dingy studio apartments of Gotham, who worked days doing the backgrounds for those early animated advertising cartoons for that querulous and demanding infant called television, who worked diligently on his own painting at night, who lived with and was married to Suzie Sanders from Indianapolis—that hoyden balletomane with all her leotards and boundings and improvised bar—Barnard graduate—pixie-headed—full of rumpus moods—daytime clerk at Saks (gloves)—bedmate a crescendo—casserole cook—cruel mimic. They knew beyond a doubt that with the ardor of her lessons, and his devotion to his painting, their life would change. She would come to the galleries when his shows opened. He would attend the first performances of her ballets. After success, they would think of babies. But after one of those floor-sitting parties and too too much muscatel, the leotards had to be put in a box in the closet, and the thought of a baby had them both equally terrified.

  And the thirty-year-old Parker Barnum, who owned an equity of one seventh in the split level in Larchmont, who was art director, at twenty-one thousand five hundred dollars at Sessions and March, one of the smaller agencies, who had fathered Kim and Nancy, the seven-year-old twins, who was held in esteem by employers and clients, who told good jokes at the too-long lunches and went back to afternoons blurred by vodka, who broiled a fair steak in a Larchmont back yard, who had programed his insurance, who was unable to save a dime, who managed to stay over in the city one night a week to enjoy the somewhat theatrical embracings of a nineteen-year-old television actress named Meg Allis.

  Who didn’t know he had lost his wife.

  Until she was gone.

  It was so damn fast.

  He came home and nobody was there. There was a note from Suzie, a number to call. He called her. She told him the address, where to come. It was a twenty-mile drive, a hell of a big house with a circular gravel drive. Suzie had sounded odd over the phone. He had thought it was some kind of a party. But the big house was quiet. A servant let him in. Suzie and a man in a big room where a fire had burned down to embers. Suzie introduced him. Douglas Bench. Park Barnum knew the name. It was connected with shipping and railroads and oil and that sort of thing. A name with a Big Rich clang to it.

  Sort of a nice guy. Quiet and broad and forceful. Maybe forty-three, forty-four. Suzie had been crying. He could see that.

  “Park, I want out. Now.”

  “What do you mean, out?”

  “I’m going to marry Doug.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? You come home!”

  “This is home. The kids are asleep here.”

  She started to cry and Bench told her gently to leave the room, that he would handle it. She left. Park tried to raise hell with Bench, but his voice sounded squeaky. Bench smiled indulgently. Park went over with the vague intention of hitting him, but Bench handed him a Scotch-and-soda. And gave him the word. He was a widower. He loved Suzie and he loved the kids. She loved him. They had met in an innocent way. There had been nothing intimate between them. Suzie had been unhappy, knowing that her husband was having an affair. So he had gotten some people to get the facts for her. It can all be done quietly. You will be able to visit your children by arrangement, of course. Naturally she will want and need nothing, no alimony, no settlement. Tomorrow she can move what she wants out of the house. Certainly a young man like you can be more relaxed without the responsibility of a family. You can be assured the children will have the best of everything.

  And he found himself driving home alone. It was all so damn fast. Douglas Bench arranged to have Suzie, the kids and a personal maid fly to the Virgin Islands. In six weeks she was divorced. A week after her return, she was Mrs. Douglas Bench. By then Parker Barnum had sold the house and moved into town, into a small apartment. As soon as the affair with Meg was no longer clandestine, he was able to see her for what she was, a shallow and mannered nympho, with as much sense of humor as a bush rabbit.

  It had happened too damn fast.

  He would be working hard, and then he would stop working and for a few minutes everything would be back in place—Suzie and the kids at home, and a train to take, and she would bring his drink to the bathroom while he was showering and … Somebody else lived in the house and she was Mrs. Douglas Bench, and to see your own kids you had to make an appointment and say please.

  So he told himself Suzie had never loved him. She’d been looking for the Big Dollar. But he knew that wasn’t true. She had loved him. And he hadn’t measured up to it. And he had the sick suspicion that Bench did, that he was a kind and good man. A better man. May the best man win. He did.

  On a tender April morning he saw himself. He had come up out of the subway and when he reached the sidewalk level he saw a man who had just fallen. It was one of the fifty thousand Parker Barnums. He lay prone, his cheek against the sidewalk, glasses shattered, narrow-brimmed hat a foot and a half from the brush-cut head. He lay helpless in his gray flannel suit, his face the color of a wet phone book, his right hand still clutching the leather handle of the dispatch case, the morning people skirting him deftly, each giving one backward glance. A cop was approaching with authoritative stride. Heart, Parker thought, and went on his way. But he had the strange feeling that even as he walked on toward the office, he was also back there on the sidewalk. He felt that if he walked lightly it would be all right, but if he stamped his foot hard he could punch it right down through the dirty cement of the New York sidewalk, and the things you would see down there would be so horrible you wouldn’t dare squat and peer down through the hole you had made.

  At eleven that morning he was looking over some layouts for an outdoor advertising series. He took his wood-clinched Ebony pencil, jet-black, extra-smooth, and with deftness and great calm, began to turn each layout into an obscenity, rubbing in the shadowing with his thumb.

  When Herbie March came to see him in the rest home, he was damn decent about it. Herbie had gotten the pitch from Dr. Gottrell. He came out onto the sun porch and pulled a chair over and said, “Park I’ve talked it over with John Sessions, and, frankly, this is what we want to do, and we hope you’ll think it’s fair. Rather than go into the market and bid for a new AD, we’ll move Becky up into your slot with the understanding that it’s temporary. We’ll farm out anything that’s over her head. Dr. Gottrell says he’d feel better if you plan to take a full six months. So, doing some thinking overheadwise, we’ll cut you to a grand a month, Park, and when you come back you come back on the old figure, naturally. And John Sessions and I c
ertainly want you back. We need you, boy.”

  “It’s … more than fair, Herbie. Honest to God, I feel all choked up.”

  Herbie clasped his shoulder and shook him gently. “It’s the least we can do for a friend and a nice guy. Let us know if there’s anything you need. Anything at all.”

  It was Dr. Gottrell who suggested a complete change of scene, after many hours on the couch, and Park who had run across the ad for the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop.

  He had been going to fly down, but he became restless and traded the car for a new Ford wagon and set out, giving himself a generous ten days to make the drive.

  But once he was south of Jersey he had the feeling that he had lost track of who he was. There didn’t seem to be any connection between this joker in the wagon and all the other Parker Barnums. The real Parker Barnums. This joker seemed more involved with all the imaginary ones; the one who did make the Yankees, and the one who could put up such a hell of a sword fight on the stone steps of the castle leading to the private quarters of the princess, and the one who could make himself invisible at will, and the one who could dance like Astaire, and the one who was a jet pilot, and the one who was a spy.

  So he looked at this one in the motel mirrors, and when he drove through the small towns there would always be a girl who, from the back, looked like Suzie. The Italian hairdo. And … not chunky … but … well … solid.

  He arrived at the Hutchinson at one-thirty on Friday afternoon. It was a sad-looking operation. There were some sad-ball people wandering around. If it turned out to be as bad as it looked at this stage, there was nothing to keep him here. He could kiss the five hundred goodbye and drive on down to Acapulco. After he had unpacked in the drab room, he changed and went out to see what was going on.

  Two women had just arrived in a pink-and-blue Buick hard-top convertible, with Ohio plates. Both were on the shady side of sixty and both wore cotton print dresses, and both wore straw sun hats shaped exactly like baseball caps. The driver, the larger of the two, bore a striking facial resemblance to Casey Stengel, and when she walked toward the hotel doorway, it was ole Case again, trudging out to the mound. Her companion was a smaller woman, timid-looking, and her hat was too big for her. She trotted along after the big one.

  About twenty minutes after they arrived, Park Barnum was in the central patio talking to a nice guy, a New Orleans architect named John Kemp, when the two women who had arrived in the Buick came bearing down on them, the big one in the lead. They had changed to fresh cotton print dresses, but they still wore the hats.

  The big one stuck her hand out and said, “I’m Mrs. McCaffrey, Hildabeth McCaffrey from Elmira, Ohio. And this here is my good friend, Mrs. Winkler, Dotsy Winkler, from the same place.”

  “John Kemp.”

  “Parker Barnum.”

  “Pleased to know you,” she said. Dotsy bobbed her shy head in smiling agreement. “Dotsy thinks this was a real nutty thing for us to do, coming down here like this, but like I told her, we could sit up there in Elmira all summer and rot and fan ourselves and drink a couple of barrels of iced tea, and who would care. I’ve been widowed four years now. Mr. McCaffrey was in the building supply business. I try to take a different kind of vacation every summer. This is new to Dotsy, though. She’s only been widowed a year and a half. Her Bert had three hardware stores in the county and a feed mill. We got enough to do with, and the children are grown and all, so I found the ad and told her this was what we were going to do. She said it was crazy and I said why and she said because we couldn’t paint a lick and I said how did we know if we didn’t try. She shoulda seen me get talked into those hula lessons out to Hawaii last summer. Seems like the older I get the more foolish I get. But, like I say, if it’s a second childhood, you might as well just settle down and enjoy it. To tell the truth, I didn’t get half so much enjoyment out of the first one. Sooner or later Dotsy will get in the spirit of the thing.” She turned and beamed proudly at Dotsy, who bobbed her head and blushed.

  “Now,” said Mrs. McCaffrey, “we’re taking a little tour of this place.” She scowled. “It certainly is a ratty old place, isn’t it? We were talking to a man named Torrigan. He seems to be one of the teachers. I don’t think he’s all right in the head. Let me see now, you’re John Kemp and you’re Parker Barnum. There’s Barnums over in Buffalo, New York. Distant kin of my husband. You from around there? No? Well, I guess it’s a common enough name. From New York, you say. Well, I suppose we’ll see you boys in school.” She winked and chuckled and strode on, Dotsy trotting alone behind her.

  “Hmm. Casey Stengel?” John Kemp said.

  “Definitely. But how about the other one?”

  “Snow White on Social Security.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  “But nice,” John Kemp said. “Definitely nice.”

  “Hildabeth and Dotsy.”

  “Foregoing a summer of iced tea on the screened porch in Elmira. And providing for themselves, you may be sure, a full, round winter of conversation and anecdote.”

  “They won’t be alone,” Parker said. “Want to ride in with me and look the town over?”

  “Thanks, yes. I didn’t drive down. I’m beginning to think it would have been smart.”

  When they got back a little after four, Mr. Miles Drummond came trotting out as they got out of the car and said, “I’m terribly sorry to impose on you, Mr. Barnum. This is the car you came down in, isn’t it? Well, here is what has happened. After talking to Mr. Torrigan, I don’t dare send my driver over the mountains to return after dark, and Mr. Torrigan refuses to ride with him again, and I’d ask Miss Agnes Partridge Keeley to do this, but she’s having an … uh … a digestive upset, and I thought you might be willing to run up to Mexico City to the airport and meet a Miss Monica Killdeering. She’ll be in on a six-twenty flight. There are ten students here now. There’s just Miss Killdeering, and the two young ladies who are motoring down from Texas. I hesitate to impose on you, Mr. Barnum, but …”

  “But I don’t know where to find the airport.”

  “I could go along and be a guide,” John Kemp said. “Between us we ought to be able to find it.”

  “Would you really!” Drummond said. “That would be so good of you. I’m at my wits’ end trying to … keep everything running smoothly.” He pulled bills out of his pocket and handed one to Park Barnum. “This will pay the toll both ways on the autopisto. Thank you so very, very much, both of you. It’s a great help, indeed.” He scurried off.

  John Kemp and Park Barnum got back into the car. “Great little organizer,” John said.

  “Reminds me of something I read in a book one time. ‘He had all the administrative ability of a kitten with diarrhea.’ ”

  “Wonder what kind of a name Killdeering is?”

  “Indian?”

  “I am under the impression there are damn few Indians named Monica.”

  Park said, “I give odds she will be creepy. But there is one item present, I think. I glimpsed it from afar. A sort of tooth-some blond item. Who is she?”

  John Kemp suddenly decided that maybe he wouldn’t like Parker Barnum as well as he thought he would. “She’s a Mrs. Kilmer. Barbara Kilmer. Very reticent sort. We were on the same flight from New Orleans down, but I didn’t know she’d be a classmate until they met us at the airport.”

  “Too bad. Where did she come from?”

  “Youngstown, Ohio.”

  “Do you know where this pseudo-Indian is from?”

  “I heard, but I do not believe, that she comes from Kilo, Kansas.”

  * * *

  The flight was late. Monica Killdeering, in a starboard seat next to the window, saw, beyond the wing, the golden tones of sunset. She was filled with such an enormous, tremulous sense of anticipation she thought she would burst. Her moist breath fogged the window and she rubbed it away with the sleeve of her suit coat.

  Yes, this would be the summer, she thought. And she tried not to remember the other summers w
hen she had felt precisely this same excitement that she never knew precisely what she meant by this.

  Miss Monica Killdeering was twenty-nine years old. She had a graduate degree in Physical Education. She had been born on a prosperous Kansas farm, orphaned in a train-auto collision when she was seven, raised in Cottonwood Falls by a maiden aunt who had died during Monica’s last year of school. Upon graduation she obtained a position as gym teacher and dancing teacher at the George D. Insley High School in Kilo, Kansas. During the six full years she had taught at the high school she had lived in a rented room in a small house on the edge of town owned by Miss Hipper, who had taught Home Ec at the high school for twenty-seven years.

  The gods had endowed Miss Monica with one body in ten million. At twenty-nine she was five foot seven inches tall and weighed one hundred and twenty-eight pounds. Her measurements were a barely credible 38-24-35. The texture of her body was flawless, creamy, incredibly smooth, without sag or wrinkle or unaesthetic bulge. It was a goddess body, pure as marble from the high proud globe of breast to arched and dainty instep. Her digestive system could have handled scrap iron without pause or pang. The interlocking network of glands, secretions, hormones, worked in a perfect and rhythmic harmony. Underneath the rounded softnesses of arm and thigh there were muscles and such splendid elasticity kept in such perfect tone that she could work out with the senior girls’ basketball team until all the children were exhausted—but Miss Monica would experience only a slightly accelerated heartbeat, a minor increase in the rate of respiration, and a little moisture on her brow and upper lip. She was physically uncommonly strong, stronger than most men, and this knowledge shamed her. She thought it unladylike.

  The body moved in seeming awareness of its own perfections, in grace and provocativeness of which Miss Monica was largely unaware. Her hair was glorious, inky-black with bluish highlights, glossy as the pelt of a healthy animal.

  But having progressed this far toward perfection, the gods, in sudden irony, had given Miss Monica the startling and unmistakable face of a sheep. Slope of brow, wide and fleshy nose, long and convex upper lip, square heavy teeth of the ruminant, brown nervous eyes—all were in deadly pattern.