Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

by Finder, Henry

  As I review this last memory it occurs to me that some readers might conclude that I am trying to cast Emily Dickinson in a negative light. Nothing could be further from my intentions. In fact, when I regained consciousness I realized that Miss Dickinson, in her tirade, had given me a final, precious gift. True, I no longer had my wallet, but I had, at long last, a separate identity, a voice. And, perhaps most valuable of all, a rhyme for “Nantucket.”

  1998

  A

  FUNNY

  THING

  HAPPENED

  ROBERT BENCHLEY

  THE PEOPLE WHO HAD THE HOUSE BEFORE

  [STRANGE ADVENTURES OF THE NEXT TENANTS IN THE FAMOUS TWO-FAMILY HOUSE AT 21 MASSASOIT STREET, NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS]

  OCTOBER 1, 1930—Moved in today. Everything looks all right, clean, etc. The people who had the house before us were evidently good housekeepers. They did take away all the electric-light bulbs and base-plugs, but they probably paid for them themselves and so were within their rights. They might have left us the patent faucets on the bathtub, though. We can’t fill the tub without dishing water over from the washbowl.

  One thing they did leave which seems kind of strange. Each room has an insurance calendar hanging in it and on the hall window-seat there is a pile of data on the New York Life Insurance Company’s special twenty-year endowment policy.

  OCTOBER 14—A rather peculiar thing happened today. We were sitting in the living-room when a couple of newspaper reporters with big cameras came up to the door and asked if we would mind sitting out on the porch and having our pictures taken. I said that I would have to put on my collar first, but the man said that it would make a better picture without it. More democratic, he said. He even said if I had those overalls handy to put them on. I said “What overalls?” and he just winked.

  When we got out on the porch into the light, the photographers seemed a little surprised and sort of disappointed and talked together in a low tone. Then one of them said: “Who lives in the other side of the house?” I said that I didn’t know as we had just come to town ourselves from the West, but I thought their name was Walters. “You just moved in yourselves?” he asked, looking rather suspicious. “Weren’t you ever President of the United States?” I laughed and said not that I knew of, but that a few years ago there was a week when I was on the Shriners’ Convention that I might have been almost anything. “No, it would have had to have been longer than a week,” he said. Then he said to the other man: “Pack up your things, Ed. We got the wrong house.” And Ed said: “We should have ought to have done this job last spring when we got the assignment.”

  So they went away and we never got our picture taken.

  OCTOBER 20—This afternoon the telephone rang and Edith answered it and Central said that the Cosmopolitan Magazine in New York City wanted to speak. So I went, being a great reader myself, and a girl’s voice said that she was speaking for Mr. Wong or Long and that my copy for the January number was due. I said that I hadn’t got my copy of the November number yet, and she said, “Not the copy of, but the copy for, the January number.” So I hung up.

  OCTOBER 21—We ran across something in the attic today which may explain something about the Cosmopolitan episode—but not much. Up behind one of the posts where we were putting our trunks Edith found a lot of yellow papers with “Cosmopolitan” typed in the upper left-hand corner of each. The first one had some sort of article begun on it, about a paragraph. It began: “My early life in Plymouth was just about the same sort of life that every God-fearing, healthy boy of that time was leading.” The next sheet had much the same sentence as a starter, only a few words longer. In the margin were some figures scribbled, which as near as we could make out were: “$1.00 per word. 23 words. $23.” The next sheet had the same sort of sentence only much longer: “I think that I may say without exaggeration that the early days of my boyhood, lived, as they were, amid the green hills of Plymouth, Vermont, were just the sort of days, taken one by one, as those which go to make up the average day of the typical healthy, God-fearing, honest and thrifty American boy of today in a town the size of Plymouth, Vermont, where Nature has a chance to imbue the growing youth with the principles of steadfast and pious observance of the laws of God and of the United States of America.” In the margin beside this were the figures: “96 words @ $1.00. $96.00,” and a note: “Ask Long about hyphenated words.”

  As none of it seemed to make much sense, we threw the whole bunch of papers away.

  OCTOBER 23—Edith swore she saw a man wearing a cowboy suit hanging around the front walk tonight. I told her not to be silly, that there were no cowboys in Northampton.

  OCTOBER 24—This thing is beginning to get on my nerves. This afternoon four Indians in full regalia came up on the porch and rang the bell. Edith answered and the biggest Indian asked for “Big White Chief.” Edith told him that our name was Meakins and that maybe he wanted Walters, who lived in the other half of the house. The big Indian shook his head and said: “Come to pay call on Big White Chief. How-do?” Edith said: “I’m all right, thank you, but nobody here knows any Indians.” Then she called to me and said: “Unless you do, George. Do you know any Indians?” I called back and simply said: “No.” So Edith got a little cross by this time and said: “And what is more, we don’t want any sweet-grass baskets, either, so get along with you, all four of you.” This sent the Indians into a conference on the front steps and Edith came into the house and locked the door. We watched them from the bay window until they went away. I don’t like the looks of things in this neighborhood.

  OCTOBER 25—Well, things have about reached a climax. I saw the cowboy tonight. He was walking up and down in front of the house about half past ten. I watched him for a little while and saw him go around to the back of the house. I put the lights out and waited. Pretty soon I heard a key in the lock and the cowboy came in the front door walking very quietly. I snapped on the light and said: “I suppose you’re looking for those Indians. Well, they went away yesterday.” He seemed a little embarrassed. “Did you find any yellow papers here?” he asked. He talked more like a farmer than a cowboy, through his nose sort of. I said: “Yes, what’s it to you?” He said: “They were typewritten only on one side, weren’t they?” I said I hadn’t looked on both sides. “They belong to me,” he said, “and I wanted to use them up on the other side.” I told him that he was too late and that we had thrown them away. “And where did you get a key for this house?” I asked him. “I used to live here,” he said, and walked out. I called up the police and they said that there was a State Hospital near here and probably one of the inmates was loose, and if I saw him again to let them know right away.

  OCTOBER 26—The Indians came back today, bringing another one with them. We didn’t go to the door and watched them from the bay window until they went away. A small crowd gathered outside and began to cheer. We decided that they were from the State Hospital too, and Edith said she thought we ought to move.

  OCTOBER 27—Edith got so nervous last night thinking she heard the cowboy and the Indians again that we put some things into a suitcase and spent the night at the Draper Hotel. Have given up the house and are going to live in Holyoke.

  1930

  WILLIAM SHAWN

  THE CATASTROPHE

  ON the fourteenth of March, at exactly fourteen minutes to three in the morning, a meteor grazed the Manhattan skyline and fell into either the sea or the outskirts of Carlstadt, New Jersey. All astronomers having been asleep at the time, the world had to rely for data on such unscientific observers as two giddy airmail pilots, a scattering of cops, several non-union millworkers on the night shift, and a man going home from El Morocco. Even the New York Daily News had to base its eight-inch headline, “METEOR ROCKS JERSEY,” on the rumor that some windows had rattled in Trenton. As far as the insurance companies could find out, no one had been killed or injured, no damage had been done. In fact, everything considered, the phenomenon did not quite come off.


  The next day, March the fifteenth, another meteor fell. This one, however, failed to disintegrate as it plunged through the earth’s atmosphere, nor did it sink itself into the traditional forest or desert. It landed, nice and tidy, on all five boroughs of Greater New York.

  Within an hour, the Red Cross in Philadelphia launched a relief drive for the victims. Mayor Kelly of Chicago long-distanced Mayor LaGuardia to offer sympathies. Cinema theatres wired the New York Paramount office to rush them eyewitness newsreels. Western Union accepted the wires. Whereas, of course, there were no newsreels, no Mayor LaGuardia, no anything. Approximately seven and a half million New Yorkers, and over a half-million visitors from out of town (who cared very little for the city anyway), had been annihilated. The only New Yorkers who had escaped were those who chanced to be at Miami Beach, and there they remained, shaking their heads and trying to find someone who would cash their checks.

  It was not until the newspapers, in simultaneous spurts of fancy, decided to reprint the New York telephone directories as an obituary notice that the country began to grasp the scope and connotations of what had happened. New York City, like Pompeii, was through. As a final grisly touch, N.B.C., its headquarters no longer in Rockefeller Center, broadcast a ten-minute dramatization of the Catastrophe (as it was already called) on a program which included a hot swing band and a talk by Glenn Frank. The American people were, at last, unnerved. Business took something of a bad turn. Control of the big corporations, suddenly left without boards of directors, reverted to the stockholders, who, left in turn without market quotations, were not any too sure there were corporations. Soon, too, the country was aware of a shortage of women’s wear, advertising campaigns, international bankers, O. O. McIntyre. Conditions were, as analyzed by Roger W. Babson, unsettled.

  Then, inevitably, came the period of readjustment. Boston took over as the Eastern shipping centre. The gap in the American League was filled by the Baltimore Orioles; in the National, by the Toledo Mud Hens. Buffalo was made the terminus of the Twentieth Century. Then there was a wave of Catastrophe jokes (Catastrophe who?), followed by a cycle of Catastrophe films, in most of which Franchot Tone, who had come to be accepted as the typical extinct New Yorker, starred. Parker Brothers put out a game called Catastrophe. Around this time, a bill was introduced in Congress proposing that a New New York be built by the WPA. This died in committee. People were getting bored with the whole subject.

  FIVE years passed, and New York City had disappeared from the last map. Ten years passed, and it had taken on the aspect of a dim exaggeration. Twenty years, and there was a full generation without a single first-hand New York memory. Eventually, the few old-timers who still claimed to have seen New York were regarded as cranks. They had to be humored when they talked about the electric signs on Broadway, the shops along Fifth Avenue, the subways, the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park and Harlem, the lobby of the Waldorf, the view from the Empire State Building. Nobody had the heart to tell them that New York had been invented by H. G. Wells.

  1936

  JAMES THURBER

  THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY

  WE’RE going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he shouted. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. “The Old Man’ll get us through,” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!” . . .

  “Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”

  “Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. “You were up to fifty-five,” she said. “You know I don’t like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. “You’re tensed up again,” said Mrs. Mitty. “It’s one of your days. I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you over.”

  Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done. “Remember to get those overshoes while I’m having my hair done,” she said. “I don’t need overshoes,” said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. “We’ve been all through that,” she said, getting out of the car. “You’re not a young man any longer.” He raced the engine a little. “Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?” Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. “Pick it up, brother!” snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.

  . . . “It’s the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan,” said the pretty nurse. “Yes?” said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. “Who has the case?” “Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington from New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over.” A door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard. “Hello, Mitty,” he said. “We’re having the devil’s own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you’d take a look at him.” “Glad to,” said Mitty.

  In the operating room there were whispered introductions: “Dr. Remington, Dr. Mitty. Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty.” “I’ve read your book on streptothricosis,” said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. “A brilliant performance, sir.” “Thank you,” said Walter Mitty. “Didn’t know you were in the States, Mitty,” grumbled Remington. “Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary.” “You are very kind,” said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. “The new anaesthetizer is giving way!” shouted an interne. “There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!” “Quiet, man!” said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep. He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. “Give me a fountain pen!” he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place. “That will hold for ten minutes,” he said. “Get on with the operation.” A nurse hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. “Coreopsis has set in,” said Renshaw nervously. “If you would take over, Mitty?” Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists. “If you wish,” he said. They slipped a white gown on him; he adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining . . .

  “Back it up, Mac! Look out for that Buick!” Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes. “Wrong lane, Mac,” said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely. “Gee. Yeh,” muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked “Exit Only.” “Leave her sit there,” said the attendant. “I’ll put her away.” Mitty got out of the car. “Hey, better leave the key.” “Oh,” sa
id Mitty, handing the man the ignition key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it belonged.

  They’re so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he thought, I’ll wear my right arm in a sling; they won’t grin at me then. I’ll have my right arm in a sling and they’ll see I couldn’t possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk. “Overshoes,” he said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store.

  When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice, before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town—he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb’s, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it. “Where’s the what’s-its-name?” she would ask. “Don’t tell me you forgot the what’s-its-name.” A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.

  . . . “Perhaps this will refresh your memory.” The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. “Have you ever seen this before?” Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. “This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80,” he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. “You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?” said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. “Objection!” shouted Mitty’s attorney. “We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July.” Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. “With any known make of gun,” he said evenly, “I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.” Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. “You miserable cur!” . . .