“Puppy biscuit,” said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. “He said ‘Puppy biscuit,’ ” she said to her companion. “That man said ‘Puppy biscuit’ to himself.” Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A. & P., not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. “I want some biscuit for small, young dogs,” he said to the clerk. “Any special brand, sir?” The greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment. “It says ‘Puppies Bark for It’ on the box,” said Walter Mitty.
HIS wife would be through at the hairdresser’s in fifteen minutes, Mitty saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble drying it. She didn’t like to get to the hotel first; she would want him to be there waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing a window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. “Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?” Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of ruined streets.
. . . “The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir,” said the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through touselled hair. “Get him to bed,” he said wearily. “With the others. I’ll fly alone.” “But you can’t, sir,” said the sergeant anxiously. “It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman’s circus is between here and Saulier.” “Somebody’s got to get that ammunition dump,” said Mitty. “I’m going over. Spot of brandy?” He poured a drink for the sergeant and one for himself. War thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a rending of wood and splinters flew through the room. “A bit of a near thing,” said Captain Mitty carelessly. “The box barrage is closing in,” said the sergeant. “We only live once, Sergeant,” said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. “Or do we?” He poured another brandy and tossed it off. “I never see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir,” said the sergeant. “Begging your pardon, sir.” Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. “It’s forty kilometres through hell, sir,” said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. “After all,” he said softly, “what isn’t?” The pounding of the cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty walked to the door of the dugout humming “Auprès de Ma Blonde.” He turned and waved to the sergeant. “Cheerio!” he said. . . .
Something struck his shoulder. “I’ve been looking all over this hotel for you,” said Mrs. Mitty. “Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?” “Things close in,” said Walter Mitty vaguely. “What?” Mrs. Mitty said. “Did you get the what’s-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What’s in that box?” “Overshoes,” said Mitty. “Couldn’t you have put them on in the store?” “I was thinking,” said Walter Mitty. “Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?” She looked at him. “I’m going to take your temperature when I get you home,” she said.
THEY went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the drugstore on the corner she said, “Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won’t be a minute.” She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking. . . . He put his shoulders back and his heels together. “To hell with the handkerchief,” said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.
1939
S. J. PERELMAN
I AM NOT NOW, NOR HAVE I EVER BEEN, A MATRIX OF LEAN MEAT
I AWOKE with a violent, shuddering start, so abruptly that I felt the sudden ache behind the eyeballs one experiences after bolting an ice-cream soda or ascending too recklessly from the ocean floor. The house was utterly still; except for the tumult of the creek in the pasture, swollen with melting snow, a silence as awesome as that of Fatehpur Sikri, the abandoned citadel of the Moguls, shrouded the farm. Almost instantly, I was filled with an immense inquietude, an anxiety of such proportions that I quailed. The radium dial of the alarm clock read two-thirty: the exact moment, I realized with a tremor, that I had become involved the night before in the Affair of the Boneless Veal Steaks. The Boneless Veal Steaks—it had the same prosaic yet grisly implications as the Five Orange Pips or the Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb. Propped up on one elbow and staring into the velvet dark, I reviewed as coherently as I could the events of the preceding night.
I had awakened around two and, after thrashing about in my kip like a dying tautog, had lit and smoked the cork tip of a cigarette until I was nauseated. I thereupon woke up my wife, who apparently thought she could shirk her responsibilities by sleeping, and filed a brief résumé of the disasters—financial, political, and emotional—threatening us. When she began upbraiding me, in the altogether illogical way women do, I did not succumb to justifiable anger but pacifically withdrew to the kitchen for a snack. As I was extricating a turkey wing from the tangle of leftovers in the icebox (amazing how badly the average housewife organizes her realm; no man would tolerate such inefficiency in business), my attention was drawn by a limp package labelled “Gilbert’s Frozen Boneless Veal Steaks.” Stapled to the exterior was a printed appeal that had the lugubrious intimacy of a Freudian case history. “Dear Chef,” it said. “I’ve lost my character. I used to have sinews, then I met a butcher at Gilbert’s. He robbed me of my powers of resistance by cutting out some of the things that hold me together. I am a matrix of lean meat with my trimmings ground and worked back into me. Please be kind. Pick me up with a pancake turner or a spatula, don’t grab me by the edges with a fork. Because of all I’ve been through I’m more fragile than others you’ve known. Please be gentle lest you tear me apart. Tillie the Tender.”
THE revelation that food had become articulate at long last, that henceforth I was changed from consumer to father confessor, so unmanned me that I let go the turkey wing; with a loud “Mrkgnao” she obviously had learned from reading “Ulysses,” the cat straightway pounced on it. I must have been in a real state of shock, because I just stood there gawking at her, my brain in a turmoil. What floored me, actually, wasn’t that the veal had found a way to communicate—a more or less inevitable development, once you accepted the basic premise of Elsie, the Borden cow—but rather its smarmy and masochistic pitch. Here, for the first time in human experience, a supposedly inanimate object, a cutlet, had broken through the barrier and revealed itself as a creature with feelings and desires. Did it signalize its liberation with ecstasy, cry out some exultant word of deliverance, or even underplay it with a quiet request like “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you”? No; the whole message reeked of self-pity, of invalidism, of humbug. It was a snivelling, eunuchoid plea for special privilege, a milepost of Pecksniffery. It was disgusting.
In the same instant, however, I saw both the futility of moral indignation and an augury of things to come. Before long, the other victuals in the icebox, their tongues loosened by some refrigerative hocus-pocus as yet unknown to science, would undoubtedly emulate Tillie and demand similar coddling. Two courses presented themselves; I could either scream the house down and prepare it for the contingency, or I could bear the brunt singlehanded—i.e., get back into bed and let things take their course. The latter plainly being the coward’s way, I adopted it at once. Between various distractions, I neglected to check the icebox the next morning, but now, as I lay there sleepless, I knew that every second of delay was calamitous. With the stealth of a Comanche, I swung my feet over the side of th
e bed and stood up on a standard apricot poodle who happened to be dozing there. He emitted a needle-sharp yelp.
“Shut up, damn you,” I hissed through my teeth, immediately tempering it with a placatory “Good boy, good boy.” The brute subsided, or pretended to, until I closed the bedroom door behind me; then, convinced I was sneaking off on a coon hunt or some other excursion without him, he started excitedly clawing the panels. I permitted him to follow and, when we were well out of earshot of his mistress, gave him a kick in the belly to teach him obedience. The moment I opened the refrigerator door, I sensed mischief was afoot. Clipped to an earthenware bowl of rice pudding was a note scrawled in a shaky, nearly illegible hand. “Dear Chef,” it said breathlessly, “you’re living in a fool’s paradise. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that go on in this box—the calumny, the envy, the chicanery. They’re all against me because I have raisins. Ish ka bibble—I had raisins when that Nova Scotia salmon in the upper tier was a fingerling in the Bay of Fundy. But don’t take my word, just look around for yourself. Nuf sed. A Friend.”
A quick scrutiny of the various compartments revealed that something was indeed very much awry. Two bunches of celery had worked their way out of the freezer, where they normally lay, and stood jammed in a cluster of milk bottles. A mayonnaise jar had been emptied of its rightful contents and was half-filled with goose fat, hinting at the possibility of foul play. It wasn’t any one single factor—the shreds of icy vapor or the saucer of frozen gravy, as bleak as Lake Baikal—but the interior was filled with a premonitory hush of the sort that precedes a cyclone or a jail break. All of a sudden, as I racked my wits for some clandestine method of eliciting the true state of affairs, the perfect solution hit me—my tape recorder. I could secrete it in the adjacent kitchen cabinet, run the microphone inside disguised as a potato knish, and overnight astound the world with its first documentary on talking groceries. The thought of the millions I was scheduled to make in royalties, the brouhaha in the press and the acclaim of learned societies, and the chagrin of my enemies when I was elevated to a niche beside that of Steinmetz so dizzied me that I had to drink a split of Dr. Dadirrian’s Zoolak to recover. True, I felt a bit anthropophagous as I swallowed it, and I half expected a gurgled Levantine outcry, but nothing more dramatic than a slight attack of double vision ensued, and within minutes I had the mechanism hooked up and ready to function.
“Now, then,” I ordered the poodle, flicking on the switch, “back to the hay we go. Better be up bright and early before someone finds this and misinterprets it.”
“Applesauce,” he retorted. “It’s your recorder, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I said, “but you know how silly peop— What did you say?” Of course, he dried up then, not another word out of him, and you’d have thought the cat had his tongue.
I GOT to bed pretty perplexed about the whole thing and, what with fear lest I oversleep and worry at the quantity of current the machine was using, fell into a wretched slumber that terminated around daylight. Hastening to the kitchen, I downed some black coffee, and rewound the spool of tape to get the playback. The first few revolutions were unproductive of anything but conspiratorial whispers and an occasional word too jumbled to decipher. Then, all at once, I heard a low-pitched voice in the background, oily and yet pompous, stiff with disdain.
“Beggars on horseback,” it was saying contemptuously. “Strictly keeping up appearances. I spotted him and the Missis right away the day they came into the delicatessen. She was wearing an old Persian-lamb coat, remodelled. ‘Something in the way of a cocktail snack, Greengrass,’ she says, yawning like she’s Mrs. T. Markoe Robertson. ‘I’ll take a two-ounce jar of that domestic caviar.’ Then she turns to her husband, which he’s nervously jingling the change in his pants, and she says, ‘Dear, don’t you think it would be amusing to have a slice or two of Novy for our guests?’ Well, the poor shmendrick turned all different colors when the boss weighed me on the scales. Five cents more and he’d have had to walk home in the rain like a Hemingway hero.”
“Listen,” rejoined a grumpy bass voice that unmistakably proceeded from a forsaken bottle of horseradish. “Stick around as long as I have and nothing these people do will surprise you. Why, one time we had a rack of lamb in here seven weeks. The plumber had to cut it out with a blowtorch.”
A mincing, rather overbred voice, of the sort usually associated with Harvard beets, chimed agreement. “There’s one thing that doesn’t get stale here, though,” it said. “Club soda. How long can he last on that liquid diet of his?”
“Forever, if he don’t fall down and cut himself,” the lox replied with a coarse guffaw.
“Can’t you make less noise, please?” put in a hateful, meaching soprano. “I haven’t closed an eye. I’m just a bundle of nerves ever since my operation—”
“Pssst, there goes Tillie again,” warned the horseradish. “Pipe down or she’ll write him another note. The little sneak repeats everything you say.” A hubbub of maledictions and recriminations broke out, the upshot of which I never heard. Quivering with fury, I stripped the tape off the reel, ran into the living room, and flung it on the embers in the hearth. Specks of assorted hues swam before my eyes; it was unendurable that I should have nourished such vipers in my bosom. Drastic steps were indicated, and I was the boy who could take them. As I flew back to the refrigerator, bent on evicting the whole kit and caboodle without mercy, I caromed off my wife, huddled in a plain wrapper, for all the world like a copy of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and gaping at the recorder.
“Wh-what happened?” she stammered. “What are you doing with that microphone in the icebox?”
WELL, I learned one lesson from the episode; suavity is lost on women. There isn’t a blessed one, from the Colonel’s Lady to Judy O’Grady, capable of dealing with abstract ideas, and if you try a civilized, worldly approach, it just antagonizes them. Can you imagine a person getting so huffy that she barricades herself in a henhouse and refuses to breakfast with her own husband? I made a meal off a few odds and ends—a grapefruit and a couple of eggs—but I can’t say much for their dialogue. You need someone you can really talk to.
1953
S. J. PERELMAN
EINE KLEINE MOTHMUSIK
War on Moths Begins
The moths are beginning to eat. Even if the weather seems cool, this is their season for gluttony. Miss Rose Finkel, manager of Keystone Cleaners at 313 West Fifty-seventh Street, urges that these precautions be taken:
All winter clothes should be dry-cleaned, even if no stains are apparent. Moths feast on soiled clothes, and if a garment has been worn several times in the last few months, it should be cleaned.
Clean clothes may be kept in the closet in a plastic bag. It is safer, however, to send all woolens to a dry cleaner to put in cold storage.
Customers should check to make sure that their clothes are really sent to a cold storage and not hung in the back of the store.
—The Times.
Gay Head,
Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.,
July 14
Mr. Stanley Merlin,
Busy Bee Cleaners,
161 Macdougal Street,
New York City
DEAR MR. MERLIN:
I heard on the radio this morning before I went for my swim that the heat in New York is catastrophic, but you wouldn’t guess it up here. There is a dandy breeze at all times, and the salt-water bathing, as you can imagine, is superlative. Miles of glorious white beach, marvellous breakers, rainbow-colored cliffs—in short, paradise. One feels so rested, so completely purified, that it seems profane to mention anything as sordid as dry cleaning. Still, that’s not exactly your problem, is it? I have one that is.
Do you, by chance, remember a tan gabardine suit I sent in to be pressed three or four years ago? It’s a very expensive garment, made of that changeable, shimmering material they call solari cloth. The reverse side is a reddish color, like cayenne pepper; during the British occupat
ion of India, as you doubtless know, it was widely used for officers’ dress uniforms. Anyway, I’m a trifle concerned lest moths get into the closet where I left it in our apartment. The suit isn’t really stained, mind you; there’s just a faint smudge of lychee syrup on the right sleeve, about the size of your pinkie, that I got in a Chinese restaurant last winter. (I identify it only to help you expunge it without too much friction. I mean, it’s a pretty costly garment, and the nap could be damaged if some boob started rubbing it with pumice or whatever.)
Will you, hence, arrange to have your delivery boy pick up the suit at my flat any time next Thursday morning after nine-fifteen? He’ll have to show before ten-twenty, since the maid leaves on the dot and would certainly split a gusset if she had to sit around a hot apartment waiting for a delivery boy. (You know how they are, Mr. Merlin.) Tell the boy to be sure and take the right suit; it’s hanging next to one made of covert cloth with diagonal flap pockets, and as the Venetian blinds are drawn, he could easily make a mistake in the dark. Flotilla, the maid, is new, so I think I’d better explain which closet to look in. It’s in the hall, on his right when he stands facing the bedroom windows. If he stands facing the other way, naturally it’s on his left. The main thing, tell him, is not to get rattled and look in the closet opposite, because there may be a gabardine suit in there, without pockets, but that isn’t the one I have reference to.
Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker Page 31