Should Flotilla have gone, the visiting super will admit your boy to the flat if he arrives before eleven; otherwise, he is to press our landlord’s bell (Coopersmith), in the next building, and ask them for the key. They can’t very well give it to him, as they’re in Amalfi, but they have a Yugoslav woman dusting for them, a highly intelligent person, to whom he can explain the situation. This woman speaks English.
After the suit is dry-cleaned—which, I repeat, is not essential if you’ll only brush the stain with a little moist flannel—make certain that it goes into cold storage at once. I read a piece in the newspaper recently that upset me. It quoted a prominent lady in your profession, a Miss Rose Finkel, to the effect that some dry cleaners have been known to hang such orders in the back of their store. You and I have had such a long, cordial relationship, Mr. Merlin, that I realize you’d never do anything so unethical, but I just thought I’d underscore it.
Incidentally, and since I know what the temperature in your shop must be these days, let me pass on a couple of hot-weather tips. Eat lots of curries—the spicier the better—and try to take at least a three-hour siesta in the middle of the day. I learned this trick in India, where Old Sol can be a cruel taskmaster indeed. That’s also the place, you’ll recall, where solari cloth used to get a big play in officers’ dress uniforms. Wears like iron, if you don’t abuse it. With every good wish,
Yours sincerely,
S. J. PERELMAN
New York City,
July 22
DEAR MR. PEARLMAN:
I got your letter of instructions spelling everything out, and was happy to hear what a glorious vacation you are enjoying in that paradise. I only hope you will be careful to not run any fishhooks in your hand, or step in the undertow, or sunburn your body so badly you lay in the hospital. These troubles I personally don’t have. I am a poor man with a wife and family to support, not like some people with stocks and bonds that they can sit in a resort all summer and look down their nose at the rest of humanity. Also my pressing machine was out of commission two days and we are shorthanded. Except for this, everything is peaches and cream.
I sent the boy over like you told me on Thursday. There was no sign of the maid, but for your information he found a note under the door saying she has quit. She says you need a bulldozer, not a servant, and the pay is so small she can do better on relief. Your landlady, by the way, is back from Amalfi, because some of the tenants, she didn’t name names, are slow with the rent. She let the boy in the apartment, and while he was finding your red suit she checked over the icebox and the stove, which she claims are very greasy. (I am not criticizing your housekeeping, only reporting what she said.) She also examined the mail in the bureau drawers to see if the post office was forwarding your bills, urgent telegrams, etc.
I don’t believe in telling a man his own business. Mine is dry cleaning, yours I don’t know what, but you’re deceiving yourself about this Indian outfit you gave us. It was one big stain from top to bottom. Maybe you leaned up against the stove or the icebox? (Just kidding.) The plant used every kind of solvent they had on it—benzine, naphtha, turpentine, even lighter fluid—and knocked out the spots, all right, but I warn you beforehand, there are a few brownish rings. The lining was shot to begin with, so that will be no surprise to you; according to the label, you had the suit since 1944. If you want us to replace same, I can supply a first-class, all-satin quarter lining for $91.50, workmanship included. Finally, buttons. Some of my beatnik customers wear the jacket open and don’t need them. For a conservative man like yourself, I would advise spending another eight dollars.
As regards your worry about hiding cold-storage articles in the back of my store, I am not now nor have I ever been a chiseller, and I defy you to prove different. Every season like clockwork, I get one crackpot who expects me to be Santa Claus and haul his clothing up to the North Pole or someplace. My motto is live and let live, which it certainly is not this Rose Finkel’s to go around destroying people’s confidence in their dry cleaner. Who is she, anyway? I had one of these experts working for me already, in 1951, that nearly put me in the hands of the receivers. She told a good customer of ours, an artist who brought in some hand-painted ties to be rainproofed, to save his money and throw them in the Harlem River. To a client that showed her a dinner dress with a smear on the waist, she recommends the woman should go buy a bib. I am surprised that you, a high-school graduate, a man that pretends to be intelligent, would listen to such poison. But in this business you meet all kinds. Regards to the Mrs.
Yours truly,
S. MERLIN
Gay Head, Mass.,
July 25
DEAR MR. MERLIN:
While I’m altogether sympathetic to your plight and fully aware that your shop’s an inferno at the moment—I myself am wearing an imported cashmere sweater as I write—I must say you misinterpreted my letter. My only motive in relaying Miss Stricture’s finkels (excuse me, the strictures of Miss Finkel) on the subject of proper cold storage was concern for a favorite garment. I was not accusing you of duplicity, and I refuse to share the opinion, widespread among persons who deal with them frequently, that most dry cleaners are crooks. It is understandably somewhat off-putting to hear that my suit arrived at your establishment in ruinous condition, and, to be devastatingly candid, I wonder whether your boy may not have collided with a soup kitchen in transit. But each of us must answer to his own conscience, Merlin, and I am ready, if less than overjoyed, to regard yours as immaculate.
Answering your question about Miss Finkel’s identity, I have never laid eyes on her, needless to say, though reason dictates that if a distinguished newspaper like the Times publishes her counsel, she must be an authority. Furthermore, if the practice of withholding clothes from cold storage were uncommon, why would she have broached the subject at all? No, my friend, it is both useless and ungenerous of you to attempt to undermine Miss Finkel. From the way you lashed out at her, I deduce that she touched you on the raw, in a most vulnerable area of our relationship, and that brings me to the core of this communication.
Nowhere in your letter is there any direct assertion that you did send my valuable solari suit to storage, or, correlatively, that you are not hiding it in the back of the store. I treasure my peace of mind too much to sit up here gnawed by anxiety. I must therefore demand from you a categorical statement by return airmail special delivery. Is this garment in your possession or not? Unless a definite answer is forthcoming within forty-eight hours, I shall be forced to take action.
Yours truly,
S. J. PERELMAN
New York City,
July 27
DEAR MR. PERLEMAN:
If all you can do with yourself in a summer place is hang indoors and write me love letters about Rose Finkel, I must say I have pity on you. Rose Finkel, Rose Finkel—why don’t you marry this woman that you are so crazy about her. Then she could clean your suits at home and stick them in the icebox—after she cleans that, too. What do you want from me? Sometimes I think I am walking around in a dream.
Look, I will do anything you say. Should I parcel-post the suit to you so you can examine it under a microscope for holes? Should I board up my store, give the help a week free vacation in the mountains, and bring it to you personally in my Cadillac? I tell you once, twice, a million times—it went to cold storage. I didn’t send it myself; I gave orders to my assistant, which she has been in my employ eleven years. From her I have no secrets, and you neither. She told me about some of the mail she found in your pants.
It is quite warm here today, but we are keeping busy and don’t notice. My tailor collapsed last night with heat prostration, so I am handling alterations, pressing, ticketing, and hiding customers’ property in the back of the store. Also looking up psychiatrists in the Yellow Pages.
Yours truly,
S. MERLIN
Gay Head, Mass.,
July 29
DEAR MR. MERLIN:
My gravest doubts are at l
ast confirmed: You are unable to say unequivocally, without tergiversating, that you saw my suit put into cold storage. Knowing full well that the apparel was irreplaceable, now that the British Raj has been supplanted—knowing that it was the keystone of my entire wardrobe, the sine qua non of sartorial taste—you deliberately entrusted it to your creature, a cat’s-paw who you admit rifles my pockets as a matter of routine. Your airy disavowal of your responsibility, therefore, leaves me with but one alternative. By this same post, I am delegating a close friend of mine, Irving Wiesel, to visit your place of business and ferret out the truth. You can lay your cards on the table with Wiesel or not, as you see fit. When he finishes with you, you will have neither cards nor table.
It would be plainly superfluous, at this crucial stage in our association, to hark back to such petty and characteristic vandalism as your penchant for jabbing pins into my rainwear, pressing buttons halfway through lapels, and the like. If I pass over these details now, however, do not yield to exultation. I shall expatiate at length in the proper surroundings; viz., in court. Wishing you every success in your next vocation,
Yours truly,
S. J. PERELMAN
New York City,
August 5
DEAR MR. PERLMAN:
I hope you received by now from my radiologist the two X-rays; he printed your name with white ink on the ulcer so you should be satisfied that you, and you alone, murdered me. I wanted him to print also “Here lies an honest man that he slaved for years like a dog, schlepped through rain and snow to put bread in his children’s mouths, and see what gratitude a customer gave him,” but he said there wasn’t room. Are you satisfied now, you Cossack you? Even my radiologist is on your side.
You didn’t need to tell me in advance that Wiesel was a friend of yours; it was stamped all over him the minute he walked in the store. Walked? He was staggering from the highballs you and your bohemian cronies bathe in. No how-do-you-do, explanations, nothing. Ran like a hooligan to the back and turned the whole stock upside down, pulled everything off the racks. I wouldn’t mind he wrecked a filing system it cost me hundreds of dollars to install. Before I could grab the man, he makes a beeline for the dressing room. So put yourself for a second in someone else’s shoes. A young, refined matron from Boston, first time in the Village, is waiting for her dress to be spot-cleaned, quietly loafing through Harper’s Bazaar. Suddenly a roughneck, for all she knows a plainclothesman, a junkie, tears aside the curtain. Your delegate Wiesel.
I am not going to soil myself by calling you names, you are a sick man and besides on vacation, so will make you a proposition. You owe me for cleaning the suit, the destruction you caused in my racks, medical advice, and general aggravation. I owe you for the suit, which you might as well know is kaput. The cold-storage people called me this morning. It seems like all the brownish rings in the material fell out and they will not assume responsibility for a sieve. This evens up everything between us, and I trust that on your return I will have the privilege of serving you and family as in years past. All work guaranteed, invisible weaving our specialty. Please remember me to your lovely wife.
Sincerely yours,
STANLEY MERLIN
1960
S. J. PERELMAN
MONOMANIA, YOU AND ME IS QUITS
MY immediate reaction when a head studded with aluminum rheostats confronted me over the garden gate last Tuesday morning was one of perplexity. That it belonged to a courier from outer space was, I felt, improbable, for nobody of such transcendent importance would have chosen a weedy Pennsylvania freehold to land on. Its features, moreover, were much too traditional for an interplanetary nuncio; instead of the elephant ears and needle-sharp proboscis that science fiction had prepared me for, the apparition exhibited a freckled Slavic nose and wattles ripened by frequent irrigations of malt. In the same instant, as I straightened up, giddy with the effort of extricating a mullein from the cucumbers, I realized that the spiny coiffure was in actuality a home permanent and the bulging expanse of gingham below it the rest of Mrs. Kozlich, our current cleaning woman.
“I hope I didn’t scare you,” she said tremulously, “but I thought I better drive over and speak to you personally. Something funny happened while you and the missus were away last weekend.” She cast a quick, nervous glance about the surrounding eighty-three acres and lowered her voice. “A man burned a chair on your place Friday night.”
“Yes, I know,” I replied. “I meant to call you so you wouldn’t be alar—”
“I was so frightened I almost fainted,” she pursued, unheeding. “My niece Kafka and I were washing your upstairs windows around five o’clock when this station wagon came up the lane. I figured it was yours—”
“It was mine, Mrs. Kozlich,” I gentled her. “Listen to me, will you? I made a special trip back from the city—on purpose—to burn that chair. Do you understand?”
It was obvious she didn’t, or, even if she did, was determined not to be denied the opportunity of a dramatic recital. The car, she went on breathlessly, had traversed a long field adjacent to the barn, parking by the gulch where I file old paint cans, leaky gutters, and window screens for future reference. The driver (who bore a striking resemblance to me, the ladies decided from their distant vantage point) had then unloaded a large black easy chair, systematically disembowelled its upholstery, and, while they watched spellbound, set fire to it. “Go back there and look, if you don’t believe me,” she challenged. “The springs are laying all over the ground where he kicked them. After he drove out, I sent Kafka up and she found a couple of scraps like horsehide or something. It must have been a leather chair.”
It was indeed, but what Mrs. Kozlich had witnessed, and what I prudently decided not to spell out for her, was the end of a dream—a romantic quest that began some twenty-two years ago. Just when or how my yearning for a tufted black leather armchair originated I cannot remember. Perhaps some elderly member of the Rhode Island medical profession, which I supported singlehanded as a boy, had one in his consulting room, or I may have seen the prototype, spavined with use, in the professorial chambers at Brown. At any rate, among the fantasies I nurtured into manhood—a princely income and a sleek, piratical schooner for cruising the Great Barrier Reef, to mention only two—was a clear-cut image of my ideal study. Its appointments varied from time to time; on occasion the walls were book-lined, or hung with rare trophies like Mrs. Gray’s lechwe or a sitatunga, or again bare except for a few gems of Impressionist painting. The focus, the keystone of the décor, nonetheless, never varied—a capacious, swollen club chair, well polished, into whose depths one sank and somniferously browsed through the latest English review. There might be a revolving mahogany bookcase alongside, but I wasn’t sure. I was afraid it might detract from the rich, baroque impact of the chair.
By the time I had acquired my own inglenook in the mid-thirties, though, and started prowling the auction rooms for my fictive fauteuil, I discovered it was a chimera. Curiosities of that sort, dealers pityingly confided, had vanished with the buffalo lap robe and congress gaiters. They offered me substitutes that awoke my outrage—knobby monstrosities of red plastic that tilted at the touch of a spring, slippery leatherette abstractions that pitchforked one into prenatal discomfort inches off the floor. The more I insisted, the more derisive they became. “Look, Grover Cleveland,” one of them finally snapped at me after my third approach. “Harmoniums and water wings, diavolos and pungs we got, but Victorian easy chairs—nyet. And now, excuse me, will you? I have another nudnick here wants a round table like King Arthur’s.”
The first intimation that my will-o’-the-wisp, however unattainable, did in fact still exist came in 1938. Yawning through a Tim McCoy Western at a rural cinema in our township, I was suddenly electrified by the furnishings of the sheriff’s office. Beside the period roll-top desk stood a voluptuously padded armchair, not only covered in black leather but (tears rose to my eyes) its outlines accented by brass nailheads. I whipped to my feet. “That
’s it! That’s it!” I fluted, my voice gone contralto with agitation. “That’s my chair!” I was so overwhelmed, to be candid, that it required the intervention of the manager to persuade me to resume my seat, and subsequent accounts, gleaned by my wife from local tradespeople, hinted I had succumbed to a Holy Roller seizure. Undaunted, I took care to note the production details of the film against some future visit to Hollywood, and chancing to be there shortly, at once proceeded to track down the chair. It was relatively simple. In a matter of minutes, Columbia’s art department disclosed the name of the warehouse that supplied such props, and, cramming my pockets with enough rhino to vanquish any obstacle, I pelted over. The manager of the enterprise, a foxy-nose with a serried gray marcel that mounted like a linotype keyboard, was the soul of courtesy.
“Of course I remember the piece,” he acknowledged silkily. “This way, please.” The freight elevator discharged us in a shadowy loft on the sixth floor, where furniture of every conceivable epoch lay stored. He dove into the maze and yanked aside a dust cover. “There,” he said. “Is this the one you mean?”
An inexpressible radiance suffused me. The chair was so much more beautiful than my cinematic memory that speech was inadequate. It was a haven, a refuge; I saw myself lolling in it, churchwarden poised, evolving new cosmogonies, quoting abstruse references to Occam’s razor and Paley’s watch. “Oh, God,” I choked, extracting a fistful of bills. “I— You’ve made me so happy! How much?”
Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker Page 32