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

by Finder, Henry

  My book will include the episode of Towne and Tennyson. It happened of a summer’s evening last year, when Charles Hanson Towne, editor and fairly bon vivant, was dining out, somewhere on the upper East Side, I assume. At all events, Mr. Towne noted with delight that the dusky jehu’s name was Clifford Tennyson, and lapsing at once into a broad Southern accent, addressed him so humorously as Cliffahd all the way up town that his companion grew restive at so much comedy. Therefore when, two blocks before their destination, Mr. Towne descended from the cab to buy a winsome nosegay for his hostess, this companion and the driver went into hasty conference, to rehearse a faintly retaliatory scene.

  Thus it befell that when they finally dismissed the cab, and Mr. Towne said, “Cliffahd, what do Ah owe you?” he was reduced to a becoming stupefaction by the sight of a brown hand grandly waving him aside. If only the driver had heard the whispered instructions accurately, the result would have been really stunning. Even as it was, the aforesaid bon vivant was bowled over by hearing this reply: “Not a penny, sir, not a penny. It is a pleasure to drive you, Mr. Towel.”

  NOW and again a driver does actually recognize his fare, particularly if it be one whose face appears much in the public prints. One of my favorite stories deals with the emotions of such a driver who, after profitably conducting a distracted and solitary young man around and around Central Park for several hours one night, finally grew sleepy and switched an inquisitive light on his fare, only to discover that it was none other than Charlie Chaplin. Under pressure of this inspection, the comedian expressed an intention to drive on vaguely until dawn. He had reason to suspect that process servers lay in wait for him at his hotel, and he was not minded to show his celebrated face there or anywhere else. Finally, the drowsy driver decided to put the fugitive up for the rest of the night at his own home, but insisted that the visit be made incognito, lest the little woman take umbrage at their sheltering so notorious a character. As it happened, the only place for guests in the driver’s flat was one half of a bed, of which the other was occupied by his ten-year-old son. I have always thought there never was such an awakening since the world began as the one which that incredulous youngster enjoyed next morning.

  Then, only the other day, Heywood Broun was at once startled and gratified to have the driver of the cab he was dismissing pause to discuss, with flattering disapprobation, the literary style of Mr. Broun’s several successors on the New York World. This unexpected pundit was particularly hard on St. John Ervine, who, by this time, must be already on the high seas, bound for the welcoming bosom of the London Observer. In his own mind, the driver had somewhat disconcertingly recognized the intended target of Ervine’s recent allusion to “a big, orbicular newspaper man,” and had loyally resented it. “Why,” he said, “I guess if anyone’s a sissy, he’s one himself.”

  Which reminds one fondly of the time when Margaret Mayo made her report to Al Woods on a French script she had just read for him.

  “I don’t think it’s so salacious,” she said.

  “No,” he replied, “I don’t think it will go well, either.”

  BUT to return to the taxi drivers, I must certainly include the experience of Samuel Merwin with the one he hailed outside the Players Club one stormy night.

  “I want to go to the Algonquin,” said Mr. Merwin firmly, and then added, with wanton pessimism, “I don’t suppose you know where it is?”

  “I ought to,” grunted the driver, “there’s only three of us left in New York.”

  “Only three drivers who know where the Algonquin is?” queried the pessimist, in the surprised tone of one beaten at his own game.

  “No,” replied the driver, thrusting a superb, hawklike Indian profile into the light, “only three Algonquins.”

  1929

  CLARENCE DAY

  FATHER ISN’T MUCH HELP

  IN Father’s day, it was unusual for boys in New York to take music lessons. His father had sent him to college, but he hadn’t had him taught music. Men didn’t play the piano. Young ladies learned to play pretty things on it as an accomplishment, but few of them went further, and any desire to play classical music was rare.

  After Father grew up, however, and began to do well in his business, he decided that music was one of the good things of life. He bought himself a piano and paid a musician to teach him. He took no interest in the languishing love songs which were popular then, he didn’t admire patriotic things such as “Marching Through Georgia,” and he had a hearty distaste for songs of pathos—he always swore if he heard them. He enjoyed music as he did a fine wine or a good ride on horseback. He had long, muscular fingers, he practiced faithfully, and learned to the best of his ability to play Beethoven and Bach.

  The people he associated with didn’t care much for this kind of thing, and Father didn’t wish to associate with the long-haired musicians who did. He got no encouragement from anyone and his progress was lonely. But Father was not the kind of man who depends on encouragement.

  His feeling for music was limited but it was deeply rooted, and he cared enough for it to keep on practicing even after he married and in the busy years when he was providing for a house full of boys. He didn’t go to symphonic concerts and he never liked Wagner, but he’d hum something of Brahms’ while posting his ledger, or play Mozart or Chopin after dinner. It gave him a sense of well-being.

  Mother liked music too. We often heard her sweet voice gently singing old songs of an evening. If she forgot parts here or there, she swiftly improvised something that would let the air flow along without breaking the spell.

  Father didn’t play that way. He was erecting much statelier structures, and when he got a chord wrong, he stopped. He took that chord apart and went over the notes one by one, and he kept on going over them methodically. This sometimes drove Mother mad. She would desperately cry “Oh-oh-oh!” and run out of the room.

  Her whole attitude toward music was different. She didn’t get a solid and purely personal enjoyment from it like Father. It was more of a social function to her. It went with dancing and singing. She played and sang for fun, or to keep from being sad, or to give others pleasure.

  ON Thursday afternoons in the winter, Mother was always “at home.” She served tea and cakes and quite a few people dropped in to see her. She liked entertaining. And whenever she saw a way to make her Thursdays more attractive, she tried it.

  About this time, Mother’s favorite niece, Cousin Julie, was duly “finished” at boarding school and came to live with us, bringing her trunks and hatboxes and a great gilded harp. Mother at once made room for this beautiful object in our crowded parlor, and the first thing Julie knew she had to play it for the Thursday-afternoon visitors. Julie loved her harp dearly but she didn’t like performing at all—performances frightened her, and if she fumbled a bit, she felt badly. But Mother said she must get over all that. She tried to give Julie self-confidence. She talked to her like a determined though kind impresario.

  These afternoon sessions were pleasant, but they made Mother want to do more. While she was thinking one evening about what a lot of social debts she must pay, she suddenly said to Father, who was reading Gibbon, half-asleep by the fire, “Why not give a musicale, Clare, instead of a series of dinners?”

  When Father was able to understand what she was talking about, he said he was glad if she had come to her senses sufficiently to give up any wild idea of having a series of dinners, and that she had better give up musicales, too. He informed her he was not made of money, and all good string quartets were expensive; and when Mother interrupted him, he raised his voice and said, to close the discussion: “I will not have my peaceful home turned into a Roman arena, with a lot of hairy fiddlers prancing about and disturbing my comfort.”

  “You needn’t get so excited, Clare,” Mother said. “I didn’t say a word about hairy fiddlers. I don’t know where you get such ideas. But I do know a lovely young girl whom Mrs. Spiller has had, and she’ll come for very little, I’m sure.”<
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  “What instrument does this inexpensive paragon play?” Father inquired sardonically.

  “She doesn’t play, Clare. She whistles.”

  “Whistles!” said Father. “Good God!”

  “Very well, then,” Mother said after an argument. “I’ll have to have Julie instead, and Miss Kregman can help her, and I’ll try to get Sally Brown or somebody to play the piano.”

  “Miss Kregman!” Father snorted. “I wash my hands of the whole business.”

  MOTHER asked nothing better. She could have made a grander affair of it if he had provided the money, but even with only a little to spend, getting up a party was fun. Before her marriage, she had loved her brother Alden’s musicales. She would model hers upon those. Hers would be different in one way, for Alden had had famous artists, and at hers the famous artists would be impersonated by Cousin Julie. But the question as to how expert the music would be didn’t bother her, and she didn’t think it would bother the guests whom she planned to invite. The flowers would be pretty; she knew just what she would put in each vase (the parlor was full of large vases); she had a special kind of little cakes in mind, and everybody would enjoy it all thoroughly.

  But no matter what kind of artists she has, a hostess is bound to have trouble managing them, and Mother knew that even her homemade material would need a firm hand. Julie was devoted to her, and so was the other victim, Sally Brown, Julie’s schoolmate. But devoted or not, they were uneasy about this experiment. Sally would rather have done almost anything than perform at a musicale, and the idea of playing in public sent cold chills down Julie’s back.

  The only one Mother worried about, however, was Julie’s teacher, Miss Kregman. She could bring a harp of her own, so she would be quite an addition, but Mother didn’t feel she was decorative. She was an angular, plain-looking woman, and she certainly was a very unromantic sight at a harp.

  Father didn’t feel she was decorative either, and said, “I’ll be damned if I come.” He said musicales were all poppycock anyway. “Nothing but tinkle and twitter.”

  “Nobody’s invited you, Clare,” Mother said defiantly. As a matter of fact, she felt relieved by his announcement. This wasn’t like a dinner, where she wanted Father and where he would be of some use. She didn’t want him at all at her musicale.

  “All I ask is,” she went on, “that you will please dine out for once. It won’t be over until six at the earliest, and it would make things much easier for me if you would dine at the club.”

  Father said that was ridiculous. “I never dine at the club. I won’t do it. Any time I can’t have my dinner in my own home, this house is for sale. I disapprove entirely of these parties and uproar!” he shouted. “I’m ready to sell the place this very minute, and we can all go and sit under a palm tree and live on breadfruit and pickles!”

  ON the day of the musicale, it began to snow while we were at breakfast. Father had forgotten what day it was, of course, and he didn’t care anyhow—his mind was on a waistcoat which he wished Mother to take to his tailor’s. To his astonishment, he found her standing on a stepladder, arranging some ivy, and when he said “Here’s my waistcoat,” she gave a loud wail of self-pity at this new infliction. Father said in a bothered way: “What is the matter with you, Vinnie? What are you doing up on that ladder? Here’s my waistcoat, I tell you, and it’s got to go to the tailor at once.” He insisted on handing it up to her, and he banged the front door going out.

  Early in the afternoon, the snow changed to rain. The streets were deep in slush. We boys gave up sliding downhill on the railroad bridge in East Forty-eighth Street and came tramping in with our sleds. Before going up to the playroom, we looked in the parlor. It was full of small folding chairs. The big teakwood armchairs with their embroidered backs were crowded off into corners, and the blue velvety ottoman with its flowered top could hardly be seen. The rubber tree had been moved from the window and strategically placed by Miss Kregman’s harp, in such a way that the harp would be in full view but Miss Kregman would not.

  Going upstairs, we met Julie coming down. Her lips were blue. She was pale. She passed us with fixed, unseeing eyes, and when I touched her hand it felt cold.

  Looking over the banisters, we saw Miss Kregman arrive in her galoshes. Sally Brown, who was usually gay, entered silently later. Miss Kregman clambered in behind the rubber tree and tuned the majestic gold harps. Mother was arranging trayfuls of little cakes and sandwiches, and giving a last touch to the flowers. Her excited voice floated up to us. There was not a sound from the others.

  At the hour appointed for this human sacrifice, ladies began arriving in long, swishy dresses which swept richly over the carpet. Soon the parlor was packed. I thought of Sally, so anxious and numb she could hardly feel the piano keys, and of Julie’s icy fingers plucking valiantly away at the strings. Then Mother clapped her hands as a signal for the chatter to halt, the first hesitating strains of music began, and someone slid the doors shut.

  When we boys went down to dinner that evening, we heard the news, good and bad. In a way it had been a success. Julie and Sally had played beautifully the whole afternoon, and the ladies had admired the harps, and applauded, and eaten up all the cakes. But there had been two catastrophes. One was that everybody had kept looking fascinatedly at Miss Kregman’s feet, which had stuck out from the rubber tree, working away by themselves, as it were, at the pedals, and the awful part was she had forgotten to take off her galoshes. The other was that Father had come home during a sweet little lullaby and the ladies had distinctly heard him say “Damn” as he went up to his room.

  1933

  JAMES THURBER

  THE NIGHT THE GHOST GOT IN

  THE ghost that got into our house on the night of November 17, 1915, raised such a hullabaloo of misunderstandings that I am sorry I didn’t just let it keep on walking, and go to bed. Its advent caused my mother to throw a shoe through a window of the house next door and ended up with my grandfather shooting a patrolman. I am sorry, therefore, as I have said, that I ever paid any attention to the footsteps.

  They began about a quarter past one o’clock in the morning, a rhythmic, quick-cadenced walking around the dining-room table. My mother was asleep in one room upstairs, my brother Herman in another; grandfather was in the attic, in the old walnut bed which, as you may remember, once fell on my father. I had just stepped out of the bathtub and was busily rubbing myself with a towel when I heard the steps. They were the steps of a man walking rapidly around the dining-room table downstairs. The light from the bathroom shone down the back steps, which dropped directly into the dining-room; I could see the faint shine of plates on the plate-rail; I couldn’t see the table. The steps kept going round and round the table; at regular intervals a board creaked, when it was trod upon. I supposed at first that it was my father or my brother Roy, who had gone to Indianapolis but were expected home at any time. I suspected next that it was a burglar. It did not enter my mind until later that it was a ghost.

  After the walking had gone on for perhaps three minutes, I tiptoed to Herman’s room. “Psst!” I hissed, in the dark, shaking him. “Awp,” he said, in the low, hopeless tone of a despondent beagle—he always half suspected that something would “get him” in the night. I told him who I was. “There’s something downstairs!” I said. He got up and followed me to the head of the back staircase. We listened together. There was no sound. The steps had ceased. Herman looked at me in some alarm: I had only the bath towel around my waist. He wanted to go back to bed, but I gripped his arm. “There’s something down there!” I said. Instantly, the steps began again, circled the dining-room table like a man running, and started up the stairs toward us, heavily, two at a time. The light still shone palely down the steps; we saw nothing coming; we only heard the steps. Herman rushed to his room and slammed the door. I slammed shut the door at the stairs’ top and held my knee against it. After a long minute, I slowly opened it again. There was nothing there. There was no sound. None of us eve
r heard the ghost again.

  The slamming of the doors had aroused mother: she peered out of her room. “What on earth are you boys doing?” she demanded. Herman ventured out of his room. “Nothing,” he said, gruffly, but he was, in color, a light green. “What was all that running around downstairs?” said mother. So she had heard the steps, too! We just looked at her. “Burglars!” she shouted, intuitively. I tried to quiet her by starting lightly downstairs.

  “Come on, Herman,” I said.

  “I’ll stay with mother,” he said. “She’s all excited.”

  I stepped back onto the landing.

  “Don’t either of you go a step,” said mother. “We’ll call the police.” Since the phone was downstairs, I didn’t see how we were going to call the police—nor did I want the police—but mother made one of her quick, incomparable decisions. She flung up a window of her bedroom which faced the bedroom windows of the house of a neighbor, picked up a shoe, and whammed it through a pane of glass across the narrow space that separated the two houses. Glass tinkled into the bedroom occupied by a retired engraver named Bodwell and his wife. Bodwell had been for some years in rather a bad way and was subject to mild “attacks.” Most everybody we knew or lived near had some kind of attacks.

  It was now about two o’clock of a moonless night; clouds hung black and low. Bodwell was at the window in a minute, shouting, frothing a little, shaking his fist. “We’ll sell the house and go back to Peoria,” we could hear Mrs. Bodwell saying. It was some time before mother “got through” to Bodwell. “Burglars!” she shouted. “Burglars in the house!” Herman and I hadn’t dared to tell her that it was not burglars but ghosts, for she was even more afraid of ghosts than of burglars. Bodwell at first thought that she meant there were burglars in his house, but finally he quieted down and called the police for us over an extension phone by his bed. After he had disappeared from the window, mother suddenly made as if to throw another shoe, not because there was further need of it but, as she later explained, because the thrill of heaving a shoe through a window glass had enormously taken her fancy. I prevented her.