The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels

by De Vries, Peter

  At last Bester said: “Why don’t we shoot him both ways and see what we think then. Let me call prop and see if they’ve got both.”

  That was the decision that was reached. The property department had a flower cart, or at least a pushcart convertible to the purpose, as well as enough wax blooms of the sort required for the effect wanted. A bona fide popcorn-and-peanut wagon would take a little digging up. But they could shoot with the flower cart any time they wanted. Stage Five was free right now. So they all rose, including Tattersall who was on hand for the conference, and trooped down to the studios. There he was turned over to costume and makeup men, and after half an hour led out onto a sound stage for a screen test.

  He had been put into dark work pants and denim shirt, with bright red and blue striped suspenders. The traditional bandana kerchief was knotted around his neck. His naturally wavy, and naturally abundant, black hair had been additionally frizzed upward at the ends with a curling iron, and a set of handlebar mustaches affixed to his upper lip. Lumpkin had distinctly not wanted to see him—or, rather, hear him—in a preliminary test as himself. Whether he was photogenic as himself was not the point. He wanted to see him cold, as the character he was intended to portray. “I want an ear of corn,” he frankly warned them all. “I want schmalz, though without hokum. No hokum, but honest schmalz. I want an ear of corn.” He was not laughing now. This was all heart.

  The opening shot was of an empty street against the rising sun. A long vista, held for a moment, with no sign of human life. It was dawn. Then against this painted backdrop Tattersall materialized dramatically into view out of a side street, rounding the corner as he sang a chorus of Santa Lucia, pushing a cartful of violets and potted geraniums before him, head-on into the audience. He looked from left to right and back again as he sang, as to neighborhood folk gathered at the curb to listen, or to listeners hanging from upper-story windows. “Home of fair poesy, land of pure harmony,” he sang, his voice rising sweet and thrilling on the morning air. His very tones evoked the virgin clarity of sunrise. The choice of theme song had struck Lumpkin as better than his original inspiration, There’s a Long Long Trail.

  It would be twenty-four hours before they could see the rushes, but everyone watching behind the glass panel was cautiously excited. It was an excitement borne out by the result. This was a find. Only one thing persistently troubled Lumpkin—the choice of a theme song. He didn’t like Santa Lucia any better than he did Long, Long Trail, or My Little Gray Home in the West either, for that matter. Kohler came up with a suggestion. “How about the Neapolitan Street Song?” he said. “After all he is a street singer, and with a certain Latin flavor. What could be more natural?”

  They did a take on it, and it came out quite well. Again, though, Lumpkin was dubious about something. This time it was the contents of the pushcart.

  “I’m not sure flowers are quite it,” he said. “Neither is the peanut vendor. Simplicity but not fragility, is what I want. Earthiness. I want it strong.”

  The flowers were removed, and, almost extemporaneously, several stalks of bananas were flung onto the cart. Everyone smiled. This was it.

  Thus was born the little Italian huckster known to millions who, weary of a world of strife as well as of the bewildering accumulations and accelerations of the Space Age, turned on their television sets at six o’clock every Wednesday evening for a quarter-hour’s respite in his simple songs. He both came out of the dawn singing, “Napoli … Napoli …” and vanished into the sunset doing so, leaving the sense of a simple workaday’s joy in between. The fadeout was a last-minute inspiration of Bester’s, incorporated barely in time for the three weeks of regional trials with which the show was to be test-marketed in smaller stations in out-of-the-way places. Reactions to the pilot programs were all that the sponsors and producers had hoped. They signed Tattersall for thirteen weeks, with option to renew.

  He threw himself as heartily into his new identity in real life as he did before the cameras. The day the contracts were signed he hurried home clutching a posy of violets, and nothing would do but that he and Sherry go out and celebrate. He was growing his own mustache now, training the ends upward rather than in the handlebar style. “We make lots a da mon,” he said, throwing his arms around her. “We have lots a da fun.”

  The occasion struck him as calling for a spaghetti house of which he had heard a good deal, known as Mama Bellini’s. He proposed to her in the cab going over. It was love at first sight, he said, when he saw her in a new rose-colored dress, with her hair cropped and swept back from the temples in a fresh way, and he hoped it was the same with her. “We get a married,” he said. “We live a happy. This time it’s a work.”

  Mama Bellini was a clucking, hovering maternal sort who sent over a bottle of Chianti when she learned they had just become engaged. A fiddler on duty leaned across the table and scraped out a chorus of O Sole Mio, in which Tattersall joined. “We have bambino in eight, nine months,” Tattersall said, causing both Mama Bellini and Sherry to blush. Mama Bellini waddled up a flight of stairs to her flat above, and returned with a pair of white booties which she pressed into Sherry’s hand. She would not hear of their being refused, for, though a kind of family heirloom, they were only one of a dozen circulating pairs she had knitted in her time, as matriarch of a clan now numbering upwards of thirty grandchildren. Her husband, Guido, was dead. Looking narrowly at Sherry, she said, “You’re not Italian.”

  “No,” Tattersall answered for her. “I marry high. I marry a fancy,” and gave Mama Bellini a winking nudge. He summoned the waiter and ordered zabaglione for two. “And I think a bottle of Asti Spumone.”

  “If you mean Asti Spumante, the Italian champagne, yes, we’ve got that cold,” the waiter said.

  “That will be fine.”

  Home again, Tattersall sat at the piano polishing up some of the songs agreed on for his repertoire. He wore a silk dressing gown and smoked a big cigar. Midway through The Spanish Cavalier, he happened to glance into a wall mirror and saw the reflection of Sherry sitting in a chair. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she was watching him without expression. Aware that he was returning her gaze, she rose and excused herself. “I think I’ll go to bed,” she said.

  To say that Tattersall lost himself in the role is to mean that he found himself in it. He became the simple wop huckster of the side streets, flinging his melodic gold to the very rooftops. He threw himself into the songs as one might throw himself into the water, with total immersion. Till performance and actuality became one, as they often do in what is called real life. The distinction between reality and illusion vanished nicely. Around the studio, he had the flamboyance that often goes with simplicity. He became known for his outbursts of Latin temper. When warned that his singing was taking on too much art, too much conscious poise and polish, and faced with the insinuation that he was taking lessons on the sly, thereby putting his whole quality in jeopardy, he reported, “That’s a big lie! That’s a false a hood!” He made a rather convincing little dago at that. It was the Celtic strain in his mixed English heritage, through which had been passed along the liquid eyes and the twisted raven locks.

  Since Double W still handled the commercials for the show—simple straightforward squibs as befit its nature—he could not always avoid seeing his former associates from the agency, nor, indeed, did he try. He never encountered the Wurlitzers, either of them, but he did Crowley and Mayo. He ran into Mayo while on his way to lunch and, since she was alone, invited her to join him. She demurred at first, shifting the strap of her bag nervously on her shoulder, but sensing that his own manner was now free of constraint, she finally agreed, and permitted herself to be whisked by cab to a nearby spaghetti house which he fancied. He recommended the spaghetti Caruso there.

  “How’s things with the jet set?” he asked at long last, swabbing up sauce with a crust of bread. The time it had taken him to raise the point, as well as the negligent fashion in which he did, indicated how little he ca
red. “They still like horses and buggies?”

  Mayo smiled into her virtually untouched plate, twining a few strands of spaghetti around her fork. She wore the silver-white lipstick then in vogue, almost like aluminum radiator paint, and its pallor gave her a vulnerable, even helpless look, as of one easily victimized. By shifting the subject onto her novel, through a tranquil murmur about the impossibility of ever really pinning down where your ideas came from, she gave the scene the quality of a dream they were jointly dreaming. Paying only the vaguest heed to what were in fact dwindling echoes of classroom days, Tattersall wished her luck with the book when it was finally published, at the same time trying to catch the waiter’s eye. This was an implied but clear declaration that he did not in the least regret the informed civilities and behavioral restraints prevailing in the days when he had been an Anglo-Saxon. “In the end all art is, you know, autobiographical,” Mayo said as he screwed about in his chair with a hand half-raised in readiness to flag the elusive waiter. Something he had completely forgotten chose that moment in which to pop curiously to mind again. In the opera, Gioconda was a street singer.

  “Didn’t Flaubert even say ‘Emma Bovary c’est moi’?” Mayo whispered on about literary matters.

  He nodded vaguely, making a chucking noise in order to dislodge something from his side teeth, at the same time brushing his verdant mustachios upward with his forefinger. He was quite right in offering himself as free of complexity now. He no longer wrote himself upbraiding letters. Those wearing analytical diatribes had ceased to encumber his mail. To the last, long screed from the Doppelgänger calling him “without a doubt the greatest single pseudo-sado-masochistic self-castigator around,” he had merely tersely replied, “Sounds a great.”

  He made every effort to see to it that Sherry rode the crest of this wave with him. He liked to have her around for the shootings—for the show was taped—and after each one they would hurry off to one or another of the steadily proliferating “their” places for lunch or dinner, as the occasion befell. The thirteen weeks were renewed, then renewed again, making for the customary year of thirty-nine, to be followed by a summer replacement.

  They spent the summer in Italy, flying to Rome and then meandering by rented car through the countryside from one fabled city to another. They spent wildly. He threw his money around. They bought lace in Naples, crystal in Venice, linens in Florence, and art objects everywhere. Their air express bill alone was staggering. Henrico developed quite a tire around his middle from all the rich food. Their lunches were dinners, their dinners banquets. They made a prolonged stay in Padua, which he had adopted as his birthplace. He remembered, from a previous incarnation long, long ago, a college musical for which he had written the lyrics. The story had loosely concerned a pair of lovers traveling with the international set, as it was then called, with episodes giving the flavor of different cities through which they passed on their madcap rounds. One had concerned Padua, and Tattersall had written patter rhymes running: “Well, here we are again in Padua. Now, darling, don’t be madua back again in Padua. You should be very, very gladua with me again in Padua. How very, very badua not to be more gladua, instead of being sadua, back once again in Padua …” It had been pointed out to him that Cole Porter had worked in much this same vein, a rotten coincidence that had left a bad taste in his mouth and nearly put him out of sorts with the whole show. Sitting in a café now, all these years later, he could smile at the memory. Padua was their last stop but one before flying home again. There, they relived their enchanted summer unpacking the treasures they had amassed on it.

  Then as suddenly as it had all sprung up the whole thing collapsed. It burst like a bubble.

  Henrico, as he was called, went on the air again late that September, along with all the returning fall shows and all the new ones. But from the very first broadcasts there was a noticeable, indeed a marked, drop in his Trendex. He laid it partly to stupidity in the choice of his summer replacement, namely a quartet of the barbershop variety dear to Lumpkin, so close in essential feeling to the Singing Huckster that, when he went back on, it was to face a public suddenly glutted with heart, with folk art, with nostalgic innocence. They were sick to death of the peddler and his Neapolitan Street Song. They were sick of his pushcart and the humble streets down which he trundled it where the heart of humanity beat. They were sick of the sight of him and the sound of him. His Trendex skidded and slid like a boulder bouncing down a mountainside. His contract was canceled. He was out on the street.

  He and Sherry had saved very little when they were riding high, and soon found themselves trying to live on her money, a precarious existence at best. Bitterness with his summary dismissal rankled. He had forgotten there was a clause in the contract giving his sponsors the right to cancel it; not renewing was the worst he had thought they could do. Flareups of Mediterranean temper were frequent, though no longer of any avail in the circumstances. They did not even serve to relieve his own feelings of resentment, which deepened and festered inside him. He tried to reach Lumpkin whenever he heard he was in town, and even once or twice by long-distance telephone at his Chicago office, without success. Lumpkin was always “out” once the secretary was onto who was calling. He was in conference, or auditioning a Swiss yodeler, or a family of German bellringers. In the end Lumpkin signed on a Gospel singer for eleven in the morning, whose theme song was Beulah Land. By that time Tattersall had already returned to coping with the problem of making a living.

  On being fired, he had been given the pushcart as a souvenir. It was his to keep. One morning he rose early and trundled it to a nearby produce market. He filled it with fruits and vegetables and set off among the back streets.

  The first few days he fared poorly. He laid it to his lack of experience, the time it naturally takes to get the hang of anything—until he remembered something he had learned in his days in show biz. It is that you can’t confuse people. He made the mistake of continuing to sing. This made him both a singer and a vendor—therefore neither. Those who might have thrown him a coin or two for his songs refrained from doing so because they assumed he made his living as a huckster. Housewives who might otherwise have emerged to haggle in a neighborly fashion with him over his wares could not take him seriously, or rather had no faith in merchandise he apparently needed to throw in songs to sell. On the air he had been clearly a singer—the good folk seen buying his produce were not real, merely atmospheric. In real life he must be one or the other. So he stopped singing, except to bawl out “Bananas, string beans, sweet corn! Get your fresh fruits and vegetables here!” in his rich voice, to announce his approach in the peddler’s immemorial cry.

  He soon learned the neighborhoods in which he could most lucratively ply his trade, where there were fewer stores in competition, where the housewives liked him best and he them, and so on. There are always streets and alleys up which the hawker does better than others, and his route readily crystallized around them. One street skirted a large university campus, and under its shady maples Tattersall loved to pause. He grew fond of the students who stopped to buy an apple or a banana, or a few figs, or, in the case of girls who were married and did their own cooking, more substantial provisions. Many would stop to chat, having grown fond of the little immigrant from Padua. He amused them with his stories, and talked often about his beloved birthplace nestled among the vine-clad hills of northern Italy. Particularly, they found his salty, straightforward blend of quaintness and assertiveness much to their taste. His unfamiliarity with the American idiom especially endeared him to the young students. “I like to stop with da kids and chew a da cloth,” he would say, provoking gales of affectionate laughter from them.

  Tattersall’s ability to sustain this level was not matched by his wife, or appreciated by her. Loyally as she exemplified the breed of woman who lives absolutely in and for her husband, the number and variety of identities with which she was called upon to amalgamate her own became finally too much. He came home one afternoon to f
ind her soberly having a drink.

  “I had lunch with Lucy today to talk about you. She called me, actually, to discuss it. She’s been discussing it with Mayo, of course Harry, and lots of others. They’re all pretty much agreed. They’ve got a theory that it’s all an act.”

  “Act?”

  “Yes. Some kind of put-on. A devastating satire aimed at all of them, in which you’re trying to say they’re all hucksters. Or we’re all hucksters.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about those literary a symbolism.”

  Devastating, at any rate, was the sequel to the exchange, introduced by Sherry as preparation for her plan. She said the next day: “I think I should go see my mother again. She’s not well, so probably I’ll stay a little longer this time.” She took most of her clothes and drove off in the car, which was in her name.

  Her departure brought Tattersall up with a start. He quite appreciated her point of view, and saw the necessity of digging his heels in and arresting the long decline that had led to it, and then of reversing it. In a decision aimed at winning her back, he quit peddling, sold the pushcart, shaved off his mustache and got his hair cut, and resolved henceforth to accept only white-collar jobs.

  A friend in the state highway department got him work writing safety slogans for use on turnpikes and parkways. “Anxious to get there? Slow down,” was an example of the maxims he coined in that capacity—a short-lived one since the demand was naturally limited and the pay slight, the work being assumed on a freelance basis. On the same basis he next turned out witticisms for the Standard Oil people. These were the humorous one- or two-line pleasantries that greet patrons and passing motorists from the bulletin boards of filling stations throughout the country. Tattersall’s aphorisms were a cut above what is usually found there, but unsuitable on other grounds, or perhaps for that reason. A typical sample was, “Marriage is for two people who want each other the worst way”—a tone somewhat more sardonic than the traffic would bear, at least the traffic typified by average American Sunday drivers—to say nothing of refinery executives. A warning, in effect putting him “on probation,” only served to sharpen the cynicism and deepen the pessimism with which the epigrams were already imbued. They grew in blackness and obliquity both, as had the commercials before them. The author was judged as harboring too bitter a vision of reality for the Standard Oil people, and he was let go. The last straw was: “Your Casanova type doesn’t really like women. Screw them all is in effect his motto.” It was really the last shot, fired in the knowledge that he was going to be fired.