—From the Blackstone, The Magic Detective radio show
I GOT UP THE PORCH STAIRS, through the door, and past Mrs. Plaut’s door. No problem. I got to my room. Still no problem. I turned on the light. Problem.
I saw it on the small table near the open window. Dash, the orange cat who sometimes permitted me to share the room with him, was sitting on it. The black cardboard covered composition book lay next to the salt and pepper shakers. A sheet of cardboard stood propped between the shakers. On the cardboard was written, Please read before morning. Breakfast at eight. It was signed, Irene Plaut.
“No way out of it,” I told Dash, who licked his left front paw.
I undressed down to my underwear, felt the stubble on my chin, filled a bowl with milk for Dash, and poured myself a big helping of Wheaties and milk.
Then I sat to eat, read, and wonder about the latest addition to Mrs. Plaut’s family history.
WOOLEY AND THE BEAR
Brother Wooley was not one to shrink from his duty or a battle with fists or bottles or anything that was helpless. Wooley toward the end of the days the good lord had given him on this orb of woes and frequent joy did shrink a bit but that was because of lumbago.
Be that as it may my brother Wooley who was as skinny as a dandelion stem was at the London Zoo. In truth Wooley had yellow hair and looked much like a dandelion if one applied one’s imagination. This may account for why my aunt Evangeline called Wooley “the wilted flower of the family.” Aunt Evangeline was a tsk-tsker. To Aunt Evangeline everything was a shame or a sin or both. Aunt Evangeline simply called me “Poor Irene.” Then she would shake her head and tsk-tsk. Aunt Evangeline was loath to explain. Aunt Evangeline would not say. This concerned me for many a year but a distant cousin named Sarah Free-homver from Sandusky Ohio did later tell me that Aunt Evangeline had met her but once and said to her upon taking her hand, “I’m so sorry.” Sarah Freemhover was not at all sure what Aunt Evangeline was sorry about and she never did explain.
Wooley had a greasy order of fish and chips wrapped in newspaper that he ate as he ambulated around the zoo. He ate the fish and chips not the newspaper. Do not misunderstand. Wooley was thin and bemused but he was not a simpleton.
He stopped before a cage behind whose bars sat a very large brown bear. People passed pausing only to glance upon the poor creature. It was a hot summer day. The bear just sat. When no one was about Wooley said, “Like some fish and chips?”
The bear looked at Wooley and Wooley threw him the wrapped-up newspaper containing one reasonably sized piece of cod and some fried potatoes. The bear picked up the newspaper and said “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Wooley and walked away so the bear could eat with some privacy. It was only after he had walked approximately forty paces and was looking at nervous wolf that Wooley realized that the bear had spoken.
Wooley turned and went back to the bear’s cage. The creature had finished the fish and chips and the newspaper it had been wrapped in was nowhere in sight which led Wooley to the immediate conclusion that this talking bear had eaten the newspaper as Wooley had not done.
“You spoke,” said Wooley.
Three people in addition to my second eldest brother were now standing in front of the cage. The three people were a man and a woman and their small daughter. It might have been their granddaughter. Wooley was not concentrating on them. They were concentrating upon him after he had addressed the bear.
The bear looked at Wooley and licked its paw.
Wooley looked at the three other people before the cage and said “He talked. I gave him fish and chips and he talked. He said ‘thank you.’”
“Polite bear,” said the man ushering wife and daughter or granddaughter away. The child may in fact have been a niece or a neighbor’s child or even a foundling they had taken in but that is no matter.
When they were gone Wooley again addressed the bear. “You can talk?”
The bear looked at the roof of his cage.
Wooley urged the bear to talk again, even promised him more fish and chips. Wooley believed the bear was considering the offer. Wooley pleaded.
“If you don’t talk I’ll spend my life thinking I am a lunatic.”
The bear didn’t answer.
Wooley believes he raised his voice to the creature. So intent was he that he would not have noticed the three men in blue zoo uniforms running toward him. He turned only because the bear said, “Look out,” and looked toward the men in blue zoo uniforms who now took hold of Wooley’s arms.
“Did you hear that?” Wooley asked the men, one of whom smelled of something vile, perhaps a Dromedary, which I understand is one of the most vile smelling of God’s creatures.
“Heard what?” asked the man with bad breath.
“The bear spoke,” said Wooley. “He told me you were coming.”
“And here we are” said the man with bad breath. “Let’s go to the office and discuss this curious phenomenon.”
Wooley was taken to the office of the keeper of the London zoo who was fat and sassy and grumpy. Wooley was a man of great conviction and determination and given to the truth that our mother had told us would keep us in good stead with the Lord and with our fellow man because once you started lying it was close to impossible to remember all of your lies.
Only a part of an hour earlier Wooley had been thinking of getting to a job interview. Wooley was an accomplished mandolin player. He could play the banjo too and was known in the family and beyond for his fast moving version of Waiting For The Robert E. Lee alternating between instruments.
“The bear spoke to me,” said Wooley.
“She spoke to you,” said the zookeeper.
“Yes,” said Wooley.
“No, I mean the bear is female,” said the zoo director.
“She spoke to me,” Wooley repeated reaching up to adjust his hat, which had been jostled by the three men in blue zoo uniforms.
“She did not speak,” said the zoo director turning red.
Wooley said nothing. Stubborn ignorance cannot be overcome by the word of even the most truthful of men.
“The bear has been with us for two years and has never spoken,” the zoo director said trying to appear calm in the face of honest certainty.
“There was the little lad about two months back who said the bear said Thank you.”
“Yes,” said Wooley. “That is what the bear said to me.”
“The little boy also said that one of the elephants threw a clump of dung at him” said the zoo director who glared at his employee. “You may either leave now and never return to the zoo or we will call the authorities and have you taken to the hospital.”
“I am not ill.”
“You are deluded, sir. Perhaps you have been drinking.”
Well Wooley had successfully imbibed a wide swath of spirits over the course of his adulthood and perhaps even a bit before that but that morning he was sober and had drunk nothing but very ill-tasting English coffee.
Wooley chose to go to the hospital rather than be banished from the zoo though as it turned out the zookeeper had not given him a choice at all because he still ordered that Wooley was not to enter the zoo again.
Wooley passed three weeks in the hospital proving to the doctors and nurses and alienists that he was of sound mind if fragile body except for his insistence that he had heard the bear speak. They allowed him to leave. The job with the dance band no longer existed. Wooley could have come home but he got a job waiting tables at a restaurant called the Chicago Bar & Grill.
When he was not working Wooley would attempt to get back in the zoo and talk to the bear. He climbed fences, crawled under bushes, took to wearing disguises including that of a Zooave and a pregnant woman, but it was all to no avail. He would always get within approach to the bear cage and be apprehended by one of the guards who had been assigned on a rotating basis to watch for him.
Twice his eyes met those of the bear but the creature did not spe
ak. One time the bear had a paw over his eyes as if trying to keep out the sight of Wooley being caught.
Wooley was never the same. The same as what you may ask. The same as he had been before being spoken to by a bear.
Eventually my brother Ezra and my cousin Matthew went to England at the expense of the London zoo to escort a recalcitrant Wooley back to the shores of our great land.
Wooley moved to Denver, obtained employment at a restaurant, saved his money, and bought a very old bear from a traveling carnival. He shared a one-room house with the bear and ended his days attempting to teach the bear to speak. He failed but he did learn to love the bear who had come to him with the name Bruno but which he changed to Ernest.
Love comes to us in strange and mysterious ways. Amen.
The night was filled with dreams of talking bears, bears in tuxedoes performing magic tricks, bears sawing other bears in skirts in half to an audience of bears applauding almost silently with their padded paws. Bears wearing turbans with green stones. And there I was onstage, the only human—if indeed human I be—waiting my turn in a line of bears to be sawed in half, evaporated, decapitated, eviscerated, levitated or, if they figured out I wasn’t a bear, masticated.
“Your first time?” asked the bear in front of me in line offstage.
“Yes,” I said.
“Just don’t let them shoot you,” the bear said. “Blackstone the Bear can shoot straight. Killed more bears last year than all the hunters west of the Mississippi. Bear that in mind.”
The other bears laughed, and then I was in bed sleeping. The three bears came up to me. Papa Bear leaned over and I felt a dry tongue on my face. I opened my eyes. Dash was looking down at me with his round green eyes. The sun was coming through the window. My Beech-Nut Gum wall clock said it was almost seven-thirty.
I rolled over, got to my knees, stiff, sore, and wounded, stood and said to Dash, “So far so good.”
Then I rolled up the thin mattress on the floor, put it in the corner, dressed quickly, pants not terribly in need of pressing, fresh white shirt, and rewarded Dash with a bowl of corn flakes and milk.
At seven-thirty, the door to my room flew open. I was ready. Mrs. Plaut, broom in hand, looked down at where I would normally be lying on my back, eyes closed.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully.
She turned her eyes to where I sat at the small table near the window.
“You are fully awake,” she said with a hint of suspicion.
“That I am,” I said.
“Have you been carousing all night instead of reading my pages?”
“I have not been carousing,” I said. “I’ve been getting shot, but I read your pages. Fascinating.”
She adjusted her glasses.
“Wooley is an interesting character,” I said.
“Breakfast in twenty-two minutes,” she said. She seemed maybe a little disgruntled at not having her ritual morning moment of terrorizing me into wakefulness. Then she stopped and faced me again, supporting herself with the broom, which was only a little narrower than she was.
“Wooley was not interesting,” she said. “He spent his life in family exile in Americus, Georgia, serving as assistant to a half-mad pharmacist named Spaulding.”
“But the bear, England?” I said.
“Wooley never was in England,” she said.
“You made it up?”
“Invention is the parent of truth,” she said.
“Who said that?”
“I just did,” said Mrs. Plaut.
I looked at Dash. He turned his head away and leaped onto the window ledge and leapt to the tree. Stiff, sore, and shoulder aching, I had neither the agility nor opportunity for such an escape.
“So none of the business about Wooley and the bear is true?”
“Not a lick,” she said.
“What about all the other stories about your family?”
“All true,” she said with indignation. “Every last word. What do you take me for Mr. Peelers?”
“But Wooley?”
“I felt the tome needed spicing up,” she said. “My imagination is futile.”
“Fertile,” I corrected.
“Breakfast this a.m. is Treet omelets accompanied by margarine-fried diced carrots gently mixed in,” she said. “There will also be an announcement of consequence.”
And she was gone.
That gave me time to shave, rub some Kreml in my hair, change the Band-Aid covering the pellet hole in my shoulder, wince a few times, wash, avoid my battered image in the mirror, and knock at Gunther’s door.
“Enter Toby,” he said.
“You know my knock,” I said, opening the door.
“I know that it is nearly eight and that Mrs. Plaut does not knock,” he said.
He was dressed in his usual three-piece, perfectly pressed custom-made suit. Since he was a little over three and a half feet tall, all his clothes had to be custom made, right down to his silk ties and leather shoes.
“Treet omelets this a.m.,” I said.
“Such a culinary delight is not to be missed,” Gunther said.
“And Mrs. Plaut says she has an announcement of consequence.”
“Then we should be at the table at the stroke of the hour,” said Gunther, rising from the chair at his desk and putting aside the book he had been holding.
At Mrs. Plaut’s dining-room table sat Ben Bidwell, the one-armed fortyish automobile salesman, and Emma Simcox, a light-skinned, shy pretty Negro who Mrs. Plaut said was her niece. I never asked about this relationship. I had the feeling that one night I would come home to an explanation of the Simcox connection in a chapter of Mrs. Plaut’s never-ending, and now fictionalized, memoirs.
Gunther and I sat. Bidwell and Emma were next to each other. He wore a grin. She wore a smile. Coffee was on the table.
“War’ll be over soon,” said Bidwell.
“Looks that way,” I said.
“Then we’ll have to deal with the national debt,” said Bidwell. “Two hundred and sixty billion dollars. How are we going to deal with that, I ask you?”
“There has been a meeting of forty-four nations at the Mt. Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire,” said Gunther. “A World Bank has been established. National debts are on the agenda.”
“That a fact?” said Bidwell with admiration.
“It is,” said Gunther solemnly.
Mrs. Plaut came in with omelet plates, placing one in front of each of us. It rated “A” for smell and something murky down the alphabet for looks. The omelets were a rainbow mixture of tree bark brown, burnt carrot orange, egg yellow, and speckled hints of some dark herb.
“Before we eat,” she said. “The announcement.”
In the sitting room behind us, Mrs. Plaut’s bird from hell began screeching.
“Ignore Jacob,” Mrs. Plaut said.
Gunther and I looked at her.
“Great,” I said.
“The changing of his name is not the announcement,” she said. “My niece and Mr. Bidwell are officially engaged,” Mrs. Plaut said.
Bidwell smiled. Emma blushed. He took her hand.
“Congratulations,” said Gunther.
“Congratulations,” I echoed.
“Nuptials on January 2 of the coming year,” said Mrs. Plaut. “In the parlor. All invited. Gifts mandatory.”
The doorbell was ringing. Mrs. Plaut didn’t hear it.
“I will begin preparing the menu,” Mrs. Plaut said. “You may eat now.”
The doorbell rang again.
The omelet was damned good.
The doorbell kept ringing. Mrs. Plaut was obviously not wearing her hearing aid.
“The door, Aunt Irene,” Emma said, standing.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Plaut, a forkful of omelet moving toward her mouth.
Emma left the room and passed through the sitting room, sending Jacob into a new frenzy of screeches.
When she returned to the room, Harry B
lackstone was at her side. He was wearing a dark suit and red tie. His hair was brushed back and he reminded me of Adolph Menjou.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” he said.
“We are not in the market this morning for brushes, vacuum cleaners, knife sharpenings, or the like,” Mrs. Plaut said, turning to him.
“This is Harry Blackstone,” I said. “The magician.”
My announcement brought a smile from Bidwell and Emma and a look of respect from Gunther. It also brought a strange look to the face of Mrs. Plaut, who did not turn to face him. I thought she hadn’t heard me. I introduced everyone. When I got to Mrs. Plaut, she kept her back turned and held up a hand to acknowledge the magician’s presence.
“Would you like to join us?” Emma asked.
“I’ve eaten, thank you,” said Blackstone. “I must talk to Mr. Peters.” And then, to me, he said, “Something new has come up.”
“Let’s go in the other room,” I said, getting up.
Mrs. Plaut was still turned away. As I started to lead Blackstone out of the dining room, she made the mistake of turning her head to watch us.
Blackstone looked at her for an instant. She turned away and then he paused to look again.
“Irene Adaire,” he said.
Mrs. Plaut concentrated on her Treet omelet.
“You are Irene Adaire,” he said, looking at Mrs. Plaut.
We all looked at Mrs. Plaut.
“You’re the widow of Simon Adaire,” he said.
“I look nothing like her,” Mrs. Plaut said, head down.
“I can’t be mistaken,” Blackstone said, moving around the table, standing between Bidwell and Emma to look at Mrs. Plaut. “The birthmark on the back of your hand is unmistakable.”
Mrs. Plaut shifted the fork from her right to her left hand and put the right hand on her lap out of sight.
“I’ve been searching for her for forty years,” Blackstone said, looking at me.
Now You See It: A Toby Peters Mystery Page 7