The Feather Merchants

by Max Shulman

I unbuttoned my collar.

  “I was an unwanted child. My father was seventy-five years old when I was born; my mother, who had married young and against the wishes of her parents, who had in mind for her a local abstract clerk named Fender, was sixty-three. Seven brothers had preceded me. The youngest was thirty-two when I was born. The next to the oldest, who suffered from a bad heart, had dropped dead upon hearing the results of the 1936 presidential election. An avid believer in the Literary Digest, he had wagered his wife’s legacy, plus whatever he could borrow on his car, a Plymouth, on Landon to win.

  “Well, there I was. My mother had become unused to children in the previous thirty years, and, moreover, her temper had grown short because of an irritating fixation of my father’s that the man across the street, an inoffensive varnish remover named McIlhenny, was Judge Crater.

  “To say that I was unwelcome would be understating the case. In many ways, both subtle and direct, it was made plain to me that I was an interloper. My first three years, the most formative period in my life, were a veritable hell. I was made to dress in severe black costumes. My appearance on the street was the signal for gales of derisive laughter from my fellows. All the children in the neighborhood called me ‘the bastid.’

  “As soon as they considered it feasible, my parents began to send me away alone on long trips. Stationmasters in far places came to recognize me, a thin, sad-eyed child carrying a well-worn valise. I stayed for varying periods with aunts, uncles, distant cousins, and occasionally, through a wrong train connection, with total strangers. Most of my hosts were frankly hostile, but even worse were some Los Angeles relatives who oozed pity and tried to convert me to membership in their religious sect, the tenets of which were diaphragm breathing and washing the feet of wayfarers forcibly if necessary. Wherever I went I was commonly called ‘the bastid.’

  “This went on for years, I bounding like a cosmic shuttlecock from one coast to another, passing through the dangerous pubic years with no mother to guide me, my schooling confined entirely to the reading of Gideon Bibles, magazines abandoned in railroad cars, haphazard encyclopedias sold by aging men working their ways through colleges to relatives at whose homes I was a scarcely welcome guest. Yes, I grew bitter. Anything of flesh and blood would have.

  “And then once I returned home to find myself an orphan. My father had died of a uremic disorder, gasping with his last breath, ‘You fools! Crater’s across the street!’ My mother married Mr. McIlhenny shortly thereafter and, weakened by the excesses of a honeymoon in the winter of her life, languished and died within three months.

  “At last I was free. Ha! Free! Free to do what? The habits of a lifetime, my friend, are not lightly cast aside. So here I am again, traveling to visit relatives who don’t want to see me, whom I don’t want to see. Free! Ha!

  “But why am I telling you all this?”

  Why, indeed?

  But now, since I had joined the Army, I could sleep anyplace, trains included.

  Which I did unbrokenly between Wichita and Kansas City.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Several hundred people poured off the train at Kansas City. A single redcap stood on the platform. “Attention!” he called. “Cripples and women past sixty step one pace forward.”

  Whoever fell into those categories complied. The redcap collected their bags. The rest of us carried our own.

  The Rocket for Minneapolis did not leave until noon, and it was only nine o’clock. I checked my bags and got shaved by a lady barber named Delilah who complimented me on the texture and consistency of my skin and mentioned that she had little, if anything, to do these evenings. Taking my pointed silence for shyness, she invited me to come up to her place for a home-cooked meal, after which she would show me how to hone a razor properly. “Full many a razor has been ruined by improper honing,” she said thickly, dusting my face lingeringly with talc and slipping into the pocket of my blouse a card on which was written her name, address, telephone number, and this admonition: “If not at home the first time, TRY, TRY AGAIN.”

  At noon the train caller announced, not without pride, that the Rocket was on time. There followed a charge of an intensity not seen since the Cimarron was opened. The train seats were filled in an instant. Nimble young men leaped into the baggage racks and were shortly joined by a contingent of lithe, long-flanked girls returning to college after the Easter holidays. Next the aisles were jammed with passengers sitting on upended suitcases. A young devotee of group singing whipped a harmonica from his pocket and started to play “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” With many cries of “What the hell. War is war,” the passengers joined the singing, except for a group of marines, piled like cordwood in the rear of the car, who stoutly sang “From the Halls of Montezuma.” The conductor, grown grizzled in the service of the line, came upon the scene and frankly wept.

  Aloof in his Diesel sanctum, the engineer released the throttle or whatever the hell they do, and the train rolled forward.

  I had just come from six months in Oklahoma, which is a dry state. In Oklahoma, if you want some whisky, you go to the nearest hotel and ask the bellboy for a pint. There is a little good-natured formality that you go through before you get it. He asks what kind you want. You say Old Schenley or Ancient Age or Four Roses or some such name. Then he goes down to the basement and finds an empty bottle of the brand you named. He fills that from his gallon jug of moonshine. He brings it to you; you give him five dollars, and after a few secretive winks and expressive smackings of lips you slink off to a dark room and bolt the swill as quickly as you can.

  Frequently, as I had lain on an Oklahoma floor waiting for welcome paralysis and oblivion, I had mused about the wet and dissolute North where a man can order a highball and sit in a clean, well-lighted place sipping, smoking, making small talk, and looking out the windows at passers-by as frankly as if he lived a good life. I had promised myself that the very first time I left Oklahoma I would hit the nearest bar to luxuriate in a resumption of what I liked to think of as civilized lushing.

  Always one to keep promises of this nature, I squirmed out from under two women officers who had abused their ranks somewhat and were sitting on my lap and hacked my way to the club car.

  A group of friendly revelers made room for me at their table. “Sit down, Sarge,” invited a jovial, round man.

  By the time we had reached the Iowa line we were all fast friends. The globular fellow who had invited me to sit down was Leo Nine, a Southern congressman and author of such legislation as the Nine-Estes bill to tax Negroes for not voting, the Nine-Coy bill to sell Ellis Island, and the Nine-Carruthers bill to pay schoolteachers. He was on his way to Minnesota for a farm-bloc conference where it was planned to find a new and imaginative interpretation of parity.

  Miss Spinnaker, the lady in the party, was a maiden teacher of English at the Harold Stassen High School in Minneapolis. Two men completed the group—Mr. Torkelbergquist, a Minneapolis rubber-goods dealer, and Señor Rarrara, a South American commercial attaché.

  The afternoon passed with drinking and conversation. Leo Nine told of crowded Washington conditions and how he himself had scarcely been able to find lodgings. Only after many days of searching, he said, was he able to sublease an apartment from three horribly scarred women who were in Washington posing for propaganda posters.

  Torkelbergquist explained the rising birth rate as a consequence of the rubber shortage, speaking, out of deference to Miss Spinnaker, in oblique terms. He had grave Malthusian fears about the outcome of the situation and after a few drinks hinted delicately at regulated female infanticide.

  Señor Rarrara told of his country’s war effort. Their air force, he said, had lately acquired several pusher-type biplanes and the slingshots of two divisions of infantry had already been replaced with muzzle-loaders. As for their navy—Rarrara chuckled ominously—let any U-boat venture up the Orinoco and it was a dead pigeon.

  I looked at posters on three sides of me which proclaimed in tur
n “LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS,” “THE ENEMY IS LISTENING,” and “NORTH AND SOUTH, KEEP SHUT THE MOUTH,” and I said nothing.

  Also silent was Miss Spinnaker. At first she listened attentively to whoever spoke, smiling or chuckling, whichever was warranted, at the proper points in the narratives. But after a bit her attention started to wander. She smiled at the wrong times and once laughed explosively as Leo Nine described the dignity of Lee’s bearing at Appomattox. A little later she gave up listening altogether and began sticking her ancient legs out in the aisle to trip the colored waiters. When the waiters learned to step carefully over her sere limbs, she turned to sticking her thumb in our drinks when we weren’t looking, and finally to snatching them up and drinking them.

  Chivalrously, these matters were not brought to her attention. The conversation continued. Leo Nine was telling about the pioneer days when his family had crossed the frontier in an Angostura wagon. He had been born on that journey, the tenth child in the family. His father had been a scholar, he explained, and named him Leo, which means ten in Latin. At this point Miss Spinnaker began shouting a raucous ballad entitled “Thirty Years a Chambermaid and Never a Kiss I Got.” Only then was any note taken of her conduct.

  “Really, Miss Spinnaker!” said Leo Nine.

  “I suppose,” she said, “you think I’m just a dried-up old virgin.”

  “Really, Miss Spinnaker!” said Torkelbergquist.

  “I suppose,” she continued, “you think I use a bed just to sleep in.”

  “Really, Miss Spinnaker!” said Rarrara.

  “I suppose you think I don’t know what a roll in the hay is.”

  “Really, Miss Spinnaker!” I said, not caring how many enemy agents heard me.

  She drained all four of our glasses as we sat back aghast. “I’ve worked every cat house from Honolulu to Rio,” she announced. “You look surprised. Well, maybe you won’t be when you see a picture of how I looked in those days.”

  She opened her knitting bag and passed around an old daguerreotype. I am only twenty-four years old, but I know a picture of Lillian Russell when I see one.

  “They called me ‘Hot Helen’ then. Sometimes just ‘Hot.’ I serviced ’em all—kings and stevedores, bankers and draymen. Jim Fisk gave me this.” She showed us a trylon-and-perisphere souvenir ring from the New York World’s Fair. “‘Hot Jim’ I used to call him.”

  She lit a cigarette recklessly.

  “During the Bull Moose convention I did twelve thousand dollars’ business in one night,” she said. “That was my best night, but I had plenty almost as good. Don’t worry, I’ve got a nice little nest egg stashed away in the Morgan bank. Old J.P.’s taking care of it for me. ‘Hot J.P.’ I used to call him.”

  A new waiter walked by, and she tripped him neatly. She reached over and sniped a drink from the next table.

  “I’ve shilled every crooked wheel from Singapore to Hatteras,” she roared. “‘Lucky Lou’ they used to call me. I dealt six-pack bezique to prime ministers and played the shell game with bumpkins. Arnold Rothstein gave me this.” She showed us the ring again.

  “‘Hot Arnold’ I used to call him.

  “Poker, craps, dominoes, faro, blackjack, euchre, red dog—I know ’em all. Name your game, gents. I’ll play any man from any land any game he can name for any amount he can count.”

  She rose unsteadily to her feet. “Wait’ll I go to the toilet, and I’ll tell you all about the days I ran Chinks over the border.”

  She lurched down the aisle. “I once smuggled in Sun Yat-sen. ‘Hot Sun’ I used to call him,” she yelled over her shoulder.

  She stumbled into the nearest lavatory, exiting hurriedly, speeded by the shouts of angry men.

  “Well, gentlemen,” said Leo Nine, “we’re almost in. I guess I’ll be going. Now, you all be sure to look me up when you’re in Washington.”

  “You bet,” we said.

  Torkelbergquist and Rarrara left immediately afterward, each inviting me to look him up.

  “You bet,” I said.

  After a while Miss Spinnaker came walking feebly back. She was very pale. She sank weakly into a chair. “I was told,” she said, “that if you drink a tablespoon of olive oil before you begin, it doesn’t affect you.”

  “It doesn’t work,” I said.

  “No, I suppose not.” She looked at me for a long while. “Weren’t you in my English class a few years ago?”

  “About ten years ago.”

  “Miller,” she said, remembering.” “Harold Miller.”

  “Daniel.”

  “Yes, Daniel. It’s nice seeing you again, Daniel.”

  “Nice to see you too, Miss Spinnaker.”

  “Well, Daniel, do you still remember anything you learned in my English class?”

  “I was just thinking of something I learned there, Miss Spinnaker. The Canterbury Tales.”

  “Why those, Daniel?”

  “Well, that’s what we’ve been doing on the train—travelers telling stories to pass the time away.”

  “Why, so we have,” she said.

  She felt much better.

  We were coming into St. Paul.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  St. Paul, and thirty minutes later Minneapolis. I pressed my nose against the window of the car as though I were a waif and there were pies outside. The thin, tame Mississippi, the green campus of the university, the lines of angry cars honking at grade crossings, the phallic grain elevators, the trackside tenements, the hissing slide into the Minneapolis station: home.

  I could see Mama and Papa on the far end of the station platform as I got off the train. Mama was stopping every man in uniform, peering into his face, and then rejecting him with undisguised disappointment. Papa was looking under the wheels of the train, perhaps thinking that I had ridden the rods home. Mama was beginning to accuse Papa of having come to the wrong station when they finally heard me calling them.

  “My baby!” cried Mama, breaking every record for the fat ladies’ 440 as she rushed toward me. “My soldier!” She threw her arms around me and started to kiss me as Papa circled around looking for my right hand to shake. “Look how skinny!” Mama wailed. “A regular skeleton. Don’t they feed you? Feel, Adam, the ribs.”

  Papa felt. “He’s in shape, that’s all. A soldier.”

  “A shadow. A little nothing,” Mama complained.

  “He’s strong. He looks good,” said Papa stoutly.

  “Half. That’s all there’s left of him. Half.”

  “He looks good,” Papa maintained.

  “Maybe you want to spend the whole night here on the platform?” said Mama to Papa. “Let’s go.”

  In the car, which Papa drove with his customary casual arrogance, the subject of my lost weight was finally dropped. Mama snuggled happily against my shoulder, alternately cooing, “My baby,” and asking such questions as “Who does your laundry?”, “When will you be an officer?”, “Can’t you stay longer than a week?”, and “Where is your gun?”

  Papa, who groundlessly felt a rapport with internal-combustion engines, spoke only of the car. “How’s she ride?” he asked rhetorically. “Smooth, eh? Just had a ring job.”

  He didn’t know a ring from second base.

  “Is gas rationing affecting you much?” I asked.

  He smiled slyly and pointed at the fuel gauge which stood at the “full” mark. “I manage. I manage,” he said with a smirk.

  “You mean black market?” I asked in astonishment. Up to the time I left home the high point in Papa’s lawlessness had been keeping a pencil that a tax assessor had forgotten at our house in 1931, and he would have returned that had not the assessor refused a request to reduce the evaluation of our Steinway on the grounds that nobody in the house could play it.

  “That’s against the law, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Say,” he said, “if they put everybody who patronized black markets in jail, there wouldn’t be anybody left on the outside to keep those on the inside in.”
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  He chuckled, pleased with his joke. Mama smiled wanly, indicating that although she had heard my father’s witticism many times, she still could not deny that it was a good one.

  When we were home Papa took belated cognizance of my majority and mixed me the first highball I had ever had in his presence. Mama went into the kitchen and in a little while called me to a spread which testified that gasoline was not the only commodity these good citizens were buying on the black market. I compounded the felony.

  After dinner Papa, affecting casualness, said, “Come into the den, Dan. I want to show you something.”

  I followed him curiously into a little room under the staircase which heretofore had not been distinguished by such a Better Homes and Gardens-y title as “den.” This cranny had been designed into our home by an uncommunicative architect who had a miserly obsession about waste space. It was not until we had lived in the house several years that the room was discovered, quite by accident, when Papa ripped off a couple of steps after my mother’s persistent complaints that she heard squirrels under the stairs at night. As it turned out, there were no squirrels under the stairs. The sound Mama had heard were small squeals from our maid, an unprincipled baggage named Hulda, who had learned of the room and was using it to further a sordid affair with the grocer’s mentally deficient but physically matured delivery boy.

  Upon entering the belowstairs alcove, I saw immediately that it now deserved to be called a den. All four walls were covered with Mercator projections of the world. A huge globe stood in the center of the floor, and beside it were two leather easy chairs. In the corner was the biggest radio in Minneapolis.

  “Sit down and have a cigar,” said Papa, thinly disguising his pride. “It’s almost time.”

  “Time for what?”

  He held up his right hand for silence and looked at the new wrist watch on his left, like a lieutenant waiting zero hour for a bayonet charge. As the sweep second hand on his watch, which he held so that I could not miss seeing it, indicated thirty seconds until nine o’clock, he attacked the battery of dials on the formidable radio. The monster lit up like a pinball machine. After some crackling and buzzing an announcer’s voice faintly said that A. K. Hockfleisch, whose acquaintance with world affairs was such that he (the announcer) felt an acute sense of inadequacy in attempting to describe it, was about to broadcast.