The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

by James Thurber

  Had Clinigan not become notorious, this prank of Nature would never have been detected, but Clinigan did become notorious and dozens of persons observed that he looked like Bruhl. They saw Clinigan’s picture in the papers the day he was shot, and the day after, and the day after that. Presently someone in the syrup-and-fondant concern mentioned to someone else that Clinigan looked like Mr Bruhl, remarkably like Mr Bruhl. Soon everybody in the place had commented on it, among themselves, and to Mr Bruhl.

  Mr Bruhl rather laughed it off at first, but one day when Clinigan had been in the hospital a week, a cop peered closely at Mr Bruhl when he was on his way home from work. After that, the little treasurer noticed a number of other strangers staring at him with mingled surprise and alarm. One small, dark man hastily thrust a hand into his coat pocket and paled slightly.

  Mr Bruhl began to worry. He began to imagine things. ‘I hope this fellow Clinigan doesn’t pull through,’ he said one morning at breakfast. ‘He’s a bad actor. He’s better off dead.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll pull through,’ said Mrs Bruhl, who had been reading the morning paper. ‘It says here he’ll pull through. But it says they’ll shoot him again. It says they’re sure to shoot him again.’

  The morning after the night that Clinigan left the hospital, secretly, by a side door, and disappeared into the town, Bruhl decided not to go to work. ‘I don’t feel so good today,’ he said to his wife. ‘Would you call up the office and tell them I’m sick?’

  ‘You don’t look well,’ said his wife. ‘You really don’t look well. Get down, Bert,’ she added, for the dog had jumped upon her lap and whined. The animal knew that something was wrong.

  That evening Bruhl, who had mooned about the house all day, read in the papers that Clinigan had vanished, but was believed to be somewhere in the city. His various rackets required his presence, at least until he made enough money to skip out with; he had left the hospital penniless. Rival gangsters, the papers said, were sure to seek him out, to hunt him down, to give it to him again. ‘Give him what again?’ asked Mrs Bruhl when she read this. ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ said her husband.

  It was little Joey, the office boy at the syrup-and-fondant company, who first discovered that Mr Bruhl was afraid. Joey, who went about with tennis shoes on, entered the treasurer’s office suddenly – flung open the door and started to say something.

  ‘Good God!’ cried Mr Bruhl, rising from his chair. ‘Why, what’s the matter, Mr Bruhl?’ asked Joey. Other little things happened. The switchboard girl phoned Mr Bruhl’s desk one afternoon and said there was a man waiting to see him, a Mr Globe. ‘What’s he look like?’ asked Bruhl, who didn’t know anybody named Globe. ‘He’s small and dark,’ said the girl. ‘A small, dark man?’ said Bruhl. ‘Tell him I’m out. Tell him I’ve gone to California.’ The personnel, comparing notes, decided at length that the treasurer was afraid of being mistaken for Shoescar and put on the spot. They said nothing to Mr Bruhl about this, because they were forbidden to by Ollie Breithofter, a fattish clerk who was a tireless and inventive practical joker and who had an idea.

  As the hunt went on for Clinigan and he still wasn’t found and killed, Mr Bruhl lost weight and grew extremely fidgety. He began to figure out new ways of getting to work, one requiring the use of two different ferry lines; he ate his lunch in, he wouldn’t answer bells, he cried out when anyone dropped anything, and he ran into stores or banks when cruising taxi-drivers shouted at him. One morning, in setting the house to rights, Mrs Bruhl found a revolver under his pillow. ‘I found a revolver under your pillow,’ she told him that night. ‘Burglars are bad in this neighbourhood,’ he said. ‘You oughtn’t to have a revolver,’ she said. They argued about it, he irritably, she uneasily, until time for bed. As Bruhl was undressing, after locking and bolting all the doors, the telephone rang. ‘It’s for you, Sam,’ said Mrs Bruhl. Her husband went slowly to the phone, passing Bert on the way. ‘I wish I was you,’ he said to the dog, and took up the receiver. ‘Get this, Shoescar,’ said a husky voice. ‘We trailed you where you are, see? You’re cooked.’ The receiver at the other end was hung up. Bruhl shouted. His wife came running. ‘What is it, Sam, what is it?’ she cried. Bruhl, pale, sick-looking, had fallen into a chair. ‘They got me,’ he moaned. ‘They got me.’ Slowly, deviously, Minnie Bruhl got it out of her husband that he had been mistaken for Clinigan and that he was cooked. Mrs Bruhl was not very quick mentally, but she had a certain intuition and this intuition told her, as she trembled there in her nightgown above her broken husband, that this was the work of Ollie Breithofter. She instantly phoned Ollie Breithofter’s wife and, before she hung up, had got the truth out of Mrs Breithofter. It was Ollie who had called.

  The treasurer of the Maskonsett Syrup & Fondant Company, Inc., was so relieved to know that the gangs weren’t after him that he admitted frankly at the office next day that Ollie had fooled him for a minute. Mr Bruhl even joined in the laughter and wisecracking, which went on all day. After that, for almost a week, the mild little man had comparative peace of mind. The papers said very little about Clinigan now. He had completely disappeared. Gang warfare had died down for the time being.

  One Sunday morning Mr Bruhl went for an automobile ride with his wife and daughters. They had driven about a mile through Brooklyn streets when, glancing in the mirror above his head, Mr Bruhl observed a blue sedan just behind him. He turned off into the next side street, and the sedan turned off too. Bruhl made another turn, and the sedan followed him. ‘Where are you going, dear?’ asked Mrs Bruhl. Mr Bruhl didn’t answer her, he speeded up, he drove terrifically fast, he turned corners so wildly that the rear wheels swung around. A traffic cop shrilled at him. The younger daughter screamed. Bruhl drove right on, weaving in and out. Mrs Bruhl began to berate him wildly. ‘Have you lost your mind, Sam?’ she shouted. Mr Bruhl looked behind him. The sedan was no longer to be seen. He slowed up. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’

  A month went by without incident (thanks largely to Mrs Breithofter) and Samuel Bruhl began to be himself again. On the day that he was practically normal once more, Sluggy Pensiotta, alias Killer Lewis, alias Strangler Koetschke, was shot. Sluggy was the leader of the gang that had sworn to get Shoescar Clinigan. The papers instantly took up the gang-war story where they had left off. Pictures of Clinigan were published again. The slaying of Pensiotta, said the papers, meant but one thing: it meant that Shoescar Clinigan was cooked. Mr Bruhl, reading this, went gradually to pieces once more.

  After another week of skulking about, starting at every noise, and once almost fainting when an automobile backfired near him, Samuel Bruhl began to take on a remarkable new appearance. He talked out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes grew shifty. He looked more and more like Shoescar Clinigan. He snarled at his wife. Once he called her ‘Babe’, and he had never called her anything but Minnie. He kissed her in a strange, new way, acting rough, almost brutal. At the office he was mean and overbearing. He used peculiar language. One night when the Bruhls had friends in for bridge – old Mr Creegan and his wife – Bruhl suddenly appeared from upstairs with a pair of scarlet pyjamas on, smoking a cigarette, and gripping his revolver. After a few loud and incoherent remarks of a boastful nature, he let fly at a clock on the mantel, and hit it squarely in the middle. Mrs Bruhl screamed. Mr Creegan fainted. Bert, who was in the kitchen, howled. ‘What’s the matta you?’ snarled Bruhl. ‘Ya bunch of softies.’

  Quite by accident, Mrs Bruhl discovered, hidden away in a closet, eight or ten books on gangs and gangsters, which Bruhl had put there. They included Al Capone, You Can’t Win, 10,000 Public Enemies, and a lot of others; and they were all well thumbed. Mrs Bruhl realized that it was high time something was done, and she determined to have a doctor for her husband. For two or three days Bruhl had not gone to work. He lay around in his bedroom, in his red pyjamas, smoking cigarettes. The office phoned once or twice. When Mrs Bruhl urged him to get up and dress and go to work, he laughed and pa
tted her roughly on the head. ‘It’s a knockover, kid,’ he said. ‘We’ll be sitting pretty. To hell with it.’

  The doctor who finally came and slipped into Bruhl’s bedroom was very grave when he emerged. ‘This is a psychosis,’ he said, ‘a definite psychosis. Your husband is living in a world of fantasy. He has built up a curious defence mechanism against something or other.’ The Doctor suggested that a psychiatrist be called in, but after he had gone Mrs Bruhl decided to take her husband out of town on a trip. The Maskonsett Syrup & Fondant Company, Inc., was very fine about it. Mr Scully said of course. ‘Sam is very valuable to us, Mrs Bruhl,’ said Mr Scully, ‘and we all hope he’ll be all right.’ Just the same he had Mr Bruhl’s accounts examined, when Mrs Bruhl had gone.

  Oddly enough, Samuel Bruhl was amenable to the idea of going away. ‘I need a rest,’ he said. ‘You’re right. Let’s get the hell out of here.’ He seemed normal up to the time they set out for the Grand Central and then he insisted on leaving from the 125th Street station. Mrs Bruhl took exception to this, as being ridiculous, whereupon her doting husband snarled at her. ‘God, what a dumb moll I picked,’ he said to Minnie Bruhl, and he added bitterly that if the heat was put on him it would be his own babe who was to blame. ‘And what do you think of that?’ he said, pushing her to the floor of the cab.

  They went to a little inn in the mountains. It wasn’t a very nice place, but the rooms were clean and the meals were good. There was no form of entertainment, except a Tom Thumb golf course and an uneven tennis court, but Mr Bruhl didn’t mind. He said it was too cold outdoors, anyway. He stayed indoors, reading and smoking. In the evening he played the mechanical piano in the dining-room. He liked to play ‘More Than You Know’ over and over again. One night, about nine o’clock, he was putting in his seventh or eighth nickel when four men walked into the dining-room. They were silent men, wearing overcoats, and carrying what appeared to be cases for musical instruments. They took out various kinds of guns from their cases, quickly, expertly, and walked over toward Bruhl, keeping step. He turned just in time to see them line up four abreast and aim at him. Nobody else was in the room. There was a cumulative roar and a series of flashes. Mr Bruhl fell and the men walked out in single file, rapidly, nobody having said a word.

  Mrs Bruhl, state police, and the hotel manager tried to get the wounded man to talk. Chief Witznitz of the nearest town’s police force tried it. It was no good. Bruhl only snarled and told them to go away and let him alone. Finally, Commissioner O’Donnell of the New York City Police Department arrived at the hospital. He asked Bruhl what the men looked like. ‘I don’t know what they looked like,’ snarled Bruhl, ‘and if I did know I wouldn’t tell you.’ He was silent for a moment, then: ‘Cop!’ he added, bitterly. The Commissioner sighed and turned away. ‘They’re all like that,’ he said to the others in the room. ‘They never talk.’ Hearing this, Mr Bruhl smiled, a pleased smile, and closed his eyes.

  The Luck of Jad Peters

  Aunt Emma Peters, at eighty-three – the year she died – still kept in her unused front parlour, on the table with Jad Peters’ collection of lucky souvenirs, a large rough fragment of rock weighing perhaps twenty pounds. The rock stood in the centre of a curious array of odds and ends: a piece of tent canvas, a chip of pine wood, a yellowed telegram, some old newspaper clippings, the cork from a bottle, a bill from a surgeon. Aunt Emma never talked about the strange collection except once, during her last days, when somebody asked her if she wouldn’t feel better if the rock were thrown away. ‘Let it stay where Lisbeth put it,’ she said. All that I know about the souvenirs I have got from other members of the family. A few of them didn’t think it was ‘decent’ that the rock should have been part of the collection, but Aunt Lisbeth, Emma’s sister, had insisted that it should be. In fact, it was Aunt Lisbeth Banks who hired a man to lug it to the house and put it on the table with the rest of the things. ‘It’s as much God’s doing as that other clutter-trap,’ she would say. And she would rock back and forth in her rocking chair with a grim look. ‘You can’t taunt the Lord,’ she would add. She was a very religious woman. I used to see her now and again at funerals, tall, gaunt, grim, but I never talked to her if I could help it. She liked funerals and she liked to look at corpses, and that made me afraid of her.

  Just back of the souvenir table at Aunt Emma’s, on the wall, hung a heavy-framed, full-length photograph of Aunt Emma’s husband, Jad Peters. It showed him wearing a hat and overcoat and carrying a suitcase. When I was a little boy in the early nineteen-hundreds and was taken to Aunt Emma’s house near Sugar Grove, Ohio, I used to wonder about that photograph (I didn’t wonder about the rock and the other objects, because they weren’t put there till much later). It seemed so funny for anyone to be photographed in a hat and overcoat and carrying a suitcase, and even funnier to have the photograph enlarged to almost life size and put inside so elaborate a frame. When we children would sneak into the front parlour to look at the picture, Aunt Emma would hurry us out again. When we asked her about the picture, she would say, ‘Never you mind.’ But when I grew up, I learned the story of the big photograph and of how Jad Peters came to be known as Lucky Jad. As a matter of fact, it was Jad who began calling himself that; once when he ran for a county office (and lost) he had ‘Lucky Jad Peters’ printed on his campaign cards. Nobody else took the name up except in a scoffing way.

  It seems that back in 1888, when Jad Peters was about thirty-five, he had a pretty good business of some kind or other which caused him to travel around quite a lot. One week he went to New York with the intention of going on to Newport, later, by ship. Something turned up back home, however, and one of his employees sent him a telegram reading ‘Don’t go to Newport. Urgent you return here.’ Jad’s story was that he was on the ship, ready to sail, when the telegram was delivered; it had been sent to his hotel, he said, a few minutes after he had checked out, and an obliging clerk had hustled the messenger boy on down to the dock. That was Jad’s story. Most people believed, when they heard the story, that Jad had got the wire at his hotel, probably hours before the ship sailed, for he was a great one at adorning a tale. At any rate, whether or not he rushed off the ship just before the gangplank was hauled up, it sailed without him and some eight or nine hours out of the harbour sank in a storm with the loss of everybody on board. That’s why he had the photograph taken and enlarged: it showed him just as he was when he got off the ship, he said. And that is how he came to start his collection of lucky souvenirs. For a few years he kept the telegram, and newspaper clippings of the ship disaster, tucked away in the family Bible, but one day he got them out and put them on the parlour table under a big glass bell.

  From 1888 up until 1920, when Jad died, nothing much happened to him. He is remembered in his later years as a garrulous, boring old fellow whose business slowly went to pieces because of his lack of industry and who finally settled down on a small farm near Sugar Grove and barely scraped out an existence. He took to drinking in his-sixties, and from then on made Aunt Emma’s life miserable. I don’t know how she managed to keep up the payments on his life-insurance policy, but some way or other she did. Some of her relatives said among themselves that it would be a blessing if Jad died in one of his frequent fits of nausea. It was pretty well known that Aunt Emma had never liked him very much – she married him because he asked her to twice a week for seven years and because there had been nobody else she cared about; she stayed married to him on account of their children and because her people always stayed married. She grew, in spite of Jad, to be a quiet, kindly old lady as the years went on, although her mouth would take on a strained, tight look when Jad showed up at dinner time from wherever he had been during the day – usually from down at Prentice’s store in the village, where he liked to sit around telling about the time he just barely got off the doomed boat in New York harbour in ‘88 and adding tales, more or less fantastic, of more recent close escapes he had had. There was his appendicitis operation, for one thing: he had come
out of the ether, he would say, just when they had given him up. Dr Benham, who had performed the operation, was annoyed when he heard this, and once met Jad in the street and asked him to quit repeating the preposterous story, but Jad added the doctor’s bill to his collection of talismans, anyway. And there was the time when he had got up in the night to take a swig of stomach bitters for a bad case of heartburn and had got hold of the carbolic-acid bottle by mistake. Something told him, he would say, to take a look at the bottle before he uncorked it, so he carried it to a lamp, lighted the lamp, and he’d be god-dam if it wasn’t carbolic acid! It was then that he added the cork to his collection.

  Old Jad got so that he could figure out lucky escapes for himself in almost every disaster and calamity that happened in and around Sugar Grove. Once, for example, a tent blew down during a wind storm at the Fairfield County Fair, killing two people and injuring a dozen others. Jad hadn’t gone to the fair that year for the first time in nine or ten years. Something told him, he would say, to stay away from the fair that year. The fact that he always went to the fair, when he did go, on a Thursday and that the tent blew down on a Saturday didn’t make any difference to Jad. He hadn’t been there and the tent blew down and two people were killed. After the accident, he went to the fair grounds and cut a piece of canvas from the tent and put it on the parlour table next to the cork from the carbolic-acid bottle. Lucky Jad Peters!

  I think Aunt Emma got so that she didn’t hear Jad when he was talking, except on evenings when neighbours dropped in, and then she would have to take hold of the conversation and steer it away from any opening that might give Jad a chance to tell of some close escape he had had. But he always got his licks in. He would bide his time, creaking back and forth in his chair, clicking his teeth, and not listening much to the talk about crops and begonias and the latest reports on the Spencers’ feeble-minded child, and then, when there was a long pause, he would clear his throat and say that that reminded him of the time he had had a mind to go down to Pullen’s lumber yard to fetch home a couple of two-by-fours to shore up the chicken house. Well, sir, he had pottered around the house a little while and was about to set out for Pullen’s when something told him not to go a step. And it was that very day that a pile of lumber in the lumber yard let go and crushed Grant Pullen’s leg so’s it had to be amputated. Well, sir, he would say – but Aunt Emma would cut in on him at this point. ‘Everybody’s heard that old chestnut,’ she would say, with a forced little laugh, fanning herself in quick strokes with an old palm-leaf fan. Jad would go sullen and rock back and forth in his chair, clicking his teeth. He wouldn’t get up when the guests rose to go – which they always did at this juncture. The memento of his close escape from the Pullen lumbar-yard disaster was, of course, the chip of pine wood.