The Thurber Carnival

by James Thurber

  Mother would not let the rest of us discuss the affair next morning at breakfast. Herman asked what the hell had been the matter. ‘We’ll go on to something more elevating,’ said mother.

  A Sequence of Servants

  When I look back on the long line of servants my mother hired during the years I lived at home, I remember clearly ten or twelve of them (we had about a hundred and sixty-two, all told, but few of them were memorable). There was, among the immortals, Dora Gedd, a quiet, mousy girl of thirty-two who one night shot at a man in her room, throwing our household into an uproar that was equalled perhaps only by the goings-on the night the ghost got in. Nobody knew how her lover, a morose garage man, got into the house, but everybody for two blocks knew how he got out. Dora had dressed up in a lavender evening gown for the occasion and she wore a mass of jewellery, some of which was my mother’s. She kept shouting something from Shakespeare after the shooting – I forget just what – and pursued the gentleman downstairs from her attic room. When he got to the second floor he rushed into my father’s room. It was this entrance, and not the shot or the shouting, that aroused father, a deep sleeper always. ‘Get me out of here!’ shouted the victim. This situation rapidly developed, from then on, into one of those bewildering involvements for which my family had, I am afraid, a kind of unhappy genius. When the cops arrived Dora was shooting out the Welsbach gas mantles in the living-room, and her gentleman friend had fled. By dawn everything was quiet once more.

  There were others. Gertie Straub: big, genial, and ruddy, a collector of pints of eye (we learned after she was gone), who came in after two o’clock one night from a dancing party at Buckeye Lake and awakened us by bumping into and knocking over furniture. ‘Who’s down there?’ called mother from upstairs. ‘It’s me, dearie,’ said Gertie, ‘Gertie Straub.’ ‘What are you doing?’ demanded mother. ‘Dusting,’ said Gertie.

  Juanemma Kramer was one of my favourites. Her mother loved the name Juanita so dearly that she had worked the first part of it into the names of all her daughters – they were (in addition to a Juanita) Juanemma, Juanhelen, and Juangrace. Juanemma was a thin, nervous maid who lived in constant dread of being hypnotized. Nor were her fears unfounded, for she was so extremely susceptible to hypnotic suggestion that one evening at B. F. Keith’s theatre when a man on the stage was hypnotized, Juanemma, in audience, was hypnotized too and floundered out into the aisle making the same cheeping sound that the subject on the stage, who had been told he was a chicken, was making. The act was abandoned and some xylophone players were brought on to restore order. One night, when our house was deep in quiet slumber, Juanemma became hypnotized in her sleep. She dreamed that a man ‘put her under’ and then disappeared without ‘bringing her out’. This was explained when, at last, a police surgeon whom we called in – he was the only doctor we could persuade to come out at three in the morning – slapped her into consciousness. It got so finally that any buzzing or whirling sound or any flashing object would put Juanemma under, and we had to let her go. I was reminded of her recently when, at a performance of the movie Rasputin and the Empress, there came the scene in which Lionel Barrymore as the unholy priest hypnotizes the Czarevitch by spinning before his eyes a glittering watch. If Juanemma sat in any theatre and witnessed that scene she must, I am sure, have gone under instantly. Happily, she seems to have missed the picture, for otherwise Mr Barrymore might have had to dress up again as Rasputin (which God forbid) and journey across the country to get her out of it – excellent publicity but a great bother.

  ‘Dusting,’ Said Gertie

  Before I go on to Vashti, whose last name I forget, I will look in passing at another of our white maids (Vashti was coloured). Belle Giddin distinguished herself by one gesture which fortunately did not result in the bedlam occasioned by Juanemma’s hypnotic states or Dora Gedd’s shooting spree. Bella burned her finger grievously, and purposely, one afternoon in the steam of a boiling kettle so that she could find out whether the pain-killer she had bought one night at a tent-show for fifty cents was any good. It was only fair.

  Vashti turned out, in the end, to be partly legendary. She was a comely and sombre negress who was always able to find things my mother lost. ‘I don’t know what’s become of my garnet brooch,’ my mother said one day. ‘Yassum,’ said Vashti. In half an hour she had found it. ‘Where in the world was it?’ asked mother. ‘In de yahd,’ said Vashti. ‘De dog mussa drug it out.’

  Vashti was in love with a young coloured chauffeur named Charley, but she was also desired by her stepfather, whom none of us had ever seen but who was, she said, a handsome but messin’ round gentleman from Georgia who had come north and married Vashti’s mother just so he could be near Vashti. Charley, her fiancé, was for killing the stepfather but we counselled flight to another city. Vashti, however, would burst into tears and hymns and vow she’d never leave us; she got a certain pleasure out of bearing her cross. Thus we all lived in jeopardy, for the possibility that Vashti, Charley, and her stepfather might fight it out some night in our kitchen did not, at times, seem remote. Once I went into the kitchen at midnight to make some coffee. Charley was standing at a window looking out into the backyard; Vashti was rolling her eyes. ‘Heah he come! Heah he come!’ she moaned. The stepfather didn’t show up, however.

  Charley finally saved up twenty-seven dollars toward taking Vashti away but one day he impulsively bought a .22 revolver with a mother-of-pearl handle and demanded that Vashti tell him where her mother and stepfather lived. ‘Doan go up dere, doan go up dere!’ said Vashti. ‘Mah mothah is just as rarin’ as he is!’ Charley, however, insisted. It came out then that Vashti didn’t have any stepfather; there was no such person. Charley threw her over for a yellow gal named Nancy: he never forgave Vashti for the vanishing from his life of a menace that had come to mean more to him than Vashti herself. Afterwards, if you asked Vashti about her stepfather or about Charley she would say, proudly, and with a woman-of-the-world air, ‘Neither one ob ’em is messin’ round me any mo’.’

  Mrs. Doody, a huge, middle-aged woman with a religious taint, came into and went out of our house like a comet. The second night she was there she went berserk while doing the dishes and, under the impression that father was the Antichrist, pursued him several times up the backstairs and down the front. He had been sitting quietly over his coffee in the living-room when she burst in from the kitchen waving a bread knife. My brother Herman finally felled her with a piece of Libby’s cut-glass that had been a wedding present of mother’s. Mother, I remember, was in the attic at the time, trying to find some old things, and, appearing on the scene in the midst of it all, got the quick and mistaken impression that father was chasing Mrs Doody.

  ‘One Night While Doing the Dishes …’

  Mrs Robertson, a fat and mumbly old coloured woman, who might have been sixty and who might have been a hundred, gave us more than one turn during the many years that she did our washing. She had been a slave down South and she remembered ‘having seen the troops marching – a mess o’ blue, den a mess o’ grey’. ‘What,’ my mother asked her once, ‘were they fighting about?’ ‘Dat,’ said Mrs Robertson, ‘Ah don’t know.’ She had a feeling, at all times, that something was going to happen. I can see her now, staggering up from the basement with a basketful of clothes and coming abruptly to a halt in the middle of the kitchen. ‘Hahk!’ she would say, in a deep, guttural voice. We would all hark; there was never anything to be heard. Neither, when she shouted ‘Look yondah!’ and pointed a trembling hand at a window, was there ever anything to be seen. Father protested time and again that he couldn’t stand Mrs Robertson around, but mother always refused to let her go. It seems that she was a jewel. Once she walked unbidden, a dishpan full of wrung-out clothes under her arm, into father’s study, where he was engrossed in some figures. Father looked up. She regarded him for a moment in silence. Then – ‘Look out!’ she said, and withdrew. Another time, a murky winter afternoon, she came flubbering up the cellar stairs and
bounced, out of breath, into the kitchen. Father was in the kitchen sipping some black coffee; he was in a jittery state of nerves from the effects of having had a tooth out, and had been in bed most of the day. ‘Dey is a death watch downstaihs!’ rumbled the old coloured lady. It developed that she had heard a strange ‘chipping’ noise back of the furnace. ‘That was a cricket,’ said father. ‘Um-hm,’ said Mrs Robertson. ‘Dat was uh death watch!’ With that she put on her hat and went home, poising just long enough at the back door to observe darkly to father. ‘Dey ain’t no way!’ It upset him for days.

  Mrs Robertson had only one great hour that I can think of – Jack Johnson’s victory over Mistah Jeffries on the Fourth of July, 1910. She took a prominent part in the coloured parade through the South End that night, playing a Spanish fandango on a banjo. The procession was led by the pastor of her church who, Mrs Robertson later told us, had ’splained that the victory of Jack over Mistah Jeffries proved ‘de ’speriority ob de race’.

  ‘What,’ asked my mother, ‘did he mean by that?’ ‘Dat,’ said Mrs Robertson, ‘Ah don’t know.’

  Our other servants I don’t remember so clearly, except the one who set the house on fire (her name eludes me), and Edda Millmoss. Edda was always slightly morose but she had gone along for months, all the time she was with us, quietly and efficiently attending to her work, until the night we had Carson Blair and F. R. Gardiner to dinner – both men of importance to my father’s ambitions. Then, suddenly, while serving the entrée, Edda dropped everything and, pointing a quivering finger at father, accused him in a long rigamarole of having done her out of her rights to the land on which Trinity Church in New York stands. Mr Gardiner had one of his ‘attacks’ and the whole evening turned out miserably.

  The Dog That Bit People

  Probably no one man should have as many dogs in his life as I have had, but there was more pleasure than distress in them for me except in the case of an Airedale named Muggs. He gave me more trouble than all the other fifty-four or -five put together, although my moment of keenest embarrassment was the time a Scotch terrier named Jeannie, who had just had six puppies in the clothes closet of a fourth floor apartment in New York, had the unexpected seventh and last at the corner of Eleventh Street and Fifth Avenue during a walk she had insisted on taking. Then, too, there was the prize-winning French poodle, a great big black poodle – none of your little, untroublesome white miniatures – who got sick riding in the rumble seat of a car with me on her way to the Greenwich Dog Show. She had a red rubber bib tucked around her throat and, since a rain storm came up when we were half way through the Bronx, I had to hold over her a small green umbrella, really more of a parasol. The rain beat down fearfully and suddenly the driver of the car drove into a big garage, filled with mechanics. It happened so quickly that I forgot to put the umbrella down and I will always remember, with sickening distress, the look of incredulity mixed with hatred that came over the face of the particular hardened garage man that came over to see what we wanted, when he took a look at me and the poodle. All garage men, and people of that intolerant stripe, hate poodles with their curious haircut, especially the pom-poms that you got to leave on their hips if you expect the dogs to win a prize.

  But the Airedale, as I have said, was the worst of all my dogs. He really wasn’t my dog, as a matter of fact: I came home from a vacation one summer to find that my brother Roy had bought him while I was away. A big, burly, choleric dog, he always acted as if he thought I wasn’t one of the family. There was a slight advantage in being one of the family, for he didn’t bite the family as often as he bit strangers. Still, in the years that we had him he bit everybody but mother, and he made a pass at her once but missed. That was during the month when we suddenly had mice, and Muggs refused to do anything about them. Nobody ever had mice exactly like the mice we had that month. They acted like pet mice, almost like mice somebody had trained. They were so friendly that one night when mother entertained at dinner the Friraliras, a club she and my father had belonged to for twenty years, she put down a lot of little dishes with food in them on the pantry floor so that the mice would be satisfied with that and wouldn’t come into the dining-room. Muggs stayed out in the pantry with the mice, lying on the floor, growling to himself – not at the mice, but about all the people in the next room that he would have liked to get at. Mother slipped out into the pantry once to see how everything was going. Everything was going fine. It made her so mad to see Muggs lying there, oblivious of the mice – they came running up to her – that she slapped him and he slashed at her, but didn’t make it. He was sorry immediately, mother said. He was always sorry, she said, after he bit someone, but we could not understand how she figured this out. He didn’t act sorry.

  Mother used to send a box of candy every Christmas to the people the Airedale bit. The list finally contained forty or more names. Nobody could understand why we didn’t get rid of the dog. I didn’t understand it very well myself, but we didn’t get rid of him. I think that one or two people tried to poison Muggs – he acted poisoned once in a while – and old Major Moberly fired at him once with his service revolver near the Seneca Hotel in East Broad Street – but Muggs lived to be almost eleven years old and even when he could hardly get around he bit a Congressman who had called to see my father on business. My mother had never liked the Congressman – she said the signs of his horoscope showed he couldn’t be trusted (he was Saturn with the moon in Virgo) – but she sent him a box of candy that Christmas. He sent it right back, probably because he suspected it was trick candy. Mother persuaded herself it was all for the best that the dog had bitten him, even though father lost an important business association because of it. ‘I wouldn’t be associated with such a man,’ mother said, ‘Muggs could read him like a book.’

  We used to take turns feeding Muggs to be on his good side, but that didn’t always work. He was never in a very good humour, even after a meal. Nobody knew exactly what was the matter with him, but whatever it was it made him irascible, especially in the mornings. Roy never felt very well in the morning, either, especially before breakfast, and once when he came downstairs and found that Muggs had moodily chewed up the morning paper he hit him in the face with a grapefruit and then jumped up on the dining-room table, scattering dishes and silverware and spilling the coffee. Muggs’ first free leap carried him all the way across the table and into a brass fire screen in front of the gas grate but he was back on his feet in a moment and in the end he got Roy and gave him a pretty vicious bite in the leg. Then he was all over it; he never bit anyone more than once at a time. Mother always mentioned that as an argument in his favour; she said he had a quick temper but that he didn’t hold a grudge. She was forever defending him. I think she liked him because he wasn’t well. ‘He’s not strong,’ she would say, pityingly, but that was inaccurate; he may not have been well but he was terribly strong.

  Nobody Knew Exactly What Was the Matter with Him

  One time my mother went to the Chittenden Hotel to call on a woman mental healer who was lecturing in Columbus on the subject of ‘Harmonious Vibrations’. She wanted to find out if if was possible to get harmonious vibrations into a dog. ‘He’s a large tan-coloured Airedale,’ mother explained. The woman said that she had never treated a dog but she advised my mother to hold the thought that he did not bite and would not bite. Mother was holding the thought the very next morning when Muggs got the iceman but she blamed that slip-up on the iceman. ‘If you didn’t think he would bite you, he wouldn’t,’ mother told him. He stomped out of the house in a terrible jangle of vibrations.

  One morning when Muggs bit me slightly, more or less in passing, I reached down and grabbed his short stumpy tail and hoisted him into the air. It was a foolhardy thing to do and the last time I saw my mother, about six months ago, she said she didn’t know what possessed me. I don’t either, except that I was pretty mad. As long as I held the dog off the floor by his tail he couldn’t get at me, but he twisted and jerked so, snarling
all the time, that I realized I couldn’t hold him that way very long. I carried him to the kitchen and flung him on to the floor and shut the door on him just as he crashed against it. But I forgot about the backstairs. Muggs went up the backstairs and down the frontstairs and had me cornered in the living-room. I managed to get up on to the mantelpiece above the fireplace, but it gave way and came down with a tremendous crash throwing a large marble clock, several vases, and myself heavily to the floor. Muggs was so alarmed by the racket that when I picked myself up he had disappeared. We couldn’t find him anywhere, although we whistled and shouted, until old Mrs Detweiler called after dinner that night. Muggs had bitten her once, in the leg, and she came into the living-room only after we assured her that Muggs had run away. She had just seated herself when, with a great growling and scratching of claws, Muggs emerged from under a davenport where he had been quietly hiding all the time, and bit her again. Mother examined the bite and put arnica on it and told Mrs Detweiler that it was only a bruise. ‘He just bumped you,’ she said. But Mrs Detweiler left the house in a nasty state of mind.

  Lots of people reported our Airedale to the police but my father held a municipal office at the time and was on friendly terms with the police. Even so, the cops, had been out a couple of times – once when Muggs bit Mrs Rufus Sturtevant and again when he bit Lieutenant-Governor Malloy – but mother told them that it hadn’t been Muggs’ fault but the fault of the people who were bitten. ‘When he starts for them, they scream,’ she explained, ‘and that excites him.’ The cops suggested that it might be a good idea to tie the dog up, but mother said that it mortified him to be tied up and that he wouldn’t eat when he was tied up.