_The Magic Christian_


                         _By the same author_

                          FLASH AND FILIGREE


                          THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN

                            TERRY SOUTHERN

                            [Illustration]

                         RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK


                           _Second Printing_

              © _Copyright, 1959, 1960, by Terry Southern
  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
     Conventions. Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and
simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada, Limited.
           Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-7681
             Manufactured in the United States of America
                   by H. Wolff Book Mfg. Co., Inc._


                           TO HENRY AND DIG


_Little man whip a big man every time if the little man’s in the right
and keeps a’comin’._

                                              Motto of The Texas Rangers




Although this book was basically shaped by certain events, and by
values otherwise manifest, over the past few years, it is not, in any
strict sense, a historical novel—and, more particularly, the characters
within it are not to be identified with any actual persons, either
living or dead.




                         _The Magic Christian_




                                   I


When not tending New York holdings, Guy Grand was generally, as he
expressed it, “_on the go_.” He took cross-country trips by train: New
York to Miami, Miami to Seattle—that sort of thing—always on a slow
train, one that made frequent stops. Accommodation on these trains
is limited, and though he did engage the best, Grand often had to be
satisfied with a small compartment fitted with scarcely more than the
essentials of comfort. But he accepted this cheerfully; and so today,
on a summer afternoon at precisely 2:05, it was with buoyant step
(considering his girth—for, at fifty-three now, he was rather stout)
that he climbed aboard the first Pullman of the _Portland Plougher_,
found his compartment, and began the pleasant routine of settling in
for the long slow journey to New York. As was his habit, he immediately
rang the porter to bring round a large bottle of Campari and a bottle
of finely iced water; then he sat down at his desk to write business
letters.

It was known that for any personal service Grand was inclined to tip
generously, and because of this there were usually three or four
porters loitering in the corridor nearby. They kept a sharp eye on the
compartment door, in case Grand should signal some need or other; and,
as the train pulled out of the station, they could hear him moving
about inside, humming to himself, and shuffling papers to and fro on
his desk. Before the train made its first stop, however, they would
have to scurry, for Grand’s orders were that the porters should not be
seen when he came out of his compartment; and he did come out, at every
stop.

At the first of these stops, which was not long in occurring, Grand
went quickly to the adjoining day coach and took a seat by the window.
There he was able to lean out and observe the activity on the platform;
he attracted little attention himself, resembling as he did, with his
pleasant red face, any honest farmer.

From the train window one could see over and beyond the station the
rest of the small New England town—motionless now in the summer
afternoon, like a toy mausoleum—while all that seemed to live within
the town was being skillfully whipped underground and funneled up again
in swift urgency onto the station platform, where small square cartons
were unloaded from a central car.

But amidst the confusion and haste on the platform there was one
recognizable figure; this was the man who sold hotdogs from a box he
carried strapped to his neck.

“They’re _red hot_!” he cried repeatedly, walking up and down parallel
to the train and only a foot from it—while Grand, after a minute of
general observation, focused all his attention on this person; and
then, at exactly one minute before departure, he began his case with
the hotdog-man.

“Red hot!” he shouted; and when the man reached the window, Grand eyed
him shrewdly for a second, squinting, as though perhaps appraising his
character, before asking, tight-lipped:

“_How much?_”

“Twenty cents,” the hotdog-man said hurriedly—for the train was about
to pull out—“... mustard and relish, they’re red hot!”

“Done!” said Grand with a sober nod, and as the train actually began to
move forward and the hotdog-man to walk rapidly in keeping abreast of
the window, Guy Grand leaned out and handed him a five-hundred-dollar
bill.

“Break this?” he asked tersely.

The hotdog-man, in trying to utilize all their remaining time, passed
the hotdog to Grand and reached into his change pocket before having
looked carefully at the bill—so that by the time he made out its
denomination, he was running almost full tilt, grimacing oddly and
shaking his head, trying to return the bill with one hand and recover
the hotdog with the other. During their final second together, with
the hotdog-man’s last overwhelming effort to reach his outstretched
hand, Grand reached into his own coat pocket and took out a colorful
plastic animal mask—today it was that of _pig_—which he quickly donned
before beginning to gorge the hotdog through the mouth of the mask,
at the same time reaching out frantically for the bill, yet managing
somehow to keep it just beyond his fingers’ grasp, and continuing with
this while the distance between them lengthened, hopelessly, until at
last the hotdog-man stood exhausted on the end of the platform, still
holding the five hundred, and staring after the vanishing train.

When Grand finally drew himself back from the window and doffed his
pig mask, it was to face a middle-aged woman across the aisle who was
twisted halfway around in her seat, observing Grand with a curiosity so
intense that the instant of their eyes actually meeting did not seem to
register with her. Then she coughed and glanced away—but irresistibly
back again, as Guy Grand rose, all smiles, to leave the day coach,
giving the woman a wink of affectionate conspiracy as he did.

“Just having a laugh with that hot-frank vender,” he explained. “... no
real harm done, surely.”

He returned to his compartment then, where he sat at the desk sipping
his Campari—a drink the color of raspberries, but bitter as gall—and
speculating about the possible reactions of the hotdog-man.

Outside the compartment, even at the far end of the corridor, the idle
porters could often hear his odd chortle as he stirred about inside.

By the time the train reached New York, Guy Grand had gone through this
little performance four or five times, curious fellow.




                                  II


Out of the gray granite morass of Wall Street rises one building like a
heron of fire, soaring up in blue-white astonishment—_Number 18 Wall_—a
rocket of glass and blinding copper. It is the _Grand Investment
Building_, perhaps the most contemporary business structure in our
country, known in circles of high finance simply as _Grand’s_.

Offices of _Grand’s_ are occupied by companies which deal in _mutual
funds_—giant and fantastic corporations whose policies define the shape
of nations.

August Guy Grand himself was a billionaire. He had 180 millions cash
deposit in New York banks, and this ready capital was of course but a
part of his gross holdings.

In the beginning, Grand’s associates, wealthy men themselves, saw
nothing extraordinary about him; a reticent man of simple tastes, they
thought, a man who had inherited most of his money and had preserved
it through large safe investments in steel, rubber, and oil. What his
associates managed to see in Grand was usually a reflection of their
own dullness: a club member, a dinner guest, a possibility, a threat—a
man whose holdings represented a prospect and a danger. But this was
to do injustice to Grand’s private life, because his private life was
atypical. For one thing, he was the last of the big spenders; and for
another, he had a very unusual attitude towards _people_—he spent about
ten million a year in, as he expressed it himself, “_making it hot for
them_.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

At fifty-three, Grand had a thick trunk and a large balding
bullet-head; his face was quite pink, so that in certain half-lights he
looked like a fat radish-man—though not displeasingly so, for he always
sported well-cut clothes and, near the throat, a diamond the size of a
nickel ... a diamond now that caught the late afternoon sun in a soft
spangle of burning color when Guy stepped through the soundless doors
of _Grand’s_ and into the blue haze of the almost empty street, past
the huge doorman appearing larger than life in gigantic livery, he who
touched his cap with quick but easy reverence.

“Cab, Mr. Grand?”

“Thank you no, Jason,” said Guy, “I have the car today.” And with a
pleasant smile for the man, he turned adroitly on his heel, north
towards Worth Street.

Guy Grand’s gait was brisk indeed—small sharp steps, rising on the
toes. It was the gait of a man who appears to be snapping his fingers
as he walks.

Half a block on he reached the car, though he seemed to have a
momentary difficulty in recognizing it; beneath the windshield wiper
lay a big parking ticket, which Grand slowly withdrew, regarding it
curiously.

“Looks like you’ve got a _ticket_, bub!” said a voice somewhere behind
him.

Out of the corner of his eye Grand perceived the man, in a dark summer
suit, leaning idly against the side of the building nearest the car.
There was something terse and smug in the tone of his remark, a sort of
nasal piousness.

“Yes, so it seems,” mused Grand, without looking up, continuing to
study the ticket in his hand. “How much will you eat it for?” he asked
then, raising a piercing smile at the man.

“How’s that, mister?” demanded the latter with a nasty frown, pushing
himself forward a bit from the building.

Grand cleared his throat and slowly took out his wallet—a long slender
wallet of such fine leather it would have been limp as silk, had it not
been so chock-full of thousands.

“I asked what would you take to _eat_ it? You know....” Wide-eyed, he
made a great chewing motion with his mouth, holding the ticket up near
it.

The man, glaring, took a tentative step forward.

“Say, I don’t _get_ you, mister!”

“Well,” drawled Grand, chuckling down at his fat wallet, browsing about
in it, “simple enough really....” And he took out a few thousand. “_I_
have this ticket, as you know, and I was just wondering if you would
care to _eat_ it, for, say”—a quick glance to ascertain—“six thousand
dollars?”

“What do you mean, ‘_eat it_’?” demanded the dark-suited man in a kind
of a snarl. “Say, what’re you anyway, bub, a _wise_-guy?”

“‘_Wise_-guy’ or ‘_grand_ guy’—call me anything you like ... as long as
you don’t call me ‘_late-for-chow!_’ Eh? Ho-ho.” Grand rounded it off
with a jolly chortle, but was quick to add, unsmiling, “How ’bout it,
pal—got a taste for the easy green?”

The man, who now appeared to be openly angry, took another step forward.

“_Listen_, mister ...” he began in a threatening tone, half clenching
his fists.

“I think I should warn you,” said Grand quietly, raising one hand to
his breast, “that I am armed.”

“_Huh?_” The man seemed momentarily dumfounded, staring down in dull
rage at the six bills in Grand’s hand; then he partially recovered, and
cocking his head to one side, regarded Grand narrowly, in an attempt at
shrewd skepticism, still heavily flavored with indignation.

“Just who do you think you _are_, Mister! Just what is your _game_?”

“Grand’s the name, easy-green’s the game,” said Guy with a twinkle.
“Play along?” He brusquely flicked the corners of the six crisp bills,
and they crackled with a brittle, compelling sound.

“_Listen_ ...” muttered the man, tight-lipped, flexing his fingers and
exhaling several times in angry exasperation, “... are _you_ trying ...
are you trying to tell ME that you’ll give _six thousand dollars_ ...
to ... to EAT that”—he pointed stiffly at the ticket in Guy’s hand—“to
_eat_ that TICKET?!?”

“That’s about the size of it,” said Grand; he glanced at his watch.
“It’s what you might call a ‘limited offer’—expiring in, let’s say,
_one minute_.”

“Listen, mister,” said the man between clenched teeth, “if this is a
gag, _so help me_....” He shook his head to show how serious he was.

“No threats,” Guy cautioned, “or I’ll shoot you in the temple—well,
what say? Forty-eight seconds remaining.”

“Let’s _see_ that goddamn money!” exclaimed the man, quite beside
himself now, grabbing at the bills.

Grand allowed him to examine them as he continued to regard his watch.
“Thirty-nine seconds remaining,” he announced solemnly. “Shall I start
the _big count down_?”

Without waiting for the latter’s reply, he stepped back and,
cupping his hands like a megaphone, began dramatically intoning,
“_Twenty-eight_ ... _twenty-seven_ ... _twenty-six_ ...” while the man
made several wildly gesticulated and incoherent remarks before seizing
the ticket, ripping off a quarter of it with his teeth and beginning to
chew, eyes blazing.

“_Stout fellow!_” cried Grand warmly, breaking off the count down to
step forward and give the chap a hearty clap on the shoulder and hand
him the six thousand.

“You needn’t actually eat the ticket,” he explained. “I was just
curious to see if you had your price.” He gave a wink and a tolerant
chuckle. “Most of us have, I suppose. Eh? Ho-ho.”

And with a grand wave of his hand, he stepped inside his car and sped
away, leaving the man in the dark summer suit standing on the sidewalk
staring after him, fairly agog.




                                  III


Grand drove leisurely up the East River Drive—to a large and fine old
house in the Sixties, where he lived with his two elderly aunts, Agnes
and Esther Edwards.

He found them in the drawing room when he arrived.

“There you are, Guy!” said Agnes Edwards with tart affection, who at
eighty-six was a year senior to Esther and held the initiative in most
things between them.

“Guy, Guy, Guy,” exclaimed Esther happily in her turn, with a really
beautiful pink smile for him—but she insisted then upon raising her
teacup, so that all to be seen now was her brow, softly clouded, as
ever, in maternal concern for the boy. Both women were terribly,
chronically, troubled that Guy, at fifty-three, was unmarried—though
perhaps each, in her way, would have fought against it.

Guy beamed at them from the doorway, then crossed to kiss both before
going to his big sofa-chair by the window where he always sat.

“We’re just having tea, darling—do!” insisted his Aunt Agnes with
brittle passion, flourishing her little silver service bell in a smart
tinkle and presenting her half-upturned face for his kiss—as though to
receive it perfunctorily, but with eyelids closed and tremoring, one
noticed, and a second very thin hand which, as in reflex, started to
rise towards their faces, wavering up, clenched white as the lace at
her wrists.

“Guy, Guy, Guy,” cried Esther again, sharpening her own gaiety as she
set her cup down—quickly enough, but with a care that gave her away.

“You will take tea, won’t you, my Guy!” said Agnes, and she conveyed it
in a glance to the maid who’d appeared.

“Love some,” said Guy Grand, giving his aunts such a smile of fanatic
brightness that they both squirmed a bit. He was in good spirits now
after his trip—but soon enough, as the women could well attest, he
would fall away from them, lapse into mystery behind his great gray
_Financial Times_ and _Wall Street Journal_ for hours on end: distrait,
they thought; never speaking, certainly; answering, yes—but most often
in an odd and distant tone that told them nothing, nothing.

                   *       *       *       *       *

“Guy ...” Agnes Edwards began, turning her cup in her hand and forcing
one of the warm playful frowns used by the extremely rich to show the
degree of seriousness felt.

“Yes, Aunt Agnes,” said Guy unnecessarily, even brightly, actually
coming forward a bit on his chair, not turning his own cup, but
fingering it, politely nervous.

“Guy ... you _know_ Clemence’s young man. Well, I _think_ they want
to get _married_! and ... oh I don’t know, I was just wondering if we
couldn’t _help_. Naturally, I haven’t said a thing to her about it—I
wouldn’t dare, of course ... but then what’s _your_ feeling on it, Guy?
Surely there’s something we can do, don’t you agree?”

Guy Grand could have no notion what she was talking about, except that
it was undoubtedly a question of money; but he spoke darkly enough to
suggest that he was weighing his words with care.

“Why I should think so, yes.”

Agnes Edwards beamed and raised her cup in a gesture both coy and smug,
then the two women glanced at each other, smiling prettily, almost
lifting their brows—whatever it was, it was a certain gain all around.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Grand’s own idea of what he was doing—“making it hot for people”—had
formed crudely, literally, and almost as an afterthought, when, early
one summer morning in 1938, just about the time the Spanish Civil War
was ending, he flew out to Chicago and, within an hour of arrival,
purchased a property on one of the busiest corners of the Loop. He had
the modern two-story structure torn down and the debris cleared off
that day—that very morning, in fact—by a demolition crew of fifty men
and machines; and then he directed the six carpenters, who had been on
stand-by since early morning, when they had thrown up a plank barrier
at the sidewalk, to construct the wooden forms for a concrete vat
of the following proportions: fifteen feet square, five feet deep.
This construction was done in an hour and a half, and it seemed that
the work, except for pouring the concrete, was ended; in fact the
carpenters had put on their street clothes and were ready to leave
when, after a moment of reflection, Grand assembled them with a smart
order to take down this present structure, and to rebuild it, but on
a two-foot elevation—giving clearance beneath, as he explained to the
foreman, to allow for the installation of a heating apparatus there.

“_That’ll make it hot for them_,” he said—but he wasn’t speaking to the
foreman then, nor apparently to anyone else.

It was mid-afternoon, and collecting from the flux of the swollen
summer street were the spectators, who hung in bunches at the sturdy
barrier, gatherings in constant change, impressed in turn by the way
the great man from the East snapped his commands, expensively dressed
as he was, shirt turned back at the cuff.

And when the work was going ahead correctly, Grand might give the crowd
a moment of surveillance from where he stood in the center of the lot,
finally addressing them, hands cupped to his mouth as if he had to
shout—though, actually, they were only a few yards away.

“_Tomorrow_ ...” he would say, “... _back ... tomorrow! Now ... getting
... it ... ready!_”

When an occasional wiseacre could get his attention and attempt some
joke as to what was going on there beyond the barrier, Grand Guy Grand
would smile wearily and shake a scolding finger at him.

“_Now ... getting ... it ... ready_,” he would shout slowly, or
something else equally irrelevant to the wiseacre’s jibe; but no one
took offense, either because of not understanding or else because of
the dignity and bearing of the man, and the big diamond he wore at his
throat.

Another contractor, three workers, a truck of sand and gravel, and
six sacks of quick-drying cement arrived at the working site at two
o’clock, but were forced to wait until the new forms were complete.
Then a sheet of metal was lowered into place and the concrete was
poured into the forms. Under Grand’s spirited command, it was all so
speedily done that well before dusk the work was ended, including the
installation of a great gas burner there, star-shaped with a thousand
dark jets, like a giant upturned squid stretched beneath the structure.
It was apparent now that when the board forms were removed, the whole
would resemble a kind of white stone bath, set on four short columns,
with a heating apparatus beneath, and small ramps leading up the vat on
each of its sides.

Before dinner Guy Grand completed arrangements begun earlier in the
day with the Chicago stockyards: these provided for the delivery of
three hundred cubic feet of manure, a hundred gallons of urine, and
fifty gallons of blood, to an address in the suburbs. Grand met them
there and had the whole stinking mess transferred to a covered dump
truck he had purchased that morning. These arrangements cost Grand a
pretty penny, because the stockyards do not ordinarily conserve or sell
urine, so that it had to be specially collected.

After securing the truck’s cover, Grand climbed into the cab, drove
back towards the stockyards and parked the truck there, where the
stench of it would be less noticeable.

Then he took a taxi into town, to the near North Side and had a quiet
dinner at the Drake.

At nine o’clock, while it was still light, he returned to the working
site, where he was met by some of the crew, and saw to the removal
of the board forms and the barrier. He inspected the vat, and the
burner below—which he tested and found in good working order. Then he
dismissed the crew and went back to his hotel.

He sat at his desk writing business letters until his thin gold
wrist-clock sounded three A.M. Exactly then he put away his writing
things, freshened himself up, and, just before leaving the room,
paused near the door and collected a big leather brief case, a gas
mask, a wooden paddle, a bucket of black paint, and an old, stiff
paintbrush. He went downstairs and took a cab out to the place where
he had parked the dump truck. Leaving the cab, he got into the truck
and drove back to the working site. There he backed the truck carefully
up one of the ramps and then emptied all that muck into the vat. The
stench was nearly overpowering, and Grand, as soon as he had parked
the truck and gotten out of it, was quick to don the gas mask he had
brought.

Stepping up one of the ramps, he squatted on the parapet of the vat and
opened the brief case, out of which he began taking, a handful at a
time, and dropping into the vat, ten thousand one-hundred-dollar bills,
slowly stirring them in with his wooden paddle.

And he was in this attitude, squatting at the edge of the vat, gas mask
covering his face, stirring with his paddle and dumping bills into
the muck, the work only half begun, when a passing police patrol car
pulled up to investigate the activity and, above all, the stench. But
before the officers could properly take account, Grand had closed the
brief case, doffed his mask, given them five thousand dollars each, and
demanded to be taken at once to their precinct captain. After a few
hushed words between them, and a shrugging of shoulders, they agreed.

At the station, Grand spoke privately with the captain, showing him
several business cards and explaining that it was all a harmless
promotion stunt for a new product.

“Naturally my firm is eager to coöperate with the authorities,” he
said, and handed the captain twenty-five thousand.

And so it was finally agreed that Grand might return to the site and
proceed, as long as whatever he was doing did not involve criminal
violence within the precinct. Moreover, while the captain could make no
definite promise about it, he was attentive enough to Grand’s proposal
of an additional fifty thousand on the following noon if the police
would be kept away from the site for a few hours that morning.

“Think it over,” said Grand pleasantly. “Better sleep on it, eh?”

Back at the site, Grand Guy donned his mask again, and dumped the
remaining contents of the brief case into the vat. Then he stepped
down, opened the can of paint, gave it good stirring, and finally,
using his left hand so that what resulted looked childish or
illiterate, he scrawled across the vat FREE $ HERE in big black letters
on the sides facing the street.

He climbed up for a final check on the work. Of the bills in the muck,
the corners, edges, and denomination figures of about five hundred
were visible. After a moment he stepped down and, half crouching
beneath the vat, took off his mask and saw to his burners. He did a
short terse count down and turned the valve full open; then he removed
the handle so that it could not easily be interfered with. As he
touched off the match, the thousand flames sprang up, all blue light,
and broke back doubling on the metal plate, and on the wet concrete—a
color of sand in summer moonlight: one of those chosen instants, lost
to childhood, damp places in reflection, surface of cement under
the earth, the beautifully cool buried places ... the stench became
unbearable; he stood and quickly donned his mask, turned away from the
site and walked across the street where he paused at the corner and
surveyed the whole. Already in the pale eastern light, the moronic
scrawl, FREE $ HERE, loomed with convincing force, while below the
thousand flames beat up, blue-white and strangely urgent for this hour
of morning on a downtown corner of Chicago.

“Say ...” mused Grand, half-aloud, “_that’ll_ make it hot for them all
right!” And he leaped into the big dump truck and drove like the wind
back to his hotel. At dawn he caught the plane for New York.

The commotion that occurred a few hours later on that busy corner of
the Loop in downtown Chicago was the first and, in a sense perhaps,
the most deliberately literal of such projects eventually to be
linked with the name of “Grand Guy” Guy Grand, provoking the wrath
of the public press against him, and finally earning him the label,
“Eccentric” and again towards the end, “Crackpot.”




                                  IV


“Is Clemence a person?” asked Guy, taking a bit of sweet biscuit now,
popping it into his mouth.

Aunt Esther raised her hand to conceal a shaming twitter, and Aunt
Agnes feigned impatience.

“Guy, great silly!” said Agnes. “Really!” Though after a moment she
softened, to continue:

“Clemence is the new _maid_! She’s a Catholic girl, Guy—_and_ a very
nice one, if I may say so. She’s marrying this Jewish boy, Sol—how
they’ll manage I’m sure I don’t know—I talked to them both, I told them
that we were Protestants, had always been Protestants, and always
_would_ be Protestants—but that I didn’t mind! Not in the least!
‘Freedom of worship and creed!’ I said. It’s always been a principle
of _my_ religion. Not so insistent and pushy as _some_ I could name!
I didn’t tell them _that_, of course, but there you are. Well, _she_
wants a honeymoon in _Italy_, and a visit to the Pope, which I think
is terribly sweet—and _he_ wants to go to _his_ place in the East,
wherever it is; Israel, isn’t it? Oh, I don’t say it badly. They’re
_very_ nice, Guy—both of them as gentle and polite as you please, and
... well, they’ve enough money for _one_ of the trips, you see, but
_not_ for both. I wish we could help them, Guy. I think it would be
nice if they could go to _both_ of their places, don’t you agree? You
remember how much I enjoyed Calvin’s chair in Geneva! Of course it
isn’t the same, but it _would_ be sweet. What’s your feeling on it,
Guy?”

“But Guy has always been _eager_ to help in such matters,” Esther broke
in warmly.

“Thank you, Aunt Esther,” said Guy with soft humility, “I do like to
think that the record speaks for itself.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Guy Grand had owned a newspaper for a while—one of Boston’s popular
dailies, with a circulation of 900,000. When Grand assumed control,
there was, at first, no change in the paper’s format, nor in its
apparently high journalistic standards, as Grand stayed on in New York
on the periphery of the paper’s operations, where he would remain, he
said, until he “could get the feel of things.”

During the second month, however, French words began to crop up
unaccountably in news of local interest:

  Boston, Mar. 27 (AP)—Howard Jones, vingt-huit ans, convicted on
  three counts of larceny here, was sentenced this morning to 20–26
  months in Folsom State Prison, Judge Grath of 17th Circuit Court of
  Appeals announced aujourd’hui.

Working then through a succession of editors, proofreaders, and
linotype operators, Grand gradually put forward the policy of
misspelling the names of cities, islands, and proper nouns in
general—or else having them appear in a foreign language:

                            YANKS HIT PARIGI
                          MOP-UP AT TERWEEWEE

During the war, when geographic names were given daily prominence in
the headlines, these distortions served to antagonize the reader and
to obscure the facts.

The circulation of the paper fell off sharply, and after three months
it was down to something less than one-twentieth of what it had
been when Grand took over. At this point a major policy change was
announced. Henceforth the newspaper would not carry comics, editorials,
feature stories, reviews, or advertising, and would present only the
factual news in a straightforward manner. It was called _The Facts_,
and Grand spent the ransom of a dozen queens in getting at the facts of
the news, or at least a great many of them, which he had printed then
in simple sentences. The issues of the first two days or so enjoyed a
fair sale, but the contents on the whole appeared to be so incredible
or so irrelevant that by the end of the week demand was lower than at
any previous phase of the paper’s existence. During the third week,
the paper had no sale at all to speak of, and was simply given away;
or, refused by the distributors, it was left in stacks on the street
corners each morning, about two million copies a day. In the beginning
people were amused by the sight of so many newspapers lying around
unread; but when it continued, they became annoyed. Something funny
was going on—_Communist? Atheist? Homosexual? Catholic? Monopoly?
Corruption? Protestant? Insane? Negro? Jewish? Puerto Rican? POETRY?_
The city was filthy. It was easy for people to talk about _The Facts_
in terms of litter and debris. Speeches were made, letters written,
yet the issue was vague. The editor of _The Facts_ received insulting
letters by the bagful. Grand sat tight for a week, then he gave the
paper over exclusively to printing these letters; and its name was
changed again—_Opinions_.

These printed letters reflected such angry divergence of thought and
belief that what resulted was sharp dissension throughout the city.
Group antagonism ran high. The paper was widely read and there were
incidents of violence. Movements began.

                   *       *       *       *       *

At about two P.M. on June 7th, crowds started to gather in Lexington
Square near the center of the city. The _Jewish_, _Atheist_, _Negro_,
_Labor_, _Homosexual_, and _Intellectual_ groups were on one side—the
_Protestant_ and _American Legion_ on the other. The balance of power,
or so it seemed, lay with the doughty _Catholic_ group.

It was fair and windless that day in Boston, and while the groups
and the groups-within-groups bickered and jockeyed in the center of
Lexington Square, Guy Grand brought off a _tour de force_. Hovering
just overhead, in a radio-equipped helicopter, he directed the maneuver
of a six-plane squadron of skywriters, much higher, in spelling out the
mile-long smoke-letter words: F**K YOU ... and this was immediately
followed by a veritable host of outlandish epithets, formulated as
insults on the level of group Gestalt: Protestants are assholes ...
Jews are full of crap ... Catholics are shitty ... and so on, _ad
nauseum_ actually.

It set the crowd below hopping mad. Grand Guy Grand dropped to about
a hundred feet, where he canted the plane towards them and opened the
door to peer out and observe. The crowd, associating the low-flying
helicopter with the outrageous skywriting going on above, started
shouting obscenities and shaking their fists.

“You rotten Mick!”

“You dirty Yid!”

“You black bastard!”

That was how the fighting began.

During the Lexington Square Riots, Grand set his plane down to
twenty-five feet, where he cruised around, leaning out the door,
expressionless, shouting in loud, slow intonation:

“WHAT’S ... UP? WHAT’S ... UP?”

                   *       *       *       *       *

By four o’clock the square was in shambles and all Boston on the brink
of eruption. The National Guard had to be brought into the city and
martial law obtained. It was thirty-six hours before order was fully
restored.

The press made capital of the affair. Investigations were demanded. Guy
Grand had paid off some big men in order to carry forward the project,
but this was more than they had bargained for. Back in New York it cost
him two million to keep clear.




                                   V


“Yes, I see,” said Guy, clearing his throat, looking with concern at
the piece of sweet biscuit in his hand, “... certainly. Why don’t you
... well, you know, find out how much they need, make out a check,
and....”

Aunt Esther covertly twittered again, her eyes bright above the very
white hand that hid her mouth, and Agnes turned her own face sharply
away in mock exasperation with the boy.

“Not _give_ them the money, Guy!” Agnes exclaimed. “They wouldn’t
_hear_ of it, of course—the young man, _Sol_, especially. Surely you
know how _proud_ those people are ... a defensive-mechanism, I suppose;
but there you are, even so! _No_—what I had in mind was to tell them of
a _stock_ to buy, you see.”

“Right,” said Guy crisply, “then they would take one of the trips
later, that the idea? But, hold on—if they spend all their money on the
one trip, how can they buy into the stock in question?”

“Guy!” said his aunt in a voice of ice and pain.

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said Grand with perfect candor.

Aunt Esther took refuge behind her kerchief, into her ceaseless
giggling.

“_I mean make it go up and down!_” cried Agnes crossly. “Or rather
_down_ first, then _up_.”

She regarded him narrowly for a moment, her thinness stretching upwards
like an angry swan, suspecting perhaps that he was being deliberately
obtuse.

“A perfect babe in the woods!” she said. “How you manage to hold your
own at conference table I’m sure I couldn’t imagine!”

“Sorry,” said Grand, unsmiling, following through with the youthful
gesture of slightly ducking his head for a sip of tea.

Of course it was all largely an act between them.

“Name one good stock in which you hold ten thousand shares,” said Agnes
sharply.

“One good stock ...” repeated Guy Grand, his great brow clouding.

“... that begins with an ‘A’,” said Aunt Esther.

“That begins with an ‘A’?” said Grand, almost incredulous, yet as
willing as a good-natured child at play.

“Esther!” cried Agnes.

“Well, do you mean _exactly_ ten thousand, or _at least_ ten thousand?”
asked Guy.

“At least ten thousand,” said Agnes. “And it _needn’t_,” she added,
with a straight look to her sister, “begin with an ‘A’!”

“Hmm. Well, how about ‘Abercrombie and Adams’?” said Grand tentatively,
“there’s a fairly sound—”

“Good,” said Aunt Agnes. “Now then, what if you sold all your shares of
that? What would happen to the price of it?”

“Take a nasty drop,” said Grand, with a scowl at the thought of it.
“Might cause a run.”

“There you are then!” cried Agnes. “And Clemence’s young man
_buys_—when the price is down, _he buys_, you see—then the _next_ day,
you buy back what you sold! I should think it would go up again when
you buy back what you sold, wouldn’t it?”

“Might and might not,” said Grand, somewhat coldly.

“_Well_,” said Agnes, with a terrible hauteur, “you can just _keep_
buying until it does!” Then she continued, in softer tones, to show her
ultimate reasonableness: “Surely you can, Guy. And then, you see, when
it’s up again, Clemence and her young man will _sell_.”

“Yes,” said Grand with a certain quiet dignity, “but you know, it
might not look good, that sort of thing, with the Federal Securities
Commission.”

Agnes’s lips were so closely compressed now that they resembled a
turtle’s mouth.

“Might not _look_,” she repeated, making it hollow, her eyes widening
as though she had lifted a desert rock and seen what was beneath
it. “_Well_,” she said with unnerving softness, taking a sip of
tea to brace herself and even turning to draw on her sister with
a look of dark significance, “... if all you’re concerned with is
_appearance_—then perhaps you aren’t the person I thought you were,
after all.” And she poured herself another cup.

Grand was stricken with a mild fit of coughing. “Yes,” he was able to
say at last, “... yes, I see your point, of course. Does bear some
thinking through though, I must say.”

His aunt, momentarily aghast, had just started to speak again, when
the maid stepped inside the door to announce the arrival of Miss Ginger
Horton—an extremely fat lady, who entered the room then, wearing an
immense trapeze sunsuit and carrying her Pekinese.

“_Guy!_” she cried, extending her hand, as he, rising, came forward.
“How _too_ good to see you!

“Say hello to _Guy_, my Bitsy!” she shrieked gaily to the dog, pointing
him at Guy and the others. “Say hello to everybody! There’s Agnes and
Esther, _see_ them, Bitsy?”

The dog yapped crossly instead, and ran at the nose.

“_Is_ Bitsy-witsy sicky?” cooed Miss Horton, pouting now as she
allowed Guy to slowly escort her towards a chair near the others, he
maneuvering her across the room like a gigantic river scow. “Hmm? Is my
Bitsy sicky-wicky?”

“Nothing too serious, I hope,” said Grand with a solicitous frown.

“Just nerves I expect,” said Miss Horton, haughty now, and fairly
snapping. “The weather is just so ... _really abominable_, and then all
the nasty little people about.... Now here’s your Agnes and Esther,
Bitsy.”

“How very nice to see you, my dear,” said the two elderly women, each
laying thin fingers on her enormous hand. “What an adorable little
sunsuit! It _was_ kind of you to bring your Bitsy—wasn’t it, Guy?”

“It was extremely kind,” said Guy, beaming as he retreated to his own
great chair near the window.

                   *       *       *       *       *

It was, as a matter of fact, Guy Grand who, working through his
attorneys, had bought controlling interest in the three largest
kennel clubs on the eastern seaboard last season; and in this way he
had gained virtual dominance over, and responsibility for, the Dog
Show that year at Madison Square Garden. His number-one _gérant_, or
front man, for this operation was a Señor Hernandez Gonzales, a huge
Mexican, who had long been known in dog-fancier circles as a breeder of
blue-ribbon Chihuahuas. With Grand’s backing however, and over a quick
six months, Gonzales became the celebrated owner of one of the finest
kennels in the world, known now not simply for Chihuahuas, but for
Pekinese, Pomeranians and many rare and strange breeds of the Orient.

It was evident that this season’s show at the Garden was to be a gala
one—a wealth of new honors had been posted, the prize-money packets
substantially fattened, and competition was keener than ever. Bright
young men and wealthy dowagers from all over were bringing forward
their best and favorite pedigrees. Gonzales himself had promised a
prize specimen of a fine old breed. A national picture magazine devoted
its cover to the affair and a lengthy editorial in praise of this great
American benignity, this love of animals—“... in bright and telling
contrast,” the editorial said, “to certain naïve barbarities, _e.g._,
the Spanish bullfight.”

Thus, when the day arrived, all was as it should be. The Garden was
festively decked, the spectators in holiday reverence, the lights
burning, the big cameras booming, and the participants dressed as for a
Papal audience—though slightly ambivalent, between not wishing to get
mussed or hairy, and yet wanting to pamper and coo over their animals.

Except for the notable absence of Señor Gonzales, things went smoothly,
until the final competition began, that between “Best of Breed” for
the coveted “Best in Show.” And at this point, Gonzales did appear; he
joined the throng of owners and beasts who mingled in the center of the
Garden, where it was soon apparent his boast had not been idle—at the
end of the big man’s leash was an extraordinary dog; he was jet-black
and almost the size of a full-grown Dane, with the most striking coat
and carriage yet seen at the Garden show that season. The head was
dressed somewhat in the manner of a circus-cut poodle, though much
exaggerated, so that half the face of the animal was truly obscured.

Gonzales joined the crowd with a jaunty smile and flourish not
inappropriate to one of his eminence. He hadn’t been there a moment
though before he and the dog were spotted by Mrs. Winthrop-Garde and
her angry little spitz.

She came forward, herself not too unlike her charge, waddling
aggressively, and she was immediately followed by several other women
of similar stamp, along with Pekineses, Pomeranians, and ill-tempered
miniature chows.

Gonzales bowed with winning old-world grace and caressed the ladies’
hands.

“What a _perfect_ love he is!” shrieked Mrs. Winthrop-Garde of the
animal on Gonzales’s leash, and turning to her own, “_Isn’t_ he, my
darling? _Hmm? Hmm?_ Isn’t he, my precious sweet? And what_ever_ is his
_name_?” she cried to Gonzales when her own animal failed to respond,
but yapped crossly instead.

“He is called ... _Claw_,” said Gonzales with a certain soft drama
which may have escaped Mrs. Winthrop-Garde, for she rushed on, heedless
as ever.

“_Claude!_ It’s _too_ delicious—the perfect darling! Say _hello_ to
Claude, Angelica! Say _hello_ to Claude, my fur-flower!”

And as she pulled the angry little spitz forward, while it snapped
and snorted and ran at the nose, an extraordinary thing happened—for
what this Grand and Gonzales had somehow contrived, and for reasons
never fathomed by the press, was to introduce in disguise to the Garden
show that season not a dog at all, but some kind of terrible black
panther or dyed jaguar—hungry he was too, and cross as a pickle—so that
before the day was out, he had not only brought chaos into the formal
proceedings, but had actually destroyed about half the “Best of Breed.”

During the first hour or so, Gonzales, because of his respected
position in that circle, was above reproach, and all of the incidents
were considered as being accidental, though, of course, extremely
unfortunate.

“Too much spirit,” he kept explaining, frowning and shaking his head;
and, as he and the beast stalked slowly about in the midst of the
group, he would chide the monster-cat:

“Overtired from the trip, I suppose. Isn’t that it, boy? _Hmm? Hmm?_”

So now occasionally above the yapping and whining, the crowd would hear
a strange _swish!_ and _swat!_ as Gonzales and the fantastic beast
moved on, flushing them one by one.

Finally one woman, new to the circle, who did not know how important
Gonzales was, came back with an automatic pistol and tried to shoot the
big cat. But she was so beside herself with righteous fury that she
missed and was swiftly arrested.

Gonzales, though, apparently no fool himself, was quick to take this as
a cue that his work was done, and he gradually retired, so that “Best
in Show” was settled at last, between those not already eliminated.

Grand later penned a series of scathing articles about the affair:
“Scandal of the Dog Show!” “Can This Happen Here?” “Is It Someone’s
Idea of a Joke?” etc., etc.

The bereft owners were wealthy and influential people, more than
eager to go along with the demand for an inquiry. As quickly as
witnesses were uncovered, however, they were bought off by Grand or
his representatives, so that nothing really ever came of it in the
end—though, granted, it did cost him a good bit to keep his own name
clear.




                                  VI


“And how was your _trip_, Guy?” asked Ginger Horton, sniffing a bit,
just to be on the safe side it seemed.

Guy shrugged.

“Oh, same old six-and-seven, Ginger,” he said.

“I beg your pardon,” interjected his Aunt Agnes smartly.

Esther beamed, truly in league at last with her long-dead favorite
sister’s only son.

“It means _not too good_, Agnes,” she said emphatically. “It’s an
expression used in dice-playing: You ‘come out’—isn’t that right,
Guy?—on ‘six,’ your _point_, then you throw, in this case, a
‘_seven_,’ which means: _no good_, _you_ lose.” She looked to her Guy.
“That’s it, isn’t it, dear?”

“Oh, it’s a _gambling_ expression,” said Agnes Edwards with a certain
amused complacency, though she must have raised her cup rather too
hurriedly, for Esther was content merely to beam at Guy.

“Then your trip wasn’t ... _too good_, is that it?” asked Ginger Horton
seriously, setting her own cup down squarely, pressing the napkin
briefly to her lips.

Esther started to answer, but in the end looked to Guy instead.

“Oh, it’s just a manner of speaking,” said Guy Grand easily. “What
really gives the expression bite, of course, is that _six_ is generally
an easy point to make, you see, and, well ... but then the fact is
really, that the ... uh, the _national economy_, so to speak, isn’t
in the best of shape just now. Not a buyer’s market at all really. A
bit bearish as a matter of fact.” He gave a chuckle, looking at the
Pekinese.

Ginger Horton seized the opportunity to bring the dog into it.

“Well, it’s all over _our_ head, isn’t it, Bitsy? Hmm? Isn’t it over
your Bitsy-witsy head? Hmmm?”

“_Bearish_ ...” Esther began to explain.

“I think we all know what _that_ means, Esther,” said Agnes shortly,
raising one hand to her throat, her old eyes glittering no less than
the great diamonds she clutched there.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Evidently Grand liked playing the donkey-man. In any case, he had
bought himself a large motion-picture house in Philadelphia. The house
had been losing money badly for six months, so it was natural that the
manager and his staff, who knew nothing of Grand’s background, should
be apprehensive over the probable shake-up.

The manager was a shrewd and capable man of many years’ experience
in cinema management, a man whose position represented for him the
fruit of a life’s work. He decided that his best move, under the
circumstances, would be to go to Grand and cheerfully recommend salary
cuts for all.

During their first conference, however, it was Grand, in his right as
new owner, who held the initiative throughout.

By way of preliminary, and while the manager sat alertly on the edge of
a big leather chair, Grand paced the floor of the comfortable office,
his hands clasped at his back, and a slight frown on his face. Finally
he stopped in the center of the room and addressed the manager:

“The _Chinese_ have an expression, Mr. ... _Mister Manager_. I believe
it occurs in the book of the _I Ching_: “Put your house in order,” they
say, “_that_ is the first step.””

This brought a flush to the manager’s face and caused him to shift in
his chair.

“My dad,” said Grand then, and with severe reverence, “pushed out here
in ... 1920. There were few frontiers open for him at that time. There
are fewer still ... open-for-us-today!”

He faced the manager and would have let him speak; in fact, by looking
straight into his face, he invited him to do so, but the man could only
nod in sage agreement.

“If there is one unexplored territory,” Grand continued, waxing
expansive now, “one virgin wood alive today in this man’s land of
ours—it is cinema management! My dad—“Dad Grand”—was a championship
golfer. That _may_ be why ... now this is only a guess ... but that
_may_ be why he always favored the maxim: ‘If you want them to play
your course—don’t put rocks on the green!’”

Grand paused for a minute, staring down at the manager’s sparkling
shoes as he allowed his great brow to furrow and his lips to purse,
frantically pensive. Then he shot a question:

“Do you know the story of the Majestic Theatre in Kansas City?”

The manager, a man with thirty years’ experience in the field, who knew
the story of every theatre in the country, did not know this one.

“In August, 1939, the management of the K.C. Majestic changed hands,
_and_ policy. Weston seats were installed—four inches wider than
standard—and ‘a.p.’s,’ admission prices, were cut in half ... and two
people were to occupy each seat. The new manager, Jason Frank, who died
of a brain hemorrhage later the same year, had advanced Wyler Publicity
nine hundred dollars for the catch-phrase, ‘Half the Price, and a
Chance for Vice,’ which received a wide private circulation.”

Grand broke off his narrative to give the manager a searching look
before continuing:

“... _but_ it didn’t work, sir! It _did not_ work ... and I’ll tell you
why: it was a _crackpot_ scheme. A crackpot scheme, and rocks on the
green! It cost Frank his licence, his health, and in this case perhaps
his very life.”

Grand paused for effect and crossed to the desk where he took up a
sheaf of onionskin papers and threshed them about before the manager.
Each sheet was black with figures.

“According to my figures,” he said tersely, “this house will fold in
nine months’ time unless there is, at minimum, an eight percent climb
in ‘p.a.’s’—paid admissions.” Here he frowned darkly, let it pass,
forced a smile, and then flapped his arms a time or two, as he resumed
speaking, in a much lighter tone now:

“Of course there are a number of ... of _possibilities_ for us here
... I have certain plans ... oh granted they’re tentative, under wrap,
irons in the fire, if you like—but I _can_ tell you _this_: I am
retaining you and your staff. We are not ploughing the green under.
Do you follow? Right. Now I have arranged for this increase in your
salaries: ten percent. I won’t say it is a _substantial_ increase; I
say simply: _ten percent_ ... which means, of course, that all ...
_all these figures_”—he waved the sheaf of papers in a gesture of
hopelessness and then dropped them into the wastebasket—“will have to
be _revised_! More time lost before we know where we stand! Yet that
can’t be helped. It _is_ a move—and _I_ say it is a move ... in the
right direction!”

He spoke to the manager for an hour, thinking aloud, getting the feel
of things, keeping his hand in, and so on. Then he dismissed him for
three months’ paid vacation.

Grand’s theatre was one of the city’s largest and had first-run
rights on the most publicized films. In the manager’s absence, things
proceeded normally for a while; until one night when the house was
packed for the opening of the smart new musical, _Main Street, U.S.A._

First there was an annoying half-hour delay while extra camp-stool
seats were sold and set up in the aisles; then, when the house lights
finally dimmed into blackness, and the audience settled back to enjoy
the musical, Grand gave them something they weren’t expecting: a cheap
foreign film.

The moment the film began, people started leaving. In the darkness,
however, with seats two-abreast choking the aisles, most of them were
forced back. So the film rolled on; and while the minutes gathered into
quarter-hours, and each quarter-hour cut cripplingly deep into the
evening, Grand, locked in the projection room high above, stumbled from
wall to wall, choking with laughter.

After forty-five minutes, the film was taken off and it was announced
over the public-address system, and at a volume strength never before
used anywhere, that a mistake had been made, that this was _not_ the
new musical.

Shouts of “_And how!_” came from the crowd, and “_I’ll say it’s not!_”
and “_You’re telling me! God!_”

Then after another delay for rewinding, the cheap foreign film was put
on again, upside down.

By ten thirty the house was seething towards angry panic, and Grand
gave the order to refund the money of everyone who wished to pass by
the box office. At eleven o’clock there was a line outside the theatre
two blocks long.

From his office above, Grand kept delaying the cashier’s work by
phoning every few minutes to ask: “How’s it going?” or “What’s up?”

The next day there was a notice on the central bulletin board:

“Rocks on the green! All hands alert!”

It also announced another fat pay-hike.

Into certain films such as _Mrs. Miniver_, Grand made eccentric inserts.

In one scene in _Mrs. Miniver_, Walter Pidgeon was sitting at evening
in his fire-lit study and writing in his journal. He had just that
afternoon made the acquaintance of Mrs. Miniver and was no doubt
thinking about her now as he paused reflectively and looked towards
the open fire. In the original version of this film, he took a small
penknife from the desk drawer and meditatively sharpened the pencil he
had been writing with. During this scene the camera remained on his
_face_, which was filled with quiet reflection and modest hopefulness,
so that the intended emphasis of the scene was quite clear: his
genteel and wistfully ambitious thoughts about Mrs. Miniver.

The insert Grand made into this film, was, like those he made
into others, professionally done, and as such, was technically
indiscernable. It was introduced just at the moment where Pidgeon
opened the knife, and it was a three-second close shot of the
fire-glint blade.

This simple insert misplaced the emphasis of the scene; the fire-glint
blade seemed to portend dire evil, and occurring as it did early in the
story, simply “spoiled” the film.

Grand would hang around the lobby after the show to overhear the
remarks of those leaving, and often he would join in himself:

“What was that part about the _knife_?” he would demand querulously,
stalking up and down the lobby, striking his fist into his open hand,
“... he _had_ that knife ... I thought he was going to try and _kill_
her! Christ, I don’t _get_ it!”

In some cases, Grand’s theatre had to have two copies of the film on
hand, because his alterations were so flagrant that he did not deem it
wise to project the altered copy twice in succession. This was the case
with a popular film called _The Best Years of Our Lives_. This film
was mainly concerned, in its attempt at an odd kind of realism, with a
young veteran of war, who was an amputee and had metal hooks instead
of hands. It was a story told quite seriously and one which depended
for much of its drama upon a straight-faced identification with the
amputee’s situation and attitude. Grand’s insert occurred in the middle
of the film’s big scene. This original scene was a seven-second pan
of the two principal characters, the amputee and his pretty home-town
fiancée while they were sitting on the family porch swing one summer
evening. The hero was courting her, in his quiet way—and this consisted
of a brave smile, more or less in apology, it would seem, for having
the metal hooks instead of hands—while the young girl’s eyes shone
with tolerance and understanding ... a scene which was interrupted by
Grand’s insert: a cut to below the girl’s waist where the hooks were
seen to hover for an instant and then disappear, grappling urgently
beneath her skirt. The duration of this cut was less than one-half
second, but was unmistakably seen by anyone not on the brink of sleep.

It brought some of the audience bolt upright. Others the scene affected
in a sort of double-take way, reacting to it as they did only minutes
later. The rest, that is to say about one-third of the audience, failed
to notice it at all; and the film rolled on. No one could believe his
eyes; those who were positive they had seen something funny in the
realism there, sat through the film again to make certain—though,
of course, the altered version was never run twice in succession—but
_all_ who had seen were so obsessed by what they had seen, or what they
imagined they had seen, that they could no longer follow the story
line, though it was, from that point on, quite as it was intended,
without incongruity or surprise.

Grand had a good deal of trouble about his alterations of certain films
and was eventually sued by several of the big studios. You can bet it
cost him a pretty to keep clear in the end.




                                  VII


“My Lord Russell books came today,” said Ginger Horton, suddenly
dropping her voice to a stage whisper, because the dog in her lap
seemed to have gone asleep.

“_Pardon_,” said Grand, almost shouting.

Mrs. Horton, dramatically wide-eyed now, raised a finger to her lips.

“_I think Bitsy’s asleep_,” she cooed, then stole a glance at the dog.
“Isn’t it _too_ sweet!” she said, lifting her face to the others,
beaming angelically.

“Oh, it _is_ too sweet!” agreed Agnes and Esther, craning forward to
see, like ancient things stretching across the sand. “Guy,” hissed
Agnes, “do come and see!”

“Best not,” said Guy sagely, “might wake it.”

“Guy’s right,” said Ginger Horton, compressing her lips tersely and
cautioning the two ladies back. “Oh, how cross my Bitsy’d be. You _are_
sweet, Guy,” she added, with a piercing smile for him—but before he
could acknowledge it with one of his own, she let a look of great care
return to her face.

“I was _saying_ that my Lord Russell books came today.”

“Lord Russell?” Guy inquired genially.

“Laird K. Russell,” murmured Esther in pure wonder as some dear
forgotten name loomed up to marvel her softly from the far far away.

“_Bertrand Russell!_” exclaimed Agnes sharply, “the philosopher! Good
heavens, Esther!”

“Not Bertrand Russell,” cried Ginger Horton, “Lord Russell of
Liverpool. The atrocity books!”

“Good Heavens,” said Agnes.

“Well, do you know what we did?” Ginger Horton demanded. “Bitsy and I
sat right down and pretended that _this ... this ... Thorndike_ had
been _captured_ and brought to justice and all those atrocities had
been done to him! To him and to a lot of other nasty little people we
could think of!”

“Gracious,” exclaimed Agnes.

“Not _Bill_ Thorndike surely?” said Grand, coming forward on his chair
with a show of concern.

“Oh, it’s just absolutely _maddening_!” said Ginger Horton. “I don’t
even want to ... to _talk_ about it. Not in front of Bitsy, anyway.”

“The dog?” said Grand. “It’s asleep, isn’t it?”

“Bitsy knows, of course,” said Miss Horton darkly, ignoring this, “and
only too well!”

“Ginger,” said Agnes, “can you really be so sure of that?”

“Oh, in simply a thousand-thousand ways,” said Ginger Horton.

“Do you remember that young Mr. Laird K. Russell?” asked Esther of
Agnes in the pause that followed. “He came to our Westport summer ball
for little Nancy.”

“Great Heavens, Esther, that was over sixty years ago! Surely you don’t
mean it!”

Esther nodded, her eyes dim with distant marvel, a pale smile on her
lips.

“Esther, really!”

Ginger Horton sniffed, at no pains to hide her annoyance with this
change of focus, while Agnes tried to recover the thread.

“Do have more tea, Ginger—and please tell us wherever _did_ you get
that darling little sunsuit? How perfectly clever it is!”

“You _are_ sweet, Agnes,” said Ginger, brightening, yet seeming to
imply a moment of reproach for Esther and Guy before turning her
attention to the great pink tent of a sunsuit she was wearing.

“Yes, I think it’s fun, don’t you? Of course Charles did it for me.”

“Simply too adorable!” said Agnes. “Isn’t it, Guy?”

“It’s extremely attractive,” said Guy in most richly masculine and
persuasive tones, and the ladies beamed all around.

                   *       *       *       *       *

One of Guy Grand’s sayings at conference was this:

“Show me the man who’s above picking up bits and pieces—and _I’ll_ show
_you_: a fool!”

Just so, Grand himself kept his finger in more than one peripheral pie.
In 1950 he bought out Vanity Cosmetics, a large and thriving Fifth
Avenue concern. He surprised staffers at Vanity by bringing in his own
research chemists, from allied fields. But these staff executives, all
old-timers themselves, were only waiting for reassurance, and it wasn’t
long in coming when Grand spoke of fresh blood, new horizons, and
thinking big.

“You’ve got to look ahead in this man’s game,” he emphasized at first
conference, “or by jumbo you’re up crap creek without a paddle!”

Granted he spoke harshly, but in his tone was tough jaunty conviction
and brutal know-how.

“He’s all right,” said one Vanity staffer after the session. “He speaks
his mind, and devil take the hindmost!”

“Joe, he’s my kinda guy,” another was quick to agree. “... I mean what
the hell, we’re _all_ out for money—am I right, Joe?”

These regulars though, were more or less cut off from lab contact now,
as Grand told them he wanted to “go it alone for a bit.”

“_Just_ want to see how the land lies,” he said.

He worked tirelessly with his new chemists, himself clad in a great
white smock, bustling about the lab, seeing to this test and that
result.

“Back in harness!” he liked to say at conference (for it was his habit
to go there wearing his smock), and it made the others feel a bit
inadequate—spic and span as they were in their smart tweeds and clergy
gray—while the new chief sat stained and pungent from the lab.

“You civies have a soft touch here,” Grand would tweak them—though of
course they were only too eager now to go to the lab themselves.

“You know I wouldn’t mind a crack at the lab,” one of the senior exec’s
would say with serious mien if he could get Grand aside.

“Yes, I’ll just bet you wouldn’t,” Grand would reply with a glittering
smile, “and how about a handful of these while you’re at it?” and he
would flash a fat roll of ten thousands that he could just get into the
catch-all pocket of his big white smock.

Though the exec might suspect that Grand was speaking symbolically, the
gambit was always impressive.

“_Yes, sir_,” would be the earnest reply, “I really _would_ like a
crack at the lab!”

But Grand would grimace oddly and wave a finger at the senior staffer;
then he would give a thin cackling laugh and fly to his flasks and
beakers.

“The old boy’s sharp as a razor,” most of them said. “He’s my kinda
guy.”

What happened in the end was the development of a couple of fairly new
products. The first was _Downy_, a combination shampoo and soft-set;
and it was heralded by a large-scale promotional campaign. The formula
of _Downy_ was supposedly based on a principle used by the Egyptians
in the preservation of their dead—though this was but vaguely referred
to, being simply the scientific springboard for the product and thereby
catching the endorsement of men in various fields, and gaining press
coverage beyond mere paid advertisement. The main promotional emphasis
though was on the social allure and overall security it seemed to
promise. “DOWNY,” according to these releases, “_will make your hair
... softer than the hair of_ YOUR OWN CHILD!”

It was unconditionally guaranteed to do so. These releases went on to
present certain inductive proofs that the formula of _Downy_ had been
“Cleopatra’s secret,” that in reality she had been a woman of “only
average prettiness (_which one must never never underestimate_)” and
that she had won her thrones and her men with “what is _now_ YOUR OWN
... D O W N Y.”

The promotional campaign was in progress for quite a while before the
product was offered to the general buyer, though it had of course
been used with amazing success for a long time by a number of famous
beauties, and there were plenty of testimonials to that effect. So that
when it was finally offered, the sales ran high indeed.

“I think we’ve hit on something here,” said the smock-stained veteran,
Grand Guy Grand, at conference with the staffers as the market
tabulations poured in that first morning. “I _don’t_ like to count the
chickens so to speak, but _I think_ we’ve hit on something here ...
something that may well spell ‘touchdown’ in the hearts of Mr. and
Mrs. U.S.A.!”

The others were agreeing wildly, but Grand was quick to show conference
acumen, “... _not_ count the chickens, I say”—and he raised a
cautionary finger—“_nor_ put all in _one basket!_”

And even as he hinted at research for another new product already under
way, adverse reports about the soft-set began coming in by the carload.
For what this Grand Guy in his work with the new chemists had contrived
was a potion that did _not_ soften the hair, after all, but on the
contrary, made it _all stiff and wiry_.

As the reports flooded in, along with an avalanche of lawsuits,
staffers at the conference table grew restive.

“Well, can’t win ’em all,” said Grand with a good loser’s chuckle.
“Common Zen savvy tells us as much,” and he was content to dismiss the
product’s failure with this, eager now to get started on something new;
but as it became ever more apparent that their million-dollar planning
had gone so terribly wrong, the staffers got panicky.

“We do our best,” said Grand, shaking his head stoically. “No man can
say more.”

It appeared though that one of the senior execs, a white-haired man of
about forty-two, might actually jump out the window.

Grand, who held the initiative throughout most of the conferences,
quietly led the man back to the table, and summed up in this way:

“Talk is cheap, gentlemen, and since I’m not one personally to favor
tired phrases, I _think_ I’ll spare you the grand old maxim about
‘spilt milk,’ but I do want to say this: Show me the man who _looks
back_—and _I’ll_ show _you_: a first-rate imbecile!”

This brought conference around, and under Grand’s good guidance, they
ignored the raging anathema without and looked to the future.

“Our M.R. people have come up with something,” said Grand, “—that’s
what we pay them for—well, they’ve come up with a couple of consumer
principles we can kick around here at conference: one, the insatiate
craving of the public for an _absolute_; and two, the modern failure
of monotheism—that is to say, the _failure_ of the notion that _any
absolute_ can be presented as one separate thing.”

Grand paused to touch his fingers together before him, shooting sharply
evaluative looks at several staffers nearest before he continued:

“And they’re quite right, of course. We of the ... the extreme
occident, for right or wrong—and there I’ve said it myself—think in
_dichotomies_ ... have done so since our very inception. Oneness? Never
had a chance in this great land of ours! Well, I ask you staffers,
where does that leave us? Monotheism shot to pieces on the one
hand—dire craving for an absolute existing on the other. I submit to
you staffers that the solution establishes itself before our very eyes:
namely, that an _absolute_—in any particular field—must be presented as
a _dichotomy_! Yes, if one mother company, such as our Vanity, could
confront the public with a _pure dichotomy_, in any particular product,
it would gain virtual monopoly there. Yes, and _we_ will present such a
dichotomy! Two sides which embrace the extremes and meet in the middle!
I say people will make their choice _within_ the dichotomy presented
by the mother company; they will not go outside it, because then the
issue would become vague and the implications of the choice no longer
clear and satisfying ... _satisfying_ in terms, I mean to say, of
the self-orientation for which they _do_, in the last analysis, buy
these products at all. Are there any dissensions from the view I’ve
expressed?”

There were none to speak of and Grand continued briefly:

“Now what we want is one product which we can present in the two
forms—good and evil, old and new, primitive and civilized—two items
designed for the same use but presented as completely antithetical,
both morally and philosophically—not aesthetically, however ...
packaging will be high-tone and identical, let the departments
concerned take note ... now do any of you—execs, staffers—know what
that product might be?”

They did not, but this was evidently just a teaser anyhow, for Grand
had already selected his product, and the work on it even now was
under way. It was to be a body deodorant of course—presented, as he
had suggested, in two forms. The first was traditional, combining
the clinical and the erotic, offering, as it did, “... _Protection
for Those Most Precious Moments of All—It Cuts Away Body Odor like
a Knife_.” It was technically superior to any others on the market,
making use of “... liquid glass, harmless plastic sealers ...” and
so on. It was called _Stealth_. The second deodorant was based on
another principle altogether, _biology_. An ancient wisdom revived,
it had to do with natural selection among mating animals, and did,
according to eminent and quoted authorities, rest securely on the
olfactory motive-response by which animals find and achieve harmonious,
monogamous relationships. Thus, the second product was designed not
to obscure the natural body odor but to cleverly assert it. And,
in M.R. terms, an undeniable correspondence and natural attraction
would result between appropriate compatible persons. It was called
_Musk and Tallow_. An irritant jingle, in stereophonic sound, on
the high-velocity repetition principle, was to be used: “_Don’t Lie
Fallow—Musk and Tallow!_” repeated many many times within a few seconds.

It was also decided that owing to the failure of _Downy_, it would be
to certain advantage to make a clear break at this point and change the
name of the mother company—a new name which would embrace both aspects
of the M.R. postulate; and so it was decided: LADY APHRODITE.

Grand arranged that a number of prominent biologists, physicians,
philosophers, church representatives, film stars, congresswomen,
nursery-school teachers, and so on, should come forward in unsolicited
endorsement of the moral correctness and practicality of the product.

Promotionwise, it did seem to capture the imagination of the public.
Grand’s contention at conference was that it appealed to the
“magnificent bohemian strain in the great middle class,” and “to the
return-to-nature elements dormant within them like a sleeping giant.”

“In offering these two products across this grand land of ours,”
he said at final conference, “Lady Aphrodite has presented a pure
dichotomy. At last a satisfactory choice may be made, a side taken, and
yet _each side_ shall enjoy the security—on this particular issue at
least—of _operating within an absolute_. Gentlemen, I say this product
may well spell ‘home-run’ in the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. U.S.A.!”

Small matter though, for both products were, as it turned out, nothing
more nor less than some kind of delayed-action _stench-bomb_—hydrogen
sulfide or the like—causing a great stench and embarrassment to a
number of people. Apparently it was simply another joke by Grand at
their expense, and not altogether in the best of taste. At least so the
press thought (when they got wind of it) and they were down on this
Grand and his staffers like the proverbial ton. It cost him plenty to
clear.




                                 VIII


“And how is our Miss Sally Hastings these days?” Agnes asking this
genially of Ginger Horton while giving Guy a meaningfully coy
glance—for she had tried to interest her nephew in the young lady.

“Poor Sally,” said Ginger Horton, putting on her look of extremest
nonchalance. “She’s become rather tiresome, I’m afraid.”

“That _is_ a shame,” said Agnes. “Such a lovely girl—didn’t you think
so, Guy?”

“A most charming girl,” said Guy Grand.

“And yet, I must say, _you_ didn’t seem to notice,” his aunt went on,
rather severely, “hardly spoke two words all evening—though, if I’ve a
shred of intuitiveness, she was very much attracted to _you_, Guy.”

“We met later at her place,” Guy explained.

“Guy, you didn’t!” said Agnes in genuine annoyance.

“Yes, of course,” said Guy. “Just for a little tête-à-tête—nothing more
certainly.”

“_Well_,” said Agnes, taking a long sip of her tea, and pursing her
lips before speaking again to Ginger, “that _is_ a shame, Ginger. And
such a _clever_ girl, too; but then I suppose so many of them are,
aren’t they—young girls, I mean, of her sort? Personally, of course, I
put _quality_ before _cleverness_—don’t _you_, Guy?”

“Oh, I should think that goes without saying,” said Guy easily.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Grand’s entrance into the world of championship boxing, significant
though it may have been, went completely unnoticed by the savants of
the press. They continued about their business, promoting the Champ.
They said the Champ had plenty of heart and moxie, and that while he
might not be the brightest guy in the whole world, by golly, he was
nobody’s fool, and pound for pound, he could punch with the best of
them.

In the columns they set up hypothetical matches:

  Maybe you’re asking, “Could the Champ have taken the Rock’s
  primeval right-cross?” The answer to that? He _could_, and he could
  have dished something out to boot! “_But_,” you want to know,
  “_could_ he have handled the Bomber’s Sunday-one, I mean the one
  that could snap a two-by-four from nine inches!” Look, you want
  me to tell you something? If Champy couldn’t roll that punch, you
  know what he _could_ do? He could just _laugh_ it off! “Granted,”
  you say, “but could the Champ have lasted with Big John L., when
  the chips were down bloody-bare-bone-knuckle in the 108th stanza?”
  You want my answer to that, buddy? Okay, I’ll tell you something.
  I was standing with the Champ and his gray-haired Mom one Saturday
  afternoon on the corner of Darrow and Lex when some punk hood comes
  up and starts slapping Champ’s Mom around.

  “You dirty old slut!” he yelled, slapping her around. The Champ’s
  Mom! Can you imagine!?! _Well_, if you think the American
  heavyweight boxing champion of the world stands idle while some
  cheap runt of a punk roughs up his _Mom_—_you’ve_ got another think
  coming, Mister! _You’d_ better put on your think-cap, Mister! The
  answer is _N_ ... _O_ ... spells “NO!” “Okay,” you say, “so far, so
  hunky-do-ray-me, but could the Champ have notched Demetrias—when
  Demi was swinging with the old net and trident, and the Champ was
  hog-tied?” What? You want my answer to that buddy? Okay, just
  listen. If Champ....

The Champ was a national hero. He became a TV personality, and his
stock in trade was a poignant, almost incredible, ignorance. He was
good-natured and lovably stupid—and, boy-oh-boy, was he _tough_!

Well, Grand got through somehow, put his cards on the table (two
million, tax-free) and made an arrangement whereby the Champ would
throw the next fight in a gay or effeminate manner and, in fact, would
behave that way all the time, on TV, in the ring, everywhere—swishing
about, grimacing oddly, flinching when he struck a match, and so on.

The next big bout was due to go quite differently now. The challenger
in this case was a thirty-three-year-old veteran of the ring named
Texas Powell. Tex had an impressive record: 40 wins (25 by K.O.), 7
losses and 3 draws. He had been on the scene for quite a while and was
known, or so the press insisted, as a “rugged customer,” and a “tough
cookie.”

“Tex has got the punch,” they said. “The big _if_ is: Can he deliver
it? Will he remain conscious long enough to deliver it? _There’s_ your
Big If in tonight’s Garden bout!”

Well, the fix was in with Tex too, of course—not simply to carry
the fight, but to do so in the most flamboyantly homosexual manner
possible. And finally, a fix—or _zinger_, as it was called in those
days—was in with the Commission as well, a precaution taken under best
advice as it turned out, because what happened in the ring that night
was so “funny” that the bout might well have been halted at the opening
bell.

Fortunately, what did happen didn’t last too long. The Champ and the
challenger capered out from their corners with a saucy mincing step,
and, during the first cagey exchange—which on the part of each was
like nothing so much as a young girl striking at a wasp with her left
hand—uttered little cries of surprise and disdain. Then Texas Powell
took the fight to the Champ, closed haughtily, and engaged him with a
pesky windmill flurry which soon had the Champ covering up frantically,
and finally shrieking, “I can’t _stand_ it!” before succumbing beneath
the vicious peck and flurry, to lie in a sobbing tantrum on the canvas,
striking his fists against the floor of the ring—more the bad loser
than one would have expected. Tex tossed his head with smug feline
contempt and allowed his hand to be raised in victory—while, at the
touch, eyeing the ref in a questionable manner.

Apparently a number of people found the spectacle so abhorrent that
they actually blacked-out.




                                  IX


“Ginger ...” Agnes began lightly, “when did you first realize that
Sally Hastings was perhaps ... well, a bit _common_?”

“Agnes, it was _Bitsy_ who knew it first,” exclaimed Ginger Horton with
perfect candor.

“The dog?” asked Grand.

“What _can_ you mean by that, Ginger?” Agnes wanted to know, dubious
herself, yet casting her nephew a quick and cutting look to show where
her allegiance lay even so.

“She didn’t really love our Bitsy, Agnes,” said Ginger narrowly, “...
and Bitsy _couldn’t_ have cared less I assure you!”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Grand’s work in cinema management and film editing had apparently not
diminished his strong feeling for dramatic theatre, so that with the
cultural ascension of television drama, he was all the more keen to
get, as he put it, “_back on the boards_.”

“There’s no biz like show biz,” he liked to quip to the other troupers,
“... oh, we have our ups and downs, heck yes—but I wouldn’t trade one
whiff of grease paint on opening night, by gosh, for all the darn
châteaux of France!”

Thus did he enter the field, not nominally of course, but in effect.
There was at this time a rather successful drama hour on Sunday
evening. “Our Town Playhouse” it was called and was devoted to serious
fare; at least the viewers were told it was serious fare—truth to
tell though, it was by any civilized standard, the crassest sort of
sham, cant, and weak-kneed pornography imaginable. Grand set about to
interfere with it.

His arrival was fairly propitious; the production in dress rehearsal
at that moment was called _All Our Yesterdays_, a drama which,
according to the sponsors, was to be, concerning certain emotions and
viewpoints, more or less _definitive_.

Beginning with this production, Grand made it a point that he or his
representative contact the hero or heroine of each play, while it was
still in rehearsal, and reach some sort of understanding about final
production. A million was generally sufficient.

The arrangement between Grand and the leading actress of _All Our
Yesterdays_ was simplicity itself. During final production, that is to
say, the Sunday-night nation-wide presentation of the play, and at the
top of her big end-of-the-second-act scene, the heroine suddenly turned
away from the other players, approached the camera, and addressed the
viewers, point-blank:

“Anyone who would allow this slobbering pomp and drivel in his home has
less sense and taste than the beasts of the field!”

Then she pranced off the set.

Half the remaining actors turned to stare after her in amazement, while
the others sat frozen in their last attitudes. There was a frenzy of
muffled whispers coming from off-stage:

“What the hell!”

“Cue! Cue!”

“_Fade it! For Christ’s sake, fade it!_”

Then there was a bit of commotion before it was actually faded—one of
the supporting actors had been trained in Russian methods and thought
he could improvise the rest of the play, about twelve minutes, so there
were one or two odd lines spoken by him in this attempt before the
scene jerkily faded to blackness. A short documentary film about tarpon
fishing was put on to fill out the balance of the hour.

The only explanation was that the actress had been struck by insanity;
but even so, front-office temper ran high.

On the following Sunday, the production, _Tomorrow’s Light_, took an
unexpected turn while the leading actor, in the role of an amiable old
physician, was in the midst of an emergency operation. His brow was
knit in concern and high purpose, as the young nurse opposite watched
his face intently for a sign.

“Dr. Lawrence,” she said, “do you ... do you think you can save Dr.
Chester’s son?”

Without relaxing his features, the doctor smiled, a bit grimly it
seemed, before raising his serious brown eyes to her own.

“I’m afraid it isn’t a question of saving _him_, Miss Nurse—I only wish
it were—it’s a question of saving my dinner.”

The nurse evidenced a questioning look, just concealing the panic
beneath it (_for he had missed his cue!_), so, laying aside his
instruments, he continued, as in explanation:

“Yes, you see, I really think if I speak one more line of this drivel
I’ll lose my dinner.” He nodded gravely at the table, “... vomit right
into that incision I’ve made.” He slowly drew off his rubber gloves,
regarding the astonished nurse as he did so with mild indignation.

“Perhaps that would be _your_ idea of a pleasant Sunday evening, Miss
Nurse,” he said reproachfully. “Sorry, it _isn’t_ mine!” And he turned
and strode off the set.

The third time something like this happened, the producer and sponsor
were very nearly out of their minds. Of course they suspected that a
rival company was tampering with the productions, bribing the actors
and so on. Security measures were taken. Directors were fired right
and left. Rehearsals were held behind locked doors, and there was an
attempt to keep the actors under constant surveillance, but ... Grand
always seemed to get in there somehow, with the old convincer.

In the aftermath, some of the actors paid the breach-of-contract fine
of twenty-five or fifty thousand; others pleaded temporary insanity;
still others gained a lot of publicity by taking a philosophic stand,
saying that it was true, they had been overcome with nausea at that
drivel, and that they themselves were too sensitive and serious for
it, had too much integrity, moral fiber, etc. With a million behind
them, none seemed to lack adequate defense arrangements. Those who were
kicked out of their union usually became producers.

Meanwhile the show went on. People started tuning in to see what new
outrage would happen; it even appeared to have a sort of elusive comic
appeal. It became the talk of the industry; the rating soared—but
somehow it looked bad. Finally the producer and the sponsor of the show
were put on the carpet before Mr. Harlan, the tall and distinguished
head of the network.

“Listen,” he said to the sponsor as he paced the office, “we want your
business, Mr. Levet, don’t get me wrong—but if you guys can’t control
that show of yours ... well, I mean _goddamn_ it, what’s going on over
there?” He turned to the producer now, who was a personal friend of
his: “For Christ’s sake, Max, can’t you get together a _show_, and
put it on the way it’s supposed to be without any somersaults? ... is
_that_ so hard to do?... I mean _we_ can’t have this sort of thing
going on, _you_ know that, Max, we _simply cannot have_....”

“Listen, Al,” said the producer, a short fat man who rose up and down
on his toes, smiling, as he spoke, “we got the highest Trendex in the
books right now.”

“Max, goddamn it, I’d have the FCC down on my neck in another
week—_you_ can’t schedule one kind of hour—have something go haywire
every time and fill out with something else.... I mean what the _hell_
you got over there ... _two_ shows or _one_, for Christ’s sake!”

“We got the top Trendex in the biz, Al.”

“There are some goddamn things that are against the law, Max, and that
kind of stuff you had going out last week, that ‘_I pity the moron
whose life is so empty he would look at this_,’ and that kind of crap
_cannot go out over the air_! Don’t you understand that? It’s not _me_,
Max, you know that. I wouldn’t give a goddamn if you had a ... a _mule_
up there throwing it to some hot broad, I only wish we could, for
Christ’s sake—but there _is a question of lawful procedure_ and....”

“How about if it’s ‘healthy satire of the media,’ Al?”

“... and—_what?_”

“We got the top of the book, Al.”

“Wait a minute....”

“We got it, Al.”

“Wait a minute, Max, I’m thinking, for Christ’s sake ... ‘healthy
satire of the media’.... _It’s_ an angle, _it’s_ an angle. Jones might
buy it ... Jones at the FCC ... if I could get to him first ... he’s
stupid enough to buy it. Okay, it’s an angle, Max—that’s all I can say
right now ... it’s an angle.”

The critics for the most part, after lambasting the first couple of
shows as “terrific boners,” sat tight for a while, just to see which
way the wind was going to blow, so to speak—then, with the rating at
sky-rocket level, they began to suggest that the show might be worth a
peek.

“An off-beat sleeper,” one of them said, “don’t miss it.”

“_New_ comedy,” said a second, “a sophisticated take-off on the
sentimental.”

And another: “Here’s humor at its highest.”

Almost all agreed in the end that it was healthy satire.

After interfering with six or seven shows, Grand grew restive.

“I’m pulling out,” he said to himself, “it may have been good money
after bad all along.”

It was just as well perhaps, because at the point when the producer and
sponsor became aware of what was responsible for their vast audience,
they began consciously trying to choose and shape each drama towards
that moment of anomaly which had made the show famous. And somehow
this seemed to spoil it. At any rate it very soon degenerated—back to
the same old tripe. And of course it was soon back to the old rating
as well—which, as in the early, pre-Grand days, was all right, but
nothing, really, to be too proud of.




                                   X


“Would you like to know why I remember that young Laird K. Russell so
vividly, Agnes?” Esther was asking.

Ginger Horton sniffed to show unqualified disinterest and murmured
something to her sleeping Bitsy.

“Esther, you can’t be serious,” said Agnes, turning to the others with
a brilliant smile. “More tea, anyone?”

“I most certainly _would_ like to know,” said Grand, actually coming
forward a little on his chair.

“Well,” said Esther, “it was because he looked like my father.”

“Esther, really!” cried Agnes.

“I mean _our_ father, of course,” Esther amended. “Yes, Agnes, he
looked just like the photographs of Poppa as a young man. It struck me
then, but I didn’t realize it at the time. So perhaps it’s not Laird K.
Russell I’m remembering, you see, even now, but those photographs. You
didn’t know him, of course, Guy—he was a truly remarkable man.”

“Young Russell do you mean, or Poppa?” asked Guy.

“Why Poppa, of course—surely you don’t know Laird K. Russell?”

“Esther, in the name of heaven!” cried Agnes. “He’s probably _dead_ by
now! How _can_ you go on so about the man? Sometimes I wonder if you
aren’t trying quite deliberately to _upset_ me....”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Speaking of upsets though, Grand upset the equilibrium of a rather
smart Madison Avenue advertising agency, Jonathan Reynolds, Ltd.,
by secretly buying it—_en passant_, so to speak—and putting in as
president a pygmy.

At that time it was rare for a man of this skin-pigmentation or
stature (much the less both) to hold down a top-power post in one of
these swank agencies, and these two handicaps would have been difficult
to overcome—though perhaps could have been overcome in due time had the
chap shown a reasonable amount of savoir-faire and general ability,
or the promise of developing it. In this case, however, Grand had
apparently paid the man to behave in an eccentric manner—to scurry
about the offices like a squirrel and to chatter raucously in his
native tongue. It was more than a nuisance.

An account executive, for example, might be entertaining an extremely
important client in his own office, a little tête-à-tête of the very
first seriousness—perhaps with an emissary of one of the soap-flake
kings—when the door would burst open and in would fly the president,
scrambling across the room and under the desk, shrieking pure
gibberish, and then out he’d go again, scuttling crabwise over the
carpet, teeth and eyes blazing.

“What in God’s name was that?” the client would ask, looking slowly
about, his face pocked with a terrible frown.

“Why, that ... that....” But the a.e. could not bring himself to tell,
not after the first few times anyway. Evidently it was a matter of
pride.

Later this a.e. might run into one of his friends from another agency,
and the friend would greet him:

“Say, hear you’ve got a new number one over at J.R., Tommy—what’s the
chap like?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, Bert....”

“You don’t mean the old boy’s got you on the _mat_ already, Tommy.
Ha-ha. _That_ what you’re trying to say?”

“No, Bert, it’s ... well I don’t know, Bert, I _just don’t know_.”

It was a matter of pride, of course. As against it, salaries had been
given a fairly stiff boost, _and_ titles. If these dapper execs were
to go to another agency now, it would be at a considerable loss of
dollars and cents. Most of the old-timers—and the younger ones too,
actually—had what it took to stick it out there at J.R.




                                  XI


“These sweet fluffs _are_ good,” said Ginger Horton, daintily taking
what was perhaps her ninth cream puff from a great silver tray at hand,
and giving Guy Grand a most coquettish look.

“Takes one to know one,” said Guy, beaming and rolling his eyes.

Esther twittered, and Agnes looked extremely pleased.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Grand made quite a splash in the fall of ’58 when he entered the
“big-car” field with his sports line of Black Devil Rockets, a
gigantic convertible. There were four models of the Rocket, each
with a different fanciful name, though, except for the color of the
upholstery, all four cars were identical. The big convertible was
scaled in the proportions of an ordinary automobile, but was tremendous
in size—was, in fact, _longer and wider than the largest Greyhound Bus
in operation_.

“THERE’S POWER TO SPARE UNDER THIS BIG BABY’S FORTY-FOOT HOOD!” was a
sales claim that gained attention.

Fronting the glittering crystal dash were two “racing-cup” seats with
a distance of ten feet between them, and the big “gang’s-all-here”
seat in back would accommodate twelve varsity crewmen abreast in roomy
comfort.

“Buy Yourself One _Whale_ of a Car, Buddy!” read the giant ads. “From
Stem to Stern She’s a Flat One Hundred Feet! Ladylike Lines on a He-Man
Hunk of Car!”

Performance figures were generally side-stepped, but a number of
three-color billboards and full-page ads were headed: “_Performance?_
Ask the Fella Behind the Wheel!” and featured, in apparently authentic
testimonial, one of the Indianapolis speed kings behind the wheel of
the mammoth convertible. A larger than average man, he was incredibly
dwarfed by the immense dimensions of the car. His tiny face, just
visible at the top of the wheel, was split in a grin of insanity, like
a toothpaste ad, a madman’s laugh frozen at the nightmare peak of
hilarity, and it was captioned:

“_Getting the feel of this big baby has been one real thrill, believe
you me!_”

The four identical models were shown at a display room on Fifth Avenue,
and though considered beyond the price range of most, were evidently
sold. At any rate, on the last day of the exposition they were driven
away, out and into the streets of mid-town Manhattan during the five
o’clock rush.

Despite their roominess, power, and road-holding potential, the big
cars did prove impractical in the city, because their turning-arc—for
the ordinary 90° change of direction—was greater than the distance
between the street-angled buildings, so that by five thirty all four
of the sleek Devil Rockets were wedged at angles across various
intersections around Columbus Circle, each a barrier to thoroughfare
in four directions, and causing quite a snarl indeed until cranes and
derricks could be brought up from the East River to pry the big cars
out.

New York authorities were quick to respond to the flood of protests
and got out an injunction to prevent Black Devil Rocket Corp. from
further production.

“Personally,” said one high-ranking city official, in an off-the-record
remark in defense of the court’s ruling—which was, after all,
a flagrant infringement on the rights of free enterprise—“...
_personally_ I frankly think the car is an ugly car and a ...
a _pretentious_ car, and, as experience has shown us, it is an
impractical car. I’ll bet it’s plenty expensive to run, too.”

At last account though, Grand—himself fairly well in the background—was
carrying on, pressing his fight to get the go-ahead and swing into full
production with the big baby.




                                  XII


“You _must_ stay to dinner, Ginger,” said Agnes. “And there _might_ be
a nice bit of fillet for our Bitsy,” she added knowingly. “Do let me
tell Cook you will!”

“But, my dear, we simply couldn’t,” said Ginger, casting a look flushed
with girlish pride down at her own great scanty costume. “What about
your nigras?”

“Cook and kitchen staff?” said Agnes, genuinely surprised. “Why,
Ginger, really! But what’s your feeling on it, Guy?”

“Sorry, don’t follow,” said Guy.

“Well, Ginger seems to think that our servers might be ... might be....”

“Might be sent straight off their rockers with bestial desire, you
mean?” asked Grand tersely. “Hmm—Ginger may be right. Better safe than
sorry in these matters I’ve always said.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Guy liked playing the fool, it’s true—though some say there was more
to his antics than met the eye. At any rate, one amusing diversion in
which he took a central role himself was when he played _grand gourmet_
at the world’s most luxurious restaurants.

Guy would arrive in faultless evening attire, attended by his
poker-faced valet, who carried a special gourmet’s chair and a large
valise of additional equipment. The chair, heavily weighted at the
bottom so it could not be easily overturned, was also fitted with a big
waist strap which was firmly secured around Grand’s middle as soon as
he was seated. Then the valet would take from the valise a huge rubber
bib and attach it to Guy while the latter surveyed the menu in avid
conference with a bevy of hosts—the maître d’, the senior waiter, the
wine steward, and at least one member of the chef’s staff.

Guy Grand was the last of the big spenders and, as such, a great
favorite at these restaurants; due to his eccentric behavior during the
meal however, the management always took care to place him at a table
as decentralized as possible—on the edge of the terrace, in a softly
lit alcove, or, preferably, at a table entirely obscured by a canopy
arrangement which many restaurants, after his first visit, saw fit to
have on hand for Guy’s return.

Following the lengthy discussion to determine the various courses, the
waist strap was checked, and Guy would sit back in his chair, rubbing
his hands together in sophisticated anticipation of the taste treats to
come.

When the first course did arrive, an extraordinary spectacle would
occur. At the food’s very aroma, Grand, still sitting well back from
the table, as in fanatical self-restraint, would begin to writhe
ecstatically in his chair, eyes rolling, head lolling, saliva streaming
over his ruddy jowls. Then he would suddenly stiffen, his face a mask
of quivering urgency, before shouting: “_Au table!_” whereupon he
would lurch forward, both arms cupped out across the table, and wildly
scoop the food, dishes and all, towards his open mouth. Following
this fantastic clatter and commotion—which left him covered from the
top of his head to his waist with food—the expressionless valet would
lean forward and unfasten the chair strap, and Guy would bolt from
the table and rush pell-mell towards the kitchen, covered and dripping
with food, hair matted with it, one arm extended full length as in a
congratulatory handshake, shouting at the top of his voice:

“_MES COMPLIMENTS AU CHEF!_”

Upon his return to the table, he would be strapped into the chair
again, hosed-down by a little water pump from the valet’s case, and
dried with a big towel; then the performance would be repeated with
each course.

Restaurants who used a special canopy to conceal Grand from the other
diners did so at considerable risk, because at the moment of completing
each course he would bolt for the kitchen so quickly that, unless
the waiters were extremely alert and dexterous in pulling aside the
canopy, he would bring the thing down on his head and, like a man in a
collapsed tent, would flail about inside it, upsetting the table, and
adding to the general disturbance, or worse, as sometimes did happen,
he might regain his feet within the canopy and careen blindly through
the plush restaurant, toppling diners everywhere, and spreading the
disturbance—and, of course, if he ever reached the kitchen while still
inside the canopy, it could be actually calamitous.

The open-mouthed astonishment of waiters, diners and others who were
witness to these scenes was hardly lessened by the bits of bland
dialogue they might overhear between the maître d’, who was also in on
the gag, and the valet.

“Chef’s _Béarnaise_ pleased him,” the maître d’ would remark soberly to
the valet, “I could tell.”

The valet would agree with a judicious nod, as he watched Grand
storming through the restaurant. “He’s awful keen tonight.”

“In the _Béarnaise_,” the maître d’ would suddenly confide in an
excited whisper, “the peppercorns were _bruised_ merely by dropping
them!” And the two men would exchange dark knowing glances at this
revelation.

By the last course Grand would be utterly exhausted, and the exquisite
dessert would invariably prove too much for his overtaxed senses.
At the first taste of it, he would go into a final tantrum and then
simply black out. He always had to be carried from the restaurant on a
stretcher, leaving waiters and diners staring agape, while the maître
d’ stood respectfully by the door with several of his staff.

“Boy, was that guy ever _nuts_! Huh?” a wide-eyed young waiter would
exclaim as he stood with the maître d’, gazing after the departing
figures. But the latter would appear not to have heard.

“The last of the _grand gourmets_,” he would sigh, and there was
always a trace of wistful nostalgia in his face when he turned back
from the door. “No, sir, they don’t make taste buds like _that_ any
more.”

Connivance with the maître d’s of these top restaurants was an
expensive affair, and there was a shake-up in more than one veteran
staff due to it. Those who lost their jobs though were usually in a
position to open fairly smart restaurants of their own—assuming, of
course, they didn’t care to buy the one from which they were fired.




                                 XIII

“In _literature_, of course,” Ginger Horton was saying, “the _best_
writing comes out of the _heart_, and _not_ the _head_!”

“_I’ll_ buy that!” agreed Guy Grand, coming forward on his big chair in
ready interest, his voice going a bit taut with feeling as he continued:

“For _my_ money the best ... the _very best_ darn writing is done right
out of the old guts, by God!” And he gave his budding paunch a short
slap to strengthen his meaning.

“Good Heavens,” said Esther crouching forward into a sea of giggles.

“And _no rewrite_!” said Guy strongly, “... right out of the old guts
onto the goddamn paper!”

“Guy!” exclaimed Agnes, “really!” It was well known that Ginger
Horton _did_ write—wrote unceasingly—relentless torrents of a deeply
introspective prose.

“Sorry,” muttered Grand, sitting back again, “get a bit carried away
sometimes, I expect.”

“_Feeling and passion!_” agreed Ginger Horton in a shriek. “Of course
most of the nasty little people around don’t feel a _thing_! _Not a
single thing!_”

“Interesting you should bring that up,” said Guy, reaching in his coat
pocket and withdrawing a small memo-book, which he thumbed through as
he continued:

“Fellow I met on the train—I won’t mention his name if you don’t mind,
because the thing is still pretty much on the drawing board, so to
speak ... but I can tell you _this_: he’s one of the top-brass along
‘Publishers’ Row’—well, we got to talking, one thing and another,
and he offered to let me in on a new scheme of his. How sound it is
I _don’t_ know, but he’s willing to let me in on the ground floor—at
_second-story prices_, of course—” added Guy with a good-natured
chuckle. “And _there’s_ your old six-and-seven again, but, still
and all, that’s to be expected in the investment game. Well, his
scheme—and I’d like to put out a feeler on it—is to issue a series of
Do-It-Yourself Portables ... the _Do-It-Yourself Shakespeare_, the
_D.H. Do-It-Yourself Lawrence_, and so on.”

“What on earth—” Ginger began crossly.

“_His_ idea,” said Guy, “—and I don’t pretend to know how sound it
is—is to issue the regular texts of well-known works, with certain
words, images, bits of dialogue, and what have you, left _blank_ ...
just spaces there, you see ... which _the reader fills in_.”

“Well, I never—” said Ginger irately.

“Oh yes, here we are,” said Grand, evidently finding the place he was
looking for in the memo-book, “Yes, now here’s some of his promotional
copy ... rough draft, mind you ... let’s see, yes, this is for Kafka’s
_Do-It-Yourself Trial_. Goes like this:

  ‘Now you too can experience that same marvelous torment of
  ambiguity and haunting glimpse of eternal beauty which tore this
  strange artist’s soul apart and stalked him to his very grave!
  Complete with optional imagery selector, master word table and
  _writer’s-special_ ball-point pen, thirty-five cents.’”

Ginger Horton made a gurgling sound of anger preparatory to speaking,
but Guy was quick to press on:

“And here we are for the _Look Homeward (Yourself) Angel_:

  ‘Hey there, reader-writer—how would you like to spew your entrails
  right out onto a priceless Sarouk carpet?!? Huh? Right in the
  middle of somebody’s living room with everyone watching? Huh? Well,
  by golly, you _can_, etcetera, etcetera.’

“As I say, it’s rough-draft copy, of course—needs tightening up,
brightening up—but what’s your feeling on it, Ginger? Think it might
spell ‘blast-off’ in the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch?”

“What? Well I wouldn’t put a ... a _single cent_ into it!” said Ginger
with considerable emphasis.

“Oh it’s just too dreadful, Guy,” exclaimed Agnes. “You mustn’t.”

“Hmm. I suppose you’re right,” said Guy, “... hard to say really.
_Might_ catch on—might not ... just wanted to put out a feeler or two
on it. Always best to keep an open mind in the investment game.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Grand had a bit of fun when he engaged a man to smash crackers with a
sledge-hammer in Times Square.

The stout fellow arrived with his gear—a box of saltine crackers and
a sixty-pound sledge—at precisely 9 A.M. and “set up shop,” as Guy
expressed it, just outside the subway entrance on Forty-Second Street,
the busiest thoroughfare in the world at this particular hour.

Dressed in khaki and wearing a tin hat, the curious man forged his way
through the deluge of people pouring out of the subway, and then in
the very midst of the surging throng, opened the brass-studded pouch
attached to his belt, extracted a single saltine cracker, and stooped
over to place it carefully on the sidewalk.

“Watch yourself!” he shouted as he stood up, gesturing impatiently.
“Keep clear! Mind your step!” And then, raising the hammer to shoulder
height, he brought it down in one horrendous blow on the cracker—not
only smashing it to dust, but also producing several rather large
cracks in the sidewalk.

Within a few minutes the area was swollen with onlookers—all but the
nearest of whom had to crane their heads wildly or leap up and down to
get a glimpse of the man in the tin hat now as he squatted to examine
the almost invisible dust of the cracker. “Sure mashed it, didn’t it?”
he muttered, as to himself, in a professional manner.

“What’d he say?” demanded several people urgently of those near the
operation.

“Said it ‘sure _mashed_ it,’” someone explained.

“‘_Mashed_ it’?” snorted another. “Boy, you can say _that_ again!”

Guy Grand was on the scene as well, observing the diverse comments and
sometimes joining in.

“Hey, how come you doin’ that?” he asked directly of the man in the tin
hat.

The man laid out another cracker, placing it with great care.

“This?” he said, standing and raising the big sledge. “Oh, this is all
technical.”

“What’s he say?”

“Says it’s technical.”

“_What?_”

“_Technical._”

“Yeah, well, what’s that he’s hitting with the hammer? What is that? It
looks like a _cracker_.”

“Naw, what’d he hit a _cracker_ for—you kiddin’?”

“Boy, look how that sledge busts up the sidewalk! Man, that’s some
_sledge_ he’s got there!”

Within a very short time indeed, the gathering had spilled over into
the street, interfering with the traffic there and causing the tough
Forty-Second Street cop to wade growling into the heart of the crowd.
“Okay, break it up!” he kept saying. “Shove off!” And when he reached
the center where the operation was being carried out, he stood for a
long while with his cap pushed back on his head, hands on hips, and a
nasty frown on his face, as he watched the man in the tin hat smash a
few more crackers with the giant sledge.

“Are you workin’ for the _city_, bud?” he finally asked in an irate
voice.

“That’s right,” said the tin-hat man without looking up. “City
planning. This is technical.”

“Yeah,” said the cop, “well, you sure picked a hell of a place to do
it, that’s all I got to say.” Then, adjusting his cap, he started
pushing at the crowd.

“Okay, let’s keep movin’!” he shouted. “Break it up here! Get on to
work! This is technical—_shove off!_”

Diversion is at a premium at this hour however, and the crowd was not
to be dispersed so easily. After a while the hoses had to be brought.
When the ruse was discovered, Grand had a spot of bother clearing it.




                                  XIV


“Perhaps Ginger could slip into one of your things,” suggested Guy.

Esther childishly covered her mouth to hide a laugh, and darted glances
of mischief and glee at the others, while Agnes drew in her breath
before speaking:

“I’m afraid we do _not_ take the same size, Guy!”

Agnes, thin as a whip, was perhaps a size nine; Ginger’s great size
must have been well into the sixties.

Ginger, too, shook her head emphatically.

“Charles would simply die if I wore a frock he hadn’t done!” she said.

“Has Charles done any chemises for you?” Guy inquired.

“I _wanted_ Charles to do some little Roman chemises for me, Guy,”
Ginger confided. “I think I have the fullness for them—well, it would
have meant giving up all my little feminine frills and laces, of
course, and Charles simply would not hear of it! He said it would be
a perfect _crime_—and he does so love to work with his laces, Guy, I
simply didn’t have the heart! But then what’s your feeling on it, Guy?”
she asked finally, giving a Carmenesque toss of her head.

“Charles _could_ be right, of course,” said Guy, after allowing it a
moment’s thought.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Grand gave a bit of a shock to the British white-hunters along the
Congo (as well as to a couple of venerable old American writers who
were there on safari at the time) when he turned up in a major hunting
expedition with a 75-millimeter howitzer.

“She throws a muzzle-velocity of twelve thousand f.p.s.,” Grand liked
to quip. “She’ll stop anything on this continent.”

Ordinarily used by the French Army as an artillery fieldpiece, the big
gun, stripped of all but its barrel, chamber, and firing mechanism,
still weighed well over a hundred and fifty pounds.

“She’ll stop anything that moves,” Guy would say, “—including a
surfaced _whale_.”

Grand had three natives carry the giant gun, while he, wearing a huge
cushion-device around his stomach and a pith helmet so enormous that
half his face was concealed beneath it, sauntered jauntily alongside,
speaking knowledgeably to other members of the party about every aspect
of firearms and big-game hunting.

“A spot of bother in Kenya bush the other day,” he would say, “the big
cat took two of our best boys.” Then he would give his monstrous weapon
an affectionate pat and add knowingly, “—the cat changed her tune when
she’d had a taste of the old seventy-five! Yessir, this baby carries a
real _wallop_, you can bet your life on that!”

About once an hour, Grand would stop and dramatically raise his hand,
bringing the entire safari to a halt, while he and one of his trusty
natives (heretofore known as the “best guide in Central Africa”) would
sniff the air, nostrils flared and quivering, eyes a bit wild.

“_There’s cat in the bush_,” Guy would say tersely, and while the rest
of the party looked on in pure amazement, Grand, big helmet completely
obscuring his sight, would take up the huge gun and, staggering under
its weight, brace it against the great cushion at his stomach, and
blindly fire one of the mammoth shells into the bush, blasting a wide
swath through the tall grass and felling trees as though they were
stalks of corn. The recoil of the weapon would fling Grand about
forty feet backwards through the air where he would land in a heap,
apparently unconscious.

“The baby packs a man-sized recoil,” Guy would say later. “The
Mannlicher, of course, is nothing more than a _toy_.”

Due to the extreme noise produced by the discharge of the 75, any
actual game in the area was several miles away by the time the
reverberations were stilled—so that these safaris would often go from
start to finish without ever firing a shot, other than the occasional
big boom from Grand’s 75.

African hunting expeditions are serious and expensive affairs, and this
kind of tomfoolery cost Grand a pretty penny. It did provide another
amusing page for his memory book though—and the old native guides
seemed to enjoy it as well.




                                  XV


“Hold on, here’s a bit of news,” said Guy then, suddenly brightening in
his big chair and smartly slapping the newspaper spread across his lap.
The banner read:

                    PRESIDENT ASKS NATION FOR FAITH
                         IN GIANT SPACE PROGRAM
                        Jackass Payload Promised

He read it aloud in sonorous tones, but Ginger pooh-poohed the claim.

“Probably one of these teeny-weeny Mexican burros!” she cried. “Jackass
indeed!” She was a notorious foe of the administration.

“I _wouldn’t_ underestimate our Mister Uncle Sambo if I were you,”
cautioned Guy, raising a rather arch look for Ginger and the others.

“Why those Mexican burros are no bigger than a minute!” Ginger insisted.

“Ginger’s right,” put in Agnes sharply, donning her spectacles—as she
almost invariably did when taking political issue with Guy—to peer down
at him then over the top of them, her face pinched and testy. “It would
make a good deal more sense to send _that_ great ninny up into space!”
She flung back her head in a veritable cackle of delight at the idea.
“I say blast that whole pack of ninnies right out into fartherest outer
space!”

Grand laid his paper aside.

“I _don’t_ think I’m an intolerant person,” he said quietly, but
with considerable feeling, as he rose to his feet, “nor one of hasty
opinion—but, in times like these, when the very _mettle_ of this nation
is in the crucible, I say that brand of talk is not far short of
_damnable treason_!” Still glowering, he did a funny little two-step
and ended in a smart salute. “I’m afraid I’ll not be staying for dinner
myself, by the way,” he added matter-of-factly.

“Guy, I simply will _not_ hear of it!” cried cross Agnes, snatching her
glasses from her nose and fixing the man with a terrible frown. “Surely
you _shall_ stay!”

“Guy, Guy, Guy,” keened Esther, wagging her dear gray head, “always on
the go.”

“Yes, only wish I _could_ stay,” agreed Guy sadly. “Best push on
though—back to harness, back to grind.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

It was along towards the end though that Grand achieved, in terms of
public outrage, his _succès d’estime_, as some chose to call it, when
he put out to sea in his big ship, the _S.S. Magic Christian_ ... the
ship sometimes later referred to as “The Terrible Trick Ship of Captain
Klaus.” Actually it was the old _Griffin_, a passenger liner which
Grand bought and had reconditioned for about fifty million.

A vessel of 30,000 tons, the _Christian_ had formerly carried some
eleven-hundred-odd passengers. Grand converted it into a one-class
ship, outfitted to accommodate four hundred passengers, in a style
and comfort perhaps unknown theretofore outside princely domains of
the East. Each cabin on the _Christian_ was a palace in miniature;
the appointments were so lavish and so exquisitely detailed that
they might better be imagined than described. All the cabins were of
course above deck and outside, each with a twenty-foot picture window
and French doors to a private patio commanding a magnificent expanse
of sea and sky. There were fine deep rugs throughout each suite and
period-furnishings of first account, private bars, chaise longues,
log-burning fireplaces, king-sized beds (canopy optional), an adjoining
library-den (with a set of the _Britannica_ and the best in smart
fiction), tape recorders, powder rooms, small Roman bath and steam
cabinet. Walls were generally in a quiet tone of suede with certain
paneling of teak and rosewood.

Ship’s dining room was styled after Maxim’s in Paris whose staff had
been engaged to prepare the meals and to serve them with inconspicuous
grace against a background of soft music provided by the Juilliard
String Quartette. The balance of ship’s appointments were in harmonious
key—there was, for example, a veritable jewel box of a theatre, seating
just four hundred, fashioned in replica of the one in the Monte Carlo
Casino; and the versatile repertory group, Old Vic Players, were on
stand-by for two shows a day.

Ship’s doctor, aside from being an able physician, was also a
top-flight mental specialist, so that Problem-Counseling was available
to the passengers at all hours.

But perhaps the most carefully thought-out nicety of the _Christian_
was its principal lounge, the Marine Room—a large room, deep below
decks, its wall (that which was part of ship’s hull) glassed so that
the passengers sat looking out into the very heart of the sea. An
ocean-floor effect was maintained by the regular release of deep-sea
creatures from a water-line station near the bow, and through the
use of powerful daylight kliegs there was afforded a breath-taking
panorama—with giant octopi, huge rainbow-colored ray, serpents, great
snowy angelfish, and fantastic schools of luminous tetra constantly
gliding by or writhing in silent majestic combat a few feet from the
relaxed passengers.

Though the _Magic Christian_ received its share of prevoyage hullabaloo
(_Life_ magazine devoted an issue to photographs, enthusiastically
captioned), its only form of paid advertisement was a simple
announcement of its sailing date, which appeared in _The Times_ and in
the _National Geographic_. The fare was not mentioned (though _Life_
had said it was “about five thousand”) and the announcement was set in
small heavy type, boxed with a very black border. “For the Gracious Few
...” it opened, and went on to state in a brief, restrained apology,
that _not everyone_ could be accepted, that applications for passage
on the _Christian_ were necessarily carefully screened, and that those
who were refused should not take offense. “Our criteria,” it closed,
“may _not_ be yours.”

Ship’s quarters were not shown until the applicant had been accepted,
and then were shown by appointment.

The ship was christened by the Queen of England.

All of this had a certain appeal and the applications poured in.
More than a few people, in fact, were _demanding_ passage on the
_Christian_’s first voyage. Those just back from holiday were suddenly
planning to go abroad again; scores rushed home simply to qualify and
make the trip. For many, the maiden voyage of the _Magic Christian_
became a must.

Meanwhile Guy Grand, well in the background, was personally screening
the applications according to some obscure criteria of his own, and
apparently he had himself a few laughs in this connection. In the case
of one application, for example, from a venerable scioness of Roman
society, he simply scrawled moronically across it in blunt pencil: “Are
_you_ kidding?!? _No_ wops!” The woman was said to have had a nervous
breakdown and did later file for a million on defamation. It cost Grand
a pretty to clear it.

On the other hand, he accepted—or rather, engaged—as passengers, a
group from a fairly sordid freak show, most of whom could not be left
untended, along with a few gypsies, Broadway types, and the like, of
offensive appearance and doubtful character. These, however, were to
be kept below decks for the first few days out, and, even so, numbered
only about forty in all, so that a good nine-tenths of the passenger
list, those on deck when the _Christian_ set sail in such tasteful
fanfare that Easter morn, were top-drawer gentry and no mistake.

Unique among features of the _Christian_ was its video communication
system from the bridge to other parts of the ship. Above the fireplace
in each cabin was a small TV screen and this provided direct visual
communication with the Captain at the wheel and with whatever other
activity was going on there, giving as it did a view of almost the
entire bridge. These sets could be switched _on_ or _off_, but the
first day they were left _on_ before the passengers arrived, in
order to spare anyone the embarrassment of not knowing what the new
gimmick was. So that when passengers entered their cabins now they
saw at once, there on the screen above the fireplace: the Captain at
the wheel. Captain Klaus. And for this person, Guy Grand had engaged
a professional actor, a distinguished silver-haired man whose every
gesture inspired the deepest confidence. He wore a double row of
service ribbons on his dark breast and deported himself in a manner
both authoritative and pleasingly genial—as the passengers saw when he
turned to face the screen, and this he did just as soon as they were
all settled and under way.

He was filling his pipe when he turned to camera, but he paused from
this to smile and touch his cap in easy salute.

“Cap’n Klaus,” he said, introducing himself with warm informality,
though certainly at no sacrifice to his considerable bearing. “Glad to
have you aboard.”

He casually picked up a pointer stick and indicated a chart on the
nearby wall.

“Here’s our course,” he said, “nor’ by nor’east, forty-seven degrees.”

Then he went on to explain the mechanics and layout of the bridge, the
weather and tide conditions at present, their prospects, and so on,
using just enough technical jargon throughout all this to show that he
knew what he was about. He said that the automatic-pilot would be used
from time to time, but that he personally preferred handling the wheel
himself, adding good-humoredly that in his opinion “a ship favored men
to machines.”

“It may be an old-fashioned notion,” he said, with a wise twinkle, “...
but to me, a ship is a woman.”

At last he gave a final welcome-salute, saying again: “Glad to have you
aboard,” and turned back to his great wheel.

This contact with the bridge and the fatherly Captain seemed to give
the passengers an added sense of participation and security; and,
indeed, things couldn’t have gone more smoothly for the first few hours.

It was in the very early morning that something untoward occurred,
at about three A.M.—and of course almost everyone was asleep. They
had watched their screens for a while: the Captain in the cozy bridge
house, standing alone, pipe glowing, his strong eyes sweeping the black
water ahead—then they had switched off their sets. There were a few
people though who were still up and who had their sets on; and, of
these few, there were perhaps three who happened to be watching the
screen at a certain moment—when in the corner of the bridge house,
near the door, there was a shadow, an odd movement ... then suddenly
the appearance of a sinister-looking person, who crept up behind the
Captain, hit him on the head, and seized the wheel as the screen
blacked out.

The people who had seen this were disturbed and, in fact, were soon
rushing about, rousing others, wanting to go to the bridge and so
on. And they did actually get up a party and went to the bridge—only
to be met at the top of the ladder by the Captain himself, unruffled,
glossing it over, blandly assuring them that nothing was wrong, nothing
at all, just a minor occurrence. And, of course, back in the cabins,
there he was on the screen again, Captain Klaus, steady at the helm.

Those three who had seen the outrage, being in such a hopeless
minority, were thought to have been drunk or in some way out of
their minds, and were gently referred to ship’s doctor, the mental
specialist, so the incident passed without too much notice.

And things went smoothly once more, until the next evening—when, in the
exquisite gaming rooms just off the Marine Lounge, one of the roulette
croupiers was seen, by several people, to be cheating ... darting his
eyes about in a furtive manner and then interfering with the bets,
snatching them up and stuffing them in his pocket, that sort of thing.

It was such an unheard-of outrage that one old duke fainted dead away.
The croupier was hustled out of the gaming room by Captain Klaus
himself, who deplored the incident profusely and declared that the next
dozen spins were on the house, losing bets to remain untouched for
that time—gracious recompense, in the eyes of a sporting crowd, and
applauded as such; still, the incident was not one easily forgotten.

Another curious thing occurred when some of the ladies went,
individually, to visit the ship’s doctor. For the most part they had
simply dropped around to pick up a few aspirin, sea-sickness pills—or
merely to have a reassuring chat with the amiable physician. Several of
these ladies, however, were informed that they looked “rather queer”
and that an examination might be in order.

“Better safe than sorry,” the doctor said, and then, during the
examination, he invariably seemed to discover what he termed “a latent
abrasion”—on the waist, side, hip, or shoulder of the woman—and though
the abrasion could not be seen, the doctor deemed it required a
compress.

“Nothing serious,” he explained, “still it’s always wise to take
precautions.” And so saying he would apply a _huge compress_ to the
area, a sort of gigantic Band-Aid about a foot wide and several inches
thick, with big adhesive flaps that went halfway around the body. The
tremendous bulk of these compresses was a nuisance, causing as they
did, great deforming bulges beneath the women’s smart frocks. They were
almost impossible to remove. One woman was seen running about with one
on her head, like a big white hat.

First lifeboat drill was scheduled for the following morning. Shortly
before it, Captain Klaus came on the screen and smilingly apologized
for the inconvenience and gave a leisurely and pleasantly informative
talk about the drill and its necessity.

“Better safe than sorry,” he said in a genial close to his little talk.

When the drill signal sounded, they all got into life jackets—which
were the latest thing and quite unlike standard passenger-ship
equipment—and then, grumbling good-naturedly, they started for their
boat stations; but an extraordinary thing happened: two minutes after
they had put them on, the life jackets began inflating in a colossal
way. Apparently the very act of donning the jacket set off some device
which inflated it. The extraordinary thing was that each one blew up so
big that it simply obscured the person wearing it, ballooning out about
them, above their heads, below their feet, and to a diameter of perhaps
twelve feet—so that if they were in an open space, such as their
cabins, the lounge, or on deck, they simply rolled or lolled about on
the floor, quite hidden from view, whereas if they were in a corridor,
they were hopelessly stuck.

In any event, almost no one escaped the effects of the faulty life
jacket; so it was—after they deflated—with a good deal of annoyance
that they came back to the cabins, quite ready to hear Captain Klaus’
explanation of what had gone amiss.

Unfortunately though, the foghorn, which had been put to practice
during the drill, was now evidently jammed. At any rate, it continued
steadily during the Captain’s after-drill talk and completely shut out
his voice, so that it was like looking at someone talk behind several
layers of glass. The Captain himself didn’t seem to realize that he
wasn’t coming through, and he went on talking for quite a while,
punctuating his remarks with various little facial gestures to indicate
a whole gamut of fairly intense feelings about whatever it was he was
saying.

The business with the foghorn was more serious than at first imagined;
it continued, blasting without let-up, for the rest of the voyage.

Quite incidental to what was happening during the drill, fifty crew
members took advantage of the occasion to go around to the cabins,
lounges, and dining rooms, and to substitute a thin length of balsa
wood for one leg of every chair, table, and dresser on ship.

When the Captain finished his lengthy and voiceless discourse, he
smiled, gave an easy salute and left the bridge house. It was about
this time that all the furniture began to collapse—in half an hour’s
time there wasn’t one standing stick of it aboard the _Christian_.

Strange and unnatural persons began to appear—in the drawing rooms,
salons, at the pool. During the afternoon tea dance, a gigantic
_bearded-woman_, stark naked, rushed wildly about over the floor,
interfering with the couples, and had to be forcibly removed by ship’s
doctor.

The plumbing went bad, too; and finally one of the _Christian’s_ big
stacks toppled—in such a way as to give directly on to ship’s dining
room, sending oily smoke billowing through. And, in fact, from about
this point on, the voyage was a veritable nightmare.

Large curious posters were to be seen in various parts of the ship:

                         SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH

                        LET’S KEEP THE CLAP OUT
                           OF CHAPPAQUIDDICK

as well as rude slogans, vaguely political, scrawled in huge misshapen
letters across walls and decks alike:

                             DEATH TO RICH!
                             BLOW UP U.S.!

Due to the strain of untoward events, more than one passenger sought
solace and reassurance from the problem-counselor, the ship’s
distinguished doctor.

“Doctor, what _in the name of God_ is going on here!” the frenzied
passenger would demand.

The doctor would answer with a quizzical smile, arching his brows, only
mildly censorious. “Fair-weather sailor?” he would gently chide, “...
hmm? Cross and irritable the moment things aren’t going exactly to suit
you? Now just what seems to be the trouble?”

“_‘Trouble’!?!_” exclaimed the outraged passenger. “Good Lord, Doctor,
surely you don’t think my complaint is an ... an unreasonable one?”

The doctor would turn his gaze out to sea, thin fingers pressed beneath
his chin in a delicate pyramid of contemplation, wistfully abstract for
a moment before turning back to address the patient frankly.

“Deep-rooted and unreasonable fears,” he would begin in a grand, rich
voice, “are most often behind our anxieties ...” and he would continue
in this vein until the passenger fairly exploded with impatience.

“Great Scott, Doctor! I didn’t come here for a lecture on
_psychology_—I came to find out what _in the name of Heaven_ is going
on _aboard this ship_!”

In the face of these outbursts however, the doctor almost invariably
retained his calm, regarding the patient coolly, searchingly, making a
few careful notes on his pad.

“Now, you say that ‘the life jacket _over inflated_,’ and that you were
‘stuck in the corridor’—that was your expression, I believe, ‘_stuck in
the corridor_’—and at that moment you felt a certain _malaise_, so to
speak. Now, let me ask you _this_....” Or again, on other occasions, he
might behave eccentrically, his head craned far to one side, regarding
the patient out of the corners of his eyes, a sly, mad smile on his
lips which moved in an inaudible whisper, almost a hiss.

Finally, the patient, at the end of his tether, would leap to his feet.

“Well, in the name of God, Doctor, the least you can do is let me have
some _tranquillizers_!”

But the doctor, as it turned out, was not one given to prescribing
drugs promiscuously.

“Escape into drugs?” he would ask, wagging his head slowly. “Mask our
fears in an artificial fog?” And there was always a trace of sadness
in his smile, as he continued, “No, I’m afraid the trouble is _in
ourselves_, you see.” Then he would settle back expansively and speak
with benign countenance. “Running away from problems is scarcely the
solution to them. I _believe_ you’ll thank me in years to come.” And at
last he would lean forward in quiet confidence. “Do you mind if I ask
you a few questions about your ... your _early childhood_?”

                   *       *       *       *       *

When Captain Klaus next appeared on the screen, he looked as though
he had been sleeping in two feet of water. Completely disheveled, his
ribbons dangling in unsightly strands, his open coat flapping, his
unknotted tie strung loosely around his collar, he seemed somewhat
drunk as well. With a rude wave of his hand he dismissed bridge
personnel and lurched toward the video screen, actually crashing into
it, and remaining so close that his image was all distorted.

“_We’ll get the old tub through!_” he was shouting at deafening volume,
and at that moment he was attacked from behind by a ruffian type who
was carrying a huge hypodermic and appeared to overpower the Captain
and inject something into the top of his head, then to seize the wheel,
wrenching it violently, before the screen went black.

Also, it was learned about this time that because of fantastic
miscalculation on the part of the ship’s-stores officer, the only food
left aboard now was potatoes.

Thus did the _Christian_ roar over the sea, through fair weather and
foul.

Guy Grand was aboard of course, as a passenger, complaining bitterly,
and in fact kept leading assault parties in an effort to find out, as
he put it, “What the devil’s going on on the bridge!”

But they were always driven back by a number of odd-looking men with
guns and knives near the ladder.

“Who the deuce are those chaps?” Grand would demand as he and the
others beat a hasty retreat along the deck. “I don’t like the looks of
this!”

Occasionally the communications screen in each of the cabins would
light up to reveal momentarily what was taking place on the bridge, and
it was fairly incredible. The bridge house itself now was a swaying
rubble heap and the Captain was seen intermittently, struggling with
various assailants, and finally with what actually appeared to be a
gorilla—the beast at last overpowering him and flinging him bodily out
of the bridge house and, or so it seemed, into the sea itself, before
seizing the wheel, which he seemed then to be trying to tear from its
hub.

It was about this time that the ship, which, as it developed, had
turned completely around in the middle of the ocean, came back into New
York harbor under full steam, and with horns and whistles screaming,
ploughed headlong into the big Forty-Seventh Street pier.

Fortunately no one was injured on the cruise; but, even so, it went
far from easy with Grand—he had already sunk plenty into the project,
and just how much it cost him to keep clear in the end, is practically
anyone’s guess.




                                  XVI


“To speak seriously though,” said Guy Grand, “_does_ anyone have news
of Bill Thorndike? I haven’t had a word in the longest.”

Ginger Horton set her cup down abruptly.

“That ... that damn _nut_!” she said. “_No_ and I _couldn’t_ care less!”

“Who?” asked Esther.

“Dr. Thorndike,” explained Agnes, “that extraordinary dentist whom
Ginger went to—he and Guy were friends at school together; isn’t that
right, Guy?”

“Yes, quite good friends too,” said Guy. “Poor fellow, had a nervous
breakdown or something from what Ginger says. No, I haven’t had a
word from him in the longest. How was he then, when you last saw him,
Ginger?”

Grand had made this inquiry any number of times, and then had always
glossed over Ginger’s account of the incident, as though he could not
fully take it in.

“The _last time_!” she cried. “Why I only saw him once, of course—on
_your_ recommendation—and once too often it was too! Good God, don’t
tell me you’ve forgotten _that_ again? Why he was absolutely insane!
He said to me, ‘These molars are soft, Mrs. Horton!’ or some such
ridiculous thing. ‘We’d better get you onto a soft-food regime right
away!’ he said, and then, without another word about it, while I was
still leaning back with my mouth open, he dropped a _raw egg_ into my
mouth and rushed out of the room, waving his arms and yelling at the
top of his voice. Raving mad!”

“Hmm—not like Bill Thorndike,” said Grand. “First-rate dentist, he used
to be. You never went back to him then?”

“I _certainly did not_! I went straight to the nearest police station,
that’s where I went! And reported him!”

Grand frowned a look of mild disapproval.

“I’m afraid that won’t help Bill’s standing with the Association any.”

“Well, I should hope _not_!” said Ginger Horton as strongly as she
could.

“How Uncle Edward used to love raw eggs!” said Esther. “Do you
remember, Agnes?”

“It’s hardly the same thing, Esther,” said Agnes.

“Well, he always had them with a sort of sauce,” Esther recalled.
“Worcestershire sauce, I suppose it was.”

“It could have been some new form of deficiency treatment, of course,
Ginger,” Agnes said. “I mean if your molars _were_ soft....” But in the
face of Ginger Horton’s mounting exasperation, she broke off and turned
to Guy, “What do you think, Guy?”

“Bill always _was_ up-to-the-minute,” Guy agreed. “Always onto the
latest. Very progressive in school affairs, that sort of thing—oh
nothing disreputable of course—but, I mean to say, as far as being onto
the latest in ... dentistry techniques, well I’m certainly confident
that Bill—”

“He just plopped that raw egg right into my mouth!” said Ginger
shrilly. “Why I didn’t even know what it was! And that isn’t all—the
instruments, and _everything_ else there were crazy! There was some
kind of wooden paddle....”

“Spatula?” prompted Guy helpfully.

“No, _not_ a spatula! Good Heavens! A big wooden oar, about four feet
long, actually leaning up against the chair.”

“Surely he didn’t use that?” said Agnes.

“But what on earth was it _doing_ there is what I want to know?” Ginger
demanded.

“Maybe Bill’s taken up boating,” Guy offered but then coughed lightly
to show the lameness of it, “... never cared for it though in school as
I remember. _Tennis_, that was Bill’s game—damn good he was too; on the
varsity his last two years.”

“I simply _cannot_ make you understand what an absolute madman he was,”
said Ginger Horton. “There was something else on the chair too—a pair
of _ice tongs_ it looked like.”

“Clamp, I suppose,” murmured Grand.

“‘_Better safe than sorry, eh, Mrs. Horton?_’ he said to me like a
perfect maniac, and then he said, ‘Now I _don’t_ want you to swallow
this!’ and he dropped a _raw egg_ into my mouth, grabbed up a lot of
those weird instruments and rushed around the room, waving them over
his head, and then out the door, _yelling at the top of his lungs_!”

“May have been called out on an emergency, you see,” said Guy, “happens
all too often in that business from what I’ve seen of it.”

“What _was_ he saying when he left, Ginger?” Agnes asked.

“_Saying?_ He wasn’t _saying_ anything. He was simply yelling. ‘_Yaahh!
Yaahh! Yaahh!_’ it sounded like.”

“How extraordinary,” said Agnes.

“_What_ was he saying?” Esther asked of Agnes.

“‘Yaahh, Yaahh,’” said Agnes quietly.

“Not like Bill,” said Guy, shaking his head. “Must have been called out
on emergency, only thing I can make of it.”

“But surely the receptionist could have explained it all, my dear,”
said Agnes.

“There _was_ no receptionist, I tell you!” said Ginger Horton irately.
“There was no one but him—and a lot of fantastic instruments. And the
chair was odd too! I’m lucky to have gotten out of there alive!”

“Did she swallow the egg?” asked Esther.

“Esther, for Heaven’s sake!”

“What was that?” asked Grand, who seemed not to have heard.

“Esther wanted to know if Ginger had _swallowed_ the egg,” Agnes said.

“Certainly not!” said Ginger. “I spit it right out. Not at first, of
course; I was in a state of complete shock. ‘I _don’t_ want you to
swallow this!’ he said when he dropped it in, the maniac, so I just sat
there in a state of pure shock while he raced around and around the
room, screaming like a perfect madman!”

“Maybe it wasn’t an egg,” suggested Esther.

“What on earth do you mean?” demanded Ginger, quite beside herself. “It
certainly _was_ an egg—a raw egg! I _tasted_ it and _saw_ it, and some
of the yellow got on my frock!”

“And then you filed a complaint with the authorities?” asked Agnes.

“Good Heavens, Agnes, I went straight to the police. Well, he could not
be found! Disappeared without trace. Raving mad!”

“Bill Thorndike’s no fool,” said Grand loyally, “I’d stake my word on
that.”

“But _why_ did he disappear like that, Guy?” asked Agnes.

“May have moved his offices to another part of the city, you see,” Guy
explained, “or out of the city altogether. I know Bill was awfully
keen for the West Coast, as a matter of fact; couldn’t get enough of
California! Went out there every chance he could.”

“_No_, he is not _anywhere_ in this country,” said Ginger Horton with
considerable authority. “There is absolutely no _trace_ of him.”

“Don’t tell me Bill’s chucked the whole thing,” said Grand
reflectively, “given it all up and gone off to Bermuda or somewhere.”
He gave a soft tolerant chuckle. “Wouldn’t surprise me too much though
at that. I know Bill was awfully fond of _fishing_ too, come to think
of it. Yes, fishing and tennis—that was Bill Thorndike all right.”




                                 XVII


“But you just _cannot_ go off like that, Guy,” said Agnes, truly
impatient with the boy now when he rose to leave. “Surely you shan’t!”

“_Can_ and _must_, my dears,” Guy explained, kissing them both. “Flux,
motion, growth, change—those are your great life principles. Best keep
pace while we can.”

He bent forward and took fat Ginger’s hand in his own. “Yes, I’ll be
moving on, Ginger,” he said with a warm smile for her, expansive now,
perhaps in anticipation, “pushing down to Canaveral and out Los Alamos
way!”

“Good Heavens,” said Agnes, “in this dreadful heat? How silly!”

“Always on the go,” purred Esther.

“It’s wise to keep abreast,” said Guy seriously. “I’ll just nip down to
Canaveral and see what’s shaking on the space-scene, so to speak.”

“Same old six-and-seven, Guy?” teased big Ginger, flashing up at him.

“Well, who can say?” admitted Guy frankly. “These are odd times—are,
if I may say, times that try men’s souls. Yet each of us does his
_best_—who can say more?”

“Guy,” said Ginger, squeezing his hand and sparkling up again on one
monstrous surge of personality, “it _has_ been fun!” Good-byes were her
forte.

Guy gave a courtly nod, before turning to go, in deference, it seemed,
to her beauty.

“My dear,” he whispered, with a huskiness that made all the ladies
tingle, “it has been ... _inspiring_.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

The S.S. _Magic Christian_ was Grand’s last major project—at least it
was the last to be brought into open account. After that he began to
taper off. However, he did like “keeping in touch,” as he expressed
it, and, for one thing, he bought himself a grocery store in New York
City. Quite small, it was more or less indistinguishable from the
several others in the neighborhood, and Grand put up a little sign in
the window.

                         _New Owner—New Policy
                        Big Get-Acquainted Sale_

Grand was behind the counter himself, wearing a sort of white smock—not
too unlike his big Vanity lab smock—when the store opened that evening.

His first customer was a man who lived next door to the store. He
bought a carton of Grape-Ade.

“That will be three cents,” said Grand.

“_How much?_” asked the man, with a frown.

“Three cents.”

“Three _cents_? For six Grape-Ade? Are you kidding?”

“It’s our two-for-one Get-Acquainted on Grape-Ade,” said Grand. “It’s
new policy.”

“Boy, _I’ll_ say it’s new,” said the man. “And how! Three _cents_? Okay
by me, brother!” He slapped three cents on the counter. “There it is!”
he said and still seemed amazed when Grand pushed the carton towards
him.

“Call again,” said Grand.

“That’s some policy all right,” said the man, looking back over his
shoulder as he started for the door. At the door, however, he paused.

“Listen,” he said, “do you sell it ... uh, you know, by the _case_?”

“Well, yes,” said Grand, “you would get some further reduction if you
bought it by the case—not too much, of course; we’re working on a
fairly small profit-margin during the sale, you see and—”

“Oh, I’ll pay the two-for-one all right. Christ! I just wanted to know
if I could _get_ a case at that price.”

“Certainly, would you like a case?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I could _use_ more than one case....”

“How many cases could you use?”

“Well, uh ... how many ... how many have you _got_?”

“Could you use a thousand?”

“A _thousand?!?_ A thousand cases of Grape-Ade?”

“Yes, I could give you ... say, ten percent off on a thousand ... and
at twenty-four bottles to the case, twelve cents a case ... would be
one hundred and twenty dollars, minus ten percent, would be one hundred
and eight ... call it one-naught-five, shall we?”

“_No, no._ I couldn’t use a thousand cases. Jesus! I meant, say, _ten_
cases.”

“That would be a dollar twenty.”

“Right!” said the man. He slapped down a dollar twenty on the counter.
“Boy, that’s some policy you’ve got there!” he said.

“It’s our Get-Acquainted policy,” said Grand.

“It’s some policy all right,” said the man. “Have you got any other ...
_specials_ on? You know, ‘two-for-one,’ that sort of thing?”

“Well, most of our items have been reduced for the Get-Acquainted.”

The man hadn’t noticed it before, but price tags were in evidence, and
all prices had been sharply cut: milk, two cents a quart—butter, ten
cents a pound—eggs, eleven cents a dozen—and so on.

The man looked wildly about him.

“How about cigarettes?”

“No, we decided we wouldn’t carry cigarettes; since they’ve been
linked, rather authoritatively, to cancer of the lung, we thought
it wouldn’t be exactly in the best of taste to sell them—being a
_neighborhood_ grocery, I mean to say.”

“Uh-huh, well—listen, I’m just going home for a minute now to get a
sack, or a ... trunk, or maybe a truck ... I’ll be right back ...”

Somehow the word spread through the neighborhood and in two hours the
store was clean as a whistle.

The next day, a sign was on the empty store:

                         MOVED TO NEW LOCATION

And that evening, in another part of town, the same thing
occurred—followed again by a quick change of location. The people who
had experienced the phenomenon began to spend a good deal of their
time each evening looking for the new location. And occasionally now,
two such people meet—one who was at the big Get-Acquainted on West
4th Street, for example, and the other at the one on 139th—and so,
presumably, they surmise not only that it wasn’t a dream, but that it’s
still going on.

And some say it does, in fact, still go on—they say it accounts for the
strange searching haste which can be seen in the faces, and especially
the eyes, of people in the cities, every evening, just about the time
now it starts really getting dark.




                            [Illustration]

                           ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Terry Southern was born in Alvarado, Texas. His first short stories
were published in Paris in 1949 by _New-Story_ and in 1953 by the
_Paris Review_. A novel, _Flash and Filigree_, appeared in England in
1958 and was acclaimed by the _Observer_ as one of the “twenty-one
outstanding novels of the year.”

Mr. Southern’s short stories have recently been anthologized by David
Burnett, editor of the _Best American Short Stories_. A portion of _The
Magic Christian_ received the Vanderbilt Prize for Humorous Fiction
given in 1959 by the _Paris Review_.

Mr. Southern is married and lives in Connecticut.


Transcriber’s Notes:

  - Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
  - Blank pages have been removed.
  - Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.