Lucinderella, p.5
Lucinderella, page 5
He used to look out of his office window at the Broad Street-Center Street intersection (“Dissenters” Street to the Judge, with all the lawyers’ offices) and watch the people crossing and crossing; what puzzled him was the way they behaved. He said he knew them all—he didn’t any more but he thought he did, liked to say he knew every dog from Rabun Gap to Tybee Light—and he knew they weren’t particularly good or upright or noble. Some were a lot worse than others; some he said were just two jumps ahead of the sheriff, some just two jumps out of the cave. But there they were, all acting good, behaving themselves. Nobody in rags, nobody really dirty, nobody really cantankerous. Old man Will Jesup, on his way to watch the backgammon game at the Cotton Exchange, usually crossed against the light under the nose of a screeching bus but it was more in the nature of swagger and sport than quarrelsomeness and Patrolman Gepfert on the corner would arbitrate the contest. “You got to watch yourself, Mr. Jesup,” giving him a blue arm and leading him across, Mr. Jesup’s elbow riding comfortably on the pistol butt as he glared at the driver and slapped the bus front with his reprimanding stick. “Watch hell, boy! Ain’t a man even free to cross the street in his own town any more?”
“Everybody on his way, Clamp, with a decent coating of good temper and cooperation, quiet, reasonably considerate, even dignified. Fewer and fewer old-timers but,” and he would sigh, “the girls get prettier every year.” He said give him ten minutes and he could pick you out just about any kind of sinner you happened to need, but nobody was doing anything bad. “And it’s not because Gepfert’s standing over there watching them. I don’t know what it is. Sometimes I think what keeps them good is other people no better than they are, which is just pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, isn’t it? and the professors say you can’t do that—keeps them acting good, which is the same thing, just like I don’t care when I hire a man whether he’s made time or not as long as he’s going to behave himself now. Maybe other people keep a man from getting enough rope to hang himself.” It might have been he liked one-armed people because he thought they couldn’t hang themselves as quick as the rest of us.
Now and then, of course, we would get a one-armed guest, the effect on whom was unpredictable. Our orders were to take no notice of his affliction but to room him in the choicest thing we had of the kind he wanted and at the minimum rate; if he was sitting in the lobby in the evening Uncle Otis might stop by and have a word with him, ask him matter-of-factly if he was “being taken care of all right,” and they might get into a conversation leading round to how it happened, but usually nobody bothered him. Sometimes he liked it, sometimes he didn’t. One man shoved his hat up off his forehead when Uncle Otis and his pocketed sleeve chanced to pass the pigeonholes as he was registering, returned the pen to Tom Dixon and beckoned to Isham to bring the luggage back to the parking lot.
The usual transient (north- and southbound motorists, parents with a boy at the basic training camp, musicians in the concert package we bought every season) wouldn’t notice anything at all, not sensitive in that way and probably encountering only one of them during his stay, or only one at a time and taking it to be always the same one. Our regular guests, the salesmen traveling that district and the two or three widows who lived with us, paid no attention to it one way or another. I mean there was nothing freakish about our hotel—a good commercial house (better than good we thought but nobody could deny it was good), a going concern listed in all the directories as having “113 rooms, 105 with baths, rates 1.50-3.50 for one, 4.00-6.00 for two [up now].” Duncan Hines had given our dining room a blessing in the old days though Uncle Otis didn’t take much to that kind of thing; he said everybody in the Southeast knew our table anyway. He had also been more than a little indignant at such listings since the directory that carried us as “Best here.”
And certainly “best here” was a far from comprehensive summary of our marble-paneled lobby with the twenty-foot ceiling, our tiled floor of brown and gray hexagonal blocks, our double-arched windows with the colored-glass borders that had really rocked the insurance people when they had to replace the two blown out by the hurricane of ’46. The hotel was built in 1911, did all right for a while, then went broke in 1931 with four out of five of all the other hotels in the country; Uncle Otis and some friends and family bought it in cheap about 1935 after he had run it a few years for the bank. He had been in the hotel business all his life, ever since he had taken the night-clerk watch at the old Ferguson House at Ferguson when he lost his arm. He loved hotels, maybe because he liked people or maybe because it had been a hotel that helped him through his bad time. He was assistant to the manager of a hotel in Scranton when the bank phoned him about the Jonathan Copp. He could hardly believe it; he had always had his eye on the Jonathan Copp.
Business had been hard though. They had bought it in cheap but not cheap enough. He was struggling along, one week in the black to one-and-a-half in the red (perhaps thinking sometimes of Mr. Copp’s “without any Temporal profit and no Happiness to myself”), crossing the street to keep from meeting the bank’s mortgage officer, wishing he had never heard of the Jonathan Copp Hotel, when the War came and suddenly there weren’t enough rooms to go round and though it disturbed him to have things turning out so good in a time like that he couldn’t stop the money rolling in then any more than he had been able to start it rolling a few years before. He said, “You think it’s your business and something else is always running it for you.” In addition to getting the bank off his neck he bought out most of the others (they had a good enough memory to jump at his offer) and by the time the war in Europe was over had built up quite a sizable fund for modernization when the materials would be available again. He had now done over most of the bathrooms, air-cooled the first and third floors, built a parking lot with floods and our sign at the gate: HOTEL JONATHAN COPP—Children Free.
It was the redecorating process I believe that really opened his eyes to Clarissa, whom he had put in charge of it. As room after room shuffled off the faded splendor of 1911 and blossomed into something quiet and neat and foursquare I think his heart was moved, as a convalescent will fall in love with the nurse who is pulling him through. He must have been about fifty-five at the time, a widower with one child, Cousin Kate, who had married and gone to live in St. Louis. Clarissa had two children by a divorced husband and was about thirty-five, as near as you can tell about that sort of thing—Clarissa Clowe, taking her maiden name again. She had a steady of about her own age named McVey who owned a radio-TV service shop, a sober and kindly chap who had been in the Signal Corps and was a wizard with small tools and complicated apparatus; his truck had monkeys painted on the sides to clarify his maxim that he didn’t “monkey with your TV,” he fixed it. I think it was McVey’s endowed hands that kept Uncle Otis silent as much as the difference in age between Clarissa and himself; he never babied himself about the loss of his arm, never referred to it (unless you were one of the initiated), but it was probably on his mind most of the time. He was always quick to get into his coat before you could help him. McVey, though, seemed to be one of these men with a tendency to drag the feet and I thought if he dragged them much longer Uncle Otis might yet have Clarissa, none of it any business of mine.
From all this it ought to be clear that Uncle Otis, though his imagination was sensitive enough, was no head-in-the-clouds man. Even if he was a little unsound in regard to one-armed people, and that’s a matter of opinion, there was nothing sentimental about the way he ran the hotel. When Tom Dixon came home from the Navy out of a job and Uncle Otis took one look at his sleeve and put him on the desk Tom asked him what was the hotel’s policy on taking a guest’s personal check. “It’s all right to take it,” Uncle Otis said, “but if it bounces it’s your check.” The hotel, for all its vagaries, was, as Tom said, a taut ship. (The only thing possibly un-taut about it was the No-Tipping regulation, which try as he would Uncle Otis couldn’t make stick. “Normally,” he said, the failure completely baffling him, “you try to get things at the bottom price, just for the sport of it, just so the other man won’t think you’re a damn fool. To insist on upping the price for yourself is one of those things you just wouldn’t believe if you didn’t see it, nothing to be gained, not even a Thank you, not even a friendly nod. And now upping the percentage as the price goes up that the percentage is based on,” and he would shake his head in fascination at the wonderful intricacy of the human brain.)
One evening about first dark, it was the week before Lucinda returned and things got complicated, a one-armed man registered at the desk as Dr. Delbert Crit of Boone’s Gap, Tennessee, a rangy big-footed smoky-mountain sort of man possibly in his late forties. His luggage, which of course was the first thing we always saw—Uncle Otis can read a man’s suitcase like a psychiatrist peeling your dreams—was old and dry with attic dust round the base of the handle; there were two or three rectangular and circular stains on the sides which translated as a European trip maybe ten years ago, not very extensive. The cluster of string-loops through the handle read as air travel, probably recent; this didn’t quite jibe with the Boone’s Gap address but the bag itself did, an old-time top-opener that we know as a grip. He moved in toward us with that smooth flow you see in lots of tall people, legs swinging like grandfather-clock pendulums; we used to have a pitcher on the Tigers with a windup and delivery like that. Clarissa roomed him on the quiet side with a new shower and a nice view of the steeple of the Methodist Church (she read him as possibly more DD than MD).
He asked what our check-out time was, said he had some business in town in the morning and wouldn’t be leaving until after lunch. We don’t pay any mind to that sort of thing (most of our regular guests are gone by seven-thirty) but I told him three o’clock so he wouldn’t think we didn’t know what he was talking about. And that was the end of it as far as I was concerned, or practically. I thought I saw Uncle Otis talking to him after supper in a corner of the lobby away from the TV but I didn’t look hard because I didn’t want Uncle Otis to see me leaving; my day was more than up all right but, as Uncle Otis had explained when he took me on, my hours would be elastic, that is they might expand but they wouldn’t contract, and I didn’t want him to expand them any further that day. I did see Dr. Crit the next morning as I came to work about seven-twenty-five; he was standing in a doorway across from the Farmers Bank as if waiting for it to open. I was inclined to tell him he would have a long wait—until nine o’clock, whatever the opening time was in Boone’s Gap—but he didn’t know me when I said good morning and anyway one thing I found out in the Service was don’t try to wash everybody else’s face for them.
I didn’t see him again. The next time I looked over the room cards his was gone. “Give you a check, Tom?” I said. “It may be your check.” Tom said, “Gave me an Andrew Jackson,” a name-dropping habit of ours suggesting our familiarity with the larger bills. And I forgot him.
But when two or three days later Uncle Otis said he wanted me to drive him up to Tennessee something clicked in the back of my head. I knew it wasn’t necessarily connected with Dr. Crit; I often drove him about the state on one errand or another, though not usually toward Tennessee, that being mountain country and generally non-commercial, resort hotels, which Uncle Otis despised as little better than playpens. He said we would be gone one night and maybe two. “And just keep it under your hat for the time being, Clamp,” he said, which wasn’t unusual either; we had plenty of things we didn’t go round talking to everybody about. Then he took me up to the big road map on the wall of his office and said, “Boone’s Gap, you see it?” It took some finding but it was there, halfway between Hardcash and Fair Play; I figured it would take us close to five hours.
“We’ll shove off at six-thirty,” he said. I knew he didn’t mean P.M., either.
He didn’t say much for a while, just sat there looking out at the country, the sun fanning over it at about the angle you blow out candles on a birthday cake. I could tell something was going on in his head but I didn’t press him, I never press him. Then after a silence that must have lasted twenty minutes he said, “I’ve got a good mind to turn round and go home.” I asked him if he wasn’t feeling good and he said, “I feel like I’m making a damn fool of myself. Go on a little bit until I decide.” I kept my eye on the road, kept myself out of his way to give him room to straighten himself out, and after two or three miles he tilted his head in my direction and said, “There was a guest in the house the other day by the name of Dr. Delbert Crit. One-armed man.” I said, “Yes, sir, yes, sir.” “And one-armed people are by and large reliable people. The more arms a man has the more trouble he’s apt to get himself into.”
I nodded to show I had heard him and he went on to say that Dr. Crit had come in his office a little before noon the day he checked out; he had been talking to the Other Bank about getting a loan on his farm. While they were turning him down (it was way out of their territory of course) he had somehow picked up the information that Uncle Otis was a director of The Bank—the Farmers, “The Bank of Personal Service”—and he thought if Uncle Otis would listen to him a minute he might put in a word for him at the Farmers, might anyhow take him down there and introduce him around. Uncle Otis said it was out of their territory too, but he listened to him on account of their common affliction. For an hour and a half.
Uncle Otis, early on, asked him of course what sort of security he was prepared to put up; Dr. Crit said a first mortgage on Boone’s Spring, and when Uncle Otis’ eyebrows had gone up and down a few times went on to explain.
It was all in all quite a piece of collateral—a tract of 20.7 acres on the other side of Little Panther Creek with a bold spring on it flowing down the mountain into the Creek which was the property line; it had come to him from his mother. He said he was studying medicine in Austria when his father died and he returned to Tennessee faced with the choice of starting a city practice or going back to his home district where there was hardly a doctor in the whole county. He decided for home. That was nearly thirty years ago and he had been there ever since; he was really needed, professionally, and to run the farm; he was his mother’s only support and she was ailing. He could have made a lot more money in the city, but money, he said, was an unreliable yardstick in adding up your reward unless you made adjustments and transpositions for the other things included too. (I could imagine Uncle Otis’ nod of “Hear! Hear!”)
Just before the old lady died she called him in and told him about the twenty-acre tract standing in her name; he had never heard her mention it before and now that she did there was a drawn look on her old face, he said, and her pulse went up and he had to give her a pill to quiet her. He supposed something upsetting must have happened over there but he didn’t dare try to find out more because of the state it seemed to put her in; she died soon after without his learning anything else except that she was leaving it to him. She said don’t let anybody get it off of him and he promised her.
When he drove over the ridge to inspect it he saw nothing unusual, no house, no fencing, no neighbors short of a mile or two, a fine spring on the upper slope, Boone’s Spring, making a good stream down through cleared land that he thought might be brought up into pasture. He found the usual collection of wild creatures as he walked about, three or four small rabbits about the size of his fist, a rattlesnake that looked (but didn’t act) like a young one, a red fox about the size of a cat.
The place sort of appealed to him, he couldn’t say why. He ran a couple of strands of barbed wire round it that he had had in payment for a night visit to a man stricken with hiccups and turned three cows in there that he had just had freshened in settlement of another bill. Somebody told him the spring wasn’t any good but he tested the water in his lab and it was fine soft water. “If there had ever been anything the matter with it,” he told Uncle Otis, “time had purified it, like time will. In fact it was more than pure.” Uncle Otis said, “More than pure?” and Dr. Crit said he was coming to that.
The calves when they arrived were well-formed and complete, normal in every respect except that none of them made much more than a double handful to hold (this was years ago when he could measure double handfuls), and except that they all stopped growing when they were hardly bigger than Shetland ponies. He assumed that the patient with the bull had shortchanged him in some way though it wasn’t like the man, whom he knew well; still when he earned another dry cow about that time with a hemorrhoid operation he bred her to a different line altogether. The result was the same: a fine calf hardly up to two-thirds size and weight that grew to be not much larger than a great Dane. It amounted to a reduction of some thirty percent in his fees of course but what could he do? And money was only money.
He puzzled about it a lot as he drove up and over and down and around the misty foothills on his calls and he ended by ordering some hamsters and bringing water over to them in their cages on the home place from the spring; sure enough the first litter grew to only about two-thirds size. The next litter was smaller still but not by as much and after two or three the hamsters seemed to stabilize at a little more than half size.
He could hardly sleep for excitement, he said: this might be a boon to mankind—Boone’s Spring in truth. Size in the human animal was of no value any more; once in physical combat it had meant something but a small finger on a push button was as dangerous as a big one. Small people would consume less fuel, be less expensive to operate, easier to park; they would move faster, think faster, respond faster. Even their bowels, he assured Uncle Otis, would move more quickly. And in the face of all this the human animal was getting larger, two inches taller between 1910 and 1932 with a prognosis of four inches more by 1980, calling for bigger beds, bigger houses, bigger automobiles, bigger everything, including bigger meals—while the earth’s arable land was being destroyed at four hundred such tracts as his every twenty-four hours. The first question to be answered was whether the water would be as effective on human beings as on his livestock.
