Tales of the Black Widowers

  "I'll be glad to do so," said Atwood politely. "The point had not occurred to me."

  Drake said, "I think that's a crock of crud. The message refers to a curious omission in Alice. I think it means in Alice as it now stands and not in some outside source." "You can't know that," protested Halsted. "Yes, but that's the point," said Trumbull. "It seems to me that if we get the right answer, we'll know at once it's right, and if we work out something that only uncovers a new layer of puzzle, that's just wrong."

  Avalon said, "Well, nothing more occurs to me. Do we ask Henry?"

  Atwood looked puzzled, and Avalon went on, "You have to understand, Mr. Atwood, that Henry, whose pleasure it seems to be to wait on us, has the faculty for seeing past complications."

  Gonzalo said, "That's what I tried to do and you all ran me down. . . . Henry, isn't the answer in the full title of the book?"

  Henry smiled regretfully and said, "Gentlemen, you must not put more on my shoulders than I can carry. I do not know the book very well, though I've read it, of course. If I'm to penetrate the meaning of the puzzle, it will have to be very simple."

  "If it were very simple," said Atwood, "we would have seen it."

  "Perhaps," said Henry, "yet it seems to me it must be simple. Surely, your friend, Mr. Sanders, wanted you to have the bequest. He put it in a game, and made a contest out of it, because that was his way, but he must have wanted you to win."

  Atwood nodded. "I would think so." "Then let's look for something very simple he felt you would surely see, but just subtle enough, perhaps, to make the game interesting. As I said, I don't know the book very well, so I'll have to ask questions."

  "Very well, sir. Mr. Trumbull said Alice in Wonderland involved a deck of cards, and I do remember, from the Disney cartoon version more than from anything else, that the Queen of Hearts kept shouting 'Off with his head.' "

  "Yes," said Avalon. "A female Henry VIII. The King of Hearts and the Knave of Hearts are also involved."

  "Any other cards?"

  "They're all mentioned," said Avalon. "The hearts are the royal family, the clubs are soldiers, the diamonds courtiers, the spades workmen. Three of the spades have speaking parts, the two, the five, and the nine. ... Do you agree with me, Atwood?"

  "Yes," said Atwood grimly. "It's fresh in my mind."

  Trumbull said, "1 suspect Henry is going to ask if any of the cards were omitted. Only a few are mentioned specifically-"

  "The six I listed," said Avalon. "The King, Queen, and Knave of Hearts; the two, five, and nine of spades."

  "But so what?" said Trumbull. "As many as necessary were mentioned and the rest were there in the background. There's nothing 'curious' about that. I insist on respecting the word 'curious.' "

  Henry nodded, then said, "Are you an Episcopalian, Mr. Atwood?"

  "I was brought up an Episcopalian. Why do you ask?"

  "You said Mr. Sanders teased you about your high-church proclivities and you said you were a Protestant. Putting those together, I felt you might be an Episcopalian. . . . Do you have a chess set, Mr. Atwood?"

  "Certainly!"

  "Yours? Or was it a present from Mr. Sanders?"

  "Oh, no, mine. A rather beautiful set that belonged to my father. Sanders and I played many a game on it."

  Henry nodded. "I ask because it seems to me that we've all discussed Alice in Wonderland without mentioning that there was a sequel."

  "Through the Looking-Glass," said Avalon. "Yes, of course."

  "Might that not be considered as included in the word Alice?"

  Avalon nodded. "Certainly. As it happens, the full title is Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, so it surely bears as much right to be referred to as Alice as the other does."

  "And isn't Through the Looking-Glass about chessmen?"

  "Absolutely," said Avalon benevolently, his role as recognized expert having completely restored his good humor. "The Red and White Queens are important characters. The White King has a speaking role but the Red King just sleeps under a tree." "And there are knights, too?"

  Avalon nodded. "The White Knight has a battle with the Red Knight and then escorts Alice to the final square. He's the most amiable character in either book and the only one who seems to like Alice, He's usually considered a serf-portrait by Carroll."

  "Yes, yes," said Trumbull testily. "What are you getting at, Henry?"

  "I'm looking for omissions. There is a reference to a white pawn at the start of the book, I think."

  Avalon said, "I don't think you're as unknowledgeable about the books as you pretend, Henry. There is a mention of a white pawn named Lily in the first chapter. Alice herself plays the part of a white pawn, too, and is eventually promoted to a white queen."

  "And rooks?" said Henry. Avalon frowned in silence for a while, then shook his head.

  Atwood interposed. "There's a reference to them. Take my word for it; I know the stupid books practically by heart. In Chapter 1, Alice enters the Looking-Glass house, sees chessmen moving about, and says to herself, 'and here are two Castles walking arm in arm.' The castles, of course, are also called rooks.

  Henry said, "That accounts, then, for the King, Queen, Rook, Knight, and Pawn. But there is a sixth chesspiece, the Bishop. Does it play a role in the book or is it even mentioned?"

  Avalon said, "No."

  Atwood said, "Two bishops are shown in one of the illustrations to the first chapter."

  "That's Tenniel's work," said Henry, "not Carroll's. Now isn't the total absence of the Bishop a curious omission?"

  "I don't know," said Avalon slowly. "Lewis Carroll, a thorough-going Victorian, probably feared giving offense to the Church."

  "Isn't it curious to have him go so far in avoiding offense?"

  "Well, supposing it is?" asked Halsted.

  Henry said, "I think it possible that if Mr. Atwood checks the four bishops of his set, a set which Mr. Sanders knew Mr. Atwood cherished and would neither sell, give away, or lose, he will probably find the piece of film. If the head comes off, he should look inside. If the head doesn't come off, pull off the piece of felt it stands on."

  There was an uncomfortable silence. "That's farfetched, Henry," said Trumbull.

  "Perhaps not, sir," said Henry. "Mr. Sanders has more than once been described as having a raucous sense of humor. He teased Mr. Atwood constantly about his religion. Perhaps this final message is another way of continuing the joke. You are an Episcopalian, Mr. Atwood, and I suppose you know what the word means."

  "It's from the Greek word for bishop," said Atwood, half choking.

  "I imagine, then," said Henry, "Mr. Sanders might think it funny to hide the message in a bishop."

  Atwood started to his feet. "I think I had better go home."

  "I'll take you," said Halsted.

  "I think the snow has stopped," said Henry, "but drive carefully."

  Afterword

  This, in a way, is a twice-told tale.

  At a time before I had begun the Black Widowers series, I was asked by Union Carbide Corporation to write a short mystery without a solution for a contest they were running for their employees, who were to supply solutions, with myself making the final judgment on excellence.

  Well, I wrote the short mystery, which was rather like the story you have just read. The contest was carried through successfully (two other writers also supplied short mysteries) and all was well.

  However, I was made restless by the fact that the short mystery I wrote was never published-except on the book jacket of an edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes which was given out to the contest applicants. That seemed a waste to me, and I abhor literary waste. It was especially annoying since the story appeared without my solution.

  So I completely rewrote the story, lengthening it a good deal, placing it against the Black Widower background, and now I feel ever so much better. Especially since now my solution is included.

  12

  Out of Sight

 
The monthly banquet of the Black Widowers had reached the point where little was left of the mixed grill save for an occasional sausage and a markedly untouched piece of liver on the plate of Emmanuel Rubin-and it was then that voices rose in Homeric combat.

  Rubin, undoubtedly infuriated by the presence of liver at all, was saying, even more flatly than was usual for him, "Poetry is sound. You don't look at poetry. I don't care whether a culture emphasizes rhyme, alliteration, repetition, balance, or cadence, it all comes down to sound."

  Roger Halsted never raised his voice, but one could always tell the state of his emotions by the color of his high forehead. Right now, it was a deep pink, the color extending past the line that had once marked hair. He said, "What's the use of making generalizations, Manny? No generalization can hold generally without an airtight system of axiomatics to begin with. Literature-"

  "If you're going to tell me about figurative verse," said Rubin body, "save your breath. That's Victorian nonsense."

  "What's figurative verse?" asked Mario Gonzalo lazily. "Is he making that up, Jeff?" He added a touch to the tousled hair in his careful caricature of the banquet guest, Waldemar Long, who, since the dinner had begun, had eaten in a somber silence, but was obviously following every word.

  "No," said Geoffrey Avalon judiciously, "though I wouldn't put it past Manny to make something up if that were the only way he could win an argument. Figurative verse is verse in which the words or lines are arranged typographically in such a way as to produce a visual image that reinforces the sense. 'The Mouse's Tail' in Alice in Wonderland is the best-known example."

  Halsted's soft voice was unequal to the free-for-all and he methodically beat his spoon against the water goblet till the decibels had simmered down.

  He said, "Let's be reasonable. The subject under discussion is not poetry in general, but the limerick as a verse form. My point is this-I'll repeat it, Manny-that the worth of a limerick is not dictated by its subject matter. It's easier-"

  James Drake stubbed out his cigarette, twitched his small grizzled mustache, and said in his hoarse voice, "Why do you call a dirty limerick dirty? The Supreme Court will get you."

  Halsted said, "Because it's a two-syllable word with a meaning you all understand. What do you want me to say? Sexual-excretory-blasphemous-and-miscellaneous-generally-irreverent?"

  Avalon said, "Go on, Roger. Go on. Make your point and don't let them needle you." And, from under his luxuriant eyebrows, he frowned austerely at the table generally. "Let him talk."

  "Why?" said Rubin. "He has nothing to ... Okay, Jeff. Talk, Roger."

  "Thank you all," said Halsted, in the wounded tone of one who has finally succeeded in having his wrong recognized. "The worth of a limerick rests in the unpredictability of the last line and in the cleverness of the final rhyme. In fact, irreverent content may seem to have value in itself and require less cleverness-and produce a less worthwhile limerick, as limerick. Now it is possible to have the rhyme masked by the orthographical conventions."

  "What?" said Gonzalo. "Spelling," said Avalon.

  "And then," said Halsted, "in seeing the spelling and having that instant of delay in getting the sound, you intensify the enjoyment. But under those conditions you have to see the limerick. If you just recite it, the excellence is lost."

  "Suppose you give us an example," said Drake.

  "I know what he means," said Rubin loudly. "He's going to rhyme M.A. and C.D.-Master of Arts and Caster of Darts."

  "That's an example that's been used," admitted Halsted, "but it's extreme. It takes too long to catch on and amusement is drowned in irritation. As it happens, I've made up a Limerick while we were having the argument-"

  And now, for the first time, Thomas Trumbull entered this part of the discussion. His tanned and wrinkled face twisted into a dark scowl and he said, "The hell you did. You made it up yesterday and you engineered this whole silly nonsense so you could recite it. If it's one of your Iliad things, I'll personally kick you out of here."

  "It's not the Iliad," said Halsted. "I haven't been working on that recently. It's no use my reciting this one, of course. I'll write it down and pass it around."

  He wrote in dark block letters on an unused napkin:

  YOU CAN'T CALL THE BRITISH QUEEN MS.

  TAIN'T AS NICE AS ELIZABETH IS.

  BUT I THINK THAT THE QUEEN

  WOULD BE EVEN LESS KEEN

  TO HAVE HERSELF MENTIONED AS LS.

  Gonzalo laughed aloud when it came too him. He said, "Sure, if you know that MS is pronounced Miz, then you pronounce LS as Liz."

  "To me," said Drake scornfully, "LS would have to stand for 'lanuscript' if it's going to rhyme with MS."

  Avalon pursed his lips and shook his head. "Using TAIN'T is a flaw. You ought to lose a syllable some other way. And to be perfectly consistent, shouldn't the rhyme word IS be spelled simply S?"

  Halsted nodded eagerly. "You're quite right, and I thought of doing that, but it wouldn't be transparent

  enough and the reader wouldn't get it fast enough to laugh. Secondly, it would be the cleverest part of the limerick and would make the LS anticlimactic."

  "Do you really have to waste all that fancy reasoning on a piece of crap like this?" asked Trumbull.

  "I think I've made my point," said Halsted. "The humor can be visual."

  Trumbull said, "Well, then, drop the subject. Since I'm host this session, that's an order. . . . Henry, where's the damned dessert?"

  "It's here, sir," said Henry softly. Unmoved by Trum-bull's tone, he deftly cleared the table and dealt out the blueberry shortcake.

  The coffee had already been poured and Trumbull's guest said in a low voice, "May I have tea, please?"

  The guest had a long upper lip and an equally long chin. The hair on his head was shaggy but there was none on his face and he had walked with a somewhat bearlike stoop. When he was first introduced, only Rubin had registered any recognition.

  He had said, "Aren't you with NASA?"

  Waldemar Long had answered with a startled "Yes" as though he had been disturbed out of a half-resentful resignation to anonymity. He had then frowned. He was frowning now again as Henry poured the tea and melted unobtrusively into the background.

  Trumbull said, "I think the time has come for our guest to enter the discussion and perhaps add some portion of sense to what has been an unusually foolish evening."

  "No, that's all right, Tom," said Long. "I don't mind frivolity." He had a deep and rather beautiful voice that had a definite note of sadness in it. He went on, "I have no aptitude for badinage myself, but I enjoy listening to it."

  Halsted, still brooding over the matter of the limericks, said, with sudden forcefulness, "I suggest Manny not be the grill master on this occasion."

  "No?" said Rubin, his sparse beard lifting belligerently.

  "No. I put it to you, Tom. If Manny questions our

  guest, he will surely bring up the space program since there's a NASA connection. Then we will go through the same darned argument we've had a hundred times. I'm sick of the whole subject of space and whether we ought to be on the moon."

  "Not half as sick as I am," said Long, rather unexpectedly, "I'd just as soon not discuss any aspect of space exploration."

  The heavy flatness of the remark seemed to dampen spirits all around. Even Halsted seemed momentarily at a loss for any other subject to introduce to someone connected with NASA.

  Then Rubin stirred in his seat and said, "I take it, Dr. Long, that this is a recently developed attitude of yours."

  Long's head turned suddenly toward Rubin. His eyes narrowed. "Why do you say that, Mr. Rubin?"

  Rubin's small face came as close to a simper as it ever did. "Elementary, my dear Dr. Long. You were on the cruise that went down to see the Apollo shot last winter. I'd been invited as a literary representative of the intellectual community, but I couldn't go. However, I got the promotional literature and noticed you were along. You were going to lecture on som
e aspect of the space program, I forget which, and that was voluntary. So your disenchantment with the subject must have arisen in the six months since the cruise."

  Long nodded his head very slightly a number of times and said, "I seem to be more heard of in that connection than in any other in my life. The damned cruise has made me famous, too."

  "I'll go farther," said Rubin enthusiastically, "and suggest that something happened on the cruise that disenchanted you with space exploration, maybe to the point where you're thinking of leaving NASA and going into some other field of work altogether."

  Long's stare was fixed now. He pointed a finger at Rubin, a long finger that showed no signs of tremor, and said, "Don't play games." Then, with a controlled anger, he rose from his chair and said, "I'm sorry, Tom. Thanks for the meal, but I'll go now."

  Everyone rose at once, speaking simultaneously; all but Rubin, who remained sitting with a look of stunned astonishment on his face.

  Trumbull's voice rose above the rest. "Now wait a while, Waldemar. God damn it, will all of you sit down? Waldemar, you too. What's the excitement about? Rubin, what is all this?"

  Rubin looked down at his empty coffeecup and lifted it as though he wished there were coffee in it so that he could delay matters by taking a sip. "I was just demonstrating a chain of logic. After all, I write mysteries. I seem to have touched a nerve." Then, gratefully, he said, "Thanks, Henry," as the cup before him sparkled black to the brim.

  "What chain of logic?" demanded Trumbull.

  "Okay, here it is. Dr. Long said, 'The damned cruise has made me famous, too.' He said 'too' and emphasized the word. That means it did something else for him and since we were talking about his distaste for the whole subject of space exploration, I deduced that the something else it had done was to supply him with that distaste. From his bearing I guessed it was sharp enough to make him want to quit his job. That's all there is to it."

  Long nodded his head again, in precisely the same slight and rapid way as before, and then settled back in his seat. "All right. I'm sorry, Mr. Rubin. I jumped too soon. The fact is I will be leaving NASA. To all intents and purposes, I have left it-and at the point of a shoe. That's all. ... We'll change the subject. Tom, you said coming here would get me out of my dumps, but it hasn't worked that way. Rather, my mood has infected you all and I've cast a damper on the party. Forgive me, all of you."