She fell into silent musing for a few moments; then, after a slight, bitter laugh, she spoke again.
“All good doctors,” she said, “have telephone numbers that contain no more than one or two digits and the rest is all zeros, you know.”
“Yes, and all good morticians,” observed the lawyer, “have telephone numbers consisting of nothing but zero, zero, ad infinitum.”
The curator of the museum was asked if he recalled any more amusing anecdotes about that Roman painter now confined to the asylum in Zurich.
“Well, yes, now, the last time I visited poor Florio, he seemed to have recovered completely. He kept assuring me that his aberrations were all gone under the excellent treatment at the retreat and he begged me to get his relatives in Rome to have him released, and I, being convinced that he really was quite well, embraced him and started for the gate and I had almost reached it when I was struck on the back of the head by a large piece of concrete paving that almost gave me a concussion but I managed to turn about and there was Florio behind me. And he had quite obviously thrown the missile. ‘Don’t forget now/ he shouted, ‘I’m the sanest man in the world!”’
The passengers were laughing at this tale when Lisabetta leaned abruptly forward from her mound of pillows.
“Ah!”
With this exclamation, she struck a fist to her groin as if unbearably pained there but on the reptilian face of the Principessa was a look of ecstasy that outshone the glassy lake surface on that brightest of autumn mornings.
The Neapolitan lawyer, seated nearest her in the boat, seized her wrist and then, discovering no pulse, turned to the party and said, “A miracle has happened, the lady is dead.”
This announcement caused one or two of the passengers to cross themselves, perhaps while reflecting upon the difficulty of seeking new employment, but, understandably, most of the others in the boat were moved to much less solemn expressions of feeling.
]uly 1972 (Published 1973)
Miss Coynte of Greene
Miss Coynte of Greene was the unhappily dutiful caretaker of a bed-ridden grandmother. This old lady, the grandmother whom Miss Coynte addressed as Mère and sometimes secretly as merde, had outlived all relatives except Miss Coynte, who was a single lady approaching thirty.
The precise cause of Miss Coynte’s grandmother’s bed-ridden condition had never been satisfactorily explained to Miss Coynte by their physician in Greene, and Miss Coynte, though not particularly inclined to paranoia, entertained the suspicion that the old lady was simply too lazy to get herself up, even to enter the bathroom.
“What is the matter with Mere, Dr. Settle?”
“Matter with your grandmother?” he would say reflectively, looking into the middle distance. “Well, frankly, you know, I have not exactly determined anything of an organic nature that really accounts for her staying so much in bed.”
“Dr. Settle, she does not stay so much in bed, but she stays constantly in it, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, yes, I know what you mean…”
“Do you know. Dr. Settle, that I mean she is what they call ‘incontinent’ now, and that I have to spend half my time changing the linen on the bed?”
Dr. Settle was not unsettled at all by this report.
“It’s one of a number of geriatric problems that one has to accept,” he observed dreamily as he made toward the downstairs door. “Oh, where did I put my hat?”
“You didn’t have one,” replied Miss Coynte rather sharply.
He gave her a brief, somewhat suspicious glance, and said, “Well, possibly I left it in the office.”
“Yes, possibly you left your head there, too.”
“What was that you said?” inquired the old doctor, who had heard her perfectly well.
“I said that Chicken Little says the sky is falling,” replied Miss Coynte without a change of expression.
The doctor nodded vaguely, gave her his practiced little smile and let himself out the door.
Miss Coynte’s grandmother had two major articles on her bedside table. One of them was a telephone into which she babbled all but incessantly to anyone she remembered who was still living and of a social echelon that she regarded as speakable to, and the other important article was a loud-mouthed bell that she would ring between phone talks to summon Miss Coynte for some service.
Most frequently she would declare that the bed needed changing, and while Miss Coynte performed this odious service. Mere would often report the salient points of her latest phone conversation.
Rarely was there much in these reports that would be of interest to Miss Coynte, but now, on the day when this narrative begins. Mere engaged her granddaughter’s attention with a lively but deadly little anecdote.
“You know, I was just talking to Susie and Susie told me that Dotty Reagan, you know Dotty Reagan, she weighs close to three hundred pounds, the fattest woman in Greene, and she goes everywhere with this peculiar little young man who they say is a fairy, if you know what I mean.”
“No, Mere, can you swing over a little so I can change the sheet?”
“Well, anyway. Dotty Reagan was walking along the street with this little fairy who hardly weighs ninety pounds, a breeze would blow him away, and they had reached the drugstore corner, where they were going to buy sodas, when Dotty Reagan said to the fairy, ‘Catch me. I’m going to fall,’ and the little fairy said to her, ’Dotty, you’re too big to catch,’ and so he let her fall on the drugstore corner.”
“Oh,” said Miss Coynte, still trying to tug the soiled sheet from under her grandmother’s massive and immobile body on the brass bed.
“Yes, he let her fall. He made no effort to catch her.”
“Oh,” said Miss Coynte again.
“Is that all you can say, just ‘Oh’?” inquired her grandmother.
Miss Coynte had now managed by almost superhuman effort to get the soiled bed sheet from under her grandmother’s great swollen body.
“No, I was going to ask you if anything was broken, I mean like a hipbone, when Dotty Reagan fell.”
A slow and malicious smile began to appear on the face of Miss Coynte’s grandmother.
“The coroner didn’t examine the body for broken bones,” the grandmother said, “since Dotty Reagan was stone-cold dead by the time she hit the pavement of the corner by the drugstore where she had intended to have an ice-cream soda with her fairy escort who didn’t try to catch her when she told him that she was about to fall.”
Miss Coynte did not smile at the humor of this story, for, despite her condition, an erotic, not a frigid, spinster approaching thirty, she had not acquired the malice of her grandmother, and, actually, she felt a sympathy both for the defunct Dotty Reagan and for the ninety-pound fairy who had declined to catch her.
“Were you listening to me or was I just wasting my breath as usual when I talk to you?” inquired her grandmother, flushing with anger.
“I heard what you said,” said Miss Coynte, “but I have no comment to make on the story except that the little man with her would probably have suffered a broken back, if not a fracture of all bones, if Miss Dotty Reagan had fallen on top of him when he tried to catch her.”
“Yes, well, the fairy had sense enough not to catch her and so his bones were not fractured.”
“I see,” said Miss Coynte. “Can you lie on the rubber sheet for a while till I wash some clean linen?”
“Be quick about it and bring me a bowl of strawberry sherbet and a couple of cookies,” ordered the grandmother.
Miss Coynte got to the door with the soiled sheet and then she turned on her grandmother for the first time in her ten years of servitude and she said something that startled her nearly out of her wits.
“How would you like a bowl full of horseshit?” she said to the old lady, and then she slammed the door.
She had hardly slammed the door when the grandmother began to scream like a peacock in heat; she let out scream after scream, but Miss Coynte ignored them.
She went downstairs and she did not wash linen for the screaming old lady. She sat on a small sofa and listened to the screams. Suddenly, one of them was interrupted by a terrific gasp.
“Dead,” thought Miss Coynte.
She breathed an exhausted sigh. Then she said, “Finally.”
She relaxed on the sofa and soon into her fancy came that customary flood of erotic imagination.
Creatures of fantasy in the form of young men began to approach her through the room of the first floor, cluttered with furnishings and bric-a-brac inherited from the grandmother’s many dead relatives. All of these imaginary young lovers approached Miss Coynte with expressions of desire.
They exposed themselves to her as they approached, but never having seen the genitals of a male older than the year-old son of a cousin. Miss Coynte had a very diminutive concept of the exposed organs. She was easily satisfied, though, having known, rather seen, nothing better.
After a few hours of these afternoon fantasies, she went back up to her grandmother. The old lady’s eyes and mouth were open but she had obviously stopped breathing…
Much of human behavior is, of course, automatic, at least on the surface, so there should be no surprise in Miss Coynte’s actions following upon her grandmother’s death.
About a week after that long-delayed event, she leased an old store on Marble Street, which was just back of Front Street on the levee, and she opened a shop there called The Better Mousetrap. She hired a black man with two mules and a wagon to remove a lot of the inherited household wares, especially the bric-a-brac, from the house, and then she advertised the opening of the shop in the daily newspaper of Greene. In the lower left-hand corner of the ad, in elegant Victorian script, she had her name. Miss Valerie Coynte, inserted, and it amazed her how little embarrassment she felt over the immodesty of putting her name in print in a public newspaper.
The opening was well attended, the name Coynte being one of historical eminence in the Delta. She served fruit punch from a large cut-glass bowl with a black man in a white jacket passing it out, and the next day the occasion was written up in several papers in that part of the Delta. Since it was approaching the Christmas season, the stuff moved well. The first stock had to be almost completely replaced after the holiday season, and still the late Mère’s house was almost overflowing with marketable antiquities.
Miss Coynte had a big publicity break in late January, when the Memphis Commercial Appeal did a feature article about the success of her enterprise.
It was about a week after this favorable write-up that a young man employed as assistant manager of the Hotel Alcazar crossed the street to the shop to buy a pair of antique silver salt and pepper shakers as a silver-wedding-anniversary gift for the hotel’s owner, Mr. Vernon T. Silk, who was responsible for the young man’s abrupt ascendancy from a job as bellhop to his present much more impressive position at the hotel.
More impressive it certainly was, this new position, but it was a good deal less lucrative, for the young man. Jack Jones, had been extraordinarily well paid for his services when he was hopping bells. He had been of a thrifty nature and after only six months, he had accumulated a savings account at the Mercantile Bank that ran into four figures, and it was rumored in Greene that he was now preparing to return to Louisiana, buy a piece of land and become a sugarcane planter.
His name. Jack Jones, has been mentioned, and it probably struck you as a suspiciously plain sort of name and I feel that, without providing you with a full-figure portrait of him in color, executed by an illustrator of remarkable talent, you can hardly be expected to see him as clearly as did Miss Coynte when he entered The Better Mousetrap with the initially quite innocent purpose of buying those antique silver shakers for Mr. Vernon Silk’s anniversary present.
Mr. Jones was a startlingly personable young man, perhaps more startlingly so in his original occupation as bellhop, not that there had been a decline in his looks since his advancement at the Alcazar but because the uniform of a bellhop had cast more emphasis upon certain of his physical assets. He had worn, as bellhop, a little white mess jacket beneath which his narrow, muscular buttocks had jutted with a prominence that had often invited little pats and pinches even from elderly drummers of usually more dignified deportment. They would deliver these little familiarities as he bent over to set down their luggage and sometimes, without knowing why, the gentlemen of the road would flush beneath their thinning thatches of faded hair, would feel an obscurely defined embarrassment that would incline them to tip Jack Jones at least double the ordinary amount of their tips to a bellhop.
Sometimes it went past that.
“Oh, thank you, suh,” Jack would say, and would linger smiling before them. “Is there anything else that I can do for you, suh?”
“Why, no, son, not right now, but—”
“Later? You’d like some ice, suh?”
Well, you get the picture.
There was a certain state senator, in his late forties, who began to spend every weekend at the hotel, and after midnight at the Alcazar, when usually the activities there were minimal, this junior senator would keep Jack hopping the moon out of the sky for one service after another—for ice, for booze and, finally, for services that would detain the youth in the senator’s two-room suite for an hour or more.
A scandal such as this, especially when it involves a statesman of excellent family connections and one much admired by his constituency, even mentioned as a Presidential possibility in future, is not openly discussed; but, privately, among the more sophisticated, some innuendoes are passed about with a tolerant shrug.
Well, this is somewhat tangential to Miss Coynte’s story, but recently the handsome young senator’s wife—he was a benedict of two years’ standing but was still childless—took to accompanying him on his weekend visits to the Alcazar.
The lady’s name was Alice and she had taken to drink.
The senator would sit up with her in the living room of the suite, freshening her drinks more frequently than she suggested, and then, a bit after midnight, seeing that Alice had slipped far down in her seat, the junior senator would say to her, as if she were still capable of hearing, “Alice, honey, I think it’s beddy time for you now.”
He would lift her off the settee and carry her into the bedroom, lay her gently upon the bed and slip out, locking the door behind him; Then immediately he would call downstairs for Jack to bring up another bucket of ice.
Now once, on such an occasion. Jack let himself into the bedroom, not the living room door with a passkey, latched the door from inside and, after an hour of commotion, subdued but audible to adjacent patrons of the Alcazar, the senator’s lady climbed out naked onto the window ledge of the bedroom.
This was just after the senator had succeeded in forcing his way into that room.
Well, the lady didn’t leap or fall into the street. The senator and Jack managed to coax her back into the bedroom from the window ledge and, more or less coincidentally, the senator’s weekend visits to the Alcazar were not resumed after that occasion, and it was just after that occasion that Mr. Vernon Silk had promoted Jack Jones to his new position as night clerk at the hotel.
In this position, standing behind a counter in gentleman’s clothes. Jack Jones was still an arrestingly personable young man, since he had large, heavy-lashed eyes that flickered between hazel and green and which, when caught by light from a certain angle, would seem to be almost golden. The skin of his face, which usually corresponds to that of the body, was flawlessly smooth and of a dusky-rose color that seemed more suggestive of an occupation in the daytime, in a region of fair weather, than that of a night clerk at the Alcazar. And this face had attracted the attention of Miss Dorothea Bernice Korngold, who had stopped him on the street one day and cried out histrionically to him; “Nijinsky, the face, the eyes, the cheekbones of the dancer Waslaw Nijinsky! Please, please pose for me as The Spectre of the Rose or as The Afternoon of a Faun!”
“Pose? Just pose???
?
“As the Faun you could be in a reclining position on cushions!”
“Oh, I see. Hmm; Uh-huh. Now, what are the rates for posing?”
“Why, it depends on the hours!”
“Most things do,” said Jack.
“When are you free?” she gasped.
“Never,” he replied, “but I’ve got afternoons off and if the rates are OK…”
Well, you get the picture.
Jack Jones with his several enterprises did as well as Miss Coynte of Greene with her one. Jack Jones had a single and very clear and simple object in mind, which was to return to southern Louisiana and to buy that piece of land, all his own, and to raise sugarcane.
Miss Coynte’s purpose or purposes in life were much more clouded over by generations of dissimulation and propriety of conduct, by night and day, than those of Jack Jones.
However, their encounter in The Better Mousetrap had the volatile feeling of an appointment with a purpose; at least one, if not several purposes of importance.
She took a long, long time wrapping up the antique silver shakers and while her nervous fingers were employed at this, her tongue was engaged in animated conversation with her lovely young patron.
At first this conversation was more in the nature of an interrogation.
“Mr. Jones, you’re not a native of Greene?”