The Genie of Sutton Place

  “Aunt Lucy—did you give Sam away? To strangers—?”

  “I have taken care of the matter. Let that be—”

  “Where is he?”

  “Young man, do not raise your voice to me!”

  We were heading into a battle royal, with swearing and a lot of other things, too, as far as I was concerned, when the buzzer at the servants’ entrance rang.

  “Saved by the bell,” Rose muttered on her way to the door.

  I was going to ask her nicely, one last time, where Sam was, before I started to punch out Aunt Lucy, when I saw who was standing in the kitchen door.

  It was him! Abdullah! All dressed up in a uniform like Maurice’s. But instead of that usual sly smile, he had a big grin on, at my amazement.

  “Are you the man from Maurice’s agency?” asked Aunt Lucy.

  “Yes, mistress,” said Abdullah. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he winked at me.

  “Now, am I to understand that Maurice just—”

  “—vanished!” said Abdullah. His smile got back to the secret it always seemed to know.

  “Well, I think it’s all very mysterious,” dithered Aunt Lucy. “People don’t just—vanish.”

  “I assure you, mistress,” said Abdullah authoritatively, “that that is just what Maurice has done.”

  “Strange,” murmured Aunt Lucy.

  “Mmm,” Abdullah echoed her with a rumble from his chest. “There’s a lot of strangeness around these days.”

  “And I take it that you would like Maurice’s position?”

  “Yes, mistress.”

  “Well—I suppose, for a week or so, we might try it. But if Maurice comes back—”

  “Mistress, Maurice is not coming back.”

  “I trust that you have references,” said Aunt Lucy in a dry employer-type voice.

  “Oh, certainly, mistress.” Abdullah put his hand in his inside jacket pocket—I’m sure I heard his fingers click—and brought out a bunch of letters. And I know they weren’t there, until he got them in by magic.

  Aunt Lucy glanced at the letters, pretending to be methodical, and finally did recognize a couple of names. “Oh, yes—the Cornelius Vintons and Mrs. Callisher Davidson. I’m sure you’ll do very well.”

  “Thank you, mistress.” Abdullah bowed slightly. But his grin didn’t put her down.

  “Now I’d like you to meet my nephew—Timothy Farr.”

  “Little Master Timothy—” I got a little bow myself and a look like a private laugh that went straight through my eyes to my brain. I’d been standing there all this time like a gawk, believing and not believing, both.

  “And this is Rose Jackson.”

  I know I keep harping on his smile—but a smile is where you can tell a lot—and his did something else now, as Abdullah made his courtly bow to Rose. “Mistress.”

  Rose was wary—the way women are, at first. “Pleased to meet you—”

  But Abdullah continued to be gallant. “And I you—Rose.”

  “Now your name is—?”

  “Abdullah, mistress.”

  “Abdullah—” Aunt Lucy mouthed the word over. “Such an interesting name. Has it been in your family long?”

  “For over a thousand years, mistress.”

  “Really! My goodness.” Aunt Lucy didn’t know what to make of that, but she made whatever she could of it, and then said, “But we can’t really call you Abdullah. I tell you what—we’ll just call you Dooley—is that all right with you?”

  “Perfectly, mistress.”

  So it was Aunt Lucy who named him. An inspiration. I think her change began right there. And I hate to admit it, but I think that that was the first time I really liked Aunt Lucy. Despite what she had just done to Sam.

  “Well—that’s settled.” She remembered how bad the scene had been before Dooley showed up. Her eyes glanced at me once, then flew away like frightened birds. “Uh—have you had breakfast this morning, Dooley?”

  “No, mistress.”

  “Then I suggest that you and Timothy have breakfast together. And I’m sure Rose will join you for a cup of coffee.” She was beating a retreat to the hall. “I have to do my desk today. Pay bills and things like that. You three get acquainted—and—and—” she stopped in the door—“and, Dooley, you don’t really have to call me mistress. I’ve always been terribly liberal.” She made good her escape.

  “Rose,” I said quietly but quaking inside, “where is he?”

  “Now look, mister, I will not become—”

  “Rose—are you my friend?”

  “—involved in an argument between you and—”

  “Rose—are you my friend?”

  She sighed, gave up, and said flatly, “The Houston Street dog pound. One sixty-eight West Houston Street.” She had it all memorized to tell me … I love Rose.

  But I didn’t think of that then. “The dog pound!” I shouted. “That means they’re going to kill him! Dooley—come on!”

  * * *

  In the elevator down to the garage—I was urging it under my breath to hurry—another fear grabbed me. “Dooley—can you drive?”

  “Oh, master,” he said scornfully, “I have driven the Wizard’s Chariot of Winds.”

  “That’s fine, but my aunt owns a Cadillac.”

  “It will hold no mystery for me.”

  Maybe not, but the first thing he did when we got the keys from the attendant—that’s how safe Aunt Lucy’s building is, you can leave your keys in the garage—was to put us in reverse and wham us into the wall. Dooley got a grim expression and gripped the wheel determinedly. “Fear not, little master.” Then he said to the car, “Machine—proceed!”

  And that Cadillac purred out in the street just as sweetly as you could ask. I’m sure it was running on magic, because Dooley never bothered to shift gears or brake. It just did what he willed it to.

  I was jouncing around on the front seat beside him, wondering if we’d make it in time, when about two blocks down Second Avenue he brought up something completely irrelevant. “Master,” he calmly asked, just as if we weren’t in a race for Sam’s life, “discuss Rose Jackson.”

  “She’s a girl who’s a singer and who’s working for Aunt Lucy to pay for her lessons. Hey, Dooley!—that was a red light—”

  “Very pretty.”

  “No, when it’s red you have to stop. On the green lights you go.”

  “Then let them all be green.” He snapped his right hand, as if he were flicking water—but it was magic—off his fingertips. Every light on Second Avenue turned green!

  I was sitting there, swimming in the wonder of that, when we came to the cop. “His hand is up now, Dooley.”

  “A greeting, no doubt.”

  I realized I was going to have to give this Genie driving lessons. (Later I found out that he’d been so busy exploring about me last night that he hadn’t bothered with simple things.) “No, when a cop’s hand is up, you have to stop. You go forward when he beckons—like this.”

  He did it with just one finger this time, crooking it forward. And I never will forget that cop’s face when he wanted us to stop, and his hand just kept rising in front of him, beckoning us on … I really would have enjoyed that ride, if it hadn’t been for Sam.

  Behind Sam there was also another nag—not nearly as important, of course. “Dooley, you didn’t do anything like—evaporate Maurice, did you? I didn’t much like him, but—”

  “Master, at this very moment Maurice dwells in his own dull vision of Paradise. In my comings and goings last night, and my picking over of many minds that appertain to you, I learned that Maurice had only one dream: to retire to a city named St. Petersburg, in a state called, I believe, Florida. Thus, this morning Mister Maurice woke up in the Golden Age Motel, 136 Palm Drive, St. Petersburg, Florida. And he found, beside his bed, a bank book containing not only his own hoarded savings, but enough in addition to keep him in his middling bliss for the rest of his days.”

  The way he could just ta
ke care of people!—as if he were dealing cards. “But Dooley,” I said, “won’t Maurice be a little suspicious—if he goes to sleep in New York and wakes up in Florida?”

  “Little Master Timothy, in my dealings with men I have found that they fall in two groups. There are some—and I believe you are one such yourself—who seek out the forces that shape their fate. As for the others—when Mister Maurice sees the amount of money that has been deposited in his name in the First National Bank of St. Petersburg, Florida, he will be well content to live in ignorance.”

  “If you say so, Dooley.” As long as I didn’t have to feel guilty about the evaporation of Maurice, I wasn’t going to worry about it.

  Besides, we’d reached Houston Street. And there was the dog pound, in all its ugliness. A terrible place, like a concentration camp, with horrible concrete buildings all around an open yard. I knew that one of those buildings had the gas chamber in it, or the room where they drained the air away and the dogs suffocated to death.

  But at least the yard was open, and that’s where the dogs were, behind this thick meshed fence. “There he is!” I shouted even before I got out of the car.

  That Sam. There he was, only minutes away from extinction, just lying off in one corner, away from the other dogs, having himself a snooze. “Sam!” I called. “Sam!” He heard me and came padding over, with his tail plopping side to side, moderately glad to see me, I guess, because he was grinning. “Thank goodness we’re in time!” He knew I wouldn’t let him down.

  “Woof,” said Sam, in that special husky woof that he woofs only to me.

  I was just about to ask Dooley to magic a hole in the fence, so Sam could get out, when a man appeared from one of the buildings in the back. I have never liked the idea of dogcatchers in general, but this was the first one I’d ever met—and he was really bad news! As big as Frankenstein’s monster, and you could tell from that gleam in his eye that he really enjoyed his work.

  “Whaddaya want here?” he barked at us. Except dogs sometimes sound nice when they bark. Men don’t. “Get away from that fence! You’re makin’ the animals nervous.”

  “I want my dog,” I said. “This is him. This is Sam.”

  “Got a license? Got a permit?”

  “Sam has a license—”

  “Got authorization? I picked this animal up this mornin’—with specific instructions. Now get outta here!” He dragged Sam off to a bunch of dogs that were cowering against one wall. They must have been the condemned group for that day.

  Behind me Dooley softly asked, “Master, shall I make that man vanish?—and I mean vanish! Not like Maurice.”

  “No, no. It’s not his fault he’s a creep,” I said. “At least, don’t evaporate him yet.” The man had gone into the building. “Gee, I don’t know what to do. Even if you get Sam out, I can’t bring him home again.”

  “Well, master,” said Dooley, “’tis my opinion that we should do something. I fear that the creep has evil designs on Sam.” His forehead puckered up a minute. And then, just as if it weren’t a revolutionary solution, he came up with the answer. “Would Aunt Lucy object to Sam if he were not a dog?”

  I didn’t get him at first. “What else could he be?”

  “Oh—an insect, a fish—a man.”

  “Could you make him a man—?”

  “With a flicker of these fingertips.”

  “But Dooley—” talk about having your mind blown—“a man!”

  “I know, little master. But in the sight of these eyes—which are immortal—the difference between an ant and a man is less than human pride might wish.”

  A man!… “Would it hurt?” I asked.

  “There is pain in being human, but the transformation would cause him none.”

  “He might not like me any more—”

  “I think he will love you, master—though men are less faithful than dogs.”

  “But how long would he stay a man?”

  “As long as my spell held him.” Just like that! So matter-of-factly. “Lo, master, the creep comes again.”

  The dogcatcher had come out of that building and was heading for a dismal little blockhouse off in one corner of the yard. The condemned group knew what was coming, too. They were barking hysterically and running around in circles, in fear.

  “Do it, Dooley!” I said. The man’s back was turned as he unlocked the door. “Oh, do it—please!”

  The Genie lifted his right hand, and from the depths of his chest, he sort of sang, “Oh, simple, soulless beast named Sam—I call thee to the dubious estate—of man!”

  7

  Sam

  “Put clothes on him!” I was so shocked I didn’t even have time to be amazed.

  Because there he was. Naked as a jaybird! Standing amid all those barking dogs, with a look on his face as if he had just dropped down from another planet. Which I suppose, in a way, he had. And it’s lucky we live in a time of hair, because he was the whiskeriest man I ever saw.

  Dooley made another pass with his right hand, and just-like-that Sam had shoes, brown slacks, a white shirt, and a mottled brown sport jacket on. I haven’t described Sam the dog to you in detail, but he was mostly patchy brown and white, and Sam the man really did rather look like him. Of course you’d have to have known them both to see the resemblance.

  The dogs were barking even louder now, because they, too, were shocked at what had happened to Sam, and the dogcatcher turned around from unlocking the gas chamber. “Hey!” he shouted. “Who are you?”

  Sam yelped a little in his old voice and then got out the words, “I—I’m—I’m a man?”

  “And whaddaya think you’re doin’ in here?”

  Sam looked at me with this bug-eyed, pleading expression. “Help him, Dooley,” I whispered.

  The Genie pointed his forefinger at Sam’s throat. And automatically out came Sam’s voice: “I’m an inspector from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”

  “Yeah?—well, we got inspected last month. An’ we’re clean,” said the creep. “Now get outta here! You’re makin’ the animals nervous.”

  “I would have been pretty nervous myself,” said Sam furiously. “If you know you’ve got only two minutes to—”

  “Get outta here!” The guy took Sam by the elbow and pushed him toward a gate in the fence, which he unbolted from inside. “An’ stay out!”

  And there we were—face to face …

  “Sam—?” I still didn’t really believe.

  “Timmy—?” Neither did he.

  Then all at once we did! And we were laughing, and Sam lifted me up and swung me back and forth. That was something I’d often done to Sam, when I got big enough to lift him, but this was the first time he’d done it to me and it was a funny experience.

  He was still pretty doggy. A lot of his laughter sounded like barking. “Dooley,” I said, when Sam put me down, “you’ve got to fix that voice.”

  Dooley touched his longest finger to Sam’s throat and said, “You canine voice—now hark! Use human accents. And don’t bark!” Sam cleared his throat, and after that his voice was better.

  “Is everything else okay, Sam?” I asked.

  He stretched out a leg. “It feels sort of strange to stand on only two feet. The balance—”

  “I know. It takes little kids a long time. Dooley, do you think you could—”

  “Legs,” said Dooley, “straighten up! And carry Sam with pride. Forget the quadruped inside.” I guess that’s what you would call instant evolution.

  But I was still jittery, staying there by the dog pound. “Come on.” I tugged Sam’s sleeve. “Let’s go.”

  Sam held back, looking into the yard. “I’m kind of sorry for all those guys. I mean—dogs.” His own face looked pretty hangdog and sad. “I got to know a couple of them.”

  All I had to do was glance at Dooley. It didn’t even need a spoken spell. The bolt slid back, and the gate swung open, as nice as pie.

  A little terrier saw the es
cape route first. He couldn’t believe his eyes and just gawked a minute. Then he shouted something in dog talk, and in one second there was the wildest, noisiest, furriest stream pouring through that gate that you could ever hope to see.

  “Hey wait!” the dogcatcher shouted. “Stop!”

  Nobody did, of course. I never found out what happened to all those dogs pouring up and down Houston Street, but I hope they made their way to safety.

  * * *

  In the car—we were all in the front seat, I never did like the idea of a chauffeur plunked up there all by himself—my nose began to twitch. “Gee, Sam, I didn’t keep you very clean. You smell half like Aunt Lucy’s perfume and half like a dirty kennel. I suppose that’s the dog pound.”

  “Oh, now, Tim,” said Sam, “you’re not going to give me another bath, are you? We had one just yesterday.”

  “Why, Sam—” I was rather disappointed—“I thought you enjoyed them.” That was the first time I learned there was more to Sam than Sam.

  “Well, I don’t,” he said. “I put up with them only because I knew you liked them so much.”

  “But it’s different for men.” I thought I could coax him into it. “And I’d like a bath, too. Wouldn’t you, Dooley?”

  “Yes, master!” said Dooley enthusiastically. “I used to visit the Wizard’s Chamber of Steaming Delights frequently.”

  “I think a local Turkish bath will do enough for now,” I said.

  We found one in midtown and went in. That was really a happy two hours! I’d never been to a steam bath before, with all the white tiles shining. At first I didn’t like the steam room—and neither did Sam—but Dooley enjoyed it so much, slapping himself around and dashing from a hot shower into a freezing cold one, that Sam and I caught the fun of it, too.

  “How do you like it, Sam?” I asked.

  “It’s great!” Of course he knew better by now, but he threw back his head and barked for the heck of it.

  That brought the bath attendant in. “You got a dog in here?” he asked suspiciously.

  “No, sir!” said Sam, very earnest now. “There’s nobody here but us humans.”

  That set the three of us off on a binge of laughing.

  They had a swimming pool, too. To begin with, Sam could only do the dog paddle, but in half an hour Dooley and I had him managing the Australian crawl.