Scoring Bertram Wiggly Read online

  I shame to say, but when Mary first arrived, I prayed that something would remove her from my life. I don’t believe in the efficacy of prayer; as a child I made the experiment several times – asking God for impossible things (the power of invisibility, super-human hearing) unlikely things (a brand new sweater, a five-dollar bill) and probable things (rain). In all cases, the results were nil, and I concluded at a tender age that if a Cosmic Watchmaker is supervising over His creation, He isn’t in the business of dishing out requests to the gears and flywheels, so I have since answered His silence with my own.

  But when we were unpacking at my new home in Medville, I found myself at prayer again. Mary had been useless all day, standing by with dull eyes as I shoved her chest of drawers – hers! That I’d bought for her! – into her room.

  “I have a headache,” Uncle Wiggly,” she pouted at me.

  “Very well, then you may lie down with a damp cloth on your head,” I told her. It was all I could do to muster a sympathetic voice. I had to dig a quilt out from a box to make a pallet on the floor – I had not had time to put together her bed yet – before I continued working.

  Later it transpired that Mary had, for reasons that have never become clear to me, put a tub of cold cream among the china. The lid had come unscrewed in transit, and in the train’s hot baggage car, the cold cream turned semi-liquid. I was staring in mute wonderment at the sticky-coated cup in my sticky-coated hand, having just made the unwelcome discovery that every saucer, every plate I owned was smeared in fragrant paste, when in walks Mary, wrapped in the quilt, her hair in disarray and eyes a-blear, informing me in the tones of a Christian martyr about to be tossed to the crocodiles, “Now my back hurts.”

  I inwardly rolled my eyes, and silently prayed – I shall never forgive myself – “Dear Lord, get this girl out of my house!” Backaches in a teenager, forsooth! Not content to dodge work with hysterical illness of internal plumbing and imaginary vapors, she had to whine about it to ensure I too suffered.

  By the time she came down with a fever, her bed had been assembled, and I threw on a comforter and let her sleep. Next morning, she was better, and I was somewhat contrite.

  But next night.

  Back came the headache, the backache, and the chills. Then the black vomit came. I was terrified. I was new in town; I didn’t know a soul. My neighbors must have thought me an escaped lunatic when they heard the pounding on their door at dawn and saw me night-shirted in my stocking cap, barefoot, hair awry, and eyes wild. I didn’t care. I said I had a sick child in the house, and who was their doctor?

  By the time I got back with Dr. Wells in my Model T, Mary was unconscious.

  The doctor laid a hand on the burning forehead and peeled back a lid to study the yellowed white of an eye. “We’ll take her to the clinic,” he said. “She’ll have a better chance there.”

  A better chance!

  How could three words wring such change of heart? Tears blurred my sight. I prayed again, “God, God, let her live! Don’t take her now!”

  God, of course, does not exist because if He did, He would be the most unspeakable felon in the universe.

  Here is the miracle wrought in answer to my first silent prayer: Somewhere in Louisiana a mosquito, nearly the last of his subgenus – a miracle itself that it should have been alive at all, when the rest of its particular family tree had been so thoroughly exterminated – emerged through a cracked cistern cover and boarded the 9:15 Memphis-New Orleans.

  It is not remarkable in itself that an insect should get on a train. Many members of the animal kingdom travel by rail on a regular basis. To wit, New York pigeons oft times take the subway to Coney Island where they spend a pleasant day scavenging popcorn at the beach before catching a northbound to their nests back in Yonkers that evening; this is a documented fact.

  But even city pigeons – who from the egg are familiar with the rail lines and schedules – make – at most – one transfer to reach their destination. But this insect, who had never theretofore left whatever outlandish backwater it haled from, had to change trains no less than three times to find himself on the precise train, at the precise time, in the precise car, where my sweet Mary sat dreaming at the passing farms and houses while across the aisle her stone-faced uncle did not once spare a glance from his well-thumbed copy of Mueller’s Life Expectancies of Modern Appliances to smile or say a cheering word.

  And this well-traveled vermin, this wee little six-legged homicide, who had gone so long without slaking its thirst, chose that moment to creep from hiding and dip its loathsome beak into Mary’s warm smooth skin. We know where the bite was because the mark became permanent – almost hidden in her dimple, a tiny scar you’d never notice unless you had remorse to guide your gaze. She killed it, of course, brushed it off with the back of her hand, its tiny body rolling in a tumble of smashed wings and legs, but it didn’t matter. Its work was done.

  Yellow Fever.

  How long had it been since the last outbreak? A good twenty years at least. And Mary had never even set foot in New Orleans. “I’m going to write it up,” Dr. Wells told me, as Mary lay in a coma sweating and panting under the white sheet. “This is one for The New England Journal.”

  Did you hear that, darling? You’re famous.

  Please do not think I’m claiming to be a good person when I tell you I spent every moment by her bed. Any callous rodent – and I acknowledge that is what I am – would have done the same in my position. I only mention the hours I spent mopping her forehead with moist flannels and turning her pillow to keep her cool so you’ll know how I came to memorize every millimeter of her face. The aforementioned dimple, for example, or the way her upper lip is a little too short to come down over her teeth, so her mouth is usually slightly open; the effect – as if she had always been taken by surprise – is charming. And also so you’ll understand how it happened when she opened her eyes, mine was the first face she saw.

  I had been sitting there, thinking just at that moment, how beautiful she was, that apart from my dear Aunt Betty Ann, hers was the only truly beautiful face I’d ever seen. And then for the first time in days, her eyes rolled under their lids and opened, and something happened I would not have believed possible – she became more beautiful still.

  “Uncle Wiggly,” she whispered. She struggled in her sheets to reach my arm. She smiled, as if those days in her darkness, she’d only hoped to find me waiting.

  I bawled. I kissed her hair, her face, her hands. I was so grateful. She was glad to see me.

  More on the Mary Theme

  She kissed my forehead the morning after the town hall meeting with a fond, “Good morning, Wiggly,” as she slid my breakfast – two poached eggs, coffee, and tomato juice – before me. The Bugle waited on the table.

  “It’s good to have you home,” I said. For the last four years I had enrolled Mary at Idlewood Academy, an exclusive girls’ college upstate. During her absence I pined but only got to see her on breaks. Now to my delight she had returned to me a lovely full-grown woman.

  Mary used to call me Uncle Wiggly before I broke her of the habit, the name having, as it does, an unfortunate connotation of a children’s card game featuring a gruesomely anthropomorphic jackrabbit. No doubt you are familiar with the surname, which my industrious relative appended to his grocery store chain, but you can trace the name first to my famed ancestor Ouiclé who came across back in 1066 with William the Conqueror, bringing a much-needed note of culture and manly decorum to what had formerly been a drab brutish isle.

  Mary said, “I threw bread out for the swallows, but I was thinking –” She set my coffee down, and I took a sip. “I wish they’d eat out of my hand. At Idlewood we read about an Indian brave who lay out all night with cracked maize in his open hand, and in the morning, birds came right up to him to feed. Do you think if I did that, it would invite the birds to me?”

  “It think it would invite influenza,” I said, “or failing that, catarrh or grippe.”
<
br />   “Oh, Wiggly, you are so funny,” she laughed. She frequently laughs at jokes I’m not aware I’ve made. I permitted myself an avuncular smile before perusing the headlines.

  “I think it’s a bunch of nonsense,” Mary said with a dismissive snort, apropos of nothing. I expected she was going to importune me to attend the Spring Festival, Medville’s yearly fete in honor of the Vernal Equinox. I had pretended to withhold my permission for several days, the better to draw out the sweet attentions she lavishes on me to sway my decision, and the delightful displays of gratitude when I inevitably relent. I looked from my paper quizzically. “The rezoning,” she explained.

  I nodded in comprehension. News of the previous night’s town hall business had pushed the simmering European turmoil to the back pages. Mary had not been at the meeting, so she had not witnessed my oratory nor known the outcome until this morning. Nevertheless, as I was gratified to learn, her views were in perfect accordance with my own. Ever since her return from Idlewood, I had begun to think how delightful it would be if Mary became Mrs. Wiggly; not that I have ever made advances toward her, but our minds are so attuned to one another, in many ways it is almost as if we were married already.

  “Well, Jim Hansom was very persuasive,” I admitted. I did not allude to my own futile plea.

  “Jim Hansom!” Mary said with a fresh dismissive snort, and took a swallow of coffee, her cheeks and eyes glowing with pique. Again, I smiled to see how similar our views are. Many of the rustic damsels hereabouts were enamored with the man; they seemed to cluster along fence rails for the express purpose of sighing in noisy unison as he passed; fortunately, however, her education at Idlewood had given Mary too much good sense to be affected by whatever bucolic charms Jim Hansom might possess. “I don’t see what the point is anyway with all this – music. What’s wrong with the way things are now?”

  I spent a pleasant few minutes on the front porch reading the weather – sunny and mild with a chance of picturesque showers later in the week – to the contented clatter of dishes as Mary washed up in the kitchen.

  “You know, Wiggly,” she called to me through the window. “All the other baby swallows have grown up and left, but there’s still one that won’t leave.” (I have mentioned before the swallows outside her bedroom.) “I hope he’s all right,” she said in a worried voice.

  I wouldn’t have cared if a plague of tabbies swept through and gulped the race of swallows down entire, but for Mary’s sake, who is devoted to birds, I said. “I’m sure he’ll be fine, dear.”

  “It would be so wonderful if they came back every year, wouldn’t Wiggly?” There was a pause in the rattling of dishes as she said this, and I imagined her lifting her gaze in the kitchen window to look over the rooftops across the street. “I heard somewhere it’s good luck to have swallows nesting in your chimney.”

  “I’m not sure it’s such good luck for the swallows,” I said. “And in any case, I think that’s pelicans. Or else storks.” I turned to the funny pages to learn of Dagwood’s parents’ threat to cut him off without a cent if he married his blond gold-digger girlfriend. Annie meanwhile was having problems of her own with a tough customer, his criminality evident in his plaid cap and way of saying “dese” and “dose” for “these” and “those.”

  “I have to go to town today to get my car,” I told Mary, “and then I’m going to Nexton to discuss some things with our lawyer, Mr. Pennyfeather. I need you to ride me to Joe’s Garage.”

  “Yes, Wiggly,” Mary said, “as soon as I do the dishes.”

  The more I thought of it, the more delectable appeared the scheme of letting Mary become my wife. Consanguinity did not rear its fearsome head in this instance; she is at most a distant, distant cousin, if that. And I don’t feel for her the simpering mush, that fodder for lace-trimmed Valentines, that bait which cads use to despoil virgins, not what people call love – but real love; the whole-hearted devotion to the happiness of one other person and the certain simple knowledge life without her would not be worth living.

  Happily toying with the prospect of inviting her to plight her troth with mine, I had almost persuaded myself that the rezoning would have no effect on our lives after all, that at most, the orchestra would play at isolated times and places, or – better still – they wouldn’t play at all, that having pocketed whatever retainer Medville had advanced, Sam would skip town with his stealthy ensemble to practice his wiles on a fresh bunch of dupes. Although I disliked having my taxes squandered this way, the thought of Medville’s citizens gaping at one another in stupe-faced wonder as they absorbed a valuable lesson about trusting every smooth talker that comes down the pike brought a delicious smile to the Wiggly lips.

  My hopes that the rezoning would prove a nil force, however, came a cropper as Mary pedaled me to Joe’s Garage. I first became aware of it as a humming or a whistling which I only scarcely noticed and even then put down to the friction of the back wheel against the mudguard. Gradually, though, it grew upon me that the noise was something more sinister. It was unmistakably violins. Worse yet, it was becoming ever clearer that what had begun as a single note or chord, blending with the natural cycling noises, for which I had originally mistaken it, was burgeoning by slow degrees into a definite melody if not an actual score. I was balanced between the handlebars with my knees tucked beneath my chin as Mary drove – I have mentioned I am very small-framed – and I could see in all directions, and yet there was not the slightest glimmer of brass or woodwind among the golden fields to one or beneath the drooping willows shading a shimmering lake to the other. Where were they hiding? Judging by the sound that even now drowned out all thought, Sam the conductor must have jammed them like sardines in every thicket and ditch along the way and yet – except for Mary, me, and one black-spotted cow that looked up to stare at us with bovine complacency – the road was utterly deserted.

  Then we rounded a bend, and the sound dropped suddenly away.

  No sooner had I concluded that we had mercifully outdistanced them, than a different and yet complimentary tune woven into the first rose again. It was then I realized: they were playing an overture.

  “Uncle Bert, be careful!” Mary warned under her breath, as if unwilling to disturb the music – not that anything quieter than a twenty-one howitzer salute could have made the slightest difference. My shudder at grasping the full scope of the horror before me would have shot us into a rose bush had not Mary careened away in time. A warning roll of a nearby snare drum accompanied this maneuver.

  As we arrived at Joe’s Garage, the music rose to a crescendo, and just at the moment I thought I could bear it no longer, stopped. For a time I was permitted to believe my ordeal was over.

  How wrong I was.

  The

  Opening Number

  Normally one brings a car to the mechanic when it makes a funny noise, and when one picks it up, the funny n. has ceased. Not so in this case.

  I was less than pleased at starting up my car that its normal purring motor – well, purring is too delicate a verb; at best a Model T sounds like the noise from a tubercular ward boiled down and run over with a flatiron – but however you would describe the steady throb of a Model T in perfect running trim, that noise had been replaced with a syncopated medley of coughs and sputters, backgrounded by rattly whirring.

  When I brought the matter before Joe’s attention, he shook his head and swore to me with a smile that he could hear nothing untoward, and that it sounded “just fine” to him. Joe is an excellent mechanic and a highly respected member of our community who thitherto had shown no signs of hearing deficit, dishonesty, nor mental illness, but I was dumbstruck that anyone could claim not to notice a noise like a set of percussion instruments vamping up for a ragtime number.

  As I pulled out of the garage, Sam’s orchestra made its presence felt for the second time that day. There was a busy zumming of strings accompanied by the warning sound of trumpets. My whitened fists clenched the steering wheel and my teeth gritted
; I determined to be out of town and beyond range before the citizenry could cry havoc and let slip the dogs of music. Fortunately, Sam the conductor indulged in lengthy warm-ups before launching his melodies, so I estimated I’d be able to get past the city limits sign before an out-and-out number could erupt.

  At Cherry and Maple, however, a crossing guard held a stop sign up and waved a gaggle of tikes through the intersection. Something in the sight filled me with foreboding of unknown horrors yet in store. It was perfectly accountable that the little dears would walk in beat to the melody, which even now was gathering force in the air; so pervasive was Sam’s orchestra, that no sentient being within earshot could resist its rhythm – my own rebel finger tapping impatiently against the steering wheel kept perfect time – no, what chilled the blood and made the small hairs on my neck start up was the realization that the precious darlings had been arranged.

  There could be no doubt; the little angels crossed single file in precise stair steps, a gangly bespectacled girl in the lead followed by a slightly shorter youth in exact gradations down to the littlest cherub bringing up the rear. I have mentioned they all walked in time, but what is more, they were color-coordinated. The girl in front was blue: blue dress, blue hair ribbon, and shiny blue shoes. The boy behind her was also blue, but a slightly different hue: his trousers were a color to be found on no store shelf I wot of. Behind him came a girl clad all in green. And what could have been the school board’s rationale in adopting textbooks with such an Easter-egg range of colors? For each brightly-dressed child carried in an arm swinging like a metronome, a book to match. This was not the work of random mothers freely making independent wardrobe choices; somewhere a costumer had been at work. It sank in, like coffee on a white shirt, that passing before me was someone’s ghastly representation of a human rainbow. But then, the last child appeared, and I felt a slight tremor of relief.