“Your first season?”
She nodded.
“You’re the actress then. Bishop said something about you when I checked in last night.”
“Thanks for not saying starlet.” She smiled again.
“The star. That’s what Bishop called you. Have you made many pictures?”
“Just one—Bikini Bash. You didn’t—”
Bobs shook his head. “But I will, the next chance I get.”
“They say a lot of important people come here.”
Bobs nodded. “To look at the nuts.”
The girl laughed. “I get it. Beechnuts.”
“Yeah, Beechnuts. Listen, I want you to do me a favor.” He drew his pistol and handed it to her. “What’s this?”
Puzzled, she looked at it for a moment, then laughed again. “A toy pistol?”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course. It says right here on it: British Imperial Manufacture, and then: MADE IN HONG KONG.”
He took the gun and threw it as far as he could out into the lake. She stared at him, so he said: “Remember that. You may be called to testify later,” before he walked away.
This story was based, in one way, on the Milford Writer’s Conference. In another, on an academic I once knew. Dom (as I shall call him) is dead now, but when “Beech Hill” was written he was a major figure in the study of popular culture.
You may have heard of Baron von Steuben, one of George Washington’s most valued—and valuable—subordinates. To put it bluntly, von Steuben was a fraud in almost every respect. He said he was a Prussian nobleman and that he had been a general in the army of Frederick the Great. He was a commoner and had been a captain. But he could do what he said he could do. He could turn farm boys into soldiers, and he could do it fast; it was a talent our fledgling America needed desperately—a talent that von Steuben provided.
Dom was like that. He wore tweed jackets and smoked a pipe. He spoke with a dubious British accent and sounded pompous even when what he said was not. He gave you every reason to think him a lovable fraud. Yet he knew his subject backward and forward and cared deeply about it. I knew him, as I said, and in a way I based the story you have read upon him. We are the poorer for his passing.
The Recording
I have found my record, a record I have owned for fifty years and never played until five minutes ago. Let me explain.
When I was a small boy—in those dear, dead days of Model A Ford touring cars, horse-drawn milk trucks, and hand-cranked ice-cream freezers—I had an uncle. As a matter of fact, I had several, all brothers of my father, and all, like him, tall and somewhat portly men with faces stamped (as my own is) in the image of their father, the lumberman and land speculator who built this Victorian house for his wife.
But this particular uncle, my uncle Bill, whose record (in a sense I shall explain) it was, was closer than all the others to me. As the eldest, he was the titular head of the family, for my grandfather had passed away a few years after I was born. My uncle’s capacity for beer was famous, and I suspect now that he was “comfortable” much of the time, a large-waisted (how he would roar if he could see his little nephew’s waistline today!) red-faced, good-humored man whom none of us—for a child catches these attitudes as readily as measles—took wholly seriously.
The special position which, in my mind, this uncle occupied is not too difficult to explain. Though younger than many men still working, he was said to be retired, and for that reason I saw much more of him than of any of the others. And despite his being something of a figure of fun, I was a little frightened of him, as a child may be of the painted, rowdy clown at a circus; this, I suppose, because of some incident of drunken behavior witnessed at the edge of infancy and not understood. At the same time I loved my uncle, or at least would have said I did, for he was generous with small gifts and often willing to talk when everyone else was “too busy.”
Why my uncle had promised me a present I have now quite forgotten. It was not my birthday, and not Christmas—I vividly recall the hot, dusty streets over which the maples hung motionless, year-worn leaves. But promise he had, and there was no slightest doubt in my mind about what I wanted.
Not a collie pup like Tarkington’s little boy, or even a bicycle (I already had one). No, what I wanted (how modern it sounds now) was a phonograph record. Not, you must understand, any particular record, though perhaps if given a choice I would have leaned toward one of the comedy monologues popular then, or a military march, but simply a record of my own. My parents had recently acquired a new phonograph, and I was forbidden to use it for fear that I might scratch the delicate wax disks. If I had a record of my own, this argument would lose its validity. My uncle agreed and promised that after dinner (in those days eaten at two o’clock) we would walk the eight or ten blocks which then separated this house from the business area of the town and, unknown to my parents, get me one.
I no longer remember of what that dinner consisted—time has merged it in my mind with too many others, all eaten in that dark, oak-paneled room. Stewed chicken would have been typical, with dumplings, potatoes, boiled vegetables, and, of course, bread and creamery butter. There would have been pie afterward, and coffee, and my father and my uncle adjourning to the front porch—called the stoop—to smoke cigars. At last my father left to return to his office, and I was able to harry my uncle into motion.
From this point my memory is distinct. We trudged through the heat, he in a straw boater and a blue and white seersucker suit as loose and voluminous as the robes worn by the women in the plates of our family Bible; I, in the costume of a French sailor, with a striped shirt under my blouse and a pom-pommned cap embroidered in gold with the word Indomptable. From time to time, I pulled at his hand, but did not like to because of its wet softness, and an odd, unclean smell that offended me.
When we were a block from Main Street, my uncle complained of feeling ill, and I urged that we hurry our errand so that he could go home and lie down. On Main Street he dropped onto one of the benches the town provided and mumbled something about Fred Croft, who was our family doctor and had been a schoolmate of his. By this time I was frantic with fear that we were going to turn back, depriving me (as I thought, forever) of access to the phonograph. Also I had noticed that my uncle’s usually fiery face had gone quite white, and I concluded that he was about to “be sick,” a prospect that threw me into an agony of embarrassment. I pleaded with him to give me the money, pointing out that I could run the half block remaining between the store and ourselves in less than no time. He only groaned and told me again to fetch Fred Croft. I remember that my uncle had removed his straw hat and was fanning himself with it while the August sun beat down unimpeded on his bald head.
For a moment, if only for a moment, I felt my power. With a hand thrust out I told him, in fact ordered him, to give me what I wished. I remember having said, “I’ll get him. Give me the money, Uncle Bill, and then I’ll bring him.”
He gave it to me and I ran to the store as fast as my flying heels would carry me, though as I ran I was acutely conscious that I had done something wrong. There I accepted the first record offered me, danced with impatience waiting for my change, and then, having completely forgotten that I was supposed to bring Dr. Croft, returned to see if my uncle had recovered.
In appearance he had. I thought that he had fallen asleep waiting for me, and I tried to wake him. Several passersby grinned at us, thinking, I suppose, that Uncle Bill was drunk. Eventually, inevitably, I pulled too hard. His ponderous body rolled from the bench and lay, faceup, mouth slightly open, on the hot sidewalk before me. I remember the small crescents of white that showed then beneath the half-closed eyelids.