The Convivial Codfish (4 page)

“They’ll be grateful for the endorsement, I’m sure. Getting back to Fuzzleys’, you’ve dealt with them before? They know you, do they?”

“I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to say they know me. I mean, what the hell a man doesn’t go buying a new set of false whiskers every day in the week, does he?”

“But you did place an order with them?”

“Not precisely, if you have to be precise. What I did was, I called them up and asked if they happened to have any dundreary whiskers in a rich chestnut brown tone. The chap who answered said he was sure they could accommodate me and why didn’t I buzz over and take a look, or words to that effect.”

“When was this?”

“Sometime last week, I suppose. I forget the exact day.”

“Did you then go to the shop?”

“No,” Jem confessed, “I forgot that, too. Damn it, I had more important things on my mind at the time.”

“Then how do you suppose the person who called knew who you were?”

Jem stuck out his pink little lower lip in a Churchillian manner and pondered. “Good question. I must have assumed I’d given it when I called them in the first place. The thing is, first I’d been preoccupied with Scrooge Day, then I’d been worried about losing the codfish. One way and another, I hadn’t given much thought to the Tolbathys’ shindig. When that chap called, I was so glad to be reminded, I just grabbed my coat and whizzed on out. I thought I’d better get those whiskers right away, before I forgot again and wound up on the train with my bare face hanging out. Anything else you want to know?”

“Yes, why dundrearies? I thought Jay Gould wore a walrus mustache.”

“So what? Every blasted male at the party will be wearing a walrus mustache. Bunch of unimaginative clods. My rationale was that Jay Gould would have worn dundreary whiskers instead of a walrus mustache if he’d had superior taste and savoir faire. I was going to represent an idealization of Jay Gould. It was an uplifting thought, and look where it got me. I must remember to throw that up to Mabel the next time she comes yammering at me about leading a purer and nobler life. God, Sarah, you haven’t told Mabel I’m in the hospital? Or Appie? If Appie finds out, she’ll be over here at six o’clock every morning, trying to make me eat that porridge.”

“Relax, Uncle Jem. You know perfectly well Cousin Mabel always goes away for the holidays so she won’t have to give any of the relatives a present. And Aunt Appie’s up in Vermont with her son Lionel, shopping for a ski lodge. Lionel thought it would be nice if she surprised his wife and children with one as a Christmas present. He’s being awfully helpful about finding ways for her to spend all that money she inherited before she dies and sticks him with the inheritance tax. I expect Cousin Theonia will be over later on to soothe your fevered brow, but you know you’ll adore that.”

“Ah, yes. When I muse upon what might have been.” Jem mused for approximately three seconds on the voluptuous beauty his Cousin Brooks had wooed away with heroic deeds and exotic birdcalls. Then he started up, cursed the pain in his hip, and fell back.

“Make them bring me a telephone, quick. Somebody’s got to call Marcia Whet and break the news that I can’t be her escort tonight, damn it. Poor woman, she’ll have to settle for old Wripp.”

“No she won’t,” said Max. “I’m hurling myself into the breach. Don’t glare at me like that, Sarah. I don’t even know the woman, for God’s sake. I’ll probably have a terrible time.”

“Not at all,” Jem was tactless enough to assure him. “Marcia’s a great gal. Perfectly respectable and so forth, but always ready for a—oh, very well, Sarah. I was only trying to perk up Max’s morale.”

“I’ll attend to Max’s morale, thank you. Get some rest and keep your hands off the nurses. Egbert will be along pretty soon, I expect.”

“He’d damn well better be. I want a shave.”

Jeremy Kelling gave the plastic gnome another dirty look, then closed his eyes in pious resignation. “Be kind to her, Max. With all her faults, I love her still.”

His niece sniffed. “Her whom? Me or Mrs. Whet? Come on, Max. These affecting deathbed scense tend to lose their poignancy if they’re allowed to drag on too long.”

“W
HAT’S YOUR PROGRAM FOR
today?” Max asked as they walked up toward Washington Street together.

“I thought I’d stop in at Jordan’s and see what I can find for Miriam,” Sarah told him. “Maybe something rather elegant in the way of cookware. She’d like that, wouldn’t she?”

“She’ll like whatever you give her. For God’s sake, Sarah, you don’t have to knock yourself out trying to please my family. We’ve never made a big deal over the holidays.”

“Darling, please remember they’re my family now, too. If you can be so noble and self-sacrificing about leaving me home and taking Marcia Whet to a lovely party, the least I can do is buy your sister a new teakettle.”

God, women could be maddening. What was a man supposed to say to that? Nothing, probably. Max played safe by pulling out his wallet.

“Need any money?”

“I expect so. Thank you, darling. Where are you off to?”

“Fuzzleys’. I want to ask them about that phone call Jem claims they made.”

“Then I’ll see you back at the apartment.”

They went their respective ways. As Max had expected, nobody at Fuzzleys’ admitted to having made such a call.

“Why should we?” the manager asked him. “Look at this.” He pulled out a long drawer filled with beards and mustaches in every possible shade and design. “And this, and this, and this.”

He seemed ready to go on slamming drawers and waving beards indefinitely, but Max conceded the point. There was simply no reason why Fuzzleys’ would have to fuss about special orders.

“We just tell them to come in,” said the manager. “If we don’t have what they want, which isn’t likely, we take some crepe hair, like this.” He selected false hair of a shade to match Max’s own, and proceeded to fashion a pair of superb side-whiskers and a natty little mustache.

Max was fascinated. He liked seeing anything done well. And there was a theatrical streak in him, though he tried to pretend there wasn’t, that reveled in an excuse to get himself up as an Edwardian masher. When he showed them off to Sarah later, he looked so wickedly dashing she could hardly stand to let him go off without her.

“I’m going over and cry on Cousin Theonia’s shoulder,” was her valediction. “Here, don’t forget your silk hat. I just hope Marcia Whet appreciates what she’s getting.”

“So do I.”

Max was having a touch of stage fright, but he needn’t have fretted. When he arrived at the Whet house in a cab he’d picked up at the corner of Beacon and Charles, he found Mrs. Whet waiting for him at the door, goggle-eyed. So was the elderly maid standing behind her with a fur-lined pelisse at the ready.

As he doffed his top hat and remarked, “It was kind of you to let me come in Jem’s place,” Mrs. Whet chuckled.

“My dear man, I feel as if I’ve cast my bread on the waters and got back
bûche de Noël.
I’d love to ask you in for a tête-à-tête and scandalize the household, but I’m afraid we ought to be getting along or we’ll miss our train. My cloak, please, Maria. Mr. Bittersohn, do you really think we can get me and all these clothes into that one little cab?”

Max wasn’t too sure. Marcia Whet was, as he’d anticipated, a fine figure of a woman. Twelve yards of skirt, a bustle, God knew how many petticoats, the fur-lined pelisse, a foxtail boa, and a matching muff the size of a sofa pillow, topped off with a hat wide enough to support a whole stuffed pheasant, which in fact it was doing, did not tend to minimize the lady’s contours. It took a fair amount of maneuvering and a few discreet shoves to get her stowed inside, but neither her finery nor her temper got ruffled in the process. By the time they got to North Station, she was calling him Max and he was beginning to feel that an evening without Sarah might be supportable after all.

At trackside, they found a number of the Tolbathys’ other guests, all in suitable costumes and great spirits, waiting to board the regrettably modern Buddliner that was to take them on the first stage of their journey. Marcia Whet plunged in among them, towing Max by the hand and introducing him right and left as her dear, dear friend Mr. Jay Gould. He got more puzzled glances than acknowledgments. People must either be wondering where they’d seen him before or else making mental notes to have a quiet chat with Mr. Whet when he got back from Nairobi.

Max in turn was trying to sort out the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish and finding it an uphill swim. While studying the group photo earlier, he’d noticed these piscatorial pals were better described as birds of a feather who actually did prefer to flock together. They must all have been lined up and stamped out with the same cookie cutter, he thought gloomily. Furthermore, as Jem had predicted, practically all of them were wearing enormous handlebar mustaches. That must have been good for Fuzzleys’ business, but it wasn’t going to be so great for Bittersohn’s. Once they got their overcoats off and appeared in conventional evening dress, as no doubt they would, he might as well try to detect a flock of penguins.

Well, maybe he’d get them sorted out after a while. They didn’t appear to be having any difficulty recognizing one another. Probably penguins didn’t either.

As for himself, it was not to be imagined that a bunch of Yankees who’d no doubt been nesting in each other’s family trees for generations would settle for any persiflage about Jay Gould. Marcia Whet was now explaining that her escort was in fact poor darling Jeremy Kelling’s nephew Max, who’d been hurled into the breach opened by Jem’s dreadful accident. She described Jem’s downfall with verve and inaccuracy, drawing cries of compassion from some and derision from others. The latter group, Max decided, must be those Comrades who hadn’t yet got over the effects of their Scrooge Day celebration.

The scoffers at least gave him a starting point. He pegged Comrade Durward easily on account of his thick eyeglasses and Comrade Wripp from his two canes and general air of advanced decrepitude. He was by now fairly sure of Comrade Dork and Comrade Billingsgate. These were both neighbors of the Tolbathys who’d had themselves chauffeured to Boston, mustaches and all, just so they could ride back again on the train.

Max identified Comrade Ogham from the fact that one of the mustaches was giving him the cold shoulder; and was amused to realize it had to be on account of his alleged relationship to Jem. The Kelling clan was so vast and bewildering that nobody so far had tried to pinpoint just where Max fitted in. It was a novelty to be snubbed as a Kelling instead of as a Bittersohn.

There weren’t many nonpartying riders on the train, and that was probably a good thing. Those who didn’t belong to the Tolbathy group were clearly nonplussed by this invasion of Edwardians. The really confusing thing was that so many of the Codfish and their Codesses were old enough to look as if they belonged in the clothes they were wearing.

Despite their accumulated longevity, they were a lively bunch: There was far too much aisle-hopping and seat-switching to help Max compile his personal Who’s Who. He’d hoped Marcia Whet would clue him in, but she was fully occupied being the life of the party. At last Max gave up and just sat looking handsome and inscrutable until the conductor came through chanting, “Lincoln Station.”

What with all the bustles and boas and dropped gloves and misplaced derbies, it took them quite a while to disembark. At last they were every last one of them out in the biting night and there, sure enough, was a bright red bus lit up like a Christmas tree with the driver passing out glasses of champagne to make sure nobody got carsick on the ride to the Tolbathys’. Max hoped to God the driver himself wasn’t having any. Neither was he, though he’d taken a glass from the tray when the rest did because it would have looked too eccentric for a nephew of Jeremy Kelling’s not to.

They had a lot more snow out here than in the city. It made Max think of the woods up at Ireson’s Landing and wish he and Sarah were back there in the old carriage house raising each other’s thermal coefficient. As the champagne went down and the party revved up, he wished so with yet more fervor. Why had he thought it would be a good idea to involve himself in this geriatric saturnalia?

Because, he told himself angrily, it really was a good idea. Jeremy Kelling had damn near got himself murdered, and Max wanted to know why. Jem wasn’t rich enough to get killed for his money. His philandering, such as it was these days, was hardly of the sort to inflame a husband or lover to murderous rage. Jem wasn’t innocent enough to be anybody’s dupe or wise enough to be anybody’s nemesis. The only logical explanation for that waxed staircase and the faked telephone call that lured him down it was that somebody’d been desperately concerned to keep Jeremy Kelling from attending the Tolbathys’ party.

Or maybe it wasn’t the only logical explanation. Where did that missing chain with the silver codfish on it come in? Max must have become lost in cogitation, for Marcia Whet reached over to tickle his nose with one of her foxtails.

“Darling Mr. Gould, you’re not leaving us yet, surely? Not on one silly little glass of champagne? The evening hasn’t even begun.”

Max opened his eyes and smiled, causing his mustache to twitch beguilingly though he hadn’t intended it to. “Oh, no. I was only thinking about poor old Jem. He’s going to come down with apoplexy when I tell him what he’s missed.”

Marcia laughed. “They must be having to tie him to the bed. I shouldn’t be a whit surprised to see him come charging down the track after us in a wheelchair with his johnny strung up on his crutches for a sail. Only Jem wouldn’t be wearing anything so prosaic as a hospital johnny, would he? A lovely red-and-white nightshirt would be more his speed, and a cap with a tassel wagging in the wind. Can’t you just see him?”

She did have a charming laugh. “I’m going to miss Jem terribly tonight, with all respect to your gallant self. You see, I’m much too vain to wear my eyeglasses out in company, so I never know who’s who unless Jem keeps me informed. He has eyesight like an eagle, you know.”