Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (56 page)

But this is chaos.

Our story properly begins
not with our invisible character but with our dead one.

Miss Ypson had not always
been dead;
au contraire.
She had lived for seventy-eight years, for most of them breathing hard. As her
father used to remark, “She was a very active little verb.” Miss Ypson’s father
was a professor of Greek at a small Midwestern university. He had conjugated
his daughter with the rather bewildered assistance of one of his brawnier
students, an Iowa poultry heiress.

Professor Ypson was a man
of distinction. Unlike most professors of Greek, he was a Greek professor of
Greek, having been born Gerasymos Aghamos Ypsilonomon in Polykhnitos, on the
island of Mytilini, “where,” he was fond of recalling on certain occasions, “burning
Sappho loved and sung”—a quotation he found unfailingly useful in his
extracurricular activities; and, the Hellenic ideal notwithstanding, Professor
Ypson believed wholeheartedly in immoderation in all things. This hereditary
and cultural background explains the professor’s interest in fatherhood—to his
wife’s chagrin, for Mrs. Ypson’s own breeding prowess was confined to the
barnyards on which her income was based—a fact of which her husband
sympathetically reminded her whenever he happened to sire another wayward
chick; he held their daughter to be nothing less than a biological miracle.

The professor’s mental
processes also tended to confuse Mrs. Ypson. She never ceased to wonder why
instead of shortening his name to Ypson, her husband had not sensibly changed
it to Jones.

“My dear,” the professor
once replied, “you are an Iowa snob.”

“But nobody,” Mrs. Ypson
cried, “can spell it or pronounce it!”

“This is a cross,” murmured
Professor Ypson, “which we must bear with Ypsilanti.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Ypson.

There was invariably
something Sibylline about his conversation. His favorite adjective for his wife
was “ypsiliform,” a term, he explained, which referred to the germinal spot at
one of the fecundation stages in a ripening egg and which was, therefore, exquisitely
à propos.
Mrs. Ypson continued to look bewildered; she died at
an early age.

And the professor ran off
with a Kansas City variety girl of considerable talent, leaving his baptized
chick to be reared by an eggish relative of her mother’s, a Presbyterian named
Jukes.

The only time Miss Ypson
heard from her father—except when he wrote charming and erudite little notes
requesting, as he termed it,
lucrum
—
was in the fourth decade of his odyssey, when he sent her a handsome addition
to her collection, a terra cotta play doll of Greek origin over three thousand
years old which, unhappily, Miss Ypson felt duty-bound to return to the
Brooklyn museum from which it had unaccountably vanished. The note accompanying
her father’s gift had said, whimsically:
“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

There was poetry behind
Miss Ypson’s dolls. At her birth the professor, ever harmonious, signalized his
devotion to fecundity by naming her Cytherea. This proved the Olympian irony.
For, it turned out, her father’s philoprogenitiveness throbbed frustrate in her
mother’s stony womb; even though Miss Ypson interred five husbands of quite
adequate vigor, she remained infertile to the end of her days. Hence it is
classically tragic to find her, when all passion was spent, a sweet little old
lady with a vague if eager smile who, under the name of her father, pattered
about a vast and echoing New York apartment playing enthusiastically with
dolls.

In the beginning they
were dolls of common clay: a Billiken, a kewpie, a Kathe Kruse, a Patsy, a Foxy
Grandpa, and so forth. But then, as her need increased, Miss Ypson began her
fierce sack of the past.

Down into the land of
Pharaoh she went for two pieces of thin desiccated board, carved and painted
and with hair of strung beads, and legless—so that they might not run
away—which any connoisseur will tell you are the most superb specimens of
ancient Egyptian paddle doll extant, far superior to those in the British
Museum, although this fact will be denied in certain quarters.

Miss Ypson unearthed a
foremother of “Letitia Penn,” until her discovery held to be the oldest doll in
America, having been brought to Philadelphia from England in 1699 by William
Penn as a gift for a playmate of his small daughter’s. Miss Ypson’s find was a
wooden-hearted “little lady” in brocade and velvet which had been sent by Sir
Walter Raleigh to the first English child born in the New World. Since Virginia
Dare had been born in 1587, not even the Smithsonian dared impugn Miss Ypson’s
triumph.

On the old lady’s racks,
in her plate-glass cases, might be seen the wealth of a thousand childhoods,
and some riches—for such is the genetics of dolls—possessed by children grown.
Here could be found “fashion babies” from fourteenth century France, sacred
dolls of the Orange Free State Fingo tribe, Satsuma paper dolls and court dolls
from old Japan, beady-eyed “Kalifa” dolls of the Egyptian Sudan, Swedish
birch-bark dolls, “Katcina” dolls of the Hopis, mammoth-tooth dolls of the
Eskimos, feather dolls of the Chippewa, tumble dolls of the ancient Chinese,
Coptic bone dolls, Roman dolls dedicated to Diana,
pantin
dolls which had been the street toys of Parisian
exquisites before Madame Guillotine swept the boulevards, early Christian dolls
in their
crèches
representing the Holy Family—to specify the merest handful of Miss Ypson’s
Briarean collection. She possessed dolls of pasteboard, dolls of animal skin,
spool dolls, crab-claw dolls, eggshell dolls, cornhusk dolls, rag dolls,
pine-cone dolls with moss hair, stocking dolls, dolls of
bisque,
dolls of palm leaf, dolls of
papier-mâché,
even dolls made of seed pods. There
were dolls forty inches tall, and there were dolls so little Miss Ypson could
hide them in her gold thimble.

Cytherea Ypson’s
collection bestrode the centuries and took tribute of history. There was no
greater—not the fabled playthings of Montezuma, or Victoria’s, or Eugene Field’s;
not the collection at the Metropolitan, or the South Kensington, or the royal
palace in old Bucharest, or anywhere outside the enchantment of little girls’
dreams.

It was made of Iowan eggs
and the Attic shore, corn-fed and myrtle-clothed; and it brings us at last to
Attorney John Somerset Bondling and his visit to the Queen residence one
December twenty-third not so very long ago.

December the twenty-third
is ordinarily not a good time to seek the Queens. Inspector Richard Queen likes
his Christmas old-fashioned; his turkey stuffing, for instance, calls for
twenty-two hours of over-all preparation and some of its ingredients are not
readily found at the corner grocer’s. And Ellery is a frustrated gift-wrapper.
For a month before Christmas he turns his sleuthing genius to tracking down
unusual wrapping papers, fine ribbons, and artistic stickers; and he spends the
last two days creating beauty.

So it was that when
Attorney John S. Bondling called, Inspector Queen was in his kitchen, swathed
in a barbecue apron, up to his elbows in
fines herbes,
while Ellery, behind the locked
door of his study, composed a secret symphony in glittering fuchsia metallic
paper, forest-green moiré ribbon, and pine cones.

“It’s almost useless,” shrugged
Nikki, studying Attorney Bondling’s card, which was as crackly-looking as
Attorney Bondling. “You say you know the Inspector, Mr. Bondling?”

“Just tell him Bondling
the estate lawyer,” said Bondling neurotically. “Park Row. He’ll know.”

“Don’t blame me,” said
Nikki, “if you wind up in his stuffing. Goodness knows he’s used everything
else.” And she went for Inspector Queen.

While she was gone, the
study door opened noiselessly for one inch. A suspicious eye reconnoitered from
the crack.

“Don’t be alarmed,” said
the owner of the eye, slipping through the crack and locking the door hastily
behind him. “Can’t trust them, you know. Children, just children.”

“Children!” Attorney
Bondling snarled. “You’re Ellery Queen, aren’t you?”

“Yes?”

“Interested in youth, are
you? Christmas? Orphans, dolls, that sort of thing?” Mr. Bondling went on in a
remarkably nasty way.

“I suppose so.”

“The more fool you. Ah,
here’s your father. Inspector Queen—!”

“Oh, that Bondling,” said
the old gentleman absently, shaking his visitor’s hand. “My office called to
say someone was coming up. Here, use my handkerchief; that’s a bit of turkey
liver. Know my son? His secretary, Miss Porter? What’s on your mind, Mr.
Bondling?”

“Inspector, I’m handling
the Cytherea Ypson estate, and—”

“Nice meeting you, Mr.
Bondling,” said Ellery. “Nikki, the door is locked, so don’t pretend you forgot
the way to the bathroom...”

“Cytherea Ypson,” frowned
the Inspector. “Oh, yes. She died only recently.”

“Leaving me with the
headache,” said Mr. Bondling bitterly, “of disposing of her Dollection.”

“Her what?” asked Ellery,
looking up from the key.

“Dolls—collection.
Dollection. She coined the word.”

Ellery put the key back
in his pocket and strolled over to his armchair.

“Do I take this down?”
sighed Nikki.

“Dollection,” said
Ellery.

“Spent about thirty years
at it. Dolls!”

“
Yes, Nikki, take it down.”

“Well, well, Mr. Bondling,”
said Inspector Queen. “What’s the problem? Christmas comes but once a year, you
know.”

“Will provides the Dollection
be sold at auction,” grated the attorney, “and the proceeds used to set up a
fund for orphan children. I’m holding the public sale right after New Year’s.”

“Dolls and orphans, eh?”
said the Inspector, thinking of Javanese black pepper and Country Gentleman
Seasoning Salt.

“That’s
nice,”
beamed Nikki.

“Oh, is it?” said Mr.
Bondling softly. “Apparently, young woman, you’ve never tried to satisfy a
Surrogate. I’ve administered estates for nine years without a whisper against
me, but let an estate involve the interests of just one little ba—little
fatherless child, and you’d think from the Surrogate’s attitude I was Bill
Sykes himself!”

“My stuffing,” began the
Inspector.

“I’ve had those dolls
catalogued. The result is frightening! Did you know there’s no set market for
the damnable things? And aside from a few personal possessions, the Dollection
constitutes the old lady’s entire estate. Sank every nickel she had in it.”

“But it should be worth a
fortune,” protested Ellery.

“To whom, Mr. Queen?
Museums always want such things as free and unencumbered gifts. I tell you,
except for one item, those hypothetical orphans won’t realize enough from that
sale to keep them in—in bubble gum for two days!”

“Which item would that
be, Mr. Bondling?”

“Number Eight-seventy-four,”
snapped the lawyer. “This one.”

“Number
Eight-seventy-four,” read Inspector Queen from the fat catalogue Bondling had
fished out of a large greatcoat pocket. “The Dauphin’s Doll. Unique. Ivory
figure of a boy Prince eight inches tall, clad in court dress, genuine ermine,
brocade, velvet. Court sword in gold strapped to waist. Gold circlet crown
surmounted by single blue brilliant diamond of finest water, weight
approximately 49 carats—”

“How many carats?”
exclaimed Nikki.

“Larger than the
Hope
and the
Star of South Africa,”
said
Ellery, with a certain excitement.

“—appraised,” continued
his father, “at one hundred and ten thousand dollars.”

“Expensive dollie.”

“
Indecent!” said Nikki.

“This indecent—I mean
exquisite royal doll,” the Inspector read on, “was a birthday gift from King
Louis XVI of France to Louis Charles, his second son, who became dauphin at the
death of his elder brother in 1789. The little dauphin was proclaimed Louis
XVII by the royalists during the French Revolution while in custody of the
sans-culottes.
His fate is shrouded in mystery.
Romantic, historic item.”