First Sentence: “I told you to fetch me a doctor, boy, not some damn —!”
Thoughts: Benjamin January had paying work as a musician at the beginning of Mardi Gras season, but when a man he treated at an n-bomb fight died of his wounds, the man’s owner blackballed Ben from all the American parties for the rest of the year. He couldn’t get work at the Creole parties because all of their musicians were already locked in. His only comfort was the pianist the Americans replaced him with was effing horrible, so he was guaranteed to have work again next year.
But that’s next year and the Januarys need a source of income now. The country still hasn’t crawled out of the depression caused by the banks crashing the year before. Fortunately the Viellards have need of Ben’s investigatory skills. You know the Viellards. Henri is Dominique’s protector and father of her daughter; Chloe is his wife who has no problems with Dominique. In fact, bring Minou and Charmian along too!
Where are they going? Washington City, aka Washington D.C. Why are they going there? Chloe’s pen pal Mr. Singletary has gone missing. He was an eccentric mathematician who used to do the accounts for various European banks until he got a job as a mathematics professor at the University of Virginia. Chloe had been writing her Uncle Veryl’s letters to Singletary until Singletary figured out who she was. He didn’t care that she was a woman as long as she understood math, which she did.
Anyway, Singletary arrived in Washington the previous October. He made a few contacts with some people he knew there and then dropped off the face of the earth.
When they arrive in the nation’s capital, the Louisianans begin a two-pronged investigation. Benjamin checks out the seedy side of town with the help of Mr. Grigg, the landlord of his boarding house, and a white man Mr. Poe who is hiding out from his creditors on the Black side of town. Meanwhile the Viellards tackle the upper echelons of society, including John Quincey Adams, former president and current senator who was also one of Singletary’s correspondents. He has no clue where the missing mathematician is either.
It isn’t until they meet a Kentucky planter whose more-cultured English wife is pressuring to get a job in the government that the investigations bear fruit. The planter’s valet, Mede Tyler, the “Good Man Friday” of the title, gives Ben a notebook that Singletary left behind at the house. The last few pages contained strange columns of numbers. A code of some kind?
Almost against his will, Ben gets caught up in the townball craze that’s sweeping the capital. Every man in the city, it seems, is on a team, even the free colored. Technically their team is illegal but the police don’t care as long as they can make money betting on their games. Mede Tyler is recruited for the team, but he doesn’t qualify since he’s still a slave. So his owner frees him, setting the whole tragedy in motion. Now Ben, Chloe, and Mr. Edgar Poe have to find the killer along with the motive for getting rid of Mr. Singletary.
And yes, that’s Edgar Allen Poe. Baltimore’s not far from D.C. so I can buy his presence in the story. He still feels shoehorned in, though. At least it wasn’t Jefferson Davis again.
First Sentence: “Where’s the butter, Unc Nunkie?” asked Ojo.
Thoughts: Baum thought The Emerald City of Oz was going to be the last Oz book. After all, Ozma had cut off the entire country from the rest of the world, so how was he going to get his stories from Dorothy anymore? Then an enterprising young fan wrote a letter to Baum with a suggestion: why not try a wireless set to contact Oz? Baum set up a radio tower and found he was able to contact Dorothy to get more Oz stories with it. He published a brand-new Oz book in 1913 and the world went insane with delight.
Insane is a good way to describe the Patchwork Girl as well. But before we get to her we have to meet Ojo and Unc Nunkie. They’re Munchkins living on the edge of the middle of nowhere. When we first meet them Ojo is looking for something to eat but all they have left is a dry loaf of bread. The rest of the loaves on the bread tree are nowhere near ripe, so Ojo and Unc Nunkie go over the mountain to visit their nearest neighbor to get some food.
The neighbors were Dr. Pipt and his wife Margolotte. Dr. Pipt was an illegal magician who we first encounter stirring a cauldron with both hands and both feet. He’s finishing up a batch of the Powder of Life after six years of stirring. You might remember the Powder of Life from The Land of Oz where Mombi and Tip used it to create all sorts of abominations. The Pipts had used the last of the old batch to bring the Glass Cat to life. Margolotte wanted her to kill mice, but the Glass Cat was too vain for that sort of menial work. She had pretty pink brains, after all. See how they roll!
Anyway, the new batch was intended for a Patchwork Girl Margolotte had made to help with the housework. While Pipt is finishing up the new Powder, Margolotte begins to put in the ingredients for the Patchwork Girl’s brains. She’s called away when the Powder is done, so Ojo decides to put in a little of each bottle of ingredients into the doll’s head. And this is why the Patchwork Girl is nuttier than a squirrel convention.
When Pipt sprinkles the Patchwork Girl with the Powder of Life, tragedy strikes. She starts to flail about, knocking the rest of the powder on a nearby phonograph. She also overturns a bottle of the Liquid of Petrifaction onto Unc Nunkie and Margolotte, turning them into statues. There’s only one way to save them: start another batch of the Powder of Life. Ojo doesn’t want to wait six years to get his uncle back. Well, there is another way to save them but it requires a list of impossible ingredients.
And so Ojo, the Glass Cat, and Scraps the Patchwork Girl set off to find the ingredients. The first thing that happens is the phonograph running after them. It annoys the everlasting out of them, so they send it off to irritate the rest of Munchkinland. They continue on until they meet the Wocky, a square creature with three hairs on its tail. Three hairs that they need to create the potion to save Margolotte and Unc Nunkie! Unfortunately they can’t pull the hairs out, so the Wocky chooses to come along with them.
Just when they’re in danger of getting lost, they meet the Shaggy Man who escorts them to the Emerald City. They also meet the Scarecrow who falls head over heels for Scraps and vice versa. When they get to the Emerald City they tell Ozma about their troubles. She lets Dorothy come with them to gather the rest of the ingredients. They head into the lands of the Quadlings and Winkies for more adventures until Ojo almost ruins everything by picking a six-leaved clover.
The Patchwork Girl of Oz was a runaway success that ensured the life of the rest of the series until Baum’s own death. It also inspired a movie in 1914 directed by Baum. I had seen it years ago on a Wikipedia page when it was a tiny Quicktime movie. Now it’s on Youtube and you can fullscreen that sucker. Warning: it is truly bizarre. Reassurance: it’s nowhere near as scary as Return to Oz. (But then, what is?)
First Sentence: A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.
Thoughts: The boy is Hamnet Shakespeare, son of William. On this particular day, Hamnet is alone in the house. It’s not the best time for everyone else to be out because his twin sister Judith has suddenly started feeling sick. He looks all over the place for his mother, sister, and grandmother but he only finds his grandfather who’s drunk again. He smacks Hamnet upside the head and sends him out of the house.
There’s not a real villain in the book, but John Shakespeare is certainly the front-runner for the role.
Turns out Judith has bubonic plague. The house is quarantined while her mother Agnes tends to her. Agnes is an herbalist with witchy tendencies and she is NOT going to let one of those doctors in to scare her children with his plague mask and drain Judith’s blood. In the end, she succeeds in saving Judith, but it cost Hamnet his life.
That’s not a spoiler. That’s history.
The story switches between the present day of Judith’s illness to the courtship and marriage of Agnes and William. They met when William was tutoring Agnes’ younger brothers in Latin. She knew from the moment she touched his hand that Will was destined for great things (see witchy tendencies above). The early years of their marriage was difficult because John was such an overbearing jerk, but everything changed when Will went to London. He was supposed to go there to find a new market for John’s gloves, but ended up working in the theater. He stayed there, writing, directing, and performing in plays, with only occasional visits home to Stratford.
Of course they notified him when Judith fell ill. The messenger caught up to him at a theater in a small town since all the playhouses in London had been closed due to plague. William raced home, but he was too late. Hamnet was dead. He knew that Agnes and his daughters couldn’t stay in the house where his son died, so he used his savings to buy them a new house with a garden for Agnes and no ghosts.
Agnes descended into a deep depression. She was roused out of it when a neighbor gave her an advertisement for Will’s new play: Hamlet. How dare he write a play about their dead son! Agnes fumed. She stormed off to London to see the play only to realize that she and Will had different ways of showing their grief.
It’s a lovely story, much like The Marriage Portrait. Unlike the other book, this one has a cover with a sense of style. I know, I know, don’t judge a book by its cover, but this is really an argument for increased art education in our schools. Design is important, people!
I also want to note that William is never mentioned by name in the novel. That’s because this isn’t about him, it’s about his family. He’s only an occasional presence in their lives, as much of a mystery to them as he is to us five hundred years later. The story is really about Agnes since she was the one keeping them all together. But even she couldn’t do it alone. Will did have a role to play: Agnes never would have recovered without her husband.
First Sentence: It was on a Sunday morning in the loveliest part of spring.
Thoughts: Franz Kafka was a man ahead of his time. I still can’t get over the fact that these were written in the 19-teens. They seem much more modern, but that’s probably because Kafka wasn’t afraid to depict the surreal in an everyday sort of way. If you’re like me, and I know I am, you are all about some surreal weird stories. Which ones are in this collection?
The Metamorphosis, obviously. It’s Kafka’s most famous work, the story of Gregor Samsa who woke one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a giant insect. It’s never specified which insect, but popular opinion makes it a cockroach. I can believe that based on his family’s reactions to him. Anyway, since Gregor had been the main breadwinner of the family, his transformation means they all have to make some big changes themselves. The biggest problem is how to make money while keeping Gregor locked up in his room. His father, mother, and sister have all find new opportunities for themselves that wouldn’t have existed without his metamorphosis. In the end he does them the biggest favor of all, dying so they can be free.
There’s also The Judgment, about the terrible relationship between Georg and his father. It begins with Georg writing a letter to his friend in Russia. He’s got big news: Georg just got engaged to a very nice young woman. After he finishes the letter, he goes to check on his father who has been ill since Georg’s mother died. The conversation starts with Georg’s father accusing him of making up the Russian friend and degenerates from there. By the end of the story, Georg’s father has completely demolished his son’s self esteem and self-will and condemns him to death by drowning.
Y’all, I don’t think they get along very well.
A Country Doctor is peak surrealism. The title character is called out to tend a sick man one winter’s night and finds himself lost in a nightmare. A Report to an Academy is more weird than surreal. The report is made by Red Peter, an ape who decided he didn’t want to be an ape after he was captured and taught himself how to be human.
Finally there’s my favorite Kafka story of all, In the Penal Colony. Why is it my favorite? Because I am a dark, twisted person. The penal colony is on a tropical island somewhere in the hot portion of the globe. A Traveler is visiting the colony for purposes that aren’t really important. The Officer invites the Traveler to witness the most famous punishment in the colony. It’s a complex machine that writes the prisoner’s wrongs on his body. The Officer spends the first part of the story crawling around the machine adjusting it for the upcoming punishment while explaining the vision of the previous Commandant of the colony. Meanwhile the condemned man and the soldier guarding him amuse themselves. The Officer tells the Traveler how great the machine was in its heyday, how people would gather for miles around to see it in operation, even bringing their children to the show. Then he tells the Traveler that he wants him to convince the new Commandant to keep using the machine. The Traveler, being a reasonable person, is horrified by the torture device and refuses. The Officer, seeing the imminent destruction, straps himself into the machine while Chekhov’s flywheel (which has been squeaking throughout the story) finally comes loose.
Again, I am a dark, twisted individual with no hope of redemption. But at least my cat loves me.
First Sentence: In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.
Thoughts: Sula and Nel came from very different backgrounds, but they were the best of friends. Nel’s mother Helene had escaped her childhood in New Orleans to make a new life for herself as a proper woman in the midwest. Nel never knew why her mother was so insistent on everything being just so until she went back to Louisiana for her great-grandmother’s funeral. There she found out that Helene’s apple didn’t just fall far from the tree, it rolled away. She went back to her restricted life. Then she met Sula at school.
Sula was much more carefree than Nel. Her house was much, much more chaotic as well. Her grandmother Eva had left town for a while, then returned with only one leg. Rumor had it she had stuck it under a train to collect insurance money. Sula’s mother Hannah was a loving woman. In fact, she loved every man in town. No one hated her for it, though, because she was so casual when it came to sex. Then there was Tar Baby, a white man boarding at Eva’s house while he drank himself to death, and the Deweys, three boys Eva adopted for no discernible reason.
Then there was Plum, Eva’s son. He came back from WWI a shadow of his former self. No one knew why he stayed locked up in his room all day until Hannah found a spoon burned black. Eva didn’t want her son to die like an animal trapped by heroin so she lit him on fire. Hannah and Sula never completely trusted Eva after that, and can you blame them?
Sula and Nel spent every moment they could together growing up. They knew all each other’s secrets, all their desires, and even their thoughts. Nel provided the restraint Sula needed on her wildness while Sula helped Nel come out of her shell.
Still it was no surprise that Sula grew up to be a hard woman who didn’t trust anyone (except Nel, of course). Eva knew what Sula was when she saw her watching Hannah burn to death. (Eva didn’t start that fire.) After Nel’s wedding Sula left town. She returned ten years later in a plague of robins. Nel thought she and Sula could pick up right where they left off and they did until Nel found her limits. It happened the day she walked in on her husband Jude in bed with Sula.
The last few years of Sula’s life were a continual downward slide. She became the town villain, uniting everyone in hatred. While she did have a few lovers, she spent most of her time alone. She died alone, as well. Twenty-five years later, Nel realized what Sula had taken with her when she died.
It’s beautifully written as only Morrison could write. She had a way of revealing the beauty in darkness. She deserved the Nobel for the way she could make the English language sing. I mean, look at this:
If I take a chamois and rub real hard on the bone, right on the ledge of your cheek bone, some of the black will disappear. It will flake away into the chamois and underneath there will be gold leaf. I can see it shining through the black. I know it is there…
And if I take a nail file or even Eva’s old paring knife—that will do—and scrape away the gold, it will fall away and there will be alabaster. The alabaster is what gives your face its planes, its curves. That is why your mouth smiling does not reach your eyes. Alabaster is giving it a gravity that resists a total smile.
Then I can take a chisel and small tap hammer and tap away the alabaster. It will crack then like ice under the pick, and through the breaks I will see the loam, fertile, free of pebbles and twigs. For it is the loam that is giving you that smell.
First Sentence: Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
Thoughts: Thea Kronborg was the daughter of Swedish immigrants living in Colorado. She wasn’t like the other girls. She had a real gift for music. Her mother always made sure Thea had lots of time to practice her piano and got her lessons from the best music teacher in the region, a dissipated German pianist named Wunsch. He had his faults, but he gave Thea a thorough grounding in the basics of music.
Because she was so devoted to her art, Thea didn’t have any friends her own age. All of her friends were older men, which is just as creepy as it sounds. Dr. Howard Archie encouraged Thea’s intellectual pursuits by letting her borrow books from his library. He took her on his house calls as well, which is how she met the Mexican immigrants in Spanish Town. She loved sitting with them at night listening to their music.
Another friend was Ray Kennedy, a railroad man who told her about the world outside Colorado. He was always talking about how he was going to marry Thea as soon as she was old enough, so it was a distinct relief when he was killed in a train wreck. He left all his money to Thea, who used it to move to Chicago to further her musical education.
The first year she studied piano under Andor Harsanyi. He soon realized Thea didn’t have any real calling to the piano, but when he heard her sing he realized it was because her real gift was her voice. He sent her to Madison Bowers to develop her vocal talents. Bowers was a good teacher but a miserable human being. Thea learned a lot from him, but she wore herself down being at his beck and call all the time.
Through Bowers she meets Fred Ottenberg, the son of a brewery mogul. He convinces Thea to spend her summer in the Arizona desert. He meets her there after a few months and they fall in love. Alas, t’was not to be just yet. Instead Fred breaks her heart before financing her further musical education in Dresden.
Ten years later Thea is in New York for the summer singing with the Metropolitan Opera. Dr. Archie, who has given up medicine and now owns several mines, comes to visit her and hear her sing. There he and Ottenberg witness her breakthrough into real artistry/stardom.
Honestly, this is not my favorite of Cather’s works. The best part was when Thea and Fred were in the desert. Cather’s true gift was describing the stark beauty of the American Southwest. Unfortunately this was a character-driven novel, not a landscape novel, and all the characters were likeable at all. Except Harsanyi, he was a good sort. All of the other men, however, were pervy creeps. As for Thea herself, she was a cold fish of a person. The novel tried to pass of her superiority complex as “artistic,” but it wasn’t. She was a spoiled brat who became a right bitch by the end of the book. The story doesn’t tell us how she turned out after her breakthrough performance, but it’s really not a mystery. She became a prima donna of the worst order. There was no other possible future for her.
First Sentence: Under a certain roof, in a certain one-roomed apartment, on a certain fourth floor, lived two young civil-servant colleagues, Arkady Ivanovich Nefedevich and Vasya Shumkov…
Thoughts: This was an okay collection of four short stories. They were entertaining, but nothing really grabbed me. Then again, nothing really annoyed me so there’s that. Rated in ascending order of how much I liked them they are:
White Nights: The story of an unnamed narrator and his brief friendship with a woman named Nastenka. The narrator liked to walk alone at night along the streets of St. Petersburg and imagine the houses were talking to him. One night he came across a young woman being annoyed by an oafish man. He rescued the woman and walked her home, conversing all the way. She invited the narrator to come over the next night so they could continue their conversation. Over the next four nights Nastenka told him her life story. It was mainly the tale of her love for the young man who boarded at her aunt’s house the year before. He went home to earn enough money to get married on, promising to contact her when he returned to St. Petersburg. Nastenka found out the young man was back in town, but hadn’t gotten in touch with her. The narrator spends his time in the story falling in love with Nastenka, but all for naught since the other young man does meet up with her and they get married.
A Weak Heart: Arkady Ivanovitch Nefedevich and Vasya Shumkov are roommates, as the first sentence implies. Vasya comes home late one New Year’s Eve absolutely incandescent with delight. He got engaged to a Nice Young Girl that day. Unfortunately he also has a pile of papers for work that are due on January 2 that he hasn’t even started on yet. He tries to sit down to work, but he can’t. Arkady tells Vasya that he’ll pay all his New Year’s visits for him so Vasya can catch up on work. Instead Vasya goes insane, leaving Arkady to pick up the pieces.
Uncle’s Dream: The story of how Mariya Aleksandrovna Moskaleva lost her standing in the town of Morsadovo thanks to Prince K. The Prince was an elderly man with a touch of the dementia. Everyone loved him, though, and called him “Uncle” even if they weren’t related. One day Pavel Mozglyakov found Prince K next to his overturned sleigh in the woods. Uncle was escaping from the harpy of a housekeeper at his estate. He had no idea where he was going, so Pavel took him to Moskaleva’s house. Pavel knew Moskaleva well because he was in love with her daughter Zinaida, even though she kept refusing his proposals. Moskaleva got a brilliant idea to marry Zinaida to Prince K because he was old and wouldn’t live much longer. Then Zinaida would inherit all his money and they’d be living on Easy Street. Pavel finds out about the plans, however, and tells Uncle who then turns the whole thing into a scandal.
The Meek One: A dark, disturbing tale of a woman driven to suicide. The narrator is a pawnshop owner with a checkered past. He met his wife when she brought trinkets to pawn to get enough money to run newspaper ads offering her services as a governess. The narrator discovered the girl (she was only sixteen) was running the ads so she could get a job away from her aunts who wanted to marry her to a brutal grocer. The narrator offers his hand in marriage instead. She accepts, but comes to regret that decision. There is absolutely no communication between them once they are husband and wife. She tries to get away from him through an affair, but that doesn’t work. She points a revolver at his head one night, but can’t bring herself to pull the trigger. Eventually she falls ill and the narrator has to nurse her back to health. When she recovers, he promises to take her to the Mediterranean to recuperate. He goes to get their passports, but when he comes home he finds a crowd gathered over his wife’s broken body in the street. She had jumped out the window to get away from him, although the narrator refuses to acknowledge his role in her death.
Today’s Saturday Short is a special occasion: “Troubles of a Merchant and How to Stop Them” is our first silent short! It’s about how a cash register can save your business in 1917.
Welcome to J.W. White’s store. There are baskets and crates of fruits and vegetables outside, with more in the window. Inside more produce is displayed in baskets and barrels. There are counters around the edges of the store in front of shelves because this is before Piggly Wiggly invented self-service shopping.
The cash till is manned by a young woman in a cage of chain-link fencing. She is also the complaints department. Two women get tired of being ignored by a sales clerk and make sure to fuss at the cashier before they leave. When she’s not getting yelled at, she’s recording all the day’s sale in her account book…in pencil.
That night Mr. White works on the books. He sighs heavily. “I expect I’ll have to borrow again,” he says via title card. They only made $21.17 today according to the receipts the cashier spindled.
How, in the days before cash registers, did the store handle its transactions? Let’s watch.
A Cash Sale: An old woman comes up to the cashier. She gives her the receipt the sales clerk gave her with the cash for her purchase. The cashier gives the woman her change and spindles the receipt. Easy-peasy!
Charge Take With Sale: The butcher weighs out a leg of meat. It will cost $5.20. Does the CPI calculator page go back to 1917? Yes it does! That’s $138.81 in today’s money, YE GODS. Nevertheless, the customer will take it. The butcher wraps it in paper, tying it with his convenient Ceiling Twine. The customer will charge the meat to his account. (At those prices, I’ll bet he will.) The butcher starts to write down the charge while the customer walks out with his leg of Wagyu beef. Mr. White interrupts the butcher to fuss at him about something. Then another clerk asks the butcher to help with something. The charge is never recorded. Free meat at J.W. White’s, y’all!
An Exchange Transaction: A woman comes in with a bundle of cloth she had bought earlier. She wants to exchange it for better cloth. “No receipt,” the title card announces. “No way to prove the place or amount of the purchase.” The woman stalks out of the store with her inferior dry good.
Cash on Delivery: The cashier takes a phone order for a pound of cheese. Sure, we all want that much cheese, but this person was brave enough to order it! She writes down the order on her pad, noting that it will be sent C.O.D. She gives the order to the delivery boy as a woman comes up to show off the new gloves she bought. While the women admire the gloves, the C.O.D. receipt falls to the floor where it is swept up and thrown away. When the delivery boy turns in his collections that evening, he has extra money in his take. The accounts, once again, will not tally.
The Sugar Purchase: A woman gives her daughter some money to buy sugar. The clerk, too involved with chatting up the cashier, ignores the little girl until she demands his attention. As he leaves, another clerk comes up to continue cashier-chatting-up duties. The first clerk measures out the sugar into a paper bag, but doesn’t notice that he spilled some of it on the scale. He wraps up the bag and gives it to the girl who takes it home to mother who’s been waiting impatiently for the one ingredient she needs for her cookies. When she takes the bag from her daughter, she notices it feels a little light. She weighs it on her own scale. This isn’t the half-pound she requested! And she was charged for a whole half-pound! She should have been given a ten-cent unobservant clerk discount! She gets her shawl on, grabs her daughter, and marches down to that J.W. White’s store to give that clerk a piece of her mind. Mr. White steps in to calm things down.
Too late, though. As the woman leaves, she makes sure to tell everyone how Mr. White shortchanges everyone. Meanwhile a man comes in with a huge bunch of bananas.
Money Paid Out: The banana man goes to the cashier. He gets the money from the cashier for his bundle. She immediately gets a call and forgets to record the transaction.
Even Change: The dry-goods clerk sells a few yards of cloth for exact change. He goes over to the cashier, but she’s getting ready to leave for the day. The clerk holds the receipt and money while he has a brief hallucination of the Devil and Grandma tempting him to keep the money. Uncounted money, the title card tells us, is the greatest temptation in the world. Grandma wins. Grudgingly, the clerk spindles the receipt and puts the money in the till.
No Record of Money Received on Account: An indignant woman comes in with a bill. “I’ve already paid this!” her title card says. The cashier checks the books. She can’t find any record of the money received on this account. The woman came prepared for this eventuality. She whips out another receipt from last month proving that she had already paid. Her point made, she stalks out of the store. “I need a better system,” Mr. White’s title card groans.
Dispute Over Change: A man says he was shortchanged a quarter. An argument ensues. The cashier gives him a quarter.
The clerks and cashier all get to go home when the store closes. Mr. White stays behind to tally up the day’s take…in pencil. He has trouble reading everyone’s handwriting on the receipts. Was that tea 10 cents or 70 cents? Mr. White makes it 70. An hour later he’s finally done adding up the day’s totals. “Short again,” his title card sighs. That tea must have been 10 cents after all. He makes up the shortage with money from his own pocket and slumps off home.
His children are cheerfully doing their homework and playing piano. They cheerfully hug Dad when he comes in. He grumbles hello as he falls into his chair. He’s too tired to read his son’s essay. Why is daughter making all that racket on the piano? Mom comes in to shoo the children away. She sits down to hear her husband gripe about his day, responding only to complain about his bad attitude. It’s another pleasant evening at The Lockhorns.
Now J.W. White’s has a modern layout. The produce is displayed on a table instead of old-fashioned crates and barrels. The counters are all snazzy now with display space underneath the tops. The shelves along the edges of the store have glass fronts. The male clerks are now wearing white pharmacist coats instead of aprons. No more chicken wire for our cashier, she’s been promoted to Ladies Apparel because now Mr. White has a cash register!
How has life changed in J.W. White’s store with this new marvel? Let’s watch:
Cash Take with Sale: One of the clerks ties up a lady’s bag of (correctly measured) sugar and enters the purchase into the cash register. The change drawer pops out. He gives the customer the correct change and a receipt printed from the register itself. Now they can have advertising on their receipts. He tucks the slip under the string on the bag and gives it to the customer.
Charge Take with Sale: The Lady Clerk sells a pair of gloves. The customer will charge it to her account. Lady Clerk writes the amount on her pad before recording it in the cash register. It prints out two charge slips. One is put in a giant file behind the register while the other is put in the envelope with the gloves.
Money Received on Account: A woman comes in to make a payment on her charge account. Mr. White retrieves her receipt from the file. He records the new balance, takes the customer’s $10 and enters it into the cash register. It prints out a payment slip. He gives the lady her new receipt and puts the handwritten one in the file.
Money Paid Out: The store owes the milkman $1.40. The dairy clerk records the payment in the cash register, making sure it’s typed correctly on the continuous record on the side of the machine. He gives the milkman his signed paid out receipt along with a giant dollar bill and 40 regular-sized cents.
The register can also keep track of what each clerk sold. They’ve all been assigned a different letter on the machine that is recorded on the continuous receipt along with their payments and charges. Mr. White can easily keep track of how much each clerk is selling. He takes a minute to show off how the register can keep track of how many customers the store had.
That cash register is actually really cool. It’s like a manual computer. It’s amazing how much registers could do back then.
The clerks can use the register to compare their totals. Now they have a benchmark to go on, they jump on customers as soon as they come up to the counters to keep their numbers up.
Checking Deliveries: The delivery boy checks the crates of goods going out. Each one has a printed receipt now. Mr. White double checks the receipts for accuracy on the register. Notice also that the window display has been updated, with fruit piled haphazardly on the shelf instead of in those old-fashioned wicker baskets.
The System Removes Temptation: A ringleted girl buys a square. The clerk goes over to the register with the change to have another hallucination. This time, instead of the Devil and Grandma, he sees the ghost of the receipt hanging in the air over his shoulder. He enters the change, adding to his daily sale total. Good thing, because that’s the first thing Mr. White checks when he comes back in from wherever he went.
C.O.D. Transaction: A clerk takes a phone order. He takes the order off the shelf, making sure to enter the price into the register. One slip is added to the order while the other goes into the giant file under the Miscellaneous and C.O.D. tab. He adds the item to the delivery crate.
Tom Wins an Increase: Mr. White keeps track of each clerk’s totals on a chalkboard in his office. He notices Tom has the top numbers for the month. He calls Tom in to show him how well he’s doing and raises his pay an extra nickel a week.
Children are no longer ignored because everyone wants a chance to use the new register. The girl from The Sugar Incident comes up to the bean counter. The clerk weighs out her order accurately. She watches him enter the purchase in the register before taking her (correct) change, the beans, and the receipt. She comes home to give the beans to Mom before putting the change in the cigar box in their kitchen cabinet. Just in case you wanted to rob them later, that’s where they keep their money.
Each clerk has their own drawer which they total at the end of their shifts. Thanks to this register, Mr. White’s figures are now accurate. He can easily check the amounts charged, sold, and paid out against what is recorded on the clerks’ statements, the register slip, and the receipts in the giant file. While he’s checking the file, let’s take a moment to admire the display or pliers and drill bits on the wall behind him.
Now Mr. White has a simple daily statement of his day’s sales totals. It’s all neatly organized thanks to the register. He goes back to his office to put the receipts and cash in his safe before putting on his hat to skip off home.
There have been changes at home as well. Mr. White used some of his profits to buy a comfy armchair instead of the hard ladderback he had before. He’s no longer too tired to listen to his children play on the piano. He can even have a pleasant conversation with his wife as she sews and he glances at the evening paper. Life is good. Thanks cash register!
First Sentence: Word flashed through the town like pebbles flying from an explosion.
Thoughts: The world runs on gossip, the more scandalous the better. The gossip in New Orleans in the fall of 1837 was especially scandalous, rivaling the speed of light in how quickly it spread. It had everything: sex, death, and weird foreign folk with weird foreign customs.
What was this delicious gossip? Simply this: A Turkish visitor to the Crescent City had murdered two of his concubines and threw their bodies out an upstairs window of his rented house. Why? Who the heck knows, probably something to do with honor. Everyone knows those Muslim guys are like Klingons when it comes to honor.
Only one person in the entire city didn’t believe the gossip. That person was Our Hero, Benjamin January. Why didn’t he believe it? Because he knew Hüseyin Pasha, the accused man. They had met ten years ago when he was living in Paris. And so the Trilogy of Backstory becomes complete because now we finally get to meet Ayasha before she died.
Like Rose, Ayasha helped Ben out with his mysteries. She was the one who introduced him to Hüseyin Pasha’s wife Jamilla when one of the concubines fell ill. It was particularly dangerous because this concubine was also pregnant with what the fortuneteller claimed was a boy. It was even more dangerous than that because when Ben arrived he discovered Shamira, the concubine, was actually being poisoned. He did what he could for her, but didn’t hold out much hope for the baby.
Then Shamira disappeared. There were rumors that she was at a nearby convent planning to convert from Judaism to Christianity. A complicated plot unwinds, involving fallen Parisian nobility, a priest, Ben’s Jewish friend who liked slumming, and Hüseyin’s political rival from the Ottoman Empire who vowed revenge on the Pasha. Benjamin and Hüseyin ended up teaming up to rescue Ayasha from the political rival and locating the missing Shamira.
A decade later, Hüseyin is in the Cabildo awaiting trial and/or word from the Turkish embassy in Cuba. Benjamin knows that Hüseyin isn’t capable of murdering anyone, especially one of his concubines, and especially especially not two of them. He gets permission to search the house where he finds clues that the concubines were dead for a while before they were pitched out the window. He also discovered they weren’t murdered in the house. Turns out they had been missing for a while before the pharmacist across the street reported their precipitous fall. (The pharmacist, by the way, is entirely too interested in this case. Hmmmmm.)
The mystery in Hüseyin’s house begins to tie in with a mystery at the livery stable behind his house. There are strange doings in the stables, but no one involved will say much about it because revealing those secrets will reveal others that are best yet unrevealed. For the moment, at least.
Then Ben finds out Hüseyin’s old rival has been seen in New Orleans, and he knows from experience the rival is more than capable of murdering women. Also, someone has been sneaking opium into Jamilla’s medication. Why someone would want to drug her will be one of the keys to the whole mystery. Getting her off the opium will be more tricky. Fortunately Hannibal is on hand to help her through the withdrawal. He’s a good man, our Hannibal.
First Sentence: The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago.
Thoughts: Have I complained about books ending badly lately? I don’t think I have. Most of my recent reads have ended either well or acceptably and the ones that didn’t I dnf’d as soon as they got on my nerves. This one, though…
An Unfinished Season is the story of about nine months in the life of Wilson Ravan, specifically his nineteenth year. He was a senior in high school at the beginning of the year and a freshman in college by the end of it. “But that’s a year off,” you say. Yes, he had to retake eighth grade because he was sick with a polio-like illness for most of the year.
Wilson’s father is Teddy Ravan. He owned a stationery factory in Chicago. Recently there have been union rumblings around the city which resulted in Teddy’s workers going on strike. Teddy is a staunch 1950s Republican and will not put up with this strike nonsense. Then someone started making threatening phone calls to Mrs. Ravan. Strange cars started following Teddy on his way home from work. So Teddy got his local sheriff (and also friend) to escort him home at night. The sheriff also gave Teddy the gun from the first sentence. Unlike Chekhov’s gun, it is never fired, not even when someone throws a brick through the Ravan’s window one night. Why? Teddy and the sheriff figure out who the mastermind behind the threats was and took care of the problem. The strike ended shortly after.
Then Wilson’s grandfather in New York got sick, so his mother went back east to take care of him. This turned into an ersatz separation between her and Teddy as Mrs. Ravan (whose first name I don’t think was ever mentioned) fell under the influence of her wealthy family. She returned to Chicago after her father died, though, although she had changed. She brought back her family’s Chinese maid who helped her redecorate the house according to the principals of Feng Shui.
Wilson wasn’t too happy about the redecorating, but by then he had graduated high school and was working his summer job as a copyboy at a local small newspaper. He used the job mainly to get stories to entertain debutantes with at the balls he went to every weekend. Networking with the People Worth Knowing, yanno. The parties are where Wilson’s life took a strange turn.
He met a young lady named Aurora at one of the balls. He had noticed her father among the parents along the walls at other balls because Jack (her father) was always silent and never mingled. The reason why was because Jack was a psychologist and amused himself by privately analyzing everyone he passed.
Aurora and Wilson began dating each other over the summer. Wilson found out that the reason why Jack was so odd was because he had been in the Pacific theater during WWII. One evening when he and Aurora explored Jack’s study, Wilson found some pictures and realized that Jack had been in the Philippines and had been on the Bataan Death March.
Then tragedy struck, ending Aurora and Jack’s budding romance. It took Wilson thirty years to find out why Aurora cut him off and when he did it was completely anticlimactic.
Another thing that bothered me about the epilogue where Wilson “got the answers” was the fact that he became a negotiator for the U.N. He didn’t strike me as the type. Corporate lawyer, yes, but not a negotiator.
But the biggest thing that bothered me about the book was Just’s allergy to quotation marks. Once again we get a book full of dead text with nothing setting off the dialogue to make the characters seem alive. People! Serious Literature is not and should not be lifeless words on a page!
The Eclectic Reviewer 