The Book of Counted Sorrows (2 page)

3

The Hideous Fate of Langford Crispin.

                   I wish someone would produce a pleasant-tasting toothpaste with something other than a mint-based flavor. The insistent, not to say relentless, not to say psychotic use of one mint or another in all available products in this category has made toothpaste a cliché in a tube. I'm convinced a huge market exists for cinnamon- or lemon-flavored toothpaste, not to mention chocolate, and I for one would buy an entire case of veal-Parmesan toothpaste if I discovered it in the market. The same criticism could be leveled at mouthwashes and Christmas candy canes. A good lobster-flavored mouthwash or a salmon candy cane would go a long way toward improving the quality of modem American life and make our world seem less medieval. I forgot to floss.

                   Excuse me.

4

The Hideous Fate of Langford Crispin, Resumed.

                   I didn't intend to take quite so long for a flossing break, but once the task was completed, I had to carry the used floss to the former carriage master's cottage adjacent to the old carriage garages at the back of the estate, which is a considerable distance from the main house, especially as one cannot walk it in a straight line due to the 2,743 works of topiary that grace the back lawn.

                   Most topiary depicts animals: dogs, cats, dolphins in mid leap, horses, deer, hulking grizzly bears savagely gutting each other in ferocious territorial disputes, bunnies, wildebeests, copulating penguins, and the like. Here at the Koontz manor, we encourage creativity among the gardening staff, as among all our exceptional and adored employees. As a result, we boast the world's only collection of topiary that takes for its subject flora instead of fauna. Here, an immensely tall length of boxwood hedge is carved into a series of pine trees. And here, the dense foliage of a line of dwarf yew trees has been trimmed to resemble a boxwood hedge. Oh, and look here: A great mass of oleander has been meticulously shaped into what appears to be a moss-hung magnolia. And over there: A potentially massive California live oak was stunted and deformed with chemicals, brutally trimmed, pinched at the roots, and ruthlessly compressed until it now appears to be a four-foot-tall, gnarled, eccentrically shaped bonsai evergreen. And how about that giant tulip formed from a thoroughly terrorized phoenix palm?

                   This essay is not about topiary, however. Neither is it about flossing, although now that you've insisted upon knowing why I took such a long floss break, I must finish the account of my journey through topiary to the old carriage master's house at the far end of the estate.

                   By the way, please understand that I do not mean to imply that the carriage master himself is old. He is, indeed, a strapping young fellow who, if only he produced leaves, could easily be trimmed and trained to resemble a sturdy oak. He is remarkably handsome, as well, and would surely be a film star of the magnitude of Tom Cruise were it not for the perpetually bloodshot third eye that sits slightly off-center in his too prominent forehead.

                   For the longest time, Skippy - the carriage master - had so little to do here on the Koontz estate that he turned in quiet desperation to a correspondence course in boredom management, offered by Harvard University. We have no horse-drawn carriages, you see. Furthermore, we keep our automobiles, SUVs, trucks, motorcycles, tanks, missile transports, ice cream wagons, and bulldozers in more modern garages closer to the main house.

                   Skippy's duties became markedly more complex and fulfilling upon the establishment of the floss-collection project. In excess of two hundred dedicated individuals are employed and housed on the estate, as well as a variety of less dedicated but much appreciated and much cuddlier animals of many kinds. Our Mrs. Scuttlesby requires that every last one of them - including me and my incomparable wife - floss after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as you might expect, but also after every snack and even after consuming something as apparently inconsequential to dental health as a diet cola or a glass of water. When I say "every last one of them," I mean toinclude the animals. Mrs. Scuttlesby is a demon about oral hygiene regardless of species. On a difficult day in the Great Vault of Unimaginable Torment, when the genetically engineered two-hundred-pound pit bulls are called upon too frequently to protect The Book of Counted Sorrows from would-be thieves and deranged poetry haters, these dogs alone can use hundreds of feet of unwaxed and waxed floss to remove stubborn shreds of visitors' flesh from between their teeth. By the explicit and vigorously enforced order of Mrs. Scuttlesby, all used floss must be conveyed to the carriage master immediately upon completion of the flossing procedure, which is most vividly, not to say painstakingly, described - with diagrams, charts, graphs, and satellite photos -on pages 376 through 394 of the official estate manual. (An accompanying videotape demonstration of the required procedure, with compulsory flossing techniques, stirringly narrated by James Earl Jones, can be obtained from the estate librarian.)

                   Upon receipt of each length of used floss, Skippy measures it with a laser micrometer, photographs it against a black velvet cloth, fills out an official floss receipt (pink copy to the user of the floss, yellow copy to Mrs. Scuttlesby, white copy directly to the nuclear-proof archives deep under the carriage master's cottage), and only then ties the latest contribution to the correct ball of accumulated floss.

                   The old carriage garages, next to the carriage master's cottage, no longer house carriages, but contain hundreds of balls of floss, of varying sizes, each clearly labeled with the name of the person or animal who has contributed to it. In recognition of the fact that the extraordinary frequency of flossing required on the estate will lead to enormous floss balls, the walls and roof of the old carriage garages were raised from one story to four, providing forty-foot-high interior clearance. The corroded gas lamps were replaced with top-of-the-line, cold-cathode lighting that makes it easy to read the labels on the balls and to find loose ends of floss.

                   Skippy - or sometimes his assistant, Werner - securely adds the latest contribution to the proper ball, under the watchful eye of the contributor. Thereafter, the necessary legal papers are signed and notarized, and one is free to go about one's business until after the next meal, snack, or diet cola.

                   Skippy and Werner conduct themselves at all times with the very deepest respect - nay, with reverence - for the rules in the official estate manual. Were either man to tie a floss contribution to the wrong ball, and were this mistake to be recognized by Mrs. Scuttlesby when she reviewed the 24-hour-a-day videotape record of the floss collection, the offender would be offered his choice of punishments: (1) His right thumb would be cut off with a dull cheese slicer; or (2) his nostrils would be stuffed with peanut butter and his nose offered as a canape to a ravenous weasel; or (3) he would be hung by his testicles from the carriage garage rafters and flailed with live rattlesnakes.

                   Such punishments may seem extreme, but at Mrs. Scuttlesby's insistence, these - and other more frightful potential chastisements - are incorporated into the employment agreements of all workers who serve in sensitive posts on the estate. Having been admitted to the California Bar Association by a sheer act of stubborn will, she has defended these contractual terms - in the case of another employee, Casper Nork - all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the justices delivered a precedent-setting unanimous decision in her favor, thus requiring Nork to surrender his left ear to be used as Mrs. Scuttlesby's key fob.

                   In triumph, addressing the lopsided Nork, Mrs. Scuttlesby said, "Never underestimate the determination of a British head housekeeper. You useless idiot, have you never read Rebecca?"

                   After delivering my used floss to Skippy, I pocketed my pink copy of the receipt, made my way across the back lawn, through the stunning topiary, to the main house. Thirsty, I considered stopping in the kitchen to acquire a diet cola from Sedley Nottingham, the Commander of Beverages, but my thirst was cured by the thought of returning so soon to the carriage master's cottage with another length of floss.

                   Thus I returned here to my study to offer you my sincere apologies for such a prolonged absence.

5

The Hideous Fate of Langford Crispin, for Real This Time.

                   The first recorded owner of The Book of Counted Sorrows was Langford Crispin, the immortal film star. Born Nate Furt, the only child of Sepsis and Donna Furt of Cheese Falls, Wisconsin, he went on the vaudeville circuit at sixteen, tap dancing while singing and simultaneously juggling flaming snakes, in blackface.

                   Certain unnamed associates of the legendary performer Al Jolson -who did not himself juggle snakes, flaming or otherwise, but who did frequently appear in blackface, which is surely no less bizarre to our modem sensibilities - waylaid poor Nate in an alley behind a theater in Cleveland. These show-biz rowdies terrified him with much aggressive finger wagging, rude use of the word foam (the verb form, not the noun), and with dire threats to tell his saintly mother, back in Cheese Falls, that while on the road he had become a sissy boy who wore women's clothes and conducted an immoral romantic relationship with the woolly half of Laura Lunney's famous act - Laura Lunney and Her Singing Llama. This was, of course, a filthy lie, but Nate never again performed in blackface. Partly to make himself less visible to Jolson's ruthless associates and also as a consequence of a belated realization that Nate Furt was not an ideal name for a would-be vaudeville star, he legally changed his name to Bob Furt, later to Burt Furt, later still to Melbourne Furt, then to Foghorn Leghorn, subsequently to Yosemite Sam, then (only briefly and in desperation over his floundering career) to Al Jolson, and finally to Langford Crispin.

                   Although a miserable failure in vaudeville, Langford Crispin was a huge and immediate hit in films, which was a new and exciting art form that had not yet been taken over by the dreaded Stupid Mafia - a criminal conspiracy of the intellectually challenged - which had fully seized control of the movie business by the late 1960s. Langford was nominated for an Academy Award in 1930, for All Quiet on the Western Front. If you have seen this classic movie, Langford's astonishing portrayal of Lew Ayres' brother, Jinky, will stay with you forever. Jinky, a carefree circus clown, trades in his polka-dot jumpsuit for a uniform and his giant floppy shoes for combat boots, to go off to Europe and fight for his country and for the dignity of humanity. In the brutal trench warfare against the Germans, on blasted landscapes smoky with mustard gas, Jinky learns to his surprise that war really is hell -and that a unicycle is more difficult to pilot through bomb craters than around Barnum Bailey's center ring. Nevertheless, through the unremitting horror, he holds fast to his sense of humor, and even as he is dying, he manages to squeeze the hand-pump bulb that operates the squirting flower in the lapel of his torn battle jacket, thoroughly wetting the startled face of the medic who is trying without success to staunch his wounds.

                   Langford was again nominated for best actor for his role in in Cimarron, 1931, the epic adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel, in which he starred with Richard Dix and the lovely Irene Dunne. In this tale of a pioneer family determined to build an empire in early Oklahoma, Langford played Richard Dix's gentle brother, Soupy, who wants only to spread Christian fellowship and a proper appreciation of flower arrangement to the crude communities of the primitive prairie. His sweetness and innocence are ultimately met with mockery, gunfire, and a blazing wagon loaded with dynamite.

                   Langford was first seen reading The Book of Counted Sorrows between takes on the set of Cimarron, during filming in 1930. By the time he was making Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the brilliant Fredric March, in 1931, he kept the book always within reach and carried it with him wherever he went, when not actually before a camera. If his hands were full of parcels, he carried the book on his head, balanced with the confidence of a man who had begun his vaudeville career juggling flaming snakes. If his hands were full of parcels, and if something was already balanced on his head - such as a basket of bread or a big water jug, or a dwarf (his vaudeville friend, Tiny Johnson, shorter than a yardstick, enjoyed the view from this high perch) - then Langford carried the precious book in his teeth. If his hands were filled with parcels and if a water jug or a cheerful dwarf was balanced on his head, and if also he was involved in a conversation, then he carried the book between his knees, which required him to walk funny and drew stares from strangers, but he was not a man who ever cared what others thought of him.

                   In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you will remember Langford as Fredric March's half brother. Jerry Jekyll, who was on the lam, pursued by the London constabulary for roughing up a group of children carolers when they insisted on singing "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" instead of "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", which he had requested in return for a donation of a shiny half pence. By the end of the film, Jerry learns all the wrong lessons from the disgrace and death of his arrogant brother. Vowing to achieve a scientific breakthrough even more dazzling than that of the late Dr. Jekyll, Jerry flees to Europe, changing his name to Victor Frankenstein, with the intent to prove that sundry parts of various dead people can, through the miracle of electrical shock, be assembled into a presentable new person capable of providing cheap but nevertheless high-quality domestic labor.

                   In 1932, Langford Crispin's performance as Jerry Jekyll brought him the Academy Award for the best supporting actor. He was the first winner ever to thank "all the little people," and when he spoke this phrase, which countless winners would use after him, he doffed his enormous top hat to reveal an actual little person, Tiny Johnson, sitting on his head. In our time, this stunt might seem politically incorrect or at least insensitive, and perhaps tasteless to some. In those long-ago days, however, the entertainment community wasn't as refined as it has become in this most genteel age of Charlie Sheen, Howard Stern, Eminem, and Freddy the Farting Chimp. With perhaps the exception of Mary Pickford and Francis the Talking Mule, entertainers in those days were largely an unseemly, unrefined, unpolished, uncouth, undulant, unplumbed, unzipped, undone, uncaged, unearthed, unbonneted rabble. When Langford removed his top hat to reveal Tiny Johnson perched on his pate, the crowd at the Academy Awards show roared with laughter, howled and stamped their feet, and hooted and spat copiously.

                   Only sixteen years later, accepting his Best Actor Oscar for Hamlet, when Laurence Olivier thought it would be great good fun to repeat Langford's stunt, he doffed his top hat, revealed the same Tiny Johnson - and was met by the stunned silence of a disapproving audience so painfully refined and classy that every last one of them was wearing clean underwear. Olivier stood in utter mortification, his smile as frozen as a bananasicle. When Tiny Johnson lit a sparkler and began to wave it and an American flag, in what must have seemed, in the planning, to be a stroke of show-business genius, the offended audience griped in shock, drawing in so much air at the same time that ushers, standing in the aisles, came dangerously close to imploding in the brief ensuing vacuum. That the Queen of England, even many years later, could overlook this shameful spectacle and bestow a knighthood on Olivier is incontestable proof of the resiliency and the compassion of the British monarchy - or proof, perhaps, of the sadly short memory capacity that has resulted from the inbreeding of all European royalty over the centuries.

                   I am happy to tell you that Langford Crispin - a kind and most considerate man who helped many orphans and deserved no one's scorn - was not humiliated by Olivier's awards-show performance, because Crispin had by then been dead many years. I can also assure you that dear Langford was not subjected to the discomfort of having to spin in his grave, because after his emulsified body was scraped off the ceiling of the library in his lovely Beverly Hills mansion, his remains were not in suitable condition to be shaped into a suit for viewing at his funeral, and the several jars of his mortal substance were at once cremated. It is possible, I suppose, that in response to Olivier's capering at the Academy Awards show, Langford's ashes whirled in the urn where they were stored, but that is a far more pleasant image than a decaying carcass tumbling around and around among worms and filth and rotten grave cloth inside a termite-riddled coffin.

                   Where was I?

                   Oh, yes. Langford triumphantly accepted the Academy Award for his role in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and thereafter his career fell as hard and fast as the bludgeoned body of a troublesome neighbor dropped into an abandoned well after midnight. Not, I hasten to add, that I would know anything about the disappearance of my neighbor or anyone else's, or about the location of any abandoned well, or about the relative speed and force of impact of a falling body that has been thoroughly bludgeoned. I am speaking, of course, entirely metaphorically, with the free and supple imagination of a novelist.

                   Although, in 1933, Charles Laughton won the Academy Award for Best Actor in The Private Life of Henry the VIII, Langford was not merely criticized for his work in the same picture but loudly reviled by people who should have known better. His decision to play Lord Havingstoke as a mincing, one-armed, twelve-toed tyrant in a funny hat and elfin shoes was, in retrospect, not a proper interpretation of the role. But nothing in his performance warranted food being thrown at him by members of the film community when he went to dine at the Polo Lounge, nor the attempts of paring valets to run him down with his own vehicle.

                   In 1934, when It Happened One Night swept all the major awards -Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay -Langford Crispin was not present to share in the glory, because though he was not yet smeared in a disgusting emulsification across the ceiling of his library, his role in the film had been left on the cutting-room floor. Not by accident, you understand, but by the intent of the producer and director. Langford had played Clark Gable's deranged brother, Norman Bates, who at one point hacks to death Claudette Colbert and eats her liver with some fava beans and a good Chianti. Although this was a brilliant performance and far ahead of its time, the studio ultimately decided that the entire character of Norman Bates was out of place in a light comedy meant to lift the spirits of a Depression-era audience, and Langford was eliminated in the final cut.

                   Only ten days after the picture received its five Academy Awards, Langford's remains were discovered by his housekeeper, Mrs. Scuttlesby, when she entered the library to serve him a glass of port wine and a wedge of wickedly sharp cheese.

                   (A parenthetical aside: This was not, of course, the same Mrs. Scuttlesby who serves with such honor and obsession as our head housekeeper on the Koontz estate. Langford's Mrs. Scuttlesby was 46 when she discovered the actor's remains that evening in 1934, which would make her 113 years old as I write this. Our Mrs. Scuttlesby, however, is only 46 years old as I write this, and will probably still be only 46 when I finish writing this, if I ever do. I've been assured by our Mrs. Scuttlesby (whose assurances are delivered with such adamancy that they cannot be ignored or taken lightly) that she is no relation to Langford's Mrs. Scuttlesby, in spite of the curious fact that each of these women lacks a first name. Our Mrs. Scuttlesby was born in Nome, Alaska, the daughter of an ice farmer, and educated in domestic service at Oxford University, whereas nothing whatsoever is known about the birthplace or the education of Langford Crispin's Mrs. Scuttlesby, which is proof positive that they cannot be the same woman, even if our beloved Mrs. Scuttlesby looked 113, which she most certainly does not.)

                   Where was I?

                   More important: Where was Langford Crispin?

                   Yes, I remember now: spread in a ghastly emulsification across the ceiling of his library. May the same never happen to you. Nor to me. I do have a list of people I wouldn't mind seeing emulsified and pasted to ceilings in their various residences, though I'm too discreet to provide that list here.

                   So, Mrs. Scuttlesby - not ours, the other - entered the library with the port wine and cheese on a silver tray, and a clothespin on her nose. She didn't ordinarily go around with a clothespin on her nose, you understand. She wasn't an eccentric. On this fateful night, she had a clothespin on her nose because she was serving, as you may recall, a wickedly sharp cheese with the port wine. From this exotic and peculiarly green cheese, a favorite of Langford's, issued an aroma so powerful and penetrating that it knocked small dogs unconscious, turned particularly sensitive young children into lifelong catatonics, and caused automobile headlamps to explode at a distance of half a block. Nevertheless, in spite of the cheese stench, Mxs. Scuttlesby - not ours, the other - might have smelled the hideous remains of dear Langford Crispin, pasted and putrefying on the ceiling, had she not been breathing, of necessity, through her mouth. In his official report, the first police officer on the scene noted that the stink of Langford's remains was, indeed, more terrible than that produced by any cheese in the world, and when he tried to commandeer Mrs. Scuttlesby's clothespin for his own use, a fight ensued that left the husky young constable with one broken leg, six broken fingers, two broken arms, a broken jaw, five dislodged teeth, a nose that looked like a crushed cactus blossom, and no hair; while Mxs. Scuttlesby - not ours, the other - sustained a bruise on her right thumb.

                   But I'm getting ahead of my story.

                   Let's back up to where the police haven't arrived yet.

                   Remember the scene: Mrs. Scuttlesby - not ours, the other - enters the library with a silver tray on which are port wine and cheese, her nose pinched by a clothespin, unaware of the horror overhead, perhaps thinking sad and deeply personal thoughts of the young man who never returned to her from the bloody battlefields of World War I, if such a young man ever existed. She put down the tray on the exquisite French marquetry table beside Langford Crispin's favorite armchair - and saw The Book of Counted Sorrows tumbled on the floor between the chair and the toad-leather footstool. Being a tidy person by nature and a housekeeper by profession, she picked up the book and put it on the table beside the tray.