The Müller-Fokker Effect (15 page)

‘We already have, Mr Hines. Our own marketing division is…’

‘I don’t have any marketing division!’

‘I mean, National Arsen…’

‘I don’t want to hear that name! Out—get out of here and let me get some work done!’

‘Hail Wes D…’

‘Out!’

In fact he had no work at all to do. Nothing to do but to dream or dread, whatever it was. Whatever it was, the picture of Marge (635 lines/inch) came to him, hot, hurting and magnificent. Her eyes were swords, her breasts mounted horns, her breath an acid bath. Now here was something nice. Mac ran the video tape of her first commercial, then her second, the next and the next. There was something…

For the first time in years, he began to wonder if another person might not be real.

No? Then what was happening in the auricles and ventricles of his heart? They felt crammed full of spinets and timetables and brass nameplates and daffodil telephones, all those old and awkward and lovely commodities.

I’m not too old to love
, he thought.
Anyway, I’m not too old to love
. He embraced her in oceans of suds; they made a little pink cake. He embraced…

He became aware of a figure on the horizon, hailing Wes Davis. The camera zoomed in on a young man with a red nose, standing right here before the desk.

‘Mr Hines?’

He put his hands on the desk and asked the b.y.m. what he wanted.

‘But I thought
you
wanted something, sir. You were shouting.’

‘I was? What’d I say?’

‘“I’m rich! I’m rich!”’

‘Well I’m not.’

‘No sir. But just how did you get so much money?’

‘By the sweat of honest toil. By working my fingers to the bone, shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone. I didn’t hide my light under a bushel. I didn’t waste my God-given talents, of which I am just the steward. Value for money! Build a better mousetrap…’

‘Yes sir. But just what kind of mousetrap did you build?’ The young man’s smile hardened.

‘Don’t borrow from Peter to pay the devil! A penny saved is money in the bank! Give me elbow grease and I’ll move the world! Yankee ingenuity, boy, and…’

‘Yes sir. Applied to what?’

Crimson to the roots of his thick white Yankee hair, Mac fought back valiantly:
‘WHEN I HIRE A MAN, I ALWAYS LOOK AT HIS SHOES! IF YOU’VE GOT BACKBONE AND SAND, GO TO THE HEAD OF THE CLASS! WASTE NOT, WANT NOT! MORE HASTE, LESS SPEED! THERE IS PLENTY OF ROOM AT THE TOP
…oh, what the fuck, I might as well tell you.’

The young man sat down and helped himself to a cigar. Mac lit it for him, then commenced his story.

Our family [he said] had always been lucky on both sides. My great-grandfather Franklin Hines, who (spelled it H-Y-N) won his wife in a game of Russian roulette. Her name was Hero Rwcz, and I believe she had just escaped a pogrom.

My great-grandfather Leonardo Fox, who was to be the only survivor of Little Big Horn, married Galilea Avaka, who could smell water.

My great-grandfather Archimedes Mutt actually made the first gold strike in California, months before the Sutter’s Mill strike. Being a lazy man, he pocketed a few nuggets and declined to stake a claim. Archy married a Swedish girl, Bernoullia Bjld, whose talents were culinary. She could cook any dish to perfection after tasting it just once, and she was good at finding double yolks.

Then there was my great-grandfather Watt Peqeq, the so-called ‘Unlucky Balloonist’. Over seventy serious accidents, and his only injury was a broken wisdom tooth. He married Dedalie Gissigi, who found at least a dollar in change every day of her life.

Franklin and Hero Hyn had twins, Dagurette and Fulton. The infant Dag was kidnaped by white slavers, but the gang was wiped out by smallpox before they could get her to market. She was found, two thousand-odd miles from home, by a next-door neighbor who happened by. He brought her home to the Hyns, then himself caught smallpox and died.

Fulton, aged four, fell out of a boat during a family outing on Lake Michigan. The lake at this point was fifty feet deep. For one reason or another, he was not missed for several hours. The family rowed back to find him standing upon the mast of a submerged shipwreck, barely keeping his head above water.

Leonardo and Galilea Fox also had twins, Howe and Jenny. Howe became a poker player, and so incredibly lucky that many times his life was threatened. One sore loser’s derringer misfired; another was taken by an opportune epileptic seizure. A third cowboy’s gun went off in its holster, and a fourth was himself shot by an old debtor at the moment he drew on Howe. Finally, one of Howe’s potential murderers was distracted by the fire that burnt half of Chicago.

Jenny seldom gambled, though on a dare she once parlayed a dollar across seven horse races to something over four hundred thousand (and this was her dowry when she married Fulton Hines). But grandmother Jenny was lucky chiefly in fashion. She had a habit of buying old dresses, altering them to suit herself, and openly disregarding the prevailing fads. Inevitably what she wore became the
avant-garde
fashion a year or two later; Paris designers finally discovered her and paid her handsomely to let them sketch her old rags.

Archy and Bernoullia had twin sons, Morse and Whitney. Morse went into a monastery; I have only one story about him. He was excessively zealous, at least according to the abbot’s way of thinking, and that good man asked him to ease up on the fasting, vigils and self-immolation. One day the abbot rebuked him rather sternly for it. At once a heavy statue, which had been solidly anchored to a stone foundation for centuries, toppled, and the abbot was killed by the Good Shepherd’s crook. This story may be apocryphal. By the way, I hear steps are being taken in Rome for my great-uncle’s beatification.

Whitney Mutt was wounded in the Spanish-American War and shipped home. The following day everyone in his platoon came down with malaria; all eventually died. Whitney married one of the pretty Peqeq twins, Merrimac, by whom he already had a nine-year-old daughter, my mother, Bell.

Some years earlier, Merri’s twin sister had been abducted by the outlaw Jess Hurch, and forcibly married. Before the marriage could be consummated, Jess was accidently killed. I don’t know the details, but somehow Monita received both a handsome reward for his capture and a medal for his bravery! Even so, she does not seem to have been that lucky. Perhaps she loved the scoundrel, and perhaps he’s have made her a good husband, who knows?

Whitney and Merrimac received as a wedding present a few shares of then worthless stock. They were to honeymoon aboard the
Titanic
, but food poisoning, a late train and a quarrel with a drunken taxi driver combined to delay them; they missed the boat. Instead they went West, to visit Monita. An incident there proved that Merri was, like her sister, immune to rattlesnake venom.

My father was Singer Hines, Fulton and Jenny’s only son. At the age often, he fell from a cliff and broke his collar-bone, which kept him home from school the day a new boy brought in cholera. As a memento of that day, my father carried with him the rest of his life the five-leaf clover he’d snatched in his fall. The collarbone set badly, and he was consequently not drafted for World War One. He enlisted in the Ambulance Corps, but peace came the following day. ‘The infernal luck!’ he said. I was to remember those words…

To continue, my mother was given by her aunt Monita eighteen silver dollars on her eighteenth birthday. Sixteen went for a dog, one for a collar and license. The other was to have purchased a leash, but the store was out of stock.

On the way home, her dog broke loose and was trampled to death by a racehorse. Its owner, a young man named Raines, apologized and offered her half-ownership in the horse, Skitsy Darlin’. Bell’s peculiar talent lay, as we shall see, in not having time to get too attached to things before she lost them, and in always gaining by compensation. In this case young Raines became her beau, and next day took her to their horse’s first race at Duda, Kansas.

Meanwhile another man named Baynes, of nearby Lardhole, Missouri, set out for another race. Having lost his way, he was misdirected by local farmers to the Duda racetrack (where Bell and Raines sat holding hands in the center of the grandstand).

The starting bugle blew. Skitsy Darlin’ got off to a bad start, but moved from sixth to fourth place rapidly. The crowd grew excited as the horses bunched up in the far turn (Baynes was looking for a parking place, Raines was squeezing Bell’s hand). Skitsy Darlin’ entered the home stretch; so did Baynes’s yellow roadster; they collided.

The panic on the racecourse was exceeded by that a second later in the stands, half of which collapsed. Raines was killed instantly; Bell was left holding his ring (it bore the seal of the Crown Prince of Luftenberg, and many years later it saved her life in a tight spot).

For Skitsy Darlin’s broken leg, Baynes offered compensation. He proposed to mend the leg, set the animal to stud or similar work, and turn over all its earnings to Bell, and gave her the roadster as a token of good faith. Skitsy Darlin’ became famous under Baynes’s training—perhaps you have heard of Mathematical Hank, the circus wonder horse?

Bell met my father at a rest: home where both were recuperating from nervous exhaustion (he had fallen from a Zeppelin). They married. My triplet brothers and I were born a year later.

Times were hard. My dentist father, out of work, was forced to actually beg on the streets of New York. One day my mother came across the eighteenth and last silver dollar. It was not enough to hold off starvation for long, so she generously gave it to a hunchbacked beggar. It looked ‘funny’ to him, so he fobbed it off on another beggar, my father. He took it to a coin dealer.

It was a rare 1897 Medicine Dumps Bank Dollar (Obverse: a frontiersman shaking hands with Liberty. Reverse: a wreath, a cornucopia of buffalo, and the words
ONE DOLLER
) in mint condition, and worth thousands. The dealer offered him five hundred for it and my father sold. The following week, all over the country, immense caches of these dollars were turned up; its value dropped to ‘face’.

Some of the five hundred went to pay for a trip West for Bell, to visit her dying mother. She arrived hours too late, and there were the funeral expenses to meet. Merrimac had died in poverty, leaving only her old, tumble-down house (which had, though, survived an earthquake).

Bell called in a realtor to appraise the place. Seeing how desperate she was to sell, he began depreciating the house, knocking on walls to show their flimsiness. One entire room caved in, killing the realtor and revealing the hiding place for Merrimac’s valuables. Here were all the old ‘worthless’ stocks, now priceless. My father sold them to buy his practice, a mansion, and a large hoard of gold bullion for inlay work.

Next day the market crashed, and Singer was able to buy back all his sold stocks for pennies (which he did, out of sentiment). And so, though he spent his entire fortune trying to trace the origin of the Luftenberg ring, he did leave me those stocks.

Every investment I made paid off, or very nearly every one. In time, I could afford to buy the time of bright young investment counsellors like yourself. In time…

Mac blew out the match and dropped it in his clean platinum ashtray.

‘You were about to tell me,’ said the young man, ‘the secret of your success.’

‘Was I? I thought I just had.’

‘You didn’t say a word!’

‘Indeed. It’s just as well. I was thinking of a story—something I saw the other day on television. Well, never mind. Back to work. Time, my young friend, is money.’

The art critics of a dozen newspapers and magazines came to the opening at the Moody Gallery. They shuffled in like a soup line, snatched what was free (catalogues and drinks) and ignored the paintings as much as possible while they talked to each other.

Ank had been through it all many times, when he’d worked for the
Sun
. They called this ‘the game’.

The game was to conceal your own opinion of the show while sounding the opinions of your colleagues. When you had polled enough of them to decide whether it was worthwhile or not, you went back to the paper and set down a few epigrams. If the show was worthwhile, you tried to have at least one ‘insight’ no one else would manage. This might involve talking about the arrangement of the works, the name cards attached to the walls near them, how many steps to the gallery door, or anything else you were sure no one but you had noticed.

Ank knew the game, but now it was his show, and he really wanted to know what they thought of it. He walked a crooked route through the gallery, avoiding the clusters of wealthy guests, and trying to eavesdrop on the critics’ conversations.

‘Vasari…’ said a woman, in triangular glasses. ‘…Berenson…’

A man with the blurry, distorted features of a Francis Bacon executive stood with his back to one of Ank’s favorite paintings, a blue-eyed Giotto copy. ‘That’s it, all right. Tensions lacking. The quintessence of
lif i framställning’.

Next to him a woman jerked her sneer toward the Turneresque storm at sea (including a coke bottle floating on a nearby wave). ‘Insulting as a tit, ain’t it?’