“I know how you must feel,” Bobs said. He watched Brain go down into the water. His back was scarred too.
There was a path along the water’s edge. Bobs walked slowly, head down, until he saw the girl; then she looked at him and smiled, and he said, “Sorry. Hope I’m not intruding.”
“Not at all,” the girl said. “I should be over with the others, but I’m afraid I’m shy.” She was beautiful, in the blond-cheerleader girl-next-door way.
“Your first season?”
She nodded.
“You’re the actress then. Bishop said something about you when I checked in last night.”
“Thanks for not saying
“The star. That’s what Bishop called you. Have you made many pictures?”
“Just one—
Bobs shook his head. “But I will, the next chance I get.”
“They say a lot of important people come here.”
Bobs nodded. “To look at the nuts.”
The girl laughed. “I get it. Beechnuts.”
“Yeah, Beechnuts. Listen, I want you to do me a favor.” He drew his pistol and handed it to her. “What’s this?”
Puzzled, she looked at it for a moment, then laughed again. “A toy pistol?”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course. It says right here on it:
He took the gun and threw it as far as he could out into the lake. She stared at him, so he said: “Remember that. You may be called to testify later,” before he walked away.
This story was based, in one way, on the Milford Writer’s Conference. In another, on an academic I once knew. Dom (as I shall call him) is dead now, but when “Beech Hill” was written he was a major figure in the study of popular culture.
You may have heard of Baron von Steuben, one of George Washington’s most valued—and valuable— subordinates. To put it bluntly, von Steuben was a fraud in almost every respect. He said he was a Prussian nobleman and that he had been a general in the army of Frederick the Great. He was a commoner and had been a captain.
Dom was like that. He wore tweed jackets and smoked a pipe. He spoke with a dubious British accent and sounded pompous even when what he said was not. He gave you every reason to think him a lovable fraud. Yet he knew his subject backward and forward and cared deeply about it. I knew him, as I said, and in a way I based the story you have read upon him. We are the poorer for his passing.
The Recording
I have found my record, a record I have owned for fifty years and never played until five minutes ago. Let me explain.
When I was a small boy—in those dear, dead days of Model A Ford touring cars, horse-drawn milk trucks, and hand-cranked ice-cream freezers—I had an uncle. As a matter of fact, I had several, all brothers of my father, and all, like him, tall and somewhat portly men with faces stamped (as my own is) in the image of
But this particular uncle, my uncle Bill, whose record (in a sense I shall explain) it was, was closer than all the others to me. As the eldest, he was the titular head of the family, for my grandfather had passed away a few years after I was born. My uncle’s capacity for beer was famous, and I suspect now that he was “comfortable” much of the time, a large-waisted (how he would roar if he could see his little nephew’s waistline today!) red-faced, good- humored man whom none of us—for a child catches these attitudes as readily as measles—took wholly seriously.
The special position which, in my mind, this uncle occupied is not too difficult to explain. Though younger than many men still working, he was said to be retired, and for that reason I saw much more of him than of any of the others. And despite his being something of a figure of fun, I was a little frightened of him, as a child may be of the painted, rowdy clown at a circus; this, I suppose, because of some incident of drunken behavior witnessed at the edge of infancy and not understood. At the same time I loved my uncle, or at least would have said I did, for he was generous with small gifts and often willing to talk when everyone else was “too busy.”
Why my uncle had promised me a present I have now quite forgotten. It was not my birthday, and not Christmas—I vividly recall the hot, dusty streets over which the maples hung motionless, year-worn leaves. But promise he had, and there was no slightest doubt in my mind about what I wanted.
Not a collie pup like Tarkington’s little boy, or even a bicycle (I already had one). No, what I wanted (how modern it sounds now) was a phonograph record. Not, you must understand, any particular record, though perhaps if given a choice I would have leaned toward one of the comedy monologues popular then, or a military march, but simply a record of my own. My parents had recently acquired a new phonograph, and I was forbidden to use it for fear that I might scratch the delicate wax disks. If I had a record of my own, this argument would lose its validity. My uncle agreed and promised that after dinner (in those days eaten at two o’clock) we would walk the eight or ten blocks which then separated this house from the business area of the town and, unknown to my parents, get me one.
