The Avram Davidson Treasury (72 page)

“Bound to!” exclaimed Barnes. “Absolutely!”

Mother Ruth looked up from her lap. “Maria, dear. While you’re up.
Would
you mind also bringing back with you the dustpan
and
the broom? Thank you, dear.”

Samjo had as usual seemed to have been thinking of nothing at all; as often, this semblance was deceptive. He had been wiping, first his eyes, then his nose, with an article of cloth quite as archaic as Mother Ruth’s apron. Then he spoke. “Only four glasses now, Maria,” said he.

Who could help chuckling?

I
NTRODUCTION BY
A
LGIS
B
UDRYS

“The Spook-Box of Theobald Delafont De Brooks,” Avram’s last story published before his death, came to me via a literary agent. But when it was published, he wrote to Kandis Elliot, my Production Manager and, in this case, illustrator, to say how much he liked the illustrations, and could he have them? What I don’t think he knew was that Kandis composed them on her computer, so it was no trouble at all to run off a complete set and send them to him. But he was dead by then.

Avram and I go back a long way. At one point, when we were both selling men’s hairy-chested “true” adventures, we even were collaborators, in the sense that we often talked about it, and fully intended to do it. The problem became that Avram’s stories were true, whereas mine were “true,” and we finally decided against it. But when he published
Masters of the Maze,
about a hack who wrote “true” adventure stories, he mentioned my invariable working title: “Love-Starved Arabs Raped Me Often.” And when I became editor-in-chief of Regency Books, I published an excellent collection—
Crimes and Chaos
—of Avram’s true adventure tales.

We went back further than that. Both of us were living in New York City, and I often wound up in his place on 110th Street. We had something—exactly what is difficult to pin down—that drew us together. It turned out, among other things, that his father had had a chicken farm a few miles up the road from my father’s chicken farm, but that would hardly account for even a part of it, because we never came in contact during that period. But whatever it was, it endured; he and I would trade letters pretty steadily from about 1955 to his death (and he always included my wife in his greetings). I was immensely flattered; here was one of the finest wordsmiths in the English language, with a first-class mind behind all that, and first-class creativity, and he deigned to speak to me as “Uncle Ajay.”

I wish he still did. I saw him at all the Norwescons I attended, and I did not think he would be gone so soon. I did not realize that Jahweh would dare to take him away from an Earth he made special.

THE SPOOK-BOX OF THEOBALD DELAFONT DE BROOKS

I
T WAS MORE THAN
his theory, it was the very foundation of his belief, that if you were legally entitled to use a name containing the names of two very well-known people, then…sooner or later…it would result in some very good pieces of business getting thrown your way. It hadn’t happened yet…well…not
very
good pieces of business. He collected rents on a number of properties, collected them for the owners, that is, and he sold the insurance policies to the same properties. He alas did not hold a power of attorney for any of the properties. Not as yet. And he had managed to keep an apartment in one of the properties vacant for so long that old Miss Whittier had forgotten it was even rentable. And then—

“Eighty-five West Elm really needs a night watchman, Miss Whittier,” he said.

“It
does
?” her voice had already begun to flutter.

“Yes, it does. But it isn’t going to get it. Tell you what I am going to do, Miss Whittier—”

“Ye-es?”

“
I
. Am going to give up the place I now have. And
I.
Will move in there. Will,” and here he named a sum about the third of his present rent, a rent which he was increasingly finding it inconvenient to pay, “—will that be all right, Miss Whittier?”

Miss Whittier would have undergone a slow course of the water torture rather than admit she really no longer had a good notion of what would be all right for the place (or any other place). “Oh…why I suppose …” Some last vestige of business sense entered Miss Whittier’s aged mind. “Wasn’t that about what those nice Van Dynes used to pay?”
Was
it necessary for him to remind her that the Van Dynes (they had been dead for decades) had actually occupied another apartment in another building? Theobald Delafont De Brooks didn’t think it was.

He squinted a moment, deep in thought, then: “Oh, I have to hand it to you, Miss Whittier. For a minute there
I
had a hard time remembering just what the Van Dynes used to pay. Little bit less, Miss Whittier. Little bit less, they paid.”

Another flutter. “Well, then, is that quite fair to
you
… Mr. De Brooks? To pay more than—”

But Mr. De Brooks begged her not to think about him. “The main thing, you see, is to have somebody living in that apartment. Apartment stays vacant, no curtains, no screens, no shades in the windows: gives the place a bad name.”

Miss Whittier was never moved to ask how long the apartment in question had stayed vacant, or anything else pertaining to its possible bad name. “Why…then… I’m sure it will be just fine.
Thank
you—”

Very politely he brushed away her thanks. “Anybody wants anything, for example, at night: there I am. Never go out at night anymore. Except,” he did want to be honest with her, his face said, “Thanksgiving.
Got
to.” He breathed the magic words,
Family Dinner
.

Ever squeeze a drop of lemon on a live oyster? Remember what happened? That, more or less, is what happened to Miss Whittier. “Well, of
course—
why, oh, certainly, Mr. De Brooks! The very idea! that you for one moment or any reason shouldn’t
think
of going—!”

“Don’t like to leave the place alone, you see.” Do
you
see? He hadn’t even moved into the place yet, Thanksgiving was months away, already the owner was begging him not to give it a second thought.

The prophets, where are they? And your fathers, do they live forever?

And, bringing it up to date, do your owners live forever, either? It would have been almost as easy as for him to have gotten the apartment rent-free. But a man had to look at the future. Were he to have done so, and the cold eye of an executor or a cost-accountant looked at that No Rent arrangement—and not by any means could De Brooks have pretended he had acted as janitor—superintendent—engineer, so as to have justified the rentlessness: No. Whereas this way, if it were even mentioned, “Well, the late Miss Whittier very much wanted someone whom she knew very well to live in that apartment and, as she put it, ‘Keep an eye on things …’” What could the heir…the banker…the whoever…say? At most, a slight grunt, and at worst, some small amount of time later, a civil letter on crisp paper to the effect that his services were no longer…but that was likely enough in any event. No camp lasts forever.

So
there
was one piece of good, if not very, very good, piece of business.

And although he did not know it, yet he—having a sixth or/and a seventh sense for such things—would have been not at all surprised to learn that a Certain Connection of Miss Whittier had, oh, some several years ago, at her own expense, obtained an independent genealogical report; from which we will cite just a bit, as follows:

The family line or lines of Mr. Theobald Delafont De Brooks himself are certainly traceable to 1820, and probably to 1800. Possibly as far back as 1787. There were quite a number of De Brookses in New York, and only one known progenitor, the Jacobus Aurelius De Broogh who had arrived from Bergen-op-Zoom in the Netherlands in 1643 and on whose great success in the Indian trade the De Brooks family fortunes were founded…so that a distant relationship to both Presidents is certainly probable, though now impossible either to prove or disprove. A further search, though perhaps more productive, would be much more expensive.

And at the words
more expensive
, the Certain Connection (certain…and suspicious) drew in her horns, bore the costs in silence, and never, ever said another word. Just as well.

Visitors and possible clients, gazing at the two large framed photographs, invariably asked on their first visit, “Are you related to
both
presidents?” and Theobald Delafont De Brooks would say, with a smile, “Shirt-tail cousins, you might say—” Adding, “We were the poor relations.” And…
invariably
?…well…just in case the visitors and possible clients didn’t ask, TDD would somehow always manage to get in an early reference to
Cousin Theo
and to
Cousin Grosvenor
, would laugh and add, “They stopped sending us the Christmas turkey after My Folks supported the other candidates.” Who could fail to enjoy that not-quite-a-story? and who could fail to get the not-quite-point?—
High Family Connections …
and…
Fearlessly Independent People
…

But…really…
were
they?…
weren’t
they? Mr. Quincy De Brooks was once semi-publicly asked this outright; rather smoothly said, “If they didn’t have a lot of enemies, then we are probably not related;” rather smoothly passed on before further question time. Still—how could one but wonder? What names to be announced by trumpets!
Theobald De Brooks, President of the United States! and Grosvenor Delafont De Brooks, President of the United States!
Dead now, long dead, both of them, of course—but what about the descendants?

Q. Do you ever see anything of any of them, Del?

A. Nope.
Nope
. They don’t push it. And
we
don’t push it.

This was perhaps wise of Mr. Theobald Delafont De Brooks who had, anyway, a few other stories to tell. Not many.

Story Number One. When TDD’s grandfather was a student in the seventh grade at the old Governor Daniel Tompkins School (long obliterated), who should make a visit to said school but old T. D. himself: see an officious principal shove Del’s grandfather forward,
Mr. President, here is a namesake of yours!
Well, you don’t get to be President by asking too many dumb questions and so all that old T. D. said was, “I believe we may be related, then.” “I believe we may, sir.” Old T. D. grinned, made feint of offering the boy a cigar, and, amidst the genial laughter, briskly shook hands with him, and passed on along.

Story Number Two. Del’s father did have the courage to send a letter beginning
Dear Cousin Grosvenor
congratulating GDD on his first election: back came another letter, from the same mold and form as all replies to all such letters, but beginning—mind you, mind you—
Dear Cousin Delafont.
Explain
that
, would you. They knew—almost spooky, as you might say.

In neither case:
No
invitation to come boating or swimming at Muskrat Sump.
No
invitation to go golfing or riding at Parkill Ridge.

Oh well. Take what you can get. Hope for the Big Chance. Keep your powder dry. And—say?—don’t knock it. On the strength of the Story Number One, Theobald De Brooks the distant, floated into a job offered by an uncle of the boy standing next to him during the handshake. And on the strength of the letter (framed) D. James De Brooks floated into a job given
him
by the local Commiteeman: not much of a job, but it kept them in groceries and off Relief.
See?

Maybe at one time they
had
been the poor relations. But for a long,
long
time, they hadn’t even been that. Had Del’s dad been merely boasting, swaggering, in giving his son the names, the given names, of both the presidential De Brookses? Or had he merely given what he had to give—

Were there any other family anecdotes? There were no other family anecdotes. Were there, then, any family traditions …? any, even, family words or phrases, such as almost every family has? Well…this expression:
More money than six patroons…
Theo. Del. De Brooks’s grandfather sometimes used to say that. And, actually, for quite a while, the grandson had taken it for granted that a patroon must be a rich Irishman! Later he learned, long later, that a patroon had been a Hudson Valley landowner, a sort of squire, with a land-grant from the old Dutch or English governments. And
this
expression: did someone say, Say, guess what I found? a family answer was,
the spook box!
No explanation came with that. And
this
expression (and a little bit more): If the family was having a hot-dog roast or toasting marshmallows in the backyard (the barbecue had yet to cross the Mississippi) and the fire didn’t at first or at second burn too well, see Grandpa De B. grub for a cigar- or cigarette-butt or even a pinch of pipe-tobacco, stamp his foot, and say, with an air of mock solemnity something that sounded like Skah-
ootch!
and cast the bit of tobacco on the fire. And the fire did always seem to burn better. Once: Theo. Del De B.: “Grandpa, what does Skah-
ootch
mean?” Grandpa (once) “That’s what the pow-wow man used to say.” “Grandpa, who was the—”
Mrs.
De Brooks: “Pa, you are going to
burn
that frankfurter!” A low-scale squabble, but after that it (the trick) was seldom done. A few times, if an electric light flickered or the old vacuum-tube radio misbehaved, the boy did actually stamp his foot and cry “the magic word” and sometimes it did work. But his Mother didn’t like feet being stamped in the house. So he quit doing it.

And the funny old yellow brick “from the old house in the Bowery”? Vanished. Dusty old thing. Forget it.

And don’t think, either, that it was all peaches and cream and little anecdotes (even what little there were of them), having a famous Name. Names. For one thing: If you’re so much, whutta ya doin’
here?
If your name is De Brooks, why ain’t chew rich?
How
often, merely to answer, What’s your name? was to collect a sneer, a scowl, a jeer, jibe, explicit insult, sometimes—more than once—a poke in the ribs? Often. There was an army sergeant who had made his life a living hell, and—Ya don’t
like
it? Write t’ GDD! Well…doubtless there had been people who had hated George Washington… Millard Fillmore, for that matter.