A Good Story and Other Stories

Devilishly

I said, “I’ll go as the Devil. That ought to be funny.”

“Hilarious,” said Doris, in that sardonic voice of hers. “Where do you think them up?”

“Well, after all,” I went on defensively, “it is appropriate. The scalawag son returns—”

“To cop his mama’s sparklers,” Doris finished.

“Just so. A Lucifer suit seems perfectly in keeping with the occasion. The mast devilish guest at the costume ball, that’ll be me.”

“Subtle,” said Doris. “That’s what I love about you, how subtle you are. Why don’t you just go as the Prodigal Son?”　

I considered the idea, but shook my head. “No,” I said. “The costume wouldn’t be self-explanatory. But a bright red demon suit, now, with a long tail and a pitchfork—”

“Scrumptious,” said Doris. “Pass the pickles.”

I passed the pickles. I took a bite out of my pastrami sandwich, chewed it, swallowed it, and said, “You’re so smart, what are you going to be?”

“I haven’t decided yet. But nothing banal, darling, believe me. Nothing obvious. Something beautifully original.”

“September Morn,” I suggested.

“You would say something like that,” she said. “Why don’t you suggest Lady Godiva?”

Just before we finished lunch, Doris reached across the table and took my hand and said, “Don’t mind me, Willy. You know I don’t mean it as bad as it sounds—”

I did know that, and said so. “You’re cleverer than I am,” I said, “in some ways. But you love me all the same.”　

“Oh, you know I do,” she said, and gave me an emotional smile, and squeezed my hand. “And I know you love me,” she said.

“I should think so.”

Yes, I should think so. I’d been disowned for loving Doris, disinherited, kicked out of the biggest house in this city. I threw over a multimillion-dollar inheritance for the love of Doris. Here was one wife who need never have doubts about her husband’s affection.

The last five years, since I’d packed and moved out of the Piedmont estate, giving up any claim to the Piedmont soapflake fortune, had not been entirely easy ones. William Piedmont III could not, it goes without saying, do manual labor for his livelihood, but a liberal arts education at an Ivy League college had left me singularly unprepared for any sort of white-collar occupation. With work impossible, Doris and I had had to be fast on our toes and quick with our wits in order to maintain an income sufficient to our tastes.

But after the first year, when in essence we’d been learning our trades, life went along rather well. A bit of pocketpicking here, a touch of burglary there, a modest stock sale elsewhere, it all mounted up. And in rural parts of the country, especially in the South, the old badger game was still worth a small but reliable income.

Not that things went so well that I was prepared to forgive my dear family, however. Oh, no, definitely not. Aside from having turned me out to starve or worse, my nearest and dearest relatives had seen fit to be insulting about Doris, my only true love, merely because she had come from a poverty- stricken family with a scattering of police records among its members. The sting of that rejection was still with me, as sharp as ever, and had been with me constantly throughout these five years. To get back at my family, to somehow even the score with them, how I longed for the opportunity.　

But it was impossible. I couldn’t approach them, not on any pretext, and if I couldn’t approach them, how could I get at them, how could I work my vengeance upon them? No, it was impossible.

Or, that is, had been impossible. Impossible until the happy day when I’d found, within a wallet my light fingers had lifted from its former owner, an invitation for two at the Piedmont estate. For a Mardi Gras, a masquerade ball. Prizes would be given.

Oh, yes. Prizes would be given.

The time was two weeks off. We had just come to town the day before I received the invitation — I returned once or twice a year to my native city, drawn back time and time again by the till now fruitless quest for revenge — and had engaged in only the barest minimum of pilfering and light larceny. It was safe to stay, so long as we avoided any part of town where my family might be and recognize me, and so long as we were careful not to pull any capers big enough to start a manhunt. We lived, in the meantime, on the fruits of others’ hip pockets, and bided our time.

Now, during lunch at a deli three days before the big masquerade ball, it had come to me what costume I wanted to wear. Doris made fun of it, of course; one of the things I loved most about her was her unceasing war against the banal, the obvious, the trite. I had come from a family for whom banality was a philosophic concept, and it was by now impossible for me to change this style within myself, but I appreciated Doris’s position and took a real pleasure in the way she punctured every cliché I launched.　

On the other hand, I had still inherited a taste for the apparent, and was not about to give it up. The Lucifer suit, for instance; I thought of it, Doris punctured the triteness of the conception, I took pleasure in her barbed attack, and afterward I would take a different kind of pleasure in going right ahead and wearing the Lucifer suit.　

I would call myself, generally, amiable. Yes, amiable. In my dealings with the world except for the single instance of my immediate family, toward whom I was implacably determined upon revenge — my normal, almost my only, reaction was of amiability.

Now, having reaffirmed our love for one another, we went ahead and finished our lunch. We left the deli, I jostled a stranger, and we walked four blocks to the costume shop I’d noticed earlier. With money from the stranger’s wallet I put a deposit on a really stunning Satan outfit, tail and pitchfork and all. To Doris, I then said, “Well? Is there anything here you want? I might as well put a deposit for both costumes at once.” The stranger had apparently been well-to-do; in any case, he carried a goodly amount of cash on his person.

“I’m sure you will,” I said.

But by Saturday afternoon, when I went out to the costumer’s to pick up the suit, the idea had not as yet occurred to her. “I’ll have something by the time you get back,” she swore.　

“Oh, yes, you will,” I said disbelievingly. “You’ll wind up going in an old sheet. The ghost of Christmas past.”

“You’ll see,” she said.

And when I came back from the costumer’s, my diablo uniform in a box under my arm, there was Doris dressed all in black, form-fitting black from head to foot. She looked as though she’d been dipped nude into a vat of black paint. The outfit included a skull-tight head covering like that worn by the Phantom and other masked heroes of the comics, which completely shielded everything but the lower part of her face. That was covered by a small square mirror she had somehow attached to the nose of her costume.　

I looked at her, and found her very difficult to see. All that black— The only thing my eyes could really focus on was my own reflection in that little mirror.

I blinked several times, and said, “All right, I give up. What are you supposed to be?”

“You,” she said from behind the mirror.

“Eh?”

“I’m going as you. Whomever I’m talking to, whoever is looking at me, that’s who I am.”

I looked at the mirror. I saw myself.

I said, “Oh, come on, Doris, that’s cheating. You have to be somebody.”

“I am somebody,” she insisted. “I’m you. Besides, this isn’t really a bad outfit for burgling in, is it?”

There’s no getting around it, Doris is much more imaginative than I am.

Well, it was too late to change. Besides, I still like the devil costume for other reasons. So when we arrived at my family’s mansion a little after nine that evening, beneath my coat I was all encased in bright red, just as Doris under her coat was all in black.

There were no names on the invitations, of course, as that would have spoiled the fun of guessing who everybody was. I handed mine to Kibber, a villainous old servant whose continued employment had never ceased to amaze me, and Doris and I joined the colorful throng on the inside, in the main banquet room.　

Doris became the instant hit of the party. People kept coming up and asking her what she was supposed to be, and invariably she said, “You.” Then the questioner would look blank for a second, finally get it, and collapse with delight.

I finally took her out onto the dance floor, where I murmured in her ear, “Once upon a time, it seems to me, you told me the first rule of the good burglar, as it had been passed on to you by your Dad. Do you remember what it was?”

“Be inconspicuous,” she answered.

I said, “Uh huh.”　

“Smarty,” she said, and stuck her thumb into my ribs.

A little later I danced with my sister Eugenie, who confessed, “I feel I must know who you are. It’s right on the tip of my tongue. You’re so familiar somehow.”

Dear Eugenie. I was pleased to see she was as impenetrably stupid as ever.

I saw my brothers Jocko and Hubert from time to time, but didn’t dance with them, and so could not be certain that they also had remained feeble-minded. Looking at them from a safe distance, however, I must say they seemed the same old bumblebrains. (I noticed them looking at me one time, but the perusal didn’t last. Afterward I saw that they were staring at each guest in turn. Memorizing the costumes, I supposed.)　

At ten-thirty I returned to Doris, where she stood surrounded by lusting males, and whispered in her ear, “It’s time.”

She made excuses to her new-found circle of friends and joined me in the hall. Down by the door, Kibber was still at his post. I said to Doris, “This way,” and led her back to the servants’ stairs. We saw no one.

The well-remembered house. I prowled now through the scenes of my pampered but miserable childhood. In this house, dominated by a robber-baron father and a giddy nitwit mother, I had grown up in the company of brothers and sisters of such stultifying banality that it can be no wonder that I clung to Doris, once I found her, as a drowning man clings to a passing life preserver.

But Doris hadn’t preserved my life. She had created my life.

It was still there. Five thousand dollars in used hundreds. I stashed it inside my costume, put the false bottom back, closed the drawer so that its having been jimmied wouldn’t be readily apparent, and on we went to my mother’s bedroom.　

In each instance I was the one who actually entered the room while Doris stood in the doorway to watch for intruders.

In Mama’s room I moved aside the painting of autumn woods — it looked like a jigsaw puzzle — and there was the safe hidden away behind it. In it were most of Mama’s jewels. She hadn’t worn much by way of jewelry tonight, because of her costume. Although she should most appropriately have attended in the guise of a Mack truck, she had chosen instead to be Diana the Huntress, complete with the quiver of arrows on her quivering back.

From the doorway, Doris whispered, “How are you going to break into that? We don’t dare blast it.”

“That’s incredible,” said Doris. “What’s it under? C for combination?”

“No. L for Locke. John Locke. Mother is literate.”

“You mean literal,” said Doris faintly.　

I opened the address book, and there it was: John Locke, VAndyke 6-1233. The VA on the phone dial was 82, and the first number would be to the left. Therefore, the combination was L8, R26, L12, R33.

I went back to the safe and opened it. I put the jewels inside my costume, shut the safe, slid the painting back into place, and Doris whispered, “Somebody coming!”　

I zipped under the bed. Doris stepped behind the door.

It was, unfortunately, Mama. She came into the room, switched on her small vanity lamp — Mama dislikes bright light in a bedroom — and went poking through her dresser drawers, the arrows rattling faintly in the quiver on her back.

Doris was in plain sight! Peeking from under the bed, I saw that the door was only half open, and that Doris was where Mama merely had to turn her head to see her.

But Mama didn’t see her. Doris had put her black-garbed hands up in front of her face, covering the mirror and her eyes, so that she was now totally black. She blended into the shadow behind the door, as invisible as glass. The only reason I knew she was there was because, uh... well, because I knew she was there.

Finally Mama left, and a very few minutes later so did we. We returned to the main banquet room and both made ourselves conspicuous for a little while, dancing with this one and that one, joining the largest chattering groups, all as preface to a nice obvious smooth withdrawal. Thirty or forty people would see us leave, departing casually, openly, with not an apparent care in the world. Who would suspect such leave-takers of burglary?

But just as I was about to begin my farewells, a heavy hand closed on my arm and a familiar voice said, “Hold on, there. Somebody wants to see you.”

I turned my head and saw my older brother, Jocko, the football player, as huge and as dense as ever, dressed in a Tarzan suit. I braced myself to pull out of his grip and try for the door, but then I saw he was smiling. He had not penetrated my disguise after all, but had approached me for some other reason.

I said, “What’s up?”

“Just come along,” he said, taking a childish delight in being mysterious. “You’ll see.”

I went with him warily, ready to run. We walked down the side of the room to the bandstand, where I saw, milling about in some confusion, seven more Satans, plus Doris, plus — standing in front of the microphone — my Mama.

As Jocko placed me among the other devils, Mama began to shout for attention, announcing, “It’s time for the prizes, everybody!”

Prizes?

When she had everyone’s attention, Mama went on to explain: “Instead of the usual prize for best costume,” she yelled, “we thought it would be fun to give prizes for the most original costume and for the least original costume!”

Oh.

I very carefully avoided looking at Doris, but I knew without looking that she would be wearing a little triumphant smirk behind her mirror at that moment. Obviously she had been brought forward to be awarded the prize for the most original costume, which was all she’d needed to make her unbearable for weeks to come.

All she’d needed, but not all she’d get. What were we eight Lucifers there for, if not to be jointly — and quite properly — awarded prizes for the least original costume? It would take me months to live this down, months.

My forebodings were correct. Mama announced that the prizewinner for the most original costume was “the young lady who came as everybody else!” Doris stepped up on the platform, bowed prettily to the burst of applause, and accepted her prize, a little brooch-watch that would have made a nice addendum to our haul.

And then it was our turn, we eight scarlet fiends. Sheepishly, we trooped up onto the bandstand to get our prizes: blank identification bracelets.

I felt foolish, of course, standing there above the crowd, being hailed and applauded for my lack of originality while Doris looked on, but a minute later I felt even more foolish as I began to hear the word the crowd was shouting at us, over and over again:

“Unmask! Unmask!”

Well, I didn’t get all the way to the door, but at least in the confusion Doris managed to get away, and if I know Doris she’s already plotting some way to break me out of here. I don’t know what her plan is yet, but I know one thing about it.

It’ll be original.