Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 25, No. 7, July, 1980

Furberry’s Banana by M. G. Frost

Sophie wanted Furberry to give up the banana...

I now have the office in the English Department of Poverton College that used to be Furberry’s office. The room is not spacious nor particularly well lit, and its decorations are few. One really cannot call framed certificates of degree decorations at all, I suppose, more just professional convention. There is certainly nothing on my wall to match Furberry’s banana.

The banana had been a prominent decoration in Professor Furberry’s office, its yellow velour plumpness forming a crescent shape on the wall above his desk, much like that of fighting fish often found in the offices of business executives. It was certainly what people call a “conversation piece.”

Neither a fighting fish nor a banana would be appropriate to my walls, for I am not forceful and businesslike, nor am I light-hearted, sophisticated, and a social lion like Furberry. I admit I envied him the bright attentions his suave presence evoked at faculty meetings and parties. I envied the gay repartee that issued from his office when, prodded, he referred to himself as “top banana in the English show” here at Poverton. I envied him the blushing oh-you-naughty-man attentions of visiting females and new office staff.

Repartee about the banana often seemed to bring “naughty man” responses and, once in a while, Professor Furberry would wink at me over the shoulder of some giggling lady as if to say, “We men, Poffering, we men — like old Lord Byron, you know — are dashing devils to be reckoned with!” And I would grin back at him, rather foolishly, I fear, yet feeling for that moment just such a devil indeed.

Furberry encouraged face-to-face speculation about the banana’s origin, and he even gave some credence to one behind-the-back one. A lady faculty member, miffed over some disagreement with Furberry, once declared that she expected any day a raid by some angry Carmen Miranda type intent on refurbishing her headpiece. “Close,” grinned Furberry when the theory got back to him, “close.” Less flattering theories, even if he heard them, he chose to ignore.

The banana, as you see, contributed greatly to Furberry’s chosen life style. It had benefits, and yet the possession of such an unusual objet d’art can, it seems, lead to certain difficulties.

Furberry’s difficulties, at least my first knowledge of them, began one day when I had been working late, grading papers in my little office adjacent to his. Furberry entered the outer office. I was very surprised to see him so late in the afternoon, for his classes were arranged to his liking early in the day, other faculty members being forced to arrange their schedules around his, which was inflexible.

I was surprised too at Furberry’s appearance. His hairpiece was just a little askew — obvious — as it seldom was even to his familiars. His face was flushed, and missing was his usual affable, thirty-two-force grin of ivory and gold. He stalked into his office without a word to me (my door was open and I was in full view) or to Miss Hagachoff, who was always the last to leave the office on any day. Miss Hagachoff looked alarmed and upset, and a few minutes later, when a loud groan was heard within Furberry’s sanctum, she got up and nervously but deliberately moved her sensible oxfords toward his door. She didn’t get there.

“Stop, Hagachoff! Oh, Hagachoff, do go home! Stop that incessant pencil-pushing and paper-rattling. Out!” said Furberry.

I couldn’t see Miss Hagachoff’s face, but I could imagine it. When Hagachoff was upset, the thin paleness of her face turned into a ski slope down which her wire-rimmed glasses threatened to plunge as into an abyss. A look at that face did temper Furberry’s violence, for I heard the usual suave Furberry saying, “Please, my dear, forgive my harsh words. You work too hard, dear Miss Hagachoff, and you are thoughtful and kind besides. But do go home, to your well earned evening’s rest.”

“Are you sure? Are you—” Miss Hagachoff’s small voice and small protestations faded as Professor Furberry gallantly pressed her handbag and coat upon her and guided her firmly out the door.

The lady out, he turned and faced me. “Oh world, oh life, oh time, Poffering! Oh false womankind! Poffering, never, never marry. Never, never have anything at all to do with women!”

I had hoped to pretend I’d observed nothing and go on grading my papers, but of course, that now was not to be. He advanced into my office (that never happened before) and flopped into the straight-backed visitor’s chair in front of my desk (that was incredible). I blinked and tried to find something to say, but that wasn’t necessary — a blessing, since I quite often have difficulty synchronizing reaction with speech.

“Poffering, I need a drink,” he said. “And I need a bit of companionship. Come on, old boy, leave off the labor and let us adjourn to Paco’s. Have you got your car?”

“Well—” I hesitated. I don’t drink, but I did have my car.

“Right on, then!” he said without waiting for my answer, and soon we were in my 1964 Fairlane and at a location not far from campus in miles, yet one totally unfamiliar to me. I parked at his direction on the street near a small unprepossessing establishment, over the door of which was stated in as yet unlit neon, PACO’S. I was very nervous. The streetlight on this suspicious-looking street was half a block away, and Furberry hardly waited for me to lock my car door after we stepped out.

It was black in Paco’s. Going in was like entering a movie theater out of bright sunlight. There were low murmurs and clinks of glassware, and a chunk-kachunka noise I later learned came from the pinball machines at the back. Furberry seemed to know his way, and I kept him in earshot, if not in sight, until we slipped into a now twilit booth, my eyesight beginning to return.

Furberry did know the way and the bartender as well, and we soon had two tall Tio Pacos before us. Furberry swallowed long, slumped, and sighed.

“Have you ever been in love, Poffering?” he asked, and as usual didn’t pause for an answer. “Sophie, Poffering, thinks love is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but then—” he hesitated, as if reflecting “—it is, it is ‘of man’s life a thing apart’ and ‘woman’s whole existence.’ Right?”

I dared to sip the drink before me. Its astringent taste and a brief indecision about attempting to speak plus a quick mental chase after the quotation — Byron — all conspired to gag me. I doubled over, coughing, and almost upset the drink.

“Down the wrong way?” said Furberry, but made no saving move. “I wanted to be honest with Sophie,” he said.

Now my mind made another search. Oh yes. Sophie Hennington was Professor Hennington’s widow. I recalled that I had heard something about Sophie and Furberry going about together, but the private lives of my fellow faculty have never been of much interest to me. Now I recalled the face — and, oh yes, the Opera Guild meeting last year. She had given a little talk, reminiscing about the time John McCormack visited her mother — she had been a mere babe at the time, of course, she had said, and the assembly had laughed politely as she smiled and pushed a bit at the too-red hair framing her Irish face, her charm bracelet jingling pleasantly along with the laughter of the crowd — but less pleasantly, I fear, during the pregnant pauses of the tenor aria which followed her talk.

Furberry continued. “I said, ‘Sophie, of course there were others. We are mature people, Sophie. A lovely woman like you is sure to have had love affairs herself.’ I guess I should have said a while ago, twice-in-a-lifetime is love to Sophie, for she began to tell me of her late Homer and the real devotion of their love for each other. Oh, Poffering, how that woman talks! Much as I admire her outgoing manner, her joie de vivre, I must say that Sophie never lets anyone but herself say anything. ‘Harold,’ she said, ‘there is true love, and there is philandering. I have seen how ladies flock about you at parties, and I have heard about’ ” — Furberry paused — “ ‘about that infamous banana.’ ”

“Yes,” I said, still not daring another sip of the Tio Paco.

“She wants me to give up my banana! She has even threatened to come in and snatch it off my wall. She suspects—” he leaned forward, whispering “—that it was a gift from a lady.”

“Was it?”

Furberry grinned brightly. “And if it was, Poffering, if it was? No, Poffering, I will not let Sophie take away my banana. Whatever she thinks about it, it is my banana. So much for Sophie! A marriage cannot be founded upon such a start.” He took a big swallow of his drink and sat back in the booth as if everything had been unalterably settled. His eyes gleamed with determination and Tio Paco, and although leaning against the midnight plastic booth pushed his hairpiece a little forward he did not notice it.

“Furberry — Harold—” I said, for my own few sips of Paco were making me bold “—is a banana really worth it? I mean, if you and Mrs. Hennington have gone so far as to consider marriage—”

“No!” he thundered at me. “No, no, no! There are other bonnie lassies around. Have you perhaps noticed Miss Lakey, the new teaching assistant in our department? Such a scholarly mind, such damask beauty—”

Indeed I had noticed Miss Lakey and, while she was usually all business, not one to giggle and make conversation, she had been invited to confer in the inner sanctum many times, and I had seen Furberry accompany her solicitously, the two smiling and laughing, to the outer office door, Hagachoff’s pruney disapproval affecting them not a whit.

It was seven P.M. by the blue-lit clock in the bar, and my stomach’s urgings prompted a suggestion to leave. Furberry was unwilling at first, but he yielded, and we made our way at last from twilight within to twilight without. I dropped him at a house across the street from the East Campus. It seemed that he parked his vintage MG in the driveway of Sophie’s abode every day and, as he said, “enjoyed the salutary briskness” of a walk to West Campus, where our offices were located.

Through my rear-view mirror I saw him adjust his black beret and drive off. And did he make a vulgar gesture at the curtained windows of the house’s upper story? Yes, I fear he did.

Our “drinking buddy” relationship, Furberry’s and mine, did not extend into the next day. Furberry was his old, detached, smoothly sophisticated self, and I was again the forever paper-grading resident of an adjacent box in the English office. The resumed distance between us did not disturb me. I was, in fact, grateful not to be involved in the splintered mosaic of his love life, but I couldn’t help noticing that Furberry and Miss Lakey were often together in the hall, in animated conversation over the drinking fountain or paused on a stairway landing for a moment’s discourse. And I noticed that the banana remained in its accustomed place on his wall.

In the days to follow, Furberry took to wearing a red rose in his tweedy buttonhole, and — yes, I’m sure of it — he had a new, less treacherous hairpiece. During this time he hummed a good deal and was pleasant enough to Miss Hagachoff, to the student help, Bonnie and Betty, and to me. Thus we were unprepared for the day when his mood suddenly changed.

That day Hagachoff was rudely ordered to bring certain files up to date, the student help was rebuked for bringing their social lives into the office, and several odious teaching assignments were given out for the next term. My assignment was certainly no winner, but I noticed that Miss Lakey’s was even worse — a large class of Freshman English students at a particularly inconvenient time of day. Now, in places of more prestige than Poverton College teaching assistants never get anything other than Freshmen to teach, so Miss Lakey’s assignment would not be surprising. However, I couldn’t help but observe Miss Lakey and young Dr. Rogers together here and there in much the same circumstances as I had earlier observed her and Furberry. In any case, Furburry was in another snit, and he stayed that way, seemingly feeling no obligation to oil the troubled waters this time.

Then one morning I arrived at the office after my ten o’clock class and found everything in an uproar. Miss Hagachoff’s glasses had skied lugubriously onto her neatly arranged desk, and she stood white and shaking.

“I... I don’t know, Professor — only for a moment was I out of the office — you know it was only a moment!”

The furious Furberry turned on me as I entered. “You, Poffering — where is my banana?”

“Ba-ba-nana?” I stuttered.

“My banana is missing. It was there last night, and you and Hagachoff were still here when I left.”

I tried to remember. “Yes,” I said, “but—”

“Was it here when you left?”

How the hell do I know? was what I wanted to say but I merely murmured, “I don’t know.” He vented his wrath on me, Miss Hagachoff, and the student help at great length, then angrily left the office.

“Haggy,” I finally said — and realized two hours later that while I had used the diminutive affectionately it was not a flattering one — “will you please go to Dr. Rogers’ office and ask him for his final roll?”

Miss Hagachoff needed to get out of there and was most grateful for the opportunity.

Following were days of gloom and grey, inside and often out, days of trickling umbrellas and of ill concealed snifflings (Hagachoff’s). Furberry was very late to work most days, and cold and curt to all of us.

The first banana missive arrived on a Friday, but I didn’t know about it until the Tuesday after when a strange lady stopped me outside Staunton Hall and pressed upon me, suddenly and inexplicably, a package and a letter addressed to Furberry. There were no words spoken, just a collision of umbrellas, and before I could realize the situation she had sloshed away into the crowds of class-bound students.

Bewildered, I made delivery to a seemingly work-absorbed Furberry, who accepted the package without a word and waved me thither — only to come to my door just as I sat down at my desk and, motioning incoherently, and red-faced, indicate that I should follow him back into his office. There, he shut the door.

“Poffering, where did you get this thing?” He indicated a great, green cucumber on his desk. I told Furberry how quickly it had all happened and that the lady was so muffled up against the weather that I couldn’t have seen her face even if I’d had the time or wits enough to try.

He pushed the now crumpled-looking letter, sans envelope, toward me.

“I understand,” it said, “that you advertised in the Craterville Times for the return of an object of certain dimensions which, belonging to you, was recently stolen; and I was moved to ameliorate your distress, if I can indeed do so. Is this the purloined object? If it is, I rejoice. Do not try to find me. I desire no reward.” It was unsigned.

My evident astonishment must have cleared me of any suspected complicity. Furberry sank dejectedly into his squeakless executive chair (it was, by orders to Hagachoff, kept well oiled). He opened a desk drawer and, with shaking hands, pulled out another paper which he silently gave me.

The message on this one was made of letters evidently cut from the comic strips of a newspaper. “Your BaNANA,” it read, “Is IN my CUStoDy You Will bE INformeD IN FUTURE coMMuNicAtionS AS TO the PRice of ITS saFe ReTUrn.”

“Who, Poffering, is committing this outrage upon my sanity?” moaned Furberry.

I had, of course, no answer, and no answer to that same question when the tape recording came: on which someone, in the dim recesses of the Listening Lab where Furberry led me one evening, sang, “Yes, we have no hmm-hmm-hmms” and “Banana ripe, banana ripe, ripe I cry-y! Full and fair ones, co-o-ome a-a-and buy-y!” The voice, said Furberry, was unfamiliar to him — as it was to me. He cast the offending cartridge into the wastebasket, then retrieved it. His eyes gleamed menacingly and he said, “Deduction — clues. I’ll get this robber yet.”

“Well,” I asked, feeling like Dr. Watson, “who has the motive? Who most dislikes your liking your banana?”

“Sophie! Sophie, of course. And she’d know that wretched eighteenth-century ditty too. But Sophie made it clear that she had no further interest in me whatsoever.”

“Nevertheless a bona fide suspect. But, Furberry, how about Miss Lakey? How does she feel about—”

Furberry’s expression changed from detective glee to bloodhound gloom. “She hated it. Of course, I didn’t know at first. Poffering, things had been going so well for us. Well, it was all over the night I took her to the Aztec Room of the Shelton. Over her third champagne cocktail — I was telling her about my college fraternity initiation and old Harry Buller and I riding buses all night without any funds — he had to point to his head and say, ‘I’m a cuckoo, I’m a cuckoo!’ Hilarious! — anyway, over her third champagne cocktail, she suddenly suggested we go somewhere else. It was called Tonio’s. I could hardly enter for the din of that rock-and-roll stuff. I spent the evening trying to drink some poisonous green thing called a Tonio’s Tempest, and she... she actually left me sitting alone while she gyrated with a series of young clowns. Oh, it was a terrible evening, but at least I discovered that Miss Lakey and I could never be close. Common values, Poffering, are essential if two people are to have a meaningful relationship. When I think that I even toyed with the idea of telling her how I came to have the banana — the poignant and meaningful circumstances—” Furberry stopped, grimacing angrily. “No matter. Then and there I cut Miss Lakey out of my life!”

I decided that Miss Lakey was a poor suspect for our thief, unless the teaching assignment she’d been given by Furberry was a source of resentment.

“Professor,” I said, “could Miss Hagachoff have a possible motive?”

“Miss Hagachoff?” He looked amazed.

“I’m just trying to cover all areas which might bring enlightenment. Miss Hagachoff has worked for you for many years. And she’s always been solicitous of your needs and intensely loyal.”

Having so recently rethought the sad affair Lakey, Furberry now settled, smilingly relieved, into the flattering possibility of being the object of Miss Hagachoff’s unrequited love. “Well!” he said, still smiling. Then, shaking his head, “No,” he said. “What you say may be true, Poffering, but this is just not Miss Hagachoff’s style.”

“A student prank, perhaps?”

“Not Bonnie or Betty!”

This time it was I who said no. Betty and Bonnie were serious-minded scholarship students, and I happened to know that they needed their jobs too much to risk playing jokes.

After an hour or so of these conjectures, we left the Listening Lab, Sherlocked-out for the day, more or less agreed that Furberry could only watch and wait for further developments. The comic-strip letter had, after all, promised further developments.

But days and weeks went by and there were none. It began to seem the affair had never been, and we of the English office were rather glad, although I confess a certain sense of anti-climax disturbed me when I thought about the matter.

Furberry was not relieved, however. At first he seemed to be, but then he began asking Miss Hagachoff rather too anxiously about the daily mail. Then one day he stopped me in front of Staunton Hall to ask me if I had seen anyone who might perhaps resemble the lady of the cucumber occurrence. Of course Furberry knew full well the details of that happening and how I was not able to make any identification. But he made me go over the incident once again: the muffled figure, the umbrella, the color of her clothing, her walk, her jingle—

“Jingle? You say she jingled as she walked away?”

I had amazed myself. The jingle must have been stored somewhere in my subconscious until this moment of recall. Yes, I was sure, there had been a jingle.

“Then it’s Sophie, Poffering! It had to be Sophie and that damned charm bracelet she always wears. Poffering, I am going after my banana. Sophie Hennington has no right to play these demeaning games!” And Furberry walked briskly away in the direction of East Campus.

The next thing I knew, the Furberry-Hennington alliance was on again. Furberry himself volunteered nothing to me, but his mood was cheerful and assured, even as soon as the day after his resolution to confront the wicked Sophie. I finally decided to press the matter. I was, after all, willing or no, involved, if only as consulting detective. I walked into his office — and saw a large picture of Sophie on the wall behind his desk. I asked him flat out what had happened.

Furberry looked uncomfortable. I had the impression he would wish me into the nearest supply cabinet or worse, had he the power. But then he got up and closed the door, waving me into the chair across from him.

“You were all wrong, Poffering. I should have been able to counter your suspicions of Sophie, but distraught as I was—”

My suspicions! But I was too intrigued at that moment to point out to Furberry his gross calumny.

He went on, “Sophie was absolutely broken-hearted that anyone should think that she would steal — that even in her very natural jealousy—” he smiled “—she would take from me an object I so obviously valued.”

“And she cried,” I said.

“Oh, of course she cried. Dear Sophie has such a sensitive soul. We’re to be married next week, Poffering, and you must come to the wedding. Dr. Heinrich — you know, the eighteenth-century scholar who is retiring as head of the English Department at Coppershaw University? — has consented to be my best man. You may as well know now, Poffering, that he has named me as his successor at Coppershaw, and Sophie and I will be leaving for the new campus very soon after the wedding. A great man, Heinrich. Have you read his ‘On the Nature of the Comma in Keats’?”

I shook my head and found myself being escorted out Furberry’s door, the topic of Sophie obviously curtailed.

The topic of banana was likewise terminated. It came up briefly at the faculty’s “Farewell, Furberries” party. Someone — did I see Bonnie and Betty exchange conspiratorial smiles? — furnished a great banana cream pie as part of the refreshments. I think Furberry looked a little shocked at the first forkful, as his tastebuds recognized that characteristic mellow flavor, but all remained jolly and merry. Furberry prattled and punned, and Sophie was grace and vivaciousness personified. She was even nice to me. I had suspected that Furberry had made me the villain of their estrangement, but Sophie seemed to have no hard feelings. I said the conventional things to her, and was surprised at her warm response, a reaction no doubt kindled by the Cold Duck then flowing freely.

As we talked, she leaned toward me a bit unsteadily, and a glass of the Cold Duck spilled onto the front of my best suit. “Oh, my!” she said, “oh, dear, I’m so sorry!” And she began brushing me with one of those paper napkins that quickly disintegrate into distasteful white fuzz. As she wiped, she jingled. She jingled as always, and this time the jingle’s source, her heavily laden charm bracelet, fell at my feet. With no little bumping of heads and undignified scrambling, I retrieved it for her.

“Oh, my,” she said, as she tried a bit unsteadily to stand, “that bracelet is such a trouble, but it was a gift from — oh, Professor Poffering, I would take losing it as a very symbolic loss.” She leaned forward, whispering. “Harold is sush, such a jealous man, you know. This is a collection of my life’s experiences. Giving it up will be like giving up a part of myself, but Harold gets absoluly, absolutely green.” She giggled a little, and in the process of opening her bag to stow the bracelet away, she dropped it again.

I was glad that she did. I was becoming embarrassed by Mrs. Furberry’s indisposition, and was glad to pick it up and focus my attention on it instead of on her fumblings. In retrieving it, I noticed some of the charms hanging from it: a wee mortarboard, a heart with a diamond in the center, a replica of the Eiffel Tower—

“Thank you,” she said as she took the bracelet from me. “How good it is to be with old friends as Harold and I begin a new life.”

As a matter of fact, it was a new life beginning for me also. I am enjoying Furberry’s former office that is now mine. I am even beginning to think about how I may decorate it. I think now and then also about how Furberry now decorates his. Sophie no doubt helps him with the interior design. I am sure there is no banana, but I am equally sure that Sophie, true to implied resolve, no longer clinks nor jangles.

As Miss Hagachoff brings me my morning coffee and as I swing pleasantly in my squeakless chair, I think, Farewell, Furberry. You have lost and you have gained. You will never see your purloined property again, and are now perhaps glad of it. May you also, Furberry, never see that charm bracelet again — mercifully never see what I saw as I held it in my hand that evening. For among your lady’s bangle’s shining and cacophonous penduli, hiding between the cunning treble-clef and the tiny American flag, hangs a brightly gleaming golden banana.