The Couple Next Door: Collected Short Mysteries

Preface by Tom Nolan

Stories made by fiction-writers are often like the rumors described by the narrator of “Notions”: they “start with a seed of truth which grows wildly in all directions but straight.”

So seems the case with this brief tale in which little seems to happen but a good deal is revealed.

During World War Two, with Ken Millar on duty aboard the Shipley Bay, Margaret Millar sent her husband a newsy letter from the hotel in La Jolla, California, where they’d both been staying recently: “Scandal in the Cabrillo! Two young girls arrived last week — turned out to be Wanted by Detectives. They were runaway freshmen from U.C.L.A. & their poppas (from Iowa) had hired det’s to find them. Upshot: they both sternly refused to return home or to college, & one of them already has a job at Morrie’s Grill. What idiots!”

A few months later, Margaret bought a house up the California coast in Santa Barbara, where Helen Hunt Jackson had drawn inspiration for her 1884 novel Ramona. The heroine of that enduringly popular work was a woman of mixed Scotch and Indian blood, who eloped with a young Temecula Indian, who in turn came to a tragic end. The “legend” of Ramona, as written by Mrs. Jackson, was a key part of the myth of Old California around which Santa Barbara grew.

A droll modern Ramona is encountered in Ross Macdonald’s 1973 novel Sleeping Beauty (a title, its author pointed out, which shares initials with Santa Barbara) — a half-Indian woman who asks the book’s detective, “Where’s your bow and arrow, Archer?” To which Lew replies, “Out in the back of the Pontiac.”

Bits of the Ramona legend, mixed maybe with Margaret Millar’s memory of those runaway girls and their two pursuing detectives, seem sprinkled into “Notions,” whose Miss Porter, with her Pontiac radiator cap, all her life mourns (and takes pride in) her “lost” Ramon.

Miss Porter is proud too of another persistent presence: Blue Boy, the jay she insists is devoted to her. Art lovers hearing the name Blue Boy will be reminded of the famous Gainsborough portrait of a dashing English youth, wellknown to Southern Californians for being on display from the 1920s at the Huntington Library in San Marino. Many fair copies of this painting were made over the years — a fact which plays into the humor of “Notions.”

Also on view at the Huntington for decades, hung directly opposite the “Blue Boy,” was a “sister” portrait (by Thomas Lawrence): “Pinkie.” Is it mere coincidence that “Notions” mock-Indian Miss Porter is described as “short and plump and pink”? And that the woman writing her story in 1987 was, like “Pinkie,” less wellknown but, many said, equally as “good” as her blue-eyed, lifelong companion in art? And that Canada geese, even more devoted than bluejays, mate for life?

This oddly poignant tale, by an avowedly unreligious teller, draws attention to some of the ways (myth, fable, fiction) through which humans transcend such harsh realities as a killed bird or a vanished partner.

“Of course it’s not likely we’ll meet again. But it’s a lovely notion, isn’t it?”

Notes

“‘Scandal in the Cabrillo!’”: Margaret to Kenneth Millar, February 28,1945, M Millar Papers, UCI.

“where Helen Hunt Jackson had drawn inspiration”: See Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s, by Kevin Starr (Oxford, 1990).

“a title, its author pointed out”: Ross Macdonald interviews with Paul Nelson, UCI. Macdonald also once noted that Lew Archer shares initials with Los Angeles.

Notions

Miss Porter had some strange notions. Many of us do: they wander in and out of our heads, leaving little or no impression. Miss Porter’s were more persistent, impervious to time and reason. She was convinced, for instance, that a certain bluejay which frequented her feeding station at the rear of her townhouse followed her whenever she left the premises to go to the grocery store, the doctor, the bank, the library. It waited, she claimed, on the parapet of the library roof, on the telephone pole outside the doctor’s office, on the water-maiden fountain in front of the bank, or on top of the oak tree planted in the center of the grocery-store parking lot. When Miss Porter returned to her old Lincoln, she would snap her fingers to alert the bird to her departure, and drive home using the same route every time.

I wasn’t surprised that the jay or any other creature could recognize her car. The Lincoln was distinctive not only for its age and size but because the roof had been painted white to reflect the sun’s rays and keep the interior of the car cool, Miss Porter having no use for air-conditioning. In addition to its rakish roof, the Lincoln carried an Indian radiator cap once used on Pontiacs. Miss Porter had gone to considerable trouble to acquire the Indian radiator ornament, corresponding with the main Pontiac officials in Michigan and, on their advice, canvassing various used-car lots and junkyards. She finally purchased one for fifty dollars at a swap meet, explaining to the swapper that the reason she wanted it was because she was one-ninth Indian. How she arrived at this unlikely figure no one knew, but to give it some authenticity she wore her hair long and black and straight. The rest of Miss Porter must have come from the other eight-ninths of her heredity. She was short and plump and pink.

There are always rumors about the very rich. Many of them start with a seed of truth which then grows wildly in all directions but straight. One of these rumors concerned Miss Porter’s elopement at the age of fifteen with a Mexican gardener. Three weeks later she returned home in the company of a couple of burly men hired to find her. The fate of her lover remained in doubt. There were several versions: he had accepted a bribe to get lost; he had been killed by one of the two burly men; he was arrested after a bar brawl in Ensenada. The story Miss Porter told was different. She had repeated it to everybody she knew, swearing each to secrecy, without changing a detail. Her lover, Ramon, broken-hearted, had flung himself off a cliff into the sea and drowned.

“He was devoted to me,” Miss Porter said. And I was, in spite of myself, rather touched, though it was long ago and far away and may never have happened.

The bluejay was also devoted to her, or so it seemed. There were numerous bluejays in the neighborhood, all of them the same size and shape and color, the same brashness of manner and loudness of voice. I couldn’t tell if it was the same bird who came every day and perched on the railing of Miss Porter’s deck, bobbing and weaving like a fighter at the sound of the bell. Its raucous demands brought Miss Porter scurrying out the back door with a handful of peanuts. She talked to the bird. If the air was still and my windows were open I could hear an occasional sentence.

“Now, now, is it nice to be so greedy? No, it is not nice. And that voice of yours. Why, it’s enough to wake the dead and kill the living. Oh, oh, what a hungry boy you are.”

Sometimes one of her sentences was punctuated by a little cry of pain when the bird’s beak jabbed her flesh instead of a peanut.

She was a good sport about it.

“Just a touch of blood-poisoning,” she said when I met her one day in the library and inquired about her bandaged hand. “My little bird gave me a love peck.”

“It was probably unintentional.”

“My dear child, you don’t know much about love pecks,” she said with a little laugh. “They are always intentional.”

About three months after I moved out from Chicago and rented the house next to Miss Porter’s, she invited me to drive over the pass into the Santa Ynez Valley to pick olallie berries. I’d never heard of olallie berries but it was a pleasant day for a drive and I had nothing better to do.

Most short elderly women look overwhelmed behind the wheel of a huge car, but Miss Porter seemed right at home and in full charge. She drove skillfully around the sharp precipitous road up the mountain, pausing every now and then to look over at a tree or shrub with the binoculars she kept on the seat beside her.

“Oh, dear,” she said finally, “I feared this would happen, I really feared. But there was nothing I could do to stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“Blue Boy is following us.”

And so he was. Or so it seemed. Every time Miss Porter braked the car and pointed at a toyon, a manzanita, a scrub oak, a bluejay would be perched on top.

“He will be exhausted,” she said. “The trip is much too long for him.”

It had been a rainy spring and the valley was lush and green and the lake was blue as jays. We turned off the main road into a lane marked by a hand-printed sign, OLALLIES, PICK YOUR OWN, $4 PER BUCKET. At the ranch house, we were each outfitted with a plastic belt with a bucket fastened to it.

“We will just take our time,” Miss Porter said. “That will give Blue Boy an opportunity to rest up for the return trip.”

By noon, the day had turned hot and the sun was relentless. My head felt as if it had been put in an oven and taken out medium rare. Miss Porter filled her bucket before I even reached the halfway mark. My fingers were stained purplish red and covered with painful little scratches. We paid for the olallie berries, which were then transferred to plastic bags. On our way back to the car, Miss Porter stopped suddenly.

“Where’s Blue Boy? I don’t hear him. Do you?”

“No.”

“I must find him and tell him we’re leaving.”

She plunged into a wild blue sea of sky flowers toward the place on the telephone pole where we’d last seen Blue Boy. He lay almost directly underneath in a tangle of burr clover.

Miss Porter turned away, covering her eyes with her hand. “Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

“The trip exhausted him,” she said. “It wore out his brave lit-tie heart. He loved me enough to die for me. He died of devotion.”

I didn’t point out the two small round holes in the bird’s breast, nor did I draw attention to the boys with the BB guns we passed on the main road.

“There will be other birds,” I said.

“No. Not for me. When Ramon died, people said there would be other men. But there never were.”

“Birds are easier to replace.”

There were other birds, of course, all the way home, many of them jays perched on scrub oak and toyon and manzanita, all exactly alike, the same color and size and shape, the same brash manners and raucous voices. Miss Porter did not acknowledge them.

When we reached home, she silently handed me both bags of olallie berries with an expression of revulsion on her face as if the berries had gone bad and she wanted to get rid of them.

This is how I remembered her during my month-long trip to Chicago on family business. When I returned home, my first job was the usual stocking up on groceries. Miss Porter and I met at opposite ends of the delicatessen counter. She waved at me merrily with her right hand. The left was heavily bandaged and supported by a sling made of a silk scarf.

“Another love peck,” she said brightly. “Would you believe it?”

I said I would.

“What a surprise it was to come out on the deck and find Blue Boy waiting for me. He wasn’t dead after all. He had merely fainted from exhaustion. When he regained consciousness we were gone, and it took him several days to get home without my car to guide him. But lo and behold, there he was, good as new.” She took a step closer to me and lowered her voice. “It makes me wonder about Ramon.”

“How?”

“Perhaps he didn’t really die when he jumped over that cliff. Perhaps he is, right this minute, working in someone else’s garden. He will have changed considerably by this time, but I would still know him — the way I knew Blue Boy.” She shook her head as if trying to dislodge an idea. “Of course it’s not likely we’ll meet again. But it’s a lovely notion, isn’t it?”

I had to agree. It was a lovely notion.