Allen Kopp – Page 67 – Literary Fictions

The Song of Bernadette ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Song of Bernadette ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The Song of Bernadette, by the Austrian writer Franz Werfel, is a fictional account of the true story of a simple peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, who experienced visions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France, in 1858. The novel was first published in 1941 in German and was made in 1943 into what is today considered a classic movie that is usually shown on TV around Christmastime.

At almost six hundred pages, The Song of Bernadette is not an easy book to read. The English translation is filled with oddly arranged and wordy sentences that often require re-reading to understand. You are going to have to be a dedicated reader to get through this book. The story is minutely and scrupulously detailed or, to put it another way, it’s a very slow-moving reading experience. It could have been told in half the number of pages. However, those readers who stick with the book through to the end will be glad they did. It’s a fascinating story of simple faith in a cruel, cynical and unbelieving world. The life of a saint is not an easy path.

Bernadette, following examples set in the Bible, was the least likely person to be singled out for a divine visitation. She was a sickly girl from a poor family that lived in what was known as the “Cachot,” a former prison converted into a poor dwelling place. She suffered from asthma from birth and was not a particularly well-liked or well-disposed child, or a bright student in school. There was nothing remarkable about her; she was, in fact, one of hundreds just like her.

One day when she was gathering firewood with her sister and another girl in an ugly, repellant place near her home, she experienced a vision of what she described as a beautiful lady in a niche in a rock formation. She thereafter referred to the vision as “The Lady,” while it is assumed to have been the Virgin Mary. Bernadette tried to keep the vision a secret but, of course, news of it broke out and everyone wanted to know what it was all about and what it meant.

The Lady instructed Bernadette to come to the place where she first saw her every day for fifteen days. On one of these daily visitations, the Lady instructed Bernadette to get on her hands and knees and dig in the dirt. When Bernadette obeyed this directive, a spring gushed forth beneath her fingers, a spring that was found to have curative powers. Among the first to be “healed” from their afflictions were a blind man whose sight was restored and a two-year-old boy, near death, who suffered from paralysis and convulsions. When word of these miraculous cures spread, the spring and Bernadette became famous. People from all over the world came to Lourdes to be healed of whatever ailed them. Enough genuine healings occurred to convince many that it was real.

With all her notoriety, Bernadette’s troubles were just beginning. For every person who believed she was genuine, there was an equal number who believed she was a charlatan and an instrument of the devil. Local officials and even some members of the clergy took it upon themselves to discredit Bernadette and to find plausible reasons to prove she was a fake.

With all that happened to Bernadette and her family, she never lost her simplicity and her faith in her visions of the Lady. What it meant was for others to figure out. She remained humble throughout her life and wasn’t interested in the ways of the world. She entered a religious order, where she performed menial kitchen duties, and died twenty years after her visions at the age of thirty-four from a painful affliction known as tuberculosis of the bones. When a fellow nun suggested during her illness that she partake of the curative waters of the spring at Lourdes, she stated simply that the cure was not meant for her.

Fifty-four years after her death, in 1931, Bernadette was sanctified as a saint in a ceremony at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, with fifty thousand people in attendance. Her body, during the investigative process for sainthood, was found to have not decomposed in all the decades since her death. Her detractors had a logical explanation even for that, saying that she had been expertly embalmed and was merely a “mummy.”

January 9, 2013 by allen0997

Django Unchained ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Django Unchained ~ A Capsule Movie Review By Allen Kopp

The new movie Django Unchained is directed by Quentin Tarantino. Those who are familiar with the work of this director know that his movies are inspired by samurai films, “spaghetti westerns” from the 1960s, and exploitation films of the 1970s. Whether you like Quentin Tarantino’s films or not, you have to admit there’s nothing else quite like them.

Django Unchained is entertaining, violent, bloody, intelligently written, long (two hours and 45 minutes), funny at times (as when the vigilantes are trying to decide whether or not they should wear hoods to cover their faces), and completely implausible. Admirers of Quentin Tarantino will think it’s a masterpiece, while others will be put off by the spurting blood, exploding heads, and simplistic moral tone. It has lots of riding and shooting, just like a western, but it’s set in the pre-Civil War South, so it’s technically not a western. Also like a western, there are good guys and bad guys (the bad ones are really bad), and we know from the outset exactly which is which. It’s a story about retribution, about the good people giving to the bad people exactly what they deserve.

Dr. King Shultz (played by Christoph Waltz) is a native of Germany who ended up, somehow, in America and who speaks excellent English, although with a slight German accent. He is a onetime dentist, now a bounty hunter. He delivers the dead bodies of escaped criminals to the U.S. authorities and receives payment for it. He is seeking (and finds) a slave by the name of Django (played by Jamie Foxx) to help him locate three brothers from a certain plantation where Django lived. After Dr. Shultz finds and kills the three brothers, he discovers that Django has an aptitude for being a bounty hunter, so they become partners. They travel around together, with Django pretending to be Dr. Shultz’s valet. Dr. Shultz learns that Django’s one desire in life is to find his wife, Broomhilda, from whom he has been separated for many years.

The search for Broomhilda leads Dr. Shultz and Django to Mississippi to a plantation named “Candie Land,” owned by one Calvin Candie (played by Leonardo DiCaprio). Calvin Candie is not a nice person. He is, in fact, the villain of the story. He and his simpering sister own slaves and they don’t care how badly they are treated. He owns Broomhilda, the young woman that Django seeks.

Dr. Shultz and Django just can’t take Broomhilda and leave with her. Calvin Candie is a powerful man and he would see that Broomhilda is found and returned to him, and there’s no telling what punishment he would mete out to her. Dr. Shultz, to hide his and Django’s real reason for being at Candie Land, pretends to be interested in purchasing a Mandingo wrestler, a demonstration of which affords yet another opportunity for some exaggerated violence. The winner of a Mandingo wrestling match kills the loser with a hammer, which the spectators enjoy immensely.

Django Unchained ends with a shootout to end all shootouts, with predictable results. Retribution is delivered on the evil, with many bodies torn apart by bullets and enough spurting fake blood to fill a swimming pool. When Django shoots Calvin Candie’s silly sister from the staircase, he blows her ass all the way into the next room. If you think she deserves it, you’re probably the kind of person who will enjoy this film.

January 2, 2013January 2, 2013 by allen0997

A Pack of Cigarettes and Thou

A Pack of Cigarettes and Thou ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

When she was younger, April Snow liked school, or at least could tolerate it but, now that she was fourteen, things had changed. Her body had changed, had filled out, and that somehow affected her outlook on life. She was no longer a child and she was ready, she felt, to leave all childhood things behind. She had had enough of her mother telling her what to do and of going to school day everyday and abiding by a bunch of rules that seemed to have lost all meaning for her.

As she walked the four blocks to the bus in the morning, her thoughts turned to suicide. She thought back to the day a week ago when she and her mother were having a raging argument and her mother slapped her in the face and knocked her off the toilet and caused her to hit her head on the bathtub. She lay on the floor and screamed that she couldn’t move her arms and legs, but her mother knew she was just putting on an act. She told April that she was insane—insanity ran in the family—and she was going to “put her away” in the place where they had straightjackets and padded cells and shot charges of electricity through people’s heads like in a Frankenstein movie to try to make them less crazy. If she hanged herself or cut on herself enough to bleed to death, she thought, her mother would certainly be sorry she had been so mean to her. People at school would say, “Poor April! If we had only known she was so sad, we might have given her some money or done something to help her, but now it’s too late.”

At the bus stop, she lit a cigarette and pointedly ignored the two skinny girls standing there. They looked liked little children compared to her but one of them was actually older than she was. They needed some fashion advice, some rouge and lipstick; they needed to dress and act more grown up, or they would always be hopeless losers.

The bus was late. Just when April was hoping it wouldn’t come at all and she would be able to go back home and go back to the bed, it came around the corner with a malodorous roar. She flipped her cigarette away with her thumb and forefinger in her grown-woman way, knowing the two skinny girls were looking at her. When she boarded the bus she went all the way to the back as she always did.

Of the thirty or so people on the bus, the only one who interested her in the least was Selma Butts. She sat primly with her books on her lap and her ankles crossed. She had a face like a bird—a tiny pointed nose like a beak. On her head a silly green-and-yellow knit cap she had made herself. She wasn’t interesting in herself but she was the sister of Seymour Butts, so that made her as interesting as she would ever be.

April was in love with Seymour Butts; she had only just realized it on the day her mother slapped her off the toilet. He was the reason they had been fighting in the first place. Her mother didn’t like Seymour, didn’t think he was the “proper” boy for April to associate with. She had heard things about him, bad things that would curdle cream, she said. He was, figuratively speaking, from the wrong side of the tracks, and was—anybody with any sense could see it—headed for the state penitentiary and probably the electric chair.

April had been out with him three times in his car with the “souped-up” engine that she could hear from half-a-mile away. They had gone driving two times; the third time he picked her up in front of her house and took her for an ice cream cone. Each time, she had been thrilled by his pouty expression, his perfectly coiffed hair and the skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his bulging bicep. She had expected him to sweep her off her feet in an ardor of passion—if he had she wouldn’t have been able to resist—but the most he had done was to touch her lightly on the knee to get her attention and put his hand on the back of her neck and squeeze. He was more of a gentleman than she might have expected.

He had quit high school when he was sixteen and worked at mysterious “odd jobs” for his uncle and his cousins. If he really needed a high school diploma, he said, he could get one without having to go through the hell of going to school everyday and listening to those hypocrites spout their lies that anybody with any sense didn’t believe anyway. April thought him deep and endearingly independent. He wasn’t like anybody she had ever known before.

When the bus pulled up in front of the school to let everybody out, April held back a little, keeping her eyes on Selma. She stood up just as Selma did and made sure they almost collided as Selma stepped into the aisle to get off the bus.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” April said. “Did I step on your foot?”

Selma looked at April and the corners of her mouth turned down. “No, it’s all right,” she said.

“I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

She expected Selma to say something else, but she just kept going with her head down. When she got off the bus, she ran to the door of the school and went inside as if it was raining and she was afraid she would get wet (it wasn’t).

April took her unsatisfying encounter with Selma as rather a bad omen, a bad way to start the day. She had hoped to at least speak Seymour’s name and to gauge Selma’s response, if any. In that way, she might have discovered if Seymour had ever mentioned her name to Selma. On these small things do lovers hang.

In first-period English class, she dozed through a discussion of Endymion, losing interest after “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” She didn’t much like poetry. It was too hard to figure out.

In physical education class, which she loathed more than all her other classes put together, she feigned illness so she wouldn’t have to change out of her clothes into shorts and a red jersey to play volleyball. How she despised volleyball! She never cared whether the team she was on won or not, so she didn’t even try. The result was a barely passing grade.

While the other girls were playing, she lolled on the cot in the locker room, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette. She went through the lockers that hadn’t been locked and “found” a dollar and eighteen cents that somebody hadn’t bothered to secure. She didn’t think of this as stealing, but, rather, as “finding.” She had no scruples where “finding” was concerned.

In math class she failed a test that she hadn’t bothered to prepare for and, in fact, turned in her test paper with half the problems unanswered. After that was study hall, during which she propped a novel, Forever Amber, in front of her and pretended to read. When the bell rang for lunch, she ran to her locker to put her books away and went downstairs to the lunchroom, where a long line had already formed.

After she got her food (a slab of gelatinous meatloaf, watery mashed potatoes and two stewed prunes) and was looking for a place to sit, she spotted Selma Butts sitting alone at a table in the back of the room. She rushed to claim the spot across from Selma before somebody else got it.

“Hi, there,” she said with a winning smile as she pulled out the chair and sat down.

“Hello,” Selma said.

“I’ll be glad when this day is over.”

“See that boy over there?” Selma said.

April turned to look over her shoulder at a very large boy with blond hair and bulging cheeks.

“He just ate his fifth hot dog.”

“You’re counting?”

“Until you sat down, he was all I could see.”

When April looked at Selma, she felt a little rush of pleasure. Here was somebody who was not only related to Seymour Butts (although she looked nothing like him), but also lived in the same house with him.

“You know my brother, Seymour, don’t you?” Selma asked.

It was almost as if she had read April’s mind!

“Yes, I know him,” April said. She didn’t want to be too obvious but she hoped to convey in those few words that she and Seymour were on very intimate terms.

“Did you hear what he did?” Selma asked.

“No. What?”

“He and his boyfriend moved to California. They just packed up and left without a word to anybody. So impulsive!”

“Did you say ‘boyfriend’?”

“Yeah, didn’t you know he’s ‘that way’? I thought everybody knew it. He doesn’t go around talking about it but he doesn’t exactly make a secret of it, either.”

“When’s he coming back?” April asked with a sick feeling.

“Oh, he’s not ever coming back here,” Selma said. “He’s had it with this place. I can’t say I blame him. I’m going to get away from here, too, just as soon as I can.”

“People can certainly surprise you sometimes,” April said.

After lunch she was feeling too dispirited to remain at school, so she left for the day without telling anybody. Nobody cared where she was, anyway, she told herself; she wouldn’t even be missed.

She couldn’t go home because of her mother, so she just began walking, she didn’t know where. She didn’t have a thought about how she would get home; she didn’t care if she went home or not. She just kept thinking about how she had been so wrong about Seymour Butts and how she would never see him again, just when she realized she was in love with him. How could he just go away like that without saying anything to her? Did she mean nothing to him at all?

After walking for eight or ten blocks, she came to a little park that she had never seen before. She entered the park and went in far enough so she felt hidden from view. She found an inviting bench in the shade of an enormous maple tree and sat down. She cried some, knowing that nobody could see her and, after she had cried as much as she was going to, she lay on her back on the bench and closed her eyes.

When she opened them, a young man—more a boy, really—was standing about ten feet away looking at her. How long had he been standing there? She hadn’t heard him at all. Had he seen her crying?

She sat up, a little embarrassed, and smiled at the young man. He came and sat down beside her on the bench. He was nothing like Seymour Butts but quite interesting in his way. Instead of dark hair, he had fine, sandy-colored hair and the beginnings of a little moustache and hairy forearms. All the things she had been told about not being friendly with strangers passed through her mind and then were gone.

She took out her cigarettes and offered him one. He nodded his head as if a cigarette was the one thing in this world he needed and took one out of the pack. When she had taken one for herself, he lit hers and then his own. She blew out a cloud of smoke and he did the same; the two clouds merged into one. She looked into his eyes and he looked into hers. They hadn’t yet spoken a word. They seemed to have passed into a realm where words are not needed.

In a little while he stood up from the bench and motioned for her to follow him. He led her to another part of the park where there was a clump of bushes as big as a herd of elephants. He crouched down and crawled inside. She followed along behind him, smelling the damp earth and another smell that she was unable to identify. For the first time all day, she was thinking about something other than Seymour Butts.

December 30, 2012December 30, 2012 by allen0997

Les Misérables ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Les Misérables ~ A Capsule Movie Review By Allen Kopp

I have never seen the stage version of the musical Les Misérables, so I don’t have a lot of basis for comparison, but I think the movie version works very well. It has everything I want in a movie and more. It is a complete escape from reality; I haven’t ever seen anything like it before; it’s a touching story about redemption; the characters are nothing like any real people I know; it’s beautiful to look at. Most of the dialogue is sung by actors who don’t usually sing in the movies they’re in, and there are at least two very memorable songs (“I Dreamed a Dream” and “Bring Him Home). It is, of course, based on a classic of world literature, Victor Hugo’s massive 1862 novel of the same name, which has never been out of print in 150 years.

Les Misérables is set in France during the turbulent years of 1815 to 1832, the time it takes for a small girl to become an adult. It is about a man, the fictional character Jean Valjean, who is utterly lost but finds redemption through an act of kindness directed toward him. He has served “nineteen winters” in a brutal prison for petty theft. (He stole a loaf of bread because he and his family were starving.) He is granted conditional parole but escapes. He finds refuge in a convent, where nuns and a kindly priest care for him. One night when everybody is asleep he steals some silver plates and flees. When he is captured by the police, he tells them the priest gave him the items he has stolen. The police take him to the convent to confront the priest, who tells them that Jean Valjean was welcome to take the things he stole and gives him a pair of elaborate candlesticks to go with them. This is the act of kindness that changes Jean Valjean’s life.

He “turns away from hatred,” regains his health after the terrible conditions in prison, and “turns his life over to God.” (After that, his life is as directed by God.) He becomes a successful businessman, owning and operating a factory that employs women, specifically a young woman named Fantine, who will play a significant part in his life. Fantine is unjustly fired from the factory (unknown to Jean) and has to turn to prostitution to support her small child, whose name is Cosette. (One of the highlights of the movie is when Fantine [played by Anne Hathaway] sings “I Dreamed a Dream.”) When Jean discovers what has happened to Fantine, she is dying. He promises her that he will take care of her daughter—that she will never want for anything as long as he lives.

In the meantime, Jean Valjean’s past catches up with him. He meets again, by chance, Inspector Javert (played by Russell Crowe), who recognizes him from his prison days and knows that he skipped out on his parole. Javert believes he is duty-bound to send Jean back to prison, in spite of the smallness of his crime and the twenty years he has already spent behind bars.

In the coming years, Javert continues to obsessively pursue Jean Valjean, who always manages to stay just one step ahead of him. Meanwhile, Cosette has grown to adulthood and lives with Jean Valjean as his daughter. She has fallen in love with a young leader of the “June Rebellion” named Marius. Through a twist of fate, Jean is able to save Marius’s life. Through another twist, he spares the life of Javert when he is given the chance to exact revenge and kill him.

If you are tired of the banal “romantic comedies,” sequels, franchises such as James Bond and Spiderman, animated 3D movies for the under-six set, action-adventure movies, and the mindless drivel that passes these days for entertainment, don’t miss Les Misérables. Movies like this one don’t come along very often.

December 28, 2012December 29, 2012 by allen0997

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ~ A Capsule Movie Review

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ~ A Capsule Movie Review By Allen Kopp

The new movie, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, is the first installment of a trilogy based on a novel by J. R. R. Tokien, the world’s foremost fantasy writer. (The other two parts of the trilogy will be out in 2013 and 2014.) It is a cinematic return to Middle Earth after the enormously successful Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is similar in theme and scope to the Lord of the Rings movies but is a different story entirely, involving mostly a different set of characters.

The movie begins with the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, in his cute little house in the “shire.” He is thoroughly domesticated and lives a comfortable life. (For the uninitiated, a hobbit is a rather human-like being, small in stature, with pointed ears and very large feet—they don’t wear shoes.) One day the wizard, Gandalf the Grey, arrives unexpectedly. Gandalf is very tall in relation to a hobbit. He marks Bilbo’s door to indicate it is to be the meeting place of a delegation of thirteen dwarves. To Bilbo’s dismay, the dwarves arrive and make themselves comfortable in his home, eating his considerable stores of food. It turns out the dwarves are about to embark on a quest to reclaim their homeland from a very bad and very large fire-breathing dragon that loves gold. The dwarves, we are told, are expert at mining gold from the earth and have accumulated enormous piles of it for their greedy king. The dragon flies in, kills the king, takes everything from the dwarves and drives them out into the wilderness.

For some reason that isn’t made clear, the dwarves want Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit to come with them on their quest. He is certain he doesn’t want to leave his comfortable life, but he relents and decides to join them. Almost at once the party of dwarves—plus Bilbo and Gandalf the Grey—encounter dangers and hardships they hadn’t expected. They must deal with Orcs (a kind of brutal, warlike, half-man, half-beast) and disgusting trolls that want to eat them. At one point in the narrative, Bilbo Baggins encounters the Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies and finds himself in possession of the “ring” that he doesn’t understand the significance of. (The Gollum hasn’t become any more attractive in the intervening years.)

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (and the upcoming two installments of the trilogy) has the same director, writers, and production team as the Lord of the Rings movies, so it is essentially a continuation of what has gone before. It is big, loud, and long. In 3D it is beautiful to look at with its outdoor vistas and computer-generated effects. I’m not a huge fan of this kind of fantasy but I found it engaging and certainly worth the price of admission, plus the nearly three hours running time. My one quibble is that we’re going to have to wait a year (God willing) to find out how the dwarves get the dragon away from the gold. You can bet they’re going to have a huge, special effects-laden fight on their hands!

December 21, 2012 by allen0997

The Christmas Club

The Christmas Club ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k).)

Stanley and Virginia Miller lived in a modest four-room house on a tree-lined street in a small town. They had known each other their entire lives and had been married for ten years. To this union had been born two children: Georgette, age nine, and Ian, age seven. When Ian was born, Virginia experienced some complications and wasn’t able to have any more children, but that was fine with her because she thought two children were as many as she could reasonably hope to take care of. Both children attended the town’s public elementary school, the same school that Stanley and Virginia had gone to when they were growing up.

Stanley was never very good in school, had just barely graduated, and worked as a miner. He spent all day long, every day, below the ground chipping away at rock. The mine where he worked had been in operation for many years, and every year the mine became bigger and bigger until it had become so vast that people never believed how big it was until they saw it for themselves. It had become big enough, Stanley joked, to swallow the entire town. He sometimes had nightmares about the mine, about digging down too far to ever make it out again, and he would wake up calling for help and gasping for air. Every time he came out of the mine at the end of his shift, being out in the open air again seemed like something of a miracle.

Stanley’s take-home pay was meager and he and Virginia never quite had enough money to go around. After paying the rent, buying food, paying the gas bill and the light bill and all the other incidentals, they sometimes ran out of money before the end of the month. To help meet expenses, Virginia took in washing and ironing and occasionally hired herself out for “heavy cleaning” or some other kind of domestic work.

When Virginia was younger, before she married Stanley, she had worked in a tailor shop doing alterations and seamstress work. She thought she was quite good at it and she liked working for the old man who ran the tailor shop. Now that she was older and, knowing that she had real aptitude for the work, she wanted to buy her own sewing machine and whatever else was needed to go into business for herself. She was sure she could make enough money to supplement Stanley’s pay and provide a few little extras for her family.

When she spoke to Stanley about going to the bank and borrowing money to start her own little business, he was against the idea from the outset. He was superstitious about banks and he hated the thought of owing money. He had the idea that Virginia would never make enough money on her own to pay back a loan and he would have to make good on the loan himself.

In spite of the shortage of cash, Virginia was still able to save a little money here and there by scrimping and counting pennies. If she bought a cut of meat, for example, for thirteen cents less than she had paid for it the last time, she would put thirteen cents in her jar at the back of the kitchen cabinet. If the light bill was two dollars less this month than last month, she would put two dollars in the jar. When she had more than two or three dollars in the jar, usually in small change, she would take it out and deposit it into her Christmas Club account at the bank. By autumn she had about two hundred and thirty dollars in the account, but she didn’t want Stanley to know about it just yet. Eventually she would have to tell him, but she would deal with telling him at the appropriate time. She hoped he would be pleased with her for saving money he didn’t even know they had.

She wanted to give Ian and Georgette a wonderful Christmas, the kind of Christmas she had never had when she was growing up. Every Friday when she was finished at the grocery store and had the groceries stowed in the trunk of the car, she would take a walk down the block to look at the bicycles in the window of the hardware store. There was a boy’s bicycle and a girl’s bicycle that were very much alike. The boy’s bicycle was a little bigger, with a crossbar that the girl’s bicycle didn’t have. Both were shiny red, with chrome bumpers, pristine-looking whitewall tires, and streamers attached to the handlebars. She knew that any child would be thrilled to own such a bicycle.

When Virginia was growing up, Christmas never amounted to much in her house. Her father was much older than her mother and, although a decent man, he was odd in his own way. He didn’t believe in any kind of religious observance and would never allow the celebration of Christmas in his house. Christmas was, he said, for people with lots of money to throw away and he had none, in spite of the stocks and bonds he owned that eventually left Virginia’s mother well-off in her widowhood.

There were never any gifts or music or Christmas tree or decorations in their house, and on Christmas Day they usually had stew or hash or beans and cornbread for dinner, while Virginia’s father silently read the newspaper or listened to the stock market quotes or the war news on the radio and Virginia and her mother sat with their eyes downcast and ate in silence.

On the first Friday in December, Virginia went to the bank to withdraw the money from her Christmas Club account. She waited in line behind several other people, and when her turn came she stepped up to the teller’s window and handed the teller her passbook that showed the balance in her account. She told the teller she wanted to withdraw the money and close the account.

The teller frowned and squinted as she looked for the account number in her records. She had a double chin and eyebrows drawn on in graceful arcs halfway up her forehead. When she spoke, her voice had an odd little-girl quality about it. “Hold on a minute,” she said. “I’ll have to go check on this.” She turned and walked away to the rear of the bank and disappeared through a doorway.

When she came back, she smiled at Virginia and handed the passbook back to her. “Your money has already been drawn out of this account,” she said.

“There must be some mistake,” Virginia said. “I haven’t taken my money out.”

“No, but your husband did. I guess he forgot to tell you.”

Virginia just stood there looking at the teller with no expression on her face until the teller asked her if she was all right and if there was anything else she needed.

When she got back home, she felt better because she was sure the bank had made a mistake and, after speaking to Stanley when he returned from work, she would call the bank and have the matter straightened out in a matter of two minutes. Stanley would never take her money without telling her. He didn’t even know the money was there, so how could he take it out? She couldn’t wait for him to walk through the door so she could talk to him about it.

When Georgette and Ian arrived home from school, Virginia gave them some money and sent them to the store to buy a loaf of bread and a quart of milk. She gave them a little extra money so they could each buy themselves a candy bar, but she made them promise not to eat it until after supper.

She was sitting at the kitchen table thumbing through a magazine when Stanley came in from work, a few minutes later than usual. Without looking at Virginia, he set his lunch pail on the table and went to the sink to get a drink of water.

Virginia looked up from the magazine at the back of Stanley’s head. She waited until he had turned the water off and then she said, “I went to the bank today.”

He turned around and faced her with the glass of water in his hand, his hip resting against the sink. “What?” he asked.

“I said I went to the bank today. They told me you took the money out of my Christmas Club account. I was sure it had to be a mistake. I knew that, even if you had known about the money, you would never take it without telling me.”

“Oh,” he said, looking down at the floor.

“So, the question is: Did you withdraw the money from the Christmas Club account?”

“Yes, I guess I did,” he said.

“Why did you do that? That was my money. I saved it.”

“Just what is a Christmas Club anyway?”

“I want to know why you took my money.”

“Well, I think there’s a law somewhere that says your money is also my money.”

“You had no right to take it without telling me.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“That money was for Christmas. I wanted to buy some things for Ian and Georgette. I wanted to give them a nice Christmas.”

He poured his glass of water out into the sink. “Some things are a lot more important than Christmas,” he said.

“Do you still have the money?”

“No.”

“I want to know what happened to it.”

“Ian and Georgette have everything they need. They have food to eat and clothes to wear and they’re getting an education. That’s a lot more than I had.”

“What happened to the money?”

“I’ve owed my brother Richard two hundred dollars for a long time. He was desperate to get it back. He’s getting a divorce and he needs all the money he can get.”

“So, you’re telling me that my Christmas Club money went for your no-good brother’s most recent divorce?”

“He’s family,” Stanley said. “I think family is more important than buying stuff for the kids for Christmas that they don’t need.”

She wasn’t finished with what she wanted to say, but Ian and Georgette returned from the store and she didn’t want them to hear her and Stanley arguing about money. She stood up from the table and went to the sink and began peeling potatoes for supper.

Over the next few days, Virginia wouldn’t look at Stanley and she spoke to him only when he spoke first or when he asked her a question. She slept on the couch and when Stanley got up in the morning to get ready for work, she covered up her head with the blanket and wouldn’t get up and cook his breakfast as she usually did. She wouldn’t uncover her head until after he had left for work.

In the second week of December, there was an accident in the mine. Stanley and two other miners were injured when some rock above where they were working gave way and fell on them. One of the miners died instantly. Stanley and the other miner were rushed to the hospital.

Stanley had a fractured skull and a badly broken arm and shoulder and was in a coma. Somebody from the mine called Virginia and told her what had happened and she got the next-door neighbor to drive her to the hospital in his car. She sat in a chair by Stanley’s bedside and prayed that he would be all right. She twisted a handkerchief in her hand and wept some, but most of the time she just looked at Stanley lying in the bed, hoping to see some sign that he was going to be all right. When there was no one else in the room, she told him—even though he was unconscious—that she was sorry for the way she behaved about the Christmas Club money. He was right, she said; some things are a lot more important than Christmas presents.

After a day and a half, Stanley died without ever regaining consciousness. Virginia knew there had never been any hope that he would live. She went home and sat on the sofa and cried and waited for Ian and Georgette to come home from school to tell them their father was dead.

A week after Stanley’s funeral, two letters came in the mail. Virginia carried them into the kitchen and opened them one after the other with a paring knife. One was from the mine where Stanley worked and it contained his last two weeks’ pay. The other letter was from the miners’ union; it was a letter of condolence and a “death benefit” check in the amount of three hundred dollars. These two checks were all the money she had in the world.

That night she lay awake most of the night, hearing the forlorn sound of the train whistles off in the distance. After Ian and Georgette left for school the next morning, she put on her clothes and drove downtown with the two checks. She went to the bank and deposited Stanley’s paycheck to pay for the rent and other bills that would soon be coming due. The death benefit check she endorsed. When the teller handed her six crisp fifty-dollar bills, she folded the money and put it inside the zipper compartment inside her purse. It was the most money she had ever seen or owned at one time.

Her next stop was the hardware store. Luckily they still had the bicycles in stock that she admired and hoped to get for Ian and Georgette. She bought both bicycles, paying a small down-payment on them and arranging to have them delivered to her house on the day before Christmas. She signed an agreement stating she would make monthly payments on the bicycles until they were paid for.

After the hardware store, she went to another store where they sold sewing machines and asked to see the best top-of-the-line machine the store carried. The clerk demonstrated the machine and told her it was so simple to operate even a child could use it. She bought the machine and asked that it be delivered to her house as soon as possible.

After the sewing machine store, she went to another store where she bought a record player with a radio built into it and a selection of records that she knew Ian and Georgette would like. In the same store she bought new winter coats for herself and for Ian and Georgette, refusing to add up in her head the amount of money she had spent that afternoon.

On her way back home she stopped at the supermarket, where she bought a large turkey and everything she would need for a Christmas dinner. She also bought a lot of extra things she would not ordinarily buy, such as candy and nuts and fruit. Outside the supermarket where they were selling Christmas trees she bought a large fir tree that would reach all the way to the ceiling in their little house. The clerk tied the tree to the top of the car for her.

When she got back home, she carried everything inside, and then carried the Christmas tree in and set it up in the living room. She went down to the basement to bring up the lights and decorations. She was stringing lights on the tree when Ian and Georgette came home from school. She knew they would appreciate decorating the tree by themselves without any help from her.

She stood back and watched as they excitedly took the decorations out of the box and began putting them on the tree. She tried to remember what it was like to be their age and find joy in such simple things; she had lost the feeling long ago and would never experience it again.

The phone began ringing in the kitchen. She didn’t want to leave the Christmas tree and answer it, but she would tell whoever it was that she would call them back later, after supper. It was a woman down the street, a Mrs. Capers, for whom she had done some housecleaning a while back.

Mrs. Capers had heard about Virginia’s past experience as a seamstress and wanted to know if she was interested in coming by her house the day after Christmas and talking to her about making some new drapes for the dining room. If everything went well (that is, if she liked the drapes), she would have other work to be done. Also, she had a couple of lady friends who needed to have all their clothes let out due to the middle-aged expansion. Having their old clothes altered would be so much cheaper than buying new ones.

Virginia arranged with Mrs. Capers to come around to her house at one o’clock on the twenty-sixth. When she hung up the phone and went back into the living room, Georgette stopped what she was doing and looked at her.

“Who was that on the phone?” she asked.

“It was the spirit of Christmas,” Virginia said.

Georgette didn’t ask for an explanation because they had all the lights strung on the tree. When Ian plugged them in and they saw that all of them still worked after their year-long hibernation in the basement, Virginia took that as a very good sign.

December 17, 2012December 17, 2012 by allen0997

The Teddy Bear Phase

The Teddy Bear Phase ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Phillip stood behind the door in his pajamas, clutching Elfie to his chest. He was listening to his parents arguing in the kitchen.

“You should have consulted me first,” father said.

“I didn’t think I needed to ask your permission,” mother said.

“If you had, I wouldn’t have given it.”

“He’s all that’s left of my family. I think we can tolerate him for a couple of days.”

“Yes, but why did you have to invite him at Christmas?”

“Christmas is a time for families to reunite. I can see my mother smiling down at me from heaven for inviting her only brother into my home.”

“What makes you think she’s in heaven? And it’s our home. Not my home.”

“Should I put him in the guest room or do you think he’d be more comfortable in the spare bedroom?”

“How about in the shed outback where we keep the gardening tools?”

“Once you get to know him, you’ll like him.”

“I don’t want an alcoholic around Phillip and Chickie.”

“He’s a recovered alcoholic.”

“How about if I just take them to a hotel and you can have the house to yourself with your wonderful uncle?”

“We’ll welcome him as a family. That’s what he needs.”

So it was decided that mother’s long-lost Uncle Benny would come for a Christmas visit. Father said that if he didn’t leave by the day after Christmas at the latest, he was going to grab him by the throat and throw him into the street. There was to be no extended visit.

When Uncle Benny arrived by taxicab on the day before Christmas, he had a box of candy for mother (she was dieting), a box of Havana cigars for father (he had no intention of smoking them), and Groucho glasses and a flashlight for Phillip and Chickie. Chickie was only five and was enchanted by the flashlight. She shone it all around the room, in her own mouth, in the dog’s face.

Phillip was a little frightened of Uncle Benny from the first time he met him. He was tall, slightly stooped, and had a wrinkled face; he wore a black wig that looked like it belonged on somebody else’s head. His dentures were too big and looked as if they might fly out of his mouth with a life of their own.

“Who is this little chappy?” Uncle Benny asked.

“This is Phillip,” mother said, standing behind him and putting her hands on his shoulders. “He’s our oldest.”

“And how old is Phillip, may I ask?”

“He’s eight.”

“And what is that thing he’s holding in his arms?”

“That’s Elfie, his teddy bear,” mother said. “It’s his favorite toy. He takes it with him everywhere he goes. He can’t go to sleep without it.”

“I see,” Uncle Benny said. “Don’t you think he’s a little old for a teddy bear?”

Mother laughed. “We indulge him in his teddy bear phase,” she said. “I expect it’ll pass after a while.”

“I think we need to take that thing away from him and throw it in the river,” Uncle Benny said, twisting Elfie’s furry ear.

Phillip felt Elfie stiffen in his arms. When he went into the bathroom to wash his hands for dinner, he locked the door and set Elfie beside the sink.

“I don’t like him,” Elfie said. “He’s a jerk and he smells funny.”

“I don’t like him, either,” Phillip said, “but he’ll only be here until day after tomorrow. He’s family so we have to be nice to him.”

“Bah!” Elfie said.

After dinner it was snowing, so mother opened the curtains and turned off all the lights in the living room except the ones on the Christmas tree. Father read in the newspaper that it was going to get down below zero, a record low for Christmas Eve, so he built a big fire in the fireplace.

“It feels exactly the way Christmas should,” mother said.

Chickie wanted to open her presents but mother told her she had to wait until after Santa had had a chance to drop by. She fell asleep on the couch while she was watching the snow out the window, so mother put her to bed.

Mother served eggnog to father and Uncle Benny, adding a little harmless (she thought) whiskey for “body.” Uncle Benny took a drink and said it was too weak; he asked mother to bring the bottle of whiskey in from the kitchen so he could flavor the eggnog to his own liking. She and father exchanged a significant look, but she went and got the bottle anyway and set it on the table next to Uncle Benny.

Father had one glass of eggnog, but Uncle Benny kept drinking. Each time mother refilled his glass, he added a generous amount of whiskey from the bottle. Mother and father could see him getting drunk, but they said nothing. To anybody else she would have said, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough,” but she couldn’t bring herself to say that to Uncle Benny. He was family and she didn’t want to offend him.

Phillip was bored with Uncle Benny; he knew that he was spoiling the fun that he and Chickie would be having on Christmas Eve. He wanted to turn on the TV, but mother said it was rude to have it on when company was present. She made him a cup of cocoa and a bowl of popcorn and told him he could sit by the fire for a while longer with the grownups but he would have to go to bed soon because tomorrow was a big day.

Uncle Benny was telling mother and father about all the places he had been. He had worked as purser on a passenger ship and had been all over the world.

“I had to get out of the country,” he said. “My ex-wife was after me for back alimony payments. They couldn’t touch me as long as I was at sea.”

“Didn’t they get you when you came back?” father asked.

“No, because by that time the old girl had found some other sucker to marry and had dropped the suit against me. She was my third wife and I learned from that experience never to get married again, although I had plenty of chances, believe me. Haw-haw-haw!”

“Whatever happened to your daughter?” mother asked.

“The last I heard, she was living in Texas, but that was years ago. She wants nothing to do with me.”

“If I knew her address, I’d write to her. After all, she’s the only first cousin I have.”

“You’d be wasting your time, I’m afraid,” Uncle Benny said.

Further conversation revealed that he had been living in a cheap rooming house but was going to have to move because the landlady had rented to his room to another man.

“Where will you go?” mother asked.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ve always got irons in the fire. I always land on my feet.”

When grownups were talking endlessly, or “visiting” as they called it, Phillip had a knack of blocking out the words so the voices began to sound like dogs barking off in the distance or the drone of a machine. After he finished his cocoa and ate all the popcorn, he fell asleep on the settee, holding Elfie in his arms.

He awoke with a start. Uncle Benny was bending over him, smiling at him with those big teeth. Mother and father were out of the room.

“I’m going to do you a big favor, now” Uncle Benny said, slurring the words.

He wrenched Elfie out of Phillip’s arms and, taking three quick steps to the fireplace, threw him in the fire. Phillip jumped up off the settee and screamed as if he himself had been thrown into the fire. As mother came running in from the kitchen, Phillip fainted and fell to the floor unconscious.

When he came to, he was in his bed in his room but he didn’t remember how he got there. All the lights were off but the room was very bright from the drapes never having been drawn and the snow outside. He remembered what happened to Elfie and began crying.

The door to his room opened silently—he could see the bar of light from the hallway—and then closed again. He was surprised—and rapturously happy—to see Elfie climb up on the bed and sit down beside him just inches from his face.

“You’re all right!” he said, reaching out and touching Elfie on the head to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

“Mother took the andiron and pulled me out before I caught on fire,” Elfie said. “Happy to say, I’m made from nonflammable material.”

“The house is quiet now,” Philip said. “I don’t hear a thing.”

“Mother and father have gone to bed. Uncle Benny is outside smoking a cigarette in his pajamas and bathrobe. He’s as drunk as a coot and it’s killing cold outside. If he couldn’t get back inside for some reason, he’d freeze to death and they wouldn’t find him until morning. I can see him walking down the street in his bedroom slippers trying to get help and falling and busting his hip. There’s nobody around on Christmas Eve. Too bad.”

Phillip threw back the covers and stood up. “I’ll be back in just a minute,” he said. “I think father forgot to lock the door.”

December 9, 2012December 17, 2012 by allen0997

Hitchcock ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Hitchcock ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

In the new movie, Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins plays the famed movie director and Helen Mirren his long-suffering wife, Alma. Alfred Hitchcock is sixty years old and is looking for a project to direct after the success of North by Northwest. When the novel Psycho, by Robert Bloch, is brought to his attention, he decides that will be his next picture, a decision that meets with a chorus of opposition. The movie studio executives don’t like the idea of filming Psycho and won’t back the project. The office of censorship tells Hitchcock he will never get away with showing his lead character hacked to death in a shower in a motel. Members of the press believe that Hitchcock has lost his deft touch as the master of classy suspense films such as Strangers on a Train and Vertigo and has been reduced to making schlock. Even Hitchcock himself believes that he has possibly been cheapened by his association with television and has lost whatever it was that made him unique.

In spite of all the problems put in his way, Hitchcock perseveres. He mortgages his own house to finance Psycho. It’s an enormous gamble for him. If the film fails, not only is he ruined financially, but all the naysayers will have been proved right and his reputation as a director will be ruined.

Much of the one hour and thirty-eight minutes of Hitchcock is taken up with behind-the-scenes stuff about the making of Psycho. If you are a movie fan, a Hitchcock fan, or a Psycho fan, this is fascinating stuff and fun to watch. Ed Gein, the creepy Wisconsin serial killer who inspired the character of Normal Bates in Psycho, becomes a sort of alter-ego for Hitchcock during the making of the movie. The actors who play Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, and Vera Miles are all perfect. We see Hitchcock terrorize Janet Leigh with a butcher knife in the shower scene to elicit believable screams from her.

Of course, Alfred Hitchcock proved everybody wrong. Psycho was a critical and financial success. It is now considered his best movie of the dozens he directed and one of the best American movies of all time. If he had given in to those who were telling him it couldn’t be done or shouldn’t be done, we might have been denied the piece of pure cinema that is Psycho.

A companion piece to the movie Hitchcock is a film that HBO aired a while back called The Girl, a movie about the making of The Birds, which was Hitchcock’s next movie after Psycho. The “girl” in question is Tippy Hedren, who Hitchcock chose to star as his blond leading lady in The Birds. Apparently she was never the same again.

December 5, 2012December 5, 2012 by allen0997

Anna Karenina ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Anna Karenina ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

There have been many film versions of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anne Karenina, most notably the 1935 (Greta Garbo) and 1948 (Vivien Leigh) versions. There was also a big-screen 1997 version and several adaptations for TV, including the memorable twelve-part Masterpiece Theatre adaptation in the 1970s. It’s an accessible story with fascinating characters that lends itself well to filmic adaptation. In 1870s Imperial Russia, aristocratic Anna is married to stodgy government official Karenin. Karenin is a “good” man who follows the rules; he believes a wife is a wife for life. Anna meets young cavalry officer Count Vronsky and the earth moves for her and for him. She engages in an adulterous affair with him, has his child, leaves her husband, and in the course of all this shocks St. Petersburg society. The story is simple and almost operatic in its themes of love, duty, honor, obsession.

The latest 2012 film version is true to Tolstoy’s original story but is different from every other film version that has gone before. It has all the traditional elements of a big-budget costume drama (elaborate sets and costumes, stirring music, beautiful photography), but it has something more: it takes a deliberately “stagey” approach to the story. It is, at times, as if we’re watching a play. At the end of a scene, the actors will walk from one set to another or walk backstage to get to where they need to be for their next piece of business. We see stagehands changing the scenery and, at times, it’s as if we’re observing the action taking place on a stage from the audience. Since Anna Karenina is a novel and not a play, this is a highly stylized approach and it works beautifully. It must be seen to be appreciated.

December 2, 2012December 3, 2012 by allen0997

Sanctuary ~ A Capsule Book Review

Sanctuary ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Many readers find William Faulkner’s work difficult to navigate. His style is very dense at times and we don’t always know at first what he is saying. Whereas many writers walk the reader step by step through what is going on, Faulkner leaves the reader to make certain connections that aren’t always easy to make. For example, in his 1931 novel, Sanctuary, the character Horace Benbow mentions Little Belle, his stepdaughter, on numerous occasions. Little Belle seems to be extremely important to Benbow but we never really known why. Is he in love with her? Does he lust after her? Why has he run away from his wife, Little Belle’s mother? Why does the subject of Little Belle come up with him so much? Why does Benbow have such a contentious relationship with his sister, Narcissa? Is Narcissa his conscience?

These small things aside, Sanctuary is (along with As I Lay Dying) one of Faulkner’s most accessible works, at 250 pages. I first read it many years ago and, after seeing the sanitized 1935 film version, called The Story of Temple Drake, I dug the book out of a box in my basement and read it again. It’s a sordid story about bootleggers (it takes place, after all, during Prohibition), prostitutes, and a fallen woman. Over everything looms the presence of a character named Popeye (we never know him by any other name). Popeye is a sociopath with a misshapen body (he was sickly as a child and never developed properly).

Bootlegger Lee Goodwin operates out of the shattered shell of an antebellum mansion. He has a woman with him (apparently they are not married) and a baby that’s sick all the time. Several nefarious types, including Popeye, hang around Lee Goodwin’s place. His “woman” cooks for them, complains all the time, and takes care of the baby.

Pretty college girl Temple Drake goes to Lee Goodwin’s with a male friend to buy some illegal booze. When the male friend becomes permanently drunk and can’t be relied upon to remove Temple from this awful place, she finds she is in for an extended stay, whether she likes it or not. She tries to get somebody to take her back to town, but it seems that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. She captures the attention of the low men who inhabit the place, including Popeye.

In the course of sexually assaulting Temple, Popeye shoots and kills Tommy, a halfwit who has taken it upon himself to protect Temple. Popeye then leaves with Temple and installs her in a Memphis whorehouse. Lee Goodwin, the bootlegger, is assumed to have killed Tommy and jailed to await trial, although he is innocent of the charge.

At the whorehouse where Popeye has taken Temple, she becomes mentally unhinged. She seems to have given up on being able to return to her old life. Is she willing to let Popeye do whatever he wants with her, or is she only pretending? We learn later that Popeye is not able to perform sexually. (In his initial assault of her, he used a corncob.) At one point he uses a man named Red to engage sexually with Temple while he watches and then shoots Red in the head and kills him.

The whorehouse gives Faulkner the chance to add some humor to the story, especially in the person of Miss Reba, who runs the house. She has two little yapping dogs named Reba and Mr. Binford. (Mr. Binford is a long-dead sweetheart of hers.) In one of the chapters that provides a comic interlude, Reba and two lady friends have just come from the funeral of Red and are getting drunk. One of the ladies has a small boy with her whom they call Uncle Bud who has an unusual (for a child) fondness for beer.

Horace Benbow defends Lee Goodwin in his trial for killing Tommy, but it is a miscarriage of justice. Lee knows that Popeye killed Tommy but won’t say so. When they bring in Temple Drake, she testifies that she saw Lee Goodwin kill Tommy. She is afraid of what Popeye will do to her if she tells the truth. Her testimony seals Lee Goodwin’s fate.

Popeye leaves town but, we learn, his past catches up with him when he is apprehended someplace else for an earlier murder he committed. Temple is free of Popeye but apparently her life is ruined. She is beyond redemption.

November 30, 2012December 2, 2012 by allen0997