Tag: Allen Kopp

My Week with Marilyn ~ A Capsule Movie Review

My Week with Marilyn ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

In 1956 Marilyn Monroe was at the peak of her movie stardom. She was thirty years old and married to her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller. In spite of her fame and all she had achieved, she was a deeply troubled and insecure woman. She traveled to England at this time to make a movie with Laurence Olivier that would eventually be called The Prince and the Showgirl. While in England, she became acquainted with a twenty-three-year-old production assistant named Colin Clark. The new movie, My Week with Marilyn, is based on Colin Clark’s memoir about Marilyn.

Michelle Williams gives a great performance as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn. She will be remembered when Oscars are being handed out. She doesn’t just do a Marilyn impression, but shows the damaged person underneath the sex goddess persona. Marilyn knew as well as anybody that she wasn’t the person that people thought she was, the woman they saw on the screen. At one point in the movie, she says that as soon as people realize “she isn’t really Marilyn,” they abandon her. She isn’t emotionally equipped to live in the world in which she finds herself.

During the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, Marilyn latches on to young Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), in spite of the executives on the picture trying to keep them apart. She comes to rely on Colin to comfort her; she summons him in the night to come to her. Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Brannagh), Marilyn’s costar in the movie and also the director, finds her impossible to work with. She can’t remember—and doesn’t seem to grasp—the simplest direction or line of dialogue. But, as a character in the movie states, “when she gets it right, you can’t look at anybody else on the screen.” She has a magnetism and an appeal that can’t quite be explained or understood.

Young Colin falls in love with Marilyn, as it seems that most men do who come under her influence. At one point he asks her to leave the movie business behind and marry him, because he believes he’s the only person who really understands her, but he knows it’s impossible.

Fifty years after Marilyn’s premature death at age thirty-six, her legend lives on. She is the unique screen goddess who will be forever young. Anybody who has ever been drawn to her on the screen, for whatever reason, should enjoy seeing My Week with Marilyn.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

War Horse ~ A Capsule Movie Review

War Horse ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Steven Spielberg’s new movie, War Horse, is like the kind of movie they don’t make (much) anymore. With its notable absence of four-letter words and its lush, retro-sounding music score, it has a kind of old-fashioned, Lassie Come Home feel to it. It’s a “family” movie (based on a children’s novel by Michael Murpurgo), but that doesn’t mean it’s only for kids. With the proper “suspension of disbelief,” many adults should like it too.

In 1914 Devon, England, struggling farmer Ted Narracott (Peter Mullen) buys a horse at auction that he can’t really afford; he’s about to lose his farm. The horse is more of a show horse than a farm horse. His wife (Emily Watson) tells him to take the horse back this instant, but we know he’s not going to do that. For his teen son, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), it’s love at first sight. He names the horse Joey and promises to train him and take care of him.

Things are not going well at the Narracott farm; farmer Ted is not able to make of the place a going concern. War has broken out between England and Germany, so farmer Ted sells Joey to the cavalry for the little bit of money he can get. Albert is understandably broken-hearted; you just don’t sell something you love as much as he loves Joey. He wants to join up to be near Joey, but he is too young.

A sympathetic officer, Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston), recognizes what a fine horse Joey is. When he discovers what Joey means to Albert, he promises to take Joey as his own personal horse and return him to Albert when the war is over. It’s not the only time that Joey, through a twist of fate, experiences kindness in strangers. Maybe it’s not such a rotten world after all.

When Captain Nicholls is killed in a skirmish with the Germans, Joey falls into the hands of a young French girl, Emilie, and her grandfather. Emilie loves Joey and comes to consider him her own horse; she, of course, doesn’t know his history or anything about him. One day when she is riding Joey over a hill, she comes across the invading German army. The Germans take everything Emilie and her grandfather have, including Joey. They use him for pulling cannons through the mud, work that will eventually kill him. But do the Germans care? When Joey succumbs, they’ll have another horse waiting at the ready.

Joey experiences war at first-hand but, like the trouper he is, he perseveres. At one point he becomes hopelessly entangled in barbed wire on the battlefield with shells going off all around him. In my favorite scene in the movie, a young British soldier risks his life to go to Joey and extricate him with wire cutters. While he is setting Joey free, a German soldier emerges from an opposing trench. The two young soldiers, British and German, have a brief but telling (and beautifully written) conversation.

The war goes on long enough that Albert ends up in the British army. He has never given up on getting Joey back, although he doesn’t know all the terrible things that Joey has been through since he last saw him. Albert is gassed in the trenches by the Germans and temporarily (we learn) loses his eyesight.

Through all the twists and turns that Albert and Joey experience, the story comes full-circle in the end. While there might be a little too much irony in the conclusion to be entirely believable, it’s impossible not to be moved by it, especially if you are the sort who understands the love that exists between a boy and his horse (or the love between any human and any animal). 

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Rain Continuing Tonight and Tomorrow

Rain Continuing Tonight and Tomorrow ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in Writers’ Stories Magazine.)

Louise Eldritch didn’t have an umbrella. By the time she walked the six blocks from the bus station to the hotel, she was soaked through to the skin. She stood there, shivering a little and dripping water on the floor, while she signed her name to the register, a false name that came to her in the moment before she wrote it down. The night desk clerk smiled at her familiarly, as though he knew her. He had the same smile for everybody, no matter who they were.

“I have a nice room for you on the eighth floor, Miss Whitehead,” he said, reading the name off the register.

“It’s Mrs. Whitehead. Don’t you have anything on a lower floor?”

“Not cleaned and made up. With all this rain, you see, we’re short-staffed.”

“I guess the eighth floor will have to do, then.”

“It’s nice and quiet up there and you’ll have a fine view. The elevator is in working order, so you won’t have to walk up the stairs.” He handed her the key.

She took the creaking elevator up to the eighth floor. The door opened on a long carpeted hallway, silent and deserted. On the way to her room, she heard voices coming from behind the door to one of the rooms. She paused for a moment because something about the voices seemed oddly familiar; first a woman’s voice, pleading and crying, and then an angry man’s voice. There was the sound of breaking glass and the woman screamed. A different male voice, higher-pitched than the first one, yelled as if he was calling a dog and then the other two voices were stilled. She wondered if maybe someone was in trouble and needed help, but she had problems of her own and didn’t want to become involved in anybody else’s. She walked on to the end of the hallway.

Her room was as dreary as she expected. The walls were covered with faded green-and-brown wallpaper and the ceiling spotted with water stains. She turned on the lights and stepped out of her wet shoes and draped her jacket over the back of the desk chair. She took a towel from the bathroom and dried herself off the best she could. She longed to get into a tubful of hot water to try to soak the aches out of her body but she was just too tired. The day and a half spent travelling on the bus had taken its toll. She wanted only to sleep.

There was one window in the room and beside it a small door that opened onto a tiny fire escape landing. The window and door were both covered with a heavy green curtain, the kind that completely shut out the light. She pulled back the curtain and looked out at the rain, which hadn’t diminished and was, if anything, coming down heavier than before. She looked down the eighty feet or so to the street but couldn’t see much of anything, other than a streetlamp at the next corner and the lights of an all-night drugstore in the next block.

It could be any one of a thousand different towns in America. In the two days she had been traveling, she crossed several states lines and had lost track of where she was. If she had known the name of the town when she arrived there, she had forgotten it, but she derived a sort of perverse pleasure in not knowing where she was. If she didn’t know where she was, didn’t it follow that nobody else would know?

The room, for all its shortcomings, was warm and dry, and for that she was thankful. After she smoked a cigarette, she took off her clothes and got into the too-soft bed underneath the pile of peculiar-smelling covers and switched off the light. She could still hear the voices coming from down the hallway but underneath the soothing sound of the rain they seemed detached and far away.

She lay on her back in the dark for perhaps half an hour, smoking one cigarette after the other. As tired as her body was and as much as she needed to sleep, she knew she wasn’t going to go to sleep without a struggle. She had the sensation of still being in motion; her head reeled and she had a knot in her stomach. She got out of the bed and switched on the light and opened her suitcase and took out some pills, one to calm her down and another to make her sleep. She washed both pills down with a swallow from a bottle of Kentucky bourbon that she had bundled among her clothes to protect it from breakage.

While she had the suitcase opened, she took the diary out of a zippered compartment and opened it and sat down on the bed and held it open on her lap. The diary was for her more than just a book; it represented the end of her old life and the beginning of a new life, the kind of life she had always wanted.

In the diary, in Byron’s own handwriting, was his own confession. She didn’t know why he would confess in writing to having two business associates killed in five years, but that was just his way. He was thumbing his nose at the world. He believed he could get away with anything and outsmart anybody; he believed he was infallible. He kept the diary locked in a safe to which only he had access and he believed nobody would ever even know of its existence.

He slipped up, though, and she found the diary and read it, as wives sometimes will. She recognized it at once as a gold mine. Byron would pay a lot to get it back. She had wanted to get out of the marriage for years and now here was her chance, as if dropped into her lap from heaven.

When she got a safe distance away—and she didn’t know yet exactly where she was going—she would contact Byron and make him an offer. She would start at five-hundred thousand; she didn’t want to be overly greedy. That amount would be enough to keep her comfortably well-off for the rest of her life. She could travel and keep a nice apartment and have friends and give parties and never have to worry about anything; live the kind of independent life she had always wanted.

Byron would kill her too, though, of that she was certain. He would use any means at his disposal to get the diary back. She wasn’t certain that he hadn’t been following her or having someone else follow her—a hired killer, perhaps. For that reason she had taken a meandering course across four states, had changed buses five times, and had stopped at a dreary old hotel on the edge of nowhere—a place that wasn’t even on the map. She didn’t think she was being followed, but still one could never be certain of anything, especially when dealing with a man like Byron Eldritch.

Almost immediately the pills began to take effect and her eyelids began to feel heavy. She put the diary away carefully for safekeeping and got back into bed again. Soon she was asleep.

She dreamed she was walking along a flat country road. She didn’t know where the road was but it seemed somehow familiar, as if she remembered it from her far distant past. Looking down at her legs and feet, she saw they were covered with the dirt of the road.

As she walked along this road to an unknown or uncertain destination, she heard a car coming up behind her. She stopped walking and turned around and faced the car. She was interested in knowing who was driving, but apparently no one was, or, if there was a driver, he was invisible. An invisible driver didn’t make any sense, so it was easier to believe the car was moving on its own.

The car was bearing down on her and she had the sudden sickening realization that it meant to run her down in the road and kill her. When it was no more than thirty or forty feet away, coming toward her very fast, she jumped out of the way just in time and it went on past her in a cloud of dust.

She was awakened from the dream at that moment by a crash down the hallway, as of something being thrown against the wall, and then a scream. After that she could hear the voices, louder than before, as though the argument was still going on and had intensified. She tried covering up her head with a pillow but it was no use; she could still hear it. She got out of bed and turned on the light and picked up the receiver.

“Night clerk,” the voice said.

“There’s an argument going on down the hall from my room, loud voices and shouting, and it’s keeping me awake.”

“What room are you in?”

“846.”

“Oh, yes. The eighth floor. I believe they’ve been celebrating. I’ll call them and tell them to keep it quiet.”

She heard the phone ringing faintly down the hall and the murmur of voices, followed by laughter and the slamming of a door, and then stillness. Whoever they were, they seemed to have finally stopped the arguing and settled down for the night. She switched off the light and covered up her head and went to sleep again.

It might have been ten minutes or an hour or two hours before a knocking on the door jerked her violently awake. She sat up in the bed, her heart pounding, uncertain for the moment where she was. When the knocking came again, she got out of bed and went to the door.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Mr. Mendel calling for Mr. Sloan,” a raspy voice said.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Mr. Mendel calling for Mr. Sloan’.”

“I don’t know who you are,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong room.”

“I need to see Mr. Sloan right away.”

“There’s nobody here by that name.”

“He said room 846.”

“You’ve got the wrong room.”

“There came one day a lovely box of flowers.”

“What?”

“Will you let me in?”

“You’ve got the wrong room.”

“So you say, but can you give me a good reason why I ought to believe you?”

She heard a huff of breath and faint footsteps as the man turned from the door and walked away. A few seconds later she heard the elevator door open and close and then the faraway creaking as the elevator descended.

The next time she awoke she could still hear the rain, but underneath that was some other sound. She pushed back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed and stared into the darkness. It took a few seconds before she was awake enough to know that she had been hearing someone calling her name outside the door to her room, softly yet insistently. She went to the door and put her ear against it.

“Who’s there?” she asked softly. “Is anyone there?”

There was no reply but the unmistakable sound of someone breathing in air and letting it out again.

“Who is it?” she asked, louder this time. “What do you want?”

There was a long pause, after which a man’s voice said, “Aren’t you going to tell me I’ve got the wrong room?”

“Who is it?” she asked.

“What’s the point of asking such obvious questions?”

“I’ve got a gun and I know how to use it.”

The man laughed. “All right, all right,” he said. “No reason to get excited. So I’ve got the wrong room. No need to shoot me!”

She heard him walking away, followed by silence. She longed to open the door and look down the hall toward the elevator, but she was afraid he was playing a trick on her and when she opened the door he would force his way in.

She went to her suitcase and took from underneath the jumbled clothing the little .22 caliber handgun that Byron had given her in happier days when he traveled a lot and she was left at home to fend for herself. Having a gun nearby had always made her feel safer, even though she had never had any reason to fire it.

Clutching the gun to her breast, she got back into bed and sat against the headboard and pulled the covers up and stared into the darkness. The rain blew in gusts against the window. She went to sleep again.

She awoke to the phone ringing. She dropped the gun to the floor, forgetting she was holding it, and grabbed the receiver to silence the ringing.

“Yes?” she said, her voice breathless.

“This is the night desk clerk.”

“Yes?”

“I wanted to ask you if you’ve been bothered any more by the guests on your floor. We always follow up on these things.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s exactly one-forty-seven, Central Standard Time.”

“There was a man knocking on the door a while ago. He was looking for somebody he thought was in this room.”

“Did you open the door?”

“No.”

“If he comes back, don’t open the door. You never know who might be lurking about. We try to keep people out late at night who aren’t actually paying guests of the hotel, but sometimes they come in unnoticed for one reason or another.”

“Do you have the number of the local police force?” she asked.

“The police? What do you need to call the police for?”

“Well, I can’t say for sure. I have an uneasy feeling.”

“You don’t need to be calling the police, ma’am. I’ll be here all night, until seven or so, and if you’re bothered again pick up the phone and call me. Just don’t call the police.”

“I’m going to leave this place. I don’t feel safe here.”

“Where would you go in the middle of the night in the pouring rain? The dam might be breached and if it is this whole area could be under water. You wouldn’t even get a cab.”

“I’ll sit in the lobby or I’ll go to the all-night drugstore down the street and wait there until morning.”

“No need to do that, ma’am. Just go back to sleep. Everything will be all right.”

When she hung up the phone, her hands were shaking and she felt dizzy and short of breath. She took two more pills and drank the rest of the bourbon in the bottle.

Suddenly a pounding at the door brought her to her feet. She stared at the door in the darkness, as if expecting to see through it to the other side.

“Who’s there?” she asked.

This time a different male voice (with a hint of a foreign accent) said, “Open the door and stop fooling around!”

“I said ‘who’s there’?”

“If you don’t open this door, you’ll have to answer for it later.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s the middle of the night. I’m trying to sleep!”

“Do you know how silly that sounds?”

“You’ve got the wrong room.”

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll open the door.”

“Go away!”

For good measure, he pounded on the door again and kicked it with both feet.

She returned to the bed and pulled the covers up over her head, hoping to shut out any further disturbances. She longed to be at home where everything was certain and where nobody would dare bother her in the middle of the night. She was thinking about getting out of bed again and checking to make sure the door was double-locked, when the phone rang again. Unlike before, she let it ring ten or twelve rings before she picked it up.

“Yes,” she said groggily into the receiver, holding it several inches from her ear.

“You’re not fooling anybody,” a voice said quietly, followed by a click and the dial tone.

“Who is this?” she said, even though she knew no one was there. “Why are you doing this to me? What is it you want?”

When she hung up the phone, she felt ill and took two more pills to calm herself down. Unable to remember how many pills she had taken, she took two more. She then pulled all the covers off the bed and piled them on the floor and lay down on them and tried to cover herself up. She would make herself small on the floor underneath the bedclothes and no one would even know she was there. She would roll herself up in the corner and make herself invisible if that’s what she needed to do. She was more resourceful than people were willing to give her credit for.

There came then a rhythmic pounding on the ceiling and then on the wall behind the bed and then on the opposite wall. It was coming from every place at once and no place at all. She let out a scream and wrapped herself in the blankets on the floor like in a cocoon and covered her ears with her hands but she could still hear the pounding, loud and then soft like tapping and then stopping altogether and starting up again in a different place. When she could stand the pounding no longer, she stood up and made her way to the phone and picked up the receiver.

“Night clerk,” the voice said.

“What is that terrible noise?” she asked.

“This is the lady on the eighth floor, isn’t it?”

“Someone is bothering me, harassing me!”

“How so, ma’am?”

“It sounds as if someone is hitting on the walls and the ceiling with a lead pipe.”

“That’s just the plumbing, ma’am. Air gets trapped in the pipes. This is an old building. You hear all kinds of strange noises.

“It has to be something more than that.”

“Just try to ignore the sound and get some sleep, ma’am. Nobody is deliberately trying to bother you.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Good night, ma’am.”

The pounding continued for some time, growing louder and fainter and then stopping altogether. When all was quiet again, she went to the door and put her ear against it. She imagined she could hear blood coursing through the veins of whoever was standing there, just on the other side of the door. She wanted to call out to the person and ask who they were and what they wanted with her, but her own heart was pounding in her chest as if to strangle her and she seemed to lack the breath to get the words out. She backed slowly away from the door and, as she did so, the doorknob turned quietly one way and then the other. Someone was trying to come into the room.

She picked up her gun and, holding it in both hands, lay down again on the blankets on the floor and covered up, leaving only her eyes exposed.

From her vantage point on the floor she could see the crack underneath the door that admitted a sliver of light from the hallway; in that sliver she could see shadows as people moved silently back and forth, in and out. She had stopped trying to figure out who they were and what they were doing. She trained her gun on the door, holding it in both hands, ready to fire when needed.

She focused all her attention on the door for the remainder of the night, determined to stay awake to protect herself. She lay on the floor in the dark, listening to the rain, waiting for the next thing that was going to happen.

The pounding on the wall had stopped. People were no longer moving about in front of the door. There were no more phone calls, no more voices. She began to feel toward morning that everything was going to be all right. The awful night was almost over. She could get up in a while and get dressed and order some breakfast and catch the next bus out of town. With these thoughts in her head—and in this more relaxed state of mind—she fell into an exhausted sleep.

She had been asleep for only a few minutes when the door to the room opened slowly, without making a sound. A small sound—a footstep or a sigh or the clearing of a throat—woke her up. When she opened her eyes, she wasn’t terribly surprised to see two men in the room with her. They were wearing dark clothes and had no faces; they were only outlines in the dark. She reached for the gun but was unable to find it. She stood up and made her way around the bed to the far side of the room.

Standing in front of the door to the fire escape, she turned and looked at the men. They seemed for the moment to not know she was there. They weren’t looking at her but were instead intent on rifling through the clothes in her suitcase. She believed that when they turned their attention on her they would kill her, so she must somehow get out of the room. Since they were blocking the way between her and door, there was only one way out.

She opened the door and stepped out onto the tiny rain-slicked fire escape landing. She felt the cold sting of the rain on her face as she gripped the railing and looked down into the darkness for the steps that would lead her down to the ground and to safety. Hanging onto the railing with both hands she eased one foot down on the top step and then the other foot. When she stepped down to the next step, she misjudged the distance and her feet slipped out from under her. Try as she might, she wasn’t able to regain her footing. She held on for as long as she could but it was no use. The railing slipped from her hands and she was gone.

The awning over to the entrance to the hotel broke her fall. She was only knocked unconscious and would have survived if she had not fallen face-down into the water that had accumulated in the awning and drowned. Her body was discovered in the daylight and retrieved by firemen with hooks.

When interviewed by the police, the night desk clerk was voluble. Enjoying the unaccustomed attention, he disclosed everything he noticed about the woman. Something about her seemed terribly amiss. She seemed unusually nervous and appeared to have been drinking. He spoke to her several times in the night and she seemed distraught; believed somebody was bothering her for no reason. She complained about noise that only she seemed to hear.

After completing their investigation and establishing the identity of the woman, the police ruled her death a suicide with no indication of foul play. Since she had left no suicide note, maybe she hadn’t intended to commit suicide, but if that was the case what was she doing out on the fire escape before dawn in the rain? It was just one of those silly things that people do for which there is no logical explanation.

Copyright © 2011 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Never Let Me Go ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Never Let Me Go ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

A 2010 movie that got little or no play in my area is one called Never Let Me Go. It’s about ten times more interesting and compelling that most of the crap that plays at the seven-screen multiplex in my neighborhood, but nobody asked me. It is currently available for viewing on HBO. Otherwise, I would probably have never seen it.

Never Let Me Go is about a group of kids at an English boarding school called Hailsham, specifically three kids: Tommy, Kathy and Ruth. The kids at Hailsham are just like kids anyplace else, with one striking difference. We learn about thirty minutes into the movie that they exist for one reason only. They are “clones” (although that word is never used); when they are at the appropriate age, their organs will be used to save the lives of others. Most of them will make two or three “donations,” at most, until they reach “completion,” which is a polite way of saying their sad lives will end at a young age.

Since the Hailsham kids have no family and no ties outside of school, all they have is each other; they don’t learn skills in school that will help them cope with the outside world because they won’t need them. Kathy and Tommy (played by Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield as older kids and as young adults) are drawn to each other from childhood. Under different circumstances, they would have fallen in love, married and lived happy lives. Ruth (Keira Knightley) witnessing the attraction between Tommy and Kathy, is jealous and afraid of being left behind; she decides that she and Tommy were meant for each other. She takes Tommy away from Kathy; Tommy seems more than willing to be taken. As Tommy and Ruth embark on donating their organs one by one, Kathy becomes a “carer,” meaning that her “donations” are delayed for a number of years so she can help to care for the donors as they undergo the horrific surgeries that will ultimately end their lives.  The question becomes: How much of a “normal” life can young people in such circumstances reasonably expect to have?

Never Let Me Go is based on a novel by the English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s a memorable and intelligent little movie with poignant characters that seems to have been mostly overlooked. Too bad, because it might just be the best movie of 2010 that you never saw.

Copyright © 2011 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

My Favorite Christmas Movie

My Favorite Christmas Movie ~ Remember the Night

I don’t have to tax my brain very hard to think of a bunch of Christmas-themed movies, movies that are either about Christmas or that revolve in some way around the Christmas season.  Movies that immediately come to mind are Meet Me in St. Louis, Miracle on 34th Street, The Bells of St. Mary’s, A Christmas Story, A Christmas Carol, Meet John Doe, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Apartment, Christmas in Connecticut, Holiday Inn, The Polar Express, and many others. My favorite Christmas movie, though, and one that I’ve seen maybe thirty times, is a little gem from 1940 called Remember the Night, with Barbara Stanwyck as a girl thief who runs afoul of the law at Christmastime, and Fred MacMurray as the straight-arrow prosecuting attorney who just might redeem her. 

The character Barbara Stanwyck plays is a charming and not-quite-decent girl named Lee Leander, who is caught stealing expensive jewelry right before Christmas and ends up in jail. Her trial is being held over until after the holidays, so it seems she’s going to have to spend Christmas behind bars. John Sargent (played by Fred MacMurray), the prosecutor in her case, takes pity on her and bails her out at least until her trail will resume after Christmas.  Since she has no place to go, he offers to take her with him to Indiana to spend Christmas. It turns out that Lee is also from Indiana, so she is eager to return there with him. 

After a memorable road trip and one stop along the way at Lee’s hateful mother’s house, where it turns out Lee isn’t wanted, they end up at John’s Indiana home which, as it turns out, is everything a home should be. John has a mother (played by Beulah Bondi), and an aunt, (played by Elizabeth Patterson) and they have an odd but lovable hired man named Willy (played by Sterling Holloway). These are warm, quirky characters, and you will immediately feel a connection with them. They are the kind of people we have all known in the past, or wish we had known.

John’s family welcomes Lee with open arms and treats her like family during the few days she is with them. They gradually come to learn of her troubles back in the city and that she is likely to end up in jail. John’s well-intentioned mother has a talk with Lee and makes her promise she won’t do anything to spoil John’s career, which he has worked so hard to get. Lee assures her that there is nothing between her and John and that when they return to the city she won’t ever see him again. 

On their way back to the city after Christmas, Lee and John discover they’ve fallen in love. The Christmas she has spent with decent John and his decent family has changed her and has made her want to go straight after her life as a thief. What happens in the courtroom when her trial resumes might not be what you expected, but it is fitting to the characters and the situation and we see that it’s exactly the conclusion they’ve been headed toward all along.   

Remember the Night has sentiment but is never hokey or heavy-handed. It’s sweet but not overly sweet. The characters and situations are believable and the dialogue is crisp and funny. It’s one of those rare movies where all the elements come together in a perfect blend.  Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray appeared together in several films, but I think they were never better than in this one. If it’s a Christmas movie you’re wanting—and likely one you haven’t seen before—it’s Remember the Night from 1940. You might even want to see it more than once.

Copyright © 2011 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Truth About Lizzie Shennick

 

The Truth About Lizzie Shennick ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in Yesteryear Fiction.) 

Every morning Miss Frid opened her book and called roll, going down the list: Harry Abbot, Maxine Abernathy, Beryl Barrister, Donald Best, Roy Brewster, Virgie Carrow, George Crawford…and so on to the end.  Every morning at least one or two were absent, but every morning there was one who was always absent.  

“Does anybody know Lizzie Shennick?” Miss Frid had taken to asking the sea of slack-jawed faces staring at her. “Has anybody seen Lizzie Shennick? Does anybody know the whereabouts of Lizzie Shennick?”

Since any inquiries had failed to provide a satisfactory explanation, Miss Frid decided to do some investigating on her own. When she was in the principal’s office one morning before anybody else had arrived, she took a forbidden look into the registration file. She found the address she was looking for, memorized it, and went back to her classroom and wrote it down before she forgot it.

A few days later, on a sunny Saturday morning, she got into her old Nash Rambler and drove across town. With the aid of a map, she found the street she was looking for and drove along it slowly, looking for the right number. The houses were big and old and in some places boarded up or falling down.

The house she was looking for was set back from the street and obscured by trees and thick foliage. She parked the Nash and got out and approached the gate of the chain-link fence that surrounded the property. When she tried to open the gate it fell off its hinges but she didn’t let that stop her. She walked up the front steps to the door and rang the bell.

In a few moments a woman came to the door and opened it. She was, Miss Frid thought, Lizzie Shennick’s mother. She was thin and rather on the young side with strange beet-red hair parted down the middle of her head. The hair swept out in waves on both sides away from the part and crashed over each ear like a huge wave in suspended motion. How she achieved this effect was not immediately apparent.    

“Yes?” the woman—she went by the name of Griselda—said to Miss Frid in a voice that indicated she had rather been expecting her.

Miss Frid identified herself and explained she was Lizzie Shennick’s teacher from school. “Are you the mother?” she asked Griselda.

“Well, some would say yes and some would say no.”   

“I wonder if I might inquire why Lizzie is enrolled in school but never attends,” Miss Frid said, careful not to sound priggish or inflammatory.

Griselda motioned Miss Frid inside and closed the door. “Lizzie isn’t like other children her age,” she said.

“Is she ill?” Miss Frid asked.

“It’s not an illness. It’s a condition.”

“Maybe you’d better explain to me what you’re talking about.”

Griselda motioned for Miss Frid to follow her through the dark house and into the kitchen, where a large window opened onto the back yard. She directed Miss Frid’s attention out the window.

Miss Frid saw, or believed she saw, a gorilla dressed in a red dress with little white flowers on it jumping up and down on a trampoline. The gorilla jumped very high, with grace and precision, and landed delicately on first one foot and then the other, and then on both feet. With each jump her dress billowed out to reveal white underpants.

“Why, that’s astounding!” Miss Frid said. “How do you get a gorilla to do that?”

“It’s not what it appears to be,” Griselda said.

“Why, what do you mean?” Miss Frid asked.

“That’s our Lizzie.”

Miss Frid looked at her with disbelief. “Wait a minute! Are you telling me your daughter is a gorilla?”

“She hasn’t always been a gorilla. Sit down and I’ll make you a cup of tea and try to explain it the best I can.”

She set the water on the stove to boil and the two of them sat down at the table. Griselda lit a cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke; she seemed to be trying to think of how, or where, to begin.

“We just moved here from a long way off a few months ago,” she said, picking a particle of tobacco off her tongue. “We had been noticing a change in Lizzie for some time, but it was very gradual. The doctor said it was a hormonal thing. He said she would get over it.” 

“What kind of a change?” Miss Frid asked.

“At first it was hair growing on her face and arms and then all over her body. We tried to keep the hair off using depilatory creams, but it was no use. The hair came right back, thicker than before.”

“I can see how that would be a problem,” Miss Frid said. “For a young girl, I mean.”

“Then her body began thickening through the arms and shoulders. Her head got bigger and her mouth widened; her teeth grew longer and more ferocious looking. Her strength increased every day; she could bend a metal bar in half without even trying. She didn’t seem to be aware at first at what was happening to her. She would look at herself in the mirror and see herself as she used to be, before she started changing. We started keeping her in the house all the time so people wouldn’t stare and laugh at her and ask questions. There was really nothing we could do except hope the situation would reverse itself, which is what I prayed for every day. After about a year and a half of very slow change, the transformation speeded up—became more pronounced. You could see her becoming a little more gorillafied every day. And then, by the middle of the summer, the change was complete—she was all gorilla. After that, I gave up all hope she would ever change back into a regular girl again.”

“I see now why she didn’t want to go to school with all the non-gorilla children,” Miss Frid said sympathetically.

“Oh, she wants to go to school, all right, all right! We just thought it would be too cruel to send her to a school where she was the only gorilla. Think how she would be stared at! Children can be so cruel!

“Have you thought about sending her to a special school? A place where she could be with her own kind?”

“And what kind is that exactly? Do you have a name for it?”

“Well, I—“     

“Neither do I. We’ve given up on the idea of school altogether. She’s training now for a circus career.”

“The trampoline?”

“The trampoline is part of her acrobatic act—she also does a song and dance routine—but I figure her best chance for success is with the freak show. She could headline with Crab Girl and Skeleton Boy and the Human Sponge. With the proper buildup, I think she could be quite the sensation. If people are going to stare at her and point and laugh and be amazed, they’re going to have to pay a price for the privilege.”

“A child should go to school, even if she is a gorilla.”

“She can learn everything she needs to know in the circus. Besides, they have an old woman that teaches the kids their lessons, even the freak kids. The circus is in her blood. I was in the circus as a clown when I was carrying her. Something happened to me in that circus that I believe—that I know—is the reason for Lizzie being the way she is.”

“What could possibly–?”

“We were performing one night to a full house. I was in the main ring going through my routines with a couple of other girl clowns. We were juggling bowling pins and doing some acrobatic stunts when suddenly there was a loud scream from the audience. Everybody stopped what they were doing and turned toward the scream. That’s when we saw that one of the gorillas—his name was Hugo—got loose from his trainer. He was running frantically, swiping at people with his big hands. Nobody knew what had provoked him. Everybody was running and screaming, trying to get out of his way. He came running toward the ring where we were as if he knew what he was after. I ran from him, the same as the other clowns, but he caught me by my back hair and dragged me down. Everybody who saw it happen thought I was a goner. I thought I was a goner too.”

“What did you do?”

“There I was on my back on the ground. I knew not to scream or struggle; I pretended I was dead. Hugo had me pinned with his upper body; I could feel his hot breath on my face. The trainers were yelling to try to get him away from me and leave me alone, but he just ignored them. When I dared to open my eyes a little, Hugo’s face was just above mine. I saw he was terrified and confused; he didn’t know what to do. It was him against everybody else. And then suddenly he did an unexpected thing: He began whimpering and stroking the side of my head. When the trainers approached him, he growled at them and flailed out his arms.”  

“How did they get you away from him?”    

“They were going to throw a net over him and pull him away, but he began nuzzling the side of my head with his snout and nibbling on my ear. They thought he was hurting me, biting me, but he wasn’t doing anything of the kind. And then he leaned all the way over and kissed me on the mouth. It was the sweetest, gentlest kiss! You would never know that such a huge monster of an animal could be so gentle. In just a few seconds he had developed this—I don’t know—kind of protective bond with me. I felt it too and was no longer afraid of him as I had been. I just knew then that he wasn’t going to hurt me.”

“Were they able to get him away from you then?”

“One of the clowns—the one named Beauchamp—always carried a small gun wherever he went. Beauchamp was standing about fifty yards behind Hugo and couldn’t see what was really going on. Like everybody else, he thought Hugo was hurting me. He took out his gun and shot Hugo in the back and killed him. I saw the surprised look on Hugo’s face when he was hit. Of course he fell forward on top of me but they pulled him off before his body crushed me to death.”

“And that’s why Lizzie turned into a gorilla,” Miss Frid said to herself.

“When she was born a few months later, she seemed normal in every way, but I always knew in my heart that she would be marked in some way.”

Before Miss Frid left, she wanted to speak to Lizzie (never having conducted a conversation with a gorilla before), but Griselda thought it best if Lizzie didn’t know about Miss Frid’s visit. The less she was reminded of school, the quicker she would be able to forget about attending. Miss Frid told Griselda she hoped they would reconsider sending Lizzie to school, gorilla or not, but Griselda said they had already made up their minds that Lizzie was going into the circus as soon as she could, when the new season began. Having no reason to stay any longer, Miss Frid thanked Griselda for telling her the long-in-coming truth about Lizzie Shennick and stood up to go. As she was going out the door, she said with regret that she would tell everyone at school that Lizzie would not—and would never—be coming to school. She wouldn’t tell people the real reason for Lizzie not coming to school, but she would tell them something they would be able to believe and comprehend. She had always been able to make up a good story. 

Copyright © 2011 by Allen Kopp   

by allen0997

Sometimes I’m Happy

Sometimes I’m Happy ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in Buzzard Picnic Magazine.)

Arlene Danker had been down to the little market and was on her way back home, pulling her wheeled basket. One of the wheels had developed a squeak that it didn’t have before. In the basket were milk, bread, a one-pound bag of peanuts in the shell, light bulbs, cat food, a carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes with filter tips, and a romance magazine. She would have to hide the romance magazine as soon as she got home and not let anybody see it.

About halfway home, she stopped on a corner in the shelter of an overgrown cedar tree to rest for a minute and get a quick look at the magazine. She looked around to see if anybody was coming and, seeing no one, opened the magazine to a random page. There was a story entitled “How to Improve Your Love Life,” with a big picture that covered a whole page. In the picture, a man and a woman were sitting on a couch in front of a fire looking into each other’s eyes.  The woman was wearing a low-cut red dress and had hair the color of a lemon. The man had shiny black hair streaked with gray and an eye patch over one eye, making him look sinister and foreign. If he spoke, he would have a voice like Conrad Veidt. A few pages over was another story, “I am in Love with My Father Confessor and Afraid My Husband is Going to Find Out.” She read the first few sentences of that story, but she stopped reading when she heard somebody coming.

It was only the mailman, a young one she had never seen before. His uniform didn’t fit him well; he looked like a child playing dress-up. They used to have the same mailman all the time, but he was gone now and in his place was a series of young ones. This one looked bored and unfriendly and unhappy. She was going to smile at him and say something pleasant, but he didn’t even look at her. She couldn’t imagine that he would last very long in the job.

When the mailman was past, she put the romance magazine in the pocket of her coat and continued on her way, pulling the cart behind her. Most of the remaining three blocks were uphill and she had to take them slow because she had just turned seventy-five and didn’t have the stamina she once had.

She passed a house where several small children were playing some rowdy game in the front yard, seemingly trying to out-scream each other. As she walked past, they stopped what they were doing and stared at her. One of them said something in a shrill voice and the others laughed, but she didn’t catch what it was he said; it sounded like foot the shoat faster, but it couldn’t have been that because it didn’t make any sense. Whatever it was, though, they seemed to find it funny.

By the time she got home, she was out of breath and her calf muscles ached. She opened the door and bumped the cart over the threshold. Hazelnut, her daughter, came to the kitchen doorway and looked at her, fists on hips. She was still wearing her silk Japanese lounging pajamas with the dragon on the chest and the white crinoline bag she wore on her head at times to protect her hairdo.   

“It takes you one solid hour to walk to the store and back?” Hazelnut said. “I ask you to do one little thing!”

Arlene squeaked the cart into the kitchen past Hazelnut, who was a good six inches taller than she was. Sitting around the breakfast table were Addison, Hazelnut’s husband, and Addison and Hazelnut’s grown children, Duncan and Lorraine.

Lorraine was a bored twenty-three; she believed that any favorable opportunities in life had passed her by since she remained unmarried and still lived in her parent’s house. Duncan, who with his fair good looks was nothing like either of his parents, had just turned twenty. He had little ambition in life beyond increasing the size of his chest and biceps. Addison was reading the personal ads in the morning newspaper to keep from having to talk to his children.

Arlene wheeled the cart past the table without looking at any of them and stopped at the refrigerator to put the milk away.

“I hope you remembered my cigarettes,” Hazelnut said. “I don’t see them anywhere.”

Arlene picked the carton—which had become buried under the other items—out of the cart and handed it over. Hazelnut grabbed at it like a person dying of thirst in the desert who was being offered a drink of water. In just a few seconds, she had the carton torn open and a cigarette in her mouth. She lighted it and exhaled a stream of smoke and sat down at the table.

“Must you?” Addison asked. “While I’m eating?” He fanned the air with the folded-up newspaper.

“What’s that you’ve got there, sticking out of your pocket?” Hazelnut asked Arlene, pointing to the romance magazine.

“Nothing,” Arlene said. She had for the moment forgotten the magazine. She clamped her arm down on it to hide it. “Just something I picked up at the store.”

“I hope you’re not spending good money on those trashy magazines.”

“Nope.”

“You may have money to spare, but if you do you’re the only one. If you have a big stash of secret money somewhere to draw on, I’d like to know about it.”

“You should know by now you can’t hide anything from her,” Lorraine said. Having finished her breakfast, she was examining parts of her face closely in a tiny round mirror. “She always spots everything. I think she should join the FBI.”

“I think she should stop smoking,” Addison said, “or go pick out her coffin.”

“I’ll have you know I had a chest x-ray last fall,” Hazelnut said, “and the doctor said it was clear and fine. He said my lungs are perfectly healthy.”

“He got the x-rays mixed up with somebody else’s,” Duncan said and laughed. When Hazelnut glared across the table at him, he closed the gap in his bathrobe to cover his chest.

“Just don’t you worry about it,” Hazelnut said. “I’ll outlive all of you.”

“Some people are too mean to die,” Addison said.

In a moment of defiance, Arlene took the magazine out of her pocket and laid it face-up on the table for all to see. “I don’t care,” she said. “I’m not a child. Why should I hide it?”

“I’m disappointed in you,” Hazelnut said, regarding the magazine with distaste. “If you have to waste money, can’t you at least waste it on something worthwhile?” She picked up the magazine and opened it and turned a few pages. “This is just filth.”

“I’ll leave it hidden in my room and you won’t have to see it,” Arlene said.

“Yes, but I’ll know it’s there all the same.”

“Poor Grandma,” Lorraine said. “Foiled again in her efforts to read sexy stories.”

“This is not a prison,” Addison said. “She can read whatever she likes. I’ll pay for the magazine.”

“She’s my mother and you just stay out of it!” Hazelnut said. “Anyway, I say what goes in this house.”  

“I’d be happy to share my pornography with you, Grandma,” Duncan said.

“Any time you bring pornography into this house, mister,” Hazelnut said, “you can pack your bags and catch the afternoon train.”

“Hey, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea!”

“When you and your brother were little,” Arlene said, speaking to Hazelnut but in a rather indirect way, “I covered up for the two of you all the time. One time you dented the fender of your father’s new car with your bicycle. When he saw it, he was furious. I knew you had done it, but I convinced him that it happened on the parking lot at work.”

“We’ve heard all this stuff a million times before,” Hazelnut said with a sigh.

“When you were in fourth grade, you stole a five-dollar bill out of the teacher’s desk at school. When they called me and told me, I said I didn’t believe you had done it, but then they found the money in your shoe where you had hidden it. They wanted your father and me to come to the school to meet with the principal, but I told them your father was on a business trip and couldn’t make it. I didn’t want him to know you would steal money from the teacher.”

“I don’t remember that,” Hazelnut said. “Are you sure it wasn’t someone else?”  

“I always knew she was a criminal,” Lorraine said to Duncan behind her hand.    

“When you were in the eighth grade, you and two other girls were caught smoking cigarettes in the rest room at school. They were going to suspend you for three days, but I begged them not to do it because your grades weren’t very good and I was afraid you would get behind in your studies and wouldn’t get promoted to the next grade.”

“She’s been smoking since eighth grade?” Duncan asked. “That’s about sixty or seventy years, isn’t it?”

“And then there was that time in high school when you and your friend Norma Holliday were caught shoplifting costume jewelry from a store downtown. The store detective called the police and I had to come down to the police station and get you. They were going to make you stay overnight in a cell to teach you a lesson, but I pleaded with them to let me take you home. I told them you would be terrified if you had to spend the night in jail.”

“I think I see a pattern here,” Addison said.

“All right, all right!” Hazelnut said. “That’s enough! Keep the damn magazine! I don’t care!”

She picked the magazine up and hurled it through the air. Arlene, still standing in front of the refrigerator, threw her arms up to keep the magazine from hitting her in the face; it struck her on the shoulder and fell to the floor.

Hazelnut doubled up her fists and her face contorted with anger. “You always do that to me!” she said. “Can’t I even have an opinion in my own house without having you try to make me look like a fool? I don’t like trashy magazines! What is the crime in that?”

Addison shrugged his shoulders and threw his hands up in a melodramatic gesture and rolled his eyes, eliciting a laugh from Duncan.

“Oh! You always take the side against me, don’t you?” Hazelnut said. She ran from the kitchen and up the stairs to her bedroom and slammed the door. 

“It’s that time again,” Addison said, but nobody knew exactly what he meant. He wiped his mouth and finished his coffee and went out the back door and drove away in his car. He would be gone all day until far into the night.

“Gentlemen, sheathe your swords!” Lorraine said, and then she too got up and left.   

Arlene was left alone in the kitchen with Duncan. He gave her a little nod and a knowing smile that seemed to say, “You and I are alike and we’re not like them.” He continued to eat his breakfast, glad for the stillness, while Arlene opened a can of cat food and spooned it into the cat’s bowl in the corner. The cat, hearing the sound he liked best, came running from another part of the house and began gobbling the food as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.  

She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down to the table. She spread the magazine open before her and turned to the first page. She was going to read the whole thing from front to back and not skip anything—not even the ads about relieving menstrual pain and getting rid of acne. It was her magazine and she was going to do with it as she damn well pleased—even if it took all day.

Copyright © 2011 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Five-Finger Discount

 
Five-Finger Discount ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in Superstition Review.)

Dot loved her binoculars. Through them she looked at anything and everything. She looked at the sky and the clouds, the moon and the stars. If she saw a bird in flight, she followed it until it flew out of sight. She looked at herself in the mirror and at her feet as she walked; at her sister as she ate tuna fish from the can and as she put on lipstick; at squirrels as they played underneath the trees and the tom cat as he walked slowly from the shed to the house and back again; her mother as she slept in the bed and as she stirred soup on the stove; Toots as he cracked walnuts or pushed a wheelbarrow full of fertilizer from one side of the yard to the other; cars on the road, coming toward her with startling clarity; the dog as it scratched its fleas; trains going by on the tracks behind the house.  

A few days after acquiring the binoculars (she stole them from a parked car at the fairgrounds), Dot was lying on her stomach in the back yard watching a pair of identical starlings drinking from the dog’s water pan. They sat on the edge of the pan about six inches apart and took turns drinking. When they weren’t drinking, they were looking around to make sure they were safe. They didn’t know it yet, but the gray striped cat known as Dutch was stalking them from behind the trunk of a tree about fifteen feet away. He was crouched down, his back legs quivering, ready to pounce when the time was right. Just then, and far too noisily, somebody came up behind Dot from the house. The starlings flew off and the cat jumped into the bushes. Dot didn’t have to turn around to know it was her sister Lennie.   

“Don’t you ever get tired of looking through those spy glasses?” Lennie asked.

“No,” Dot said. “Look what you did.”

“I want you to go to town with me,” Lennie said. “Put your jacket on.” She dropped the jacket over Dot’s shoulder.

“I don’t want to go to town,” Dot said. “I’m busy.”

“Come on. Get up off the ground. Toots is giving us a ride.”

“Oh, all right. Do you have any money?”

“A little,” Lennie said.

“Will you buy me a goldfish?”

“What do you want with a goldfish?”

“For a pet. What else?”

“The cats will eat it. You know cats.”

“I don’t care. I want one anyway.”

“What’s the use of spending money on a goldfish if it’s going to end up in a cat’s stomach?”

“Come on!” Toots yelled from the porch. “I haven’t got all day!”

Dot stood up and put the binoculars on their string around her neck. She slipped into her jacket and she and Lennie went and got into the truck. Dot, since she was the youngest, sat next to Toots and Lennie sat next to the window. Toots started the engine and headed out for the highway into town. 

“I think I’ll fix my hair in a French roll,” Lennie said.  “What do you think?”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” Dot said. She was watching oncoming cars through the binoculars.

“I want to get some new panties and some lipstick and some emery boards and some conditioner for my hair,” Lennie said.

“I want to get a goldfish,” Dot said. “I think I’ll get two. A boy and a girl.”

“You two are never satisfied, are you?” Toots said. “Always wanting things you can’t have.”   

“Who says I can’t have them?” Lennie asked.

Toots let Dot and Lennie out at the intersection where the bank and the used car lot were. “You’ll have to walk back home,” he said, “or hitch a ride with somebody, because I’m not going to be back until tonight.”

“Where’s he going?” Dot asked Lennie as he drove away.

Lennie shrugged and opened her purse and took out some cigarettes. She took one out of the pack for herself and one for Dot. They lit up and headed down the street to where the good stores were.

They went first to the cut-rate department store known as Dunlap’s. They threw their cigarettes into the gutter in front of the store and went inside and found their way to the ladies’ department on the second floor. A fat saleslady with a round face and little pinched-up eyes went over to them as soon as she saw them and asked if they needed any help. Lennie looked at the woman and shook her head and walked on.

She found a round table full of ladies’ underpants and picked up a pair of pink ones and a pair of yellow ones and handed them to Dot. Dot slipped them inside her jacket and they walked on to the swimsuits. 

Lennie picked up a brightly colored two-piece swimsuit. She held the two pieces of the swimsuit up against her body to see how it was going to look on her. “How do I look?” she asked.

Dot stood back a few feet and looked at Lennie through the binoculars.  “You look like you should be arrested,” she said.

Lennie put the swimsuit back and they walked on to a table of ladies’ rubber swim caps; there were many laid out on the table in a lot of different colors and styles. Lennie picked up a yellow one with green scallops that looked like flowers. She looked at it inside and out and then set it back down and looked at Dot and nodded her head. Dot went over to it and picked it up and hid it inside her jacket along with the underpants.

They were headed toward the stairs to go back down to the first floor, when the same saleslady as before came out of nowhere and held her hand out to stop them. Her face was hard and sour. She leaned over toward Dot to keep anybody else from hearing. “Did I just see you put something inside your jacket?” she asked.

“No,” Dot said, shaking her head emphatically.  

“Well, I’m pretty sure you did, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt this time. I just want to warn you, though, if I ever see you in this store stealing things or trying to steal things, I will call the law. Do you understand me? Shoplifting is a very serious crime.”

Lennie smiled coolly at the woman and took Dot’s hand protectively and the two of them started down the stairs.

“I’ll be keeping my eye out for you!” the woman said. “I wasn’t born yesterday!”   

“Imagine that,” Lennie said when they were outside the store.

“What does ‘born yesterday’ mean?” Dot asked.

“It’s just something grownups say to make them think they’re smarter than you are,” Lennie said.

“I didn’t like her. She scared me.”

“I didn’t like her either.”  

“Do you think she’ll tell on us?”

“I don’t know how she could. She doesn’t know who we are.”  

They went down the street to the variety store and went inside. Lennie went to the cosmetics counter and Dot to the back part of the store where they kept the pet supplies. She found the goldfish tank and stood in front of it looking at the myriads of goldfish swimming around inside. Some were black, some white, some gold, and others were combinations of spotted and speckled colors. Some were no more than three-quarters of an inch long, while others seemed very big in comparison. A few of them had long tails that seemed to drag them down as they swam. Dot watched with fascination. 

A high school girl named Freda Stamm worked in the pet department. She was a big girl with a fuzzy head of hair growing down almost to her eyebrows, causing her to have the nickname “werewolf.” When she saw Dot looking at the fish, she went over to her and asked if she could be of assistance.  

“I’d like two goldfish,” Dot said. “A boy and a girl.”

“Do you know which two, or just any two?” Freda asked. She picked up a little net with a long handle on it and started to stick it into the tank.

“Oh, I guess I’m just looking today,” Dot said. “I’m with my sister and I don’t have any money.”  

“Well, you’ll have to come back when you have some money, then, won’t you?” Freda said.   

“If I buy a boy and a girl, will they have babies?”

“Under the right conditions they would. We’ve got a little book that tells all about them.”

“How much is the book?”

“It’s included in the price of the fish.”

Lennie came up behind Dot and tapped her on the shoulder. “I knew right where you’d be,” she said. “Looking at those silly old goldfish.”

“Did you ever see anything so beautiful?”

“Well, yes, I believe I have.”

“I want one that’s all different colors.”

Lennie handed Dot some things she had picked up, a comb and a little package of emery boards and a bottle of nail polish and a pack of gum. Dot took them and hid them inside her jacket.  

“While we’re here, don’t you want to get anything for yourself?” Lennie asked.

“No,” Dot said. “The fish is all I want.”

They left the variety store and when they were outside again on the sidewalk, Dot took the swim cap out of her jacket and tugged it onto her head. “How do I look?” she asked, pushing her hair up inside.     

“You look like a crazy person,” Lennie said.

“How about if you give me this?” Dot asked. She stopped to admire her reflection in a window, turning her head from side to side.   

“I’m not giving it to you, but I’ll let you wear it sometime.”

“Oh, what do you need a swimming cap for?”

“Well, I guess I need it about as much as you do!”

They headed down the street in the direction of the drug store. Lennie, when she saw a boy she recognized from high school coming toward her on the sidewalk, hurried to get a cigarette out of her purse. She wanted the boy to see her smoking and think she was sophisticated. She got the cigarette lit and gave him a breezy little smile just in time before he passed by, but he didn’t even look at her.   

When they went inside the drugstore, a woman in a tight skirt up on a ladder behind the counter turned and looked at them. Lennie saw right away that the woman had her hair arranged in a French roll. She tugged Dot’s arm to get her attention.

“That’s how I want my hair to look,” Lennie said. “Isn’t it stunning?”  

“Oh, what’s so hot about that?” Dot said. She was bored already. She went over to look at the magazines.

Lennie went to the cosmetics counter and began looking at the display of lipsticks. She picked up a tube and took the cap off to get a better look. The woman got down off the ladder and stood behind the counter in front of Lennie.

“What color would you recommend for my complexion?” Lennie asked her.

“Something dark,” the woman said. She looked much worse up close than she had from a distance. She had pockmarks on her face and an ugly misshapen nose like a prizefighter. She reached over and plucked a tube off the display and handed it to Lennie. It was something called flaming orange. “Go ahead and try it if you want,” she said.

Lennie tilted the oval mirror on the counter so she could get a better look at herself. She coated her lips with the flaming orange and blotted them on a piece of tissue the woman gave her. 

“How does it look?” she asked.  

“Oh, I think it’s just the appropriate shade for your coloring,” the woman said.  

“It makes you look like a clown,” Dot said. She had come up behind Lennie carrying a couple of comic books she wanted to buy.  

“Oh, who asked you?” Lennie said.  “I’m sure you don’t know the first thing about it.”  

“Would you like to try a different color?” the woman asked.

“No, I’ll take this one,” Lennie said.

“Will that be all today?”

“I want these,” Dot said. She laid the comic books on the counter. One was Submariner and the other was The Invincible Iron Man.  

“Oh, all right,” Lennie said. “I want a pack of Pall-Malls, too.”

“I thought you smoked Luckys,” Dot said.

“Well, today I’m smoking Pall-Malls.”

Lennie paid for the things out of the scant stash of money in her purse, and she and Dot went back out to the glaring sunshine of the street.

“I bet you could have got that lipstick without paying for it,” Dot said.

“With that woman looking at me the whole time?”

“You could have pretended to have a fit and when the woman went to get a doctor you could have slipped the lipstick inside your underwear.”

“Don’t you think that’s a lot of trouble to go to for a tube of lipstick?”

“Well, it depends on how much you want it, I guess.”

They walked around aimlessly for a while, looking at window displays, until they found themselves in front of the Blue Note Café, where they could smell hamburgers cooking.  

“I’m hungry,” Dot said. “Can we get something to eat?”

“Why not?” Lennie said. “You only live once.”

“What does that mean?”

They went inside and sat at a booth near the front. A waitress in a pink uniform brought them each a glass of water and waited for them to say what they wanted so she could write it down.

“I want a hamburger,” Dot said, looking at the waitress through the binoculars, “a Coke and a hot-fudge sundae for dessert.”

The waitress wrote that down and turned to Lennie.

“I just want a grilled cheese sandwich,” Lennie said. “I’m watching my figure.”

“Anything else?”  

“You can get me an ashtray, honey, if you don’t mind.”

The waitress went to a nearby table and picked up an ashtray and set it down in front of Lennie.

“I know you,” Lennie said to the waitress.

“What?”

“Don’t you go to Calvin High?”

“I used to. I graduated.”

“I used to see you every day at school.”

“Funny,” the waitress said, “I don’t think I’ve ever noticed you before.”

“Do you think they’d hire me here? As a waitress?”

“Well, I don’t know. You could talk to the manager about it. I think they only want girls with experience, though.”

“I’ve got lots of experience,” Lennie said. 

After the waitress went away to place their order with the cook, Lennie said, “That snooty bitch! We used to be good friends in school, and now she pretends to not even know who I am.”

“Maybe she doesn’t recognize you with that orange lipstick,” Dot said. “And why did you tell her you have experience? You know that’s a lie.”

“Well, I do have experience, but I didn’t say what kind of experience. You haven’t learned yet how you can bend the truth a little without ever telling a lie. You’ll learn that as you get older.”

“Lurlene is right,” Dot said. “You are a bad influence on me.”

“Well, we do what we must,” Lennie said, checking her reflection in the window and lighting a cigarette.

After they finished their lunch and the waitress brought the check, Lennie discovered she didn’t have enough money to pay since buying the things in the drugstore.

“Don’t worry,” Dot said. “We’ll just make a run for it.”

The lunch rush was over, and most of the people who were in the café earlier had left. There were just four or five old ladies sitting at a table toward the back, drinking coffee and gossiping. Only one waitress was behind the counter, and the cashier had stepped out back for a moment to have a cigarette. When a clatter of dishes erupted from the kitchen, obviously signaling an accident of some kind, the waitress disappeared through the swinging doors in the back.

“Now!” Dot said.

She bent over from the waist, as though that would make her less noticeable, and made for the door, with Lennie right behind her. When they were outside, they ran down to the next block and turned the corner, in case somebody from the café was coming after them.

“I think we just had a free lunch,” Dot said with a laugh.

“I hope that waitress has to pay for it herself,” Lennie said. “That would just about serve her right for pretending she didn’t know me.”

They went down to the end of the street to where the dance hall and casino used to be before they burned down. They turned the corner and there, up ahead at the next intersection, they saw where a crowd of people had gathered.

An old man in a blue sedan had swerved to avoid hitting a small boy on a bicycle and ran his car up on the sidewalk and smashed into a light pole. The old man was waving his arms and berating the boy while a policeman tried to calm him down. The boy stood behind the policeman and smirked at the old man, ready to run if need be.

Lennie didn’t want to go too near the crowd but Dot wanted to go see what was going on. She left Lennie standing underneath an awning while she pushed her way forward to get a good look. Bored with the whole scene, Lennie took a cigarette out of her purse and was lighting it when she felt a tap on the shoulder. She turned and saw Newton Milbank looking at her with his strange orange eyes.

“Hello, sweetness!” Newton said.

“Newton, what are you doing here?” Lennie asked, genuinely surprised to see him.

She knew Newton from high school. She never liked him very much. He wasn’t very good-looking and he always had a funny smell. His ears stuck out and he was from one of the notoriously poor families in town with at least a dozen brothers and sisters. He looked better to her now, though, somehow. His complexion had cleared up and his hair looked clean. She didn’t mind flirting with him a little bit. She looked up at him and blew smoke in his face. She hoped he would notice the orange lipstick.

“I just met with my parole officer,” Newton said.

“Oh, my goodness!” Lennie said. “Are you some kind of a big-time hoodlum? Do I need to be afraid?”

“You would never need to be afraid of me,” Newton said. “I was always hoping to meet up with you again, ever since high school. I’ve thought about calling you up.”

“Well, why didn’t you just do it, then? I’m in the book.”

“Would you like to go someplace and have a drink with me?”

“Do you mean right now?”

“What better time?”

“I’ve got my little sister with me and we were just about to go home.”

“We can drop her someplace and go on from there. Wait a minute. There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

He walked a few feet away and came back pulling a dark-haired young man by the arm. “Lennie,” he said, “this is my friend, Stegg Lucy. Stegg, this is Lennie Miggles. I’ve known her since high school.”

“Hello,” Stegg said, looking past Lennie’s shoulder.

“How do you do?” Lennie said.

As Stegg shook Lennie’s hand, a kind of electrical charge went through her, from the top off her head to the tip of her toes. She was immediately taken with him, from his sullen eyes and his pouty mouth to the black stubble on his face.

“Lennie has her sister with her,” Newton said to Stegg. “I was just telling her we could swing by and take the sister home and then go on to the party from there.”

“The sister can come, too, if she wants,” Stegg said.

“I’m afraid she’s still quite a child,” Lennie said, happy to have a reason to speak directly to Stegg.

“Oh,” Stegg said, turning away with disinterest.

“You didn’t say anything about a party,” Lennie said.

“Well, we hadn’t definitely decided on going,” Newton said. “We didn’t want to go unless we had dates.”

“Ask her if she’s got a friend,” Stegg said to Newton.

The incident involving the old man and the boy on the bicycle was coming to a conclusion and the crowd beginning to disperse. Dot saw where Lennie was standing talking to Newton and went over to her.

“That was great!” she said. “I thought that old man was going to kill that kid.”  

“I want you to meet some friends of mine,” Lennie said to Dot, “Newton and Stegg.”

“Hi there!” Newton said.

“I’m ready to go home now,” Dot said, ignoring Newton.

“She is kind of young,” Stegg said speculatively. “Why does she wear that thing on her head?”

Lennie laughed a little too loud. “Oh, you know kids,” she said. “She always likes to do that which is odd and unexpected.” 

“I like it,” Dot said. “I’m going to sleep with it on tonight. Tomorrow I’m going to stick my head under water with it on and see if it keeps my hair dry.”

“She’s just at that age, you know,” Lennie said. 

“When are we going home?” Dot asked.

“Well, there’s been a change of plan,” Lennie said. “You’re going home, but I’m not.”

“What do you mean? Where are you going?”

“I’m going to a party with these two gentlemen.”

“What kind of a party?”

“A social gathering of friends. Isn’t that what a party is?”

“Lurlene won’t like it.”

“Oh, she won’t mind,” Lennie said. “She’s always saying she wished I would get out of the house more often.”

“Who’s Lurlene?” Newton asked.

“She’s our mother,” Dot said, looking down at the ground.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Stegg said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Newton’s car was parked a couple of blocks away. As they were walking toward it, Dot pulled on Lennie’s arm.

“I don’t want to go with them,” she said.

“You can walk home, then,” Lennie said. “You know the way. You’re not a baby.”

“I don’t want you to go with them, either.”

“Well, now, isn’t that just too bad?”

When they came to Newton’s car, Lennie, Stegg and Newton piled into the front seat while Dot got into the back. Newton started the car with a roar and a satisfied grin and they were off.

“Just where is this party?” Lennie asked.

“It’s at a friend’s house,” Newton said. “You don’t know him. We’ll introduce you.”  

“Will there be lots of people there?”

“I think it will be kind of intimate,” Stegg said.

“Now, wait a minute,” Lennie said. “Who will be there besides you two and this friend?”

“There’ll be other people there,” Newton said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Will there be other girls there besides me?” Lennie asked with a laugh.

“Well, of course there will be,” Newton said. “What do you think I am?”

“I don’t think you should go,” Dot said from the back seat. “You’ve got things to do at home.”

“What things?” Lennie asked.

“You’re supposed to wash your hair tonight.”

“I can do that anytime, silly.”  

Lennie gave Newton directions, and in just a few minutes he came to her house and pulled up at the front gate. He put the car in gear and revved the engine and he and Stegg laughed for some unknown reason.

“I’ll be home after while,” Lennie said to Dot to let her know she was supposed to get out.  

“What do you want me to tell Lurlene?”

“Tell her whatever you want,” Lennie said. “Tell her not to wait up.”

Newton and Stegg laughed again.

“Something about this just doesn’t seem right,” Dot said as she got out of the car and closed the door, but Lennie didn’t hear her because Newton was saying something funny about the shock absorbers on his car.

For the moment Dot had forgotten about the binoculars but, when she remembered them on the string around her neck, she raised them and watched Newton’s car as it receded into the distance. She saw the three heads, Lennie’s head between Newton’s and Stegg’s. She saw Stegg put his arm around Lennie and Lennie turn toward him. Then she saw Stegg and Lennie kissing on the lips, just as plain as day, exactly as it was done in the movies.

“They were just waiting for me to get out of the car so they could do that,” Dot said to Dutch, who went to meet her when he saw her getting out of Newton’s car. 

When she went into the house, Lurlene was making a pitcher of martinis.

“Where’s Toots?” she asked, a glass in one hand and the pitcher in the other.

“I don’t know,” Dot said. “He doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Where’s Lennie?”

“Don’t ask me.”

She went into her bedroom as fast as she could and closed the door before Lurlene had a chance to ask any more questions. She knew the next question was going to be about the swim cap and she didn’t want to have to explain.

 She kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling and took a few deep breaths. She was feeling tired after her afternoon in town and it felt good to be at home, in her own room, by herself at last.

She heard Lurlene singing to herself in the other room. She closed her eyes and imagined Lurlene sitting down on the couch with her drink and putting her feet up and lighting a cigarette. After a couple of minutes, she opened her eyes and picked up her new comic book, The Invincible Iron Man, and opened it. She turned to page one and began reading from the beginning. By suppertime she would have read nearly the whole thing. She was not going to be able to resist it.   

Copyright © 2011 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

J. Edgar ~ A Capsule Movie Review

J. Edgar ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp 

J. Edgar Hoover was one of the most famous and influential men of the twentieth century. He built the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the best investigative entity in the world and facilitated the capture of John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis and other high-profile hoods during a time of lawlessness in America. He was instrumental in bringing to justice the alleged perpetrator, one Bruno Hauptmann, in the “crime of the century,” the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh. He was a patriot, a man of principle and conviction who wasn’t above exaggerating his own accomplishments in his memoirs.

In the new movie, J. Edgar (directed by Clint Eastwood) Leonardo DeCaprio plays the man who was known to his intimates simply as “Edgar.” In spite of his professional accomplishments, Edgar’s personal life was conflicted. He never married and, being of a decidedly homosexual bent, was never comfortable in that role. In one scene, where he is trying, as a young man, to explain to his devoted mother (Judi Dench) that he “doesn’t like dancing with women,” she tells him she would rather have a dead son than a daffodil (gay) son. (We’re speaking in metaphors here.) This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of his sexual proclivities.

The subject of Edgar’s homosexuality is never sensationalized here. We never see him cruising gay bars or propositioning male prostitutes. It’s plain, though, where his sympathies lay. The most important figure in his life (besides his mother) is Clyde Tolson (played by Armie Hammer, who played both Winklevoss twins in The Social Network). Clyde was Edgar’s friend, confidante, and business associate and at one time the number-two man at the FBI. Edgar and Clyde go on vacations together, share hotel rooms and intimate meals. Clyde advises Edgar on matters of fashion. They seem to spend every moment together. However, as we are told in the movie, they never shared a physical relationship. Clyde doesn’t balk at telling Edgar that he loves him; Edgar is not able to respond in kind. He is not able to show the most important person in his life how he feels about him.

In Titanic and The Aviator and other movies, Leonardo has just been Leonardo (however good that might be), but in this movie Leonardo seems submerged (with the help of what must be several pounds of makeup) in the persona of J. Edgar Hoover. For my money, this seems to be the part Leonardo was born to play. I believed him every step of the way. If he isn’t in serious contention for an Oscar, there’s something wrong with those movie people. He would get my vote if I had one.

Another standout in the cast is Naomi Watts (who I can’t see without thinking of King Kong). She plays Edgar’s sympathetic secretary, Helen Gandy. She is one of the few people in the world Edgar trusts. In what seems a thankless job, she is loyal to the end and will do whatever she must do to protect Edgar and his legacy.

While the movie seems slow to start (it takes about fifteen minutes for it to take off) and is darkly lighted (all the interiors seem dark), these are minor quibbles in an otherwise excellent movie. J. Edgar is not a bad way to spend 138 minutes sitting in a darkened movie theatre. On a personal note, however, I, for one, am getting tired of seeing Richard Nixon portrayed as a foul-mouthed lunatic. He must have had some relatively sane moments in his life where he was actually sincere about something. Can’t we ever see any of those?

Copyright © 2011 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Mortal Remains

Mortal Remains ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

On a rainy evening in mid-October 1940, a large crowd had gathered at the Biederhoff funeral parlor on Mission Street near the bridge. By six o’clock—the time when most people were having dinner or settling down for the evening—the chapel was already filled to capacity and the street outside clotted with cars. Every few seconds the door opened to admit new arrivals into the foyer, their voices hushed as they closed their umbrellas and shook the rain off their coats and hats. As they entered the Greek chapel to view the remains of the deceased, their smiles of greeting faded and they assumed expressions of solemnity appropriate to the occasion.    

When an old person dies, it’s just a matter of course. A young person dying, though, gets everybody’s attention, especially when the death is sudden and violent and has raised questions for which no answers have been given. Galen Fahrenwald’s death was just such a death. In truth, many of the people who showed up at the funeral parlor to pay their respects didn’t know or care about him—or anybody in his family—but were there because they had heard the news reports of the death and wanted to see for themselves a young man (he was only thirty-seven) laid out in his coffin, a young man with a beautiful young wife and a lot of money who may or may not have died under mysterious circumstances.    

Galen Fahrenwald, banked by elaborate floral offerings of every color and variety, was resplendent in his white tie and tails, nestled cozily in his golden chariot casket with its elaborate scrollwork, handles that looked to be made of pure gold, and apricot-colored lining. With his pursed lips that made him appear to be about to break into laughter, perfectly coiffed hair and red cheeks, he looked the picture of health. Nobody would ever know by looking at him that a bullet had struck him in the back, lodged in his heart, and killed him in the space of three seconds.

The police who investigated the murder and examined the evidence were about evenly split, with one-half believing that Galen Fahrenwald was murdered and the other half that the bullet that found his heart was a stray bullet fired from the weapon of a hunter. After all, it was the middle of hunting season and Galen Fahrenwald was not far from a spot known to be frequented by hunters, where game was said to be plentiful. He had taken his lunch with him and was leaning on the fender of his car, eating a chicken sandwich and admiring the view when he was killed. What he was doing there was no mystery; he was known to visit the spot on occasion when he wanted to think and be alone.

A hush came over the crowd when Galen Fahrenwald’s mother and father came in. The old lady was small and frail-looking, dressed entirely in black, her face behind a veil. She held onto her husband’s arm as if she would not have been able to stand on her own. He was tall and dignified, his face expressionless. Those who were hoping for a display of emotion were disappointed as the two quietly viewed the body of their son and moved on, as dispassionate as if they had been looking at a side of beef.

Just as the frisson over the arrival of the parents was waning, Doreen Fahrenwald came in, the wife of the deceased. She was the star attraction of the evening, the one person in everybody’s thoughts. How broken up was she over the death of her husband? Was she as baffled as everybody else over what happened? Just what was she planning to do with all the money that would come to her (at least half a million in life insurance, in addition to the house and everything else)? Would she stay put or go away to a place where nobody knew her? Was she sorry now she never had any children?

Dressed in her exquisitely sleek, Parisian dress the color of wine, with a simple strand of pearls at her neck, Doreen Fahrenwald was the picture of poise and grace. She would put to shame any fabled Hollywood beauty. Her auburn hair was drawn away from her face and arranged simply at the back of her neck. She wore little or no makeup because her beauty was the kind that doesn’t need adornment or fakery. Neither did she wear a hat or a veil or any other mourning frippery. As she approached her husband’s casket, all eyes were turned toward her. People wanted to hear what she was going to say and how she was going to bear up under her tremendous loss. There was a collective intake of breath.

She stood for several minutes and looked at her dead husband, her face a mask. What she was thinking or feeling no one was able to discern. She was a cool customer, people would say. She didn’t believe in public displays of grief, but, oh, to be a fly on the wall when she was alone: that’s when she would let it all out. She moved on as though coming out of a trance and accepted the condolences of those standing nearby.

When Galen married Doreen, he had only known her for only a few weeks and knew almost nothing about her. She was a new teacher at the school and he a member of the school board. She told him she had no family to speak of and had lived with a great-aunt while growing up. The aunt died and left Doreen a little money, so she decided to move on and start a new life for herself in a different part of the world. He was satisfied with the account she gave of her life and saw no reason to look further.

Galen’s mother and father looked unfavorably upon Doreen from the beginning. They believed they saw right through her to her rotten core, in spite of her polished exterior. She was interested in Galen only for his money and the comfort and security it would provide. Galen, they believed, had too much sense to be taken in by such a person. It wasn’t in his nature to want to marry someone he just met and knew nothing about.

They hired the best and most expensive private detective agency to uncover the truth that they knew was lurking there, somewhere just beneath the surface. They hoped to disillusion Galen with the information that was sure to be uncovered.

The investigation revealed that Doreen had, in fact, lived for years with her only known relative, an elderly woman who was a sister of her grandmother. The aunt was nearly bedridden with a host of maladies; Doreen helped care for her. The aunt died unexpectedly of a drug overdose a month after Doreen turned twenty-one. The police investigated, but the death was in the end ruled an accident. The old lady wasn’t in her right mind and just didn’t know how much of her medicine she was taking.  

Doreen inherited about a hundred thousand dollars. She rented a luxurious apartment and lived the high life for a couple of years with her fashionable friends until she discovered, to her surprise, that she had spent her entire inheritance. She was forced to leave her apartment and move into a boarding house. All her friends dropped her as if she had died.   

She worked for a while as a nightclub hostess. Some of the men she encountered during that time were well-heeled older gentlemen who gave her presents of jewelry and cash. She sold the jewelry and saved the cash. She hated the way she was living and longed for a different kind of life. Through taking some night courses, she was able to earn her teaching certificate. She applied for a teaching job in another state and was hired without too much effort. That’s when she met Galen.

When Galen’s mother and father presented the report from the detective agency to him, he read it silently and threw it into the fire. He said none of the information in the report made any difference and he was going through with the marriage in spite of their objections. He told them calmly that he never wanted to see them again. He would never forgive them for meddling in his private affairs. He was a grown man and past caring what they thought of him. It was the first time in his life he had ever rebelled against parental authority.

From the beginning the marriage was not a conventional one. Galen and Doreen lived as separately as they could for two people who occupied the same house. Doreen was rumored to have her discreet love affairs, but she always made sure she didn’t give Galen a reason to hand her a divorce. For his part, he wanted a wife in name only. All he required was that Doreen run the household, accompany him to certain social functions, and to act in the role of wife or business confidante when needed. Nobody knew for sure, of course, but the general belief among friends and acquaintances was that the marriage had never been consummated.

The marriage was amicable enough for a while until Doreen became bored with her fat, comfortable life. She began to drink heavily and spend enormous sums of money at the roulette table and the race track. She wasn’t nearly as lucky at gambling as she thought she should be. Her debts accumulated to the point where she was unable to repay them. Her creditors threatened to try to get the money from her husband.

Galen had, from his strict upbringing, a moralistic view of the world. He believed in the principles of right and wrong; he believed that to waste one’s precious resources on such trivial pursuits as gambling was stupid and irresponsible. When he learned of his wife’s enormous debt, he refused to bankroll her activities. For the first time in their marriage, they engaged in vicious fighting over money. He slapped her across the face, knocking her down and loosening two of her teeth; she threw a bookend at him and cut a gash in his forehead. A few days before Galen was killed, Doreen told friends she was going to file for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility and physical cruelty.  

While Doreen Pitkin Fahrenwald was viewing the mortal remains of her husband, a different kind of scene was playing out across town at the police station. After hours of questioning, an auto mechanic by the name of Curtis Faulkner, who held medals for marksmanship from the army, had just confessed to the murder of Galen Fahrenwald. Frightened out of his wits when told he could go to the electric chair, Curtis Faulkner told the police everything.

He had known Doreen Fahrenwald for a year or so, and, no, he wasn’t her lover—she was too much of a lady for that. He met her when she brought her Ford into the shop where he worked. They started talking and discovered they were both just wild about horse racing.

Talk of horses led to more serious conversation. Doreen told Curtis Faulkner about her unhappy marriage and how cold and strange her husband was; how he was controlled by a domineering mother who hated her and wished her dead. To escape her unhappy marriage, she had been drawn into the unsavory world of gambling and café society. She had taken on more debt than she could ever repay. She was being threatened to repay the money she owed and she didn’t know what she was going to do. She was contemplating suicide.

When Doreen learned that Curtis Faulkner was an expert marksman, she was tremendously interested and asked to see his medals. Playing on his ego, she coaxed him into telling her about his exploits in the army. Soon after, she came up with the idea of paying Curtis to kill her husband. Since Curtis didn’t know her husband and had never met him, nobody would suspect him. With her husband dead, she would have control of all his money, could pay off her gambling debts, and live comfortably for the rest of her days. Curtis would have more money than he ever dreamed possible and could escape the job he despised. Everybody would be happy.

The police chief wanted to pick Doreen up quickly before somebody tipped her off and she had a chance to flee. If he could get a confession from her before the voters went to the polls in about three weeks’ time, he would be assured of being re-elected. He dispatched four armed men to pick her up at Biederhoff’s funeral parlor, telling them not to handcuff her unless she resisted.

The four police officers walked single-file into Biederhoff’s, trying to be unobtrusive but getting the attention of everybody there by the mere fact of their presence. The lead man, with the others behind him, went over to Doreen Fahrenwald—at that moment engaged in quiet conversation with a friend near her husband’s casket—and told her she was under arrest for suspicion of murdering her husband, Galen Fahrenwald. When she smiled at him as though he had paid her a compliment, he put the handcuffs on her to show that he meant business. Murder was nothing to smile about.

Doreen Pitkin Fahrenwald showed no emotion, no surprise, as she was led from Beiderhoff’s funeral chapel by a retinue of police officers on that rainy October evening. She stopped in front of Galen’s mother and the four officers stopped, too, willing to give her a chance to say what needed to be said. She seemed about to speak to the veil—seeing nothing of the face underneath—but no words came. She just smiled and shook her head and moved on. There would be much speculation later over what the headshake meant, but, or course, nobody would ever know for sure. She was, to the end, a mystery to all who knew her.  

Copyright © 2011 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997