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The Correspondence of Dudley Beaker and Eliza Foote
(Part One of "My
Mother Takes a Tumble," from Little
Follies)
By Peter Leroy
 R.
BEAKER LIVED ALONE in a stucco house next door to Gumma and Guppa, my mother's
parents, on No Bridge Road. There was, as a sign on the corner cautioned,
no bridge at the end of No Bridge Road, though one had once been planned,
and rumors persisted that construction would begin soon.
 All
the houses on No Bridge Road were stucco. Beside each house, on the right
as you faced it, was a clamshell driveway that led to a stucco garage.
Guppa, a salesman at Babbington Studebaker
who never took "no" for an answer, had seen to it that in each garage was
a Studebaker.
Under
the right conditions, on a winter morning, when snow covered their roofs
and glistened in the morning light, the houses looked like the chocolate
cakes for which my mother was, within her circle, noted: dark, rich, two-layer
cakes covered with shiny white frosting that she pulled into peaks with
the back of a spoon.
My
mother and father were living in Gumma and Guppa's house then. Gumma taught
my mother how to pull the icing into peaks, and Mr. Beaker ate his share
of those cakes at Sunday dinners. I first saw one on the day that my mother
and I came home from the hospital in South Hargrove. My father swung Guppa's
Studebaker into the driveway, crunching clamshells under the wheels. Gumma
and Guppa ran from the house, with Mr. Beaker right behind them. My father
slid from behind the wheel and dashed to the rear door. Gumma and Guppa
ran right up to the car, but Mr. Beaker held back a bit. My father opened
the door with a flourish and held out his hand in a gesture usually accompanied
by "Voila!"
"Voila!"
burst from Mr. Beaker. My father scowled at the driveway.
Gumma
and Guppa poked their heads into the car to get their first look at me
in natural light. Beyond them, Mr. Beaker was bending this way and that,
trying to get a glimpse between them. He was holding his hands behind him
and wearing a grin of the sort that usually made Gumma, and later my mother,
say, "You look like the cat that swallowed the canary."
At
last Gumma and Guppa moved aside, and my father reached into the car to
take me off my mother's hands. Seeing an opening, Mr. Beaker stepped up
and produced from behind his back, with a flourish, one of the famous chocolate
cakes, baked under Gumma's guidance as a birthday cake for me.
"Voila,"
muttered my father, twisting his foot in the shells.
My
mother blushed. "Isn't that nice?" she asked me. "Your first birthday cake."
My
father carried me, very carefully, into the house. Mr. Beaker helped my
mother from the car.
Mr.
Beaker was said to have a college degree, and he may have had one, for
(a) he smoked a pipe; (b) on weekends he wore loafers and a cardigan sweater
with suede patches on the elbows; and (c) at about the time that I learned
to stand up in my crib, he began making a tidy living in a line of work
that my father called, shaking his head in grudging admiration, "a swindle
that only a college man could have dreamed up": writing letters, as "Mary
Strong," to lonely men who from time to time could be persuaded to send
the unfortunate Miss Strong some money.
Mr.
Beaker drummed up business by running advertisements in the personals columns
of small-town newspapers. He ran his first ad in the Hargrove Daily
News, just to test the waters:
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Lonely Man
Lovely young woman in unfortunate circumstances wishes to correspond
with lonely man. Mary Strong, Post Office Box 98, Babbington, New York. |
At
that time, Eliza Foote was living in Hargrove and working as a typist at
Hackett & Belder, Insurance, the premier firm of its type in Babbington.
Guppa recommended them so highly to purchasers of Studebakers that all
the homes, lives, and automobiles on No Bridge Road were insured through
them, and Mr. Hackett saw to it that Guppa had a steady supply of liquor
and turkeys.
When
Eliza came home from work each evening, she read the Daily News straight
through while she sipped bourbon from a juice glass. Sometimes she read
aloud, so that her room would not seem so empty. Mr. Beaker's ad caught
her eye just as she was swallowing the last little sip. She choked, gasped,
and choked and gasped again. For a moment, she saw Mary plainly, somewhere
across town, maybe in one of the rooms at the River Sound Hotel, sitting
at a table, sipping from a glass of bourbon, reading and rereading her
ad, hoping that someone else was reading it too. Eliza began rummaging
in her pocketbook for a pen. After a few minutes she remembered that Mr.
Hackett had borrowed her pen to print his name on the stub of a raffle
ticket he had bought from a pushy high school girl who just wouldn't take
"no" for an answer, and rarely gave it either, if Eliza didn't miss her
guess. In a kitchen drawer she found a pencil, which she sharpened with
a paring knife. She sat at her table and began to write, but she hated
the way the pencil lead looked on the nice stationery her sister had sent
her for Christmas, so she went next door to Mrs. Mitchell, who had to repair
typewriters in her spare time to make ends meet, because Mr. Mitchell had
not given much thought to death when he was alive, and had left her ill-provided-for
when he died, though God knows he had sent enough money to that brother
of his. Mrs. Mitchell was happy to lend her a typewriter after Eliza had
given satisfactory answers to a few probing questions.
Eliza
wasn't the only person to answer Mr. Beaker's ad, but she was the first.
She signed her letter "John Simpson," approximating the name of Dan Hanson,
the only unattached salesman at Hackett & Belder, a fellow who cut
a dashing figure in his fedora and checked jacket and set Eliza's heart
aflutter whenever he walked past her desk.
 N
THE MORNING that Mr. Beaker found Eliza's letter in his post office box,
snow still covered Gumma and Guppa's lawn.
I
was sitting in a high chair in the kitchen, gumming a piece of toast,
when Mr. Beaker let himself in through the back door, ending the conversation
my mother and Gumma were having about the way I ate my toast.
"You
see," my mother was saying, "he doesn't like the dry part of the toast
much -- I think because it hurts his pink little gums and the roof of his
little mouth. But he doesn't like the slobbered part much either -- I think
because it's revolting. So what he does is turn the toast as he eats it.
See that? Dudley says that -- " My mother chewed on her lower lip a moment
while she tried to remember just what it was that Mr. Beaker had said about
the way I ate my toast. While she was ruminating, Mr. Beaker burst into
the room.
"Dudley!"
exclaimed my mother, breaking out in a smile. "I was just talking about
you and what you said about the way Peter eats his toast. How does that
go again?"
Mr.
Beaker was holding an envelope in front of him, at arm's length, dangling
it between two fingers as a boy might dangle a small fish, a killifish
or mummichog, say, that he had caught with an old hook and a piece of bacon,
sitting on the bulkhead somewhere along the estuarial stretch of the Bolotomy
River. He was wearing the same grin that he had worn when he had stood
at the end of the driveway with a chocolate cake behind his back.
"It's
something about nibbling at the
elusive, ever-receding twilight line of this moment, ahead of which
lies an abrasive future, and behind which we leave a messy past, isn't
it?" my mother asked.
"Yes,
yes, something like that," Mr. Beaker answered impatiently. He waggled
the envelope and cleared his throat. Gumma poured him a cup of coffee.
"Why,
Dudley," said my mother, her mouth falling open and her eyebrows rising,
"why aren't you at work? Are you playing hooky?"
"Ladies,"
Mr. Beaker said, flapping the envelope with great vigor, "I have caught
one. I have here a letter written by a shy insurance salesman in response
to Mary Strong's advertisement. My new career is launched, and so is --
" He pulled the letter from the envelope, unfolded it, and read the signature.
" -- John Simpson's. He doesn't know it yet, but he is going to become
the first of Mary Strong's epistolary sugar daddies. I have quit my job
-- "
Gumma's
face fell. "You quit your job?" she asked.
"Yes,
indeed." He adopted a conspiratorial tone and put his arm around Gumma's
shoulders. "To tell the truth, I never liked that job. Every morning I
would sit at my desk and ask myself, 'Dudley, is writing advertisements
for clams suitable work for an educated man, a man with imagination and
taste, a man who can be struck dumb by a sunrise, transfixed by a hawthorn
abloom in the spring, choked up by Venus gleaming beside the moon on a
winter night?'"
I
tried holding my toast by two fingers, as Mr. Beaker had held his letter,
and flapping it with great vigor, but it got away from me and fell to the
floor. Mr. Beaker picked it up and put it on my tray. I looked at it. Some
cat hairs and a little fluff ball were stuck to it. I tried to push it
disdainfully just to one side of the tray, but in those days there wasn't
much subtlety in my vocabulary of gestures; the toast flew off the tray
and fell to the floor again.
Mr.
Beaker picked the toast up and threw it into the trash. "Do not play with
your food , Peter," he said.
"I've
always thought your ads were wonderful," my mother said. She was dunking
one end of half a slice of toast into her coffee; glistening discs of melted
butter drifted and merged on the surface. She stared at a spot about midway
between her and me, where her memory projected a retrospective show of
Mr. Beaker's advertisements for the Babbington Clam Council, each of which
my mother had placed in an album that my father had given her, intending
that she would use it for photographs of me. "They're real clever," she
pronounced, the show complete.
"Really,"
offered Mr. Beaker.
"Oh,
yes, Dudley. I wouldn't lie to you," asserted my mother. "If I thought
they weren't any good, I'd tell you. That's the way I am. I just have to
say what I think, even when I shouldn't."
"She's
always been that way," said Gumma. She laughed a little and settled into
her chair. She dunked her toast, and a reminiscent glaze formed over her
eyes. "I'll never forget the time when Billy Whozit's father -- oh, what
was his name, Ella, that Billy What's-his-name?"
"Not
the one we called Billy Lardbottom, the fat boy whose father was a butcher?"
"No,
no, no. I mean that Billy Whatchamacallit. I think his father was a handyman
or a painter. He was very handsome, I remember -- the father, I mean. Well,
anyway, one day this Billy Somebody-or-other's father was talking about
something -- what was it? -- he always talked as if he knew everything
-- and Ella suddenly said something like -- "
"I'll
have to hear it another time," said Mr. Beaker. He gave Gumma a kiss on
her forehead. "I have a great deal to do." He gave my mother a kiss just
to the side of her mouth.
When
Mr. Beaker got home, he dashed to the room that he had outfitted for work,
a room on the second floor, facing my grandparents' house, directly across
from the room I shared with my mother and father, where I slept in the
crib my mother once used.
He
read and reread John Simpson's letter, until he could begin to hear John
Simpson reading it to himself to see how it would sound to the lovely unfortunate.
He wrote draft after draft, trying again and again to strike just the right
note in his reply. He relished this work as he never had any other, and
he labored at it long and hard, working on into the night, until he began
to feel the distance between him and John Simpson shrink, and began to
develop the trait that would make him so successful in this line of work:
an uncanny knack for echoing, in Mary Strong's replies to her many correspondents,
the tone, style, and yearnings of each of the men who wrote to her. The
light from his desk lamp threw shadows of the branches of a young oak across
my crib, across my parents' bed, and onto the opposite wall. Later, Mr.
Beaker would become quite facile -- "a virtuoso of the heartstrings, especially
adept at pizzicato," he liked to say -- but his correspondence with Eliza
Foote was difficult from start to finish.
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