The Cabin Read online

  What magnificent diversion, fresh from the opium dens of Indo-Chine, would the sophisticates elect and practice?

  Would they gash one another’s flesh and drink one another’s blood?

  Would they play liar’s poker for the souls of the yet unborn? Would they hug and kiss …?

  Well, I can’t tell you, ’cause I’m not much of a partygoer, and I and Miss Pidgeon went home.

  We said good-bye to the movie star and the opera director, who were a lovely pair of people, and quite a welcome bit of friendship and show-business hospitality, and we went out into the rain, which I have described before, and the wind, which I shall limn as an “enraged monster, whipping now this way and now that.”

  The bodyguards—I know you will not believe me—had changed their jackets once again and now sported white piqué affairs, and they helped us down the line of now-deserted marquees, and into a car, which took us back to the hotel.

  Miss Pidgeon and I got into our bathrobes, and sat around dissecting the evening’s events.

  The phone rang. It was our friend Brigitte. She was down in the lobby, and had been missing us at each stage of the evening’s festivities. We invited her up. She said that she was in the company of several members of our film’s production-distribution team. We invited them up, too. Up they came.

  There was a rather splendid bottle of champagne in the room, sent by an agent friend, with a well-wishing note that concluded: “Today Cannes, Tomorrow the World, then the Creative Artists Agency.”

  Brigitte and the crew previously described sat on the floor, and the men loosened their bow ties and took off their jackets and smoked cigars. We drank the champagne, and emptied the minibar, and Brigitte took pictures of Miss Pidgeon and myself sitting on our bed in our bathrobes.

  The next morning, Friday, Miss Pidgeon and I awoke. The room smelled of cigar smoke.

  We decided to enshrine the events of the last wee hours in our collective memory as “the night of the penguins.” We went down for coffee.

  That Friday noon found us at the Hôtel du Cap, in the space that, the producer told me, had been Nazi headquarters for southern France.

  We had our lunch, and talked in an open and friendly fashion with many journalists, most of whom would probably, thinking of their responsibility to their readership, turn around and cut us to shreds; but it was a lovely lunch.

  That afternoon was spent chatting with various groups of international press, and I don’t remember what we did that evening.

  The next day was warm and clear, a beautiful day to sit out on the beach, looking at the harbor. But our plans were otherwise.

  Brigitte was taking Miss Pidgeon’s picture, and I had a couple of hours to kill. I walked down the Croisette, by the Festival Hall, which area was now, of course, deserted.

  Down by the city hall I found a flea market, and I was in heaven for a half hour or so.

  I bought a pot-metal barrette depicting a rooster, to bring back for my assistant, Harriet.

  I bought a beautiful ceramic water jug in the shape of a crow, and bearing the legend HÔTEL DU CORBEAU.

  I walked back to the hotel and bought commemorative T-shirts and trinkets for children and friends.

  The concessionaire was a very old and very polite man. He took a great deal of time with me, opening each plastic-wrapped T-shirt to display the difference between the French idea of medium and their idea of large. He offered me several mints, and I took them. At the conclusion of the transaction a middle-aged woman, to whom this man deferred, entered the shop with her French poodle and walked behind the counter. This woman paid scant attention to the old man, who reiterated the details of our transaction. He showed the woman my bill, which he was in the process of preparing.

  She acknowledged him hardly at all, and told me the total price, and I paid her and took my souvenirs. On my way out of the store, the man gave me another small packet of mints, and I thanked him.

  Miss Pidgeon and I drove back to the airport in Nice.

  The Buttons on the Board

  First, I should like to speak of the Topperweins.

  Ad and his wife, Plinky Topperwein, were trick-shot artists. They played vaudeville, and toured also for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, whose products they used and promoted.

  I was once at an auction in New York to benefit the arms-and-armor collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the many beautiful and belligerophiliant items put up for sale there was the trunk of the Topperweins.

  It contained many of their playbills and posters; it contained several of their hats and other articles of clothing; it contained two model-63 Winchester .22 pump rifles, one of which was guaranteed to be one of the battery with which Ad shot forty-three thousand two-inch wooden cubes out of the air. It contained, as if all this were insufficient, several of the copper “rifle portraits” that Plinky and Ad shot as part of their various demonstrations.

  These portraits were two-by-three-foot thin copper sheets that, in the demonstration, were put at a distance from the shooter, and on which he or she inscribed, by means of the .22 Long Rifle cartridge, a portrait of (to choose from their repertoire) George Washington, an Indian chief, a turkey, Abraham Lincoln, and so on.

  I had heard much of these copper sheets, but, prior to the auction, the only one I had ever seen was in the shop of a celebrated gunsmith in Louisiana, which portrait was definitely not for sale.

  So I sat amazed as, one after another, beautiful Edwardian artifacts came out of the trunk; mementos of shooting, and show business, and, in short, the dream material of “another time”; and, for some reason I couldn’t tell you, I did not bid on the trunk.

  I think I was one of the only people in the audience who knew of the Topperweins (my knowledge coming more from the show business than from the shooting side of my experience), so the bidding did not go very high. The trunk went cheap, and somebody else bought it.

  What would it have meant, I ask myself—as, perhaps, many of you who are collectors of this and that do; what would it have meant to have possessed that trunk, that trinket, that connection to another time, or that suggestion to ourselves or others of another aspect of ourselves; what would it mean, and why is the longing for the unobtainable worse than the transmutation of the unobtainable into the everyday? (For, my reluctance to bid on the trunk was, finally, a refusal to contribute to the transmutation.)

  In any case, some years later I saw, in a tray at an antiques show, a pin-back button, one inch across, promoting the Topperweins, and I bought it. The button bears a photograph of the two. She is a bluff and bulky-looking individual in a white shirt and black tie. She has a large mouth and dark hair. He is standing next to her in a dark suit. He has a thick mustache, and looks to be the passive one of the pair. Both wear large-brimmed hats, his blocked in the “trooper” fashion.

  The button reads THE WONDERFUL TOPPERWEINS. WHO ALWAYS SHOOT WINCHESTER GUNS AND CARTRIDGES.

  Inside the button’s back is the maker’s mark: WHITEHEAD AND HOAG COMPANY (BUTTONS, BADGES, NOVELTIES, AND SIGNS), NEWARK, NEW JERSEY.

  Whitehead and Hoag invented and patented the pin-back button in the 1890s. This mode of advertisement caught on immediately, and was soon used to promote any and everything thought remotely promotable. Politicians, comic strips, newspaper give-aways, religion, temperance, fraternal associations, and every article of merchandise and every service of that period can be found advertised on pin-back buttons.

  Over the years I have collected, displayed, traded, and hoarded buttons. I have worn them and given them away as jewelry; I have even commissioned some.

  Since I became attracted to the form, I have always stuck them in the wall or molding or bulletin board near any writing desk that I was using over any extended period.

  Now, the above sentence displays a strained circumlocution for and reveals an inability to employ the term office. It is, perhaps, that inability or refusal to face the indignity of self-knowledge which has led me, over
the years, to adorn my workplace with what, to me, are the artifacts of romance.

  I do not want to be at the desk. I want to be at a place and in a time alluded to by these mementos. And, further than a creed, my assertion, while in my office at my desk, is “anywhere but here.”

  The buttons are not mere reminders, they are survivors, the archeological artifacts of the dream kingdom where, if and when I am doing my job effectively, I spend what I suppose must be called my working hours.

  Stuck in the corkboard, directly in front of me as I write, is a six-point metal star that looks to be nickel over iron or steel. It is embossed APACHE POLICE, SAN CARLOS, ARIZ., and has a small brass head of an American Indian in feather headdress brazed into its center. The badge seems to have seen a lot of wear and use. Directly to the right is a small cloisonné pin in blue, with a large white cross in the center. Sailing out of the cross is a black-and-red ocean liner, and below, in gold, is written AMERICAN RELIEF SHIP FOR SPAIN. To the right again is a half-inch-diameter celluloid button with a girl’s face on it.

  The button’s back informs us that it was, again, made by the Whitehead and Hoag Company, and that they, in this case, are advertising Perfection cigarettes. This girl’s picture, it seems, was one of a series depicting types of feminine beauty that one could obtain and examine at leisure through the purchase of the Perfection brand.

  The girl on the button is dark honey-blond, with correspondingly blue eyes, rosy cheeks, a bee-stung mouth, and a mole on the left side of her lip. She is placid and rather expressionless, I think; and her face is full and somewhat heavy, and childlike, and very much in line with the fin-de-siècle American notion of beauty. Perfect, heavy, regular, and docile—the picture would not, today, be recognizable as an attempt to depict feminine allurements.

  And we would find the picture on the adjacent button odd by contemporary standards. It shows a happy Boy Scout in his campaign hat and red neckerchief. His white face beams boldly out from the blue background, smiling a wide, delighted, and unreserved smile. A linen ribbon is affixed to the button’s back and reads CAMPOREE—1935.

  And, next to him is a rare employee’s badge from the 1933 World’s Fair, the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, which may give a clue to the boy’s expression.

  That World’s Fair was the most recent celebration of the final subjugation of the material world. It was the apotheosis of the notion of technology as grace. The innocent, happy, and overall hopeful Boy Scout was blessed to live on the very verge of that time for which his forefathers had striven: the future.

  The deliberate, laudable, and serious rectitude of the Victorian Age had vanished in the unaccountable appearance of the First World War and the madness of the twenties, but society was once again on track and all of a mind; and the noble though outmoded notion of duty had been supplanted by the more perfect ideal of progress.

  For what was that girl going to do, but court and marry, and give birth to and raise children? And why should she not be placid—for, if introspection and anxiety and anger were a part (as, of course they were) of her life, they were not a part of her age’s ideal of beauty, as they are in our age.

  To the left of the Apache police star is a metal-plant identification badge. It is stamped EBALOY. ROCKFORD, IL. FOUNDARIES INC. And numbered 708. It is a sandwich: two layers of metal, between which the employee’s photo was to have been put, so as to be visible through a window in the badge’s front. The photo it carries now is not of the original employee; it is a snapshot cut out of a proof sheet of 35-mm black-and-white film.

  Even on the proof sheet, the photographic quality is extraordinarily good. We see a man and woman with their arms around each other, smiling at the camera. They both have on short leather jackets and sunglasses and baseball caps. They are standing on what seems to be a wharf or a pier. Behind them we see the water of a harbor, and a small fishing boat tied up to a pier opposite.

  We can see that the woman is very beautiful. She has long dark hair, a lovely smile. She is very slender and graceful.

  Sometime, eventually, this button will be destroyed. Sometime, it is likely, before it vanishes, someone will look at it and wonder who the man and woman could have been; and perhaps that person will make up stories about them. For, there they are, very little different from the Topperweins, woman on the left, man on the right, a head taller; two couples smiling at the camera, and what can they have been thinking that day, and who were they?

  A foot or so off to the right on the bulletin board is Dwight Eisenhower’s picture on a cheap piece of tin. It says I LIKE IKE, and has the five stars of his army rank below the photograph.

  And there’s the union button I picked out of the gutter—a crimson rectangle that reads, STANDING WITH THE UNION, I SUPPORT THE HARVARD UNION OF CLERICAL AND TECHNICAL WORKERS. And I remember finding it. It was a rainy day in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And there had been quite a bit of agitation and, I think, bad feeling—on both sides of an issue that had to do, I believe, with the right of Harvard employees to organize, or to strike, or to do something that they, as a group, desired and another group opposed.

  In any case, when I saw it I thought the STANDING WITH THE UNION button rather unusual, as it was a rectangle, standing the long-way up. I thought it rather clunky and unbeautiful. But I looked down at it, in the rain, in the gutter, and I thought that I would add it to my collection. But no, I thought, you didn’t appreciate the button when you saw it displayed legitimately on the clothing of the antagonists, how could you be so greedy as to covet it now, in the gutter? I castigated myself with the accusation of having a taste for trash, rather than a clean and legitimate nostalgia. So I walked on down the street for a while, and then I turned around and came back and picked up the button.

  For it had not been sufficiently removed from me to endow it with any of the totemic power of a romantic article, and to enshrine it myself, without the intervening purification of a mercantile transaction, felt like a Gnostic leap of faith, and it made me uncomfortable.

  But, nonetheless, I took it back, and stuck it in the bulletin board in my office, off to one side. And as the months and then the year or so passed since its acquisition—as I removed buttons from the board to wear them, or to give them away, or just to change the design, I moved the Harvard button into a more and more prominent position; and comforted myself with the twin notions that it was being cleansed by time, and that someday, with my dissolution, it would be completely purified.

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