Weegee and the Bachelor
by Phyllis Humphrey
I’m not as good-looking as Clooney or Brosnan. I admit that. But I have my assets: dark wavy hair, blue eyes, a good build. One look at me and you’d say, “Here’s a swinging New York bachelor, somebody who weekends in the Hamptons, knows all the ‘in’ spots, and would rather be caught jogging naked down Fifth Avenue than visiting his mother once a month.” Right?
Wrong.
It wasn’t always this way. I was as neglectful a son as you’d ever hope to meet. Guilt drove me up to see Mom four, maybe five, times a year. Then one Sunday my mother, the high priestess of guilt, said something that changed my life.
“Maurice,” she said.
In the city I go by my middle name, Eric.
“Maurice, so when will I come to your wedding? It’s not natural you should live alone in an apartment the size of a closet I don’t care if it is Manhattan.”
This she says every time I visit. And I counter with some variation of “Ma, I’m not even seeing anyone seriously right now,” and she wails, “So what’s wrong with my news reporter son he can’t even get a date?”
“Ma, let’s change the subject. I don’t want to talk about my love life.”
“So what did you come for then?”
“Your cheesecake, of course. You make the best cherry cheesecake in the country. Lindy’s should make it so good.”
“So, why can’t you bring a wife? I’ll teach her how.”
“But then I wouldn’t come to see you so often.”
She gave me a skeptical look. “So often? Four, five, times a year. I’ll take a chance.” Shaking her head, she went into the kitchen and returned with a piece of cheesecake for me.
“Okay, when I get a wife, you can teach her. Just remember I warned you.”
So here comes the line that changed my life.
“I know,” my mother said, “we’ll ask Ouija.”
“Weegee who? What?”
She patted her blue-rinsed hair and settled her weight more comfortably in the wicker porch chair, which accepted this abuse with more than the usual creak indigenous to wicker. “The Ouija Board!” She moved a pile of magazines on the glass table top in front of us. “Mabel Feldstein dropped by earlier. She wanted to know if her Sam would take her on a cruise this year. Fat chance, he hasn’t taken her even to Coney Island.”
No offense, but Sam couldn’t find his way around his backyard without a map.
I glanced down at the table and there sat a large box marked “Ouija Tells All.” She opened it and set out a square wooden board whose corners had been rounded off, with letters of the alphabet arranged along the perimeter, and a small wooden block that tapered to a point at either end and rested on little feet.
Her fingers on the board, she said, “It’s got letters of the alphabet around the sides, so it can talk to us.” She held up the little thing with the feet. “This is the pointer. See, one end is pointed and it points to ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and the letters of the alphabet.”
“Where did you get this thing?”
“In the attic. As a child you loved to play with it.”
“Me?” I said through a mouthful of cherry cheesecake. “It must have been one of Aunt Sara’s kids. Joe, probably. Call him, he’ll come over and play it with you.”
“Joe I don’t need. He’s married already twice with four children. With you I want to find out if it’s going to happen even once.”
I wanted no part of this. “The setting is wrong. You should wait for a stormy night during a power blackout instead of a summer afternoon on the porch.”
“You won’t be here then. You’re here now.”
“Ma, these things can’t tell the future.”
“That’s how much you know. Mabel Feldstein left almost in tears.”
So I humored her. I hitched my chair closer to the table. “What do I have to do?”
“We each put our fingertips on the sides of the block and it will move around the letters in the circle.”
Yeah, right.
But we each put our fingertips on the block and waited for it to move.
“Give me a sign that my son, the single news reporter, won’t be so picky all his life,” my mother said, closing her eyes momentarily and tilting her head upward.
Ouija went into a deep coma instead.
I began to doze at about the same time my fingers went numb. So I barely felt the little block finally take off and sail to the letter “A” like a teen-ager’s skateboard. My mother, to whom patience is the eighth cardinal sin, no doubt had given it a nudge.
My accusation brought shock to her blue eyes. “What do I know from ‘A’ I should push it?”
“Okay. Okay. It finally woke up.”
When it decided we had absorbed the first letter into our consciousness, it took a lengthy pilgrimage all the way to “R” and stopped again.
“R,” we said in unison.
The miniature skateboard next skittered over to “G.”
After at least an hour (or maybe two minutes), it wandered to the middle of the board and stopped and nothing would get it started again. The experiment had been a disaster and I said so.
My mother naturally had other ideas. “It knows something,” she said.
“ARG? What is that? If the last letter had been ‘F’, I’d say it thinks it’s a dog.”
I got up, kissed her on the cheek and phoned for a cab, blaming Amtrak and an early rising time for my hasty departure.
She insisted the silly thing was onto something, however, and by the time I got to the door, she had it figured out. “It’s the initials of your future bride!”
“It’s the what of my who?”
She slapped her forehead, but gently, with the palm of her hand. “No wonder you haven’t married yet. You haven’t met the right initials. The Ouija Board has given you a clue so now you’ll know when you meet her.”
“Except I’m not looking for a wife yet. Yes--” I headed her off. “--I’m thirty-two, but I’m usually broke. And why should Weegee decide to tell me who my wife will be anyway?”
“Because I asked for a sign and your wedding--God forbid you should stay single another year--was on my mind. I have a very strong psychic sense. Mabel always tells me this.”
“Have you thought that maybe it’s telling you the initials of your next husband?”
“Marriage I had once to a prince, it was enough. You know I’ll never marry again.”
“But you admit you’re lonely.”
“Not for husbands, Maurice. Grandchildren. Grandchildren.”
The word followed me down the walk to the waiting cab.
* * *
ARG didn’t
enter my mind again until the next morning when I had to
cover a story at the New York Stock Exchange. The
interviewee turned out to be Melissa Louise Berman, a tall,
leggy blonde stockbroker with a cute upturned nose and a
smile that made me want to stock up on shares (no pun
intended) as if they were beer for a SuperBowl party. At
the end of the interview I asked her to open an account for
me so I could get in on the market, which she had just told
me was a bargain.
When she asked which stock I had in mind, I drew a blank,
and then my eyes shifted to the electronic ticker-tape that
flashed symbols across the wall at ceiling height. ARG
leaped out at me.
Coincidence, you say? I thought so too, but I bought a
hundred shares of this mysterious ARG anyway. It was
cheap.
I promptly
forgot my transaction because of getting assigned to a
Presidential hopeful and spending a lot of time in
Washington, but eventually I went back to Yonkers and my
mother.
“No luck?” she asked.
“Of what kind?” I returned.
“Finding the RIGHT WOMAN.” (It sounded to me as if she
capitalized it.) “Miss A.R.G.”
“Oh, that
right woman. I
haven’t met her yet, no.” I was on the verge of saying I
had bought a stock with those initials, but she whisked out
the Ouija box and insisted we try again.
“‘A’s are not popular nowadays,” she said. “Young ladies
are no longer named Anne or Alice--they’re Chelsea or
Tiffany.”
“There’s Ashley,” I offered.
“No, that’s a man’s name. You remember Ashley Bilko
from Gone With
the Wind.”
“Of course, Ashley Bilko. How could I have forgotten?”
Melissa Louise Berman popped into my mind, neatly
corroborating Mother’s theory, but if you think I’m one to
throw dynamite into a fire--
“If you haven’t met an ‘A’ yet,” she continued, “you
probably never will.”
So saying, she produced the board. While waiting for
Weegee’s next pronouncement, I thought of M.L.B., the
stockbroker, with more than casual interest. Why had I
almost forgotten her as easily as Allied What’s-its-name?
The skateboard/marker didn’t take the scenic route this
time. As if in a hurry to get this nonsense over with, it
flipped around the board, pausing only for micro-seconds at
“G,” “C” and “M,” and then went back to the middle to
hibernate for the rest of the millennium.
G? Who could that be, Gwendolyn?
Undaunted, my mother, who couldn’t wait to add “in-law” to
her title, promptly gave me twenty-five good reasons why I
should try to find such a girl.
“Give it a week. What could it hurt?”
I told her I thought Weegee was being very fickle, but the
next day I skipped lunch and went to the brokerage. Melissa
Louise smiled when she saw me and I conned myself into
believing she didn’t smile quite that nicely for anyone
else.
We talked business at first and she told me my ARG had gone
up to fifteen. Fifteen?
My God, the thing had practically doubled. I told her to
sell it quick before it realized what it had done and got
scared of the height. Just for fun I asked if she had a
stock with the symbol GCM.
She did.
Okay, so you caught on already. Then I’ll make this part
snappy. I bought GCM and, like the other, it went up as if
it were a jet clearing the Rockies. And the next time I
visited my mother, I was the one who dragged Weegee out of
his box and made him dance around the alphabet. He
pirouetted at STG, and I sold GCM the next day--at a profit
that suggested at least the down payment on a Porsche--and
bought the new one.
And then I made a mistake.
“Maurice, I mean Eric. You’re back again so soon. I didn’t
make a cheesecake this week.”
“That doesn’t matter. I just need to talk to Weegee.”
“All the time lately, you want to play with the Ouija
Board. First you hated him, now you love him. And he never
gives us more than three letters.”
“But they’re important letters.”
“So are you meeting ladies with these initials? Are you
dating dozens of beautiful girls instead of settling down
with one? This is not what I had in mind.”
“No, Ma, I’m not dating lots of beautiful girls. Look, I’m
going to be honest with you. I’m using the letters as tips
on the stock market.”
Her eyebrows headed for her hairline. “I think you
are pulling my leg.”
“No, Ma, I mean it. I don’t know why it happens, but when I
buy a stock with the initials Weegee gives us, I make
money. And the next time I get initials from Weegee, I sell
the old stock and buy the new one, and that one makes money
too.”
“You are a few sandwiches short of a picnic.”
“Believe me, Ma. I can show you my receipts.”
“All right, you’re getting rich. Rich men can always find a
wife. Why don’t you concentrate on that for a while?”
“Because I’m a good son and I want to make you rich too.”
“Rich I don’t need. I get along on what your father left
me.”
“But I could turn it into so much more. Do you have some
investments?”
“A little AT&T, a little ConEd--that’s it. They pay
dividends I use when I lose at Mahjong.”
“I can double
your money, triple it, and throw in a mink coat besides.
Just let me buy some stock for you when I buy mine. Trust
me--you’ll thank me later.”
“All right, already. If it makes you happy.”
So I bought some stock for her when I bought mine and for
the next six months everything went down!
She suggested I get out of the stock market and go back to
looking for a prospective wife, because judging by my
investing acumen, I desperately needed someone to take care
of me. She went back to her original theory about the
initials being a clue to my future wife who would switch my
capital from stocks and bonds to carpets and drapes. To say
nothing of nursery furniture.
My mother is a very persuasive woman and on the off chance
that she was also a jinx, I stopped investing. Fiancées I
didn’t need, because I now spent every Friday and Saturday
night with Melissa Louise, with whom I had fallen in love.
One Sunday, Weegee headed straight for “M.” Was he going to
spell Melissa?
Oh no he wasn’t. My mother’s psychic suggestions made no
impression on Weegee. He opted for “S,” then “V.”
There was a stock on the Exchange with those letters for
its symbol and I was back in the game again. And winning
again. And this time I didn’t tell my mother, because
Mother was definitely a jinx. With her subconscious trying
to turn stock symbols into women’s initials, how could it
be otherwise? The only problem was I couldn’t think of a
way to break the news to her that I was thinking of getting
married, or she would immediately, upon meeting the lovely
M.L.B., put Ouija away forever.
So, swinging bachelor I’m not. I work hard Monday through
Friday, see Melissa Louise two nights a week, and once a
month I visit my mother in Yonkers where we put Weegee
through his paces. Then I sell last month’s stock and buy
the latest one. And, crazy as it sounds--even to me--I
always make a profit and the money is piling up.
So what’s the problem, you ask?
Every time I buy a new suit, my mother asks me how I can
afford it, and I’m running out of creative ways of
explaining how I save out of my income. I can’t show up in
a Porsche or BMW, I can’t travel abroad, I can’t give her
an expensive Mother’s Day gift.
But pretty soon I guess I’ll have to tell her of the
impending nuptials, because smiling New York girls are hard
to find and I can’t let my mother go to her grave without a
grandchild.
But not for another year at least. Have you seen the price
of nursery furniture lately?
Copyright
2008 by Phyllis Humphrey