“At a wake, yes, that would be the polite thing to do.” The lawyer moved to pour again.
“Just hold it, right there!” The priest stared around, up, down, at his friends from the pub, at Finn their spiritual leader, at the sky where God hid, at the earth where Kilgotten lay playing Mum’s the Word, and at last at lawyer Clement and his damned, ribboned codicil. “Beware, man, you are provoking civil strife!”
“Yah!” cried everyone, atilt on the air, fists at their sides, grinding and ungrinding invisible rocks.
“What year is this wine?” Ignoring them, Clement calmly eyed the label in his hands. “Le Corton. Nineteen-seventy. The best wine in the finest year. Excellent.” He stepped free of the priest and let the wine spill.
“Do something!” shouted Doone. “Have you no curse handy?”
“Priests do not curse,” said Father Kelly. “But, Finn, Doone, Hannahan, Burke. Jump! Knock heads.”
The priest marched off and the men rushed after to knock their heads in a bent-down ring and a great whisper with the father. In the midst of the conference the priest stood up to see what Clement was doing. The lawyer was on his third bottle.
“Quick!” cried Doone. “He’ll waste the lot!”
A fourth cork popped, to another outcry from Finn’s team, the Thirsty Warriors, as they would later dub themselves.
“Finn!” the priest was heard to say, deep in the heads-together, “you’re a genius!”
“I am!” agreed Finn, and the huddle broke and the priest hustled back to the grave.
“Would you mind, sir,” he said, grabbing the bottle out of the lawyer’s grip, “reading one last time, that damned codicil?”
“Pleasure.” And it was. The lawyer’s smile flashed as he fluttered the ribbons and snapped the will.
“‘—that contrary to the old adage, a man can indeed take it with him—’”
He finished and folded the paper, and tried another smile, which worked to his own satisfaction, at least. He reached for the bottle confiscated by the priest.
“Hold on.” Father Kelly stepped back. He gave a look to the crowd who waited on each fine word. “Let me ask you a question, Mr. Lawyer, sir. Does it anywhere say there just how the wine is to get into the grave?”
“Into the grave is into the grave,” said the lawyer.
“As long as it finally gets there, that’s the important thing, do we agree?” asked the priest, with a strange smile.
“I can pour it over my shoulder, or toss it in the air,” said the lawyer, “as long as it lights to either side or atop the coffin, when it comes down, all’s well.”
“Good!” exclaimed the priest. “Men! One squad here. One battalion over there. Line up! Doone!”
“Sir?”
“Spread the rations. Jump!”
“Sir!” Doone jumped.
To a great uproar of men bustling and lining up.
“I,” said the lawyer, “am going to find the police!”
“Which is me,” said a man at the far side of the mob, “Officer Bannion. Your complaint?”
Stunned, lawyer Clement could only blink and at last in a squashed voice, bleat: “I’m leaving.”
“You’ll not make it past the gate alive,” said Doone, cheerily.
“I,” said the lawyer, “am staying. But—”
“But?” inquired Father Kelly, as the corks were pulled and the corkscrew flashed brightly along the line.
“You go against the letter of the law!”
“No,” explained the priest, calmly, “we but shift the punctuation, cross new t’s, dot new i’s.”
“Tenshun!” cried Finn, for all was in readiness.
On both sides of the grave, the men waited, each with a full bottle of vintage Château Lafite Rothschild or Le Corton or Chianti.
“Do we drink it all?” asked Doone.
“Shut your gab,” observed the priest. He eyed the sky. “Oh, Lord.” The men bowed their heads and grabbed off their caps. “Lord, for what we are about to receive, make us truly thankful. And thank you, Lord, for the genius of Heeber Finn, who thought of this—”
“Aye,” said all, gently.
“Twas nothin’,” said Finn, blushing.
“And bless this wine, which may circumnavigate along the way, but finally wind up where it should be going. And if today and tonight won’t do, and all the stuff not drunk, bless us as we return each night until the deed is done and the soul of the wine’s at rest.”
“Ah, you do speak dear,” murmured Doone.
“Sh!” hissed all.
“And in the spirit of this time, Lord, should we not ask our good lawyer friend Clement, in the fullness of his heart, to join with us?”
Someone slipped a bottle of the best in the lawyer’s hands. He seized it, lest it should break.
“And finally, Lord, bless the old Lord Kilgotten, whose years of saving-up now help us in this hour of putting-away. Amen.”
“Amen,” said all.
“Tenshun!” cried Finn.
The men stiffened and lifted their bottles.
“One for his lordship,” said the priest.
“And,” added Finn, “one for the road!”
There was a dear sound of drinking and, years later, Doone remembered, a glad sound of laughter from the box in the grave.
“It’s all right,” said the priest, in amaze.
“Yes.” The lawyer nodded, having heard. “It’s all right.”
The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair
He called her stanley, she called him ollie.
That was the beginning, that was the end, of what we will call the Laurel and Hardy love affair.
She was twenty-five, he was thirty-two when they met at one of those dumb cocktail parties where everyone wonders what they are doing there. But no one goes home, so everyone drinks too much and lies about how grand a late afternoon it all was.
They did not, as often happens, see each other across a crowded room, and if there was romantic music to background their collision, it couldn’t be heard. For everyone was talking at one person and staring at someone else.
They were, in fact, ricocheting through a forest of people, but finding no shade trees. He was on his way for a needed drink, she was eluding a love-sick stranger, when they locked paths in the exact center of the fruitless mob. They dodged left and right a few times, then laughed and he, on impulse, seized his tie and twiddled it at her, wiggling his fingers. Instantly, smiling, she lifted her hand to pull the top of her hair into a frowzy tassel, blinking and looking as if she had been struck on the head.
“Stan!” he cried, in recognition.
“Ollie!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been?”
“Why don’t you do something to help me!” he exclaimed, making wide fat gestures.
They grabbed each other’s arms, laughing again.
“I—” she said, and her face brightened even more. “I—I know the exact place, not two miles from here, where Laurel and Hardy, in nineteen thirty, carried that piano crate up and down one hundred and fifty steps!”
“Well,” he cried, “let’s get out of here!”
His car door slammed, his car engine roared.
Los Angeles raced by in late afternoon sunlight.
He braked the car where she told him to park. “Here!”
“I can’t believe it,” he murmured, not moving. He peered around at the sunset sky. Lights were coming on all across Los Angeles, down the hill. He nodded. “Are those the steps?”
“All one hundred and fifty of them.” She climbed out of the open-topped car. “Come on, Ollie.”
“Very well,” he said, “Stan.”
They walked over to the bottom of yet another hill and gazed up along the steep incline of concrete steps toward the sky. The faintest touch of wetness rimmed his eyes. She was quick to pretend not to notice, but she took his elbow. Her voice was wonderfully quiet:
“Go on up,” she said. “Go on. Go.”
She gave him a tender push.
He started up the steps, counting, and with each half-whispered count, his voice took on an extra decibel of joy. By the time he reached fifty-seven he was a boy playing a wondrous old-new game, and he was lost in time, and whether he was carrying the piano up the hill or whether it was chasing him down, he could not say.
“Hold it!” he heard her call, far away, “right there!”
He held still, swaying on step fifty-eight, smiling wildly, as if accompanied by proper ghosts, and turned.
“Okay,” she called, “now come back down.”
He started down, color in his cheeks and a peculiar suffering of happiness in his chest. He could hear the piano following now.
“Hold it right there!”
She had a camera in her hands. Seeing it, his right hand flew instinctively to his tie to flutter it on the evening air.
“Now, me!” she shouted, and raced up to hand him the camera. And he marched down and looked up and there she was, doing the thin shrug and the puzzled and hopeless face of Stan baffled by life but loving it all. He clicked the shutter, wanting to stay here forever.
She came slowly down the steps and peered into his face.
“Why,” she said, “you’re crying.”
She placed her thumbs under his eyes to press the tears away. She tasted the result. “Yep,” she said. “Real tears.”
He looked at her eyes, which were almost as wet as his.
“Another fine mess you’ve got us in,” he said.
“Oh, Ollie,” she said.
“Oh, Stan,” he said.
He kissed her, gently.
And then he said:
“Are we going to know each other forever?”
“Forever,” she said.
And that was how the long love affair began.
They had real names, of course, but those don’t matter, for Laurel and Hardy always seemed the best thing to call themselves.
For the simple fact was that she was fifteen pounds underweight and he was always trying to get her to add a few pounds. And he was twenty pounds overweight and she was always trying to get him to take off more than his shoes. But it never worked and was finally a joke, the best kind, which wound up being:
“You’re Stan, no two ways about it, and
