“Are there many …” I stopped, embarrassed.
“Are there other Laurel and Hardys out beyond? Yes and no.”
“Both?”
“Why not? Other Stans and Ollies morphing down the cosmos? What harm would a dozen of us do?”
“But, but, but,” said Will.
“No buts, sir.” Ollie scanned his derby as if it were a crystal ball. “With so much melancholy to be cured on so many needy worlds, there could be a dozen Stans and Ollies. Good gravy, the Lonely sickness might rise again to knock millions into grief.”
“I know—” said Will.
“You do not know, sir, so I’ll continue. When questioned by skeptics we deny our DNA family. We are the only black-and-white ghosts who fall downstairs out of the Lazarus Internet.”
“Like,” piped Stan, “two peas in a pod!”
“Still, it is hard for me to believe—” I said.
“Do not believe, sir, know. Observe caterpillars and butterflies. Unrelated? Yet they are one. And what of Life itself, on Earth? How could dead rock, in primal sweats, hit by lightning, come alive? How could electric storms cause life to stir and know itself? Dunno, the scientists say. It just happened. Boy, some science! So, dear sirs, that’s us. We happened. No beginning and no end. Half caterpillar, half moth.”
“What’s more …” whispered Stan, “Ollie and me, Ollie and I, will live forever.”
“Forever?” I gasped.
“Isn’t that what you always wanted, in the old days? When we did vaudeville in Dublin and London they shouted, ‘Stan? Ollie? Don’t die!’
“So,” Stan finished, looking with moist eyes at the years ahead, “that’s how it’ll be. We’ll come back for a last Farewell Tour. It’s in our contract, year after year after year …” His voice was a falsetto whisper. “… forever.”
“Forever,” whispered someone.
“Or Eternity,” said Ollie jauntily. “Whichever comes first.”
“Where do you go next?” I said.
“There are planets in the Alpha complex, eight habitable, seven with colonial drops. Lots of Lonelies out there waiting for cheerleaders to show up and save a civilization. But there I go again.”
“You,” said Will quietly, “are Christs without the crucifixion. God’s most dearly beloved intergalactic sons. Nazareth without tears.”
“How you do go on,” chirped Stan. “If we ever truly knew who we were, Ollie would be twice as pompous, me twice as dumb.”
“I wouldn’t say that!” cried Ollie.
“I just did,” said Stan.
“Well,” said Hardy, wiggling his fingers. “We must say ta-ta. The Centauri branch of the Irish orphans has a midnight feed. Stanley and I must head a Destruction Derby. Right, Stanley?”
“Do you never rest, never sleep?” I asked.
“With so much to do?”
“Ta-ta.”
“Wait,” I said.
I reached out to touch. Their handshakes, though black-and-white, were warm. “Toodle-oo,” I said.
And they ambled, rolled with vaudeville jumps and leaps, out the door.
The rest of that night, suspended in laser beam Virtual Realities,
- they met a gorilla on a flimsy bridge over a deep gorge.
- their feet trapped in cement, they plunged into deep waters.
- they heard a lunatic promise to twist their heads, tie their legs under their chins.
- Laurel skipped over a picket fence. Hardy, jauntily trying the leap, knocked the fence down.
The grand finale was, of course, Oliver Hardy poised atop a staircase holding a huge birthday cake, fully lit, pompously certain of his dignity, taking just one misstep, not down, but hurled out.
With a terrible cry of despair, birthday cake and Ollie in slow motion soared until cake, candles, and Ollie landed full on the dining-room table, Ollie’s face smashed in frosting, as the table crashed and cake and Ollie hit the floor, and the chandelier and all the wall pictures leaped and fell in the same instant so that pictures, chandelier, table, cake, and Ollie were buried under lit candles!
Then behold! The pictures leaped back onto walls, chandelier to ceiling, the cake reconstituted, and let Ollie go so that he was thrown in reverse up to the top of the stairs, the cake in his hands, glancing grandly over at us with a fake modest glance which said, here I go again, but this time no fall, no shriek! Watch!
And there he went again, in black and white, forever certain, forever slipping, forever dreading the upthrust target of flimsy table, gullible pictures, guillotine chandelier.
Pandemoniums of Alpha Centauri applause.
“But when, when, oh when will you return?” I asked.
“Whenever you feel the greatest need,” said Ollie. “When the Affliction sets in, when the Loneliness stays. Now say the magic words. What the traffic cop said when we didn’t move our wreck.”
Stan and Ollie held on to their hats, waiting.
“Ollie,” I said, “twiddle your tie.”
Ollie twiddled his tie.
“Stan, pull your topknot.”
Stan yanked his hair.
I took a deep breath and shouted:
“Git outta here, or I’ll give you a ticket for blocking traffic!”
Leaping up, clapping their hats, elbows flying …
Laurel and Hardy got out of there.
The crying didn’t stop till after the third Bombay gin.
Leftovers
Ralph Fentriss put the phone down, scowling.
His wife, Emily, still seated at the breakfast table, glanced up from the morning newspaper and stopped sipping her coffee.
“Who was that?” she said.
“Beryl,” said Ralph, still scowling.
“Beryl?”
“You know. Sam’s girlfriend, mistress, almost his wife, lover, Beryl what’s-her-name.”
“Ah, yes,” said Emily Fentriss, buttering her toast. “Beryl Veronique Glass. That’s the only way I remember: with the whole name. Veronique, especially. Do you have a headache?”
Ralph Fentriss touched the scowl fixed to his forehead.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “How did that get there?”
“What did Beryl Veronique Glass want, Ralph?”
“Us,” he said, rubbing his brow.
“Us?” Emily abandoned her toast.
“For dinner,” he added.
“Oh, my,” said Emily.
“You can say that again.”
“How many years has it been? Since Sam died, that is.”
“Three, maybe four. Four, I guess.”
“Can’t we get out of it? The dinner, I mean.”
“Tell me how,” he said.
“Oh, my,” said Emily Fentriss again.
“Why,” said Ralph Fentriss, seated in the restaurant, “do they keep calling me? Old flames, old friends of our daughters, former lovers, lamebrain suitors, flimsy girlfriends, friends of friends, first cousins to distant acquaintances. And now, tonight, what in hell are we doing here? Where is she?”
“If I recall correctly,” said Emily Fentriss, drinking her second glass of champagne in preparation, “she was always late. And as for your first question, they call because you keep answering.”
“You can’t just hang up on people.”
“No. Promise to call back, then don’t.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I know, and that’s the cross you’ll have to bear.”
“You don’t call back ever, do you?”
“No, and I have a better life for it. Beneath this silk bosom, no bleeding heart.”
“Bleeding heart?”
“Every drunk in a bar thinks you’re the Second Coming, every homeless bum thinks you’re Jesus of Nazareth arrived to carpenter their souls, every prostitute thinks you’re the lawyer to beg her case, every politician knows that your heart lies under your wallet and pours on the banana oil, every bartender tells you his life story instead of you telling him yours, every cop looks at your face and doesn’t give you a ticket, every rabbi asks you to lecture Friday nights even though you’re a fallen-away Baptist, every—”
“All right, all right,” he said.
“I just ran out of gas anyway. Tell me again, who are you?”
“Winner of the Bleeding Heart Red Cross New Year’s Award.”
“And don’t you forget it. Pipe down! Here she comes.”
“Beryl Veronique!” Ralph Fentriss cried, with mock joy.
“Just Beryl will do,” said the young woman, very lovely and, for now, very quiet.
“Sit down, sit down.”
“I am, don’t you see. Is that champagne? My God, this glass isn’t big enough. What are you waiting for?”
He filled her glass till it overflowed.
She drank it down and gasped: “Please, sir, I want some more.”
“This is going to be a long evening,” murmured Emily Fentriss.
“Beg pardon,” said Beryl Veronique Glass.
“Fill the glass, and mine, too, while you’re at it.”
With a death-rictus smile Ralph Fentriss refilled the glasses.
“Well, it’s good we’re all together again,” he said.
“Not really,” said Beryl Veronique Glass.
“How long has it been?”
“Four years, one month, and three days,” said the young woman.
“Since last we met?”
“Since he died.”
“Sam?”
“Why else would I be here? Top this, will you?”
He topped the champagne.
“Still bother you, does he? Sam, I mean.”
“He never lets up.”
“Even though he is long gone?”
“What has death got to do with it? I wonder, can you sue the deceased for harassment?”
“I never thought. Sam was persistent in life, and, I gather, dominates the moments even now that he’s out of here. Go on.” Fentriss glanced at his watch. “Why did you call us, of all people?”
“Because I have a new boyfriend.”
“Good for you!”
“No, not good. We’re both fingernails-on-the-edge-of-the-cliff. I reach up, he reaches down, but we’ve never touched. More than a year now, a year and two months, I’ve been seeing him but every time I see him I start crying. Sam again. Always Sam.”
Ralph Fentriss took a healthy swig and dared to say: “Might I make a suggestion? Your new friend, if, finally, you let him cover you, that should put a lid on the coffin.”
“I beg your pardon?!”
“I’m saying, if you let your new friend make love to you, really cover you in the old Biblical sense, then Samuel, Sammy, Sam, will really be dead. At last,” he added.
Beryl Veronique Glass stared at him for the longest moment until Ralph Fentriss glanced down at his dinner. Then she burst into tears.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I’ve got to,” she said, and let the tears flow, with very little sound. When she was finished she examined her salad and said, “My God, look what I’ve done to my lettuce.”
“It probably needed some salt anyway,” he said, with a nervous smile.
“It did,” she said. “He never has.”
“Never has what?”
“My new friend. Never has. Covered me.”
Fentriss ordered a good wine, waited for it to be opened and aired, and at last said, “It’s time.”
“I
