So here he was on the third day of a convention which stretched out over an incredible four days; here he was in room 217 of the Holiday Inn, his wife and daughter at home, the TV broken, an unpleasant smell hanging around in the bathroom. There was a swimming pool, but his eczema was so bad this summer that he wouldn’t have been caught dead in a bathing suit. From the shins down he looked like a leper. He had an hour before the next workshop (Helping the Vocally Challenged Child — what they meant was doing something for kids who stuttered or who had cleft palates, but we wouldn’t want to come right out and say that, Christ no, someone might lower our salaries), he had eaten lunch at San Remo’s only restaurant, he didn’t feel like a nap, and the TV’s one station was showing a rerun of Bewitched.
So he sat down with the telephone book and began to flip through it aimlessly, hardly aware of what he was doing, wondering distantly if he knew anyone crazy enough about either small, lovely, or seaside to live in San Remo. He supposed this was what all the bored people in all the Holiday Inns all over the world ended up doing — looking for a forgotten friend or relative to call up on the phone. It was that, Bewitched, or the Gideon Bible. And if you did happen to get hold of somebody, what the hell did you say? ‘Frank! How the hell are you? And by the way, which was it — small, lovely, or seaside?’ Sure. Right Give that man a cigar and set him on fire.
Yet, as he lay on the bed flipping through the thin San Remo white pages and half-scanning the columns, it seemed to him that he did know somebody in San Remo. A book salesman? One of Sondra’s nieces or nephews, of which there were marching battalions? A poker buddy from college? The relative of a student? That seemed to ring a bell, but he couldn’t fine it down any more tightly.
He kept thumbing, and found he was sleepy after all. He had almost dozed off when it came to him and he sat up, wide awake again.
Lord Peter!
They were rerunning those Wimsey stories on PBS just lately — Clouds of Witness, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors. He and Sondra were hooked. A man named Ian Carmichael played Wimsey, and Sondra was nuts for him. So nuts, in fact, that Ed, who didn’t think Carmichael looked like Lord Peter at all, actually became quite irritated.
‘Sandy, the shape of his face is all wrong. And he’s wearing false teeth, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Poo,’ Sondra had replied airily from the couch where she was curled up. ‘You’re just jealous. He’s so handsome.’
‘Daddy’s jealous, Daddy’s jealous,’ little Norma sang, prancing around the living room in her duck pyjamas.
‘You should have been in bed an hour ago,’ Ed told her, gazing at his daughter with a jaundiced eye. ‘And if I keep noticing you’re here, I’ll probably remember that you aren’t there.’
Little Norma was momentarily abashed. Ed turned back to Sondra.
‘I remember back three or four years ago. I had a kid named Todd Bowden, and his grandfather came in for a conference. Now that guy looked like Wimsey. A very old Wimsey, but the shape of his face was right, and—’
‘Wim-zee, Wim-zee, Dim-zee, Jim-zee,’ little Norma sang. ‘ Wim-zee, Dim-zee, doodle-oodle-ooo-doo—’
‘Shh, both of you,’ Sondra said. ‘I think he’s the most beautiful man.’ Irritating woman!
But hadn’t Todd Bowden’s grandfather retired to San Remo? Sure. Todd had been one of the brightest boys in that year’s ninth grade class. Then, all at once, his grades had gone to hell. The old man had come in, told a familiar tale of marital difficulties, and had persuaded Ed to let the situation alone for a while and see if things didn’t straighten themselves out Ed’s view was that the old laissez-faire bit didn’t work -if you told a teenage kid to root, hog, or die, the kid usually died. But the old man had been almost eerily persuasive (it was the resemblance to Wimsey, perhaps), and Ed had agreed to give Todd to the end of the next Flunk Card period. And damned if Todd hadn’t pulled through. The old man must have gone right through the whole family and really kicked some ass, Ed thought. He looked like the type who not only could do it, but who might derive a certain dour pleasure from it. Then, just two days ago, he had seen Todd’s picture in the paper — he had made the Southern Cal All-Stars in baseball. No mean feat when you considered that about five hundred boys were nominated each spring. He supposed he might never have come up with the grandfather’s name if he hadn’t seen the picture.