A Grand Folly: Or, The Ultracrepidarians

A GRAND FOLLY

or,

The Ultracrepidarians

A Novelette

by S. P. Elledge

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 S. P. Elledge

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for my loves,

Oggie and Snudge

Table of Contents

Part One: Enid

Part Two: Oscar

Part Three: Satchell

Part Four: Jubilee

First,

A Defense and a Provocation:

Basil: Well? Well?

Rodolphe (dashing the pages aside): Don’t exasperate your reader, bud. No one in Podunk would actually look, dress, think, or talk like that.

Basil: That’s just it. Maybe they should!

from the two-act comedy Half Amused

by Morley Wrenn, based upon the non-autobiographical memoirs of Basil Blakethorne

Part One: Enid

Like hawk upon hare Enid Whitsell had surprised the dawn, for she very seldom gave the world witness before nine. Never mind the diamantine dew, the barn-bound owls, the dozy droning bees—potential inspirations all—never mind the sunrise that demanded an aubade. Today, on the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday (when she would become irreversibly old), matters even more important than poetry loomed large and near. It was taxing to corral her many wandering thoughts, but she must try, weary as she was. Only by the grace of a few sips of a potent valerian tincture had she finally been able to sleep for a few short hours; with the first intrusions of daylight though her blinds she had fled from her bed as if it were on fire.

Oh, to be dissolved!

Out the door she ran, down the steps, across the lawn—somewhere out there she would find freedom, somewhere find an answer! Yawning, blinking, and jangling with jujus like a shaman, Enid took Rector’s Lane in fretful strides, convinced that she now knew exactly what a condemned prisoner watching the gibbet’s rise beyond the barred window feels.

Alas, it was intended to be a summer for engendering bright ideas that resulted in brilliant works, for with a great deal of forethought she had guided her two brothers and herself toward what should be their occupations of the season: Oz must leave off his mooncalfing and begin to get serious about his experimental novel, Sax had to collate his copious annotations concerning grotteschi from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment and commence work upon an actual working monograph, while she herself must try again to fit to a more eloquent frame her latest cycle of ekphrastic odes. But life as their studious little threesome knew it, Enid reminded herself, was going to change irremediably. Indeed, all they had planned was fizzling, soon to explode.

A simple but devastating postcard superficially of the usual sort had brought about this crisis. Enid had it now, concealed within one of the many pockets of her repurposed angler’s jerkin, and she was tempted to destroy it, but knew she never could, for one day it might prove to be evidence: of what exactly, she couldn’t at the moment formulate; events it foretold might or might not come true, given the author’s questionable repute.

The author was their mother, or the Matriarch, as they usually addressed her memory, which nowadays they seldom had call to do. She was dead—or should have been—for seven years now. Their much more kindly regarded father (the Patriarch, of course), was dead, as well, having slowly, extravagantly, and at last fatally poisoned himself—as much with books as with pills and booze; he had been gone now the same span of years ago as their mother, plus six or seven months.

What to do about her secret torment, how to undo all of the hateful and humiliating past, seemed more insoluble to Enid with her every stride. She could barely heed where she was heading. There, you see—she could have twisted an ankle when clearing that fallen limb in her damp dance slippers!

At that precarious moment Enid decided she must change tack, after all, stop expecting a sort of instant divine deliverance, instead allow the quotidian to subsume the more extraordinary urgencies of fate. Is that how she meant to phrase it? Well, then, she must sit on that stump a spell, breathe like a yogi, tighten her laces, and, steadying her feet, relaunch herself…

So, down the sleeping lane she sallied forth again, chin held higher, humbly challenging nature to provide, as ever it promised, all the distraction she should need. One might have thought midsummer could work its customary magic, but nature, as it so often had in her life, came up short: classifying the shifting clouds, tallying blackbirds balanced on high branches, trying to catch swallowtails or monarchs on the wing… conversely, with eyes back on the road, kicking pebbles, pitching acorns like false hopes into mud puddles—these timeless rituals she had practiced since childhood could not at present ease her pain. Still that creased, oversized card burned against her breast like the lingering sting of a wasp.

Enid’s usual first, last, and best weapon to deal with anxieties and ward off fear (or boredom, should she ever approach its yawning abyss) lay in losing herself in words, imagery, metaphors, art, all that. What better reason to go on living, if one must go on living? Typically she could find far greater minds than her own into which to retreat. Weighted as she was now with worries, however, intellectual immersion seemed well-nigh impracticable. Nobody, whether the most resourceful lyricist or the noblest of metaphysicians, could be up to the task. With every step this morning she felt at turns benumbed, dumfounded, or stunned.

Only with great effort was she able to drag to the surface of her thoughts a once-popular but really rather trivial photograph of The Principessa Incorriggibile, taken by Emile Celèstine three-quarters of a century ago, and only because just yesterday she had been poring over the pages of a forgotten London gallery’s even more forgotten retrospective of interbellum society portraitists. She had pulled the old water-warped catalogue quite at random from a hodgepodge of similar items while spring-cleaning the disused outhouse under the wistaria bower.

Something curious—even deceptive—about the princess’s nebulous likeness had arrested Enid later as she lay abed idly flipping pages. One must understand and appreciate, she reminded herself then and again now, that the artist, in this case a much-sought-after society photographer, often and wisely obfuscates motives or sentiments. Who was it said that mystery alone is eternal, not meaning? Celèstine, a well-respected professional voyeur, must have been in love with his subject: either that, or he was terrified of her, and maybe it is the same thing. (It had been much the same thing with He Who Had Sinned Against Her.)

As Enid remembered it, the palladium print showed the most dangerously alluring debutante of 1933 sulking behind a fan made of a lyrebird’s orphic tail feathers, revealing not much more of the girl than an eye black and accusatory, a lasciviously white shoulder, and, most importantly, half of what was much closer to a cynical moue than any girlish pout.

A smile that could be something quite contrary was, or could be, deeply subsumed within her latest villanelle, Enid had decided, excitedly slurping her afternoon Assam (two squeezes and two lumps, please, Sax). No need for everything to make sense the way tottings-up and tax rates are obliged to make dull fiscal sense; let the tercets and quatrain, like that controversial cotillion portrait, question, not strive to answer. She should change aged to autumned, should go ahead and make of her heartfelt emotions a burlesque—beat the world to it, at any rate.

Oh, but contemplating the complexities of versification could do her no good right now, right here, on Rector’s Lane! She still foresaw the noose’s pendulum swing before her, closer than those tragic undines and leering puppets evoked in her tercets and quatrains; she still felt, if she might mix sensations and methods of capital punishment, the blade grazing her slender bejeweled nape. Might as well face it: there was simply no use trying to incite or invite diversions on this day of all days.

Though it was a balmy morn in June, that most innocent of months, and though she was alone and willfully autonomous on a backwoods road in the rustic wilderness somewhere north of Missouri and west of Illinois, in a safe year at the end of a recent millennium, there was still everything in the world to agonize over—not the least being that, because the Matriarch had somehow been reborn, their whole household was balanced on the edge of disaster. For the Matriarch would, like the Aesopian wolf, be blowing off the jovial piglets’ rooftop in just around two days’ time. The big bad woman had said something or other on the card about statutes of limitation, Enid recalled, and how she had married again, and then again, but came out of it all no better off and in the end had no recourse but to regain her birthplace and resume her throne. Resume her throne! Those were her very words, or close to them.

So much of the woof and warp of life would change, all those easy and comfortable patterns they had long woven for themselves. Normally, at this hour of the morning, the Whitsells could be found at home, in their separate and inviolable habitats, in a wholly settled state: Enid, only lately awakened and poised for another day’s levee with her brothers, would already be dropping crumbs into the divide between translations and originals; Oscar would be submerged under the salted foam sloshing over his immense marble tub, a board like Marat’s accommodating the notebooks where he set into motion the Bavarian clockwork of characters he’d enmeshed in inescapable plots more intricate than seamless; Satchell, who arose the earliest to perform all his domestic duties, including serving Enid her tea and rusks and Oscar his newly shined shoes, might already have lifted the lid of his Apollo branded Pianette and once again be second-guessing the ear of the tuner. Such were the beginnings of what always had been very full if not to say fulfilling summer days for the Whitsells. How Enid would miss what she had taken for granted!

Lost in such sorrows, Enid suddenly saw that a very large and very imperial-looking toad stood squat and square in her path; in fact, she had almost trod upon the immobile amphibian. Excuse me, she mumbled as one might to a passerby. No answer or reciprocal pleasantry, of course. This prince of the order Anura simply goggled up at her, unblinking, evidently displeased, as if she had kept its royal highness waiting. Really, when eyed more closely, it could be called the perfect specimen of toad: gray-golden skin, rubbery toes or fingers, agate eyes, sardonic lips, a generally lovely wartiness.

It had long been young Satchell’s habit to rise with the robins and set about shooing toads and other small animals off the lane, lest any pickup trucks or tractors, operated by irresponsible farmers or farmhands, should flatten them before they could scramble out of the way. His older sister had mentioned to both brothers more than once how she disliked finding the carnage left behind by agricultural juggernauts when she was out taking her daily constitutional. Some days she had come upon as many as three or four sticky brown stains in the middle of the lane.

Such horrors could stop a developing rhyme-scheme right in its tracks. But this hour was too early even for Satchell, gentlest of creatures himself, so he was nowhere about with his hawthorn prod; Enid had to stoop as best she could in her twill-knit tourniquet of a skirt to interview the toad—she could not bear to touch or even step over or around it. Some sort of superstition held her back.

"O, Bufo bufo, you buff buffoon! she chanted to it, never minding how comedic this picture must look to yon audience of skeptical heifers gathering along the fencerow. Do hear me out, do, Enid went on in that heightened, actressy tone she frequently took with both animals and younger brothers. You really shouldn’t be courting danger this way. Anyone who finds this shortcut drives too fast down it. I’ve nearly been killed myself, dozens of times—it’s true. This roadway is a virtual Verdun of the fallen."

And yet the toad did not bat an eye, assuming a toad can, nor did he alter one iota his supercilious expression.

Why… I know you! she said, close to kneeling, nearly eye-to-eye. You’re Toby. Hello, Toby, my dear. I haven’t seen you for yonks. Toby was what she called any large old toad who she took to be the biggest and oldest of the denizens of this region (in all truth, most looked alike to her).

Frogs usually obligingly hop out of the way; salamanders slither off without a howdy-do, but toads have a disquieting habit of squatting in the middle of moist pavement, staring one down and begging not to be budged. I have a right to my share of the insects that hover here, they let it be known. On other days Enid might have engaged Toby in conversations about the weather (which toads are always interested in) or the problems of poesy (which they never are). Today neither she nor Toby was in the mood.

So unflappable and fat and wise, there was a buddhist quality to toads that Enid endorsed—one could almost grant that they surpassed the determinism of certain Attic sages. I should be so stolid, she advised herself.

Then Enid felt moved again by an inexplicable despair. Look, Toby, you absolutely must getting about your business, she pleaded. Naturally, you can read my mind, or you think you can. But in this case such an attitude is not helping. You see, I’m totally serious, I am! I give you my word, I only want to save you… With real distaste for her own feelings, she felt a cold teardrop dangling from the tip of what kind people alluded to as her impressive nose. This wasn’t just about the toad, of course.

Songbirds sang. Midges gyred in the air. The toad adroitly snatched a snack from his rump with his long, sticky, and surprisingly purple tongue. Somewhat revulsed, Enid at last very cautiously tapped the tip of her soft-soled schooner-shaped slip-on against the overgrown tadpole’s humidly pulsating ribs. It did not yield. Oh, where oh where is Sax? she moaned, and at the sound or vibration of her voice the little brute at last sidled away, more crab than hopper, to the side of the sandy lane. Relieved but still restless, Enid nonetheless decided to turn back.

Only to resume her litany of woes. Next in order of atrocities was that supremely offensive (yet really risible) review she’d stared down again under an indifferent moon, before she gave in to that sleep-inducing elixir. A botched bit of libel, it was, that review, worthy of further examination only at a more sedate hour—for the prick of the lowly nettle, caustic though it be, is harmless and fast to fade, she knew. (All last weekend long, however, she’d felt herself wincing.)

More important than that sarcastic affront, more important even than the sum of all her literary frustrations, was the fact that the Whitsells had no more money, at least not enough to make any difference, not enough to save their souls. No matter how she had begged them to, at last interrogation both bankbook and account book had refused to collaborate in the kind of sugar-coated fibs she approved. How long the three siblings could afford to participate in their charade of running a solvent business, not to mention a functioning household, she shuddered to admit. Bookselling as a whole was a dying occupation; used books by and large seemed worth less these days than their weight in feathers.

But that was nothing—all of the above was nothing at all, she yet again reminded herself—compared to what the nickel-plated gullet of the mailbox at the end of the drive had yesternoon disgorged. (Unlike the previous Saturday, or most days, Monday’s delivery had been hours late, probably due to a six o’clock windstorm, so Enid had volunteered to check again after lunch. Such were the workings of fate—and what a miracle that she had intercepted Satchell!) Now she patted her pockets again for the loathsome epistle which she had discovered all alone in the box, found it, held it before bleary eyes, but refused at the moment to reread it.

That dated diction, stilted phrasing, and schoolgirl script all undeniably belonged to Mary Seraphina Winchelsea Whitsell—the Matriarch, the monster—her! Today was Tuesday; on Thursday, at fifteen minutes past two o’clock by Amtrak time, their former mother had announced, she would sail through their front door, in all her gloriously ruined and despotic beauty, like a homecoming argonaut, so many creeping years after her fleet-footed but very welcome departure. She had pointedly used only first-person singular; apparently, the new husband, like another mentioned only in passing, was already left behind—divorced or deceased? Had that vain fiend effectively murdered him—them!—like the old one?

No wonder, Enid told herself, that before her encounter with the stubborn toad she had been thinking of the awful and awesome Elena Incorriggibile, later to become a legendary temptress and counterspy: surely, such an artful femme fatale could have been cousin to their mother, so much alike were they. The Matriarch had never winked behind exotic plumes or filigreed screen for an artiste like Celèstine—indeed, that wasn’t quite her era—but cameras had been invented for her sort, even if of course cameras like mirrors always deceive.

That wicked woman—boldly returning here to the land she had forsaken, after she had bankrupted their father and absconded with his (their) funds from Grandfather’s slow-witted savings and loan! (She had already burned through her own inheritance.) By all rights she should be in prison—and would be, if she had ever been located and brought to trial… This accordingly was news Enid knew she must concoct to conceal from her brothers.

Bright-eyed Baby Satchell had been barely ten when his mother deserted him; his sister assumed this meant then that he had no memory of her beyond an asphyxiating civet scent and a malicious glister of jewels and teeth. But Oscar, the middle child, was different; in a way Enid sometimes suspected him of still secretly worshipping this personage they had all vowed to denounce—after she had forsaken them and the Patriarch—categorically denounce until their dying days.

Oscar was twenty-two now and held that unseemly regard certain bashful, awkward young men reserve for the likes of flirtatious sirens they would never dream of affronting, still less touch. Enid felt that as a member of their own sex she could easily see through such females’ beguiling exteriors. She had not forgotten that just a few years ago, poor Oscar had become rather too friendly with a stuck-up girl who had been cast as ingenue in that year’s junior-class production (not just any old ingenue, but Electra in a trot through the entire