The woman who answered the phone sounded senile.
I asked if I might talk to Lillian Eaton, and she said she was Lillian Eaton.
I asked if there were a younger Lillian Eaton there, her daughter perhaps, or her granddaughter, and she said she was a ninety-four year old spinster, and the only Lillian Eaton in that house, or for that matter in all of McDowell County.
She was also a little hard of hearing. When I asked her if she was by any chance a midget, she said there was nobody named Bridget in that house. I decided she was not the lady who had written the letter to your magazine. (It was interesting to learn, by the way, just how many men are sexually attracted to novagenarians, as reported in your article on Geriatric Sex in the February issue.)
Limp and dejected, I walked the two blocks to my office, knowing full well I would be unable to rest until I had taken a train or a plane to Oaken Bow and searched that town from house to house for my enigmatic, monogrammatic love. (Yes — love! I had already begun to think of her as such, even though I had never laid eyes on the creature.) I agonized for the better part of August. I am a bookkeeper with a large accounting firm, and am rarely if ever required to go out of town on business. But so driven was I by the thought of locating the L.E. who had promised to “oblige me in every possible way,” so determined was I to experience after almost five decades an encore of that first blissful interlude, so obsessed was I that I created an opportunity to absent myself from New York. I told my wife a furniture company we represented had burned to the ground in Old Fort, North Carolina, and that I would have to go there in an attempt to reconstruct their destroyed books. The lie was based on an actual furniture company fire in Schenectady four years earlier, at which time one of our accountants had gone upstate to do exactly what I was pretending to be doing now. On the fifth of September, then, a Friday night — I flew from the airport in Newark, New Jersey, to the Asheville-Hendersonville airport in North Carolina, and then I rented a car and drove to Oaken Bow. On Saturday morning, September the sixth, I began looking for L.E. in earnest.
I could not find her.
I searched through Oaken Bow all day Saturday and part of Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, I canvassed the nearby communities, but none of the people to whom I spoke had the faintest knowledge of a redheaded midget with the initials L.E. On Sunday evening, I went back to the only hotel in town and learned to my dismay that McDowell County was dry, and that the package stores in the nearby wet county were closed on Sunday. Deprived of even the solace of alcohol (I am not normally a drinking man, but my inability to locate L.E. was both frustrating and distressing), I sat in the lobby of the hotel and eventually struck up a conversation with a one-armed former blackjack dealer who mentioned in passing that he had read in a man’s magazine (I don’t believe it was yours) an article stating that certain types of women found one-armed men sexually attractive.
We then began discussing my penchant for midgets, and he said I should have been down there in June when the circus had pitched its tents on the fairgrounds. He said there must’ve been six or seven good-looking midgets in town, wouldn’t have minded getting hold of one of them himself, he said, though his tastes usually ran to larger women.
I asked him if he had happened to notice a redheaded midget, a girl of about twenty-two, and he said there might have been a redheaded midget but he couldn’t say for sure because in addition to his one arm being missing, he was also color blind. (Though he had read in a magazine that many women found it sexually stimulating to go to bed with men who were color blind.) I told him that this particular midget would have had the initials L.E., and he asked me if I mightn’t be thinking about Ellie Carpenter, who was a midget who’d been there with the circus in June, and who used to come over to the hotel every now and then to turn tricks, since what she doubled as in her spare time away from the sideshow was a hooker. She’d been around for two weeks, while the circus was there, and then she’d left when the circus had.
On the plane back to New York, I pondered what he had told me. Was it possible that Ellie Carpenter, a redheaded midget passing through Oaken Bow with the circus in June, had read my letter in your June issue, and had answered it while in Oaken Bow (hence the address) and had asked that it be signed with the homophonic initials L.E. — for Ellie? In November, telling my wife that a furniture store in Sarasota had gone up in smoke, I flew down to the winter quarters of the circus in a further attempt to locate Ellie Carpenter. The man I spoke to had been with the circus for the better part of his life, and he told me that the only redheaded midget they’d employed in recent years was a woman named Else Kopchek, who was twenty-two years old, and Polish, and from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But she had left the circus immediately after the season, mentioning in parting that there was bigger money to be made elsewhere. She had not even remotely hinted where “elsewhere” might be.
It now seemed entirely possible to me that Else Kopchek might indeed have called herself Ellie Carpenter while turning tricks at the Oaken Bow Hotel, and it seemed further likely that she had not gone back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it being common knowledge that nobody goes back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (I certainly hope this casual remark does not unleash another cageful of beastly letters, if you’ll pardon the metaphor. My first letter has caused me problems enough.) The very thought of reliving that thrilling youthful experience with a new and different partner — but oh so similar in size and coloration — was enough to send me to Philadelphia the very next weekend, hoping against hope that soon I might disrobe an elfin Ellie, discard her dainty delicate underthings, pat her seemingly pubescent peaks, probe her pithy pussy, manipulate her miniature mons veneris and Lilliputian labiae, caress her compact clitoris and crisp pauciloquent pubic — please, an elderly man should not carry on so in a public forum.
Suffice it to say, I went to Philadelphia.
I found a man there named Karl Kopchek who told me his daughter was indeed a redheaded, twenty-two year old midget named Else Kopchek. Karl was six-feet three-inches tall and had black hair. He told me he had last seen his daughter when she’d come home for Christmas. At the time, she said she was doing social work in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but he had not heard from her since, and did not know where she was or what she was doing now.
And neither do I.
And that’s why I’m writing to you once again.
Is Ellie Carpenter (nee Else Kopchek) indeed the L.E. who extended her kind invitation to me in the pages of your magazine? If she is, I will of course continue the search for her as long as I have breath, and I will find her one day, I know I will, and then, beware you lovers of yore! We shall scale Parnassian heights, we two, and shatter legends and myths! But, sirs, is she my L.E.? Only you can say, for only you have her original letter, written from Oaken Bow last June but presumably carrying a name and address (in capitals, please) as asked for at the very top of your “Letters” column. I implore you now for your educated advice. Should I now curtail my quest for this carmine-curled, concise, and curvaceous munchkin whom I believe to be the L.E. who first wrote to you? In short, is my minor marvel a myth, or a midget worth pursuing? Tell me, sirs. Is Else Kopchek the L.E. who wrote to you last June? Consult your files, I beg of you, and send me your response in the enclosed stamped, self-addressed envelope. I shall be eternally grateful for your speedy reply.