“Papa, it’s me!”
“Emily?”
“No, Pa, it’s me. Your daughter.”
“Where is Emily?”
“She’s not here, Pa.”
“Where is she?”
“She’ll be home soon.”[3]
“I must speak to her. It is of the most utter importance.”
“She and I just went shopping together. She knows how you hate shopping, so she didn’t want to drag you along. I brought you some groceries.”
“Oh. That is very nice of you. How much should I tip? I am not familiar with the currency here. I will just have to trust you to tell me.”
“No tip necessary, Pa. I’m happy to do you such favors.”
“Oh… That is very nice of you.”
“I brought you some buttermilk.”
“Buttermilk? But where is my wife?”
“She’s in the town. Here, just a minute. I have something else for you, too. Let me get a bowl and crack these open… All right, now, take a whiff of this. What’s it remind you of?”
“Hmm… It is like the volcanoes of Vanaheim. We are in Vanaheim?”[4]
“No, New Crúiskeen, Pa. Upstate New Uruk. The United States. It’s Mom’s home town, remember?”
“No. Some mistake has been made. I should not be here. You must fetch me my papers.”
“Your papers are all in order, Pa. Don’t worry. You and Mom will be back in Vanaheim soon enough. Magnus Valison—”
“Hmph. I have never liked that man.[5] He has always had his eye on my Emily, I am sure.”
“I know, Pa. Everybody always had their eye on Mom.”
“Oh, my daughter! How are you? It is so nice to see you, my dear. You appear so strange to me, though. You are looking so old and tired!”
“I’m doing fine, Pa. Thanks for asking.”
“Hmm. You are welcome, dear thing. It is good news to my ears to hear that you are so fine, though. But where have you said that your mother has gone? She is not with Magnus Valison, is she?”
Magnus Valison, surprisingly enough, was fond of playing the fool. Our Heroine was thirteen when she first met him—during the L’anse aux Meadows case[6]—but he treated her as if she were three. This disappointed her somewhat, since she’d only recently read Itallo, and it had filled her with such readerly pleasure that she’d been compelled to plow immediately through his various other novels of the fifties and sixties—all of which she’d enjoyed—and so she’d initially been quite excited about being introduced to him. But that excitement dissolved with his first words.
“This bean appears to be sprouting quite nicely,” he’d declared in his thick Danish accent.
She’d already been sensitive enough about what she perceived as her Amazonian height at that point in her life, and so this comment was perhaps not received in the same spirit in which it was intended. Still, by the end of the case, she was ready to forgive him.
Valison had been in L’anse aux Meadows doing research for a proposed novel of the supernatural. In particular, he was looking into recently reported claims of strange visitations from what seemed to be the spirits of the first Viking settlers of North America proper. New Crúiskeen being only a few hours away, the Bean-Ymirsons had been unable to resist the opportunity of debunking these reports themselves, and they had arrived in the area soon after Valison, who immediately became more fascinated with them than he had ever been with the supposed ghosts.
Emily—being a fan of Valison’s work, herself—had welcomed him into their circle, and a few days after their initial meeting she and her husband had even entrusted Our Heroine to Valison’s care while they went off to deal with the annoyances offered by two bungling “metaphysical detectives.”
“You seem excessively fond of fidgeting,” Valison had said to Our Heroine. She was sitting in an overly stuffed red velvet chair in the center of his generally garish parlor. He was sitting across from her on the red velvet couch, trying to keep an eye on her. She, of course, had been itching to help her parents with the case and so did not appreciate his dutiful vigilance.
“You are like a brincador,” he continued, arching an implausibly tensile eyebrow.
“A what?” she asked, incredulous, readjusting herself on the rocklike cushion.
“A brincador. What is inappropriately called in English a ‘jumping bean.’ But they do not jump. They fidget.”
“Gee, thanks for the compliment,” she answered.
“Ah, but it is a compliment. The brincador is a most remarkable thing, as I suspect that you are, too. Do you know how it is that it is able to fidget about, this little bean?”
“Yeah, it has a bug in it or something,” she said. As she spoke, she covertly surveyed all of the room’s windows with an eye for the easiest escape route.
“Well, but it is not just a bug!” Valison exclaimed, rising rapidly to his feet.
“No?”
“Carpocapsa saltitans,” he pronounced. “It is a moth.” His voice had assumed a solemn tone, and he seemed to relish wrapping his mouth around the final “o.” But with a great flourish, then, he pulled a brown blanket from the back of the couch and crumpled it into a concentrated mass on the carpet in front of him.
“Um,” Our Heroine said. “What are you doing?”
“The adult lays its eggs within the little bean, and—when they are hatched—the larvae hollow the core and attach themselves to it with silken strands.”
Our Heroine watched, dumbfounded, while he acted out each step of this description—squatting to “lay his eggs” in the balled-up blanket on the floor, blinking dramatically as he “emerged from the egg within it,” and then forming a hollow space for himself by unfolding the blanket and pulling it up by its corners to drape over his head as he stood back up again.
“Then, when some young girl innocently takes the bean into her hand,” he shouted from beneath the blanket, “the sensitive little larva within feels the poignant heat emanating from her body, and he reacts to this heat by writhing—tugging upon the threads that bind him to the bean, thus effecting the aforementioned motion of fidgeting.”
Our Heroine never found out where the demonstration went from here, though, since—just as soon as Valison’s eyes were covered and he began to fidget upon the floor—she took the opportunity of tiptoeing toward one of the windows and silently boosting herself through it, off to help her parents round up the criminals responsible for the false ghosts. But the performance did endear him to her a little.[7]
“Go ahead and get some rest, Pa. I just came by to see how you were doing and to bring you the groceries. I know how you always get down around this time of year, so I brought you stockfish for dinner.”
“Mmm. Stockfish is my favorite.”
“I know it is, Pa.”
“I will cherish it always.”
Despite the anticipatory rise of nausea, she continued: “There’s another reason I came, too, Papa. You probably won’t remember this when I leave, and it’s probably best that you don’t, but I should at least let you know… It’s about Shirley.”
“Shirley… Oh, I have always liked her.”
“Yeah, she liked you, too, Pa. She looked up to you… Actually, I think she even had a bit of a crush on you, but… I’m sorry.”
“It is all right, dear thing.”
“No… She’s—Shirley is—”
“Why are you crying, dear thing? Do not cry!”
“It’s okay, Pa. Sit down. I’m sorry, I’ve just been trying not to think about it. I can’t think about it right now. She’s dead, Pa. Shirley’s dead.”
3
Emily Bean, of course, died in 1985. It is at least odd, then, that Our Heroine would willfully deceive her own senile father on the matter.
4
See also Jon Ymirson’s excellent treatise on
5
Ymirson’s professed animosity for the Master was one of the key factors in determining exactly which copy of Valison’s will was authentic in the aftermath of this novel’s events. Why would he have appointed a literary executor who hated him? See my Afterword for further information.
6
See
7
This supposed affectionate attitude toward the man did little to deter Our Heroine’s much publicized feud with Valison, in later years, over whether or not he had the moral right to novelize her mother’s memoirs. Art, of course, creates its own morality.