“But no clothes,” said Fauna.
“Right! We think somebody got to set a standard. If the loyal friends look like mugs, what’ll the mugs look like?”
Fauna nodded. “I see what you mean. How far you want to go—monkeysuits?”
“God no!” Mack said. “Just pants and coats made out of the same stuff and nobody gets in without he’s got a necktie on, and none of them bow ties that light up neither. This is a goddam solemn moment, Fauna.”
She scratched her scalp with her pencil.
Mack went on, “I ain’t as young as I was. I don’t know how many more parties I can take.”
“Don’t none of us get no younger,” said Fauna. She tapped her teeth with the pencil. As it happened, she also had a problem, and she intended to ask Mack’s advice. Now, suddenly, the two problems crashed together and a solution for both was born. Into Fauna’s eyes came the light of triumph as she murmured, “I got it!”
“Give it to me gentle,” said Mack. “I didn’t get much sleep today.”
Fauna got up and found the stick with which she directed astrological traffic or whacked a protruding piece of bad posture. She talked better with the wand in her hand. “This here calls for a drink,” she said, and she poured it.
Mack turned the stem of the bud vase in his fingers and sighted through his drink. The red glass made the brown whisky look green.
Fauna said, “There was a queen a long time ago and she was loaded. Didn’t think nothing of paying a couple hundred bucks for a house dress. Got so many bracelets she couldn’t bend her arms. You know what she done when she had a birthday or a hanging or something?”
“Overalls,” said Mack.
“No, but you’re close. Dressed like she’s a milkmaid. They’d wash up a cow and the queen’d sit on a gold stool and take a whang at milking. And there’s another old dame. Just the top cream of the top cream. Gives them parties can’t nobody get in. She wears a head rag. Done it for years. If you look over the crowd and don’t see a head rag—she ain’t there.”
Mack’s hand shook as he raised the bud vase to his lips. “Is it what I think?”
“Masquerade!” cried Fauna. “There’s only two kinds of people in the world gives a masquerade—people who got too much and people who ain’t got nothing.”
Mack smiled inwardly to himself. “Can I have a freshener?” he asked.
“Help yourself,” said Fauna. “Masquerade has got other things too. People get kind of bored with who they are. Makes them something else for a while.”
Mack spoke with reverence. “They used to say, if you got something you can’t figure out, give it to Mack. Fauna, it’s your dice. You’re a bull-bitch idear dame. God te-tum-tum His wonders to perform.”
“Like it?”
“Like it! Fauna, this here’s one Life[98] magazine would give its ass for an invite.”
“We got to have a theme.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, we can’t let people just run wild. You don’t know what kind of stuff they’d wear. I don’t want no tramp and gunnysack party.”
“I guess you’re right. You got any idears?”
“How about ‘At the court of the Fairy Queen’?”
“No,” said Mack. “First place, we got no right to hurt Joe Elegant’s feelings; second place, the cops—”
“Well, how about then ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’?”
“I seen the picture,”[99] said Mack. “I think you got something. Some of them dwarfs looked like mugs. I can’t see Hazel as no fairy, but he’d do fine as a great big overgrowed dwarf.”
“That’s what’s nice about it,” said Fauna. “Gives you some leeway.”
“Do you think this might call for a drink?”
“I sure as hell do! You spread the word, Mack, will you? You come either as a dwarf, a prince, or a princess, or you damn well don’t get in. Hold that vase steady.”
“But not Doc,” said Mack.
“You know,” said Fauna, “five’ll get you seven Doc wears a tie.”
27
O Frabjous Day![100]
The communications system on Cannery Row is mysterious to the point of magic and rapid to the speed of light. Fauna and Mack came to the decision that the party should be a masquerade on Friday evening at 9:11½. By 9:12 the magic had started, and by 9:30 everyone who was not asleep, drunk, or away, knew about it. One particularly mean woman who hadn’t had a man for a long time commented, “How will you know whether they’re in costume or not?”—a statement clearly drawn from her own state of misery. But mainly the news was received with wonder and joy. Mack’s tom-wallager had achieved the stature of a bull-bitch tom-wallager.
Consider what was in store for the ticket holders: a party at the Palace Flop house; a raffle that amounted to a potlatch; an engagement of exciting proportions unknown in the annals of the Row; and, on top of this, a costume party! Any one of these would have been enough. Together they threatened to be a celebration close to a catastrophe.
Fauna breathed a sigh of relief for it solved her greatest problem. She wanted to dress Suzy in a certain way, and Suzy, being the tough monkey she was, would have resisted. Now it was easy. There’s little difference between the wardrobe of Snow White and that of a lovely young bride.
There will be those who will consider that Fauna took too much upon herself in engineering a marriage without the knowledge or collusion of either party, and such skeptics will be perfectly right. But it was Fauna’s conviction, born out of long experience, that most people, one, did not know what they wanted; two, did not know how to go about getting it; and three, didn’t know when they had it.
Fauna was one of those rare people who not only have convictions but are quite willing to take responsibility for them. She knew that Doc and Suzy should be together. And since they were too confused, or thoughtless, or shy to bring about that happy state, Fauna was prepared to do it for them. Her critics will cry, “Suppose she is wrong! Maybe this association has no chance of success.” And Fauna’s answer to this, if she had heard it, would have been, “They ain’t doing so good now. It might work. What they got to lose? And when you look at it, what chance has anybody got? Doc put on a tie, didn’t he? And if I’m wrong it’s my fault. Sure, they’ll fight now and then. Who don’t? But maybe they’ll get something too. What’s the odds for anybody?”
And if it was suggested that people should have the right to choose for themselves after thinking it over, she would have replied, “Who thinks? I can think because I ain’t part of it.”
And if she had been accused of being a busybody she would have said, “Damn right! Done it all my life!” You couldn’t win an argument with Fauna because she would agree with you and then go right on as she had planned. She had taken up astrology because she found that people who won’t take advice from a wise and informed friend will blindly follow the orders of the planets—which, by all reports, are fairly remote and aloof. Doc would refuse astrology, so he had to be sandbagged. Fauna expected no thanks. She had given that up long ago. Doc could not interpret the black voice of his guts, but it sounded loud in Fauna’s ears. She knew his loneliness. When she was with him, that low voice drowned out all the others.
On Saturday morning she made every girl in the house bring out every article of clothing she possessed and lay it on the bed in her office.
Now Mabel was a natural-born, blowed-in-the-glass hustler. In any time, under any system, after a period of orientation, Mabel would have found herself doing exactly what she was doing in Cannery Row. This was not a matter of Fate, but rather a combination of aptitudes and inclinations. Born in a hovel or a castle, Mabel would have gravitated toward hustling.
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the picture:
100
O Frabjous Day!: From Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” which appears in chapter one of