Four and Twenty Beds

by Nancy Casteel Vogel

I had converted into draperies a matching green spread which had been burned by a smoker-in-bed, and these I hung over the closet doorway and in front of a big cabinet of shelves Grant had made. After I had cut away the burned parts and made the draperies, there were still several fairly good-sized pieces of the material left, and of these I made scarves for the two small chests in the room. (From remaining scraps I made little curtains for the window of the door between the office and the living room--curtains that would be easy for me to move slightly in order to peek into the office to see what might be going on there.)

The total effect was very pleasing. The room looked a lot different than the ugly garage into which we had put the children's beds the day we arrived.

I had been in the habit of hurriedly shutting the bedroom door whenever anyone came to visit or to telephone, so that they couldn't see into the upset, unfinished room. Now, however, I always made it a point to see that the door was boastfully, confidently ajar.

I gestured vaguely toward the telephone one evening when Grant ushered in a man who wanted to make a long distance phone call. I pulled the bedroom door open with an unostentatious gesture, and sat down, apparently to read a book, but actually to study the man and listen to what he would say. If you were to stand on the corner of a busy street and watch the hordes of people hurrying past, you'd mark them off as just ordinary, unoriginal, all-alike people, none of them possessing noticeable peculiarities or even individuality; but if those hordes were to separate and come singly into your living room, to sit for five or ten minutes using your telephone, the realization would slap you in the face that people are different from one another, that they do possess amazing or amusing idiosyncrasies, and that whatever scientist it was who stated that every human being has a counterpart somewhere, must have had his fingers--or his wires--crossed.

There couldn't have been, anywhere on the face of the earth, a counterpart of the man whom Grant had just brought in. He looked like an expectant elephant, nearing the end of a two year pregnancy. His long nose, which drooped a little at the end, was a dull violet color; and the skin of the surrounding rather insignificant face was a brilliant shade of peach--occasioned, I guessed, by either dipsomania or habitual bad temper. His ears were deformed; they were simple holes in his head, with a small external bulge of flesh to indicate the location of each. His small eyes were obscured by horn-rimmed spectacles. The glasses were apparently held up by some natural law (seemingly in conflict with the law of gravity) which my high school science teacher had neglected to explain. Certainly those impotent little bulges of flesh that masqueraded as ears couldn't have had anything to do with supporting the glasses.

The man, putting in a long distance call, was trying to make the operator understand his unusual name. The back of his fat neck was getting redder and redder. It wasn't surprising, though, I thought, that she found it hard to understand his name.

"No, not Dugan!" he spat at her. "Dubaf! DUBAF!" He moved his bulk heavily on the chair, and I half expected it to fold under him. His free hand, drumming irritably on the desk top, was shaking with rage, the veins knotting up as he shouted "Dubaf! Dubaf!" into the mouthpiece. "I didn't say Dusle!" he screamed. "Dubaf! D-U-B-A-F. No, I said D-U-B-A-F!" He mopped his forehead. He clenched the telephone tighter, his eyes distended.

"D as in dammit!" he roared. "U as in you silly slut--"

I retreated hurriedly, throwing down my book and rushing into the kitchen to see whether I had remembered to wash yesterday's breakfast dishes.