Raising Demons (7 page)

“It's probably a horse for Laurie,” Jannie said, inspired.

“I'll get it,” my husband said, abandoning Laurie in mid-sentence.

“I'll just change into my bathing suit right now,” Jannie said, taking advantage of my preoccupation with the ringing of the phone to leave two slices of bread and mayonnaise behind the toaster. “See you later, kid,” Laurie said, patting me on the head.

“Well, well, well,” my husband was saying over the phone. “Isn't this a
surprise.
” He turned and grinned evilly at me. “But you've
got
to come on over,” he said, “we'd never forgive you if you didn't stop in. And plan to stay on for dinner,” he said, looking away from my dropped jaw. “Pot luck, of course.”

 • • • 

Two days before we were to leave, we got a letter from the real estate agent at home, saying that all four apartments in our new house were empty, the downstairs back having loaded their clothes and their television set in a pickup truck in the middle of the night and made off without further reference to the back rent. The agent said that a checkup on the downstairs back apartment indicated that they had been systematically removing furniture and household goods for some time; perhaps ever since they were first informed of the sale of the house. Nothing was left in the downstairs back apartment, not even the lightbulbs or the curtain rods, and the agent was of the opinion that they would have taken the glass out of the windows if it had not been broken already. My husband thought that we should keep the downstairs back apartment intact, repair the windows, and rent it out again. I thought that if we rented the apartment again, we should make out a lease since, although we had not had a lease with Mr. Fielding for nine years, I was still rankling over the arrogant terms in our old lease for our apartment in New York, and I thought that we could give the people who compose leases a lesson in generosity and broad-mindedness. It turned out, however, that the only truly unjust clause which rankled with me was the one prohibiting tenants from keeping mockingbirds, and it seemed pointless to plan to rent our downstairs back apartment with a lease urging the tenants to keep mockingbirds, so we thought we would not rent the apartment.

We wrote to Mr. Cobb and asked him to give us back our furniture on August twentieth. We thought that it would take us about three hours to drive home, so we told Mr. Cobb to expect us around noon. Because there was no place we could reasonably hope would take in six of us, with dog and cats, overnight, we planned to spend our first night at home in our new house. “We will be camping out,” I told the children. “We will all pitch in and help together,” my husband said, “and not expect Mother to cook a real dinner or anything that first night.”

It had been impractical, in terms of simple cubic feet, to let Mr. Cobb store our books, after all, and we had at last agreed with a friend of a friend that if he let us leave our books in his empty warehouse we would arrange to have them moved whenever he needed the space for something else. Early in August he had written asking if we could move the books, and we said he could put them in our new house, the downstairs front of which was then empty, and we would of course pay for the trucking and unloading. I do not think that either my husband or I remembered this clearly; we knew, of course, that there were two hundred cartons of books, but we still thought of the books as lined neatly on bookshelves, even though we had packed them ourselves. Because of the mounting expenses connected with our moving, we decided that we would not plan to have the house painted or the wallpaper removed for a while yet, my husband pointing out that the way things were piling up we would be lucky if the children could get a shoe each to wear to school.

I had already discovered that during the short space of the summer we had accumulated so much more property that it was not going to fit in the car going home, so I had borrowed cartons from the grocer in our summer town and packed them with whatever I could fit in, and mailed them off home, where the postman, thinking that we would have enough to worry about in our moving without coming down to the post office to pick up packages, had taken them up one evening on his way home and dropped them off on the front porch of our new house. As a result we were able to fit into the car very nicely going home, with the dog, the cats, the children, the typewriters, the coin collection, the baby carriage, and the picnic hamper, although our departure, full of sad goodbyes, was a little marred by the discovery that I had put the car keys in an old pocketbook which was in a carton now on the front porch of our new house, and we had to unpack the glove compartment of the car to get the spare car keys and in order to unpack the glove compartment we had to clear the front seat of the car because we were crammed in so tight.

When we got home it was later than we had expected, around two o'clock, and our new house was waiting for us, eager, expectant, and empty, with the cartons on the front porch. The front door was unlocked and so, we discovered, were all the other doors. There was a great tangle of door keys in the kitchen sink of the downstairs front, but none of them fit any of the doors in the house. Inside, divided among the several rooms of the downstairs front, were our two hundred cartons of books, spread judiciously so that their combined weight would not go through the floor. The phone in the downstairs front had been disconnected, and Laurie went around and in the downstairs back and reported, shouting through the kitchen wall, that that phone had been disconnected, too. Then he went out and up to the upstairs back, where
that
phone had been disconnected, and around and up to the upstairs front, and of course that phone had been disconnected, too. Barry was still in the car, in his car bed, and so were the coin collection, the typewriters, the picnic hamper, and the box with Ninki and her five kittens. I got into the car and drove down to the railroad station where there was a pay phone. I looked up the number of the E. J. Cobb Storage and Transfer Company, and when I got Mr. Cobb on the phone I said well, here we were, and was our furniture on the way over?

Mr. Cobb was quiet for a minute, and then he gave a little silly laugh. “Look,” he said, “I certainly do hope that you're not going to be sore at me or anything.”

“Why on earth should I be sore at you or anything?” I asked. “I only called to find out about the furniture.”

Mr. Cobb laughed the silly little laugh again. “I know how you ladies all like to have things arranged just so,” he said. “My wife—”

“
My
furniture.”

“Well,” said Mr. Cobb. “See, the men got the small truck all loaded for you. All ready. That truck could roll right now.”

There was a long silence. Finally Mr. Cobb started all over again. “I know how you ladies like to have everything just so,” he said. “I just hope you're not going to be sore at me.”

“I think after all I
am
going to be sore at you,” I said.

“Mostly,” Mr. Cobb said in an aggrieved tone, “mostly, people are always rushing you and telling you to be sure and certainly get their furniture right there and ready to roll at exactly a certain time. And then mostly those same people don't even bother to be there or anything.
Mostly
, you can figure if you deliver the furniture on the day they say, why, there won't even be anyone there to sign for it. That's just the way it goes,” he finished brightly.

“I suppose it is,” I said. “Now, about our furniture. Right now we don't even have a place to sit down, so if you could—”

“I could send over a bench or something,” Mr. Cobb said.

The operator cut in, to say that my three minutes were up, and I could hear Mr. Cobb's phone hang up emphatically. I had to go to the ticket agent to get change, and when I came back I had to look up the number of the E. J. Cobb Storage and Transfer Company again, and this time the phone was answered by a female voice. I told her who I was and asked for Mr. Cobb.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Mr. Cobb is out of town.”

“He was there just a minute ago.”

She turned away from the phone and spoke to someone. “—had to hurry—” a voice said indistinctly in the background. “I'm sorry,” she said into the phone again. “Mr. Cobb has just left for Philadelphia. He was in a great rush to catch his train. What?” she said off the phone. “Oh. He probably won't be back before Thursday,” she said to me.

“I see,” I said. “Well, I don't really want Mr. Cobb in any case. I want my furniture.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “If it's furniture you want, you will have to speak to the foreman.”

“Then let me speak to the foreman,” I said.

“Just a minute,” she said, “I'll see if he's in. Freddie,” she called, off the phone, “you know that load of goods was supposed to be put on yesterday and Ed forgot? You got enough on to go? Well,
you
come and talk to her, then.”

There was another silence, and then a man's voice on the phone. “Yeah?” he said.

“What about my furniture? It was supposed to be delivered at noon today.”

“You the lady with the goods supposed to go out today?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“Well, that goods is not loaded yet.” He thought. “We ain't got it on the trucks,” he explained.

“Why not?” It was getting warm in the telephone booth, and I opened the door.

“Because we didn't load it on yet. Ed says to tell you he's sorry and he hopes you ain't sore.”

“Your three minutes are up,” said the operator, and the foreman said “boyoboy,” and hung up.

I had one more nickel and before I looked up the number of the E. J. Cobb Storage and Transfer Company I took a deep breath and planned roughly what I was going to say so I would not have to waste any of my three minutes. When I rang the number again Mr. Cobb answered. “Hello?” he said. “Cobb Storage.”

“All right, now,” I began, and Mr. Cobb gasped.

“This is the Cobb Storage Company,” he said in a different, high voice. “Did you want something?”

“Yes,” I said. “And if you are Mr. Cobb you had better get onto that train you are in such a hurry to catch, and I am warning you right now that Philadelphia is not half far enough and Thursday is not half long enough because in approximately four minutes I am going to arrive at the E. J. Cobb Storage and Transfer Company with a crowbar and when I get there I am going to come into the E. J. Cobb Storage and Transfer Company warehouse with my crowbar and when I come in I am going to start swinging that crowbar right and left smashing whatever is closest, and if whatever is closest turns out to be Freddie that is going to be all right although I would rather it were Mr. Cobb or his secretary. And,” I went on, raising my voice, “now I think of it I am going to bring Mr. Tillotson the policeman and my lawyer with me and I am going to have you arrested for stealing even if you are not Mr. Cobb at all. And after I have you arrested for stealing I am going to call our insurance company over at the bank and tell them that every stick of furniture we own has been stolen with malice aforethought by Mr. Cobb of the E. J. Cobb Storage and Transfer Company and we want to collect all our insurance on it so we can buy more to replace what Mr. Cobb has stolen, and left us without even anything to sit on. And then I am going to send you the bill for hotel accommodations for our family of six from now until we get furniture for our house, and our dog will have to board at the kennel and so will our six cats, and then I think I am going to bring suit against Mr. Cobb for extreme mental anguish brought about by his stealing all our furniture so we came home to an empty house with nothing to sit down on.” I stopped for breath.

“I am extremely sorry that you are taking this attitude,” Mr. Cobb said.

That is a phrase which has always annoyed me. I raised my voice a little higher, and the ticket agent, who had been craning his neck around the corner of the ticket booth, ducked back down inside.

“Now look,” I said, “I am not going to be insulted by some trifling little insignificant worm of a storage and transfer man who scratches and mars and steals people's furniture and I should think that you could regard yourself as pretty lucky because I have not really lost my temper yet, but I am going to if you keep talking about attitudes because what attitude can people take when they have no place to sit down? And if you think for one minute that you can retire to Philadelphia with the profits from stealing our furniture you are very much mistaken, because the next person you will deal with will be my husband and
he
is not a poor defenseless woman.”

“If you would try to be calm,” Mr. Cobb said.

“And I am not going to be insulted on top of everything else and if you think you can talk that way to a lady you had better think again because I am right now going out to tell everyone I know in town that the E. J. Cobb Storage and Transfer Company not only steals furniture entrusted to them for storage and breaks and smashes everything but they also yell curses and obscenity at people just trying to get their furniture back and by the time I finish with you you will regard yourself as extremely fortunate if they let you out of jail long enough to fire Freddie, because I personally am going to—”

“Your three minutes are up,” said the operator.

I still had a good deal I wanted to tell Mr. Cobb, but when I went to get more nickels the ticket agent peered out at me from the back of the ticket booth, and shook his head no. I got back into the car and drove to our new house, where I found that my husband and the children were sitting on cartons of books and eating potato chips. My husband said that they were trying to decide what to name Jannie's new room and Laurie's new room, since Jannie and Laurie were going to share the upstairs back apartment, and each of them would thus have a small bedroom and a larger room for other activities and there was quite a problem in thinking of names for these larger rooms. Laurie thought he would like to call his room Laurie's Laboratory, because since it had formerly been a kitchen he could keep the sink in and do chemistry there and maybe set up a darkroom to develop pictures and we could get him a microscope. Jannie wanted to call hers a Study so she could study there, but my husband said that
he
had a study, and two studies would be confusing, and he suggested that she put her books in there and call it Jannie's Library. I said she could call it her salon, and Laurie said a salon was not a nice name for a room where a little girl kept her books, but she could call it Jannie's Joint. Sally said why not put her bed in there, bed, and then she could call it her bedroom? Or, Laurie thought, she could call it her Giggle Room, because that was all she ever did, anyway.