The Mysterious Disappearence of Leon (2 page)

“The soup was
my
idea,” Mrs. Fish insisted.

“And those were
my
tomatoes,” shouted Mr. Fish. “Besides, fair is fair.”

Mr. Carillon folded his arms and stared defiantly at his neighbors. “This is my house, and besides, I’ve already named the soup. Carillon’s Pomato Soup.”

“What?” screamed Mr. Fish, jumping up and knocking over his chair.

“You heard me. Carillon’s Pomato Soup.”

“Fish’s Pomato Soup!”

“Carillon’s Pomato Soup!”

“Fish’s Pomato Soup!” Mr. Fish pounded his fist on the table. The dishes clanked; the candle fell; a soup spoon flew through the air, smack into Mr. Carillon’s eye.

Leon and Little Dumpling peered through the window. Their mittens were soaked and their toes were numb with cold, but they thought it best to stay where they were.

“My father’s going to beat up your father,” Leon said, trying to start a fight of his own to keep warm; but Little Dumpling Fish plopped down on a snow pile and cried.
⁴
Leon had to stand on his head to cheer her up.

“It all boils down to two problems,” Mrs. Fish explained after she had convinced the men to sit down and talk it over, “the sharing of the profits, and the naming of the soup.”

They argued and argued until the Fishes convinced the Carillons that fifty-fifty was fair and proper.

Naming the soup was another matter. The Fishes agreed that neither “Fish and Carillon’s Pomato Soup” nor “Carillon and Fish’s Pomato Soup” sounded very appetizing; but they refused to call the soup “Carillon’s.” The Carillons refused to call it anything else.

Night was falling and they were no nearer a solution than when they began. Suddenly Mrs. Fish noticed the darkened window. “The children!” she cried, hastening to the door.

“That’s it!” Mr. Carillon shouted. “The children!” He waited until he had everyone’s attention. “We’d have no problem with the name of the soup if both children had the name of Carillon.”

Mrs. Fish was horrified. “You want to adopt Little Dumpling? Never!”

“No, no,” Mr. Carillon said, “what I mean is that your daughter must marry my son.”

The Fishes thought if over.

“What if they grow up and don’t want to marry each other?” said Mr. Fish. “What if Little Dumpling grows up and marries Augie Kunkel down the road? You’ve still got your name on our soup.”

The Carillons thought it over.

There was only one solution: Leon and Little Dumpling must be married right away. No tomato could be chopped or one potato peeled until the wedding had taken place.

“After all,” Mr. Fish said, “business is business.”

Two Mrs. Carillons

Two weeks later, when their runny noses had slowed to trickles, five-year-old Little Dumpling Fish and seven-year-old Leon Carillon stood before the preacher in the Fishes’ cold living room. Everyone was shivering in his thin Sunday-best except the bride, who wore boots under the long purple-flowered dress made out of the Carillons’ tablecloth.

“Do you, Caroline Fish, take this man for your lawful-wedded husband... ?”

Little Dumpling giggled.

“Do you, Leon Carillon, take this woman for your lawful-wedded wife. . . ?”

Leon sneezed.

Either the preacher accepted a giggle and a sneeze as answers, or he couldn’t hear through his earmuffs. He pronounced the children “man and wife.”

Whereupon Mr. Fish made a speech.

“Fun is fun, but now it’s time to get down to business. From this moment on, so there’s no mistaking the fact that the Fishes own half of Carillon’s Pomato Soup, my daughter shall be called by one and all, and that includes everybody, including Leon: Caroline Caroline. . . ! I mean Carillon Carillon. . . ! I mean. . . .”

Mr. Fish curled his lips and twisted his tongue, but Caroline Carillon just wouldn’t come out.

Mrs. Fish suggested Little Dumpling Carillon, but Little Dumpling hated her nickname and Mr. Fish said it wasn’t dignified enough for a soup heiress.

“From this moment on,” Mr. Fish announced, “everybody, including Leon, calls my daughter Mrs. Carillon!”

“But I’m Mrs. Carillon,” protested Leon’s mother.

Mr. Fish shouted, “A bargain is a bargain,” and there was even talk of a divorce; but the argument was finally settled. Leon’s mother would be called “Mrs. Carillon,” Little Dumpling would be called “Mrs. Carillon,” and the soup would be called “
Mrs
. Carillon’s Pomato Soup.”

Business Booms. Boom!
⁵

Mrs. Carillon’s Pomato Soup was an instant success. Poverty had spread throughout the land, and poor people found they could feed a family on a ten-cent can of the rich soup. Mr. Fish and Mr. Carillon brought in more orders than their wives could fill. Cooks and canners were hired, and a factory was built spanning both farms. In no time at all the Fishes and the Carillons became one millionaire each.

The two families decided to keep the children apart until Leon was twenty-one. Leon was sent away to the Seymour Hall Boarding School for Boys, where he lived summer and winter. He never returned for holidays or vacations, not even for the funeral.

No respectable girls’ school would accept a married woman, so little Mrs. Carillon had to be educated at home. Mrs. Fish hired the first governess to apply for the job, mean Miss Anna Oglethorpe.

What Miss Anna Oglethorpe lacked in imagination and kindness, she made up for in bones: big, knobby shoulder bones, elbow bones, knee bones; long, thin hand bones and even longer foot bones; and a large, sharp, twice-hooked nose bone. One or more of these bones always seemed to be aimed at Mrs. Carillon—jutting, poking, slapping, kicking—especially when she was caught daydreaming. Miss Anna Oglethorpe hated dreamers (she never had a dream in her entire life), and Mrs. Carillon had little to do but dream.

She seldom saw her parents anymore. They were too busy running the business during the day and counting their money at night. She never saw Leon. Sometimes Mr. Kunkel, the factory foreman, brought his motherless son Augie to the Fishes’ big, new house during school holidays. Augie Kunkel was her one playmate and her only friend; then he, too, was sent away.

Mrs. Carillon would never forget the day Augie was sent to live with his aunt. It was the day that she became an orphan and the only Mrs. Carillon. It was her twelfth birthday.

Miss Anna Oglethorpe had caught her nose between the swinging pantry doors and was upstairs in bed, her face buried under ice packs.

“Happy Birthday to me,” twelve-year-old Mrs. Carillon muttered, chin in hand, alone at the breakfast table. Her parents had forgotten her birthday. They had dashed out of the house hours ago to attend a directors’ meeting at the factory.

The meeting was well under way when Mrs. Fish accused Mr. Carillon of out-and-out theft, or was it the other way around? No matter, for just as Mr. Fish pounded the table and shouted “Fair is fair,” the boiler on the floor below blew up.

The explosion was heard five miles away. By the time the fire was put out, one wing of the factory had been gutted. The rubble was cleared and sifted; but no identifiable remains of the Fishes, the Carillons, Mr. Kunkel, or the sales manager were ever found.

People began to wonder about the missing bodies. People began to say the soup tasted a bit peculiar after that.

Luckily a Mr. Banks, trustee of the estate, was able to save the business from total ruin. He eased the minds of the suspicious soupeaters with a clever jingle he wrote to the tune of “On Wisconsin.” It was sung by a hundred-man chorus over every radio station in the country, twenty-five times a day for a year.

In Pomato, in Pomato,
You will find no meat;
Mrs. Carillon’s Pomato,
Soup that can’t be beat.
U-rah-rah!
Our Pomato, our Pomato,
Just ten cents a can,
Is the soup, the soup, soup, soup
That’s ve-ge-tar-i-an.

2
_*
Leon’s Fourteen Messages—and Two More

Black and Blue and Purple

It wasn’t the explosion that frightened Mrs. Carillon; it was Miss Anna Oglethorpe screaming, “Armageddon!”
⁶
Both thought of hiding in the window seat, but the twelve-year-old got there first. The frantic governess clomped down the stairs at top speed, lifted the seat, and too flustered to see it was already occupied, began to climb in. All Mrs. Carillon could do to protect herself was sink her teeth into a big, knobby ankle bone.

Miss Anna Oglethorpe let out a piercing shriek. She hopped about in dizzying circles, then dashed through the hallway and dived into the narrow laundry chute.

Every bone in her body hit one part or another of the tin lining during her headlong fall. Thunderous reverberations boomed up and down the shaft, and in and out of her skull. She landed on a pile of dirty linens and lay, sore and trembling, entangled in soiled socks and sheets for two days, her brains addled, temporarily deafened. A wet bath towel, thrown from the second floor, finally brought her to her senses.

Miss Anna Oglethorpe’s bruises disappeared within a week; but Mrs. Carillon, world’s champion daydreamer, remained black and blue for the next seven years.