Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (88 page)

TEN
FILMS ABOUT CRIME AND CHRISTMAS

Christmas Holiday
(1944) in which sociopath
Gene Kelly terrorizes his wife Deanna Durbin with the help of his mother Gale
Sondergaard. No dancing, just guns and psychopathology.

The Lemon Drop Kid
(1951) in which con
artist Bob Hope sets up a phoney old folks home for Jane Darwell and her
friends in order to swindle some mobsters out of $10,000 in old racing debts.

Lady in the Lake
(1946) in which Robert
Montgomery (Philip Marlowe) is seen only in reflections as he solves a case of
disappearance and murder in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's classic,
reset at Christmastime.

The Thin Man
(1933) in which William
Powell (Nick Charles) shoots the ornaments off his Christmas tree while he and
Myrna Loy (Nora) contemplate the fate of a missing inventor.

Larceny Inc.
(1942) from S.J.
Perelman's play "The Night Before Christmas" in which Edward G.
Robinson's attempts to go straight are thwarted by Anthony Quinn.

I'll Be Seeing You
(1944) in which
furloughed convict Ginger Rogers becomes romantically involved with emotionally
disturbed GI Joseph Cotten at Christmastime.

Remember the Night
(1940)
in
which shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck gets invited home for Christmas by
assistant-D.A. Fred MacMurray.

Three Godfathers
(1947) in which John
Wayne as one of three outlaws on the run at Christmastime acquires a baby on
the way to New Jerusalem, Arizona.

The Mystery of Edwin
Drood
(1935)
in which Claude Rains is suspected of a Christmas Eve murder in an adaptation
and completion of Charles Dicken's unfinished novel.

Black Christmas
(1974) in which Margot
Kidder and Olivia Hussey are stalked by an unseen killer in a sorority house as
detective John Saxon tries to discover why.

If we are to have more stories of
the calibre of those that appeared previously in this collection, we must look
to the slush piles of our magazines to provide them. Slush piles are those
towering stacks of unsolicited manuscripts that come through the mail in search
of publication. Cursed by writers, disparaged by editors, they are nevertheless
a necessary, even vital, evil in this time of dwindling short story markets.

As few writers are born with agents
in attendance, or publishers standing by, waiting to record each precious word,
most are forced to find their readership through painful trial and error. They
will read junk and feel they can do better. They will want to attract the
attention of a successful agent, but will be unable because they are unknown.
They will hope, then, that some astute editor will discover them in a slush
pile. But how? And when?

“Mother’s Milk” is a story from a
slush pile. It was once headed for the pages of
Mystery Magazine
but has been rerouted
here. That it finds publication is no doubt a matter of some luck. Or is there
more to the story than that?

Is Mines to become another Hoch or
Keating? Or will he join the legion of “also-published” authors who have their
day and are gone? Only time and the reader can tell.

It had snowed
in the
night, and more was predicted by evening. The cold that had accompanied it
penetrated closed windows and doors, trying to get at the sickly heat inside.

I had
come upstairs about ten to collect her breakfast tray and listen to the usual
recitation of mid-morning maladies. After twenty years of a ritual like this,
the ear develops a selective deafness. It hears without listening.

It was
remarkable, then, that I caught it. Just a trivial little observation. A single
chord in a symphony of blabber like:

“And
another thing. That new nurse Mrs. Fletcher is not suitable. Not suitable at
all. My evening milk was cold again last night. And,” she continued, drawing
the bedding around her, “she spent the entire night in the sitting room around
the corner. What does she have in there? A sailor?”

“I
wouldn’t know, Mother,” I answered, watching her parched, puckered lips open
and close.

She
tossed her white head contemptuously and buried it in the morning paper.

“She’s
no better than the others. What’s wrong with people nowadays? Pride in working
doesn’t interest them any more.”

Mother
could give any banality the force of a Supreme Court judgment.

“I
suppose I will have to let her go after the holidays,” she concluded.

I was
shifting uncomfortably in my place at the end of the bed.

“Now,
here’s something. Vitamins that kill people. Some sort of plant food. Carried
off one unfortunate already.”

There
was a certain glee in her thin, screechy voice. Mother got a big kick out of
stories about other people ‘s misfortunes. The Jonestown disaster had her
walking on air for weeks.

She
looked back at me and shook her head dramatically. “It’s getting so a person
can’t take a glass of water without worrying about what’s in it.”

She
laid the paper aside for a quiet moment of cosmic contemplation, as she stared
meaningfully off into space. This familiar gesture of social concern had, by
now, reached such a level of unsurpassed fraudulency that it deserved to be
preserved in the Smithsonian.

“As if
I didn’t have enough to worry about, what with this terrible dizziness and
weakness I suffer from. And my arthritis—and bad circulation.” the thought made
her stir in the mound of pillows. “You know, it hasn’t been easy for me.”

I
wanted to tell her she could probably still take on an entire football team
single-handed, but I suppressed the thought.

“The
worst of all has been my allergies.”

I knew
we’d get around to them. We always did.

“There
are so many things I don’t tolerate. Why if it wasn’t for all my allergies, I’d
have been up and around years ago. I must be so very careful. I don’t react to
things like normal people.”

She
sighed with heartfelt self-pity.

“I
shall never forget that awful attack I had after Dr Snavely gave me the
penicillin injection.”

I was
sure she was going to recite the Great Event all over again, highlighting every
gasp and welt and bead of sweat, but luckily I was spared.

Her
recall of this fabled episode was confined to making her watery blue eyes
project more than their usual amount of bogus suffering.

The
tray was beginning to feel like lead. My arms ached to get out of there.

“I
guess there’s no use trying to hide it. I
am
feeling poorly
today. I’ve asked for Miss Livesey to send for Dr. Snavely.”

She
never let up. Not once in eighty years.

“She
told me,” I said, reassuringly. “He’ll be by about 3.”

“I don’t
know where I’d be if it weren’t for him. He is the only doctor in town decent
enough to make house calls.”

I
wanted to add that he was the only doctor in town with time to make house
calls. Bernard M. Snavely, M. D. was a rare medical specimen— a doctor who
outlives his practice. Five years ago he’d closed his office on Beecher Street
and returned to the comforts of the Chesterton Club where he passed his final
hours playing poker, smoking cigars and downing healthy shots of Corby’s
whiskey. Concerns of public health no longer troubled him.

It is
true, that between hands, he did administer to the needs of a few
contemporaries like Mother. But as these last patients passed on, he took
grateful solice in the uninterrupted company of Kings and Queens, panatellas,
and those comforting shots of Corby’s restorative.

I have
heard from those in a position to know that Dr. Snavely’s retirement had a
salutory effect on the health of the community. At the end, his trade had
become all tricks. Whatever he had once known of the substance of medicine was
long since forgotten.

But
Mother, of course, would have none other.

“I’m
very reluctant to complain,” I realized she was saying, “but the Cream of Wheat
had lumps in it. I’ve told Miss Livesey what havoc they wreak with my dentures.”

As she
closed her eyes to savor this havoc more fully, I whisked the paper off the bed
and stepped quickly out into the hall.

I
avoided looking in the hall mirror as I passed. The things I had seen there
recently had upset me. Scared me, if you want to know the truth.

Thin
wisps of colorless hair over long expanses of pale scalp, puffy creases of skin
beneath my eyes, spidery little blood vessels around my nose —I realized that
time was eating away at me.

I’d planned
so carefully for some good years—a studio apartment in New York, a box at the
Met, stimulating friends whose interests extended beyond the livestock report.
And I’d assumed that, by now, I’d be enjoying them.

When I
came home from college after father died, it was just to be for a few months,
until mother had a chance to get back on her feet. But somehow it went on and
on.

At
first, I didn’t notice that time was passing. Then suddenly it was almost all
gone. What had made it really painful was the realization that time was making
me look like
her.

I was
terrified. Panicked. I had to do something. All that money Dad had left would
be squandered on nurses and medical care. I was having nightmares about being
left here, poor, alone and dying in a town I’d always hated.

I was
desperate for a way out.

“How
is she?” Molly Livesey’s brogue purred as she took the tray I’d brought into
the kitchen.

“She
said there were lumps in the Cream of Wheat. They irritate her dentures.”

Molly’s
eyes flared for a moment. “That woman hasn’t got a grateful bone in her body.
If she were my mother, I’d have done something to irritate her dentures long
ago, and in no uncertain terms.”

She
threw her head back in defiance.

“She’s
just sick and afraid,” I said in a deliberately bland voice. “We have to try
and understand.”

She
let out a laugh that sounded like a snort and carried the tray over to the
sink.

I took
the paper and a fresh cup of coffee and retired to the dining room and the
inner satisfaction that acknowledged martyrdom brings.

The
article about the plant food vitamins was the sort of bilge newspapers pass off
as “human interest” and bury among the clothing ads on page eighteen.

The
problem had come to light following the sudden death of a child in Georgia.
Apparently the mother had discovered her sleeping through her favorite
television show and immediately suspected something was wrong. Paramedics were
dispatched, but, by the time the child reached the hospital, she was dead.

An
autopsy disclosed nothing. Then a playmate recalled seeing the child eating a
pellet from a planter in the hall. The pellet was checked and found to be
Mullen’s African Violet Vitamins, a commonly used product that has been on the
market for years. Investigators discovered the pellet contained succinyl-choline-alginate,
a substance similar to one used in anesthesia.