Эд Макбейн - Barking at Butterflies and other stories

You’ll remember that you published my letter in May of last year, and that you headlined it (somewhat cutely, I felt) SMALL WONDER, and signed it Name and address withheld. Your “Letters” column (as I’m sure you know) warns that “Letters for publication should carry name and address — in capitals, please — though these will be withheld by the Editor on request.” I requested that you withhold my name and address only because it seemed de rigueur. For example, most of the gourmands who wrote in to describe the flavorsome uses to which they had put yogurt asked that their names and addresses be withheld, though God only knows why. To be perfectly honest, I once believed your editors were inventing all those unsigned letters. This was before you published my letter in May, of course, which I knew was genuine since I myself had written it. I assumed, too, that the July issue’s firestorm was equally genuine, and I thought I had seen the last of the correspondence in that issue — but instead, another letter appeared in your August issue. I reproduce that letter now, verbatim, including the precious headline which I’m sure was created by the same editor who headlined my letter.

TINY TURN ON

As a twenty-two year old redheaded (and red-blooded) female midget, I must say I was really turned on by that bald, mustached macho male who wrote to say he preferred abbreviated beauties to overblown broads. If ever you decide to pick up on his suggestion and run a midget in your centerfold, I hereby volunteer my face and form. My proportions, if you’re seriously interested, are a spectacular 24, 20, 25, and since your centerfold measures almost twenty-four inches opened wide, and since I measure only thirty-eight inches similarly, a nude centerfold photograph of me would be something very close to life-size. Think about it, and if you decide to go ahead with it, why not send the guy with the walrus mustache to take the picture? I’d be happy to oblige him in every way possible. L. E., Oaken Bow, North Carolina.

My first response to L.E.’s letter was, I am not ashamed to admit, anatomical. The very thought of photographing all three-feet two-inches of her in the nude was enough to trigger the wildest memories of what had happened with my first (and last) redheaded midget almost five decades before. Was it possible that your magazine would actually consider running a centerfold of a nude midget? Was it equally possible (vain desire!) that you would assign me to the pleasurable task of photographing L.E. in Oaken Bow, North Carolina?

And then I began to doubt.

Was the letter bona fide, or had it been concocted to spur another avalanche of angry responses from your readers? Immediately, I resurrected my earlier theory that all unsigned or otherwise anonymous letters were written by your staff editors, and concluded that the letter from L.E. had been written by one Louis Edwards, whose name appeared on your masthead — and who apparently had been sloppy enough to have used his own initials when signing his imaginary epistle. I even doubted the existence of Oaken Bow, North Carolina, until I looked it up in the Atlas that night after dinner — and then my entire perspective changed.

Oaken Bow did exist. It was a town in McDowell County, and it had a population of 787, and it could be found on the North Carolina map on page 109 at location D4, which I discovered was in the Blue Ridge Mountains, some twenty miles southeast of Asheville. I cannot begin to describe the enormous pleasure I derived from the simple act of locating Oaken Bow on the North Carolina map. If Oaken Bow existed, then it was entirely possible that L.E. also existed, that L.E. was in fact one of the 787 people living there, a twenty-two-year old redheaded ( and red-blooded) midget who had invited me in print (was that legally binding?) to come take her picture in the nude for the centerfold of your magazine! I slammed the Atlas shut and turned to find my wife staring at me. I mumbled something about never having known Tasmania was so close to New Zealand, and then I spent the rest of the night longing for morning to come.

At the crack of dawn, I rose, showered, shaved, dressed, and was out of the apartment by seven-thirty. Instead of going directly to my office on East 40th Street, I went instead to Grand Central Station, where I searched through the out-of-town telephone directories until I found one for McDowell County, with combined listings for Garden City, Glenwood, Providence, Oaken Bow, Marion, Old Fort, and Sevier. My heart was pounding furiously as I scanned the “E” listings, and then my forefinger and my heart stopped almost simultaneously — I had found a listing for a woman named Lillian Eaton! It was the only L.E. listing in Oaken Bow, and I was certain even before I dialed the number that I had found my fiery-haired minikin.

The woman who answered the phone sounded senile.

I asked if I might talk to Lillian Eaton, and she said she was Lillian Eaton.

I asked if there were a younger Lillian Eaton there, her daughter perhaps, or her granddaughter, and she said she was a ninety-four year old spinster, and the only Lillian Eaton in that house, or for that matter in all of McDowell County.

She was also a little hard of hearing. When I asked her if she was by any chance a midget, she said there was nobody named Bridget in that house. I decided she was not the lady who had written the letter to your magazine. (It was interesting to learn, by the way, just how many men are sexually attracted to novagenarians, as reported in your article on Geriatric Sex in the February issue.)

Limp and dejected, I walked the two blocks to my office, knowing full well I would be unable to rest until I had taken a train or a plane to Oaken Bow and searched that town from house to house for my enigmatic, monogrammatic love. (Yes — love! I had already begun to think of her as such, even though I had never laid eyes on the creature.) I agonized for the better part of August. I am a bookkeeper with a large accounting firm, and am rarely if ever required to go out of town on business. But so driven was I by the thought of locating the L.E. who had promised to “oblige me in every possible way,” so determined was I to experience after almost five decades an encore of that first blissful interlude, so obsessed was I that I created an opportunity to absent myself from New York. I told my wife a furniture company we represented had burned to the ground in Old Fort, North Carolina, and that I would have to go there in an attempt to reconstruct their destroyed books. The lie was based on an actual furniture company fire in Schenectady four years earlier, at which time one of our accountants had gone upstate to do exactly what I was pretending to be doing now. On the fifth of September, then, a Friday night — I flew from the airport in Newark, New Jersey, to the Asheville-Hendersonville airport in North Carolina, and then I rented a car and drove to Oaken Bow. On Saturday morning, September the sixth, I began looking for L.E. in earnest.

I could not find her.

I searched through Oaken Bow all day Saturday and part of Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, I canvassed the nearby communities, but none of the people to whom I spoke had the faintest knowledge of a redheaded midget with the initials L.E. On Sunday evening, I went back to the only hotel in town and learned to my dismay that McDowell County was dry, and that the package stores in the nearby wet county were closed on Sunday. Deprived of even the solace of alcohol (I am not normally a drinking man, but my inability to locate L.E. was both frustrating and distressing), I sat in the lobby of the hotel and eventually struck up a conversation with a one-armed former blackjack dealer who mentioned in passing that he had read in a man’s magazine (I don’t believe it was yours) an article stating that certain types of women found one-armed men sexually attractive.