Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Voices were heard denying that he or she or they had squealed. Ears were cupped and eyes were shaded… It was very soon indeed that fingers were pointed. Dorothy, realizing that concealment was useless, shyly stepped forward.

Alfred Emmanuel Smith-Smatz—“Alfy” (for it was he) clapped both hands together. “ Dotty! ” he exclaimed. “Not only did you chase away Sandra, that yenta; early this morning I get a phone call from my thirty-year-old stepson Sammy, the schmuck: ‘Mommy is so terrified she swears she’ll never leave Desert Hot Springs again’—but you are still giving out the intelligent squeals, with expression! Bartlett Bosworth never got no expression in his squeals; that’s the way it is with them silent screen stars: squeak, yes; squeal, no. Are you a quick study, Dotty? Yeah? Good! So take a quick sixty seconds to study the next scene… You got it? Yeahh! Yeay! Lights! Camera! Dolly in on Dotty, this great little gorilla lady! ACTION! Let’m roll!”

The rest is Film History, even if much of it must be concealed from the fans and the gossip columns and the world at large. To be sure, Alfy Smatz (“King of the D-films”) was a bit put out at first when he learned that Dorothy couldn’t play gorilla roles week after week; but only during those weeks when the moon is full in central Sumatra.

But the month has, after all, more than one week. The first week Dorothy, in her own natural form (with artfully padded hips and bosom) plays the heroine in a science fiction film as the daughter of (despite feeble social protest) the mad scientist. The second week Dorothy is kidnapped from various wagon trains and restored to various wagon trains by, alternatively, Marco Thunderhorse and Amos Littlebird. The third week Dorothy is, first, threatened by love-starved Arabs, and second, saved from same by the noble efforts of either Marco or Amos in djellabas. — But the fourth week in the AESSP shooting schedule: Ahah!

In the fourth week of every month Dorothy stars in one STARRING JEANNIE OF THE JUNGLE, THE WORLD’S MOST LOVABLE LITTLE GORILLA film after another after another after another. These movies have wowed the fans in every drive-in in North America, and break records in every box office from Tampa to Tahiti; and, boy! How the money rolls in!

Dorothy has paid off her father’s debts and retired him on a personal pension, with modest privileges at the gaming tables in the poker palaces of Gardena.

Every now and then she and her blond, youngish-looking leading man of the moment get into her lemon-yellow Pighafetti-Zoom convertible to visit Luanne and Angela. They are green with envy. Again and again, separately and together, Luanne and Angela wonder. What is the secret of Dorothy’s success? It isn’t looks. It isn’t figure. What? What? What?

It’s showbiz, is what.

Dr. Songhabhongbhong Van Leeuwenhoek has never been heard from again.

Serves him right.

“The Slovo Stove” is probably the definitive statement on a process central to the American immigrant experience — the loss of ethnicity. I once wrote Avram to praise this story and mentioned that my wife, Marianne Porter, who is of Ruthenian extraction, had been able to learn almost nothing about her heritage. He wrote back:

As for the already dead and gone Czechoslovakian Republic of my youth. Local attitudes in Yonkers went like this: “What about the Czechs?” “The Czechs… The Czechs are all right. They have funny names but basically they are all right.” “And the Slovacks?” “Well…the Slovacks…they work hard…but on Saturday night they get drunk and beat up their wives and kids, the Slovacks…they don’t wear hats…they wear caps!” “And the Carpatho-Ruthenians?” Answer: “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” I never heard anybody mention them without laughing. To this day I don’t know what is or is supposed to be so damned funny about the Carpath-Russian-Ruthenians. NO idea.

Which was how Avram wrote casually —with erudition, street smarts, and enormous humor. If, by the way, you have a loved one who “doesn’t read science fiction,” but appreciates the fine literary craftsmanship of (say) Updike, Cheever, or Raymond Carver, here is a story you can urge upon him or her with confidence. Because Avram was — is — their peer. In craft, in heart, in experience, his best are the equal of theirs. He was, like them, a great American short story writer.

As to why this fact was never acknowledged in his lifetime, I simply cannot say. NO idea .

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN a little bit hard for Fred Silberman to have said a completely good word for his hometown; “a bunch of boors and bigots,” he once described it; and life had carried him many leagues away. However. In Parlour’s Ferry lived Silberman’s sole surviving aunt, Tanta Pesha; and of Tanta Pesha (actually a great-aunt by marriage) Silberman had only good memories. Thinking very well of himself for doing so, he paid her a visit; as reward — or punishment — he was recognized on the street and almost immediately offered a very good job. Rather ruefully, he accepted, and before he quite knew what was happening, found himself almost a member of the establishment in the town where he had once felt himself almost an outcast.

Okay, he had a new job in a new business; what was next? A new place to live, that was what next. He knew that if he said to his old aunt, “Tanta, I’m going to live at the Hotel”—Parlour’s Ferry had one, count them, one —she would say, “That’s nice.” Or , if he were to say, “Tanta, I’m going to live with you,” she would say, “That’s nice.” However. He rather thought that a roomy apartment with a view of the River was what he wanted. Fred developed a picture of it in his mind and, walking along a once long-familiar street, was scarcely surprised to see it there on the other side: the apartment house , that is. He hadn’t been imagining, he had been remembering, and there was the landlady, sweeping the steps, just as he had last seen her, fifteen years ago, in 1935. He crossed over. She looked up.

“Mrs. Keeley, do you have an apartment to rent? My name is Fred Silberman.”

“Oh,” she said. “ Oh . You must be old Jake Silberman’s grandson. I reckernize the face.”

“Great-nephew.”

“I reckernize the face.”

The rent was seventy-five dollars a month, the painters would come right in, and Mrs. Keeley was very glad to have Nice People living there. Which was very interesting, because the last time Silberman had entered the house (Peter Touey, who used to live upstairs, had said, “Come on over after school; I got a book with war pictures in it”) Mrs. Keeley had barred the way: “ You don’t live here,” said she. Well. Times had changed. Had times changed? Some thing had certainly changed.

The building where the new job would be lay behind where the old livery stable had been; Silberman had of course already seen it, but he thought he would go and see it again. The wonderful dignified old blue-gray thick flagstones still paved most of the sidewalks on these unfashionable streets, where modernity in the form of dirty cracked concrete had yet to intrude; admiring them, he heard someone call, “Freddy! Freddy?” and, turning in surprise, almost at once recognized an old schoolmate.

“Aren’t you Freddy Silberman? I’m Wesley Brakk. We still live here.” They rambled on a while, mentioned where each had been in the War, catalogued some common friends, then Wesley said, “Well, come on into the house, we’re holding my father’s gromzil, ” or so it sounded; “you don’t know what that means, do you? See, my father passed away it’s been three years and three months, so for three days we have like open house, it’s a Slovo and Huzzuk custom, and everybody has to come in and eat and drink.” So they went in.