[6/9/2011] Perelman Tonight: Finding a "country" identity -- Part 3 of "Acres and Pains" (continued)

For the money I have spent on blueprints alone, I could have razed the house, erected a replica of the Taj Mahal, and retired to Sun Valley. If I ever adopt a coat of arms, it will show a ravenous draftsman sighting through a transit, over a shield marked "Soft Pickings."

-- from Chapter Four of Acres and Pains

Acres and Pains
Part 3

FOUR

Every now and then on a breathless August evening, I like to draw up my easy chair before a glowing fire, puff on a calabash and stare thoughtfully into the flames. The heat is unendurable and the calabash makes me nauseated, but like a bachelor remembering his summer sweethearts, it helps me recall the architects who have almost remodeled my quaint old stone farmhouse. For the money I have spent on blueprints alone, I could have razed the house, erected a replica of the Taj Mahal, and retired to Sun Valley. If I ever adopt a coat of arms, it will show a ravenous draftsman sighting through a transit, over a shield marked "Soft Pickings."

The most recent architect I engaged was as typical as any. He came highly recommended by my attorney, Newmown Hay, of Ashen, Livid & Hay, a profound student of the dollar. From Hay's account, he had just converted a decrepit feed mill into a lordly mansion complete with ballroom and interior squash courts for a little more than $200. The cost would have been half, the architect explained, if Hay had not insisted on marble stairs. The man seemed to have a shrewd eye for values and I crisply outlined my needs -- five rooms, three baths, a sun porch, a rumpus room and a tennis court. He made a hasty calculation on the back of my collar and informed me it would cost $1500. I am not one to haggle over pennies and I signed a contract forthwith. He collected fifty clams as a token of good faith -- my good faith -- and arranged to inspect the premises shortly.

His arrival coincided unhappily with that of an actor named Cagney, who had dropped in to borrow a cup of film and was exclaiming over my freesias -- people come from as far as ten feet around to exclaim over my freesias. The architect kept staring suspiciously at him while I was posing my problem. "I've seen that man somewhere before," he said accusingly.

"Yes, yes," I murmured. "Now if we extend this wing to here -- " Suddenly I realized I had lost my audience; he had sneaked up the slope and was peering narrowly at Cagney from behind a syringa bush. "Listen," he whispered excitedly, clutching my arm. "I can't place this bird, but he's wanted by the police! I got a hunch I saw his picture in a post office -- I never forget a face." All at once his jaw dropped and he uttered a squeal. "It's Cagney!" he shrilled. "James Cagney!" Before I could intercede, he had pinned his quarry to the fence, and was re-enacting his favorite scenes in the latter's movies. I fought my way in between them, vainly attempting to restore the architect to his senses.

"I want the master bedroom facing north!" I shouted desperately. "Then we can put the kitchen in the cellar -- I mean, the cellar in the attic!" The architect tried to shake me off, but I clung, and we rocked about the lawn like three dancing bears. Finally I managed to loosen his grip, and he made a cursory, grumbling survey of the house.

"It's a mess," he said, "but maybe I can save it." When I suggested he look inside, he grew pale with fury. "Are you trying to teach me my own business?" he snapped. In leaving, he asked Cagney for a small loan, implying that I would probably chisel him out of his fee. I eventually persuaded him to accept a check for a hundred on account though it was plain he would have preferred cash.

The following Monday, at three o'clock in the morning, he phone me with a frantic appeal for another hundred; his wife was just undergoing a serious operation. In the background I could hear the characteristic tumult of a hospital amphitheater -- the strains of a jukebox, the tinkle of ice, and a male quartet singing "Hold That Tiger." The patient subsequently had two relapses, each of which cost me an additional sawbuck. By the time I got the preliminary sketches, Sir Christopher Wren had put the bite on me for four hundred dollars. The first contractor I consulted estimated the job at $21,942. The second was unable to read the plans. The third, who took the job, had a nervous breakdown a week later.

Six months afterward I met the architect on Fifth Avenue with a friend. He cut me dead, and as I passed him I heard him say, "See that little sneak? If I had the money he owes me, I'd be in clover."

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FIVE

The events of last Saturday afternoon may be summarized briefly as follows: At 2:30 I was dozing on the porch of my rustic retreat, in tune with the infinite and my fellow-man. Above my head, instead of the usual saw biting through a log labeled "Z-z-z," was an acetylene torch cutting a steel girder; there is no room on the up-to-date farm for antiquated methods. At 2:35, roused from my reverie by my wife's broom, I was toiling up a ninety-degree incline with two king-sized pails of garbage. At 2:37, with a report like a pistol crack, several vertebrae went off duty, and by three o'clock I was back on the porch, reeking of liniment and watching my wife toil up the incline with the pails. Painful as it was to turn my head, I gamely spurred her on, and were it not for my constant inspiration and advice, she might never have completed her mission.

Every time I step off that porch, something disastrous happens. The worst mistake the owner of a country place can make is choosing a role too ambitious for his talents. A recent neighbor of mine, for instance, found a lawn mower left by the previous tenant. He immediately began pushing it around in the hot sun, unaware that grass dies back anyhow after a sharp frost. Today that man is a hopeless wreck in a sanitarium, shattered in mind and body. When I first settled down on a heap of shale in the Delaware Valley, I too had a romantic picture of myself. For about a month I was a spare, sinewy frontiersman in fringed buckskin, with crinkly little lines about the eyes and a slow laconic drawl. One look told you that my ringing ax and long Kentucky rifle would tame the forest in jigtime. In fact, as I stepped off the train, I overheard a native remark admiringly, "His ringing ax and long Kentucky rifle should tame the forest in jigtime."

After I almost blew off a toe cleaning an air rifle, though, I decided I was more the honest rural type. I started wearing patched blue jeans, mopped my forehead with a red banana (I found out later it should have been a red bandanna), and crumbled bits of earth between my fingers to see whether it was friable enough. Friable enough for what I wasn't quite sure, but I kept at it until my wife screamed like a banshee if I so much as picked up a clod. I never entered our kitchen like a normal individual; I always stamped in roaring, "Well, Mother, got plenty of vittles for the menfolk? Thrashin' sure makes a man hongry!" The upshot was that the hired girl started leaving a couple of sandwiches behind the barn. I even went so far as to buy a good secondhand tractor. It was dirt cheap, as the engine had disappeared; nevertheless, I got some really effective snapshots of myself against the horizon. At sundown, when the day's loafing was done, I generally repaired to the village store with a quid of cut plug in my cheek, and spent the evening sullenly spitting on my bluchers and cursing the Administration. Sometimes I did a little whittling, but just because a few measly shavings fell into the cracker barrel, the postmaster made a neurotic, half-hysterical scene and I took my custom elswhere.

It was nearly two years before I discovered my true identity. One day, while stretched out on the porch, I realized I needed only a mint julep to become a real dyed-in-the-wool, Seagram's V.V.O. Southern planter. I promptly barked a command, which was ignored. Instead, my wife appeared and confronted me, arms akimbo. "Who do you think you are, you lug?" she demanded. "A Southern planter?" I knew at once my instinct was right and, dismissing her with a cut of my riding crop, set to work assembling the necessary gear. I sent to New York for a broad-brimmed hat and string tie, and at enormous expense trained the local idiot to fan me with a palmetto leaf. Procuring a no-account hound-dog was more difficult; every kennel I wrote to stocked thoroughbreds, so I was finally forced to buy one and starve it into submission. It has taken a lack of energy and a shiftlessness few men are capable of, but after eight years you can't tell me from the genuine article -- at least, that's what the hookworms say. Up to last Saturday I never once budged off that porch. Well, I've only myself to blame. I guess I'm my own worst enemy.

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