The Four Stooges

When the night comes, Gloria wants to go uptown so badly she can hear it. “Tonight?” She starts asking every evening, but the sitter always says, “No, no, no, I’m too tired tonight.”

Through a state-accredited home tutoring agency Laudette finds a bovine middle-aged man named George Burger to come to the house. Burger chews gum and lows on for five hours a day in the first story library, telling Gloria all about the Beantown Tea Party, least common denominators, dangling participles, and cumulus clouds.

When three o’clock rolls around, Gloria runs down to her booth at the Kronos Coffee Shop, drinks coffee, and blows smoke rings.

“Now that I’m not in school any more,” she tells Thalia, “it’s really swell, no uniform, no hassles. And with the tutor, as long as you pay him, you pass.”

To manage the money coming into and going out of the house, Sarah has Harry’s accountant. He has instructions to apportion whatever funds Laudette thinks she needs for bringing up Glory; he also pays the bills and the staff’s salary. However the responsibility of looking after those old hands at goofing off hangs entirely around the neck of Miss Lord.

Since day one, the staff has been in opposition to her; they have never seen her as a friend. Since day one hundred, when she made the complaint to Sarah that would have resulted in Pearly and Mona being fired had she not chosen to let them have another chance, the four of them have shared a grudge against her. They have always called her “squealing rat” behind her back. Now, with the Mrs gone they call her “Miss Lard” to her face. They challenge her authority by neglecting their work. Pearly and Mona go back to spending entirely too much time at the kitchen counter warming their stools over a pot of hot coffee with Kitty and Shepp.

Laudette knows she is the reason for the snickering in their conversation, the big butt of their jokes. She should fire them, she knows, they dare her to do it, but her X-rated conscience, her effort to imitate Emanual, prevents her from doing so. She is happy being miserable; the persecution by her underlings gives her the opportunity to return good for evil.

This darn staff is the cross I have to shoulder, she tells herself.

“Excuse me, Mona, I notice that the flowers in the library have been dead for three days” … “Pearly, did I remind you already that the car needs to be serviced this week?” … “Shepp, perhaps you and Kitty could wash some of those dishes in the sink. Last night I couldn’t find a clean plate to eat from.”

These most kindly-phrased requests are met with rancorous smirks. The boss is big, but that’s about all. Her apologetic tone earns her nothing but scorn. “We’re just on our break, Miss Lard,” says spokesperson Pearly, affecting his proper Grammar School valet accent that at first so impressed Laudette and now makes her sick. “Doesn’t it say somewhere in the Statutes of Liberty, or the Notice you colonies gave His Majesty that coffee is the inalienable right of every Freewayfaring worker?”

“I worked for a real lady once,” offers Mona, “whose great-great-grandfather helped throw the tea in Beantown Harbor.”

“And that tea party was probably over quicker than your coffee break,” Laudette snaps. “It’s been sixty-seven minutes. Now please come on, get lively! There’s work to do!”

They force her to exercise her authority because they know how reluctant she is to do so; they exchange looks of exasperated patience with one another when they go about their work, leaving Laudette with the feeling that she is a spoilsport, an unreasonable stickler for rules and regulations.

The staff’s resentment of Laudette is no secret, but something else is. At this point in our story our father Moe is only four years old and my brother and I, both waiting to be born, have respectively twenty-six and nineteen years ahead of us before we are formed in the womb of Glory, so it is not hindsight, but because my brother whose narration I mediate is an omniscientist, having, like the Purple Haze, been to eternity and back, we can be witness to things Grandma Sarah, Harry and Laudette never knew at the time. They could have known, had Laudette made a more thorough investigation of Gloria’s reports of seeing Pearly exchange papers with the man in the yellow suit behind the newsstand.

It’s easy to see your own flaws in others. The real squealer is not Laudette. The help is more than unhelpful, they are unfaithful. The man behind the stand is none other than Sunset Sam Hunkel, the private investigator hired by Harry’s sister Hilda to keep an eye on the museum and its inhabitants. The paper Sam gives Pearly contains an envelop with money for him and the others. The paper Pearly gives Sam has a written report on the goings-on in the house.

“What’d’ya got for me this week, Wheatstraw?”

“The kid got kicked out of school for playing with a dildo. The old lardass broad is going to crack any day now, mark my words.”

Thus the staff were serpents all along, paid spies who keep their eyes open for any inside information which Hilda might find useful to launch some sort of disinheritance suit either against her brother or his heirs.

Furthermore the four stooges are motivated to undermine Laudette’s power. Sam always reminds Pearly, “There’s something extra in it if you stir up some trouble where none exists, if you know what I mean.”

Now that the Mrs is away and the girl is putting a strain on her sitter they all agree that this is the time to test “Miss Lard.” Their work slow-down has the added intent of pushing her into doing something they can stooge about.

Rats!