ONCE UPON A TIME—I say that up front so you will know this is a fairy tale and not just another wish-fulfillment fantasy—there was a boy named Adequate Dick. Unfortunate, but true. His mother, being no better than she should have been, but a beauty nonetheless, named him after that which had brought her much fame though little fortune.
When she saw that having a child narrowed her client base, she abandoned him. Simply dropped him off at the nearest dock: Whittington Pier. If she had dropped him off the dock instead of at it, this story would have been considerably shorter.
Adequate Dick knocked about the port for quite some time, about fifteen years to be exact, eventually taking the dock’s name as his own, after much pier counseling. He was handsome; in that, he took after his mother. But in all other ways he was like his dad: adequate.
At last one day he was hired by a kind merchant who was always on the lookout for cheap labor.
“Will you come and work for me, Adequate Dick Whittington Pier?” asked the merchant.
“I will,” said Adequate Dick.
They shook hands but signed no papers. In those days no one could write, though most had handshakes down pat.
Now, the boy quickly came to the attention of the merchant’s pretty daughter, Tess, who had a fondness for lower-class Dicks. She gave him money and considerable other favors, which Adequate Dick, being well named and handsome but not particularly favored in the brains department, took as a compliment.
He took a few other things as well: her silver ring, a glass vase, a small nude portrait done on ivory. He didn’t take Tess’s virtue. She had none left for him to take.
The merchant knew that cheap labor has a way of drifting, and so to keep his servants happy and at home, he gave them certain allowances. He allowed them once a year to give him something of theirs to take on his voyage, something the merchant might sell to make their fortunes. None of them ever got rich this way, of course. But, as if it were a sixteenth-century lottery, the chance of becoming millionaires overnight kept all the servants trying and at home. Very trying and quite at home.
Adequate Dick had nothing to give the merchant but a cat named Pussy (and the things he had taken from Tess, but those he would not part with). But when it was his turn, he handed over his pet without a thought. “Pussy could make my fortune,” he thought, thereby proving himself his mother’s boy. The vegetable does not fall very far from the tree.
Tess could have warned him that his chances for a fortune were slim at best. But she didn’t want him leaving anyway. “Why waste a perfectly adequate Dick?” was her motto.
So far—I can hear you saying—this sounds like a folktale, what with the merchant and his pretty daughter, a servant and his cat. Or maybe it sounds like the plot of an eighteenth-century picaresque novel. Or a grainy, naughty black-and-white French film. But how can it be a fairy tale? It has no fairies in it. Or magic.
And you would be right. Right—but impatient.
Wait for it.
The merchant’s ship ran aground on a small island kingdom and he was thought lost to the world. The household, like a boat, began to founder; the servants to look for other work. Adequate Dick, being last hired, was first fired, so he went off toward the familiar docks to seek his fortune. Without—of course—his Pussy. Either one.
So what of Tess?
She tried to take over her father’s firm. She was the merchant’s only child, after all. But the men who worked for her complained.
“She has,” they said, “no Adequate Dick. And who can run a business without one?” It was true. Her Adequate Dick had gone back to his piers.
Then a miracle!
You must allow me a miracle.
Surely miracles will do in a tale when magic is nowhere to be found. Miracles are magic processed by faith and a lack of a scientific imagination.
The merchant returned home unexpectedly, but just in time it seems, with much gold in his ship’s hold. The island kingdom where he had run aground had itself been overrun by rats. That he had Pussy to sell was a great fortune. Or a miracle. Or a serendipity. Or a fairy tale. Or the kind of luck a Donald Trump would envy. (Speaking of adequate Dicks.)
So he sold Dick’s Pussy. But little did he know the consequences of such a sale. For miracles are not singular. They lean on one another, like art on art. No sooner was Pussy sold than Tess—far away in London—found herself changed beyond measure. That is, she could measure the change. It occurred between her legs.
Was she surprised? Not really. It was merely form following function.
The merchant returned home rich beyond counting.
“Where is that Adequate Dick?” he asked when he entered the door.
“Oh, Father!” Tess cried. “He has gone. But something rare has occurred. Something better than Adequate.”
Her father did not listen. He was not a man to believe in the miraculous beyond the swelling of a purse. “Better get him back, then,” he said. “He has wealth and treasure.”
“As do I,” thought Tess, pausing to spit accurately by the stoop. Then she ran down the road to call Adequate Dick home, crying: “Turn again, Whittington Pier.” She had never called him by his first name outside her bedroom.
He heard her, and he turned.
And returned.
Now that he was rich, Tess could marry him, though, given the circumstances, she never slept with him again. He was no longer of the lower classes and he was—after all—only an adequate Dick.
She had better.