become one enormous undifferentiated persona for me now) pays you for? Climb, bastard, decoy me at something better than ground level. Ah, old sealegs, a little at least sweat, please! Make those picturesque adjustments up in the mizzen of that thing. Lazybones, landlubber, less decorousness in your game, if you don’t mind. Murtaugh must have been left by him (I meant the Credenza brothers, and the wives and sisters too now) as a sort of staff sentinel and shill, a nice philosophic touch. Can a man fall in the forest if there’s no one by to hear him scream?
“I heard the radio and realized that’s how it could come, my fate a spot announcement perhaps, or a bulletin, or maybe he would come on the air himself and read out my doom in some Credenza fireside chat: ‘We’—strangely, Credenza, the single merged nemesis did not mean ‘we,’ he spoke for himself but had slipped royally into the inverted synecdochic—‘have not lightly arrived at our decision to speak out this evening. No one not in our situation can know the ponderous personal gloom and wrenching loneliness attendant at these levels of responsibility. It gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. But despite our hopes for an amelioration of our difficulties and maugre our four times forebearance, those hopes have foundered. Sadly we needs must admit the priority pull of necessity and lay at once the claims of all soft sentiment. We have decided to act—whatever the cost in dashed hopes and even, we may say, lives. No matter that it gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. We needs must, perhaps, go into a little of the background of the situation. We must needs indeeds lest what is devastating seem harsh.
“‘At the beginning, then, the man that calls himself Marshall Maine… ’”
Music was coming over the radio. It was The Children’s Hour. The man who called himself Marshall Maine could not make up his mind whether it was more likely that Credenza would allow the nursery rhyme to finish, or interrupt it, hoping to take him by surprise. The song concluded and Maine thought now, but it was only the relief man speaking patronizingly in the voice of Uncle Arnold. He played another nursery rhyme. Then it was time for the relief man to read the bedtime story, and Maine again thought now, but except for what Marshall felt to be some strange emphases—the story was “Jack and the Beanstalk” and the relief man’s voice was loud when it should have been soft and meek when force was called for—he was permitted to get all the way through it without interruption.
The suspense was terrific. He knew it would come, but he could no longer even hope to anticipate when. It would be random; he could not second-guess it. It was as if they were playing some mortal version of musical chairs with him. As if this were exactly the case he turned away from watching the transmitter man and went to stand by the receiver that couldn’t be turned off as long as the station was on the air. It was within a yard of the transmitter man’s chair, close by his complicated machinery. He thought that if he heard Credenza’s voice he would still have time to rush to the chair before the man could pronounce his doom. Credenza may have permitted him this one hope of forestalling his annihilation, he thought crazily.
“Why did I stand around waiting? Why didn’t I just get out? I couldn’t. Mullins and Carpenter had taken the car. There were endless empty miles of Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior counties to traverse before reaching safety. Why, I would have had to have run out of the effective range of the radio station itself.”
He stood there all through The Children’s Hour and through The Six O’Clock Round-Up (thinking he might hear it as a piece of the news itself, announced as something that had already happened; perhaps it would be tacked on at the end, what they meant to do to him one last human-interest
“I heard the radio and realized that’s how it could come, my fate a spot announcement perhaps, or a bulletin, or maybe he would come on the air himself and read out my doom in some Credenza fireside chat: ‘We’—strangely, Credenza, the single merged nemesis did not mean ‘we,’ he spoke for himself but had slipped royally into the inverted synecdochic—‘have not lightly arrived at our decision to speak out this evening. No one not in our situation can know the ponderous personal gloom and wrenching loneliness attendant at these levels of responsibility. It gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. But despite our hopes for an amelioration of our difficulties and maugre our four times forebearance, those hopes have foundered. Sadly we needs must admit the priority pull of necessity and lay at once the claims of all soft sentiment. We have decided to act—whatever the cost in dashed hopes and even, we may say, lives. No matter that it gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. We needs must, perhaps, go into a little of the background of the situation. We must needs indeeds lest what is devastating seem harsh.
“‘At the beginning, then, the man that calls himself Marshall Maine… ’”
Music was coming over the radio. It was The Children’s Hour. The man who called himself Marshall Maine could not make up his mind whether it was more likely that Credenza would allow the nursery rhyme to finish, or interrupt it, hoping to take him by surprise. The song concluded and Maine thought now, but it was only the relief man speaking patronizingly in the voice of Uncle Arnold. He played another nursery rhyme. Then it was time for the relief man to read the bedtime story, and Maine again thought now, but except for what Marshall felt to be some strange emphases—the story was “Jack and the Beanstalk” and the relief man’s voice was loud when it should have been soft and meek when force was called for—he was permitted to get all the way through it without interruption.
The suspense was terrific. He knew it would come, but he could no longer even hope to anticipate when. It would be random; he could not second-guess it. It was as if they were playing some mortal version of musical chairs with him. As if this were exactly the case he turned away from watching the transmitter man and went to stand by the receiver that couldn’t be turned off as long as the station was on the air. It was within a yard of the transmitter man’s chair, close by his complicated machinery. He thought that if he heard Credenza’s voice he would still have time to rush to the chair before the man could pronounce his doom. Credenza may have permitted him this one hope of forestalling his annihilation, he thought crazily.
“Why did I stand around waiting? Why didn’t I just get out? I couldn’t. Mullins and Carpenter had taken the car. There were endless empty miles of Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior counties to traverse before reaching safety. Why, I would have had to have run out of the effective range of the radio station itself.”
He stood there all through The Children’s Hour and through The Six O’Clock Round-Up (thinking he might hear it as a piece of the news itself, announced as something that had already happened; perhaps it would be tacked on at the end, what they meant to do to him one last human-interest
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