Tennyson Tympany

By Stuart Gelzer

If Preston Sturges and Anthony Trollope had collaborated on a breezy how-to manual for pickpocketing, forgery, house burglary, counterfeiting, and murdering a few of your closest relatives, it might have turned out a little like this light-fingered caper about all those things and more. 

TENNYSON TYMPANY starts with death by falling b

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bertie Stanhope Press
• Release date: Feb 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798987808146

Stuart Gelzer

Stuart Gelzer, the child of American missionaries, grew up in Cameroon and India. Over the years he's been a screenwriter, a film editor, a drama teacher, a film and photography teacher, and a singer specializing in folk music from the Republic of Georgia. Nowadays he does fine-art photography, writes fiction and travel memoir, and translates old French popular novels. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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TENNYSON TYMPANY

For Marie, present at the spark

Copyright © 2024 by Stuart Gelzer

Cover design by Stuart Gelzer

Published by Bertie Stanhope Press

ISBN 979-8-9878081-3-9

ISBN 979-8-9878081-4-6 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024900843

NOTICE TO THE READER

The canvas for this story about art and theft is Wilkie Collins’s 1879 novella A Rogue’s Life, which I’ve stolen right off the wall, restretched, hung in a bigger and gaudier frame, and cheerfully painted over.

ONE: THE DIVERSIONS OF THE CITY

1 How Are You Going to Get Ahead in Life?

2 At the Age of Nineteen I Left Home Forever.

3 Everything Goes to Tennyson Tympany!

4 It Was Prune’s Idea, But I Helped.

5 Have You Painted Anybody Famous?

6 I Have Misunderstood Your Skull.

TWO: THE BEGUILEMENTS OF THE COUNTRY

7 Carpe Diem, I’ve Been Known to Say.

8 How Many Ways Are There to Arrange Five Letters?

9 Even Artists Have to Live, My Dear.

10 You Are Cherishing a Fallacy.

11 I’ll Kill Them! And This Time I’ll Like It!

12 I’ve Been Looking All Over for You.

INDEX OF TOPICS FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION

ONE:

THE DIVERSIONS OF THE CITY

1.

How Are You Going to Get Ahead in Life?

IMAGINE, PLEASE, a small-town gas station in a small town. It was one of those stations on a downtown corner with an entrance from both intersecting streets, so if the light (the only light in town) happened to be against you, and the cars waiting in front of you were going straight, you could take your chances and cut across the gas station lot, hearing the satisfying ding of the bell as your tires ran over the long black hose.

But the people we’re initially concerned with in these pages weren’t the kind to pull a stunt like that. They were careful, responsible adults: young people who, though young, were true grownups who understood that cutting corners is fine if one car does it, but what happens if everyone starts cutting through the gas station? Ding! Ding! Fender-crumpling chaos. And since not everyone can do it, out of fairness no one should, so in general this young couple patiently waited their turn at the light.

But, on the particular occasion we happen to be observing, they carefully used their blinker and turned off the street into the station because they needed gas. They were going away for a romantic weekend together, and they’d already left their two young children with the husband’s mother. But let’s not burrow too deeply into these characters—names, appearances, and so forth—because they aren’t the heroes of this story, and in fact they’ll occupy our attention for only a few paragraphs more.

Since they were headed all the way to the mountains today, and since they lived in a state without the option of gasoline self-service, they asked the attendant to fill the tank. The grizzled old fellow in grease-stained blue overalls hooked up the pump and—luckily for him—ambled back into the station to look for something. The couple’s car was a little thing, the kind of car you could keep from driving off just by leaning hard against the front bumper, so it wouldn’t have taken long for the tank to fill, but the attendant thought he had time to fetch whatever it was he needed from inside.

I ought to have mentioned, back when I was painting that picture of the charming little station at the center of the little town, that the company whose gas it sold was the very one whose stations featured that most remarkable roadside display, an enormous plaster brontosaurus painted a cheerful green. Everything about the brontosaurus was cheerful, in fact, as if he meant to say, by his posture and his smile and the sparkle in his eye and even the jaunty tilt of his tiny head on its endless neck, I gladly died in a swamp and was flattened by unspeakable pressures so you could cruise up and down Main Street looking for a parking space and waving at girls. Enjoy!

But I fear the pride the brontosaurus took in his work wasn’t shared by the men who raised him onto his pedestal and bolted his elephantine feet into place at that particular station. Over the years his bolts had gradually worked themselves loose. He could feel the give and play around his toes when a wind came up, and it alarmed and discomfited him, and he tried to warn the station manager, but the relentless smile on his plaster face was poorly designed to express concern or anxiety or indeed any emotion other than generosity and eagerness to please the customer.

On the day we’re speaking of (well, I’m writing of and you’re reading of), the brontosaurus’s failing bolts had reached a tipping point—and it’s hard to imagine the expression tipping point has ever been used more appositely. As the tired gray attendant stepped back outside carrying his coffee or his cigarette—no, no, not a cigarette at a gas station!—or whatever it was that for our purposes actually doesn’t matter at all, a light breeze came up. The couple sitting patiently in the car listening to the murmur of gasoline filling their tank had the windows down, and they felt the breeze and looked forward to the clear bracing air they’d draw into their lungs later that morning in the mountains.

But the attendant still at the doorway heard the unforgettable sound of metal tearing against metal, and looked up in time to watch the great green brontosaurus, as big as the whole garage, stagger with dignity from side to side for a while and then tip gently past his point of recovery and fall, still smiling his cheerful smile of welcome, straight toward the pumps and that little car.

Let’s pause at this painful moment, the brontosaurus in midair over the car—and aren’t you grateful now that I didn’t build up that poor doomed couple, draw you in so you were more invested in their fate?—and consider that they were good people, people who wanted only to do the right thing (like not cutting through the gas station to save a few seconds if they didn’t need gas), who wanted nothing but the best for their young children, and who’d done nothing whatsoever to deserve the violent fate that now hung a few feet over them and that they couldn’t even see coming, because the roof of their car hid the catastrophe from view, and because in any case they were in the middle of a kiss.

Tenny himself—and he is our hero, so you may pay attention to him—in later years would summarize the whole sad story this way: My parents died when I was small.

❦

As is the tradition in stories with young heroes, we’ll now skip a few years in Tenny’s life. The customary leap would be about twenty years, but for now we’re going to settle for half of that, with another leap to come later. Tenny was four years old and his sister was eight when a brontosaurus pressed their kissing parents into hydrocarbon. That awful day, as I think I’ve mentioned, they’d been with their father’s mother, whom they called Gran, and with Gran they stayed for the rest of their childhood.

You can conceive and forgive, I hope, the emotional troubles that might haunt and cripple those orphans and be manifested in different and surprising forms in the two children, as I feel sure the pages to follow will show. But their grandmother’s eccentricity had nothing to do with the gas station accident—I can tell you plainly she’d always been that way.

Imagine now the back yard of Gran’s house on a summer afternoon in that long-ago time when about a quarter of the twentieth century remained. The house was a nondescript suburban split-level, the kind of beige vinyl-sided house whose windows are always a little too small and set a little too high in the wall to be truly graceful. (Oh: I just said it was nondescript and then I fell into describing it.) The yard behind the house was bordered by a hydrangea hedge and was small enough—and I have to say meek enough—to be dominated by a very humble little swimming pool.

On that day, about ten years after the accident, Gran stood in the back yard holding a garden hose, watering a row of tomato plants while her scruffy little dog nosed around near her feet. Gran was by now frail and elderly—or I should say more accurately at least she seemed that way—and frail and elderly will do as a description of the dog too. Let’s make the picture complete and call the tomato plants frail and elderly as well.

Tenny’s sister, Sis, now eighteen, was spending that day the way she’d spent every day of the summer so far: she lay on a lawn chair by the edge of the pool in a very small bikini and big round shades, sunbathing. Her name was not, of course, Sis, but that’s what she preferred to be called, and considering her actual given name I don’t blame her.

We’ve overlooked only one character in this charming scene: our hero Tenny himself, now fourteen, a skinny little fellow just beginning to get his height, with wild hair too tangled to admit a comb and sharp impish features loosely arranged around very bright eyes that always suggested he saw something about you that you didn’t see, something that made him laugh. He too wore swimming trunks, but instead of playing in the pool he lay on his stomach in the grass, fully absorbed in whatever it was he was drawing on the blank pages of the lined school notebook spread open on the ground in front of him.

Let’s leave them in peace for a moment, respectively watering and sunbathing and drawing, because they were not to have many more moments like it…

But even I, the almost all-powerful author of the volume in your hands, can only hold that moment for so long. It was Gran who upset the stasis and moved the story forward, which is where stories must go. Gran was annoyed, had been annoyed all summer, at Sis’s willingness to do nothing with her time but sleep in the sun instead of getting a job and bringing in some money or at the very least gaining some valuable experience for the future.

In short, Gran came from stock that worked, and Sis was lazy and wouldn’t work. It must surely have added to Gran’s annoyance that she couldn’t blame Sis’s poor dead parents for the way the girl had turned out—she’d been Gran’s to shape for all these years. So Gran got back at Sis the way she always did, by addressing her by her real name. Still watering the tomatoes, she called out, Prunella?

That was indeed Sis’s name, and when I consider it was freely given to her by her parents I’m led to wonder whether they really were as innocent and good-hearted as I made them out to be a few pages back. But maybe it was an old name in the family, maybe even Gran’s own given name, so they might not have had much choice. Let’s say it was that, so we can continue to think well of that doomed young couple at the gas station.

Sis reacted the way she always did to being called: she pretended she hadn’t heard.

So Gran called again, Prunella?

This time Sis waited as long as she possibly could before answering, so long that Gran was gathering breath to call her a third time. You might wonder why Sis would ever respond at all, but this is a routine matter of conversational control: if the pattern was that Gran would call and Sis would ignore, then Gran would control at what point the torture ended. But if the pattern was that Gran would call and Sis would eventually respond, the choice of how long to wait before answering would put Sis in control. Sadly, that’s how many relationships work in this world.

So at the last opportunity, without turning her head or opening her eyes, Sis said, What?

At that moment the elderly little dog stepped into the row of tomatoes to sniff their lower leaves. Gran, a woman with a very clear sense of boundaries and of punishment (not so much of reward), turned the hose on him. A hard jet of water hit him in his scruffy little face, and I think may even have flipped one of his scruffy little ears aside and drilled water into his waxy little ear hole. The poor dog jumped away with a yelp—of sadness rather than surprise, because he knew from long experience what kind of master life had given him.

Gran called out, How did we win the war?

Sis opened her eyes and said What? again, but this time in real surprise or at least confusion, and I think we can grant her that, because after all it would be hard to say even what war Gran had in mind, she’d lived through so many, only a few of which could be described as unambiguously won.

I said, how did we win the war?

By now Sis had recovered from her surprise, and she resumed her smooth onward course as a bored teenager who cared nothing for military history, or any other kind of history for that matter. She closed her eyes again and said, Leave me alone, Gran.

But I suspect Gran’s relationship to Sis and Tenny wasn’t much different from the one she had with her poor dog. So she whirled around and aimed the hose at Sis. Now Sis must have heard something—some change in the quality or the intensity of the sound of the water flowing out of the hose—because she opened her eyes just in time to see the vanguard of the liquid jet hit her smack in the middle of the face. The force of the water ripped her shades right off her head.

Gran raised her voice over the sound of the impact. We stayed alert, Prunella!

Sis, of course, did her best to dodge the soaking. But no matter how she struggled and thrashed, confined in her lawn chair, the rules of geometry are such that Gran had only to make tiny adjustments with the hand that held the end of the hose for the watery machine gun to continue peppering Sis in the bull’s-eye. And Sis’s ever more desperate escape attempts merely provoked the lawn chair to begin folding up around her, trapping her in its faded nylon lap. And still the tough-love grandparental hosing-down went on.

Gran called out, How are you going to get ahead in life if you lie around a pool all day? Ah yes, the unanswerable demand of our elders that we get ahead in life.

And our hero, Tenny? He paid no attention to the slapstick business going on in front of him; we can assume he’d seen it or its close relative many times before. Instead he lay on the grass, as described above, intent on the drawing in his little notebook. And perhaps I misjudge him, and he wasn’t oblivious, and the drawing was in fact a depiction of the scene: old lady armed with hose, wet girl snapped shut in lawn chair.

But we’re never to know, because now Gran called out, Tennyson!

Tenny, surely from habit and not from his sister’s bad example, ignored Gran just as Sis had done. He went on drawing.

Tennyson Tympany! Here there’s no need for you to feign shock at the moniker our hero towed around: it is, after all, the title of my book, so under what conceivable circumstances could you have failed to notice the funny name when you first picked it up? And from there to deducing that Tenny was short for Tennyson—and that therefore the boy lying around in his back yard whom I keep calling our hero (even though, as you’ll see later, I have my occasional doubts about his suitability for that role) is in fact the titular hero of the story—is frankly worth no cleverness points at all.

So, yes, the uncomfortable fact remains: Tympany was indeed the last name of this family. I hope you’ll think of the name as standing, not for boom and bombast, but for our hero’s rhythm, verve, spring, eclat, buoyancy—though, to be pedantic, its spelling (those y’s) evoked less a drum than a disorder.

Again Tenny didn’t answer his grandmother. But his sure touch, the quality inadequately called timing that’ll carry him through these adventures, enabled him to anticipate what his sister had not. After that indefinable pause that might have been followed either by his answering or by his grandmother calling his name again, Tenny snapped shut his notebook and rolled to one side. The spear of hose-flavored water stabbed the grass exactly where he’d been lying. As he rolled, the water followed him, always slightly behind him but always catching up.

Tenny leaped to his feet and then, never letting go of the notebook or indeed even exposing it to the water, executed a series of bounds, dives, feints, crouches, and zigzags, a breathtaking backyard Baryshnikov always inches away from a hosing. Gran, most of whose practice took place with relatively stationary tomato plants, was better at watering a sitting duck like Sis than a prancing target like Tenny, and she was slow to understand that the way to hit him was to anticipate where he’d be next rather than aim where he was now.

Finally, sensing his luck expiring, Tenny sprinted flat out in a straight line across the yard toward a small gap in the hydrangea hedge. Gran’s jet of hose water followed, behind him but gaining. And then she realized where he was headed, and made the conceptual leap, and twitched her hose hand to meet him there. A split second before Tenny dove through the gap in the hedge, the jet of water caught him hard in the ear.

But about those events, just as he was about his parents’ fatal accident, Tenny himself was later far more reticent than I’ve been. He’d say only, Some days I went over to see our neighbor, old Mr. Syllabub.

When Tenny was gone, out of sight and out of range, Gran, expressionless, turned the hose back on the pale tomatoes. And the lawn chair enfolding the still struggling Sis teetered for a while on the edge of the pool and then fell in.

❦

To picture the Tympanys’ neighbor you need to imagine the oldest, ugliest, most repulsive man that it’s in your power to imagine—and then accept that old Clement Syllabub went beyond all your superlatives: everything you just imagined, he was more so. Mr. Syllabub’s house was exactly like him, and in that house the room most like him was his workshop, a dark and dirty room filled with dark and dirty tools and gadgets and materials. Mr. Syllabub was an inventor, and the latest of his many fruitless schemes was a