Chapter Two

So the man of whimsy fell in his great funk, fell like the redwood falls, smashing the smaller trees all around, and so did his wife and daughter fall as well, wandering the house as if echoes lost in the greatness rather than the sparks of laughter, life, and even anger that used to rebound in the halls of the mansion.

The man took to his attic, his hair extending its length by the automatic biologic process, that, if left unchecked, provides the neighborhood with more of the carrion upon which the strutting, preening vultures must feed. His wife, concerned of his health, and certainly of his sanity, brought to him trays of divine succulence, the finest wines and the sweetest pastries, and, in the end, despairing him his life, brought merely coarse bread and water, which he took with a soulful look, a look of acceptance, a distant look of a man deeply lost in thought, so deeply lost that his eyes are mere pools of liquid, with no life, as the man he is is now so deep in his mind that it cannot be bothered to answer the door. Such a man took her proffered bread and water, set on a steel plate and tin cup, and ate slowly, as with a powerful hunger that cannot be sated but is comfortable in its strength to take its time to assert its will over the food.

His wife stood there, gratitude pouring down her face. She reached up and wiped some of the sparkle out of her eyes, said "Oh, it is so good to see you eat. I had come to worry you would never eat again. I will bring some more bread tonight, and maybe some cheese?" This last bit she said with such hopefulness, such eagerness, the kind that happens when it seems that the impossible is going to be a certainty, that it seemed to stir our man's soul and he took a moment from his ruminations to smile wanly, to reach up and touch her arm and say, "That would be nice, thank you."

She knew nothing more to do, so she kissed him on the cheek and turned to descend the stair. She met her daughter at the foot, with an upturned and questing face, and the question needed no asking. "Yes, he ate. He will eat some cheese tonight. No, he's not coming down just yet."

The daughter turned, herself lost in thought about her father, a man who, to her teenage mind, had seemed a giant massive redwood of a man, never swayed by anyone, anything, nor even the relentless march of time itself, the man who always knew how to stand when everyone ran, the man that stirred such jealousy in others that he, of the immaculate manners and immense magnanimity, still had enemies in those whose existence was mousy or snakelike, which is an unforgivable insult to the majestic snake family, although the insult to the mice family can be let stand as their lobbying efforts have been less effective.

That the giant redwood of a man that was her father had fallen was perplexing enough, doing immense damage to her understanding of the world and her place in it, but what to do about it was substantially more perplexing. She, the daughter, had been up to see the man a time or two, but he had been as if he had not seen her. Part of her railed in jealousy against her mother, but that part was quickly smothered by her own gratitude that the man, the redwood, her father, had eaten, that he had responded, that he was less despondent. She took solace that soon her father would be right, that her world would be right, that once again she'd be the little princess she had become accustomed to being, and, with the flexibility of youth, her countenance brightened, and off to some social event she went, as teenagers make social events of the smallest things, dare to contest it, you who either will be, are, or were a teenager.

Her mother, her poor mother, had no such luxury. She took up her position on the love seat in the den, curled up with a book, the letters and words which passed under her gaze without stringing together into any sort of story she could recall, as such a result requires the effort of the part of her brain now deeply taken up with schemes, plots and distractions to enable her to woo her husband out of his funk and down into some semblance of normalcy, for although she married this man because he was no strutting goose, she often secretly wished he'd not give such fodder to the enemies of the happiness she'd built herself here. She keenly felt the daggers aimed her way by those huns of the tree-lined-lane and country club, the barbarians in the finery of civilization, who have the accoutrements that resemble those of the true bon vivant but lack both the bon and the vivant to back it up and make it really work.

They were out there right now, for sure. By now a servant, even the most loyal, who would never hurt the man out of deep and abiding love for him, even out of that very love might, in an instant, let slip the concern bubbling in their soul to the wrong person, a gollum of the chattering class, most certain to tell the next wrong person in the chain of wrong persons, ending up with all the wrong persons knowing, the persons who did not really care except that it provided the tiniest splash of color to their everlasting white lives and made them feel that much better that they could not themselves attain the level of goodness set for them by themselves and all their kind.

They'd be chattering again. They'd go on about his choice of wife, how she did not really support him. They'd go on out of the other side of the same mouth how she married beneath her and should have left the crackpot a confirmed bachelor, but look, the sheen of respectability a woman of such high breeding as herself had allowed this man to worm his way lots higher in life than he should have, to get power he should not have got, and to anger the wrong people such that now he faced prosecution, and that prosecution would hurt so many who would lose their jobs. Of course, all of them had seen this coming; had said so just last week, dare deny it, and thought then that she should just divorce him before he became a millstone around her neck, as he most certainly would become, and look, they would do the same if the situation warranted it.

So she brooded into the night, torturing herself with the imagined words of others, and such a better person was she that she was able to imagine slights and slander that was beyond the simple imagination of the wolves circling her house. She pretended to take it with grace, but eventually curled up in a ball to have a good cry, late into the night, quietly so that her sobbing not carry up and unduly stress her husband in his darkest hour. She cried thus until it became the last thing she remembered doing and she fell asleep. Her daughter, coming back from the social meeting at the place that they all go to, covered her with a shawl and patted her affectionately. Then the daughter went off to bed, secure and happy that things were not, at least, getting any worse.

Chapter One

It was a whimsy, this thing of his, this need that burned like a firefly, all winking on and off and flying all around.  If you asked of him his need, he could not define it, so you could not know it.  Fool, thinks you, he of the whimsy that drives him so hard.  Yet, drive him it did.

It drove him to acquire initially.  Such was the misunderstanding of his whimsy that he acquired things, the substantives of the modern race to the top.  His car was a Bentley, a vehicle of monstrous whimsy, his house an airy estate in the Hamptons where he partook of afternoon strolls in a tophat with his wife and daughter grumbling incessantly about the lace and parasols they must carry, even in the rain, particularly in the rain.  Such was his dedication, nay his compulsion, that often he did not go out on sunny days, and if he did so, he did so with his umbrella.

He felt guilty often on those days, for opposition is truly not whimsy, and merely donning the wrong kit did not produce in him the welling of playfulness of the child he still wished to be.  His hobbies were, therefore, diverse, ranging from that of taming of the shrew, which had yet to be accomplished, but lent mightily to his collection of finger scars, to the arbitrary slaying of insects to childish rhymes, such as one potato, two potato, three potato, four.  Those were the dark days of whimsy, days better spent in the attic consumed by foreboding of the comeuppance a man such as he should certainly suffer.

The neighberhood wives, of the constitution required by stalwart men of business, would call upon his wife to feast on her misfortune, after whence they would commence to neigh and whinny amongst themselves about his nature.  Never mind he the industrialist had built such great and graceful things nor that things of their very own issued from his factories, scattered all over the globe, or that his was the most reverent house on the block in the worship of the atlantic normal, with its stately columns in purest white and majestic lawns with beautiful hand wrought wicker and iron furniture, all gleaming white as was the custom.  Nor could the whinny and neigh of his stables be contested, and the men and women who worked his grounds turned out in the most immaculate livery in the entire town.

Neither, truly, was his wife a bitter, miserable woman.  She saw in her husband the spark of the unknown greatness.  The men of her acquaintance, many who held wives in this very neighborhood, were to a fault conventional, such that their punctuality was so habitual it was effected without the aid of a timepiece and their expectations of their wives was the same, that dinner be at six in the evening and so on, that it be held at the table with the slaughtered beast or fowl and that junior have his homework done and that the wee lassie be decked in finery.

Such was the high standard of huskhood achieved by the rare denizens of this sleepy little town.  So thick was the whitewash over every single soul that the only way of achieving color was to reek of the mould and rot of snipish gossip.  So, nevermind the new Rolls Royce at the lawyer's house, his wife was seen with the gardner in an improper way.

The truth of the matter is, of course, that all of the species in all walks of life partake of a long draught of the gossip, for it renders each and every one of us that much better by comparison, as well as provides a strong reminder that we remain human, rather than divine.  However, in most walks of life, the taint of gossip is lost in the glorious color of living, as the standard, being somewhat lower, allows people to live as people, doing as they wish with little care of the consequences.

Not so in this sleepy little town.  The slightest infraction leads to wagging toungues and, sooner or later, an injunction at the town hall about the beach balls littering your back yard.  That sort of thing, the process of living a life such that happiness is allowed to seep into it, is strictly forbidden.

However, our Misses of the Mister in question had chosen him precisely because he lacked the dour self possession of his colleagues.  His Bentley was du rigor for his stature, but was painted bright yellow with purple seats and spinners on the wheels.  Rather garish though it might seem, it pleased our man.  Truth be told, his vast empire owed more to his sense of whimsy than any other thing, as his products did more than do a thing, they brought the joy of the doing of a thing to life.

Have you ever had a thing that to hold it was a delight?  That to use it was glorious?  That was so intoxicating you found yourself using it incessantly, whether or not whatever it did needed doing?  That thing came from our man's factories.  Truth be told, the glorious things pouring out of the gates of his monuments to efficiency probably did more real damage to productivity than could be calculated, with workers tending to use his hammer rather than another company's screwdriver, causing, of course, the screw to be bent or broken, and the thing once made in this fashion to lack luster.  Such a trend can cause a man to be king, when his things are so superior that the things of others pale so much that the public clamors that all things be made by him.

However, in this world, there are those who, driven by the spirit of spite in plentitude, will reject the success of man as little more than a capricious happenstance, something that is immoral, as it has ennobled one man above another despite that they ought to be the same.  These men we call communists for lack of a more precise printable word.  These men have seen the world for what it is in its stark nakedness and have determined that the various ugly pieces must go.  And, like crazed surgeons, they begin to hack these pieces off.

Such was the peril of the day, leading to a black whimsy, a dark, foreboding whimsy, of epic proportions in the darkest, dankest dungeon of a basement in the house.  The inspectors had arrived that day and determined he possessed a monopoly in the production of useful things in one particular market.  They further determined that, since he charged so much more for his things, despite that the public was eager to pay it, and, indeed, lined up for city blocks to pay it, that he was price-gouging the public and must either reduce his prices or reduce his production.

Well, a facet of the soul-hardened communist that is of no little amusements to his enemies is his rather incomplete grasp of economics.  Were the man to reduce his price, he must needs reduce his quality, and, thus, likely, lose his monopoly, as the public call out for quality on some goods.  Were the man to reduce his production, and there be none other that can match his quality, his price must needs go up, as the public with the wherewithal to satiate their wishes would clearly continue to bid for his goods.  Were he to not allow the price to go up, he would simply run out.

Our hero understood this.  Our hero's wife and child understood this.  It is likely most of his horses and certain that his dog understood this.  The cat could be taught it given sufficient patience, time and thick gloves.  Humans are, of course, another story.  Never is a man so obdurate as when he concludes a thing must be done no matter the cost.  The communist cares not whether his idea can be made to work, his mind has settled that it must work.  This he terms as mandate, that the thing shall be accomplished, because, lo, is it not righteous and good and of a modular construction?

The man of whimsy, the man of greatness, our man of great sorrow this day, must see his happiness and the things he produces that bring others happiness brought low because they meet not the righteousness of those who have annointed themselves the consciences of the nation.