“And there was no way I could argue effectively with her. She won every time. Of course, she was an intellectual and I’m not—though I like to think I’m intelligent…”

  Rubin said, “Intelligence is the diamond and intellectualism only the facets. I’ve known many a beautifully faceted rhinestone. What do you do for a living?”

  Washburn said, “I’m a stockbroker.”

  “Do you do well? I mean, as well as your feminist?”

  Washburn flushed. “Yes. And I’ve inherited a rather sizable trust fund. She seemed to resent that.”

  “Let me guess,” said Rubin dryly. “You make more money with less brains because you’re a man. You get farther with less deserving because you’re a man. You probably even inherited the trust fund because you were a man. Your sister would have gotten less.”

  “That’s about it,” said Washburn. “She said the way I dressed, the way I held myself, everything about me was designed to show my masculine wealth and power. She said I might as well wear a neon sign saying, ‘I can buy women.’”

  Trumbull said, “Did you ever try to defend yourself?”

  “Sure,” said Washburn, “and that meant a fight. I asked her why, if she thought she should be considered as a human being and as an intellectual, without being penalized for her sex, she insisted on emphasizing her sex? Why didn’t she remove her makeup and meet the world with an unpainted face as men did? Why didn’t she wear less revealing clothes, and accentuate her breasts and hips less? I said she might as well wear a neon sign saying, ‘I sell for a high price.’”

  “She must have loved that,” muttered Rubin.

  “You bet she didn’t,” said Washburn grimly. “She said a masculine society forced that on her in self-defense, and she wouldn’t give up the only weapon they granted her. I said she needed no weapon with me. I said I would marry her without enticement or allure, straight out of the shower with wet hair and a pimple on her shoulder if she had one. And she said, ‘To do what? To cook your dinner and clean your house for you?’ And I said, ‘I have a housekeeper for that.’ And she said, ‘Of course; another woman.’”

  Halsted said, “What good would it have done you to marry her? You would have fought like that every day. It would have been a purgatory. Why not just walk away from that?”

  “Why not?” said Washburn. “Sure, why not? Why not just kick the heroin habit? Why not just stop breathing if the air gets polluted? How do I know why not? It’s not the sort of thing you can reason out. Maybe—maybe—if I had the chance, I could win her over.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” said Rubin flatly. “She’s a ballbuster, and she’d stay one.”

  Halsted said, “That’s a stupid phrase, Manny. It’s part of the routine bigotry of the chauvinist. A man is ambitious; a woman is unscrupulous. A man is firm; a woman is stubborn. A man is witty; a woman is bitchy. A man is competitive; a woman is abrasive. A man is a hard-driving leader; a woman is a ballbuster.”

  Rubin said, “Call it what you want. Say she’s a lily of the valley if you want. I say her ambition and occupation would have been to make our friend here wish he had never been born, and she would have succeeded.”

  Turning to Washburn, he said, “I assume from your early outburst, your failure with her was complete. If so, I congratulate you, and if I knew of a way to help you succeed, I would refuse to give it to you.”

  Washburn shook his head. “No fear. She’s married someone else—a dumb creep—and the last I’ve heard she is cooking and cleaning house.”

  “Did she give up her career?” said Avalon in astonishment.

  “No,” said Washburn, “but she does the other, too. What I’ll never understand is why him.”

  Trumbull said, “There’s no accounting for the nature of attraction. Maybe this other fellow makes her laugh. Maybe he dominates her without bothering to argue the point. Maybe she likes the way he smells. How can you tell? How do you account for the way she attracts you? Nothing you’ve said makes her attractive to me.”

  “If she liked him better,” said Washburn, fuming, “why not say so, for whatever reason—or for no reason? Why make it look like a straightforward test? Why humiliate me?”

  “Test?” said Rubin. “What test?”

  “That’s what I referred to when I said earlier that in one way I had been particularly ill used. She said she would see if I were the kind of man she could live with. She dared me to give her a one-syllable middle name to represent what every schoolchild knew—and yet didn’t know. She implied that she was giving the other fellow the same test. I knew about him and I didn’t worry about him. My God, he was a stupid advertising copy writer who shambled about in turtleneck sweaters and drank beer.”

  Avalon said, “Surely, you couldn’t believe a woman would choose one man over another according to whether he could solve a puzzle. That happens in fairytales perhaps; otherwise, not.”

  Washburn said, “I see that now. She married him, though. She said he had the answer. That idiot passed, she said, and I failed. Not getting her was bad enough, but she arranged to make me lose in a battle of wits to someone I despised—or at least she said I had lost. It wasn’t a test. It was nonsense. Suppose you chose a middle name with one syllable—John, Charles, Ray, George—any one of them. Who’s to say the answer is right or wrong, except her?

  “If she were going to marry him anyway, she might have done that without going out of her way to make me look foolish in my own eyes.”

  Halsted said, “What if the question were a legitimate one? What if he had gotten the correct answer and you hadn’t? Would that make you feel better?”

  “I suppose so,” said Washburn, “but the more I think of it, the more certain I am that it’s a fake.”

  “Let’s see now,” said Halsted thoughtfully. “We need a one-syllable middle name that every schoolboy knows—and yet doesn’t know.”

  “Schoolchild,” growled Washburn. “Schoolboy is chauvinistic.”

  Gonzalo said, “Go ahead, Roger. You teach school. What does every schoolchild know—and yet not know?”

  “In my class at the junior high school,” said Halsted, gloomily, “every schoolchild knows he ought to know algebra, and what he doesn’t know is algebra. If algebra were a one-syllable middle name that would be the answer.”

  Drake said, “Let’s be systematic. Only people have middle names in the usual meaning of the word, so we can start with that. If we find a person whom every schoolchild knows—and yet doesn’t know, then that person will have a middle name and that middle name will be the answer.”

  “And if you think that,” said Washburn, “where does it get you? For one thing, how is it possible to know something or someone—and yet not know? And if it were possible, then it’s quite impossible that this should be true of only one person. How would you pick out the correct person? No, that witch was playing games.”

  “Actually,” said Avalon, “middle names are, on the whole, uncommon. Nowadays, everyone gets one, but they were much against the rule in the past, it seems to me. Think of some famous people—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte, William Shakespeare—no middle names in the lot. The Greeks had only one name—Socrates, Plato, Demosthenes, Creon. It limits the field somewhat.”

  Halsted said, “There’s Robert Louis Stevenson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gustavus Adolphus Vasa.”

  “Who’s Gustavus Adolphus Vasa?” asked Gonzalo.

  “A King of Sweden in the early 1600s,” said Halsted.

  Gonzalo said, “I suppose every Swedish schoolchild would know him, but we should stick to the knowledge of American schoolchildren.”

  “I agree,” said Avalon.

  Rubin said thoughtfully, “The Romans had three names as a matter of course. Julius Caesar was really Gaius Julius Caesar. His assassin, Cassius, was Gaius Cassius Longinus. Every American schoolchild would know the names Julius Caesar and Cassius from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, which every American schoolchild is put through. Yet he wouldn’t know the names Gaius Julius Caesar and Gaius Cassius Longinus. He would think Julius was a first name and Cassius was a last name, but each would be a middle name. That would be the sort of thing we’re after.”

  Avalon said, “Many cultures use patronymics as routine middle names. Every Russian has one. Peter I of Russia, or Peter the Great, as he’s usually known, was really Peter Alexeievich Romanov. Every schoolchild knows Peter the Great and yet doesn’t know his middle name, or even that he has one.”

  Rubin said, “There are other possibilities. Some middle names are treated as first names even for Americans. President Grover Cleveland was really Stephen Grover Cleveland. He dropped his first name and used his middle name, so every schoolchild knows Grover Cleveland and doesn’t know Stephen Grover Cleveland. The same is true for Thomas Woodrow Wilson and John Calvin Coolidge.

  “Then again, some middle names are lost in pen names. Mark Twain was really Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and Lewis Carroll was really Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Every schoolchild knows Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll but probably doesn’t know Langhorne and Lutwidge.”

  Washburn said impatiently, “Pardon me, gentlemen, but what good is all this? How does it help with the problem? You can rattle off a million middle names, but which one did that female want?”

  Avalon said solemnly, “We are merely outlining the dimensions of the problem, Mr. Washburn.”

  “And doing it all wrong,” said Gonzalo. “Look, every middle name I’ve heard from Julius to Lutwidge has more than one syllable. Why not think of a one-syllable middle name and work backward? If we want to consider American Presidents, we can start with the letter’s.’ You can’t be more one-syllable than a single letter. Well, it was Harry S Truman; and the S was just S and stood for nothing. Every schoolchild has heard of Harry S Truman, but how many of them know S doesn’t stand for anything?”

  Drake said, “For that matter, every schoolchild knows Jimmy Carter; but his name really is James Earl Carter, Jr. The schoolchildren don’t know about Earl, and that’s one-syllable.”

  Washburn said, “You still have a million answers, and you don’t have one.”

  Trumbull suddenly roared out angrily, “Damn it to hell, gentlemen, you’re leaving out the third and crucial clue. I’m sitting here waiting for one of you to realize this fact, and you just run around in solemn pedantic circles.”

  “What third clue, Tom?” asked Avalon quietly.

  “You need a one-syllable middle name; that’s one. You need that rigmarole about schoolchildren; that’s two. And you have the fact that the woman said that the puzzle was intended to indicate whether Washburn was a man she could live with. That’s three. It means that the puzzle must somehow involve male chauvinism, since the woman is an ardent feminist. The implication is that a male chauvinist, such as she firmly believes Washburn to be, would not get the answer.”

  Rubin said, “Good Lord, Tom, you’ve made sense. What next? Don’t tell me you’ve worked out the answer, too.”

  Trumbull shook his head. “Not exactly, but I suggest we confine ourselves to women’s names. A feminist would argue that many women have played important roles in history but that male chauvinism tends to blot them out. Therefore every schoolchild should know them, but doesn’t.”

  Halsted said, “No, Tom. That’s not the clue. It’s not something every schoolchild should know but doesn’t. It’s something every schoolchild knows and doesn’t. That’s different.”

  “Besides,” said Rubin, “even if we confine ourselves to women, we have no clear route to the answer. If we stick to historic feminists, for instance, we have Susan Brownell Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Helen Gurley Brown, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan—who’s got a one-syllable middle name?”

  Drake said, “It needn’t be a feminist.” His little eyes seemed to peer thoughtfully into the middle distance. “It might just be a woman who contributed to history—like the one who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and helped cause the Civil War, as Lincoln said.”

  “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” said Rubin impatiently, “and Beecher has two syllables.”

  “Yes,” said Drake, “but I merely mentioned it as an example. What about the woman who wrote ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ Julia Ward Howe? How many syllables in Ward?”

  Avalon said, “How is that something every schoolchild knows and yet doesn’t know?”

  Drake said, “Every schoolchild knows, ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’ and yet doesn’t know the author, because she’s a woman. At least that’s what a feminist might claim.”

  There was a confused outcry of objections, and Avalon’s deep voice suddenly rose into an overtopping bellow, “How about Little Women, which was written by Louisa May Alcott? Which would the answer be: Ward or May?”

  Washburn suddenly cut in sharply, “Neither one.”

  Drake said, “Why not? How do you know?”

  Washburn said, “Because she sent me what she said was the answer when she wrote to say she was married. And it isn’t either Ward or May.”

  Rubin said indignantly, “You’ve withheld information, sir.”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Washburn. “I didn’t have that information when I tried to get the answer, and now that I have it, I still don’t see why. I think she just chose an answer at random as a continuing part of her intention of making me feel like an idiot.

  “Nor will I give you the solution now, since you’ll be able to dream up a reason once you have the name, and that’s not good. The point is to be able to get a solution and reason it out without knowing the answer in advance—though she did hand me a feminine name. I’ll give Mr. Trumbull that much.”

  Gonzalo said, “If we can reason out the name she gave and tell you what it is and why, will you feel better?”

  Washburn said gloomily, “I think so. At least I might imagine it was a fair test and that I might have had her if I were brighter, and she wasn’t just laughing at me. But can anyone tell me what the middle name is?”

  He looked about the table and met six thoughtful stares.

  Gonzalo said, “Do you have any ideas on the subject, Henry?”

  The waiter, who was removing the brandy glasses, said, quietly, “Unless the middle name in question is Ann, Mr. Gonzalo, I’m afraid I am helpless.”

  Washburn let out an incoherent cry, pushed back his chair with a loud scraping noise, and jumped up.

  “But it is Ann,” he cried out. “How did you come to decide on that? Was it a guess or do you have a reason?”

  He had reached out almost as though he were going to seize Henry by his shoulders and shake the answers out of him, but controlled himself with obvious difficulty.

  Henry said, “The gentlemen of the Black Widowers supplied the pieces, sir. I needed only to put them together. Mr. Rubin said that a middle name might be hidden by a pseudonym, as in the case of Mark Twain. Mr. Trumbull pointed out that feminism was involved. It seemed to me quite possible that at times in history someone who was a woman might hide under a male pseudonym, and I pondered over whether there were such a case in connection with something every schoolchild would know.

  “Surely, one book that schoolchildren have notoriously been required to read for decade after decade has been Silas Marner. Every schoolchild knows it, and the further fact that it was written by George Eliot. It seemed to me, though, that that was a pseudonym. I checked it in the encyclopedia on the reference shelf, while the discussion raged, and I found that Eliot’s real name is Mary Ann Evans.”

  Washburn said, eyes big with wonder, “Then it was a fair question. I’m glad of that. But do you mean that the jerk she married figured it out?”

  Henry said, “He may well have. I think it would be best for you, sir, to believe that he did.”

  12

  Sixty Million Trillion Combinations

  I love to feel ingenious. Suppose you have sixty million trillion possible combinations of letters and from that enormous number you have to choose exactly one. Can you do it?

  Unfortunately, I don’t remember any longer exactly how long it took me to think up the gimmick to this story, but I suspect that, like all such things, it came to me in a flash.

  People ask me, “Where do you get your ideas?” A young man (an aspiring writer) called me from South Dakota last night, thinking that perhaps I had a magic formula I could give him. I said I didn’t. I just thought and thought. The thing is that the thinking goes on unconsciously while I am doing other things and then, apparently out of nowhere, it comes up with something and surfaces.

  Then I feel ingenious and love the story.

  Since it was Thomas Trumbull who was going to act as host for the Black Widowers that month, he did not, as was his wont, arrive at the last minute, gasping for his preprandial drink.

  There he was, having arrived in early dignity, conferring with Henry, that peerless waiter, on the details of the menu for the evening, and greeting each of the others as he arrived.

  Mario Gonzalo, who arrived last, took off his light overcoat with care, shook it gently, as though to remove the dust of the taxicab, and hung it up in the cloakroom. He came back, rubbing his hands, and said, “There’s an autumn chill in the air. I think summer’s over.”

  “Good riddance,” called out Emmanuel Rubin, from where he stood conversing with Geoffrey Avalon and James Drake.

  “I’m not complaining,” called back Gonzalo. Then, to Trumbull, “Hasn’t your guest arrived yet?”

  Trumbull said distinctly, as though tired of explaining, “I have not brought a guest.”

  “Oh?” said Gonzalo, blankly. There was nothing absolutely irregular about that. The rules of the Black Widowers did not require a guest, although not to have one was most unusual. “Well, I guess that’s all right.”

  “It’s more than all right,” said Geoffrey Avalon, who had just drifted in their direction, gazing down from his straight-backed height of seventy-four inches. His thick graying eyebrows hunched over his eyes and he said, “At least that guarantees us one meeting in which we can talk aimlessly and relax.”