The dog who didn’t speak much (2/3)

More family games for rainy days

Remember that it’s still the 80’s, so when the phone rings, I hurry to pick up the handset from the wall. No sound.

“Go to hell,” I say, and hang up.

“Not so fast,” says a voice in my head, “I’m Angela Hoenikker.”

And there she is. Miss Hoenikker is a striking doppelgänger of Franny Berry, I swear, a nice-looking slender girl from the same casting book. Franny looks at her in bewilderment.

“Don’t be shy, sweetie,” says Angela. “I can explain everything.”

“Are we twin sisters?” asks Franny.

“That’s the silliest thing! Look at you! I’m older than you, babe. You’re looking good but you’re no more than a mirror image, from every side, a complete reversal. Do you hear me?”

“What’s wrong with you?” says Franny. “Am I touching a sore spot?”

“Please, let me take the investigation from there,” I say. “Eighteen years after Vonnegut, Irving writes about Frank, John and Franny. He doesn’t use the name Angela. He calls her Franny. So, the question is, miss, why is it that Vonnegut must call you Angela in the first place?”

“This is ridiculous! My name? OK, just so you know, it comes from Angelia, a Greek goddess who rules the underworld,” says Angela.

“No wonder you’re being rude,” says Franny. “And still, we look so much alike…”

“You don’t understand,” says Angela. “I’m sentenced to go freeze in hell.”

For me, there’s one clear thing about their resemblance. Angela is the original blueprint for Franny, period. But why should she come forward and spill the beans like that? Could she be suffering from the same trouble as Franny Berry?

“Now that you know about Kurt’s novel,” says Angela, “I expect that you’ll drop your infringement investigation right away.”

“You expect?” I say. “Sorry, miss, the evidence is just blinding, like 100% pure pepper spray to me.”

“Are you deaf, too? There’s no infringement.”

“I can see that plagiarism is flattering you,” I say.

“This has nothing to do with me, dummy. Kurt never sued Irving.”

“These things take time, you know. I’ve just started gathering the facts.”

“You mean, you can’t see Kurt in Iowa Bob? I don’t believe it.”

“If you say so, fine, it’s one more smoking gun.”

“No, no, no, you’re not getting away by being obtuse. You should do your research. Have you? Oh, I don’t think so… OK, here’s what you have to do, Mr. Archivist. Go to your library and search the New York Times archives for Vonnegut AND Irving together. Then you’ll learn once and for all that John Irving is at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for two years, from 1965 to 1967, under the sweet rule of Meister Vonnegut himself. Writing coach, wrestling coach, get it?”

“You’re sure he really knows about this prank?” asks Franny.

“He’s smiling like the Cheshire cat,” says Angela.

I don’t like it when a character tries to fool me like this. Angela Hoenikker plays cat-and-mouse on a championship level, and she just throws me into a mousetrap. She’s not reluctant to talk, only a bit defensive-aggressive on the edge. All she wants is to protect Kurt, but from what?

Could it be?…

What if Kurt can’t complain to John because the Hoenikkers are not his in the first place? That would explain everything.

“You mean I’m a fake, too?” asks Angela.

“I know, it hurts,” says Franny. “But look at me now. I’m a second-generation fake and I don’t cry.”

I should be elated by the discovery that Franny and Angela are both avatars from an unknown source, but I feel the opposite, exhausted. Instead of opening new vistas before me, I find myself stuck in a complete dead-end. It makes no difference to the girls. I failed them both. As I cannot ask them to leave my mind, I set up a special place in there where they can meet alone. They can roam anywhere, I don’t care.

Years come and go, and the girls get along pretty well by now.

For me, I had to learn some new skills to keep up with my job. I’m now unmovable since I’m the only one who can retrieve data from password-protected hard drives, so it keeps me busy once in a while at the firm.

Time goes by without any newsworthy clue catching my eye to help me in Franny’s investigation.

In 1985, Robert Zemeckis directs “Back to the Future”, revisiting Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” for a new generation of unsuspecting fans. Of course, nobody cares. This all-time hit is in the public domain.

In 1990, Tim Burton releases “Edward Scissorhands”, a character depicted in “Der Struwwelpeter”, a children’s book written in 1845 by Heinrich Hoffmann, psychiatrist. Hoffmann’s work is in the public domain, so there’s no ground for infringement.

In 1999, the Wachowskis disturb the box office with “The Matrix”, a dystopia described by Stanislaw Lem in “The Futurological Congress” (1971). Fictional topics are not protected by copyright laws, and no one is hurt.

Then, in 2007, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. dies at 85, taking his secret with him. If only I could prove that he borrowed his characters from the public domain, free of charge, I could tell Franny and Angela to stop worrying about infringement.

“Good luck with that,” says Angela.

“We’ll help you,” says Franny.

In 2014, the Archives Room is my personal playground. It’s now well equipped with the latest in obsolete technologies, from tablets to smartphones, and so on. I still have plenty of free time. So, one night, I turn on the TV to a special PBS airing of Shane Salerno’s documentary, “Salinger” (2013). Salinger dies in 2010. This looks like an interesting tribute.

As the film tells more and more about Salinger’s works, Franny and Angela are ecstatic and I don’t know what to expect next because I’ve never read a single page of Salinger in my whole life in Montreal, believe me. It takes these girls only a flash to see through the whole family charade.

“First clue: her name is Franny,” says Angela.

“That’s me. Second clue: Seymour is a soldier.”

“That’s the uniform. Third clue: the quiz show, It’s a Wise Child.”

“That’s our curse. We’re the Glass family!”

Wow, tomorrow I’m recording the rerun on VHS because right now I can’t follow their line of thought, even with close captioning on. Franny and Angela are playing hand claps on the sofa, and I’m certainly blessed to be their friend because without them I would have been as blind and deaf as any other lost soul on Earth.

Let’s see what we have here. Les and Bessie Glass are vaudeville artists who have seven children: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey and Franny. The Glass series talks about their lives, written from different points of view, like a dazzling house of mirrors. The stories are set over short time spans, interconnecting slowly to form a super deluxe thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box. Jerome D. Salinger writes all these stories between 1948 and 1965. “Franny” first appears in 1955, and again in 1961. Then in 1965, Salinger stops publishing–he’s frozen in time–leaving The New Yorker magazine orphaned behind him.

“Actually,” says Franny Glass, “Bill Maxwell totally supports him, and he is his editor, you know.”

Franny Glass is so self-confident, she thinks she doesn’t need any introduction. Let me help her. To this day, Miss Glass is still making a profitable career in printed books as THE nice-looking slender girl. She has never been pictured on glossy covers but, nevertheless, she works a lot for her publishers. A proficient polyglot, she speaks almost every language you can think of.

She also likes to make me feel that she knows everyone in the publishing trade, and I don’t. Let’s put her to the test.

“Is it true that your character–Franny–is responsible for Salinger quitting the business?” I ask.

“Nonsense,” she says, “Jerry would never write a lie about me. Seymour goes to war and kills himself soon after his return. I try to relieve my pain with religion, to no avail. It didn’t please everyone, apparently.”

“Exactly,” I say. “Kurt and Jerry both know war from personal experience. So, what’s the point about religion?”

“It makes matters worse,” she says, “and I’m telling you from personal experience. Anyway, Jerry didn’t try to make sense of war. Any meaning would make the next war even more compelling. That’s why Seymour must commit suicide. He can’t carry on. And I can’t agree more.”

“Just like Kurt,” says Angela, “it’s self-destruction on a bigger scale. He destroys the whole planet to make the exact same point.”

“No wonder he couldn’t call you Franny in 1963,” I say. “Readers would have made the connection.”

“But if that’s true,” says Franny Berry, “we now have a real infringement case with Vonnegut picking up Salinger’s work right under his nose.”

“No, no, no, it’s totally different,” says Angela, “they just appear closer in retrospect.”

I can’t lie to myself like Angela does. Franny is right. J.D. Salinger is well known for suing infringers when it comes to his work. Writing in secret for years, he even managed to protect the Glass characters as his own. Now that he has died, I’m not sure I want to pit the Salinger and Vonnegut estates against each other like cats and dogs.

“What I can’t figure out,” says Franny Berry, “is why Jerry didn’t sue Kurt in the first place?”

“Perhaps,” says Franny Glass, “perhaps he’s the one using a public domain source?”

There we go again. Infinite regression. Oh girls, you have no idea where this will take you. It’s been thirty years since I met Franny and Angela for the first time, and I was stuck down the rabbit hole for the most part of the investigation. Now, you want to dig even deeper? No thanks! Count me out! I’m going to rest in my armchair and watch tenderly over you.

This time, the girls are taking complete control of the situation room. Here’s what they do best, removing all tables and chairs from the place and piling them up in the hallway, spilling the thousand-piece puzzle on the rug and trying to put it back together. They’ll have to be unearthly wise to find any clue in this mess.

“Get out of the way, we have work to do.”

“Go fetch some hot chocolates, will you?”

After a few hours, they call me back in to show me my whiteboard with sticky notes on it, lots of scribblings and heavy marker lines crossing in all directions.

“Girls? Next time you go erasing my whiteboard, just ask me, please?”

They don’t even care to notice me. I could as well be speaking to myself. They didn’t bother to draw perfectly straight lines either, but they tried their best to fit three columns on one side of the board. In the first column, the larger one, they listed all the Berry children’s names: Frank, John, Franny, then small Lilly and tiny Egg. Then all the Hoenikkers in a second, narrower column: John (not a Hoenikker, but so what!), Angela, Franklin, and small Newt. The Glasses are all jumbled in the last column because there’s no more room to breathe in there. My first impression? If this were a wedding seating plan, there would be a food fight before the end of the night.

“We can all hear you loud and clear. Do you think it’s funny?”

Franny Glass pushes the whiteboard aside, revealing my desktop computer and flat screen sitting nervously on top of a rickety rolling cart.

“Oops, didn’t ask, sorry…”

This is getting more graphic. On screen, there’s a police lineup wall with the silhouettes of each character from each family, ordered by decreasing age. The white backdrop has evenly spaced black horizontal lines and a height scale on each side. There are seven children in the Glass family, and they fit perfectly under a slanting red line running atop of their heads.

There are five Berry children. So, between Franny and Lilly, the girls left two empty places. The Hoenikkers are four, counting John, so between Franklin and Newt, two empty places, followed by Newt and a final blank spot. It all fits neatly together.

“See these missing spots? That’s for the ghost characters. There should be seven children in each family,” says Franny Berry.

The full cast of Glasses is hard to put together in a single frame, let alone in a single story. It’s only for convenience that Vonnegut and Irving crafted smaller subsets for themselves. And here’s how they did it.

Seymour is the soldier, Franny the wisest and Buddy the narrator. These three stand behind Frank, Franny, and John. Lilly and Newt, respectively writer and painter, are paired with Zooey, the actor. Egg is the mate of Walter Glass who dies young in Japan. The two missing ghosts are Boo Boo, the only one to bear kids, and Walter’s twin, the Carthusian monk called Waker.

“Well done, Franny, but what makes you think that the Glasses come from another source?” I ask.

“It’s a secret,” she says, “I cannot share what Jerry wrote since 1965.”

“You know nothing, and you know it!” says Angela.

“Say what you want, I’m not spoiling it.”

That’s fair enough. No spoilers. I respect that. This leaves me with fewer choices. That’s not bad for an investigation running on a shoestring budget.

All I have to do is search for a fictitious family of seven siblings. Filtering the results for exactly five boys and two girls. Where there’s one and only one set of twins. Oh, and they must be born of vaudeville actors, an absolute prerequisite. And all of them must be very precocious kids, too wise for their own good, so they would all long to live ordinary lives, but life would have it otherwise for them.

Let me tell you this. I tried many versions of this query on several web search engines myself, hoping that I would get a crisp answer in no buzzing time, but the result has always been zilch, in even less time. Too many parameters. What I really need here is a pattern recognition network, something more like an organic brain. Hey, I already have my own and three more in my head. We could do this together, right?

“See, there’s a picture emerging,” says Franny Glass.

I’m afraid I can’t see it, yet. Whatever it is, that puzzle, Salinger made sure to throw the box cover away.

A 3-part series:

Part 1/3: A copyright scene investigation

Part 2/3: More family games for rainy days

Part 3/3: The Salinger code