L. Dudley Fitzgibbon believed in proper dress, proper behavior, and proper respect for station and class. He was no democrat, God forbid, though part of his code of genteelness incorporated the ancient notion of noblesse oblige toward what he would call the unlettered masses. L. Dudley Fitzgibbon also was a stickler for proper grammar and diction, a person who never descended to the vulgarity of even colloquial familiarity, to say nothing about slang and sundry neologisms. The horrid leveling tendency of the modern world, he maintained, came about when the first man in medieval England was so negligent of the mother tongue, so inimical to good breeding, that he began using can't instead of cannot, you're instead of you are, and there's instead of there is . Imagine his surprise one morning, then, when his wife of thirty five years rose from the breakfast table with her face expressing a mixture of surprise and delight, and going to the window, exclaimed, "Why, Dudley, there's a peregrine falcon in the pear tree!"
"There are," corrected L. Dudley Fitzgibbon, doubly shocked at what he perceived to be an error of grammatical number in addition to the breach of proper diction in the contraction. "There are a pair of green falcons in the pear tree, my dear."
"But honeybunch," cried she of thirty five years duration, now with her nose pressed to the glass and her eyes riveted on the falcon, and so excited as to be positively in danger of appearing vulgar, "a peregrine falcon is a kind of bird — a rare and magnificent one. There is a peregrine falcon in the pear tree."
His error pointed out to him, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon bowed deeply to his wife and apologized. "How delightful, my dear," he said in an effort to gracefully share her enthusiasm as a sign of respect (though you may be sure he would not split an infinitive in describing his behavior).
This incident is just one small example of L. Dudley Fitzgibbon doing the gentlemanly thing. In a world of uncertainty and flux, one thing alone could be depended on, and that was that never could it be said that L. Dudley Fitzgibbon was not always unerringly gracious and excruciatingly correct. Among his friends and acquaintances he was the final arbiter on any question of propriety. If a friend's daughter wanted to bring her black lesbian roommate home for the holidays, the friend would call L. Dudley Fitzgibbon to inquire about the proper sleeping arrangements. If a neighbor needed to know what kind of sympathy card would be appropriate to send a Christian Scientist whose child had died from his refusal to allow a blood transfusion, he asked L. Dudley Fitzgibbon. The same was true for questions concerning everything from the proper placement of silverware at a formal dinner party to what to do if you came home early to find the wife in bed with the UPS man making an unauthorized delivery. So proficient and so excruciatingly correct was L. Dudley Fitzgibbon, that the bookstore in the suburb in which he was domiciled stopped carrying etiquette books. It had been fifteen years since last it had sold one.
On those rare occasions when someone would treat his dedication to proper behavior with levity, saying for instance that such enslavement to mere forms was inane and pointless, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon would peer over his black rimmed glasses perched on his aquiline Anglo-Norman nose and smile good-humoredly (for that too was the mark of a gentleman) while explaining that in his considered judgment the rules of etiquette and proper behavior, far from being useless and inane, were what separated us from the beasts. "It is what allows us to live together in harmony. It is the glue that cements society together. Without courtesy life would indeed be short, nasty and brutish. No, no," he would end with a dramatic and dismissive wave of the hand, "as for me, I would rather be imprisoned for life than for one moment to be thought incorrect."
Now every day at precisely one o'clock L. Dudley Fitzgibbon took a constitutional. So regular was its appointed rounds and so precise their chronology, that the people of his town found themselves in the enviable position of the good burghers of Königsberg back in the days when Immanuel Kant would cogitate a-foot with such Teutonic precision that they would set their watches to his itinerary. Similarly, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon would pass the Episcopal church at 1:14, the historical society at 1:21, the north corner of the town common at 1:30, and arrive at Mac's Newsstand to buy his afternoon paper at 1:35. On the same day as the little misunderstanding concerning the peregrine falcon, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon was sallying forth in his usual fashion and was just approaching the north end of the common when he espied a woman resting in an automobile. In itself there was nothing extraordinary about this. Gentlemen and ladies alike often parked by the commons at the lunch hour and some of them would even rest their eyes for a few moments -- a practice L. Dudley Fitzgibbon had never entirely condoned, but which had become widespread enough that one could hardly be singled out for a breach of propriety for indulging it.
But something did not look right about this woman. It wasn't her appearance — she wore a silk blouse and her necklace of genuine pearls marked her as a lady of distinction — but for one thing, her head was not in a position of repose; rather it appeared to be slumped over the steering wheel. Moreover, her left hand, which was resting on the bottom of the open window, appeared to clench and unclench spasmodically. L. Dudley Fitzgibbon, regarding the woman while not breaking stride, was confronted with a dilemma: her behavior suggested that she might be in the throes of a seizure and in need of help, while on the other hand it was a fundamental tenet of his code that it was impolite to stare, and it went without saying that one simply did not meddle in the affairs of another person. Even with the car now, and with these two conflicting ideas bouncing like ping pong balls from one end of his mind to the other, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon panicked. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second all hung in the balance, but during that moment of moral abeyance, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon looked ahead of him to perceive a hundred or so paces ahead another gentleman (he wore a bowtie, a sure sign) strolling toward him, and this piece of intelligence determined his course of action: L. Dudley Fitzgibbon walked on. Etiquette and breeding are only operative, being correct or incorrect can only occur, in the presence of another; society is the presence of a witness, and so L. Dudley Fitzgibbon, ever the quintessential social creature, concentrated all his attention into how he would greet this oncoming gentleman. His reading of the countenance told him a curt but polite "good day" together with a slight nod would be the appropriate greeting. This maneuver he effected at five paces after making eye contact (the proper distance, the proper procedure, should you wish to know). As for the other gentleman, had he closely been regarding our hero (a doubtful proposition) he would have noticed at most the merest hesitancy in L. Dudley Fitzgibbon's gait as he passed the car — rather as if one had varied his stride to avoid stepping on some unmentionable substance in one's path. But judging from the quick and careful perusal of his watch, that gentleman's main concern was checking the accuracy of his timepiece. Appearing satisfied, he crossed the street and went on his way as L. Dudley Fitzgibbon proceeded to Mac's Newsstand. There L. Dudley Fitzgibbon momentarily debated retracing his steps instead of returning home via his usual route of Ashberry Street and past the public library, but he had never done that before and couldn't bring himself to break new ground now. Besides, he reasoned, it was only his imagination, overwrought from being found to be in error about the peregrine falcon earlier this morning, that caused his dark moment of doubt and confusion. He was sure now that the lady was merely resting.
That night he and his wife gave a dinner party for the man who succeeded L. Dudley Fitzgibbon as president of the bank when he opted for early retirement and the gentlemanly life of leisure, and in being perfectly correct for four hours (a skill which, you may be sure, even in long practitioners of the art took total concentration), the matter of the woman in the parked automobile slipped his mind. He was a little bothered in bidding his guests good-night that one of them, a neighbor and a widow, addressed him by his first name even though they had only known one another for ten years, and in turning over the possible impropriety in his mind before drifting off to the shores of Lethe, he had no further occasion to remember the momen
t of awkward uncertainty during his constitutional.
At breakfast next morning, however, the world treated L. Dudley Fitzgibbon most rudely. He was just finishing his poached egg and about to ask his better half to pass the coffee when he turned to the Metro/Region section of the morning paper, and there, with particulars that were unmistakable, was the story of a woman who had died of a cerebral seizure while parked in her car yesterday afternoon. If it is true that horses sweat, men perspire, but ladies only glow, then L. Dudley Fitzgibbon became three creatures in one in that instant, sweating, perspiring, and glowing up a storm on the outside while a damp, clammy fog gripped the cockles of his heart on the inside. His mind, like a car with the clutch disengaged, raced with no where to go, and his heart thumped at such a prodigious rate that L. Dudley Fitzgibbon thought that only a primal scream of anguish would release him. But you must never underestimate the power of proper breeding. We shall get no primal screams from L. Dudley Fitzgibbon. Like a gentleman, he sat there and said nothing then and nothing for the remainder of his life about this incident. Its only effect on his wife was to puzzle her for ever after as to why on earth L. Dudley Fitzgibbon arose from the breakfast table without saying "excuse me." In their thirty-five years of perfectly correct life together, that was the first and only time she had ever witnessed such a breach of decorum. If anything, however, she was secretly pleased to see that her man was not perfect. It made him seem more human to her, more capable of being loved. Perhaps that is why they lived happily ever after.
The Reminder
A Modern Fable