Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning
The Twin Who Lived: The Remarkable Tale of Mavis Gallant's Funny Uncle, The Count Paul Anatole Monte of Monte Fiore
“One day, when my mother had taken me on a walk down by a dark green pond, the ghostly form of the old money lender from the middle ages rose up before us.
“Trembling, weeping, my poor mother fell to her knees. ‘I am here to give a gift,’ spoke the spectre of of my ancient ancestor. ‘Shall it be the gift of charm or the gift to get gold?’
“ ‘What is money, when money is the only possession,’ cried my mother. ‘I beseech you, make it the gift of charm.’
“ ‘Very well,’ said the spectre. ‘To Paul Anatole, then the gift of fascination. All maids and matrons who look upon him — all all — shall melt to his charms.’
— Count Paul Anatole Monte of Monte Fiori
I wrote a lot and then I didn’t. Time went by. I didn’t have much to say about Mavis Gallant (MG) for a while. I posted briefly a few days back, on February 18; that was to mark the tenth anniversary of her death. Writing about her again, after an attenuated silence, writing even briefly, set me to thinking some more about how fascinating and complicated a creation she was.
Well who isn’t? you might well ask, and without fear of refutation from this corner.
But MG could lay claim, I daresay, to a past richer than most with kinship complexities, with extravagant, eccentric, and transgressive personalities. I’m speaking matrilineally; about her father’s family, the English family, the Youngs, or De Trafford - Youngs, I don’t know much. About them, and about the circumstances that landed her young father in Montreal, I’m sure there are many compelling tales to tell. It’s the Wiseman family, her mother’s middle-European clan, that have fascinated me. Some of what follows I’ve said before. Some is brand new.
Where to begin, by way of review? How about with this page from the registry of Erskine Presbyterian church in Montreal: October 2, 1921, Albert Stewart Roy de Trafford Young marries Benedictine Wiseman.
A unimpeachable ten months (and change) later, along comes their daughter, Mavis Leslie — Mavis de Trafford, as she’s listed here.
For M. B. Ward (have I got that right? I’m no palaeographer), registering clerk, this would have been very routine. He wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, given a thought to the future, bright or bleak, of every baby whose name he inscribed. He might have said, genially, “Mavis, that’s an unusual name;” he might have wondered if the father, with so many arrows in his nominal quiver, was some kind of aristocrat in the Motherland; and he might have muttered, sotto voce, “Wiseman, Wiseman, Wiseman,” and not necessarily in a way connected to visitors to the stable in Bethlehem. “Benedictine Wiseman. That’s a familiar name, somehow.”
Well.
She’d been in the news.
Again.
I’ve written before — as have others, the discovery wasn’t mine! — about the really astonishing career of MG’s mama, Benedictine. You can easily find the story from 1913 of how Bennie, as she was called, ran away from Montreal, and was found in Toronto, dressed as a boy, going by the name of Jimmy or Jimmie, singing in a club by night, working in a department store by day, and possibly married. To a man. She was apprehended, much interviewed, charged with vagrancy, and sent home. It was an extraordinary tale, salacious, strange, and widely, widely covered. Here’s but one example of the reportage, from the San Francisco Bulletin, October 13, 1913.
Delicious. Irresistible.
They brought her back to Montreal, but she didn’t stay put. Bennie kept busting loose, or so hearsay has it; the record of her escapes is incomplete, fragmentary. There are hints of a Huck Finn-worthy episode where she’s said to have written a play called “The Best and the Worst of It,” for which she put together a touring ensemble of child actors, and they got as far as Miami before being turned back. Highly unlikely, that is, and I can find nothing to substantiate it; still, it’s one of the stories that’s out there, along with the one of her dressing up in male attire and walking through New England, winding up in Portland, Maine, working as a grocery boy or some damned thing before she was apprehended and returned. Then came her last great adventure as a single woman, and this was againwell and widely reported.
Not long before meeting and very quickly marrying Mr. De Trafford Young, see above, Benedictine Wiseman ran away with an American who’d enlisted in the Canadian army and served during the European War. His name was Oren (you also see Orren, or Aurin, but Oren is correct) Robert Earl.
Oren Robert Earl — Bennie called him Bob — was said to have been a boarder in her mother’s house. A great scandal ensued when the pair if illicit lovebirds eloped, owing in large measure to the indignation Bob’s wife expressed on her behalf, and that of their four children. The Ballad of Bennie and Bob — as we might as well call it — is there for anyone who wants to dig into it. My favourite account of the affair — their flight, their discovery, his return to hearth and home, and her imprisonment (four months) — is one that circulated in the English papers. Met in Bookshop! Dressed as Boy Scout! I hope you can take the time to read this. It’s fantastic.
Reading this, someone less bound to the hardtack and factual and empirical than I might speculate that MG — independent, restless, French speaking, reading German, also a certain amount of Russian (night school at McGill during the war) and who listed some of those books as her own childhood favourites — was VERY much her mother’s daughter.
Now, as noted, that story made its way through the English press. It would have been seen by the father of Mavis's father-to-be —and plainly it made an impression because when word came from his remittance man offspring that he’d met the woman he was going to marry, and that her name was Bennie, and etc., the elder Young sent his junior version a warning letter. Did he know what he was in for?
Albert Stewart Roy, taking his father’s cautionary words to heart, did what any obedient son would do: he wrote to the chief of police in Syracuse, New York, asking if there was any truth the to the rumours he’d heard, via his pater familias, about his bride elect and one O. R. Earl with whom she was said to have been living in the nearby woods, and the chief of police advised him to ask his wife, which he’d apparently already done, and she’d said, “Nonsense.”
It was in all in the papers of the day — they loved a scandal in 1921 as much as we love one today — and you can find the details if you look for them. You should. It’s a great story, for all kinds of reason, and a sad one, too. It makes me admire Bennie, I have to say, that she had so much strength of will. Did she ever confess to Mr. Young the details of her dalliance with Mr. Earl? If she did, they worked it out. They married. They had Mavis, the sine qua non of this writing.
I wonder if possibly the classic question of “is there any insanity in the family?” came up as part of the marriage preparation? It would have been an interesting one to consider; it always is, and my guess is that Bennie would have waved it away, much as she did O. R. Earl. Sometimes, the truth is better dealt with by a delicate sidestep.
By way of background to this rather tragic part of the story, let’s remember that the Wisemans came from Romania to Montreal, arriving in 1900. Here’s the page from the 1911 census.
This odd looking document is via ancestry.ca, and I know it’s hard to read. It names Solomon Wiseman as household head, and Rosa (nee Steinmetz) as his wife. Three dependents are listed: Benedictine is the middle child; she’s flanked two brothers, to whom I’ll return. We were speaking on insanity in the family, so, rirst, a note on the father, on Solomon. When the next census came around, in the 1921, some of his details had changed. This following screenshot facsimile is also via ancestry.ca, and I include their helpful, though often inaccurate, rendering of the statistical information into contemporary font.
It’s possible, of course, that this is another Solomon Wiseman, but as the dates match, I’d say chances are better than average that he’s our guy. We note that he’s a resident in the Protestant Hospital for the Insane, in Verdun? What happened to land him there? Perhaps this.
This clipping is from 1919 and it is, of course, as with any story of self-harm, terribly sad; also provocative. What was going on with Solomon? Why was everyone making fun of him? It’s a fear that carries about it the scent of paranoia, of persecution complex. But he might have thought people were pointing at him and staring because of his daughter’s history of running off dressed as a boy and being hauled home by the cops; or perhaps it had something to do with his first-born son, Contantine, to whom we now come, and who had done his own sullying of the family name.
Oh, dear.
I suspect tit for tat was in play here. Constantine, an uncle MG would never have the chance to meet, landed in court because he stole his from his sister — MG’s eventual mother — some clothes and a violin; but then, Bennie had stolen his clothes the year prior when she made her great escape to Toronto. Turn around is fair play.
Poor Constantine! There’s more to the story, about how his parents pressed the law to apprehend him, teach him a lesson and so on. What happened to him, poor guy? Was he incarcerated? If so, it wasn’t for long. One year later:
How did Constantine (Constant, Constantin) die, age 19, on March 1, 1915? Why wasn’t he buried till June 5? And while we’re asking necessary, if awkward, questions, how is it that in the 1911 census, the Wiseman family is listed as “Catholic,” but in the 1921 census, Solomon, confined among “the insane,” is of the tribe of Israel? Was his son’s burial — however it took place — from the Basilique Notre-Dame, a representation of faith or some kind of official expedience? Were the Wisemans Catholics? Or were they — as you might expect, given that you’d be hard-pressed to find a name more classically Semitic that Solomon Wiseman — Jews? Or were they, as seems quite likely, a bit of both, depending on the circumstances and who was gathered at the table? How many families have found a way to make such an accommodation? Why would they not? They were immigrants to a place that was overwhelmingly Catholic. Assimilation was how you got not just by, but ahead. Were their circumstances in Romania more secular than religious? Did it really matter, one way or another, if the picture over the fireplace was Moses or Jesus? Who knows? Who cares?
So, we know about Bennie and Contantine, a little bit. But what about the name listed in the 1911 census as, it seems, their younger brother? Here’s the easily legible transcription, from ancestry.ca, of that 1911 census where the Wisemans (Catholic!) are listed.
You see how annoyingly problematic it is. Wiseman is rendered as Wisseman. Benedictine is Benedietur and is also a son. (Was she cross-dressing? Did she represent herself as a son to the census taker?) And what the hell kind of name is Gaborice, who was 11? I’ve looked far and wide for any trace of sign, without success. Part of the problem is that the name, on the original ledger, in its digital facsimile, is NOT “Gaborice.” That’s a misrendering of whatever the census taker wrote. About “Gaborice” I still need to learn; but the whole reason I’m writing this now is is because of an accidental discovery of yet another sibling: another uncle to MG, and not someone one could easily ignore.
When Benedictine ran away with Oren Robert Earl, and when so many papers, all over North America, covered the story, reporters frequently made inquiries of two of Benedictine’s family members concerning how what course of action thy were taking, and so on. One was Rosa, her mother, who was plainly the rock of the family.The other was N. Wiseman, who was identified in some reports as “an inventor of a safety device for airplanes.” Who on earth was that?
This afternoon, Tuesday February 20, I was talking to a friend who’d known MG well. Unprovoked by me, and with no mention on my part of this mysterious N. Wiseman, this shared friend said something about how she'd been prodded to remember that there’d been a Nicholas Wiseman who was kin to MG, maybe an uncle? Aha. Was this Nicholas Wiseman the N. Wiseman who’d been a spokesman for the clan? I made inquiries via the usual oracles, and lo and behold, there he was, Nicholas Wiseman, in that famous 1911 census, with a variant spelling, of course. Only he’s not living with the rest of Wiseman family. No! Nicky is in the pokey.
The census taker had found Nicholas Wiseman (a Protestant, en plus!) not quite at home but rather resident — I don’t know why and I don’t know for how long — in the Institut Mont St-Antoine, which was a reform school. It was a cheerful looking place.
Poor Solomon! All his clan in trouble with the law. What’ struck me as odd is that in the year of that census, 1911, Nicholas, in the reformatory, was 15, and that was also Constantine’s age. What gives? I believe the answer would be the self-evident one: they were twins. And, in fact, some years later, Nicholas himself would confirm this nifty family tad-bit in one of the many interviews he gave during heyday of his fame which was considerable.
Hold that oddity in mind. All will become clear. Or clear-ish. The point is that, a few hours ago I was looking (and I still am, I guess) for the mysterious Bennie brother whose name was something like Gaborice, and suddenly, via the accident of a conversation with a friend, I found a brother I didn’t know existed. I appreciate that anyone reading this might shrug off my excitement, but for me this was one of those Stanley / Livingstone moments. And not just a brother, but a twin, which is good fodder for those people who are inclined to connect life and art and who might have wondered about MG’s not infrequent, and sometimes creepy, use of twins in her stories, but I’m NOT one of those people, I’m NOT, so let’s move along.
Now, about Nicholas, as it turns out, there is A LOT to say, more than I have time for now, and more than I have space for here. Benedictine was unusual, for sure, but she paled in the unbelievably strange sun of her brother, the twin who lived, who’s been out there hiding in plain sight all this time, and about whom I’m only just learning. Here’s a bit of what I’ve garnered.
For one thing, he was married. He was elastic enough with his Protestantism that he agreed to a Jewish ceremony, as noted below. (And again, we find the inconsistencies that are the bane of this kind of research; Rosa Shimetz, listed below, is Rosa Steinmetz, his mother, MG’s maternal grandmother.)
Paul and Esther Trachtenber were married — mazel tov! — and they had a child, Miriam. Like many Canadians in those days when borders were porous and citizens moved easily between Canada and the U. S. they made their way to “the Boston states,” lived in Lynn, Mass.. and, eventually, were divorced. The years prior to their split-up were, un, eventful. The clipping below is from 1928 — it was published on February 18, the date on which MG would die 86 years later — and in it, Esther is named as Estelle. Always, the names so fluid! Always, so many mistakes!
Strange, no? The minor shift from Esther to Estelle is nothing compared to the tectonic gap separating Nicholas Wiseman from Count Paul Monte, which is who MG’s uncle became, in his own mind, not long after her birth in 1922. (There’s no reason to suspect a cause / effect relationship!) Somehow, as now and again happens, a Canadian of Romanian birth, working in a shoe store, managed to convince himself, and a remarkable number of women, that he was of French nobility. The story is vast, operatic. Here are a few headlines that hint at the breadth of it.
There is so much more. I wish I could tell you all. I wish I knew it all! In a couple of hours, my Covid having been quelled, I’m going to Palm Springs, of all places, to spend a happy few days with the in-laws. While there, assuming they have wifi by the pool — somehow, I suspect they do — I’ll do some more digging and tell the story of Nicholas more fully and lucidly. My question for now is — WHY DON’T WE ALL KNOW THIS ALREADY? It was always there. The uncle of one of the world’s greatest writers in English was a first class con artist, a playboy, a deceiver, a rogue, and, it seems, a bigamist. Trigmaist, even.
About her family, MG was reluctant to speak. Questions from journalists about her mother she shut down, as during this on-stage interview in San Francisco.
Anyone born into the kind of family like that where Benedictine and her siblings were raised — deracinated, loud, disputatious, forever feuding and testing the margins of propriety — is landed with a choice: you either celebrate their weirdness and occasional criminality, perpetuate the stories of their adventures, their peccadilloes, their sometimes sociopathic originality, or you draw a veil, turn your back on the past altogether. Renewal or eschewal —- it’s up to you. MG was a journalist. She knew very well that if the stories about her mother’s cross-dressing adventures, or her grandfather’s suicide attempt, or her wildly inventive Uncle Nicholas, the surviving twin, were known, she would have been constantly, constantly compelled to tell the family story, over and over. It would have driven her crazy. It was not what she wanted. She knew what to do. And she was correct. She got out. To temporal distance, she added the spatial. But she’s safe now from having anything to address or defend, and the story of Uncle Nicholas is plainly very, very rich. It merits telling. And arguably, it has some bearing on The Work. Read MG’s 1960 short story “Rose,” now. You’ll see very clearly that Nicholas — also Miriam, her cousin — are all through it. It is their story, and hers. It is ours.
I’m going to wrap this up with a long transcription — the WORK I do for you, oy! — of a very, very funny piece that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, July 18, 1926. It sums up his career as a Count, cursed by charm and sexual magnetism. It was syndicated, not sure where it started out. As was often the way back then, no byline is attached and that’s a pity. I want, I NEED to know who wrote this, it’s brilliant. I’m sure my secretarial work is flawed, my apologies, but you’ll get the idea. Note that here, too, Esther is called Estelle, and Miriam is also misnamed.
My love to you all. Long live the Count, and viva Regina. Viva MG.
What is there about “Count” Paul Anatole Monte that makes him as irresistible to women as catnip to cats? What is it that makes women reach out for him, pet him, and adore him, and get him in trouble all the time?
Enmeshed in a net whose every strand is blonde, the count says he mourns the outcome of a curse visited upon him by an ancient ancestor who wished upon him the fatal gift of charm. This happened many years ago, and from that moment on Paul Anatole was to blonde women what a steel magnet is to iron filings. Gentlemen prefer blondes, but Paul goes much further than that — he can't resist ‘em, nor they him, so he says.
Alas that the shoe-store in which he was forced for a time to engage in common toil was not a shoe store for men only! No environment so deadly for a charming man as that wherein, daily, he sits at the feet of women, many of them blondes, and fits sleek boots. The pay was small — $25 per week — but the peril great.
Count Monte, involuntary male siren, would never have lowered himself to become a shoe-clerk where it not for certain temporary lapses along financial lines. And a shoe-horn was just another trumpet of doom. He fitted tan shoes to the feet of a blonde woman, and his fate got him again.
Subsequently, in jail in Staten Island, in jail in Boston, the blonde skeletons of the past rapping the bars of his cells, Count Monte had ample time in which to contemplate his past. He could mull over in his dear thoughts the circumstances wherein Mrs. Estelle Wiseman, of Winthrop, Mass, nee Trachtenberg, with her sudden claim of being a deserted wife and mother, added still another woe to the many under which his spirit bent. Not content with causing his arrest on a charge of abandonment, Mrs. Wiseman, who scorns the title of Countess Monte, insists that Paul Anatole is not the son of the Marquis of Monte Fiore, as he proudly claims. His real name, the blonde wife declares, is Nicholas Wiseman, and she says, he is only a good shoe-clerk gone wrong.
Oh, fate, blondine fate! This of a man who married, it has said, three women, made love to a beautiful blonde mother, and courted the blonde daughter of said mother, the while fascinating a blonde actress. And was it not an ironic gesture of destiny that Paul Anatol should be arrested in the company of still another beautiful blonde? Were fate a brunette, she would not have pursued and persecuted the Count of Monte Fiore, human quicksand or susceptible blondes.
Seadfastly, Paul Anatole denies that he is the Mortimer Paul Montefiore who, on February 22nd, 1921, was married to the exceedingly blonde Miss Merle E. Supp at Fort Sim, Houston, Tex., by the Rev. G. E. Wilson, Chaplin of the Sixteenth United States Cavalry.
Mournfully he disclaims being the Bruce Whiteman, who sometime later in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, at Quebec, was joined in holy matrimony by Father Alphonse Gognon (sic) to Helen de la Garde of Shippingan (sic), N. B, although he does admit having lived with the blonde Canadian. There is a child, and although he declares he is not positive he is the father of it, he has told the authorities he is willing to pay a reasonable amount for its support.
In an apartment in New York, neatly arranged on several wardrobes and closets, were the sixty odd suits, representing an investment of over six-thousand dollars, with which the count, in happier days, was won’t to adorn himself. There was a little notebook, ruled off by days in which he kept a schedule of his daily attire. If, on Monday, Paul Anatole put on his suit of grey-green and his purple-clocked battleship-grey silk socks, then on Tuesday he must wear his outfit of a tan the hue of a Nubian lion's skin, and his amber socks. On Wednesday something in black, for contrast, with shoes to match, and so on throughout the week. For two months at a time, the Count could wear a different frame for that charm, which would, no doubt, have been just as potent in denim.
Where the money came from to purchase all this apparel, together with wine-colored cravats and rings to match each change of garb, and a dove-colored roadster, and many other expensive things, Paul Anatole does not divulge. Open and frank he is, indeed, about his charm, but most secretive about the source of his income.
But what good all these suits, socks, cravias, and rings, when he was in jail? In the caboose at Staten Island he languished, knowing that soon he would be extradited to Boston, scene of his earlier triumphs and struggles. It was in Boston, living in a modest little apartment with his wife and their little daughter, Marie, in the quiet little suburb of Winthrop, the Count Monte was forced to accept employment in a shoe-store.
Of this period of his life, the Count had this to say while in his Staten Island cell.
“I had made the great error. In Montreal I had met Estelle. She had hair like the Sahara sands, when the sun burnishes them a dull gold. I did not make love to Estelle. I made love to love. But she thought I meant her. We were married shortly after. I cursed the curse of my ancestor, who have bequeathed me my legacy of charm. But of that later.”
Mrs. Wiseman took the subsequent departure of her husband with a philosophical calm.
"What's the use?" she queried. “The women kept chasing him. Particularly, the blondes. And he couldn't resist them, any more than they could resist him. He comes from good, honest people, not royalty. His father was Solomon Wiseman, of Montreal. The trouble with Nicholas is that he just won't work. I guess I did my part to spoil him, manicuring his fingernails, pressing his clothes, babying him. Oh, he has charm no doubt of it.”
But to return to the mournful story of the Count:
“I did not breathe a word against Estelle. She was an amiable wife, a good mother; but a routine soul with hours set aside for everything, for eating, for sleeping, for going to the movies. Her routine wore me out. We grew apart. My money began to vanish, and I was forced to go to work. I, Count Paul Anatole Monte, son of a French marchioness, whose name for reasons of familial devotion I abstain from mentioning, secured a job in a shoe store.”
In his recital, the count seemed overcome by the memory of those cruel days. Yet the shoe-store was more than a mere shoe-store. It was the avenue which led to high emprise. It was that very shoe store which Mrs. Elinor Grover, wife of Linden V. Grover, millionaire shoe manufacturer, selected to buy a new pair of shoes. Fitting her, Paul Anatole neglected to look upward, neglected to observe that the customer was a blonde.
“I might have known,” he sighed. :Mrs. Grover was suffering from a slightly falling arch. I found for her the correct orthopedic at last. As long as I was there, you know, I took an interest in my work. I tried to make an art of it. The shoe fitted perfectly. Mrs. Grover complimented me. In the sheer joy of the artist, I kissed her ankle, and she patted my head.”
Count Monte became a frequent caller at the home of the Grovers. Indeed, in time, he became almost a member of the family. Mrs. Grover had an attractive daughter by a former marriage, Dorothy Cleveland, by name, a girl of twenty with hair the colour of pale honey. It was not long before Mr. Grover, suing his wife for divorce, mentioned Count Monte as the cause of it all.
“What a contretemps!” sighed the Count. “What a mess. He accused me of taking a steamer ride with his wife. He brought up a pajama party at a summer camp in Casco Bay, Me. And yet he must have known that Dorothy and I were engaged.
“Ah, that suit. It was crippling. At times I thought my spirit was hopelessly broken, but I managed to outlive it. I outlived the implication that Dorothy Cleveland and her mother fought over me as dogs fight over a bone. When it was all over, and I was acquitted, I made up my mind I would steer clear of blondes for the rest of my life.”
But then he met Miss Juanita Hansen, the movie actress. This blonde chapter in the blonde tragedy of his life, the Count prefers to pass over as briefly as possible. They were reported engaged, despite the previous engagement to Miss Cleveland. But this romance was short-lived, wrecked on the race course at Belmont Park.
Said the Count with a weary smile:
“Again, the golden smile of a blonde woman lured me to my destruction. She liked to bet on the horses, and yet she wanted to bet with my money. She looked at me with her pale smile, and always she selected blonde horses for me to bet on. I bet on Nelly Girl, and Wimple Dimple, and Sorry Maggie, and other equine blondes. My last dollar, I bat on those horses whose hides were the shade of pre-war Pilsner. I bet my fur coats — the sable I wear when my mood is exotic, the raccoon I don when I am impatient with my fate, the Astrakhan to remind me of old days in Brittany — all those I gambled, and when my last dollar was gone we parted.”
But there was solace. In New York, he met the eligible daughter of a wealthy family of New Drop, Staten Island. Her hair was the color of angel cake. Life was beginning to look rosy again when the arrest of the Count spoiled everything for him, but saved her.
The cruel blow came just as the Count with the charming young Staten Island heiress on his arm, was entering a theatre.
In appearance, the count does not give the impression of an accomplished Don Juan. And, indeed, he denies that he is one. It is just that he is irresistible to women. Real emotion was in his voice as he made the amazing explanation —
“My poor young mother, the marchioness, was as unhappy as she was beautiful. Her match with the stern old Marquis, my father, had not been a love match. We had an old family estate in romantic, ghost-ridden Brittany. It was there my mother lived many months of the year when I was a little fellow. It was an estate haunted by the ghost of the founder of our line. He had been a money-lender before he was ennobled.
“One day, when my mother had taken me on a walk down by a dark green pond, the ghostly form of the old money lender from the middle ages rose up before us.
“Trembling, weeping, my poor mother fell to her knees. ‘I am here to give a gift,’ spoke the spectre of of my ancient ancestor. ‘Shall it be the gift of charm or the gift to get gold?’
“ ‘What is money, when money is the only possession,’ cried my mother. ‘I beseech you, make it the gift of charm.’
“ ‘Very well,’ said the spectre. ‘To Paul Anatole, then the gift of fascination. All maids and matrons who look upon him — all all — shall melt to his charms.’
“With that, my ancestor’s ghost disappeared and my troubles began. The fatal gift was bestowed upon me. As my charm for women grew, so grew for me the deadliness of blondes.
“You see,” concluded Count Paul Anatole Monte of Monte Fiore, Winthrop and Staten Island, “to what it has led me?”
These words were spoken from his cell in the Staten Island jail before he was taken to Boston.
“An army of blonde women,” he lamented, “have loved me, and each of them has brought me danger and disaster. You have heard my story. Am I to blame because I am fascinating, irresistible to women? Am I to blame because blonde creatures have always been my ruin and my misfortune?
“I say no. My charm is a heritage. It is my fate. Who can escape his destiny?”
Oy, the work you do for us, indeed! So glad to have you back, even though it means picturing you Palm Springs poolside and us here, knee-deep in snow.
I think you’ve got a one-man show just in this submission alone. I know you can memorize every word -so that will be no problem. Of course, perhaps it’s several one-man shows because you have to give Mavis her due …. So glad you’re feeding us again.