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  “Can we spend tomato soup, Matt?” Hawkeye asked.

  “The bequest was in the form of cash,” Matthew Q. Framingham said. One of Mr. Framingham’s problems, which is rather common among his peer group, is that he takes what other people say quite literally.

  “I thought Fosberry died five years ago,” Trapper John replied.

  “Indeed, he did,” Matthew said. “Fellow Fosberry went to the Great Seminar in the Sky five years, two months and four days ago, to be precise.”

  “Then why did it take so long to get the money?” Trapper asked.

  “His widow and female offspring went to the courts in a rather shoddy attempt to have him declared non compos mentis and the will invalid,” Matthew Q. Framingham said.

  “Why shoddy, Matthew?” Hawkeye asked.

  “Her position was that any man who would leave the vast bulk of his estate to an organization that she described as ‘the last unashamed bastion of male chauvinism’ was, de facto, non compos mentis. But she went too far. She also pleaded abject poverty. She and both daughters showed up in court wearing rags. I thought our cause, however noble, doomed for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “The probate judge was a woman,” Matthew said.

  “Well, what happened?”

  “The court held, in a brief summation, that the widow and the female offspring had enough money both to maintain their present life-style, that is to say, the three houses, the pied-à-terre in Paris, and one of the yachts, and to snare husbands for the daughters. And, so far as the charge of being non compos mentis was concerned, Her Honor held, that was patently absurd. Anyone who established in the same will a scholarship fund for the offspring of underpaid probate judges was not only quite compos, mentally speaking, but a splendid all-around chap who should be allowed to dispose of his hard-earned money in any way he saw fit.”

  “And so we’re flush?”

  “In a manner of speaking, one might indeed say that.”

  “What are you going to do with Fosberry’s money?”

  “Well, some of it will be applied to overdue bills, of course. We really dropped a bundle on the last seminar on ‘The Role of Religion in a Changing Society.’ Just between us, fellows, when Dr. T. Mullins Yancey said that he was going to offer a program on religious prostitution, I thought he was talking about colored slides or, at most, motion pictures.”

  “What did he do? I was in Texas, and didn’t get to come.”

  “Have you any idea what it costs to fly in twenty-five Indian hookers from New Delhi? First-class, too. One would think that as, so to speak, clergy persons, they would have been willing to ride tourist class.”

  “Back to Fosberry’s money, Matthew?”

  “Oh, yes. Well, after we pay off some of the more pressing bills, we’re going to redecorate the upstairs pocket billiard room. Put new felt and cushions on the tables, that sort of thing, and then redo the walls so we hang the Fosberry Collection in a proper setting.”

  “I’m not familiar with the Fosberry Collection, Matthew,” Trapper said.

  “Either am I, but I was afraid to ask,” Hawkeye said.

  “Your knowledge of fine art or, rather, the lack of it, never ceases to amaze and astound me,” Matthew Q. Framingham VI said. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that either of you have ever heard of the famous Frederick Remington oil—the one called ‘Encounter on the Plains’?”

  “Is that the X-rated one? Where the Indian and the squaw...”

  “That’s the one,” Matthew said. “Well, the Fosberry Collection is generally acknowledged to be the largest assemblage of objets d’art of that genre outside the Vatican. He left it to us, asking only that we mount a small plaque identifying the donor.”

  “That certainly was very nice of him,” Trapper said.

  “I have the artwork for the plaque right before me,” Matthew went on. “It will be cast in bronze. Here it is. It will read: ‘Presented to the Framingham Foundation in Fond Memory of the Tomatoes I Have Known, by Elwood T. Fosberry, F.F.F.’ Now, isn’t that touching?”

  “Brings a tear to the eye,” Hawkeye said.

  “And the upstairs pocket billiard room is just the place for it,” Trapper John said. “The last time I saw ol’ Fosberry, he was passed out on the bumper-pool table.”

  “What’s on your mind, Matthew?” Hawkeye said. “I’m a busy man. Among other pressing matters, I’ve still got one dart to throw.”

  “As I was starting to say to Trapper John,” Matthew said, “I am confident that he and you, that is to say, the both of you, can readily recall, verbatim, that section of the oath you took upon being admitted as fellows.”

  “Put your hand back on your wallet, Trapper,” Hawkeye said.

  “Go on, Matthew,” Trapper John said. “Carefully. You may be large, but there’s two of us.”

  “You swore, on your honor as gentlemen, to render whatever aid and assistance it is within your power to offer, whenever such aid and assistance was requested by the widow of any Framingham Foundation Fellow.”

  “You’re asking us to render aid and assistance to the widow Fosberry? The same one that was trying to beat us out of the art collection and the bequest?”

  “Not the widow Fosberry, actually,” Matthew said. “The Framingham Foundation Fellow widow in question is the widow Babcock.”

  “Never heard of her,” Trapper John said.

  “Or of him, either,” Hawkeye said. “Before our time, probably, Matthew.”

  ‘That’s odd,” Matthew said. “You are obviously in error, for when I spoke with the widow Babcock just now, she specifically mentioned your names.”

  “Never heard of her,” they repeated, in unison.

  “But you do know the poor fatherless boy, of course, Burton Babcock IV?”

  “Never heard of him, either,” they said, again in unison.

  “The widow Babcock led me to believe that you had become friends in Texas. They call him ‘Bubba.’ ”

  “Oh-oh,” Hawkeye said.

  “Oy, vay iz mir,” Trapper John said.

  Chapter Two

  The widow Babcock, Josephine Babcock, cared for only two things in the whole wide world. At the top of the list, perhaps naturally, was Bubba, whom she thought of privately as my “Precious Babykins.” Bubba was the only fruit of her too-brief marriage, and the apple of his mama’s eye. Josephine Babcock devoted at least every other waking moment to worrying about her Precious Babykins and, now that Bubba was growing up, his future.

  The world, Widow Babcock knew, was nothing but one snare after another for someone like Bubba, and what she was doing was simply her maternal duty, protecting her young from the lions and tigers and worse of the jungle of human experience.

  In those moments when she wasn’t thinking about Bubba, she thought of the one other thing in the whole wide world that she loved with a deep and unflinching loyalty. This was Burton Babcock & Company, Tobacco Manufacturers, of which she was chairperson of the board, presidentress and chief executive officer.

  As the Annual Report to the Stockholders (which was thirty-eight pages long, printed in four colors on expensive paper and bound in Moroccan calf despite the fact that there were only two stockholders, Josephine and her Precious Babykins, each of whom owned exactly fifty percent of the 3,890,000 outstanding shares of stock*) put it, rather succinctly:

  (* Since the stock has never been traded, no New York big board price is available. Knowledgeable economists, however, and the Internal Revenue Service have estimated the value of one share of stock at figures ranging from 23[ to 87^.)

  From humble beginnings circa 1750, Burton Babcock & Company has grown steadily over the years to become the fifth largest manufacturer of tobacco products for the consumer. In a vertically and laterally integrated corporate structure, Burton Babcock & Company presently manufactures seven brands of cigarettes, fourteen brands of cigars, five of chewing tobacco and four of snuff.

  Seed from the B&B Seed Company is s
own upon lands owned by the Babcock Land & Timber Company by farm vehicles specially designed and built by the Burton Tractor Works. Burton Babcock Farms, Inc. workers harvest the crops for processing in Burton Babcock & Company drying barns and final conversion into consumer products by the Burton Merchandising Company, Inc. Although the company’s products may be found on grocers’ shelves and in automatic vending machines around the world (many of the latter products are made by Burton Coin-Operated Machine Company), fully five percent are sold through the 605 familiar Old Burt Cigar & Tobacco Stores and the recent addition to our family of enterprises, the twenty-seven Now That You Are Where You Are, Baby, Booze and Butt Boutiques.

  At the annual stockholders’ meeting, held this year as always in corporate headquarters, the sixty- six story Burton Babcock Building in Babcock, Burton County, North Carolina, Mrs. (Josephine) Burton Babcock III was unanimously reelected as chairperson of the board, presidentress and chief executive officer. The board of directors, among other important business, passed a resolution welcoming Burton Babcock IV, who had been absent on military leave, back to his duties as special executive assistant to the chairperson.

  Manifesting once again its unselfish interest in things of the spirit, the board authorized a grant to the Matthew Q. Framingham Theosophical Foundation of Cambridge, Massachusetts which, it is hoped, will enable that distinguished body to continue its good works for the general betterment of mankind. The grant was again made as a memorial to Burton Babcock III, F.F.F. and former chairman of the board of Burton Babcock & Company, who was lost at sea in 1955.

  For all of his life Precious Babykins had brought nothing but joy to his mama’s heart, from the moment of his birth until last week, when Josephine Babcock sensed that the status quo was about to experience a severe upheaval, and if there was one thing Josephine Babcock didn’t like, it was a change in the status quo.

  It was whispered privately around Burton County, North Carolina that “Josephine was not to the Cottage* born.” This was, of course, quite true in the literal sense. Josephine (Morgenblum) Babcock had come of poor but reasonably honest stock. Her grandfather, the late August Morgenblum had immigrated to the United States from his native Steinhager an der Donau (Danube) in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bohemia in April, 1914, three months before his regiment (the 17th Bohemian Light Horse, of which Herr Morgenblum was bandmaster) was called to the Imperial Colors for World War I.

  (* The Cottage was the Italian Renaissance family manse, whose tile roof covered, the last time someone counted, 128 rooms, which Burton Babcock, Sr. had built 1906-09, atop Mount Babcock. It had taken over a year to dynamite the four acres on which the Cottage sat out of the mountain, and two more years for a force of 125 workmen to build the Cottage. It has been described as “one of the finest earlier examples of conspicuous consumption by one of the more important robber barons.")

  Arriving in the United States with nothing but his wife, their firstborn, Max (Josephine’s father), and his sousaphone, August Morgenblum had found employment quickly in New York City as a musician. Within a year, he had formed his own musical ensemble, Augie Morgenblum’s Viennese Waltz Kings, and started out on the musical career he pursued for the rest of his life.

  The one disappointment of Augie Morgenblum’s life was that his firstborn, Max, was an absolute bust as a musician. He was, in fact, tone-deaf. But he was a loving son and a hard worker and he had inherited from his mother an appreciation of fine food. By the time he reached manhood and took a bride, he was the acknowledged master of the Wiener schnitzel and the Sacher Torte as that art was practiced in the Yorktown section of Manhattan.

  As a wedding gift, August Morgenblum advanced his son the necessary funds to open his own restaurant and, had not the war clouds of 1941 lowered, Max Morgenblum would probably never have left New York City. In a burst of patriotic fervor, however (after all, the blood of the former bandmaster of the 17th Bohemian Light Horse did course through his veins), he closed the doors (forever, as it turned out) of Max Morgenblum’s 86th Street Bierstube & Conditorei and enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private.

  This patriotic gesture nearly cost Max his happy marriage. As Brunhilde Morgenblum put it at that time, “anybody who not only owns a successful restaurant but is draft exempt because of his wife and twelve-year- old daughter and who joins the army is out of his mind.”

  In the first few weeks of his military service, Max often had occasion to reflect on his wife’s point of view and to admit, in his secret heart of hearts, that there was, indeed, a good deal to be said for her position. But, while still in basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he came to the attention of the commanding general of the 82d Airborne Division, who was making a routine inspection of troop messing facilities. The general, rather unaccustomed to sauerbraten mit kartoffel knodel followed by a Demel Torte cooked by a KP in a mess tent,* was quick to recognize talent where he saw it, and to put it to use. Pvt. Max Morgenblum was soon Sergeant Morgenblum, the general’s personal mess sergeant, and soon after that, when it occurred to the general that a unit about to fight the Dirty Hun could well use someone who spoke the language, Warrant Officer Morgenblum.

  (* Max had, in fact, brought his supper in a brown paper bag, aware that the menu of the day for that day was K ration, Type III (ham chunks in red-eye gravy).)

  Brunhilde went back on her solemn vow vis-à-vis Max’s military service* when Life magazine published a feature story of the 82d Airborne Division training for war in North Carolina. Three factors arose when she read the article that caused her to reconsider her decision. One, there was a photograph in which Max appeared, standing to one side of the picture. He was far slimmer, she saw, than he had been since their honeymoon. In his officer’s uniform, with the glistening jump boots (she was never to learn that it had taken three of the 82d Division’s largest MP’s to push him five times out the door of the C-47 so that he would be a qualified parachutist) and the silver parachutist’s wings, he was as handsome as she remembered him on their wedding day.

  (* What she had said, specifically, was, “It will be a cold day in hell, you overgrown adolescent, before I leave New York to go with you to the boondocks.")

  Factor two was the realization that since he was wearing jump wings and paratrooper boots he had, in fact, ergo sum, actually jumped out of an airplane in flight, to float to earth beneath a silk canopy. Damned fool or not, he was still her husband, and that sort of thing was obviously dangerous.

  That he was still her husband, even if temporarily bereft of his senses, was also involved in factor three. The main character in the photograph from Life magazine was actually the general, welcoming to Fort Bragg the McSweeney sisters, the most popular singing trio of the day. As one of the McSweeney sisters (the redheaded one) shook the general’s hand and smiled at the general, another of them (one of the blondes, the one with the larger mammary development) smiled at Max in what could only be considered a shameless leer of invitation and desire.

  She went to August Morgenblum and tearfully laid her suspicions on “Poppa Gus’ ” shoulder.

  "Liebchen," the old gentleman said, “dot’s someting you’ve going to have to learn to live wit. Ve Morgenblum men haf a fatal attraction for duh ladies.”

  That very day, having collected all the gas-ration coupons from everybody in Waltz Kings, Brunhilde set out for North Carolina in Poppa Gus’ Packard limousine, with Karl-Heinz Hauptpferde, who played the French horn for the Viennese Waltz Kings, and whose son, Ferdinand, was also in the 82d Airborne Division.

  On the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina, they came upon a lady whose 1936 Ford coupe had broken down. As a Samaritan gesture, Brunhilde picked her up and offered to take her wherever she wanted to go.

  “As a matter of fact,” the lady said, “I’m on my way to Fort Bragg.”

  “Isn’t that a pleasant coincidence?” Brunhilde replied. “So am I.” Feminine pride compelled her to add, “My husband is aide-de-camp to the commanding g
eneral.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” the lady replied. “My husband is the commanding general.”

  “My boy Ferdinand,” Karl-Heinz chimed in, “plays the bass drum in the division band.”

  “And do you live at Fort Bragg with your husband?” Brunhilde asked, not knowing enough about the army to be awed by the general’s wife.

  “As of yesterday,” the lady replied.

  “What happened yesterday?”

  “Life magazine came,” the lady said. “And I came to realize that if a trio of big-busted singers can make sacrifices for the war effort, so can I.”

  And so began a lifelong friendship between the ladies. The general’s wife was a North Carolinean, and when the division went overseas to war, she returned to her native Chapel Hill. At her suggestion, Brunhilde and Little Josephine went with her. They could give one another company while the men were away.

  The second thing that Brunhilde said to Max when he returned from the war was that one thing Chapel Hill really needed was a Viennese Restaurant. He was doubtful at first, but Brunhilde’s argument that Chapel Hill was a far, far better place to raise Little Josephine than New York City was unanswerable.

  Morgenblum’s Carolina Gasthaus (which included a cocktail lounge known as the Geronimo Landing Zone, Max having learned that booze is an inseparable part of the American cuisine) was a success from the moment the doors opened.

  It was there, in the summer of 1952, that Josephine Morgenblum first saw Burton Babcock III. And it was there that Burton Babcock III first saw her. She was twenty, between her junior and senior years at the University of North Carolina, and helping her father out in the Carolina Gasthaus by waiting on tables. In keeping with the ambiance of the establishment, the waitresses were dressed in quaint Austro-Hungarian native costumes, consisting of short skirts, knee-length stockings, embroidered aprons, dirndl blouses, with their hair braided and coiled in loops at the ears.