Word: doubloons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Tony's precocious third-grade essay, "Why I Would Hate to Be a Basement," has long been enshrined in local lore, but his early academic promise has led only to idle fancying. Miss Doubloon, the lad's current teacher, explains to his anxious parents: "He would rather read novels in which the characters toy with a little Brie while waiting for their friends to turn up along the boulevard. If we can't get Anthony to concentrate, and hard, on the War of 1812 and obtuse triangles-" The pupil interrupts: "Like the dumb postmaster and his wife...
Desperate measures are clearly required. Tony's minister father offers to pay Miss Doubloon for the young wag's private tutoring. She agrees and sets her room in the local boardinghouse as the appointed place. Her landlady greets Tony's arrival there with dark suspicion. She senses an aura of incipient scandal hovering about Miss Doubloon. The teacher will, in fact, soon ask her class to read The Scarlet Letter, provoking local bluenoses to declare: "We're gonna tighten our Bible Belt!" On this snowy winter evening, the landlady's wicked mind proves prescient. Upstairs...
...entire nation teetering in its aftermaths. These include pregnancy, mutual guilt, Tony's frightened vision of what marriage to his teacher might mean ("Would I be allowed to whisper and chew gum in the house?"). Before she goes home to bear his child in Kalamazoo, Miss Doubloon strikes a defiant pose on the balcony of her motel, where she has been exiled in disgrace from the boardinghouse. Like Hawthorne's adulterous heroine, the teacher wears a scarlet letter A on her chest, with one modern addition: a plus sign on the right side. A badge of shame becomes...
Tony is not halfway to the end of his adventures when he follows Miss Doubloon to her home town. Absurdities interrupt non sequiturs. Plot grows so complicated that it seems easier to tell than summarize. But De Vries is only half kidding. The fine cutting edge of his comic vision comes, as always, from the sense that there is hell to pay. The author, a resident staffer at The New Yorker, was raised a Dutch Calvinist, and he is a past master at striking antithetical poses. He is at once the liberal humanist, tolerantly condoning free expression and yearnings...
With reason. The most celebrated theft of a Brasher doubloon occurred as fiction in Raymond Chandler's 1942 mystery The High Window, later made into a movie. But in 1965 real thieves snatched the Yale doubloon from Sterling Memorial Library. The university got it back only because a private detective, tipped off that a Chicago mobster had the coin, was able to apply...