MASH 14 MASH goes to Moscow (14 page)

In Siegfried’s defense, it must be reported that he had not, at first, included little Gertrude in his plans. For one thing, she was only four, and for another, truth to tell, he regarded his first (and only) born as a mean little kid who couldn’t be trusted as far as he could throw her. The very first thing that Little
Gerty
had done with her very first tooth was to bite her daddy on the nose, and things had gone
down hill
from there.

But as the dog-napping plans were taking final form in Siegfried’s head, an incident involving their neighbor lady on Sunny Dale Avenue,
Tottenville
, Staten Island, occurred. The neighbor lady, whose name has unfortunately been lost to posterity, was a cat freak. She had cats of all sizes running wild around her property. One dark, dismal, rainy evening when Siegfried came home from pushing his garbage-can-on-wheels through Central Park, he was greeted by the neighbor lady (also known as the Cat Lady) who was in a state of high excitement and hysterical indignation.

“I want to see you,
Rumplemayer
,” she screamed.

“It’s Grass, Path, and Walkway Sanitary Technician
Rumplemayer
to you, Cat Lady,” Siegfried replied.

“Do you know what your little monster has been up to,
Rumplemayer
?” Cat Lady screamed.

“Which little monster do you mean, Cat Lady?”

“Dirty Little
Gerty
is who I mean,” she shouted. “How many little monsters do you have, anyway?”

“I’m a busy man, Cat Lady,” Siegfried had replied. “Get to the point.”

“You know that pack of wild dogs that runs around the swamp?”

“What about them?”

“Your Dirty Little
Gerty
has been feeding my precious pussy cats to them, that’s what about them!”

“I don’t quite follow you, Cat Lady,” Siegfried said.

“I’ll explain it in simple terms,” she said. “That little monster of yours has been catching my precious pussy cats in a potato sack and then carrying them down to the swamp and letting them loose so those terrible dogs can chase them.”

“Thank you for bringing the situation to my attention, Cat Lady,” Siegfried replied with dignity. “I’ll have a word with the little … with Gertrude-Darling.”

“You should take a horse-whip to her, that’s what you should do!”

“Unfortunately, there are laws against that,” Siegfried said. “And Little
Gerty
knows all of them.”

“She’s a vicious little monster, that’s what she is,” Cat Lady said.

“She does favor her mother,” Siegfried said. “I’ll look into the matter.”

By the time he had climbed the stairs to the third-floor rear apartment he thought of as his little place in the country, Siegfried had realized that one of his major dog-napping problems (how to get the mutts away from the pansies) had been solved.

“
Gerty
-Baby,” he said, “how would Daddy’s little darling like to go to work with Daddy tomorrow?”

“Not on your life,” Little
Gerty
replied, with the lisp that would one day become as world famous as Jimmy Carter’s choppers.

“Daddy’s heard about the fun you’ve been having with Cat Lady’s kitty cats,” Siegfried said.

“The old witch squealed on me, did she?” Little
Gerty
said, with a snarl. “I’ll push her wheelchair down the stairs for that!”

‘I’ve got a better idea than that,” Siegfried said, and he explained what he had in mind in some detail.

“Daddy-Dear, that’s an absolutely rotten idea,” Little
Gerty
squealed gleefully. “I’ll do it!”

The very next day, it being a Saturday, Little
Gerty
went with her daddy to work. The ticket taker on the Staten Island Ferry informed the pair of them that taking three cats in a burlap sack aboard an official ferryboat of the City of New York was a no-no. For a moment, Siegfried was stumped, but Little
Gerty
rose to the challenge.

“One more word out of you, tomato nose,” she snarled, “and I’ll tell that fat cop over there that you offered me a Hershey Bar and a dime to play show-and-tell with you.”

Little
Gerty
waited at the Fifth Avenue and Sixty-third Street entrance to Central Park until Siegfried, by then in uniform and pushing his garbage-can-on-wheels, showed up. Two of the three cats in the burlap sack were stashed in a closet of a Gentleman’s Rest Facility to which Siegfried had a key. Cradling the third tabby in her arms, Little
Gerty
skipped down the curving path ahead of her daddy until they came across what they were looking for: A ten-dog strong pack of furry friends, ranging in size from a Chihuahua to a St. Bernard, being taken on their morning constitutional by an exquisitely graceful young man in purple pedal-pushers and a yellow beret. They were on a collision course.

“Get out of my way, you nasty sanitation person, you,” the young gentleman said. “Or I’ll sic my doggies on you!”

“Oh,” Little
Gerty
yelped, throwing the cat at him. “I dropped my pussy cat!”

The last seen of either the pussy cat, the exquisitely graceful young man, or the St. Bernard was as the latter chased the former through the rowboat concession on the shores of picturesque Central Park Lake. By that time, Siegfried and Little
Gerty
had the Chihuahua, a toy French poodle, and a sad-eyed beagle firmly stashed in the garbage-can-on-wheels and were heading out of the park.

It had been Siegfried’s original intention simply to telephone the dog’s owner and announce that for a suitable reward the owner could have his furry friend back. But Little
Gerty
had showed such a natural inclination for the business that they improved on the basic plan.

He rented a cheap basement room on the West Side and telephoned the furry friend’s owners to announce that his little girl had found their animal and that they could have it back simply by coming to pick it up. When the distraught dog owners arrived at the basement room, they found their furry friend snuggled up close to Little
Gerty
,* who had been equipped with both a set of dark glasses of the type worn by blind persons and a striped cane. There was also a pair of crutches leaning against the wall. Siegfried then cued his daughter.

(* The means of getting the dog to snuggle up close and whimper had been Little
Gerty’s
contribution, and it had been simplicity itself. The dogs were fed, but instead of using water to make that Yummy-Yummy Gravy we see on TV,
Rumplemayer
pere
et
fille
used bourbon whiskey. Since most pet owners are not at all familiar with the sound
a
hungover
dog makes, the deception worked perfectly.)

“Poor little blind daughter, your doggie-
woggie’s
real owner has come for it.”

Little
Gerty
began with a whimper not much louder than the one the
hungover
hound was making, but soon worked herself into a mournful frenzy. The furry friend’s owners would then either come up with a reward four or five times as large as they had intended to bestow or would announce that they couldn’t possibly have the coldness of heart to separate their dog from the poor little blind girl on crutches. If this latter situation developed, Siegfried would say that what the child really needed was a seeing-eye dog, that they had been scraping their pennies together to buy her one and were only $124.80 short of the purchase price. Two out of three soft-hearted dog owners handed over the $124.80.

(There were those who came up with the $124.80 and still refused to take their own dog back. These animals were transported back to Staten Island, where Siegfried “returned them to nature’s paradise” by turning them loose near the swamp and the pack of wild dogs.)

Over the three years before Siegfried was caught and brought before the Sanitation Department’s Court of Honor for conduct unbecoming a Grass, Path, and Walkway Sanitary Technician, father and daughter honed their act to a fine art. Their downfall came when the neighbor lady became suspicious about the dwindling size of her herd and employed a private detective to investigate the matter.

The trial itself went down in Sanitation Department annals as one of the darkest blots on the Sanitation Department’s previously spotless escutcheon. Although there was no doubt whatever in anyone’s mind that Siegfried
Rumplemayer
had, as charged, wrongly, illegally, and with malice aforethought diverted his garbage-can-on-wheels to his personal profit, the court martial board was unable to reach a unanimous verdict.

“A scoundrel like that,” one court member said to the
Daily News’s
Inquiring Photographer, “certainly deserved the greatest punishment provided by law. But I simply couldn’t find it in myself to vote that way, with that horribly ugly child begging for her daddy’s freedom on her knees that way.”

A compromise was reached. Siegfried was subjected to the public humiliation of being drummed out of the Sanitation Department in Times Square. As the Sanitation Department Band played the “Rogue’s March,” the brass buttons were snipped one by one from his uniform, and his Grass, Path, and Walkway insignia ripped from his sleeve. But that was all the punishment he received.

The furor quickly died down, after a spate of angry editorials in
The New York Times
and the
Village Voice
about the appalling lack of moral fiber in the Sanitation Department’s upper echelons.

Father and daughter were crushed. Not only was their moonlight income (which had been sufficient for them to travel to Europe and to buy an eleventh-floor deluxe condominium on Florida’s Gold Coast above Miami) gone forever, but the fun in their lives was gone too. Never again would they see the wonderful sight of the pansies being dragged through the flora of Central Park by baying dogs in hot pursuit of one of the Cat Lady’s precious pussy cats.

But they were resilient. Within two months, they were back on the streets of Manhattan—this time with a wheelchair. Little
Gerty
, wearing her dark glasses, pushed her beloved Daddy back and forth through Times Square while she sang at the top of her lungs the song about the rainbow which Judy Garland had made famous in the motion picture
The Wizard of Oz-

It generally took no more than two full days of pushing (noon till 11:00
p.m.,
Little
Gerty’s
Daddy insisting that a growing girl needed her sleep) before Daddy’s battered old Sanitation Department cap had been filled with enough donations to permit them to take the Eastern Airlines Champagne and Bagels flight to their Florida condominium for the rest of the week.