The Value of Calm Detachment

“Try a little to the left.”

The workman scratched his mustache, but acquiesced. He climbed down from his ladder, pushed it a handful of inches to the side, climbed back up, held the hanging sign up to the rafters, and looked back at his ersatz designer for approval.

The designer in question was a youth, with wild blond hair and constantly puckered lips. He appeared to be considering the signage placement with all the gravitas of a navy admiral surveying ship deployments. He looked at the shop window, where merry little cupcakes squatted among ludicrous cardboard towers glazed in frosting — the splendor of a wedding setpiece, the stability required to age gracefully in a sunny window. He looked at the tree on the side of the street in front of the shop, its trunk wrapped in fencing to keep the squirrels off. He looked at the square bricks in the pavement under his feet. He looked back at the mustachioed workman.

“Yeah, I think you should hang it there.”

The workman considered. Technically he was supposed to do exactly as asked. But the youth was charming, and maybe he was even right. Did it look better from here? It was hard to tell, being so close. He decided to risk it. “Alright, I’ll install the sign here instead. But if there’s hell to pay with the owner over it you can bet I’ll tan your hide,” he said.

The boy chuckled.

“What’s that, Franz?” The question came from a matron of the town, one Gertrude Matholdson. She had been on her way to the butcher to get a goose neck for making gravy out of when she’d overheard a threat to the youth, and felt it was her demogenic duty to verbally intervene, instill an awareness of the watchful community in the two males. “I said, what was that, Franz?”

“Er, that is, Miss Matholdson,” the workman muttered, “I’m taking a risk by indulging the lad and I want him to appreciate the gravity of what that is.” Franz busied himself with the screws, but he could feel Gertrude Matholdson’s gimlet gaze on the back of his head. “I was supposed to hang it on that rafter there, Miss, but he suggested I move it over here.”

At this, Gertrude Matholdson perked up. She considered herself something of an informal hobbyist in the art of architravation. Designing doorways was her specialty, and this time of year especially she was always busy in consults for wreaths, ribbons, streamers, staffage and general festivity. The late autumn was when she did her best work. She set her discerning eye on the problem.

Immediately, she saw the wisdom of the youth’s decision. The tasteful asymmetry, the balance against the tree, yes — and as she considered it, she realized more and more. The texture of the smooth window was broken by rough wooden signage in just such a way. The colors of the sign which had seemed garish last week sitting in the alleyway waiting to be installed were now a cheerful complement to the autumn leaves. Gertrude Matholdson considered how the sign might look once snow began to fall on it, and saw that it would create a divot in the snow beneath it just where the door hinge aligned. She pictured the sign in spring, and saw it dancing merrily in the wind, flashing against the bright blue sky. Gertrude Matholdson’s mind reeled at the sublime perfection of the placitum before her. In every season, in every way, the decision to move it slightly to the left had been just the thing! She tore her gaze away from the midinettery to behold its messiah.

The youth grinned at her. “I think it looks better, don’t you?”

Gertrude Matholdson tousled his hair, and hurried off to tell Deborah Herbst.

The youth took to celebrity as nonchalantly as he’d taken to exterior design. People came to him with questions — a housewife looking to upstage her neighbor at their next potluck dinner, a young woman hoping to impress her beau with artificial poise, a cozenous man-about-town seeking the right bouquet to placate his nagging wife. He considered each case as casually as the first, and offered some minor suggestion to each. The housewife ought wear her braid over the other shoulder. The young woman should say “ought” more. The prodigal husband might do better to buy one of Gertrude Matholdson’s baskets. This last suggestion won him even more favor with the town matron, and as his celebrity grew he became less of an oracle and more of a prophet. Even skeptics who initially asked his advice as a joke, or to settle bets, now sought him out on grave matters of law and death.

At first he seemed entertained, but gradually he began to believe in himself. This became a matter of some debate. Most townfolk felt his pride was earned, and pointed to his successful track record (the shop sign always featured most prominently in this list). “Who wouldn’t be proud of such accomplishments? You would, if it were you. You only envy him, or fear his competition against your own talents.”

His detractors now were quite different from the initial skeptics, and indeed Miss Gertrude Matholdson figured prominently among their number. “I won’t deny the lad has a good eye betimes, lord knows,” she said. “But it’s simply unseemly for a young man to act so orgillious. I wish he wouldn’t let a good idea get to his head. And you people give far too much credence to his idle chatter now, when he ought to be doing chores.” There began to be whispers that Gertrude Matholdson was afraid the boy might supplant her as the town’s source of wisdom on matters of aesthetics entirely.

It all came to a point one day when the youth said “a little to the left”, and young Gillie Jackfrond slipped on a wet rock down to the riverbed some twelve feet below, where she cracked her head on the smooth David stones beneath the water. John Jackfrond swore he’d kill that blond Malvolio, and the boy accordingly made himself scarce about town. Gillie Jackfrond didn’t die herself, but had a lump on her head and breathed through her mouth after that incident. The shop owner quietly paid Franz to put the sign back in its original place — the perfect aesthetic balance was not worth the tainted name. Gertrude Matholdson considered this the greatest pity. “A shame he felt the need to run off, and a greater one to see the state of poor Gillie. But I do wish that sign could remain where it was. I will miss its mellow mansuetude.” And she’d bustle off to find Deborah Herbst for more news.