Number, Please

by Groucho Marx, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The Halloran exchange was on the second floor of the Odd Fellows building, over the hardware store, and from eleven at night until seven in the morning it belonged to Verna Haskell. With it came a switchboard of four hundred lines, a percolator, a cot that nobody had ever seen her lie down on, and the town of Halloran, California, population eleven hundred. She could have put any one of them through to any other in four seconds, and after midnight none of them wanted to be put through to anybody.

Verna had been the night operator for twelve years. Before that she had been married to Mr. Haskell, and before that she had been a girl in Modesto with a clear voice. The voice was the only one of the three that had lasted.

Between midnight and six the board lit up perhaps five times. The sheriff's substation rang through to the county. Dr. Amundsen got called out when a baby was coming, which in Halloran they mostly did around four, there being nothing else to do at that hour. Koenig's bakery rang the creamery about the milk. And since the March before, at ten minutes past three, line 41-J lit.

Line 41-J was a party line. It was shared by the Methodist parsonage and by Mr. Felix Oberdorfer, who had retired from forty years in trusses and surgical supports in Los Angeles and come up to the foothills for the dry air. He said he had held up half of Los Angeles in his time, and the other half had never thanked him either. He rang at ten past three, he told Verna, because by ten past three the parsonage was asleep, and a man could not speak freely with a minister listening in, or he could, but then he had to hear about it on Sunday.

Verna put the answering cord into the jack and opened her key.

"Number, please."

"Mrs. Haskell, I've had the same number since 1889, and every year they make it bigger. Who's awake?"

"I couldn't say, Mr. Oberdorfer."

"You could say. You know who's awake in this town better than the Almighty. He's on a party line. He has to wait his turn like the rest of us."

"Would you like the bakery?"

"I would like the bakery."

She rang the bakery. Emil Koenig answered with flour on his voice, the way he always did, and Mr. Oberdorfer said, "Koenig, your rye bread is so heavy that the Gas Company wants to run a pipe through it," and Koenig said something in German that was not about bread. Verna closed her key. Company rules said that the operator closed her key once the parties were connected, and Verna had kept the company rules for twelve years. She had, at any rate, kept most of them.

After the bakery he wanted the substation, where Deputy Lyle Pruett sat with his boots on the desk and the radio turned low. Mr. Oberdorfer asked him whether he had caught anybody yet, and Pruett said no, and Mr. Oberdorfer said that was the finest police work he had ever heard of: in Los Angeles they caught people all the time, and look at the state of the place. Then he wanted the night man at the Shell station out on the county road, a boy called Dwayne Pettibone, who was studying for the bar by mail and had nobody to argue with except Mr. Oberdorfer. Mr. Oberdorfer told him the law was a noble profession and one of the few where the client paid to be found guilty. Dwayne took notes.

By April the bakery picked up on the first ring at ten past three. By May Pruett had started taking his boots off the desk at a quarter past, which was as close as Pruett came to dressing for an occasion. Nobody in Halloran said a word about it at the drugstore counter in the daytime, and so the whole town knew.

---

The letter from Pacific Telephone came in July, on the company's good paper, and it was signed by a Mr. Royce Whitlock, District Plant Superintendent, Stockton. Verna read it at the board at two in the morning by the light of four hundred little lamps, all of them dark.

Halloran will be converted to modern dial service at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 14th, 1958. All numbers will change. A new directory is enclosed. Subscribers will no longer require the assistance of the operator to complete local calls.

There was a second letter, addressed to her personally, which said that the company valued her service and was pleased to offer her a position on the toll board in Modesto, days, at the same rate. She read that one twice, folded it in half, and put it under the percolator, where it would be warm.

At ten past three the lamp on 41-J lit.

"Number, please."

"Mrs. Haskell, have you seen this?"

"Seen what, Mr. Oberdorfer?"

"This directory. Ninety-one pages. The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company has written the whole town a book, and I've read it, and I want you to know there's no plot. Everybody's in it and nothing happens to any of them. I'm on page sixty-four. I'm ELgin 4-3170. I've never been an ELgin before in my life. I was born on Rivington Street."

"It's a very nice number."

"It's a very long number. They gave me seven figures to dial and took away the one person I wanted to speak to. Who's awake?"

"The bakery is awake."

"Then give me the bakery while there's still somebody to give it to me."

In August the calls ran longer. Mr. Oberdorfer told Koenig that he would miss him, and then, before Koenig could answer, that he meant the rye, which he would miss the way a man misses a toothache, glad it had found somebody else. He told Pruett that the dial telephone was a conspiracy to put an honest woman out of work and that it was his sworn duty to arrest it. Pruett said he would look into it, and took his boots off the desk to say so. Dwayne Pettibone asked whether the case would stand up in court, and Mr. Oberdorfer told him nothing stood up in court, which was why they gave everybody a chair.

On the Thursday before the cutover Mr. Whitlock came up from Stockton himself to show the town the dial. He set one on a card table in the Grange Hall, black and shining, and he showed a short film in which a woman in a hat telephoned her sister in under eight seconds and seemed pleased about it. Then he asked whether there were any questions. Mr. Oberdorfer stood up in the third row.

"Mr. Whitlock. At three o'clock in the morning, who do I call?"

"Anyone you like, sir, at any hour, without troubling the operator."

"I see. And if I like troubling the operator?"

Mr. Whitlock smiled, the way the woman in the hat had smiled. "Then I'm afraid, sir, there won't be an operator to trouble."

"That," said Mr. Oberdorfer, "is the first honest thing the telephone company has said to me since 1903," and he sat down again. Verna, at the back of the hall with her pocketbook on her knees, did not laugh. Koenig did, and Pruett did, and young Dwayne Pettibone wrote it down. Mr. Whitlock went on to the subject of rotary hunting groups. Verna was looking at the dial on the card table the way she might have looked at a woman who had been hired to take over her kitchen and turned up in a hat.

---

On the last night the board lit four times before three. Mrs. Dalrymple on Orchard Street rang to ask whether it was true. Dr. Amundsen rang to ask whether it was true. The creamery rang, and that was only about the milk. And somebody on 17-R rang, said nothing at all, waited, and hung up, and Verna sat for a while afterward with her hand on the cord.

At ten past three the lamp on 41-J lit.

"Number, please."

"Give me the night operator."

Verna sat up straight. In twelve years nobody had asked her for that.

"This is the night operator, Mr. Oberdorfer."

"I know who it is. I asked to be put through."

There was no jack on the board for the night operator. Nobody had ever thought she would need one. Verna looked at the four hundred lamps, and at the cord in her hand, and then she said, in the voice that had come with her from Modesto, "One moment, please." She let the moment go by, the same as she would have for any other call. "Go ahead, Mr. Oberdorfer. You're connected."

For a while he said nothing, and she could hear the line, and behind it his kitchen clock, and somewhere behind that a dog over on Orchard Street that was also awake.

"What's your number, Mrs. Haskell? At home."

"I'm sure it's in the directory."

"I haven't opened the directory since Tuesday. I don't want it from the directory. After tomorrow I'll have to dial everything myself, and I'll do it, I'm not a child, I'll put my finger in the little holes like everybody else. But this one I wanted from you."

Verna took the new directory out of the drawer and found the page. It took her some time, and she did not hurry.

"ELgin 4-6022."

She heard him write it down, and then she heard him read it back to her, slowly, all seven figures, the way people do with a number they mean to keep.

"Thank you, operator," said Mr. Oberdorfer, and he hung up.

At half past five Mr. Whitlock came up the stairs with a thermos. At six o'clock by the Western Union clock, in the new brick dial office behind the feed store, two linemen cut the cables over, and the four hundred lamps on the board went out all together, the way a town would if everybody in it had agreed to go to bed at once. Mr. Whitlock said, "Thank you, Mrs. Haskell. That will be all." Verna pulled her cords out one by one, the way she always did at the end of the shift, and laid them back in their rows, and took the letter out from under the percolator and put it in her pocketbook, and went down the stairs into Main Street, where the hardware store was just pulling up its blinds.

---

She did not take the job in Modesto, not that month. She found she could not sleep at night either. Twelve years had turned her the wrong way round, and no letter from Stockton was going to turn her back.

On the Tuesday she sat in her kitchen on Elm Street in her housecoat, with the new black telephone on the counter. It had a dial and her name on a little card under the dial, and it had not rung once. At ten minutes past three it rang.

Verna let it ring twice, so as not to seem to have been waiting, and picked it up.

"Number, please," she said.

On the other end of the line Felix Oberdorfer began to laugh, and she let him, and then she told him the one about Koenig's rye, which she had been saving since April.

---

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Grouchōne Marx per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Groucho Marx, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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