In Honor of Answering Machines and Good Samaritans

My wife has gone to visit Disney World in Florida for five days with four of our grandchildren, ranging in age from 9 to 18.

It is an adventure quite beyond my energy and ambition. She got the idea when we visited that immense playground after our recent Caribbean cruise. “I’d love to bring the kids here,” she said, having exhausted me on a tour of the Epcot Center.

“You’re out of your mind,” I said.

“I mean it. I think they’d love it.”

“Count me out,” I said.

“You’re out.”

She announced the odyssey as a Christmas present, picking a time when the younger children--Alison, 15; Casey, 13, and Trevor, 9--would be out of school. Adriana, 18, who works in women’s handbags at the Broadway Pasadena, got off work.

I saw them off with the three younger children’s parents. My wife had her hands full with her purse, her carry-on bag, her tickets and a sheaf of Disney literature. Her camera was in a pouch belted to her waist.

“Don’t lose anything,” was the last thing I said to her. When we travel I insist on carrying both passports, because I consider myself less likely to lose them. Once in the London underground, a thief stole her wallet right out of her open purse.

We watched the plane taxi out on the tarmac, out of sight, then drove back to our jobs. My son and daughter-in-law, I suspected, were troubled by the same anxieties as I was. Casey had mentioned crashing, but one must not even think of that. But there might be smaller catastrophes.

That night I escorted a colleague’s wife to the Pasadena Junior Philharmonic Showcase preview. The colleague was in Mexico. (Treating her just as if she were my wife, I neglected to open the car door for her.)

Though I usually don’t turn on my telephone answering machine at night, I did this time, perhaps thinking my wife might call. Also unusually, I remembered to check it when I returned about 10:30. I had four new messages. The first two were from the Southern California Counseling Center, where my wife works. I didn’t even listen to them, figuring they wouldn’t concern me. The third was long distance. The operator urged me to pick up the phone. “It concerns a lost wallet,” she said. My ears perked up. She had a man on the phone. He had a heavy Spanish accent and was hard to understand. He had found a wallet belonging to Denise Smith. He gave his Orlando hotel room number and phone number.

The last message was from my wife. She sounded anxious. She asked me to call her at once. I called. She said she had lost her wallet, and started to tell me how. “Hold on,” I said, and I told her about the man’s call.

“Call him right now,” I suggested, “and call me back.”

In a few minutes she called me back, sounding greatly relieved. The man was in a nearby hotel. He would wait for her. It was then about 1:40 a.m. in Orlando. I told her to call me as soon as she came back.

I waited nearly two hours. All kinds of scenarios crossed my mind. The man was a rapist. She was being held prisoner. She couldn’t find his hotel.

Finally she called. She had got lost. There was another hotel with the same name. She had knocked on the door of Room 209 and a man came to the door, angry at being disturbed. He was the wrong man. I wondered what he must have thought of her, a woman coming to his room at almost 3 a.m. in a resort town. She escaped.

Finally she found the right hotel and the right man. He had waited up for her. “He was charming,” she said. He was an Argentine, visiting the United States with some countrymen. He was returning to Argentina at 9 o’clock that morning. His name was Diego Viviani. He said he had taken 75 cents from the wallet for phone calls. “I threw my arms around him,” she said.

It was almost 3:30 a.m. when she got back to her hotel room and her charges.

The next morning I played the tape back. The two calls from the counseling center had been from their answering service. The operator wanted to tell me that a man had called about a lost wallet, and she had given him our number. She also gave me his.

What if he hadn’t called our house? He would have been gone in the morning and, when I got around to listening to the center’s messages, it would have been too late.

Never again will I assume that a call from my wife’s place of business does not concern me.