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Still, he didn’t yet have the wherewithal to know if he had become a laughingstock. He began to pay attention. Was including Brrr on a guest list a sleight-of-mockery to amuse the disdainful? An Animal in Society—in these days, in these hard times, with the Animal Courtesy acts!—had he become a joke? A beloved old joke? Was treating him like a hero a part of the joke? It might be just so. His allowing it to happen—showing up at dinner parties as the outré guest, dandified and powdered and beribboned—that was his part of the joke, people assumed. He had no shame. Good for him. He was a token of the Wizard’s clemency and understanding.
Perhaps they weren’t as cruel as they seemed. He pondered it. The Cowardly Lion? Sure, it sounded like a slur of sorts, but he’d looked on it as almost a kind of stage name, a title. He’d assumed they meant it affectionately. He had been very young when he’d made his name, after all.
Then, at last, and who knows how, the word began to get out that he’d been paid for playing dead all those years ago.
The Traum massacre. The journalist in the train’s dining car, all those years back, had coined a phrase, the Cowardly Lion. The tag was an insult in remission, ready to metastasize in the public consciousness now that Brrr had established himself as a public figure.
The Lion who wouldn’t fight. The pesky Glikkuns who were mowed down. The big old peaceable pussycat. The dead trolls. The wussums with his wittle Wion’s tears.
Ah, but Brrr would have survived the shame of it a little better had he not taken the purse.
He’d been too wet, too inexperienced, too damn hungry to think twice about accepting it. In the end, as the stink of a questionable past began to bloom around him, it wasn’t as much the cowardice people commented upon, but that Brrr had been paid handsomely.
We all make mistakes. But we’re not supposed to profit from them.
What could he do next? The rumors kept doubling the amount of the sum he’d been awarded. If he’d had anything like such an initial investment, he’d be the wealthiest Animal in Oz by now. In gossip, presumed wealth is always overestimated by garish exponentials. That in itself was a burden to him.
He couldn’t give the money back to the hard-up burghers of Traum; that would be to acknowledge some sort of wrongdoing, and he’d done nothing wrong except to be young and ignorant.
Besides, he could never afford to give back the amount of money folks now said he’d earned on his first day in human society.
In any case, giving publicly to charity was thought unseemly. He’d only be able to contribute anonymously. And while this might help his soul, it wouldn’t salvage his reputation.
He tore his mane out at nights, sleepless and distraught. But he kept accepting invitations, for suddenly to drop out of society might also signal a sense of failure, of guilt. The soirées became ugly but he kept showing up, in part to prove he wasn’t scared to show up.
Then one evening, as he stood under the stone portico of the Sir Chuffrey Opera Palace, waiting in a queue of the great and the good for the next available landau, Brrr was approached by a young blueblood. “The Cowardly Lion! You’re the Lion from the labs at Shiz University,” he said. “Aren’t you? The little orphaned cubling! Doctor Nikidik tried to sever your language stem. I was there. I remember.”
“I was never in Shiz as an infant,” he replied, affronted, though as he spoke he realized he couldn’t be sure of this. Who remembers their own infancy?
It was a Margreave’s son, deep in his cups, slurring his words and making a scene. “Brrr. Is that right? I remember—the doctor named you Brrr because you shivered like a kitten with the flu.” Only it came out “shivered like a shitten.”
“Nonsense,” said Brrr. “This is my first episode in Shiz. I should remember an earlier visit.”
> “The cage,” prompted the inebriate, “a cunning little cage! I remember because your name was pronounced like the first syllable of berserk.”
Avaric Tenmeadows, the Margreave’s son, it turned out, had attended some classes with Elphaba. The dreaded Wicked Witch of the West, as she’d come to be known. On the day in question, she’d witnessed the dustup, swore the Margreave’s son. She had!
Heads turned. The Witch was big news just then, because her sister, Nessarose, recently had orchestrated the secession of Munchkinland from Oz. The Thropp family was in dudgeon, both sisters alike. No one yet had taken any measure of their baby brother.
Overnight—as the rickshaws and buckboards and broughams pulled sloppily into the rain—the Lion’s reputation was tarnished in another way. Suspicious through association. Complicit. A familiar…
The Witch had rescued the poor little cub from the experiment, said a letter to the editor, signed Anonymous (a pensioner).
No, it was a pair of fey boysies called Crope and Tibbett, said someone in a gossip column. The Witch actually wanted the cub killed so she could drink its baby Animal blood.
No, the Witch had hexed him, that poor little Brrr.
Are you kidding? He’d been hexed at Brrrth. Ha-ha.
I wish I’d been hexed with a trust fund like his.
Within a few weeks, vaudeville comics on the variety stages of Ticknor Circus were mocking Brrr’s precision in speech. When he made an attempt to talk street-thuggy, they mocked that even more.
What astonished him—when he had achieved the distance from the events to interpret them without rages—was the extent to which a comic accusation could, by dint of repetition, begin to be taken as received wisdom. The Witch, after all, was on her way to becoming feared and despised, but she was still only a distant threat. Whereas if the Lion was her familiar—hah! It made the threat of the Witch seem more like a joke.
When the joke faded, the sentiment remained. The bemused tolerance that had attended his myopic insistence on being a civilized Animal in Shiz began to evaporate. His silvered tray was empty of calling cards; the morning post brought fewer and fewer requests to call, to dine, to take a promenade through the Scholars’ Arbor, to attend a charity function at considerable cost. He was stuck with a stock of expensive old mettanite engravings he couldn’t shift, and he owed a bundle on them.
Miss Scallop began to be not at home to him, when, on her receiving afternoons, Brrr came to call.
