Chapter 1

Way back in the early days of my youth, I was an addicted movie goer that would eat up a triple feature with gusto on hot summer days when the streets of the city were blistered with melting tar.

The tiny movie houses scattered on quiet avenues in unexpected places were implanted in my mind like treasure troves of varied content. Due to my immature age, I was supposed to be seated in the children’s section, but I always managed to escape to the mezzanine or the balcony by using the diversion of a visit to the bathroom. Sometimes, my older sister would accompany me to the theater, but I liked it better by myself, because I was so intensely involved in the plot that I hated any conversation that would distract me from the screen.

In those days, the small movie houses presented grade “B” movies recently released or older films that had been shown a few years prior and were coming back for a second run at the viewing public.

Between the films, they would show a cartoon or a short documentary or a newsreel to change the mood while the customers went to the bathroom or bought some popcorn in the front lobby.

Sometimes, I would go to a movie just to see one of the films that I was attracted to because of a particular actor or actress of my liking and other times it was part of a series of films about a certain storyline that intrigued me.

I remember enjoying one of the various Boris Karloff horror films, or an Abbot and Costello film which were all basically the same movie with different jokes. In amongst the mix of such offerings was a comedy series about a middle-aged businessman called Cosmo Topper. I found these films to be fascinating because it used some film effects to present a dead husband and wife team along with their faithful dog to haunt poor Mister Topper’s mundane existence with some spicy scenarios that mystified his suffering spouse and close friends and associates causing them to worry about his sanity.

This story is basically a fan fiction work in tribute to the outdated films that remain in my memory as little gems of humor to be cherished a lifetime.

I have changed the title character’s name from Cosmo to Cornelius because Cosmo just does not fit into today’s world with any degree of understanding by modern readers. I have kept the same names for the husband and wife team of ghosts. Cary Grant played the original George Kirby in the first movie and Constance Bennett played the role of the wife Marion Kirby. It was a low-budget film by Hollywood standards at the time, but it still received two Academy Award nominations in a highly competitive year of content. The dog was a Saint Bernard, and it was also featured in the television series for the first sit-com comedy on television in the 1950s. The original film was released in 1937.

It remained quite popular throughout the decade of the 1940s and was a favorite of GI’s watching on adverse circumstances.

Now, we begin the story.

“Cornelius! Where the devil has that man gone now?”

The plaintive voice of Cornelius Topper’s spouse of almost thirty years wandered though the empty rooms of his banker’s mansion like bits of mist on a chilly morning.

Cornelius was sitting in front of the fire in his study reading the morning paper and oblivious to his wife’s summons. His tiny dog had gone to doggie heaven recently and he absent-mindedly looked about him thinking he heard him barking off in the distance.

They had no children, the Toppers, not that they wanted things that way. It was just way of things and they had adjusted to their childless existence like good troopers being told they were “lucky” by both friends and relatives that lacked understanding of their desperate need for the annoyance of little children in their society driven lives.

Cornelius arose from the comfortable easy chair and wandered over to the large bay window looking out on the neglected garden to the rear of the mansion. He swore that he could hear a dog barking but knew it was unlikely because the nearest neighbor was almost a quarter of a mile away down the hill leading to the main road into the nearby city that fueled most of the jobs for the residents of the little community of suburbanites in Golden Acres.

He had been reading about the dreadful circumstances in Europe and wondered how it would affect the stock market because he had almost been wiped out a scant ten years ago in the terrible crash on Wall Street at the height of his empire building enterprises.

Of course, his well-insulated wife was totally unaware of the wolf at their doors in those days because he kept such matters away from her shopping trips and her little sorties down to the Madison Avenue restaurants she loved so much. He had even considered buying stock in the Russian Tea Room based on her addicted loyalty to the expensive watering hole in the middle of Manhattan.

His wife came into the study still wearing her nightshift and bathrobe she had stolen from the Plaza hotel so many years ago that she couldn’t even remember which year it actually had been.

“Cornelius! You naughty man. I have been calling you forever, darling. We have been invited to the Brown’s for cocktails tomorrow afternoon and I want you to take time off from that dreary job at the bank and come with me because I certainly do not want to go alone.”

He turned away from the window and focused on his spouse.

“Yes, dear, I will be home early so we can go together.”

He had learned a long time ago that such communication from his spouse was akin to a directive and if he wanted to avoid unnecessary grief, he should drop everything and toe the line as it was the only way to keep things on an even keel and as peaceful as possible.

Cornelius follows his wife out of the study with him only pausing to pick up the newspaper as he was still interested in the article about the news from Europe and he wanted to look at some of the closing prices in the market the previous day.