Nick had guided Judy, with his seemingly unerring sense of direction, to stop the Buchatti at the Marshall Fallow and Company Building. Judy had passed by the building on occasion, and had sometimes even seen lovers meet and hug each other beneath the enormous clocks that hung off the corners of the building, but she had never been inside. She hadn't been any more immune than her siblings, when she had been a kit, to poring over the pages of the Steers Roebuck catalog and dreaming of what she might have bought, if only she had the money, but that was quite a bit different from going into a store staffed by mammals as likely as not to turn up their noses at her once it became clear that she had neither the money nor the inclination to buy anything. Besides, she had spent what spare time she had studying and exercising to better be able to apply to the police academy when admissions opened again, and hadn't had the opportunity to indulge in window shopping.
When they entered the building, though, Judy had to keep from gawking, open-jawed; she had never imagined that a store could be so large and she had to keep craning her neck upwards to see the ceiling high above the floor of the atrium. The ceiling itself was a magnificent mosaic of pieces of colored glass almost too small to make out from the floor that made the decorations of the Mystic Springs Oasis seem plain by comparison. There were great swirling floral patterns in white picked out among a delicate blue background, contrasted with bolder knots of greens, yellows, and reds that formed around circles of deep blue that shimmered in the light of the chandeliers that hung from them. There were thirteen floors, all of the ones above street level with balconies in a starburst pattern boarded by columns richly topped with curving decorations.
It was as though everything that was for sale in the Steers catalog, and even more besides, was for sale, and despite herself Judy wished they had more time to look around. It occurred to her that despite living in the city for a bit more than a month she hadn't done any of the touristy things that her family members had said they would do themselves, if they had the chance to visit. Nick quickly picked out a pawful of new suit jackets and slacks with a mildly distasteful air, commenting that he was lucky that they would more or less fit off the rack without modification. "It's just as well, though," he sighed as he helped Judy look through the racks of dresses for something to replace her own wardrobe, "Fru Fru drove Big crazy; she always liked shopping at department stores. He couldn't get her to go to a tailor on his life."
Judy supposed that he meant Fru Fru was more likely to approve of clothes also purchased from a department store; despite Nick's apparent snobbery, she could understand the appeal of clothes that were ready to be worn right away without having to wait for them to be put together. "How about this one?" she asked, holding up a dress that looked like it would fit.
Judy had never paid much attention to how clothes were sized, and the numbers didn't mean much to her. Nick sized up the dress with a critical eye; it was entirely white, but it had a sort of paisley pattern worked into the skirt with little beads that she thought was pretty. "It'll do," he said, throwing the dress over one arm where he was keeping his other picks.
After quickly picking out a few other items so that she'd have at least half a dozen outfits, they made their way down the escalator to the ground floor. That on its own was something of a marvel; though her father would likely have dismissed it as one of the pointless excesses of the city, there was something to be said for the ingenuity of the interlocking wooden steps as they made their endless loop, creaking and groaning only a little. Nick had insisted on carrying everything, so she was glad on his behalf that he hadn't had to carry everything down flights of stairs, but she hadn't understood his insistence until they reached the register. It wasn't that she thought he wasn't a gentlemammal, but as she had two perfectly good arms his politeness only made sense once the perky little deer running the register had finished boxing up the items and addressed her directly in a seemingly affected tone. "I can have someone carry these out to your car, ma'am, if only you should like your servant to pull it around."
The deer hadn't even looked at Nick as he made this statement, and suddenly the lack of concern that the store's staff had exhibited over Nick's presence was exposed in a different light. It wasn't that they were open minded enough to not be immediately and unreasonably suspicious of a predator; it was because they thought that Nick was her employee, an impression that Nick had in retrospect carefully cultivated with his actions in the store. She had thought his lack of much commentary on her choices had been because he had understood her urgency in getting to their next lead, but it could have been interpreted as the care a servant would give their master. "Oh, that shan't be necessary, shall it ma'am?" Nick asked in an equally stuffy tone, looking down his nose at the deer, which was a remarkable feat considering that the deer had at least two feet of height on him.
"Ah... No, no that's fine," Judy said hastily.
The deer gave her a stiff nod, but after announcing the total he had appeared somewhat surprised when the payment came out of Nick's wallet, exposing a small fortune in cash as the fox carelessly peeled off the appropriate number of bills. "Would we be able to change before leaving?" Judy asked, and the deer quickly recovered to be able to reply.
"Certainly, ma'am," he said, with a somewhat superior air.
She wondered what he had thought of her appearance, still dressed in one of Nick's shirts with the belt from a bathrobe to make it fit somewhat better. Probably that she was some new kind of flapper, perhaps, some wealthy dilettante who had tried and then given up on a peculiar new fashion. In any event, she had carelessly grabbed the boxes for one of the dresses and the hat that Nick had told her matched it and made her way to one of the changing rooms, offering Nick an apology at the same time. "I didn't realize that they would have thought—" she started, but Nick had waved it off.
"That's the best I've ever been treated here, really," he said, "I'll have to bring you the next time I feel like overpaying for a suit."
After Judy had hastily changed, and then put the shirt and belt together into the box the dress had come in without much effort at folding them neatly, she saw that Nick had already changed out of his suit and into one of the ones that he had just purchased. To her eye, the suit didn't look all that different from the one he had been wearing, although it was perhaps somewhat looser. She couldn't tell if that was because it hadn't been tailored exactly to him or if that was simply the style, but he wore it with a remarkable ease. Still, she had grabbed her fair share of the remaining boxes before he could say anything and carried them out to the Buchatti, which turned out to be completely impractical when it came to carrying luggage—there was absolutely no compartment for it, the space behind the seats being completely consumed by the fuel tank. Instead, Nick had pulled forth some straps and somewhat awkwardly lashed the boxes to the smooth boat tail of the car. "That should hold," he said cheerfully, admiring his own work.
Judy nodded, although the effort it had taken made her take another wary glance at the sky, which was still overcast. If it rained, there was no getting around it; they would get wet. Still, it was quite a bit faster for getting around the city than walking, so she resigned herself not to complain about it and once Nick had arranged a sprig of the violets on her hat to his satisfaction, she drove off to Little Rodentia.
After Judy had parked the car about as close to Little Rodentia as possible, they walked right past the main entrance. Judy, at least, might have been able to get through the archway, which was grandly sized for a mouse but less so for a bunny, if she was willing to crawl, but Nick wouldn't have had any chance of squeezing through. The main entrance was set in a carved piece of granite, with little decorations so small as to be difficult to see, and the clock that was set in the pediment over the archway was about the size of a pocket watch from Judy's perspective. In comparison to the tiny grandeur of the entrance, the wrought iron fence around Little Rodentia was surprisingly mundane; it wouldn't have looked out of place in a nice garden. The gate had a clever little arrangement of springs along the hinges so that it would shut itself after it was opened, and the brass handle of the latch was polished to a high sheen from use. A number of signs had been posted on the gate; there was a stern warning to "MIND YOUR TAIL" accompanied by an illustration of some vaguely generic animal knocking over a building that hardly came up to their knee with a careless swing of their tail, and another that read "NO MAMMALS UNDER SIX YEARS OF AGE PERMITTED THRU THIS GATE." But while both of the signs were somewhat worn with time and age, there was also a much newer looking one that had hardly begun to fade. It read "ABSOLUTELY NO PREDATORS," and while Nick didn't directly acknowledge it or show any outward sign of having noticed, he had turned to Judy and said, "I'll wait with the car."
"Absolutely not," Judy said firmly, grabbing him by the paw before he could walk away, "You're coming with me."
"I don't know if you've noticed, Agent, but it seems my kind isn't welcome here," he replied, straightening his tie with his free paw in what he probably wanted to come across as an unconcerned air.
"Forget the sign," she replied dismissively, "I'm a prohibition agent—"
"Oh, are you?" Nick interrupted in an apparent attempt at light-hearted humor, "I think you might have missed a chance or two to remind me about that."
"—and if I say I need you, they can't keep you out," she finished, ignoring his interruption.
"You need me?" Nick asked, quirking his eyebrows in surprise.
"Of course I do," Judy said, not ashamed at all to admit it.
Nick was many things, but above them all he had been faithfully honoring his promise, even though she had extorted him into it at first. The stark words of the sign on the gate to Little Rodentia were only the latest in the series of insults and slights that the city directed at predators. Judy felt almost as ashamed of extorting Nick as she did of how little notice she had paid to those insults and slights before joining his company. For his part, Nick's expression softened somewhat and he chuckled, shaking his head. "You'll be a bad influence on me," he said, but he made no further protests and followed her through the gate.
Little Rodentia, to Judy's eye, looked like one of the city's blocks recreated in miniature, although there were some details that seemed off. The impression of looking at the city from a fair distance was ruined by the parts that weren't scaled appropriately; although the grass of the park areas was neatly trimmed, the individual blades were still far too large. The streets were also disproportionately wide, compared to the rest of the city, but there were far too many little electric cars and pedestrians using them to walk on them without risking crushing someone. The neat sidewalks that ran between the buildings and the streets, which were all paved unlike the wooden sidewalks still in place in some parts of the city, were perhaps two inches wide and consequently useless. However, much like Sahara Square, the buildings were widely spaced; although Little Rodentia was at least the size of a city block, easily two-thirds of it was simply undeveloped parkland, and the built up portions had a gravel path, appropriately wide for a mammal even larger than either Judy herself or Nick, that ran behind the buildings. The overall effect was that Little Rodentia was a model city, with paths to allow larger mammals to come and go without stepping on the delicate work of the modelers, but Judy couldn't complain. Nick, she noticed, had actually grabbed the tip of his tail in one paw to be sure that it would not brush up against anything. Conveniently, they did not have to rely on the minuscule signs that were on the streets themselves; they were far too small to read without bending over to look at them, and the city had wisely put far larger street signs at the intersections of the gravel paths that wound around the streets themselves.
Despite the care that they both took to avoid disrupting the tiny inhabitants, Judy could still occasionally hear little squeaks of fear and cries of alarm as they were sighted, and she glumly thought that it was likely because of Nick. At least, if they were terrified of him, no one made any move to try stopping them, and soon enough they came to what really was, as Otterton had said, a beautiful house.
It looked like an extremely elaborate dollhouse, the sort that Judy's sisters had coveted when they saw similar ones in the Steers catalog. Fru Fru's house must have been a mansion by the standards of a shrew; the house was three stories tall with elaborate Victorian ornamentation, including a tower that came to a little conical peak and a porch with a tiny little railing chased out in slate gray against the gleaming white of the building itself. For Judy, though, the top of that tower didn't even come to the bottom of her chin, and she had awkwardly bent over the neat little lawn in front of it, taking care not to mash croquet wickets, barely the size of staples, into the lichen that served in place of grass. Taking extraordinary care, she gingerly grasped the brass knocker of the door between her thumb and forefinger. After a few fumbling attempts at knocking, she instead let it go and simply tapped a nail against the door, which was soon rewarded by the sound of scurrying feet.
"Nicky!" a shrill voice called, when the door was flung open, Judy springing back to prevent the door from smacking her in the nose, "You're alive!"
"It's good to see you too, Fru Fru," Nick said, smiling as he bent carefully over to bring his head to the level of the front door.
The shrew that waddled out ignored Judy entirely to look up at Nick; the shrew was, to Judy's eye, visibly pregnant, but still dressed like a flapper with a short little black dress and her hair bobbed. A moment later, another shrew left the house, a pudgy little male dressed in a suit that appeared rather similar to the one that Nick was wearing, although obviously on a much smaller scale. His ample little frame also meant that his suit didn't fit him nearly as well, which was not helped any by the three little shrews he was awkwardly holding, wrinkling the shoulders of his suit and covering it with stains. The smallest of the shrews was wearing a white dress with pink accents—Fru Fru's first son, perhaps—while the other two, who looked quite a bit larger, both wore blue dresses; presumably one of them was the daughter that Otterton had done a floral arrangement for at her christening. "'Ey Fru Fru, who is dis fella?" the shrew, who must have been Mr. Petruccio, asked, his words thick with a coastal accent.
"I've told ya about Nicky a million times, haven't I?" Fru Fru asked, waving a paw dismissively, "It's good to see ya, Nicky, ain't it, Angelo?"
She directed this last at her husband with a harsh little look. "Real good, right," he said quickly, "Pleasure meetin' ya, Nicky."
Regardless of the infants that her husband held, Fru Fru elbowed her husband sharply and harshly whispered something into his ear which even Judy's sensitive ears could barely pick up—telling him to offer Nick something, but she thought she must have misheard the word, an impression that wasn't helped when Angelo Petruccio repeated the offer. "Ya want some gabagool, Nicky?" he said, "Got some made outta some real primo night crawlers. Be a real pleasure, breakin' bread wit' ya."
"It's been a long time since I've had gabagool," Nick replied, and he seemed to take some kind of relish in eating it again even as he gave no indication of what it actually was, "But I'm here on business."
Fru Fru and Angelo exchanged a brief glance. "What kinda business?" Fru Fru asked, but she sounded more curious than angry or afraid.
"Allow me to introduce Agent Hopps, Bureau of Prohibition," Nick said, gesturing at Judy.
Under other circumstances, it might have struck Judy as funny how the two shrews looked at her as they realized that she was present; considering that she was a giant to them, she thought she might have been more noticeable. Angelo's reaction, however, went somewhat beyond surprise as he took her in. He muttered something that she had no trouble understanding. "Aw, shit."
Author's Notes:
The title of this chapter, "The Little White House (At the End of Honeymoon Lane)" comes from a 1927 Irving Kaufman song and is in reference to the house of Fru Fru and her husband, which may not exactly be the perfect image of domestic bliss. They do, however, have a little white house, at least from the perspective of the two main characters.
Marshall Fallow and Company is a takeoff of Marshall Fields and Company, which was a major department store brand in the Chicago area from the late 19th century until their acquisition and rebranding by Macy's in 2005. Fallow deer prefer living in mixed forest and grasslands, so I thought it appropriately complemented my use of Steers Roebuck as another massive chain apparently run by deer.
The real Marshall Field and Company Building is a Chicago landmark, and for a long time was the largest store in the world. Even now, it's the world's third largest store, and much of its somewhat ostentatious ornamentation remains, including a beautiful vaulted mosaic ceiling of Tiffany glass and a pair of outdoor clocks that are frequently singled out as meeting places (although sometimes leading to missed meetings, as one is at the intersection of State and Washington and the other at the intersection of State and Randolph). If you're ever in Chicago, it's certainly worth checking out among the other wonderful architecture of the city.
I would imagine that in the world of Zootopia, clothing sizes would be even more complicated than they are in ours due to the enormous variation in the size of mammals and their features. A mammal like a beaver, with a proportionally wide tail, would need a much larger hole for it than a bunny, and I'd guess mammals with horns or antlers might not be able to wear shirts or dresses that pull over their heads. The 1920s is before the era of vanity sizing really started, though, so at that time the numbers would actually translate into meaningful measurements; there would just need to a lot of them for mammals that wanted to shop at stores that don't specialize in their species.
Escalators did exist in the 1920s, and would definitely be something of a novelty. As described, they would be made mostly out of wood, not metal, and certainly are not the sort of thing that you would expect to find in the countryside. They are rather convenient for shopping, though.
Once again, the Buchatti shows itself to be a ridiculously impractical car for doing anything other than driving fast; the Bugatti Type 35 was indeed completely lacking in any kind of spot for storing cargo.
I think that it makes logical sense that Little Rodentia would have a larger gate besides the one that Judy slid through in the movie; if nothing else it would make getting goods in and out a lot more convenient. I think it's pretty obvious why they would have a warning about tails, and the banning of small children from entering through the gate makes sense if you've seen how some toddlers play. An elephant toddler, for example, would be an unholy terror from the perspective of residents who top out at six inches, and even if they didn't directly injure anyone playing, they could easily wreck buildings.
Banning predators is a bit less understandable, but this story is set in the 1920s which makes it unfortunately understandable in its own way.
In the 1920s, pink was considered a masculine color, appropriate for baby boys, and blue an appropriately delicate color for baby girls. It's anyone's guess why this switched, but the 1940s is when it happened, and it seems pretty firmly entrenched today if you look down any toy aisle. It was also pretty common, simply as a practical matter, to dress babies in dresses no matter their gender. Skirts can be pretty easily lengthened as the baby grows by altering the hem and don't need to be replaced as often, plus it makes it easier to change diapers.
"Gabagool" is actually "capocollo" through a thick New York or New Jersey Italian accent. Capocollo is a type of cured pork, although since pork is right out in this universe, it's apparently made out of earthworms. Real arctic shrews do indeed eat invertebrates, and for a family that's obviously intended as something of a parody of east coast Italian Americans, I thought it an appropriate reference to make.
As always, thanks for reading, and I'd love to know what you think!