Twice Melvin

by James Pumpelly

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  ISBN: 9781543923865

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To M. P.

  and the marvel of second chances.

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt from Mary Pumpelly

  The year 1972

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  The year 2000

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  Excerpt from Mary Pumpelly, New York, Charles Scribner, 1852

  (on the beheading of John the Baptist)

  There no funeral wailings loud,

  No obsequies, that mourn the proud,

  No hearse, nor hatchments, pall, nor shroud,

  Betoken mourner’s gloom;

  But glorious, more than regal halls,

  That night, those narrow dungeon walls,

  And honer’d were those mortal thralls,

  The prison, and the tomb.

  That cell had been a place of prayer,

  And holy angels waited there.

  Upon a golden charger laid -

  At Herod’s high behest -

  The head was brought unto the maid,

  In presence of the guests.

  Receiving it, Salome spake,

  Impassionate and wild:

  “Oh why, proud Mother! doest thou make

  A pander of thy child!

  Enough sure that a daughter’s name

  Were sullied by her mother’s shame.

  “At last the hunted blood is shed -

  The curse be doubly thine! -

  Take, take this long devoted head,

  Oh would that it were mine!

  “For he hath gained a martyr’s crown,

  And I! - the Homicide’s renown!”

  The year 1972

  To regret deeply is to live afresh. (Thoreau)

  I

  My story begins with my funeral. Born - and soon to be buried - in Plainfield, Vermont, my quaint little village is about as close to monastic life as one can imagine short of taking the vow. More so when it’s raining, which it is on this April afternoon, the valley’s Winooski River chanting its way round barrier rocks like so many white-hooded monks, overreaching elm and maple trees dripping penitent tears from the dampening breath of the mountains. At ease by a patchwork of houses, the rain-laden nods of native perennials acknowledge the wending procession, not a few of their number in pious repose inside the Church of the Good Shepherd, its glistening steeple enshrouded by the morning mist. In the village church, stifled sobs accompany the rustle of rain across skeletal stained glass, lancets of amber and rose casting gloom on my casket thrust up through nestling blossoms.

  But if anyone present is immune to the communal melancholy, it’s my long-dead and recently reappearing Aunt Martha:

  “Take a gander at this blubbering bunch of hypocrites, will you, Melvin?” Aunt Martha jabbing my ribs like a guilty Eve, our secretive stance, peering through vertical cracks in the vestry door, forcing us closer than we’ve been in years. “Take Thelma, for instance, sniffling as if she were stretched out in that box, instead of you-“

  “But Thelma has always been a good crier,” I interject, “a necessary talent for her profession, I suppose.”

  “A Sunday-school teacher?” Aunt Martha derides, “give me some credit, Melvin. There’s no call for tears in a kindergarten class. Not unless you happen to be on the wrong end of Thelma’s ‘board of education’.”

  “Right,” I whimper, recalling the board’s familiarity with my behind. “Then again, she’s championed some causes that could make anyone cry,” I add, moving aside to give her the benefit of my view.

  “Why, nephew, are-are you suggesting?” Aunt Martha halting in mid thought, “…no, I suppose you’re not,” she finishes, offering me her curiosity.

  “Not what?” my attention now solely hers.

  “Suggesting she had anything to do with your death,” Aunt Martha emphasizing ‘death’ as though the very word is anathema.

  “Foolish, indeed,” I agree, chuckling at the thought of a Thelma Peabody harangue initiating some unfortunate’s demise. “But if there’s anyone out there who might have such ability…” I edge back for another look, “it would have to be the reverend, his expertise in the supernatural more likely than Thelma Peabody’s”

  “Look at you!” she snips, “the pot calling the kettle black! I don’t know which is worse: a lawyer or a preacher!”

  “A minister, for sure,” pride in my law firm serving me well. “An attorney has a legal right to charge for his services.”

  “And who wrote the law that makes it legal?” she cavils, “and who, but an attorney, can legally inflict a heart attack with the aid of the post office?” Aunt Martha puncturing my argument with yet another indefensible probe. “Between you and your law partner - that, that, that what’s-his-face sitting a little too close to your wife – there’s probably few folks this side of the Montpelier statehouse who haven’t opened a mailbox to the wallop of one of your bills.”

  “You mean George,” I correct, Aunt Martha on my trail like a yammering coyote. “George is my law partner’s name, Auntie, not ‘what’s-his-face’; and as to his proximity to Melody, George is merely acting the gentleman he is,” I argue. “Should my wife feel the need of a compassionate shoulder, there’s no bigger one out there than his.”

  Aunt Martha ignoring my rebuttal, motioning me to listen to the reverend, her interest in his every word not unlike her attention to hearsay.

  “’Only that day dawns to which we are awake,’” the reverend quotes, “and for our departed friend, that dawn is a spiritual one, the kind of dawn Henry Thoreau may well have been referencing when he penned those words in Walden. We take comfort in the assurance our dearly departed is awake to the glory of that new and spectacular dawn. He lives, our Melvin does. He lives afresh! Any regrets he may have suffered left behind, abandoned abruptly, even gladly, in that paltry portmanteau one drops at the crossing.”

  “Not bad…not bad at all,” Aunt Martha opines, patting my boney hand sympathetically, “but entirely too tame, this service of yours. Too tame, indeed. And I’m going to do something to liven it up. After all, you are my nephew, Melvin, and that makes you special! Makes you deserving of a better send-off than the old reverend’s managing,” her decision to tamper with the powers-that-be marking my death as nothing more than the inception of a new round of troubles.

  For five days, Aunt Martha has been enlightening me on t
he superior skills of disembodied spirits (her passing a decade before mine), our impromptu meeting occasioned by my sudden arrival. But it’s onerously apparent she’s kept up with the times, her postmortem antics in step with the latest events, the Right Reverend Rolundo (his big basso profundo waxing eloquent in my eulogy) hardly more surprised than I am as Aunt Martha begins demonstrating her savvy.

  Falling rose-petal soft on listening ears, the reverend’s pleasing elocution brings me back to my wife, her blue eyes misting with tears - then, suddenly widening as Aunt Martha’s magical “thought imposition” finds a voice in the reverend; old Mother Eve’s fascination with the unknown as nothing compared to the stark fear of knowledge in my beloved’s eyes.

  “Now as paradoxical as it may seem,” the reverend’s sonorous bass climbing to a decidedly stressful pitch, “profound thoughts can be more easily entertained in a comfortable setting. Why, even Thomas a Kempis could have improved his philosophy had he allowed himself a few luxuries…yes…and suspecting this, our Melvin…aaah! our Melvin,” his unnatural falsetto squeaks, “our Melvin worked feverishly for success. True, we may have thought of Melvin as an aspiring young attorney; but he was much more than that…more, even, than all his sudden wealth and ill-purchased fame would have us know. He was a philosopher…a thinker…a bender of facts…ah! and a bender of backs, I should add; a veritable genius in legal crimes!”

  With this sudden and unexpected turn down tribute’s trail, I can almost hear my mourners’ heartbeats, the excitement of some bizarre or bawdy discovery perversely refreshing amidst the sickening sweet of funeral sprays, the one exception being Vincent Tenklei, an English Poetry student at Plainfield’s Godhard College, his dark face glistening with a patina of sweat.

  Vince had been my only charity case, his unique situation alerting my greed. Hailing from Rhodesia, Vince, I had schemed, could open a few international doors if I handled his case gratuitously, one involving a small fortune in some New York tenements bequeathed by his uncle. The simple matter of paying off a few tax liens acquainted me with his seemingly limitless offshore accounts - and his bankers, their shadowy world of hidden wealth a realm I hoped to explore. But now exploration is at my expense, Reverend Rolundo blundering on with his invisible, soprano guide.

  “He had a painter’s talent for color,” the minister shrieks, his eloquence lost, his keen blue eyes growing spasm large, his labored breath, for all the world, portending angina pectoris. “Melvin knew the power of a pliant sentence; a well-placed word, peony brilliant; the charisma of listening. And how do I know this?” he whines as though quizzing himself, “be-because…because confiding in him was like dropping pebbles to the bottom of a well…little secrets kept to be drawn when lust demanded.”

  By now, even Thelma Peabody is squirming to the edge of her pew. Perched scandalously close to Vincent, Thelma appears to be everything she taught me not to be as my Sunday-school teacher. The busiest old maid in Plainfield, Thelma manages to profit from her organic vegetable farm while organizing protest marches in nearby Montpelier - marches in accord with her Sunday-school interpretations of the King James Version, her rendition of Joseph’s coat a Bible story I’ve never forgotten. Thelma’s graphic, animated discourse on the metaphysical meaning of said coat’s colors (“sacrificial red” among them) was more than an adolescent imagination should ponder in the winter-dark of a wind-swept, window-rattling night. The glowing embers of my bedroom hearth frequently birthed bloodthirsty fiends; the current rattling more the closet skeleton type, though the blood is still my own.

  ”Now full of distrust, now of angry courage,” the Reverend’s piercing pitch frightening the congregation, “Melvin Morrison never lacked for motivation. Prodded by pain…drawn by delight…he knew if he did what was in his lustful heart he mustered within him a loyal troupe, a deceptive effrontery, a bit of show that always kept us guessing, kept us ignorant of his sins: an ignorance allowing him a secret life at the expense of our blind admiration.”

  Vincent’s nervous, choking coughs allow my entrance: “Surely you aren’t going to tell them that, Aunt Martha,” I plead. “Think of my Melody, my grieving wife, Melody. How could you?“

  “No, how could you?” she breaks in churlishly.

  “I-I was mortal then, remember?” I stammer, “unlearned in the scheme of things. It was my legal assistant, Charlene, who led me astray - the seductive way she retrieved a file, or served my coffee.”

  “But you never drank coffee, Melvin,” Aunt Martha reminds me, “so don’t be pulling that innocence ploy on me. I happen to know what that buxom little assistant of yours served up.”

  “I didn’t know…I-I mean, yes, of course I knew,” I admit awkwardly, aware now that lies are as useless as pricked balloons in the ethereal realm of spirits, “but that’s still no reason for you to meddle in Melody’s memories.”

  “Right. It’s you that should be doing the meddling,” Aunt Martha rejoins, tugging me like a string of linguini through a crack in the door. “And if I were you, I’d get started right away, because it’s hotter than old Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace where you’re apt to be going. Fact is, you’d better start doing some meddling now, and fast; start negotiating for another chance – which is what I’m trying to give Melody. Focus on Rolundo and you’ll see what I have in mind.”

  But I can’t, my thirsty eyes returning to my sweet wife’s face like awestruck tourists to Trevi Fountain, Melody’s innocence a patch of color on a somber day. For having slipped so unsubstantially through her youth, my wastrel years are now a haunting, a specter ever mocking morrow’s call. Unlike the faithless who, when alarms pass, forget the saints, my memories unveil a conscience, the sacred spark illuming wistful might-have-beens - the Reverend interrupting my reverie:

  “For all his father’s stern admonishments, Melvin fared no better than Balaam’s ass, the very angel’s sword but scant restraint when pleasure called. Endowed with a prurient eye for the ladies, our Melvin became a man of easy virtue, an aficionado of feminine wiles, his backstairs reputation even now a thing of awe.”

  “Enough!” I implore, my inamorata fainting dead away, her nymph-like figure folding all too easily across the experienced lap of my law partner, George (brutish bachelor he really is). “Look what you’ve done, Aunt Martha! My funeral’s not half over and you already have Melody in the lap of another man! Have you any idea what that scoundrel’s like?” I ask testily. “In the game of romance, George O’Malley acknowledges no limits. He has, as it were, an instinct for infinity, forever temporizing, regarding his randy blunders as inconveniences wrought by what he deems as the weaker sex.”

  Instantly, I recall Aunt Martha’s own reputation, her former talents including an ability to discompose, the sum of my protests seeming to her as illogical as borrowing money to settle one’s debts - as making further trial of my discretion, the Reverend’s fulmination continues:

  “In the game of carrot waving,” he squeals, “Melvin Morrison was the consummate player. Though reared in the sanctity of a good parson’s home, his scheming heart fairly rejoiced in the affairs of greed, his knack of rooting advantage from the pigsty of litigation evidenced by his recent victory in the Rogue vs. Way case. You must all be familiar with that one,” he gasps, startled by his own observation. “The media was so unrelenting, so biased, the newspapers portraying the Rogue Sperm Bank’s board of directors as venerable saints; the Boston bank’s suit as heaven ordained; the bank’s effort, to keep its depositors anonymous, as a public act of mercy; the poor Way’s claim that their Rogue child had gone every which way but right, doing just that, passing on before a verdict could be rendered. And why? Because of Melvin’s expertise in the chambers, that’s why. One has to wonder just what sort of account Melvin kept with that bank.”

  This time, the protests come from the mourners, my partner George standing up with a contemptuous “Damn!” his martial manner pleasing me despite the fondling way he stretches my swooning wife on t
he pew. Too long have baited breaths been made to wait, too harsh their marked astonishment, George’s Munchausen flair for the incredible redeeming my beleaguered reputation with precipitous alacrity.

  “Objection!” George O’Malley booms. “Objection! What accounts my clie—, my partner may have had are not on trial here, Your Honor.”

  “Agreed,” spits Rolundo, his skill as a religious raconteur lost in histrionics. “It’s his second set of books we’re interested in, his double-crossing entries that don’t add up.”

  “Rev-er-end Ri-bald,” George rumbles, stepping threateningly into the aisle, “may I approach the bench?”

  “As you like!” Rolundo thunders, Aunt Martha’s sudden withdrawal, before the menace of George, reducing the man of God to a state of dementia, his wrinkled face woeful, doom gathering about his shaming eyes and quivering lips as though he doubts the eternal verities.

  “Now see here, Judge,” my partner reasons, leaning across a cornucopia of carnations to within a whispering nearness of the pulpit, “I remember reading somewhere that compassion finds another’s faults like sunlight after a shower; and if this be true, it accounts for our present pall of gloom; for nowhere in your callous ravings have you shown us a single ray of light. Now, I ask you, Judge, what kind of message are you trying to send here?”

  “I-I don’t know,” mutters the befuddled minister, “b-but what I do know is what the good book tells us, ‘In fire gold is tested, and worthy men in the crucible of humiliation’, to which I humbly add Shakespeare’s line, ‘O, how poor are they who have not patience.’”

  “Quoting Othello is not germane,” George counters, “unless you’re referencing the ‘hell’ in Othello’s name. Is that it? For that’s what you’ve been giving us for the last five minutes! I believe I speak for both sides, Your Honor, by requesting an immediate ruling.”

  “Acquitted!” Rolundo spewing the word like a wine-taster, as eager to feed, my mourners, led en masse by Thelma Peabody, rush the bewildered parson promiscuously - all save Vincent, who is sweating profusely; my wife, still lying peacefully on her pew; and Charlene Mally, my legal assistant, who, by taking advantage of the confusion, is bending over my casket to plant a kiss on my two-timing lips.