The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  Just how far back these habits of Mackerel’s extended was hard to say, but it was known that he had been “keeping company” rather soon after his wife’s death, and more than likely that he had been living this double life while she was still alive. A man who will cheat in the betrothed state will obviously not hesitate to do so in the married! He had admitted that they had quarreled constantly, and the rumor was that he had beat her, no doubt on those roaring drunks—which no one now blamed her for having kept secret to her dying day. It was a natural thing for families to do—they had their pride. Poor woman, though, what she must have gone through. She had been more of a saint than they had dreamt! And now here he was trying to queer the memorial out of his rotten alien theories and sheer insane jealousy. No wonder it turns out there seems something fishy about that so-called accident at the beach. You mean—? Yes. The police are on the trail of something. It’s still hush-hush, but expected to break any hour.

  The instant I entered the church I saw how far my reputation had fallen. The place was jammed. The worship area was not only full, it spilled over into the gymnasium-auditorium part from which it was divided by the accordion folding walls. P.L. had never packed in so many while I was a respected figure in the community and invited to dinner. Now that I was no longer received in proper society, they came from miles around to see and hear me.

  We dedicated a new liberalized hymnal that morning, and as the congregation raised their voices in the strains of “Funiculi-funicula” and “Has anybody here seen Kelly, K-e-double l-y,” I sat glancing through the text of my message. It was the last of the series on the Seven Churches in Asia, and luckily accommodated a few last-minute remarks on the events of the preceding night, the hasty incorporation of which a slight mouse on one eye and a few cuts and bruises called for.

  “Our text for this morning,” I began when the extended “sing” was over and I had taken my place at the pulpit, “our text for this morning, dearly beloved, is from Revelation three, verses fourteen to sixteen, where we read: ‘And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write … I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’”

  The first stir that had gone among the audience on my rising to speak had subsided. They watched me in alert silence.

  “Let us not congratulate ourselves,” I commenced, “on the reasonable mind that sees both sides of every question. Civilized flexibility is a fine thing, and in a sense the aim of education, but there is a point here, as everywhere, where the law of diminishing returns sets in. Tepid liberalism that never lashes out at anything, intellects too stocked with information to draw a conclusion, educations scrimped and saved for, that one may dawdle in the green bowers of non-commmitment—these lack something possessed by an honest bigot. That there is a time to throw stones is a principle I try to follow in my daily life, occasionally to my peril.” I saw Meesum fidget and look down his pew at somebody. Mrs. Sponsible watched from under a dove-gray bonnet with tiny scarlet buds around its crown. I touched the mouse on my right eye and smiled.

  “Last night I was strolling about the streets of Chickenfoot, as is my wont of a Saturday night”—there were several coughs into dainty gloved fists—“when I saw one of those open-air revivalists who always rub me the wrong way. Perhaps I was too anti-Laodicean here, forgetting that the poor man was only acting according to his lights, but I stopped to give him a piece of my mind. A not altogether sober bystander intervened, a fist fight followed, and then a policeman appeared who carted us both off to the local clink. You may imagine that your overheated Saul of Tarsus cooled off pretty fast at this point. In fact, it was worse than that. I felt a perfect ass.”

  Here Mackerel paused and gazed down at the floor below the pulpit, as though his thinking had stalled. Somewhere some mechanism seemed to have jammed. He smiled abstractedly and added: “Like the Englishman who reached down the lady’s back for her pearls.”

  There was an absolute silence. Then the silence began to take on that faintly sizzling quality of a telephone connection. Heads turned and whispers became audible. Meesum’s plucked-chicken neck twisted round to catch von Pantz’s eye. Von Pantz caught the glance of another clinic staff member and the two rose and met at the back, where they were joined by Meesum and another trustee. The four of them went out, their heads together.

  Are you satised now, my people? Is this the way you want it? If ye cannot shatter him one way ye will do it another, so that, caught in a vise of tribal manufacture and crazed by lust, he can be delivered over to whichever authority seems most in line to receive the pieces and seal his doom—that about it? Because the rest of the morning passed off without incident, no more ad libs, but ye have done your work well, O my townfolk. And you, Knopf, are you watching? “Maybe he’s not responsible,” they whisper in little groups as, forgoing the usual suburban handshake this time, he ducks out a side door and hurries along the arcade to the parsonage like one bucking a great wind.

  Gaining which he sees Hester in the kitchen calmly assembling the noonday meal. “I’m baking the chicken in red wine,” is all she says. “I hope you like it. And there’s plenty of Heineken’s in.”

  Nothing was said about the occurrence all that day and the next. On Tuesday morning I came down late for breakfast to find her reading the Avalon Globe. It was published twice weekly, and this would be the first issue in which it could have run a story about the city hall meeting.

  “Any trumped-up charges?” I asked, taking the paper from her eagerly.

  She rose and went to pour my coffee.

  “There’s nothing about the meeting at all except in general terms saying that differences were aired between you,” she said. “Nothing about that other at all.”

  “Then it’s to be a cat-and-mouse,” I said, reading for myself the story, abounding in equivocation and tipping no hands, cunningly buried on page sixteen. “I suppose great secrecy would enshroud the recovery of the film.”

  “I think the paper’s very nice to you,” Hester said, filling my cup.

  “It takes a while for a gang to seize the means of communication. Putting the screws on the editorial department through the advertising isn’t accomplished overnight. You don’t know anything about those things.”

  “You want them to do you wrong, don’t you? You’re itching to have them make a big thing of the film, only to find you innocent and have to be ashamed of themselves. But, Andrew, do be careful. This thing may backfire.”

  After breakfast I telephoned the Globe office and got Charlie Comstock himself on the wire. I thanked him for the kind write-up, then said, “How much heat are they actually putting on you, after seeing it? That started yet, Charlie?”

  “Heat?”

  “Yes. The well-known squeezeroo. Because you don’t think they’re going to let you get away with a soft policy on me, are you? They’ll get to you, and you’ll give me short shrift in the end. I just wanted you to know there’s no personal hard feelings.”

  “But they actually have talked to me, only the other way around. They nailed me right after the meeting at the city hall and said to go easy on you. They knew they’d been a little highhanded and were sorry.”

  “Asses!” I said. “What about the movies?”

  “Well, the detective bureau is running that down. George Chance, he’s head of it you know, got in touch with Fort Bliss right away under Sprackling’s orders, but Waldo’s not there. He’s been transferred to the White Sands proving ground in New Mexico, with a two-week transfer furlough, and nobody can locate him.”

  “I suppose they’ll keep trying?”

  “Oh, sure. But he isn’t actually due at his new post till next week, you see, so there’s nothing they can do till then. Meanwhile shurtainly hope everything works out for the besht,” Comstock said in the quasi-tipsy voice which was especially noticeable in moments of strain. “Ashk Lord shtraighten you
out, Andy. He’ll help you. Look up to him.”

  I finished my call and carried a second cup of coffee into the living room. Hester was sitting there. After a moment of frowning silence, she said, “Andrew, about the film. I have a plan.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “No, really. What I’m really quite frightened of is that there won’t be any picture to clear you, and all this will be left dangling. I have nightmares about it.”

  “I wish I had nightmares,” I said. “It would imply that I was getting sleep. Never mind your plan. Are we making any strides getting a secretary?” Hester had undertaken to find me one, advertising in the surrounding help wanted columns and screening the applicants. Except that the applicants, however, were almost nonexistent.

  “They’ve heard about you and, well, they’re afraid to take a job in the same office with you,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. Only two answered the ad in the Bridgeport paper yesterday and neither was secretarial timber. I could tell that right away. One of them snickered when she asked what you were like. They imagine the main qualification is a well-turned ankle.”

  “They needn’t worry about their ankles. I’ve got my mind on higher things.”

  “You going to talk like that in church again Sunday?” Hester said, lowering her eyes away.

  “Well, we’ll see.” I backed against the mantel and stood there drinking coffee.

  “Is it something you can’t help?” she asked. “Something that comes over you?”

  “Poor Yeats went out in a blaze of lust, and think of Dylan Thomas’s last days. The same thing’s happening to me. It’s a malignant satyriasis, progressive and ingrown.”

  “Dearest Andrew, will it require surgery?”

  “We’ll see about that too. I can thank you for it all. I understand there’s talk of cracking down on old Mackerel. The church board have something cooking, have they? Come on, girl, come clean. You know everything that’s going on.”

  She broke her hands apart in an elusive gesture and dropped her eyes again. “I hear a Yale divinity student has been alerted to stand by, in case he’s needed. That’s all I know, honestly. If the board’s doing anything more definite I’m sure they’ll let you know.”

  They did. I was called on the next evening by a delegation who said they were anxious about certain rumors concerning my private life, which they wished ardently to doubt but which my behavior in the pulpit last Sunday forced them to give credence. They would like not to see it happen again. Profanity (used sparingly and to lend emphasis) they had no objection to, but smut was something else again.

  “We know you’re avant-garde and all that,” said Freddy Residue, the junior member who acted as spokesman, “but you’ve got to understand other people’s limitations.” If there was a reptition of last week’s occurrence, they would have to ask for my resignation, or at least that I take a rest of, say, three months till I was myself again. Perhaps I had been overworking, and strain had temporarily unstrung me. If so, the clinic was of course open to all members of the parish for whom any rest or observation was deemed advisable. I said I saw their point of view, and promised to desist from banking on greater resilience than could reasonably be asked of a folk still short of the desired urbanity, ideally speaking.

  “I can’t help feeling though,” I said, “it’s something of the old story. Break fresh ground and they’ll bury you in it.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, really,” Freddie Residue replied in his eagerly amiable way. “It’s just our old friend, enough-is-enough, if you know what I mean.”

  “So we have a hush-hush attitude toward sex here. Is that what we have in these parts then, Residue?”

  “Oh, it’s not that, Mackerel, fellow. Really, now, I don’t consider myself a prig, but one does draw the line, you know.”

  “I suppose. Still I can’t help feeling that the pressure is more than what’s called for. That certain forces are leagued against me. I hope I’m man enough for the chopping block if it comes to that, but I must say, why can’t we have progress without shedding all this bloody blood!”

  They looked to von Pantz, also present, with an intimation of its perhaps having worked its way into his province. But he declined exercising a professional role except in private, and turned the conversation to other matters, the ultimatum having been presumably deposited. He made some vague rejoinder, and then inquired whether I had got another secretary for the office. They had some urgent extra mimeographing at the clinic and he wondered what the chances were of “moochink a hand from headquarters.” I said we hadn’t got a girl yet but would let him know as soon as we did. We got on the general subject of secretaries and their idiosyncrasies, and von Pantz recalled for our amusement one he’d had in Leipzig who could only take dictation directly at the typewriter, though her speed made the method very nearly feasible. As he talked, I studied him with my usual interest.

  He was part schnauzer, though the strain would have been more marked had he let his hair grow and his mustache friz out a bit. He clipped his mustache and cut his hair close to the scalp—so close that the top of his flat head looked like a carpet sample. It matched absolutely the pewter rug on the floor of his office. He represented the return to orthodoxy, and was said to believe in the Devil.

  “Still she was quite a pretty girl,” he mused in conclusion. “I hated to leave her behind.”

  “Her what?” I said.

  “Behind.”

  “Now you’re doing it!” I exclaimed, pointing at him. “Listen to von Pantz, everybody. He’s getting off some good ones!”

  He looked blank, but a little exegesis of what he had said soon established his skill at double entendre. Von Pantz rose, stomping to his feet, and shook his finger over me.

  “I will not be dragged into zis!” he said. “I will not be made party to zis awful thing you are in the grip of. Now I don’t care.” There were tears in his eyes, and his expression was not one of anger so much as a wind of violent petulance. Somebody rose and put an arm around him, to quiet him.

  I am always amazed at the infantilism one encounters in supposedly adult people. They are those whom the rest of us must make up for; must “carry,” so to speak, in the round of social transactions that go to make up mature human life. Add to which mountainous enough hazard, never kid a kraut.

  I apologized and he was calmed down. But the other committee members, three in number, pointed out that this fresh incident clearly revealed the gravity of my “trouble” which they had come to discuss, and before departing they repeated their ultimatum. If there was a repetition of this sort of thing at morning service next Sunday, they would have no choice but to demand my removal to the clinic for an indefinite rest and observation.

  I stood at the window watching them get into their cars. I shook my head. It was obvious which way the wind was blowing, and what pretexts were being resorted to. By the time they got through with Mackerel, Knopf wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

  If the church had been crowded last time, this time they turned them away. People seemed to have come not only from all over Avalon but from surrounding townships and even from outside the state to hear the new sensation, because a few New York license plates were seen among the endemic station wagons and convertibles parked on the lot and both ways along the road. When Mackerel rose to deliver the sermon, a profound hush fell over the audience instantly. A strategy had apparently been agreed upon with which to meet any emergency. Four large, muscular orderlies from the clinic were posted with conspicuous nonchalance at different points in the worship area. They were all in aisle seats and all within sight of von Pantz, who was to give the signal to rise and move down to the platform on the first sign of fireworks. This was obvious from the way they kept glancing over at him.

  “Our text for this morning is from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the twenty-sixth chapter, verse seventy-three,” I began. “It is the scene outside the palace of Caiaphas the high priest, where the b
ystanders say to Peter, ‘Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth thee.’”

  I took a swallow of water and set the glass down again. I drew the paper clip from my manuscript. It was a manuscript there had been none to retype for me, besides being wreathed in late marginal interpolations, from which fresh impromptus might supposedly flower …

  “I would like to consider with you this morning, dearly beloved, the subject of oral diction, not merely as a surface trait but as an expression of national or racial character, dwelling particularly on the long-labored distinction between British and American speech, and the argument as to who best uses the language we allegedly share.

  “I know it’s customarily assumed that the English pick up the marbles here—marbles being what the cisatlantic mouth is supposedly full of. But I wonder. I mean I wonder if that’s all there is to the argument as to who best uses the mother tongue as laid out for us in Webster’s dictionary. Has it ever struck you, hearing an example of so-called impeccable British diction, that while the diction is precise enough, it is in the service of noises curiously at variance with the official spelling? I have given a lot of prayerful consideration to this matter, and I think that the difference, dearly beloved, lies in this. That Americans mumble correct pronunciations while the British clearly articulate faulty ones. Let us take a few examples of what I mean.”

  There was a resolving stir among the audience, as of relief that Mackerel was adhering to his prepared text, and confidence that everything would be all right this morning.

  “The American—be he from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago or Texas—knows that the letters p-o-e-t-r-y, for instance, spell the word poetry. He may slur that word or he may in some other way fall short of giving it its due. But he does not say ‘paitry.’ That he does not say. He says poet, not pate. He will not read to you from his paims; he will read to you, however miserably, from his poems. His conversation may be as dull as ditchwater, but he will not, immaculately delineating each syllable, refer to something as ‘doll as ditchwoetuh.’ That is not what those letters spell. He answers the phone, not the fen; takes planes, not a plen; goes to a play, not a pleh. Why envy or emulate this gabble! The letters p-l-a-y comprise, I submit to you, the word play. They will not, though the American empire last a thousand years, ever constitute a sequence of characters calling for the sound ‘pleh’!”