The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Hyah, hyah!” cried an educated but feverishly nationalistic Harvardian named Yates from the third pew, in spontaneous approval. Others nodded and beamed theirs. I was inspired to go on.

  “Let Americans square their shoulders against the canard under which they have so long groaned, that of British superiority on this as other scores. They may lack what labial and glottal grace it takes to say, ‘To you, my dear,’ but they don’t, raising their glass, say ‘Chew my dim.’ The Yankee may mangle the language, but at least he opens his goddam mouth!”

  The congregation was deeply moved. They had not heard such a ringing affirmation of faith from an American pulpit in a long time. Two people did get up and walk out, but they were the Arbuckle cousins who did so out of protest at what they considered to be anti-British sentiment. The rest sat and beamed. Not solely, of course, out of pleasure in the message, inspiring though that was, but also because they were glad for Mackerel. It looked as though he was going to make it—get to the end of his sermon without mishap. No digressions lured him; no temptations rose in his path in the form of words offering double entendres and other appeals to the base nature. I sailed along through eight minutes, nine, ten.

  With sixty seconds to go, I peered to make out a penciled emendation at the end of a paragraph. “Thus we see that such slight matters as vocal inflection mirror what are deeply rooted traits. The American’s brash unconcern for nuance indicates a young and vigorous country, the Briton’s clipped speech an ancient, proverbial reserve. The difference comes equally into customs and—” Was that the word “folk” or “fond” or “food” or what scribbled in there? Folkways? Fond ways? I was thrown off my stride. I scratched my head and tried to connect the paragraph in thought with the next.

  “Folkways,” I said, raising my head. “Nothing gives us more keenly the sense of novelty than someone else’s. I recently had dinner at the home of acquaintances in Norwalk,” I went on, ignoring my manuscript for a moment to recall the incident. “As we finished our coffee I saw that the ladies alone were rising from the table and being shepherded into the drawing room while the host remained behind with the men. I perceived that here in Fairfield County, Connecticut, far in space and time from the Victorian London where it had once flourished, we were observing the custom of the fairer sex separating themselves from the men while the latter remained behind over their port and walnuts. The hostess, perhaps noticing the impression the maneuver made on guests accustomed to less quaint patterns of conduct, said apologetically aside to one or two of us, ‘I hope you don’t mind. My husband’s English, and he likes to withdraw.’”

  Von Pantz nodded to the waiting orderlies. They rose quietly and without any ostensible connection with one another, and took lounging but alert positions against the walls. Their faces were impassive, but the audience’s? Their eyes implored me not to. “Don’t succumb,” their collective gaze entreated. Many leaned forward, gripping the pews in front of them, or sat with hands clasped tightly in their laps. Hester bowed her head. Old Meesum was inscrutable, but watchful. Charlie Comstock wet his lips. The temptation in whose grip I writhed had for him its own clear and terrible parallel. The double entendre that beckoned was like that glass of whiskey round which the drinker has but to close his fingers to end the struggle and start a fresh cycle of degradation. “Don’t touch it,” Comstock’s eyes begged. “Hold tight. We’re all with you.” A man mopped his brow. A woman prayed.

  I moistened my own lips. I reached for the glass of water and took another gulp, seeing the bruisers move another inch closer to the platform stairs, ready to spring like the powerful cats they were. I put the glass back, and stood shifting my weight from one leg to the other. The cable of self-control stretched; frayed; raveled to a thread; held. My voice was but to be heard stepping on to the next thought, or better yet returning to the prepared text from which it had wandered, and it would be like a foot safely planted on the far bank of a pause now intolerably prolonged.

  I raised my head and grinned out at them.

  “‘That, madam,’ I replied, ‘strikes me as carrying Anglo-Saxon restraint a little too far.’”

  Chapter Fifteen

  IT WAS a warm, cool day in early spring. The leaves hadn’t begun to bud yet, though, so I had a view through bare treetops of the countryside on at least two sides of the high ground on which I strolled. It was sunny and bright, and as I idled up the gravel paths with that double sense of another fresh day and a newly minted season, I flicked a switch I had cut from one of the willows that grew at the far limit of the grounds. Except for a handful of people promenading, singly and in pairs, and a few sunning themselves in Adirondack chairs near the main building, I was pretty much alone outside this morning. Perhaps it was still early. Ten o’clock, I saw by my watch.

  On the highest point on this landscaped knoll, and of Avalon as well, I stood a moment gazing off into the blue distance. Of the several houses visible, two were those of members of P.L., and I had therefore been inside them in happier times. One was said to have a ghost. The place was a converted barn haunted, apparently, by a horse, said to be an old plug who had lived there before it was torn down for remodeling; the last animal, in fact, left in it, who had been taken out and shot to make way for construction. The rattling chains and thumpings at midnight attested to by the present owners suggested a four-footed rather than human revenant, come to plague those who had done him in and taken his home. The other was a spanking new modern job designed by Marcel Breuer. It was so new that the price tags were still on the shrubbery with which it was landscaped, though the explanation of the couple who lived there, Marian and Freddy Residue, was that on the reverse of these were the names of the various plants, by which she would identify them when they bloomed. Just over the flat roof I caught a blue haze, a dim translucence of water, and I thought I made out a thin line of beach and even the bridge that spanned the tidal river there. It was a bridge deserted now, but on which, in summer, girls in bathing suits strolled all day and men loitered eating hot dogs and drinking soda pop, to watch them parade. It was a local institution known, consequently, as the Bridge of Thighs.

  My eye was jerked to the right by a figure of quite another sort.

  Emerging from a black sedan and walking purposefully toward the office of the main building was a man in a tan suit and checked vest whom I knew I knew. Then I remembered. It was George Chance, chief of detectives. He was a portly number who had all through his schooldays been nicknamed, inevitably, Fat Chance. He was trying to live it down now, from what I gathered of him—the few times I’d met him and even from what I could sense in his bearing now. Rotundities fore and aft made him resemble, from the side prospect, a pair of parentheses that have slipped out of line. He marched into the front door and disappeared. I knew where von Pantz’s office was in the line of first-story windows visible through the shrubbery from here, and watching, sure enough, I caught a dim stir of motion behind it, which would be von Pantz rising to let Fat Chance in.

  I turned and after a last comprehensive gaze of the kind we give a panorama we are taking leave of, a kind of visual gulp, I walked back to the bench on which I had formed a habit of sitting in my few weeks’ stay at this plaisance. I had left a New York Times on it, and setting my switch aside, I opened it up. I had not been reading long when voices near the building, now at my back, made me turn round. Young Evans, the bright-eyed, clean-cut bore from the Yale Divinity School, who was occupying my pulpit during the rest I was taking, said a last word to a nurse in the side doorway and struck out across the grass in my direction. I quickly lay down on the bench, drawing the Times over my face.

  He had a distance of two hundred yards to come, so it was some moments before he arrived. I heard his footsteps when they reached the gravel walk, twenty yards back. They grew louder, and stopped. He was standing over me, hesitating no doubt. I was safe under my cover. In the interval in which he stood there I reviewed the defects which unfit him for civilized ministry. First was
a “solid” Scotch Presbyterian background which he found it possible to pride himself on not having shaken off. Next was the oppressive earnestness with which he went about his work, carrying a pocket Testament on his pastoral rounds and speaking of a Crusade for the suburbs, in which everyone would come in for a complete spiritual check-up. Next was a resort to bland euphemisms in personal conversation, such as his first greeting to me, “Taking your vacation early, are you?” Add to these a tendency to little informal homilies about how radar, jet propulsion and such modern things had always existed in nature, and you can see why he was not long for this community. You can bore all of the people some of the time, you can bore some of the, et cetera.

  My breathing was regular. I even turned on a light snore I had developed to discourage visitors and even those sibilant ministers of mercy known as nurses, indoors and out. At last Evans turned and walked away. When I felt it safe to leave my cocoon of newsprint, it was to find he had left a calling card on the bench at my feet, with the jolly penciled inscription, “Hope you’re feeling better, old chap!” Shredding this moodily, I watched the approach of a pair of strollers. They were both men, one a fellow named Jackson whom I liked very much. He had confided in me that his tongue was too big for the floor of his mouth. It lay upward against his lower teeth like the edge of a rug against the wainscoting of a room too small for it. “Great architect!” he said. “Huh!”

  I heard another footfall; this time one I knew well. I looked up and was not surprised to see von Pantz.

  I sat up and swung my feet over the bench. He sat down and joined me.

  “Spring in the air,” he said.

  “I almost could,” I answered, appreciating the chance for one of those fancies that grieved his tedious Teutonic heart.

  “What? Oh, yes, I see. Quite amusink.” He hiked up a trouser leg to cross his knees, and settled himself for one of his talks. He wore the same blue serge he always did, and those bulbous-toed shoes that are known, I believe, as bluchers. His clothes were all of good quality, except for his neckties, which seemed to have been bought at the Army and Navy store. His eyes were large and brown, and looked like boiled chestnuts. I was used to a roundabout approach, supported by transparent indirections and heavy German subtleties. But this time it was a frontal attack.

  “So your idea is to feign incompetence in hopes that you won’t be held responsible,” he said.

  “For what?” I answered. I spread my arms along the back of the bench and crossed my legs.

  “You know what.”

  “Is that what Fat Chance told you to come out here and try?”

  Von Pantz looked away and shook his head.

  I said, “At least in the Middle Ages they piled the faggots around you and had done with it. Today they’re more civilized. They turn you slowly on a spit.”

  “How do you account for your behavior in the pulpit if it wasn’t to give that impression? It all fits perfectly as part of a scheme—crazy like a fox!” Von Pantz sprang to his feet and began to pace a limited area of the gravel path in front of me. “A man sees ze evidence closing in, and he gives ze wildest possible account of himself in a frenzied attempt to beat ze rap.” It was when he most strove to affect slang Americanisms that his Viennese accent oftenest crept from its lair to do him in.

  “What did Chance want?”

  “He said ze film has been found and ze evidence is damagink.” Von Pantz turned away and stood stock-still a moment looking into the distance, as though helping imbibe, on my behalf, great drafts of natural beauty I would not long be here to share.

  “Then why doesn’t he come and collect me?”

  Von Pantz swung round to me again. “Because you are now under my jurisdiction, and I give you sanctuary here.” He was tense, almost hysterical. He stood directly in front of me gesturing with both hands. A single gold tooth at the back of his mouth flickered like a firefly as he talked. “I am trying to help you, to save you, but I cannot do it medically because I do not think the trouble is medical. It is spiritual. Oh, yes! I use zat word. I am not ashamed of it. I say that you are in the grip of sin—zat word too. I know it isn’t fashionable today but we are coming back to it, mark my word. Because we have done away with the concept of sin, yet never has a generation been more obsessed with guilt. It is part of every modern man’s equipment.” I remembered Turnbull’s having said something of this sort, and wondered if he had got the thought from von Pantz. “Wait. Please do not give me zat here-we-go-again look. Jung used to say to me, ‘Hugo, some people can’t be cured—they can only be saved.’ There is a way open to you, a young intellectual with something missing in his life. A tortured young man for whom there is only one salvation”—here he drew a deep, defiant breath—“to make a decision for Christ.”

  A puff of wind had blown a page of the Times to the ground and I bent to pick it up.

  Von Pantz straightened and tightened his stance. He fixed me with a look at once dramatically hard and infinitely gentle.

  “I’m going to put this question, this choice up to you now,” he said. “Reverend Mackerel, do you now, and before God, accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

  I shook my head with a friendly little laugh. “Look, von Pantz, there’s really no point in this. We’ve been through it before. We just don’t see eye to eye.”

  He raised his voice. “Let’s forget about seeing eye to eye, it’s not an intellectual matter—let’s try to see heart to heart!”

  “Oh, rubbish,” I said, bouncing to my feet and raising my own voice. “Let’s knock it off. You don’t have any use for my viewpoint and I don’t have any use for yours, and certainly not for your godforsaken theology!”

  He became livid, and seemed to rise up and down on his heels. “There’s something evil in you; why don’t you recognize it and call it by its name! It’s something you should fear and hate.”

  “There’s only one thing I fear and hate,” I said, shaking my face in his, “and that’s people shirking the obligation to evolve! Which I consider god-given, if all our sweating history up from the muck on this rotten ball and up into something resembling human grace and wit and beauty means a goddamn thing!” I shouted, in one of those bursts of profanity whose roots lie so close to those of reverence. “I’m sick of this nursery room pie-in-the-sky backsliding revivalism! And I’m especially sick of seeing the clock turned back by people who should know better! Now how do you like that?”

  “I like it!” he shouted back, so close to me that I could feel his breath, which smelt of some not disagreeable commercial lozenge. “It proves what I’m saying, that something has got you in its grip. Do you think you set a good example to people I might try to help with Christian therapy? Is it nice of you to badger servants of God in public?”

  “There are times when anything else is wrong, by my standards. A little less Christian charity with such boobs and sucklings; a little more Christ-like irritability please!”

  “By God, you’ve got a messianic complex,” he said, turning away again.

  “I thought you said I was sane,” I reminded him. He said nothing, just shook his head, one method of filling a discomposing gap. “You want to know what happened in the pulpit and so on. I’ll tell you. There are plenty of Freudian terms for it, but I haven’t time to bring you abreast of developments in that field so I’ll just use Edgar Allan Poe’s term for it—the Imp of the Perverse. A part of you that you don’t want to take over but does. Call it an island broken off the mainland and floating away by itself, or trying to if it isn’t fetched back. Or perhaps I can explain it to you in another way. Under these stresses and strains, one part of the personality ‘separates’ from the other precisely like the cream in a bottle of milk. Your job—homogenize me.”

  I sat down on the bench again. We didn’t look at one another for a minute or more. Then an almost involuntary glance on his part brought my own eye toward the front of the main building. On a corner of the portico there, Fat Chance stood leaning against
a while pillar, watching us. Some gesture from von Pantz, which I am assuming because I didn’t actually see it, brought him down off the portico and across the intervening ground toward us.

  “Zis dick wants to talk to you,” von Pantz said. He spoke rapidly, so as to finish what he had to say in conclusion before we were joined. “We have no more to say to each other, I am sorry to say. I can’t do anything for you, in any way. I can’t certify you. There is nothing for me to do but turn you over to the authorities who want you.”

  I reached into my pocket for a cigarette and lit it.

  “I guess we both lost our heads,” I said. “Surely we can talk about all these things that interest us later. I was thinking I’d have myself voluntarily committed …”

  “Committed! You must be crazy,” von Pantz said. “No, I’m sorry, Mackerel. I’ve done all I can, and I regret all too keenly that it’s so little. I have no choice but to release you and let you take your chances with the law.”

  Chance had a dozen yards or so to come, time enough for me to answer: “All right, keep your not very satisfactorily run establishment. And I’ll report my impression of it too—all the racket and what-not going on among the help at all hours. I’m still a trustee, remember.” I lowered my voice, remembering that it was my belief that I was a trustee of this place that most of the inmates took to be my malaise. “I’ll have plenty to say. Hello, Chance.”