The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “You know Inspector Chance?” von Pantz said. “Reverend Mackerel.” After a word or two he took his leave, bowing curtly and striking off diagonally across the lawn to his office.

  I offered Chance a cigarette, which he declined with a shake of his head, effected with no disturbance of a measuring gaze on me.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “We found the film, Mackerel,” he said, narrowing his eyes in the accepted idiom of his trade, “developed it, and I guess maybe you know the rest. Know what we found. I thought maybe you’d like to come to headquarters and make a full confession.”

  I gathered up my Times and retrieved my tweed hat which had fallen behind the bench. I slapped it against my knee and put it on.

  “I’m going to pack now. I’m leaving. So if you’ll excuse me,” I said. I started across the grounds, leaving him standing there. Not for long. Fat Chance was really pathetic, I thought, with his hat shoved back and his hands in his pockets and coat open to reveal the Tattersall waistcoat in which he tried to encase that tummy. The attempt to look like a sleuth, not helped by a bow tie more suited in size to a circus comedian than for normal human society, was so forlornly lost a cause that I wondered angrily, as I heard him trotting abreast of me, whether it was Sprackling who was coaching him in this bluff or whether he was pushing it on his own. Sprackling was just the type to wait in the background, to let Chance make a fool of himself if the bluff fizzled and to jump in and take political credit if it paid off. I let Chance sit in my room and watch while I packed. I wanted to befriend him, so listened tolerantly while he talked.

  “You know what the negative shows, don’t you?” he asked, more as one whining for co-operation than acting out the stratagem with anything like the brisk tone the role called for.

  “Sure, Fat, sure,” I said, tucking some shirts into my bag. “People splashing in the water and eating fried chicken on the beach. Perhaps in the distance a background shot of the Bridge of Thighs.”

  “Would you like to see it run off? Would you dare to face that?”

  “Anything you say.”

  “You want to come along to headquarters?”

  “If you like.”

  “You’re not very co-operative,” he said. He rose and walked to the window. He stood looking out of it, hands in pockets again. There was a rattling of carts in the hall, and a sound as of two of them colliding; then words of some altercation between the floor superintendent and a maintenance man working, too slowly, it seemed, on the elevator.

  “This place is a madhouse,” I said, throwing in my bathrobe. “I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

  “All right. We don’t have the film. We can’t find it. And the reason we can’t makes us really suspicious. You see, we got in touch with the Waldo Hale boy by telephone, and he told us where it was. It was still in the camera, where he’d left it, undeveloped. He said the camera was stored with some other stuff in the barn behind their house, in a big box near the door marked ‘Movie Stuff.’ He gave us permission to get it and told us where we could get the key to the barn—from an aunt of his who had charge, and had rented the house for him and all. But when we got there the barn had been broken into and that box rifled. The camera was gone. Looks like somebody else had some use for it and got there first. It was general knowledge that the Hale house was rented and almost general knowledge, in the neighborhood at least, that stuff was stored in the barn.” Chance turned from the window and looked at me keenly. “What does that sound like to you, Mackerel? What would you think if you were me?”

  “Why, that I took it, Fat,” I said, closing the suitcase, and eager to get home and ask a few questions of my own.

  “Right. And if this particular person were a murderer, what would he do with it?”

  “Destroy it,” I said, glad to help him enliven his no doubt drab existence.

  “Right again. Unless,” he said, coming over closer round the foot of the bed on which I was packing, “unless it held a deadly fascination for him, so much so that he couldn’t help sending it to the Eastman company and getting it developed. So he could run it off in the secret of his house behind drawn shades.”

  “Well, it so happens that I do have a projector stored away in my own basement,” I laughed. “You have a good imagination.”

  He nodded. “Enough to have alerted the Eastman Kodak Company and got an order through impounding the merchandise. It takes several days to develop films, of course, so it wouldn’t be back yet, but we’re ready if and when. I’m afraid we’re monitoring your mail, Mackerel.”

  I smiled tentatively over at him as I bent to squeeze down the lid of the suitcase and raise the locking hasp. That done, I secured the other side. I gave the grip a last pat. “Well, you can’t kill a man for trying,” I said, looking away from him toward the closet on which I was advancing for my topcoat.

  “No,” he answered in a level voice, “but you can try a man for killing.”

  Hester was fixing lunch. I had phoned to tell her I was returning, and she was whipping up a favorite of mine in celebration, a German pancake with Preiselbeeren. I had little appetite for it now.

  “What have you done with the film?” I said, coming right to the point in the kitchen.

  “What film?” she said, attending the skillet.

  “Come now, let’s stop this huggermugger, once and for all. Fat Chance—I think you know who he is—just told me it had been stolen and I remembered you had a ‘plan.’ Did you go over and snitch it? Of course you did, because I certainly didn’t. Well, now you’ve got me in worse soup than ever because they obviously think I did it, and must have a motive. I can’t see your expression, but in case you sent it away to be developed, they’re watching my mail. When it comes back they’ll nab it.”

  “Why should you care about that, Andrew?” she said, turning the stove off.

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I burned it.”

  I swung away with my hands in the air and my eyes to the ceiling. “So you’ve destroyed the evidence. The only evidence there was.”

  “Of what, Andrew?” Hester had gone to the icebox and now stood with one hand on the open door for so long without reaching in to take anything out of it that she resembled one of those girls who advertise refrigerators on television; though with a smile strainedly unlike those suited to the delivery of commercials. “Of your guilt?”

  “Of course not,” I said, resenting the grotesqueness of having to make the reply at all, “my innocence. Now I’ll have to live the rest of my life under a cloud.”

  “Not with me, Andrew.”

  “You’re damn right not with you,” I said, deliberately mistaking her meaning.

  “Don’t you see, this is what I’ve been waiting to hear from you?” She now had three eggs in one hand and the jar of Preiselbeeren in the other, a combination which hardly corresponded to the sequence of manufacturing a German pancake, the one neither of us was going to eat. “I can tell from the way you say it that it’s true. I knew all the literary talk about being done in by forces leagued against you was all right, but it was because you could think deep down that you were safe, physically I mean. Actually if it came to a showdown about the other part of it—the police part—you were quite scared. And I was quite scared that … that …”

  I watched her close the refrigerator door and set the eggs and jam on the table.

  “That I was really guilty?” I came over and shook her by the shoulders. “That I could really do your sister in? Come on, tell me! I’d like to know what’s going on in that head of yours once and for all!” I shook her more vehemently, till an earring dropped from her ear and I could smell her perfume like a scent shaken from a flower. It was some expensive, not unpleasant odor, that made my own head swim, what with the variety of developments being visited upon it this morning.

  “Well, she must have been hard to live with. I knew what it must have been to put up with at times. Andrew, was it really awful?”


  I stood back, reeling from this further bolt. I simply didn’t know what was going on here. The floor seemed to be sucked from under me like the sand from under your feet by a receding wave.

  “I have been through three theories about this whole thing,” I said, speaking with ghastly calm. “First that you loved her. Second that you just more or less hated me, and wanted to keep me bottled up. Next—God forgive me—that you were in love with me. Don’t let it bother you because others urged that one on me. My fourth hypothesis better be right, because I’ve got time and strength for only one more. It’s that you felt, for her, such a deep, bitter, abiding—”

  “No, not that. I didn’t hate her. It’s not that. But I did feel a certain aggressive tendency toward her that knew no bounds when—when she married you.” She jerked her head away toward the icebox with such an apparent aim to lay her brow against it that she might now have been enacting a role in a drama sponsored by the maker of that product. “When she was the one who got you.”

  “Sweet Christ in the morning,” I said, dropping like dung into the nearest chair. I loosened my tie and collar. I drew a few much-needed breaths, then asked, “If that’s the way you felt about her, why go to all this trouble to keep her memory green, as you call it?”

  “Because it’s the only way to cover up the awfulness.” She had whipped about, and spoke in such a tone of pent-up feelings released that I thought of dams bursting, of powder kegs erupting. “The awfulness of what I felt, and of not being able to feel any more love for her than I knew I did, and probably feeling guilty about that too—No, not guilty. Just hating the fact of how things were. Of how she didn’t deserve any more love, not that any of us do in the long run. So I had this overwhelming need to—to heap the awful truth over, to bury it as deep as possible, smother it the way we do death with flowers anyway. It’s the same as your drive to believe when you know there really isn’t anything to believe. Like in that awful poem of MacLeish’s where the top of the circus tent blows off and there’s nothing—nothing, nothing at all. Well, let’s make something. Let’s bury the awfulness and the nothingness with somethingness we’ve made with our own two hands. Let’s make the lie so big and so convincing, and worship it so bitterly, bitterly much, that it becomes a truth.”

  I rose and staggered past her, as though there might be some virtue or advantage in occupying another part of the room than where her revelation blazed, but at the same time heading efficiently for the bar. There was a throbbing in my ears as though my brains were being squeezed out through them by some vise-like pressure exerted at the crest of my skull. I thought again of the term “warped New England house” as I poured and drank my whiskey.

  “Was she pretty bad to live with, Andrew? Tell me. You can speak to me frankly. Was it hell living with her?”

  “Of course she wasn’t awful! Where do you get all these romantic notions about marriage?”

  “You had fights. I used to hear them.”

  “Of course we had fights. Don’t you ever go to the movies, for the love of God? Don’t you ever read books? Do you think we’d have spatted in front of you if they were serious. They were good spats too, if I say so myself—we were perfectly matched.” I gulped another whiskey and asked, “How did your mother feel about her? Let’s get this all cleared up.”

  “Mother always said a very interesting thing.” I steeled myself for another bromide, but I was surprised. “She used to say, ‘I guess I love Ida May most because, of all my children, she’s the hardest to love.’”

  “Well, I loved her,” I said resentfully, “and I want to tell you she was good company. I liked especially that waspish tongue of hers. She was entertaining partly because she was so malicious. These people often make the best humanitarians, because it’s out of the pain of limitation that the ideal is often best apprehended … Just coffee if you’ve got it. I don’t want anything to eat.”

  She’d had it brewing in an electric percolator we’d recently got. It was ready, and she poured two cups. We sat in the kitchen drinking it in silence. When one of us spoke, it was I, and as one thinking aloud.

  “This is something all right. Molly thinks I’m innocent but deserts me. You think I might be guilty but stick.”

  Hester drank the last of her coffee and carried the cup and saucer to the sink.

  “I didn’t say I thought you might be guilty. I just said I was glad you weren’t. The way you responded when I said I destroyed the film. The relief I felt.”

  I shook my head. Not to her, or even very much for my own benefit by way of elucidating a reaction: it was just a man sitting in the middle of a kitchen shaking his head. It was his own kitchen, and he had a right to. There was another silence. In a listless tone I said, “Do you want to marry me?”

  She opened the refrigerator door again to put away what she had taken out of it. She did some more tidying up. She removed her apron, folded it, and set it over the back of a chair.

  “Excuse me, I’m going upstairs,” she said, and did.

  I went into the living room and settled myself with pencil and paper in an armchair to jot some notes. The trustees of the church had given me three months for a complete rest, and I was using it to work on the book. I was deep in a new chapter on Religion and Art. I wrote:

  “We want shelter equally from death’s darkness and life’s glare. Religion is an umbrella that protects us from the rain, art a parasol with which we shield ourselves from the sun. But let us not forget—”

  I looked up to see Hester coming down the stairs banging two grips.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “Because of something I said?”

  “You could put it that way.” She set the grips down in the vestibule. “I didn’t know you felt that way about me, Andrew.”

  Having said what I didn’t mean, I was faced with the alternative of meaning what I’d said. At least of construing it in some fashion with which I could honestly align myself.

  “Well, you aren’t unattractive,” I said from the chair. “After all you’re a woman and I’m a man, Hester. You’re a person of considerable charms. Your hair is like cornsilk,” I continued, after an absurd pause in which there was nothing to do but go on, “your breasts are like brioches …”

  “You see? Everything’s changed between us. I couldn’t stay in the same house with you now,” she said, lowering her eyes. “It wouldn’t be—right.”

  “But damn it, I thought you were going to stick by me.” I put my writing things down and went into the entrance hall.

  “I’ll stick by you, but I won’t stay with you. I can’t, not under the same roof. Everything’s changed between us now. You wouldn’t want me to—you wouldn’t want that kind of a girl. I’m taking what I need now. I’ll send for the rest of my things later. I’ll probably stay at the Chelsea House until I—until things get settled. Would you call me a cab, please?”

  I did. When I finished the phone call, I said, “But this is so sudden. Who’ll take care of the house for me?”

  “You can get somebody. You can get a housekeeper easily enough. The agencies will find someone for you.”

  “Just the way they did a secretary. All right,” I said angrily. “Go ahead. Good-by and good luck!” I tramped on upstairs, leaving her to wait for her cab alone.

  To say that a man never knows what a woman is going to do next isn’t to say very much, because neither does another woman. Seeking clues to female motives is like fishing in a whirlpool. Molly wouldn’t have made head or tail of Hester’s maneuver, nor would Hester have made head or tail of Tabitha Twitchet’s next. It is my story that not an hour after the house was empty (except for me, who evidently didn’t count) the doorbell rang and it was Mrs. Calico, holding a present. It was a blue crock, more or less wrapped in foil, in which reposed a custard she had baked for me.

  When I expressed confusion, she explained, “I appreciated the way you behaved about Molly. Not trying to kee
p her. Oh, I don’t mean just giving the devil his due. You were true blue.”

  “Well, thank you very much,” I said, both for the compliment and for the custard, which I set on a table in the living room. “How is Molly?” I asked, waving her to a chair.

  “Why, she’s in Florida, with some stock company which I believe Todarescu will soon be down to direct.” She regarded me from her chair. “I hear you haven’t been well,” she said with her own kind of cherubic severity. “I took that to the hospital, but they said you’d gone home. How are things?”

  “All right, except that I have no housekeeper,” I said. “Do you know where I might get somebody—even part-time?”

  In a twinkling she was at the phone calling a woman with a domestic for whom she had only partial use and who might be willing to take on other jobs. That was just the way it turned out. The woman was a client of our very own clinic. The clinic had a free employment agency which got jobs, part-time or full, for out-patients based on their aptitudes as gauged by the social workers, and that promised to be more or less therapeutic. Mrs. Calico handled the whole thing beautifully, and that was how it came about that, within twenty-four hours, I had a cleaning woman with a washing compulsion.

  The caseworker had been right in her belief that Mrs. Vobiscum would sublimate at this job. She scrubbed for an hour at one floor plank, she rubbed for an hour at one piece of silver. She left with one corner of her domain spotless but the rest the shambles she had found it. She picked dirt out of the cracks between the floorboards with a toothpick; she wiped the wires of the telephone with a damp cloth. She spent a quarter-hour buffing one of my shoes, another quarter-hour on the other—I timed her from a corner where she did not know I was watching. Dishes accumulated in the sink while she vacuumed the living room drapes; then the tie-backs went up the tube and had to be fished out and washed over. When she saw what was inside the vacuum cleaner, she got at that. When she reached the dishes, each plate was given like attention. All this was bad enough (considering that I had to cook my own breakfast and go out for any other meals I didn’t want to bother with myself) but when I walked into the parlor one morning and saw her on a stepladder, shampooing a moose over the mantel, I blew my top.