The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Don’t you realize you’re a sick woman?” I said. “Didn’t they explain what this is all about to you at the clinic? That this is a compulsion? It’s what they call a washing compulsion. You understand what that is, don’t you?”

  She dismounted the ladder with compressed lips and folded it and set it against the wall. “You mean I’m thorough?” she said, tersely.

  “Oh, Mrs. Vobiscum, this is no use,” I said. “I’m sorry. What I need really is a full housekeeper. I’m afraid I’ll have to let you go.”

  “That’s O.K. with me,” she said, and left.

  I advertised in every paper around for somebody. Several days passed, and I had despaired of getting anybody when the doorbell rang and it was Mrs. Calico.

  “I heard about your trouble and I’ve seen the ads,” she said, entering. “I’ve come to offer my services.”

  “Oh, but …”

  “No, I must.” She fled into the living room. She stood with her back to me with an odd tension, then sat down abruptly on a sofa. “I owe it to you.”

  “Owe it to me?”

  “I’ve wronged you. We all have.” She rose and walked nervously to a sofa, tweaking her nose, I saw, with the same or another lace-bordered handkerchief. She lowered her head. “One night after that call I paid on you, I overheard Molly talking to you on the telephone, and knew from what she was saying that it was she who went to the hotel with you. I was in possession of this fact when I brought you the custard. I suppose I was sorry. But in my heart of hearts I knew that for either of you marriage under the circumstances would be bad. The scandal was there and why fly in the face of it. I didn’t want you both tarred with the same brush, to use your own very original phrase, Mr. Mackerel. And now—” She broke off and bawled into her handkerchief. Standing miserably off, I noted that she literally said “Boo hoo.” She raised her head and, drawing a fresh breath, brought out in a mounting wail, “Now she’s married Todarescu down there and he’s tuh-tuh-taken her still farther south, because the shuh-shuh-show’s folded, and she’s got a job in a Miami night club singing underwater through a snorkel!”

  She screamed out this last and, bending over, began pummeling the fat of the sofa on which she was sitting. I took a step closer but other than that could think of nothing to do. The only method by which I had seen hysteria successfully dealt with was the slap in the face that is invariably administered in the movies, and I could not bring myself to undertake that. I watched her flail the upholstery for perhaps a minute more while she emitted further wails of despair and further declarations that I was true blue and “a knight in shining armor” and the like. I finally did shake her briskly and pour her a glass of brandy.

  “Here, take this,” I said with a touch of masterliness.

  She shook her head after smelling it and gasped, “No. Too strong. Something milder perhaps.”

  I went back to the cellaret, before which I squatted calling out its contents as consulted. “Benedictine?” I said. “Kummel, cherry Heering? No? How about a spot of crème de menthe?” She nodded and I poured some into a glass, downing the brandy myself. She sipped the crème de menthe, raising her eyes in appreciation as though to say, “Good.”

  She was soon quite herself again, and I in possession of a crackajack cleaning woman. For she would not hear of my declining her kind offer to “pitch in.” She pitched in right then and there, and had that awful house in apple pie order with a vigor and dexterity that made my head swim. I smiled to myself as I thought that this ought to make Hester come running. I was in a position now to make her return, not me go begging to her.

  After three weeks of coming on alternate days, more or less as a living-out maid, as she put it herself, Mrs. Calico said to me while she was fixing my dinner one night, “Mr. Mackerel, it’s really more inconvenient than I thought. This coming and going I mean. Of the two houses, I’ve got more to do in this than my own, and so I was thinking—only if it’s suitable to your mind—if I lived in here and trotted over there to give Toits Rouges a lick and a promise now and again, it would make so much more sense.”

  I was mentally deep in a chapter of Maturity Comes of Age and hardly heard what she said or, hearing it, took it in. “Sure, that’s O.K.,” I said. “Anything that’s convenient for you, Mrs. Calico. I appreciate your doing this. And I must say this is a terrific chicken pot pie.”

  “Oh, thank you. And of course it’ll mean having Fatima here with us. But she’ll give you no trouble. Not a meower and a scratcher.”

  She was gone soon after doing the dishes, and back again bright and early the next morning, suitcase in one hand and puss in the other. I blinked at the speed with which houses could be opened and shut, and transferences made by determined women. Watching Fatima make her sniffing tour of the interior, beginning with my own person, I said worriedly, “Are you sure this is all right?”

  “Of course. Glad to do it,” Mrs. Calico said. “I have no ties back there any more.” She jerked her head in the direction of Toits Rouges. “I’m a widow, remember?” She heaved her two arms into the air and drew a pin from her hat. “An Enoch Arden widow to be sure, but a widow, nonetheless. In other words, a free and available woman.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT WAS warm for April and then it was warm for May. Not a breeze had blown for days, but, more serious, not a drop of rain had fallen in months. Newly sprung lawns had already withered and died, and though any vegetable crops were still young and tender, farmers in many parts of the country were anxious for them, remembering last year’s dry spell. Sprinkling had been discouraged by the local hydraulic company, now forbidden by city ordinance. The northeast was in the grip of its worst drought in seventy-five years.

  “The governor has declared an emergency and asked all churches to observe a day of prayer,” Mrs. Calico read to me from the paper at breakfast. “Next Friday. P.L. is joining, I see. Special services at eight o’clock sharp, all over town. The idea is that all of the congregations, thousands of people all over the state, will be praying at once.”

  With the tine of my fork I produced a lesion in the yolk of a fried egg and watched it bleed slowly across the plate. I munched a piece of toast and remembered the shower in which I had been caught under the awning after a night of hot iniquity in Chickenfoot. That was very likely the last rain we’d had since the beginning of the year. Chewing, I studied a full-page ad on the back of the upheld paper across the table. It showed a movie actress with breasts so magnificent as to comprise a deformity, enjoying a much-prized lager with friends. I moved my eye upward to take in Mrs. Calico. She was wearing a crisp plum-colored dress and her glossy brown hair, symmetrically undulant on either side of a straight part, was drawn into a bun secured with tortoise-shell hairpins. The result was someone who looked like an elevator starter from the neck down, and above that, like a trade mark for a line of home-style relishes. I had more than once been on the point of urging hexagonal spectacles on her to complete the prototype, but had not yet acted on the impulse. I had so far limited myself to daily inclusion in her focus, to give freest possible play to that uniqueness and individuality which was nearly always hers, and to sustain and feed that fascination which was certainly always mine. I played, that is, the interlocutor.

  “Look, there goes another one,” I said, pointing out the window, from which the sidewalk was visible. “Nothing but shorts and a halter. In town.”

  “Yes,” she sighed, shaking her head, after censoriously taking in the sight. “Well, if that’s what we want, walking around half naked, with our stomach button showing in broad daylight, even with some of those midriff dresses I’ve seen, all right. But then we pay the price—rape, whistling and irritability.”

  It was pleasant, cozy, playing interlocutor for the sake of the archaic spell she spun around me. We lived in a pocket of time, safe from the world’s way, from the harms which had pursued me, but which, like dogs called off or at least momentarily off the scent, seemed briefly in recess. We were sus
pended in a cocoon of words and ways and nostalgic allusions. We never called curtains drapes, nor a shawl a stole; we said not scram but skidoo; on the phone we asked for central; we drove to market in my machine. I made a trip to New York, this time spending three hard days in the public library, and on my return told her about all the dry goods stores I had been in—Lord and Taylor, Bonwit’s, Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue—browsing on my lunch hour and picking up this and that for future Christmas presents and for myself, and a wool jersey shawl for her.

  One afternoon at lunch—I believe it was the day on which she had read about the governor’s proclamation—she said:

  “The Shenstones have asked us over some evening.”

  “The Shenstones?” I said, looking up from my plate.

  “The people who moved into that old Johnson house up the block. I met her on the street this morning. She’s a very pleasant, well-spoken woman. She referred to her husband as Doctor Shenstone, so I guess we have a doctor on the block. They seem very desirable people. I was thinking maybe we should have them over, because they’re the ones who just moved in. Welcome them. I think that’s such a nice custom, don’t you, Andrew?”

  “Yes, but—do they think we’re—? Oh, well, we’ll see.”

  Here began the rude summons from my dream. A slight sensation had gone up my spine that ended in the roots of my hair. It had successors of greater duration and severity. That afternoon I complimented her on her efficiency as a housekeeper, particularly as to letting my books and papers where I had left them. “It’s a rare woman who does that, Mrs. Calico,” I said.

  “Call me Pippa,” she answered.

  I choked on some cigarette smoke and said, “I’ll try.”

  “We do seem to hit it off.”

  It was the cursed result of playing interlocutor; she felt us compatible, no doubt. I was not without a current of emotion for Mrs. Calico, but only as an instrument in my strategy—to make Hester jealous of her place in the house. I had not imagined a greater scope for her jealousy than that. The task of downgrading myself to drive still another woman off the premises was one I hadn’t the strength to contemplate even the thought of, even allowing for the fact that Mrs. Calico would give shorter shrift than her predecessor to unpunctuality, messiness and filth, whether of mind or body. Why didn’t Hester let me hear from her? What the devil was the matter with that girl? Did pride disallow her to make the first move? Well, I had pride too. I could sweat the war out a little longer, despite the ominous turn things seemed to be taking. A little longer, anyway … But I was glad to see Turnbull’s figure come up the porch steps and interrupt the passage with Mrs. Calico in which she spoke of our compatibility. He had the virtue of making Mrs. Calico scuttle for the kitchen. She must have thought him quite an ogre indeed, judging by the way she always broke for cover when he came.

  It goes without saying that Turnbull now viewed me with new eyes. The scandal, while demoting me in public esteem, elevated me to peerage with himself as a possessor of sexual background; if half the stories were true, I could a tale unfold, and he was forever asking me if I “cared to talk about it.” He urged this purgative on me again this muggy afternoon, and again I declined it. Instead we talked about the drought and the forthcoming prayer meeting.

  “Will you be there?” he asked me.

  “I don’t go to rain dances.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing Evans is here to handle it. … Otherwise he’s a bore, though.… Do you hear anything of Hester?” I shook my head. “I saw her on the street in front of the Chelsea. She’s staying there.”

  He switched the radio on to hear the two o’clock weather report. I excused myself after a moment, pleading work, and went upstairs, leaving him there to listen and urging him to make himself at home. “Fix yourself a drink if you’d like.” I often had to do this with him, and he never minded. From upstairs, I heard the radio off and on for two hours or more; and when I came down for a drink about half-past four he was still there. I asked him to stay to dinner, as he frequently did, but this time he said he had an engagement and left.

  At table, Mrs. Calico looked up from the roast lamb and said, “I think we ought to cancel our subscription to Life.”

  “‘We’?” I said in very nearly a falsetto register.

  She nodded. “It’s rather an uncouth magazine in many ways. And why can’t people read? Is that all they can do any more is look at pictures?” She took a very firm and cultured line, calculated to impress anyone at all classifiable as an intellectual. “I wonder why I haven’t been receiving my Scribner’s lately.”

  “Maybe because they folded twenty years ago.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, that might explain it.” She poured herself some claret from the bottle, did the same for me, then sat studying the label with interest. “This is an excellent year. 1628.”

  “No, that is the year the bottler was established.”

  She drank three glasses in rather rapid succession. Having finished the last, she sat back in her chair as one who has fulfilled the aim of fortifying herself to bring up a delicate subject, regarded me across the table, and said, “Andrew, do you think a difference in two people’s ages is a hindrance if they are matched in other ways?”

  I rose and, feeling twice my normal weight, dragged myself into the living room with the posture of a man toting two enormous but invisible units of luggage. “I don’t know anything about those things,” I said. “But by and large, yes. Emphatically yes. It does make a difference.”

  “How old are you, Andrew?”

  “Thirty-five. I was a kid in high school when Scribner’s folded. I remember my teacher mourning its passing.” My voice raised itself in both pitch and volume as we called to one another across the length of two rooms. Mrs. Calico seemed far away as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope, her brown paw curled like a sweetbread around the stem of her glass.

  “Perhaps you are too young to know about these things,” she answered. “I am older than you are.”

  “I know that.”

  “Why don’t you sit down and finish your dinner?”

  “I’ve had enough,” I said. “Quite enough. Who is this—who are these people you’re talking about?”

  “The man has shown every interest, the two seem well matched,” she said, lowering her eyes, “at least I think he has shown interest, judging from his attitude and presents he has given me, and I am not going to let his misgivings about the age difference interfere with what can and will be a happy union.”

  Again I had the sensation that the contents of my skull were being extruded through my ears, but this time as an alternative to the pressure lifting off my scalp like the cap on a freezing bottle of milk. I staggered toward the vestibule stairs hearing her cry behind me, “Andrew, what is it? You look ill.”

  “I am,” I threw back, plunging up the stairs to my room. “And I have to go out.” I gained my bedroom, where I set to work getting into a clean shirt. I was tying the tie with vibrating hands when there was a rap on the door and she came in.

  “You mustn’t go out if you’re sick,” she said. She felt my brow. “You’re quite flushed. You’ve probably caught the flu that’s going around. We’ll dose you with something, then to bed with you and off to sleepsin-bye. You need a good night’s rest.”

  “Breach of promise, that’s been done away with, hasn’t it?” I said, tying the tie. “Women can’t get a judgment any more just by taking it into their heads to wave what they think are tokens of esteem around in a courtroom? Hasn’t that been laughed off the books along with alienation of affections?”

  “Not in Connecticut, it hasn’t,” Mrs. Calico said, sweeping something down the front of her dress. “It’s one of the states that still has it if I’m not mistaken.”

  I thought of sliding the knot up my tie till my blood supply was cut off, my eyes popped from my purple face, and I breathed no more.

  “Now you do look sick, and you’re going to bed, I don’t
care. Come on,” she said efficiently, “off with it and in with you. I’ll be back in a jiffy with something to bring you round.”

  I was glad enough to comply with this line of thought, and I was in bed when she returned with two aspirin and a glass of hot lemonade. I drank the latter with lots of ice cubes and after its equipment with gin, to which she agreed on the ground that the potion was medicinal in purpose. When I had finished it, I felt better though weaker. She beamed at me, taking the empty glass from my hand and setting it on a table. She was sitting on the bed. She continued to beam, as though expecting me to show some sign of emotional or physical life.

  “Have you said anything to anybody else?” I asked, folding my hands on the coverlet and looking away. “About what you were just talking about?”

  She shook her head, still smiling beatifically. “I thought maybe you would make the announcement.”

  Mackerel made for the other side of the bed, like those semi-defeated figures crawling on their bellies for ammunition in action movies. He was hauled peremptorily and with tender skill back into a supine position and organized snugly under the blankets. She tucked the foot end in with a bounce of the mattress. “Now off to sleepsin-bye.”

  “Wait,” I said when she started out of the room. “This is serious.”

  “Shall I call a doctor?”

  “Yes,” I said, grasping at any diversion. “Doctor Chaucer’s my regular one but he’s out of town now.”

  “He’s mine too. Who else could we call?” She paced the room, a thumbnail to her lower teeth.

  “Hey. This guy who lives down the street—the new one. Shotwell or Fontaine or something like that.”