The bunch of them went to Schotts and to Kelly's and to the Bavarian Club. Everybody told Duffey that he would be missed, and he was treated like a king everywhere.
They went to the Dublin. All the men shook Duffey's hand there and all the women kissed him. They said that they would miss him, but they knew that it was a grand opportunity he was accepting, secret though the details were; and then it's a great thing just to travel and see the world. But neither Duffey nor Beth nor any of them had told that he was going away. Really, none of them except Beth believed it yet.
“You are my boy, you are my love,” Evelyn London said, “and you are going away.”
When it was quite late, they went back to Duffey's own Rounders' Club, and the string band began to play “The King Shall Ride” . Olga Sanchez took Duffey through all the rooms of the club, and out into the streets, and into the club again. Many people gathered to see Melchisedech in his club then, musicians and artists and dealers, politicians and monsignori and parish priests, show people and club people, bookish people. A dozen of Duffey's ladies came in, Francis O'Brien and Mary Marinoni, that slim Chinese girl Angela Ching, Gretchen Sisler and Gabriella O'Conner who were young grade-school girls, Dorothy Tarkington, Helen Platner from the Bavarian Club, two of the girl acrobats from the Star and Garter. They all kissed Duffey goodbye.
And the men came in to shake his hand and wish him well, almost everyone who had ever sat on the loafers' benches, Bagby and his shanty sort, straight businessmen of the neighborhood, priests and Levites, young men from the different colleges in town, prize fighters and newspaper guys. There were a lot of drinks around till very late, and a lot of singing.
6
There were those, mostly from among Melchisedech's pretended kindred, who said that the St. Louis adventures could not have happened, that there was no room in the years of his life for those adventures. The only unaccountable years, they said, were the seven hidden years that came later; and it was agreed by everybody that Duffey was not in St. Louis (not for any conspicuous time anyhow) during the hidden years. But the Duffey-St.-Louis adventures had to have happened. “It's a little bit dreamy,” Beth Keegan would say in later years, “but I surely knew him then. I knew him later, of course, and I know him now. But yes, I remember him in those earlier years also. Those are like years separated off from others and put away in a box somewhere. But they are still there when you get the box down and open it.”
“Of course I remember him then,” Mary Louise said years later. “He is my brother. But those were royal years, and they will not be remembered completely about him by non-royal persons. They happened; it all happened; but I can understand why the ‘relatives’ don't believe that they happened. They have, to them, clear evidence that Melchisedech was still in high school in Omaha in the years 1915 and 1916.”
“There are certain unholy persons or beings who want it to be that these things never happened,” Bagby said. “Sometimes I don't understand the workings of unholy minds. Sure, he was here for right at two years. I remember him every day of that time. He happened. Those times happened. This is the business that started here. It is still thriving.”
And there are old men still sitting on the same loafers' benches who remember it all and can verify it. But there are un-royal persons who still maintain that there were no years when those things could have happened, that Duffey could not have been a thriving businessman in St. Louis at age of sixteen. He was still in boarding school in either Omaha or Kansas City at that age.
Oh well, back to the night of the great leave-taking and to the next morning. Well, how was it the next morning? Oh, Duffey was gone in the morning, of course, and he was gone for seven years. There were a few second-hand rumors picked up as to his whereabouts, but nothing more. He had disappeared. But, from his own point of view, he couldn't have disappeared, could he?
Do not be so sure of that. Apparently the later Duffey either did not know or did not want to know where he had been in those years. There was something the matter with his own point of view. For him, there was some change made in earth and sky. He had gone out of normal places.
In another codicil of the circular log of the Melchisedech voyages, this is given: “There had been one very early morning in Melchisedech's youth, in his fifth or sixth youth really, when Melchisedech had walked out on the river shore in St. Louis, just below the Eads Bridge, and had walked right onto a low-lying boat; and it had been the Ship Argo in disguise.
“Melchisedech had then traveled in that ship for seven years, but not all of them in consecutive time. There was much time out for land adventures. The land adventures do not count in the Seven Lost Years. Neither are they deducted from the years of the life.”
Well, there are many entries in the logs of the Ship Argo that have to be taken with a pinch of iodine. Beth Keegan had visions of a boy killed by a boar. Oh, there was mythological basis for such a death, and many things are hoary in mythology before they happen in fact. But, with Beth, it may have been the case of not knowing where her own mythology began and ended.
There is precedent, of course, for losing seven years out of a life, or for having seven years hidden. There are a number of persons with seven hidden or dark years in their lives: Caesar and Diocletian, Boëthus and Carl the Great, Wellington and Lincoln and Sam Houston. George Barrow had a seven year hiatus, and Hans Schultz would have such an hiatus a few years after this time. Inconvincing details can be invented to fill the holes in every one of those lives.
And inconvincing details are invented to fill the hole in Duffey's life. Some of those details were invented by Duffey himself, and some of them were invented by other people.
Was Duffey ever in the war? Was he ever in the army in World War One? He later said that he had been. And he also said that, before he was old enough to get into the A.E.F., he had been an ambulance driver in Italy with Hemingway and in France with E. E. Cummings. He said that he returned to the United States from France, and then went overseas again, with the army in 1917. He may have been in a New England army camp very briefly in 1917, but even this is doubtful. Of course, everything that Duffey claimed as happening to him did happen to somebody with whom he was in accord. That is nearly the same as it happening to him.
Duffey's young friend Sebastian Hilton was an ambulance driver in France and in Italy in those early years. And he was the companion of high-ranking persons, in spite of his youth. Duffey may have lifted these scenes from Sebastian's mind where he always had entrée. But they were valid scenes, and Duffey lived to the full every scene that he ever lifted from anybody.
And yet there were several persons of repute who said that they had seen Duffey in Belgium and France and Italy in those years. “He was with an international organization named ARGO,” one person said. “It was a little bit like the Red Cross. He worked off a ship that — well, I don't know exactly what they did. I thought that everybody would remember about the ARGO group, but hardly anybody seems to recall it now.”
And so it may have been with seven years full of scenes, some lifted, some stolen, all vivid, covering those years three-fold and four-fold deep. (There wasn't room in seven years nor in seventy for all the scenes that Duffey assigned to them.) Some of them had been genuine Duffey scenes, but not all. But he made them all his own. And part of this mystery may not have been so mysterious as that. “Duffey, my beloved brother, is near as phoney as I am myself,” Bagby once said about the interval. “If he can't remember those times, it's because he doesn't want to remember them. If he recalls them in wrong form, it's because there was a different wrong form about the originals. If he won't say what he was doing, maybe he was doing something he shouldn't have been doing.”
Eleven of the prime creations of Duffey, eleven of the twelve human persons that he made, were conceived and born during those seven hidden years. Had Duffey something further to provide to the talismanic clay? Was his presence in various places a series of necessities? Part of the mystery of the
years will be raveled out later, but only a minor part of it. And no human person, not even Duffey himself, will know the whole of that interval until the afternoon of judgment day.
7
After seven years, Duffey came back. It was in the year 1923 that he reappeared. He didn't come to St. Louis at first, but the St. Louis people began to hear from him again. He was wandering around the other cities of his old territory, Dubuque and Sioux City and Omaha and Kansas City. He would visit some of his pretended kindred for a week or two, and then he would not be seen for several months. It was said that he had money, but he was in an unsettled state. He came to St. Louis finally. He found that his sister Mary Louise had married. Who would believe it? She was married to Bagby! That was a little bit like a goddess being married to an earthling or a mortal. That was exactly what it was.
“Bagby is my dark object, he is my uncleansed stables, he is the lower part of me,” Duffey said, “and I sincerely love the shanty freak. But what's this about him being married to my sister?”
Duffey found that his old girl Beth Keegan was married. And Charley Murray had done well for himself as well as for Duffey at the Rounders' Club. No, Duffey didn't want to take an active role in the club again, Duffey said, not just yet.
“My love, my boy my prince, you are back!” Olga Sanchez of the torchy shoulders said. She still worked at the Rounders' Club. She was now married to a beautiful Mexican man who had become high chef of the Rounders' Club Main Dining Room. “But, my love, you are not quite all back,” Olga said to Duffey.
Duffey stayed with Mary Louise and Bagby while he was in St. Louis.
“Where were you really, Melky?” Mary Louise asked him. “I get only murky glimpses of it. It seems to be a valley you were in.”
“I think it was the ‘Valley of Lost Boyhood’,” he said.
“Ah well, you kept yours longer than most do. What are you listening for, Melky?”
“For wings, I think, Mary Louise.”
“And what kind of wings are they?”
“I'm not sure, Mary Louise. Not quite butterfly wings. I'm not sure at all.”
Duffey went to visit Beth Keegan and her family. She was now Beth Erlenbaum. Oh come on, Beth, you had to get a name like that out of a play. You had to get a husband like that out of a play. Indeed, Beth was now in plays, of a sort. She really worked at the Star and Garter now. She wrote many of the skits that Piccone put on, and she played comic roles in some of them. Duffey still loved her, and she still loved him almost as much as she used to. And she still flustered him unaccountably. She had her husband and two daughters, and they did not know what to make of Melchisedech. Beth said that she had a recent goddaughter who would understand him though. This was the infant of Piccone at the Star and Garter. But Duffey did not meet that infant for another twenty-three years.
Duffey did not, at this time or ever, realize that Beth, though a little bit on the pretty side, was quite an ordinary person. He wouldn't have believed it even if it were explained to him. “What are you listening for, Duff, my prince, my love?” Beth asked him just as Mary Louise had asked him.
“Wings, I think, Beth.”
“And what kind of wings?”
“Moth wings, it seems. Can one hear moth wings for three hundred or four hundred miles?”
“Oh sure. I do it all the time.”
Book Three
Hog Butcher & Gadarene Swine
Tu Melchisedech secundum
Surgens nimis nunc jucundum
Deus tam dilexit mundumHenri Salvatore, Archipelago
Giovanni A. Solli (Finnegan) had been born June 1, 1919 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Vincent J. Stranahan had been born April 5, 1921 in St. Louis, Missouri.
Henry Francis Salvatore was born December 8, 1920 in Morgan City, Louisiana.
Kasmir W. Szymansky (Casey) was born October 7, 1921 in Chicago, Illinois.
John Gottfried Schultz (Hans) was born January 2, 1915 at St. Gallen, Wisconsin.
What had these persons in common? How was it destined, even before they were born, that they should be companions? And then there were these: Absalom Stein
Dotty Yekouris
Teresa Piccone
Mary Virginia Schaeffer
Mary Catherime Carruthers
Marie Monaghan.
These latter six were born in approximately the same years as the first five, in Chicago, in New Orleans, in St. Louis, in Galveston, in Chicago again, and in Sydney Australia. Yes, all this information is pertinent.
Eleven of them named there. In all, there should be twelve in that canon, but there is some dispute over who the twelfth one was.
How are things done in this world and in other worlds like it? Does God indeed create and effect through demiurges and giants and magi and such creatures? Yes, from one point of view that is what happens. And from a dozen other points of view it may appear that a dozen different things happen.
The complete truth of it is many dimensions beyond us, and yet every one of these different points of view may be authentic. From one of the dozen, or the billion points of view, demiurges and giants and magi do indeed create and effect. Not one of these viewpoints, not even the extravagant magi-creators view, may be subtracted from the world affair. The world would not be authentic without it.
Yes, Melchisedech Duffey was a Magus. And, yes, he created people. We will come back to this subject many times.
After the missing years, after his reappearance, Duffey had been around his circuit of midwest cities for a year or more. He started three separate businesses, and he sold them one after the other when he got them going. He made money out of every deal, but there was something that he missed getting from the deals. He had become an entertaining and interesting man, and he was still a good man. He had the savor of a man who had retained virtue, by however chancy a margin. But he still had the air of a man listening intently for something that was just over the edge.
It was in Omaha, in the year 1925, that Duffey felt a powerful directional urge and call. Someone was requiring or compelling his presence over a distance of four or five hundred miles. It was urgent. It was a moth call, and it had plenty of flame to it. It was the moth wings that he had been listening to for many months, and now he had the direction and distance of them.
Duffey took a night train to Chicago. He sat in a day coach all night, when he was not wandering up and down the aisles of the train. He had only a suitcase with him. He had left his trunks and heavier possessions to be sent to him from various towns when he should finally find a destination. He had a quart bottle of good Canadian in his coat pocket and another one in his suitcase, for the dry years were on the country then.
A chubby little girl in the day coach kept flirting with him. But Duffey was looking at the mother of the little girl. “I wonder whether she knows that she has a terminal illness?” he asked himself. “A very, very terminal illness. I wonder what it is?” Duffey had these scrappy intuitions sometimes, and they were always correct as far as they went.
Still and all, the little girl was more interesting than her mother, in spite of the death mystery on the mother.
“My daughter is so awful,” said the mother of the little girl. “I just don't know what to do with her. What can anybody do with a little girl who loves the men so much?”
“They can sit down and play cards with me,” the little girl said. She was playing some kind of solitaire: Duffey sat down and began to play two-handed cards with her. She said that her name was Charlotte Mullens and that she was nine years old. That flirty little girl knew how to handle cards, and she knew how to handle men. She played footsie and kneesie and kissie with Duffey while they played cards.
“I don't know what to do with my little daughter,” the mother said. “She is so forward.” These two suddenly reminded Duffey of Gretchen Sister and her mother Lucille in St. Louis. Gretchen manipulated her mother into going to work for Duffey. She manipulated her into having dates with Duffey: but th
ey always ended with Duffey and Gretchen carrying on together on the old Sisler living room sofa. The little girl Charlotte was the manipulator here, and her mother was her puppet. So Duffey and Charlotte played cards and they kissed for games. And no nine year old girl kisses like that.
Mrs. Mullens had big quantities of lunch with her, and the three of them ate between hands. She had paper cups and they drank Duffey's good Canadian whisky out of them and got mellow. The mother was a little bit sparing of it, but Charlotte was into it like an old toper.
“I am in love with you, Charlotte,” Duffey said, and he kissed her specially.
“Do you always fall in love with nine year old girls?” Mrs. Mullens asked.
“Always,” Duffey said, “and sometimes with their mothers.” He kissed Mrs. Mullens and she seemed pleased enough with it, but she just hadn't the style of Charlotte in these things. After a while, they played some sort of three-handed cards with kisses for stakes.
“It's more fun when you play for something,” Mrs. Mullens said. Mrs. Mullens had a certain brisk way with the cards. Duffey was glad that they were not playing for money. Mrs. Mullens (well, her name was Gloria) had a certain brisk way of kissing also: friendly and full of value her kisses were, but brisk nevertheless. Kissing her was like biting into an apple, cool and juicy and flavorsome. Yes, but Charlotte had her beat.
“We're completely destitute,” Gloria Mullens said as if she were reciting a lesson. “Our husband and father died two months ago and he seems to have left nothing but debts. He was always a fast man with the buck. He was a grasshopper; he was a butterfly; but he had to have left something, he handled so much money. He never ran out of tricks. I'm still not sure that his dying wasn't a trick. I expect him to come in grinning one day with his hands full of money and him crowing about the way he took those insurance folks.”
More Than Melchisedech Page 9
