Then there came into the room seven of the most out-of-breath mice you ever saw. They must have come from a long ways, more than a block, for they would never have lived anywhere in the area of the Gurdon S. Hubbard Elementary School. Those were tired and foot-sore mice. Mice usually don't travel very far in a hurry.
Duffey picked up the seven out-of-breath mice ind put them on the table.
“Quick,” he told Letitia, “make seven little mouse-sized oxygen masks. I will have to revive these little fellows.” Letitia made the seven little masks and put them on the mice. “But we haven't any oxygen tank with fittings small enough for these masks,” Letitia said. “And there aren't any fittings on the masks anyhow. They are only paper masks, and no oxygen to go with them.”
“The mice think they are real,” Duffey said. “So do I. There is real oxygen going to them now or I am a rodent's uncle. See, they revive. Why had you so little faith, Letitia?”
“I don't know,” she said. “I should have learned by now to have faith.”
The mice were revived and were bright-eyed and eager. They suffered their token costumes to be put on them, and they went into their roles with great verve. It was one of the best presentations the Duffeys ever gave.
But just what had happened?
“Those mice don't come from around here,” said a zoology teacher, teacher of the class ‘Our Happy World, Zoology for the Grade School Students’ as it was listed in the school prospectus. “And they don't come from a couple of blocks away either. These are Central American mice.”
“We take what we can get,” Melchisedech Duffey said.
Magic it had been, little touches of magic, bit handfuls of magic.
5
Shirley Israel (Damn that woman anyhow!) was at the heart of the rumor that there were salons around the near north side that were more witty and more informative than the salon of the Duffeys. Shirley's own salon was said to be one of them. The Israels and the McSorleys and the Calumets and the Hallahans and their crowd did not want to dump Duffey. They wanted to keep him. They were convinced, though they denied it, that there really was magic in him. They wanted to use him.The stuff that was pushed in the more witty salons was dismal, but it stuck like cockleburs and it itched like nettles. It disturbed one. It caused swellings and sores and blood, and that was only the dragon-headed tip of the iceberg.
The whole complex, and the way it savaged Duffey, was so trashy that it will only be given in bare abridgement. Some of the persons who had sordid roles in this affair later repented of their parts. Others did not repent, either here or hereafter. They are still unrepentant in Hell to this day, and they have the reputations of being very bad actors there.
The aggressive element of the Red Decade itself (the 1930's) was strong in Chicago, but its mindset cut across all cities and persons. It was only one of the many heads of the old monster, not the largest nor the most fearsome head. But all of those heads are deadly. Most of the university people were besworn to the red thing, and most of the newspaper people. But a person with a stout hide could repel most of the lances cast. So it went on for some years.
Casey Szymansky, the son of Duffey's old associate Gabriel and a talisman child of Melchisedech Duffey, had stopped attending colleges. The only thing that he brought out of his university experience was a small circulation magazine newspaper named The Crock. This magazine had some intellectual and cultural pretensions, and it was very opinionated. So the red rovers had tried to take it over. They hadn't any handle to take hold of it by then, and Casey battled them, sometimes energetically, sometimes fitfully. But there was something fearsome in their persistence in trying to board and scuttle the sheet. The attempts were annoying in the way that a housefly is annoying. And then one noticed that the supposed housefly was another kind of flying creature, deadly, deadly. But things still went on for a while, and the deadly midges weren't able to harm the Casey.
There had been a little bit of world political unease in those years. One of its earlier climaxes came a short time after the close of the Red Decade, with the entry of the United States into the global war in December of 1941. Hardly anybody remembers this minor bit of history, but it did happen.
Casey joined the U.S. Army in April of 1942 and went away to the now forgotten war. He asked Duffey to run The Crock for him while he was in service, and Duffey did so. When Duffey had the magazine, there were many talented contributors, d'Alesandro the masterly engraver, Demetrio Glauch, Hermione Groben, Ethyl Ellenberger, Thos. J. Chronicker, S.J., Christopher Tompkinson, Mary Frances Rattigan (her translations were done under the name of Polly Polyglot), Mary Lightfoot, others. Some of these had contributed to the sheet when Casey had it, but now they worked with more aim and direction. And others of them were brought in by Duffey.
The peculiar people still tried to take The Crock over, and Duffey laughed at them. This went on for several years. Then a man out of left field came to talk to Duffey. He had a portfolio. The man quickly told Duffey that it would do him no good to destroy the portfolio as there were only copies in it and the originals were in another place. He also devised that it would do no good for Duffey to destroy him, the man with the portfolio, as friends knew where he had gone, and they were standing by. In fact, the man said, if they did not hear from him by telephone every five minutes while he was in Duffey's place, they would break down the doors and come to the rescue.
This was a peculiar business. The man with the portfolio was larger than Duffey and no more than his age. Duffey was something of a battler, but he seldom assaulted visitors. Duffey threw open the door of his place and propped it open. The friends of the man wouldn't need to break down the doors to come in to the rescue. Then Duffey pulled his phone out of the phone jack and carried it to another room. Duffey had a nonstandard phone that coupled by a plug-in phone jack to the lines. This meant that the friends would not get any calls and that they would come in five minutes or so. Then Duffey took the portfolio away from the man and sat down to examine it.
It was mostly full of photographs. Duffey went through them with a sort of puzzled laughter. “Why?” he asked, “Why, who would be so interested in my private doings? I'm not that interesting a person.” The puzzlement grew stronger and the laughter weaker. Duffey himself was in every one of the pictures, or at least (in the case of several of the dimmer ones) there was writing on the face of the photograph identifying Duffey as being in them. Some of the photographs had to be more than ten years old. “Why, why?” Duffey asked Some of the pictures showed Duffey in middling compromising situations.
Many of the pictures were of Duffey and the various young girls carrying on upon that old black leather sofa in the bookstore. They showed him having dirty fun with Mary Frances Rattigan and Mary Catherine Carruthers, and Mary Jean, and Ethyl Ellenberger. It showed him playing the funny uncle with them from the time they were eight or ten years old.
“It had to be that little kid Hugo Stone,” Duffey said. “He always had a camera with him, and he was always popping up in odd corners of the store. But how could he have known then, so long ago, that you could have use of these to blackmail me now?”
“Hugo was always a smart boy,” the man said. “He is of my own kindred. He knew enough to accumulate and keep everything that might possibly be of future use.”
There were later pictures of Duffey with grown women in various places, some of them in his very own rooms. Who had planted a camera in his own place? Who could come and go in the Duffey quarters? Only about two hundred persons, that's all. The pictures showed Duffey carrying on a little bit with Countess Margaret Hochfelsen and with that mendacious midget Charlotte Garfield. But it wasn't serious carrying on with those two. Others showed him playing the funny lover with Mona Greatheart and Shirley Israel and Josephine McSorley and Catherine Quick and Elena O'Higgins and Beverly Boyd and Mary Lightfoot and Jenny Reid. And yet, there wasn't anything so very outrageous about any of them either. “Who was the assiduous cameraman of these,”
Duffey said. “They are taken in a dozen places. Who has been so busy with this hobby?”
And one of the pictures showed (Oh, no, no, no, that wasn't at all what it seemed to be: why cannot a photograph show what is all in fun and what isn't?) Duffey entangled in a very funny manner of loving with his sister-in-law Lily Koch. The only flagrante picture in the whole portfolio was of Duffey and Shirley Israel. And that was an entrapment, a badger game trick, a sneak attack. But several of the others had a little bit of heat in them and they did not seem to have any innocent explanations.
“Well, what are you going to do with them?” Duffey asked stiffly.
“Oh, we hope that we will not do anything with them,” the man said. “It is just that some of us want to join with you in the excellent little magazine you are running, and you have not welcomed us with open arms. We do not want to join in from hope of money gain. We will bring in money, not take it out. And we will enlarge the magazine. But it is an idea magazine, and we want our ideas to be in it.”
“Who are you going to blackmail me to?”
“Oh, to your wife, and to others.”
“You're wasting your time,” Duffey said. “My wife can read my mind. She knows the things I have done. These things cannot be held against me, however they may look. I have confessed the few guilty things among them and I have been absolved of them. And any guilt I ever had in them, either in fact or in appearance, is gone now. It is all past.”
“Some of these pictures, you must know, are not too old.”
“Some of my confessings and absolvings are not too old either.”
“Ah, but will your wife absolve you?”
“Certainly she will. I will explain to her that I am clear of all these things now, and that she must hold me clear of them. But she already knows this. I am, in fact, a changed man for some two years now.”
“Changed man, you had not yet changed when these pictures were taken. And I will bet that your wife takes a very unchanged view of them when she sees them.”
The friends of the portfolio man came in then. They had not got a call from him, and they came to see whether he and Duffey had proceeded to violence. Rollo McSorley and Elmo Sheehan were among those friends, and several others who were still half-friends of Duffey.
“Get out, all of you,” Duffey said. “I'll not be blackmailed.”
“Then your wife will see some of these pictures this evening,” the portfolio man said.
“Why won't she see all of them?” Duffey asked. “Show all of them to her at once. Why not?”
“Oh, we will keep some of them still hanging over you,” the man said. “It is more effective that way. Besides, I haven't even brought all of them in. There will always be others, until you cooperate.”
“Out, all of you,” Duffey ordered.
“There are sterner measures that we can take also,” said one of the half-friends.
“You mean the three preternatural slant-faced killers?” Duffey asked. “I wonder, do you carry spares for them?”
“Spares?”
“Yes. At least one of them will be killed at our next encounter. I thought you might want to keep the number at three. Out, all of you, out!”
“You'll be sorry, Duff,” Rollo McSorley warned.
“Of course I will be. I'll become a man of sorrows for a while. But I'll not let your camel's nose into the tent that is The Crock. And I'll not do worse things than I have been pictured as doing.”
When Duffey got all of them out of there, he went for a walk. This thing was an irksome threat over him, but something was also threatening to destroy a shadow of his. To a primitive, and Duffey was always that, the destruction of a shadow is a mortal wounding of the Self. Duffey had his shadows, and they were fleshed much of the time, or he believed that they were. He had shadows, he had fetches, he had doubles of himself. One of these doubles, who was often in a shabby sort of empathy with Duffey, lived there in Chicago. He lived only about six blocks from Duffey, but in a poorer neighborhood. And he was a poor man.
Duffey went to that house to talk to the overwhelmed man. There was nobody at the house. Then Duffey, following an intuitive path as a hound dog might, came to a shabby north end tavern and was called ‘McFadden's North End Tavern’. He went in and found a despondent man who looked slightly like himself.
The man was sitting alone at a table with a half-full glass of beer in front of him. He was maybe forty years old, with short-cut hair between the colors of sandy and orange. His eyes were fire-blue, but the fire in them was tired this afternoon. His hands were always busy. They were weaving patterns in the air, and banging into each other with little jolting claps.
“Of this I am entirely innocent,” the man was muttering. “I haven't done these things, and yet witnesses have seen me coming and going about them. I don't understand it at all. I am an innocent man and I don't want to understand it.”
Duffey shivered, for the man's voice was quite like his own.
“You are half-shaded over,” Duffy told the man. “So am I. Together we can form a window to let a little light in.”
“No,” the man said, but he didn't look at Duffey. “You're a devil. You bugged me once before, several years ago, or a man very like you did. There is something wrong about you. Do not sit down, I'm telling you, fellow!” And the man banged his hands together loudly and nervously. But Duffey was already sitting down at the table with him.
“I will sit here, man,” Duffey said, “and I will talk to you. You owe me an explanation, though neither of us can say why.” The man looked at Duffey angrily.
“A pitcher here, young McFadden,” Duffey called then. It was one of those seventy-two ounce pitchers that young McFadden brought, and a glass for Duffey and a fresh glass for the other man. “And onions and other things,” Duffey ordered of McFadden.
“You are sure that you are innocent of it all?” Duffey asked his tablemate then. “How have witnesses seen you going and coming about things if you are innocent of them?”
“It's as if there were a devil associated with me and the devil had done the things and they were reported of me,” the man said. “But my wife believes the reports. This is the blow. Why have you broken off that layer of onion and cast it aside? Have a care what you do there. Isn't that layer as good as the rest of the onion?”
“The onion?” Duffey asked “Why, I wasn't noticing. I eat it a bit, then I open it up a bit, and I toy with it. You were saying that there were things about your own conduct that you don't understand, and — ”
“I was saying that you cast one layer of the onion aside as if it weren't as good as the rest. Do you believe that I'm only an onion layer to you? Do you believe that I'm an inferior layer to be cast off like nothing? Well, we may go to fist bailiwick to decide which of us is the onion and which of us is the layer. I am a tornado, and you are one of my spinoffs, that's what you are, man. Oh, the other thing, as regards my wife and our relationship. I have never done one wrong thing, not one. And now I have. This afternoon I have.”
“What have you done this afternoon. And what is your name?” Duffey asked.
“Mike. Mike Melchiades, that is.”
“What did you mean when you said that you had never done one wrong thing as regards your wife, but now you had?” Duffey asked.
“When she left me, I immediately went down and pulled everything out of our joint account. It wasn't much, a little over three hundred dollars. And she had probably put more into it than I had. But I was back in our rooms thirty minutes later and I got a call from the bank. My wife was there and wanting to make a twenty dollar withdrawal. I said no. I could hear her crying near the other end of the line, but I said no again. What will she do with no money at all, and her on the town with just a little suitcase? She is shy. She doesn't know how to make out. And she is broken up in the false belief that I am untrue to her. Poor people have a hard time of it. Getting mad and pulling out are luxuries that they can never really afford. A man is like an onion
there, fellow, yes. He has layers to him, and the layer doesn't care to be discarded like that. You think I'm only a layer of it. You're wrong. I'm not that. Leave me here, Devil. But if you should happen to see my wife — Oh, but you wouldn't know my wife if you saw her — ”
“I would know her,” Duffey said.
“Tell her to come home,” the man said. “Tell her that this thing is not really broken off between us.”
Duffey went out of McFaddens and walked. He suspected that the man was right. The man was the tornado, and Duffey was only a spinoff from him. Or that was the way it was part of the time. Poor people, ignorant people, low class people often have tremendous psychic power. They are tornados indeed; blind tornados. They generate terrible power, and richer people steal it from them and use it themselves. Duffey knew that the Chicago interlude was about finished, and it had been a tolerably bright complexity of awareness and styles and livings and enjoyments and arts and immediacies. He was not overly proud, but he knew that his own dimming out from this scene would dim it a little bit for everyone there. Melchisedech and Letitia had designed their own part of Chicago as they had designed other things, other events, life scenarios, and other persons themselves. Now, as they would soon be leaving the city, one way or another, all those things would become undesigned again.
Duffey walked by the Pont du Sable Traffic Trestle that had become interior to him, a universal bridge. Several cars had just accomplished a real-life crash against some of its abutments. That meant that another part of Duffey was crippled.
“Mike!” a woman cried. “Oh, Mike!” Then she stopped confused. “I thought you were my Mike,” she said.
More Than Melchisedech Page 17
