“Duffey, I know that you've always wanted sons,” she said, “and not just your Splendid Animations. Listen, I can have sons any time, nineteen year old and full-grown sons, as many as I want, as often as I want.”
“But you let one of them walk out of here an hour ago, Charlotte, and he seemed to fill all the requirements,” Duffey said.
“I don't mean like that, Duff,” Charlotte answered. “I latch onto them like that only when I'm in too tedious a mood to go for the real thing. But sons of my body I can have, and sometimes I do. They could be your sons, Duff.”
“Small as you are, Charlotte, how could you birth grown sons?”
“The way is too weird to explain, Duff, but I can do it.”
“You're too old for me, Charlotte. I seem to remember when we first met on the train, that I was twenty-five years old and you, I believe, were thirty-eight. And now I'm possibly sixty, and you are — ”
“We both of us belong to branches of the ‘old people’, Duff, of closely related branches of them. Age doesn't gnaw on me much. And I see that you are using whiting on your hair to disguise the fact that you're into one of your youthful cycles and getting your hair color back. Take me, Duffey. We are both prodigious people, and we could have a prodigious time of it.”
“Strange words coming from a little nine year old girl, Charlotte. How did it happen that so many of us prodigious people became acquainted with each other? It's in defiance of the odds that we should have done it.”
“I suspect that we were lonesome, and we sent out signals, as your moth once did. There aren't really so many of us in the world, and we might as well be acquainted.”
“Isn't the Devil a prodigious or variant person, Charlotte?”
“Certainly, and we both know him personally. In a world this size, he would naturally have heard of us, and we would naturally have heard of him. But we don't make him too welcome in our Prodigious Peoples' Club. At least I don't. But he's not unique in his trade.
“Duffey, there are at least two other Prodigious Devils who are passing themselves off as ‘The Devil Himself’. And the ‘Devil Released from Prison’, by the way, is one of the oldest of all con tricks. It's really only a version of the ‘Spanish Prisoner Trick’, grossly magnified. I am told that his take, that last time around, in 1946, was huge: it ran into the billions. And yet this Devil, in the few brief conversations I had with him, didn't impress much.
“Well, make up your mind, Duffey. I change families every three or four years, and I think that my next manifestation should be in the ‘Patriarch and Angelic Child’. The world is getting hungrier and hungrier for prodigies, and we should be able to ride that con for several centuries. I'll be back in about four months and we can talk more on it then. I bought a nice little business in town today, and I get control of it in just four months.”
“All right, Charlotte. May you have sons like clusters of green grapes around the old arbor.”
Charlotte did tie into another ‘family’, and she called them the Darnleys. They were real professionals in the ‘profession’, a dazzler of a mother, a son-husband-father who should have been anything that the mendacious midget desired. The two Darnleys were so good at their parts that it almost looked as if Charlotte had overreached herself. Did these people intend to use her instead of she using them? Never mind. They'd go sweet on her soon enough, and then she'd have them, the blasted runt tyrant.
“Anything else from the North, Mary Virginia?” Margaret Stone asked the day after Charlotte Darnley had gone back to Chicago with her family.
“One more, I believe, Maggy,” Mary Virginia said.
Mary Catherine Carruthers came down from Chicago. Mary Catherine had always seemed to be the least of Duffey's Splendid Animations, and yet she and Duffey bad been very close. Remember when Duffey had used to wrestle her on that old black leather sofa in the back of his bookstore in Chicago, from the time she was nine or ten years old. He should have been horse-whipped for such things. Instead, he was blackmailed for them, for the pictures that that damned kid Hugo Stone took of them. But remember how Mary Catherine, from the very first, would scatter Duffey's worries. It almost seemed as if she were older than he was, the way she rationalized the worry out of him.
“There is not anything to be bothered about, Mr. Duffey,” she would say when she was no more than ten years old. “You are not being the funny uncle with me. This is all right. It isn't somebody else carrying on with some little child. It is you. And it is me. And what is between us is all right.”
And a year or two after that, she had said “I love you, Duffey, and of course I love Aunt Letitia. But if she dies, and she might (you two think you are the mentalists and can sneak-preview the future, but maybe I am a mentalist too), if she does die, then I will want you to marry me. Promise me that you will.”
“This I will not promise to a little girl,” Duffey had said.
“When it comes about, I might be an old girl,” Mary Catherine had said. Now it had come about that Mary Catherine was an old girl. She never had married Casey Szymansky, though they had been engaged to marry quite a few times.
Mary Catherine was about twenty years younger than Duffey, so she was about forty or fifty, depending on whether Duffey was about sixty or seventy by now. Duffey was looking much younger now though, younger than he had looked twenty years before. The Patriarchs have these peculiar tides in them that ebb and flow.
Mary Catherine stayed around town for a couple of weeks. She had leisure, as much as she wished to take. She had been a hard-working business girl for many years and had made good money. Then she had gone to work for Hilary Hilton and had made fantastic money. Now she was on leave.
She spent quite a bit of time wandering around the town. She spent a lot of time talking to Duffey. For some reason, Mary Catherine seemed entangled in his future, more so than the Countess Margaret, or Lily, or Charlotte, more so than the New Orleans ladies.
But the clotted future sometimes seems to be coming out of its jug not at all. And then, it comes out with resounding glugs, all mixed, and not as it was supposed to be. Well, whether she went back to Chicago only briefly, or whether she went back there permanently, Mary Catherine went back then.
“Any more blowing in from the North, Mary Virginia?” Margaret Stone had asked.
“No, I think that's all of them for right now,” Mary V. said.
So Margaret sang the bristly song to the halting of the flood of them:
“The harpies came from Illinois.
Hi! Ho!
They'd give a Gadarene a pause.
Hi! Ho!
They rend the Duff with loving claws.
They eat him up with eager jaws.
(They really have such pretty maws.)
Hi! Ho!
I'm telling it just like it waws.
There ought to be some penal laws.
Perhaps they all will die of yaws.
Hi! Ho! The gollie wol!”
Why had anybody ever taught Margaret Stone that Gadarene Swine Song? Yes, there was a little bit of action on the New Orleans front even.
Mary Virginia. Salvation Sally. Margaret Stone. Well, what about Mary V. and Salvation and Margaret? Oh, nothing, it was just that they were such pleasant and wonderful ladies. One would have to think of them intensely and often. And Patriarchs usually come to wifely harbors several times in their long lives.
What was this? Seven women, some of them less reluctant than others. Does that mean there is a pick of seven different futures?
You try to get this clotted future to come out of the jug, and it will not budge at all. And then maybe it will break loose with a cascade of stuff you never even guessed about.
Book Nine
“You, Melchisedech the odd-ski,
Stand not fearful like a clod-ski,
Follow Noah and Zabodski.”
[Bascom Bagby. Letters After I Am Dead.]
Duffey came on a painted sign one morning. It read “The Future
Begins Right Here. Follow the Arrows.” But there were seven arrows pointing in seven different directions. And there was a landscape or townscape, very well done, painted beneath each arrow. Deeply mystified, Duffey examined the sign. It had a beautiful and dampish look to it, and he touched it.
“Oh, it's still wet. You got some on you. I'm sorry,” said an adolescent girl. “I was supposed to watch, but I didn't notice you.”
Then there were several nice girls there. They said that they had painted the sign for both an advertisement and a prop in a school play and had set it there to dry. They said that the sign was a sort of ‘in’-play or ‘in’-people reference and did not have any profound implications.
“I painted the scenes under the arrows,” one of the girls said. “I'm a painter.” These were very pretty girls and they attended Ursuline Academy.
But Duffey knew that they were wrong. He knew that the sign did have very profound implications. The future really did begin here, for him, for the world. Most of his life he had lived in the present, and now there would be no more present for him. The future, parting and branching off in the different directions, would be tricky.
“There is something obdurate and absolute about this sign of yours,” Melchisedech told the girls. “It means either the end of myself in this mortal coil, or it means the end of time itself.”
“Yes it does,” one of the girls said. “That's what the play is all about. It's about this old man who comes to the end of his skein, and somehow the fate of the world is tied to his fate, or he believes that it is. Say, do you want to play the part of the old man? His name is Melchisedech. That's a name from the Bible. We've been wondering who would be good to play it.”
“I will play it,” said Melchisedech Duffey. “I am Melchisedech.”
“You will be perfect,” said a girl. “I am Therese Doucet the casting director.”
“I have here a copy of the script that you may take,” said another girl. “I am Cleo Mahoney the playwright. Do you suppose that you could learn your part within a week?”
“I can learn any part within thirty seconds,” Melchisedech said and he took the script. He read it for more than thirty seconds, maybe for five minutes, and he seemed sometimes amused and sometimes terrified.
“Tbis is written with rare prophetic gift,” he said. “It is prescient, it is almost omniscient. All right, I have it all learned. When is the performance?”
“Nobody could learn it that fast,” Cleo said. “You are joshing us. Let us hear you give the great speech at the beginning of act three.”
“All right,” Melchisedech said, and he gave it in a fine ringing voice:
“I tell you that I'm sort of split in two.
My friend, Za-bot, Oh tell me what to do.
What, gone away and left me in my stew?
A sinkless craft is very well for you,
But I'm the man who cannot have an end,
So Scripture says, that will not break or bend.
And yet it's sure that I have lost my way,
And seven roads do beckon me this day.
How may I follow all? How may I stay?
I cannot have an end though time shall end.
Oh Kephos of the blooming nose on you,
Advise me where I ought to turn or trend.
You turn away and make a joke or two.
Oh hack me up in seven pieces, friend,
And seven roads I'll follow to their end,
But these are riddle roads that do extend
Beyond. Ah, welladay and welladoo.”
People in the street had stopped to listen, and now some of them applauded. New Orleans people will applaud anything.
“This is about Melchisedech of the Old Testament,” Cleo Mahoney explained then. “He is the one man who cannot have an ending. ‘Sine Patre, neque Finem’, ‘Without Father and without End’, the Bible says about him. But what will happen to him when it is time for him to end, or when it is time for the world to end? That is the plot. I picture him hesitating before seven different roads, and then I give a sort of vision of each of those seven roads. Have you any talents? Can you do anything between the acts?”
“I can play my banjo,” said Melchisedech.
“But would a banjo be fitting for a Patriarch?”
“Well, I could play my flute then. It is a medieval recorder-flute and it would not be at all out of the way for a Patriarch to play it. And I have been fooling around with Hebrew melodies lately. Hebrew melodies are ‘in’, as you must know.”
“That will be wonderful,” the girls said, “and you will be wonderful in the part. It is one week from tonight in our auditorium. We will keep you apprised of the details.”
Knowing the play to be prescient of his own condition, Duffey went to see Kephos of the blooming nose. Kephos is stone, of course, which is Stein. And he explained the whole situation, and the fortuitous little play that was an echo of that situation, to spacious Absalom Stein.
“I know about the play, of course,” Stein said. “I've had to subscribe to twelve tickets to it. My daughter Rebeka is in it, you know. She goes to Ursuline. And what is a little Jew girl going there for? ‘To get a more narrow education,’ my wife said (it was her idea). Her education has been getting entirely too broad and I've been worried about that.’ It is easy to say that an ultra-broad education never hurt anybody, but it has hurt me here and there, I believe. Oh, the play bites you to the quick, does it Melky? You do have a problem. The worst of your problems is that people who can never end may end by being tedious.”
“You turn away and make a joke or two,” the great speech in the play had said about this Kephos, and so it was.
Duffey went to see Zabotski who was likely the Za-bot in the play.
“Zabotski, I have a problem!” Duffey roared as he went into Zabotski's always open place. But his roar echoed back to him from the empty vastness of Zabotski's old quarters. Zabotski came there very infrequently now.
“Oh yes he lives in that unsinkable house on the lake,” Duffey reminded himself. “Should I follow him there in his folly, as Bagby suggests in his latest letter?”
What had Zabotski been up to. Or what had Somebody been up to through him?
“Of all the good and illuminated persons who were in the world at that time, it was only to Zabotski that God spoke a particular message.”
Probably the best account of the Zabotski Folly or the Zabotski Happening is to be found in ‘House and Home Happenings Magazine’.
2
The following is an article in ‘House and Home Happenings Magazine’.
House and Home Happening has for a long time intended to do a piece on the fabulous and outrageous house of Zabotski (he says that his first name is none of our business) and his wife Waldo, which house is located on Pristine Cove of Lake Borgne. This house has been much talked about for its mysterious history, for the many children and strange animals that are there, for its great size and its flabbergasting design, for its ambient of rapidity (‘top speed without hurry’), and for the graciousness of its host and hostess.
But several reporters who have gone on this assignment have failed to fulfill it properly. Even the pictures that they have brought back (of one six-hundredth of a second exposure and even faster) have been blurred on what were supposed to be still-lifes, as though there were some sort of movement there that was too fast for the cameras. But that is nothing to the way the reporters themselves were blurred when they came back. One of them, gone for only three hours from the magazine office, grew a forty-seven inch long beard in the interval. His only explanation was that the time seemed like much more than three hours to him.
Stymied for a while, we have now decided to make this a two-part feature on the Zabotski house which is a house that has a ‘myth of origin’. This ‘myth of origin’ falls into the context of what is called a ‘shaggy people tale’. We have prevailed upon a sometimes associate of Zabotski, one Melchisedech Duffey, to put the rather slippery fact
s of origin into a sort of sequence. We publish it herewith, and we hope to have the actual description of the house in our next issue. We do not designate the Zabotski house, as we have designated so many others, as our ‘House of the Month’. Rather we designate it as our ‘House of the Uncertain Interval’.
There were a few smart flies (this is Melchisedech Duffey writing) who knew it when the molasses they were caught in solidified into amber. But most of the flies, though they knew that something was wrong, didn't have any idea what was happening.
Zabotski went away and came back a lot. There is no doubt that we missed him during those intervals when he was gone. This account is about the time that he went away in an outlandish, giant contraption that he had built in his own backyard.
This was the time, continuing now apparently unbroken into the future, when Zabotski went to live in a large and ungainly house on Lake Borgne, when he lived there with his wife The Widow Waldo, and with many ungainly children and animals.
And before that, he had lived on Dumaine Street in a building between those of myself Melchisedech Duffey and that of Homer Hoose.
If we are to study origins, we will just study the origin of that huge house, and its movement from one location to another.
The ‘Better Life League’ had recognized Zabotski to be an ‘Entrance Person’. But Zabotski hadn't recognized the ‘Better Life League’ to be very much of anything. There were many of these non-mutual arrangements between Zabotski and the exocosmos. The ‘League’ was correct in his though: Zabotski was an ‘Entrance Person’, a strong and peculiar one.
More Than Melchisedech Page 33
