The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  I saw his shaggy head watching from the window as I parked in front of his house, a damp, cavernous place in which he lived alone, and he opened the door before I could touch the bell.

  “Thank God you’ve come,” he said, taking my hat. He plucked it directly from my head, which struck me as odd, even by his rather weird standards of hospitality. Indicative of tension.

  “Then you called me?” I said, closing the door behind me.

  “Yes. Your housekeeper said you were out and I left the message. Isn’t that what brought you?”

  “No. I’m just dropping in for a call.”

  Turnbull was a rangy man in his late sixties, with a mop of sulphurous red hair. He usually dressed in loose-fitting tweeds, which usually smelt of cigar smoke. He had a nasal, not unpleasant, twang to his voice, rather reminiscent of a jew’s-harp, or that sound that is produced by placing tissue paper over a comb. His teeth were still white and sound, though of assorted lengths. I watched him hang my hat on a peg under an elk’s head with one eye missing, a fact which gave the remaining one a look of baleful awareness it might otherwise have lacked. Then he led the way into the living room.

  I appraised him warily. His call meant that he would want to unburden himself confessionally again, and then be prayed with. The latter was not an aspect of pastoral life to which I took, supplication being something I felt to be in its nature private and not best realized by an intermediary. Further hazard was heaped on the office in this case by one’s being hysterically enjoined to one’s knees. Penitents always gave me the willies, but Turnbull was the end.

  The living room was long and comfortable, filled with deep leather chairs and sofas and the heads of beasts slightly more unusual than elk, shot in bygone years. Turnbull waved me to a chair and took one himself. I opened the conversation before he could.

  “Well, I see you’re not satisfied with the preaching in this neighborhood,” I said. “You feel you’ve got to pitch in and do a little yourself.”

  He glanced at me, taking a cigar from a leather case. Turnbull was a very heavy smoker, and his cigars were enormous; almost like the splats of chair legs in size. He patted his pockets looking for matches, and I rose and reached for a box of them on a table near me.

  “You mean the sign?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I wanted to surprise you with that.” He gnawed the tip from his cigar and sucked on it to confirm its draft. “How do you like it?”

  “I’d like to answer that question by asking another. Just what does that statement mean—’Jesus Saves’?”

  “What do you mean, ‘mean’?”

  “What does Jesus save us from?”

  “From our sins. What else?”

  “I see.”

  I struck a match on the side of the box and extended the flame to him. He took a few puffs and emitted a cloud of smoke, which he dispersed with a wave, as though from some points of view he deplored the habit.

  “And what will happen to us if we aren’t saved from them?” I inquired. “What then?”

  “Why, we’ll go to hell,” he answered, and lapped at a tatter in the side of his cigar.

  “And where will we go if we are?”

  “To heaven.”

  I sank into my chair and dropped my arms over the sides. “Another backslider,” I thought wearily. It was this damned religious revival. They were everywhere, these converts, defecting to pie-in-the-sky from the hard-won positions to which they have been urged and hauled by rational and honest men. Looking at the codger, I thought, Can this man be educated? Or is he beyond salvation? I remembered that prior to his retirement he had owned a factory in which, it was said, he had given out report cards to his employees.

  I leaned my head back and blew out of my lips, turning the matchbox end over end on the arm of the chair. I looked at him sadly. “You going to put up others?”

  “A few maybe, around town.” He mused a moment. “They won’t all be the same. Some will have texts on them. On one I thought I’d put just ‘John 3:16.’ Nothing else.”

  “Well, that’ll drive the commuters back to New York. It’ll accomplish that much.”

  “That’s not my purpose.” He reached for an ashtray and settled it on his knee. Then he smiled in a modest fashion and said the thing that blew me out of my chair. “The reason I wanted to surprise you, it’s all a little something I thought I’d do in memory of Mrs. Mackerel.”

  It was one of those situations to which nothing in the range of known facial expressions is adequate. The man needed to be dealt with charitably, and that was a demand I was determined to meet. At the same time, the gesture was so appallingly inapt, so grotesquely out of line, that some glimmer of that fact must be got through his head if it meant boring a hole in it.

  “That’s awfully nice of you, Turnbull, it really is,” I said. “It’s the sweetest thing in the world of you, but …”

  “But what?”

  “Well, it’s not precisely the sort of thing she would have cottoned to, in life.”

  “Why not? Wasn’t she a Christian, a fine upstanding woman always doing good? Social work, organizing that clinic with her own two hands—”

  “I know. For which she is now known as the Jane Addams of the East. I realize all that,” I said with more heat than I had intended. I got to my feet and stood before him with my hands spread. “But she was more of an intellectual than I am, man! It’s fine for you to memorialize her, but I really think you might have consulted me about it. When you give a living person a present you take pains to make it appropriate. The dead deserve as much.”

  He was swinging a slipper on his great toe, but his manner became sullen and sulking. “Oh, all right,” he said at last. “It’s still anonymous. I’ll think of something else.” He fell silent again. Then after a few more puffs on his cigar, he asked rather aggressively, “Didn’t she believe in Original Sin either?”

  “Not in that sense, no, Turnbull.”

  “If I may say so, I think that’s what’s wrong with our world—no sense of sin. Guilt feelings, sure, that’s very fashionable. But a sense of sin, no. Well, I believe in it. We’re all sinners, of which I am chief.”

  “Aren’t you rather giving yourself airs?”

  “I’m quoting Saint Paul.”

  “You’re no Saint Paul.”

  “I am a sinner,” he persisted stubbornly. “A miserable, guilty, life-long rotten, damnable sinner.”

  “Prove it.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. He had been itching to do just that, and my challenge opened the sluice gates. He fell to it with relish.

  “Have I ever told you about the woman I met in Naples in 1927?” he said.

  “No, I don’t believe I’ve heard that one,” I said.

  Turnbull sought a more comfortable position in his chair. He studied the coal of his cigar, and rather a gleam came into his eye. “Well, she was traveling without her husband, and we met on the Bay there at a time when I happened to be knocking about alone myself. It was 1927, or maybe ’26—no earlier. We were both at loose ends and one thing led to another. I was the only man who ever led her off the straight and narrow,” he said, his eyes tending abjectly downward, “ever succeeded in that feat. O Lord, the sins of my youth, remember them not …”

  Something dawned on me. It was that all of these tortured disclosures of Turnbull’s—and this was far from being one of his more graphic—dealt with carnal peccancies no longer open to him. Was he regretting, thus, not the acts themselves, but the time of life when they were possible? I remembered Freud’s having defined melancholia as grief at the loss of libido.

  “When I think of the sheer number of sins,” Turnbull bragged away. “I mean in one night. I wouldn’t care to say how many times. And that isn’t all. I had two going at once,” he confided, and hung his head.

  “Two affairs?”

  “Yep. We toured the Abruzzi together,” he said, now quite recovering the tone of anecdote, which
added to the illusion created by the leather chairs and potted greenery that we were in a club, “and one evening as I was sitting alone in the lobby of a hotel in Aquila, I saw walking out of the dining room thee—most …”

  The story flowed on and the cigar wore down. I studied my host’s face with interest. It was large, handsomely molded, like a monumental ruin of good looks, and while I had no doubt that my penitent was bewailing more than had occurred, I had little trouble seeing a blade of thirty years ago knocking the ladies for a loop. That would have put him in my own present age bracket, roughly the middle thirties. I was not free to let my attention wander, for as he made a clean breast of this particular conquest, he fixed me with a vitreous eye: an almost colorless gray eye behind which one glimpsed emotions still turbidly boiling, like coffee under the glass knob of a percolator. I kept my ear cocked for discrepancies, however, wondering for example whether Aquila was actually in the Abruzzi. I made a mental note to look it up later (and was punished for my churlishness by finding it to be quite the case). But Turnbull needed a good psychiatrist and that, alas, People’s Liberal did not have. Von Pantz had been hired for the clinic in the belief that since it was church-sponsored the appointee should be devout, as though that has any more to do with a psychiatrist’s skill than it does with a surgeon’s. How much wiser the Catholics were in these matters! They had hired Matisse to do the chapel at Vence on the stated principle that “an unbeliever with talent is of more value to the church than a believer without it.” I had failed to make the trustees see that point, and so now we were saddled with this seedy Jungian who read the Bible to patients, to say nothing of traipsing off to Madison Square Garden to hear Billy Graham! It seemed I had to fight the revival singlehanded, besides being in and out of the clinic trying to give the patients a little insight …

  “… times in one night.”

  Turnbull’s wanderings in the Abruzzi had come to an end. He sat back with an air of accomplishment, the corners of his mouth coming faintly into play as he regarded me.

  “Now do you say there’s no sin?” he said. “Now do you believe in it?”

  “Not in the Mosaic sense, no.”

  “Well, I do. I believe in it. And in the Law—forever handed down.”

  “In convenient tablet form.”

  “I shall pray for you.”

  “And I for you,” I answered levelly.

  I knew this was not the tone to take with Turnbull—not if he was to be won over. “A little resilience, please,” I had often to remind myself, in the need to curb my youthful idealism. This was a caution doubly urgent in the case of Turnbull, if he was to be brought in check before he went off and disgraced us with something worse than Jesus Saves hoardings. It would be all very well to point out to him later that what lay behind his present cycle was a kind of inverted libido protest—but not now. Now, I must be diplomatic. So I began to speak more tactfully, even buttering him up a bit. I allowed it was all a matter of terminology and that the world was full of what no one could deny was plain human deviltry, recognizing his testimony as impressive evidence in point, if, indeed, I had ever heard of a wider swathe being cut by a man in his prime. Turnbull took these reproaches with eyes modestly lowered, thanking me for my patience in hearing him out and promising, for his part, not to put up any more of these depressing signs, at least not in memory of my wife. I suggested he was doing enough by contributing as faithfully as he did to the clinic that bore her name, but he said no—he wanted to give her a specific memorial of some sort. I little dreamt that this was the theme round which the symphony of my entire life was, so to speak, to be abruptly and violently woven. Now in the long, dreaming harmonies of resolution, I can look back and see myself sitting there in the quiet afternoon, talking to Turnbull, unaware that the motif was being “stated,” and that I was about to be snatched up and whirled away, helpless as a straw in a cyclone, in its contrapuntal furies.

  Turnbull would continue to put his mind to the problem, he said, and was confident that he would think of something suitable soon, but he would, without fail, consult me about his choice before doing anything about it, or even making a public announcement of it. He promised me faithfully.

  All that agreed, I took my leave—suffering the replacement of my hat on my head—and bustled off to complete my day’s rounds. Then I went home to a good dinner, and immediately afterward hurried upstairs to my bedroom study, carrying my coffee in one hand and Main Currents in American Thought in the other.

  I was eager to get to the book as fast as I could.

  Chapter Three

  I PHONED Miss Calico when I had finished the book, three days later, and arranged to meet her the following evening at a restaurant on the edge of town, in order that I might return it. “I feel I owe you a dinner,” I said.

  The idea was agreeable to her and so was the place I suggested, an Italian restaurant run by a couple named Chimento. We had a fine meal, with a bottle of wine, and later went for a drive across the river to an industrial town there named Chickenfoot.

  “Why are we going here?” Miss Calico asked, as we rattled over the bridge in the bubble.

  “It’s full of wonderful old bars,” I said. “Not any of your ‘swank’ Avalon cocktail lounges. You don’t want any of those, do you?” Another thing in its favor was that it had no congregation of mine in it, with members out seeing their leader riding around in the glass house they had given him (not without a certain cunning, I now realized).

  Taverns devoid of fashionable décor were not hard to find on the street—dominated by closed fish houses—on which I parked the car, even for a person not gifted in slumming, and as we walked by several, making our selection, I sensed that my friend had begun to lose what stomach she’d had for the enterprise. It had turned cold and snow was falling, the first snow of autumn. Flakes so huge they resembled small doilies fluttered dreamily down on her hair and her lashes, where they turned to tears, to stars. A nap of white had already collected along the dingy pavement, and I executed a few steps in it and flapped my arms to suggest that we were having more fun than might otherwise have been supposed.

  “Let’s go in this one,” Miss Calico said. “My feet are getting wet.”

  We stood a moment sizing up the tavern before which we had come to a halt, and went in.

  A bartender wearing an overcoat and three men roosting on stools watched without expression as we stood inside the door stamping our feet. “Snowing,” I said with a conciliatory smile. I piloted Miss Calico past them to a row of empty booths and settled her in one that seemed more securely moored to the floor than most. The silence putting me on edge, I walked to a jukebox in the corner and asked out in a hearty voice, “What’ll it be?”

  “Number seven,” a voice answered from the bar.

  Number seven it was. Without pausing to read its title, I dropped a dime into the slot and pressed the button. Before I had rejoined Miss Calico in the booth, the strains of one of the more tiresome religious ballads then high on the Hit Parade billowed through the tavern:

  His hand is on the wheel

  When Life rocks my boat;

  He will steady my keel,

  He will keep me afloat.

  There were no customers in the booths other than Molly—which was Miss Calico’s name—and myself, and only the three men at the bar. The verses came on with murderous volume:

  He watches from the bridge,

  He rules the briny deep …

  “Who he?” I muttered under my breath, which was visible.

  “You don’t believe in a personal deity, do you?” Molly Calico asked.

  “Would it make any difference?”

  “No, I suppose not. But keep your mouth shut in here or you’ll get us both thrown out on our ear.”

  I turned and, sure enough, eyes bright with menace watched from the bar; eyes whose owners quite sensed the disesteem in which their set of criteria were held. Ranged, under a shaded bulb, in a composition to which the bartender l
ent a loose background, and motley in the sense that one or two wore switchman’s caps, the group had the grubby solidity of drinkers in Post-Impressionist paintings.

  “You don’t look as though you enjoyed that, Jack,” one of them asked when the “Top Ten” tune was at last over. He was a barrel-chested man with a face like a broken crock, under a visor bent limp by a decade of truculent fidgeting. He fingered the peak now as he put his query.

  “Oh, sure, I liked it all right,” I said. I spoke with a large tolerance, which the other was quick to detect.

  “But what?”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit maudlin?”

  Broken Crock set his glass down and, very deliberately, walked over to the jukebox and put in a coin of his own. The strains of “My Skipper” were heard all over again.

  I asked Molly Calico what she would like and she said, “A brandy.” That sounded about right for me too, and I signed to the bartender and called for two brandies. He clarified his position immediately. He was willing to pour them but not to deliver them. I went to get them, giving as wide a berth as possible to the three traditional theists, who remained sullen and even belligerent, as though their tastes were still on trial, and one of whom, it was impossible to tell which, smelt violently of creosote. I took them back to the booth where we drank with no delay. I made a face to Molly as I tasted the brandy, to point up the hilarity of unfolding events, and to imply that this would never be “our” place. When the song was finished, I smiled and raised my glass to the men at the bar, in a sort of hope, or trust, that some one enveloping reality bound our natures into a coherent whole, and to suggest that meanwhile, certainly, we might consider ourselves united in the assumption of a First Cause. The bartender, who had been following with interest the course of some animate thing along the bar’s edge, removed his shoe and brought the sole down on the target.