However, as she drank from her coffee cup again, I knew there was more to come. She set the cup down and said:
“There’s a little postscript about this Actor’s Lab that Ivan the Terrible ran. Stanislavski wasn’t in it, the way he could use the Method. By the time you were through with the course you could be a gate with a broken hinge, or not just grapes but seedless grapes—you could be anything like that he told you to be, up there in front of the class. The only thing wrong was that you were unfit to portray anything resembling a human being in recognizable circumstances. A few more months of pestering producers in vain and Molly Calico realized she just didn’t have it. And home she came to Avalon, Connecticut—to find that in her absence her little old home town had become the chic place to move to.” She put up her hands and smiled. “That’s all there is.”
I removed my chin from my hand and my elbow from the table and sat up.
“That’s quite a story too,” I said. “All I can say is, I’m glad she came home. And I hope she’s glad I’m glad.”
She drank coffee again, rolling a grave eye at me as she gulped.
“She’s glad all right enough,” Molly said, setting the cup down in the saucer as though it were a most delicate piece of China, “but I can tell you one thing, after all those experiences in New York, next time it’s damn well going to be with bell, book and candle. That or nothing.”
There she sat, blue-eyed and honey-haired, more than a little absurd, thinking de Tocqueville was a theologian and carrying Parrington in the noonday sun. My loins constricted, and I felt as though my chest were filling up with smoke. I saw the kitchen door kicked open and the waitress bearing toward us with our dessert on a huge platter. It was flaming, and looked as big as Alaska itself. I suddenly felt a little ridiculous, seeing other diners turn their heads and smile. Anselmo had done me proud to the point of parody. We couldn’t possibly eat all that.
Quicky, before the waitress could reach us, I said to Molly:
“How about dinner next Saturday?”
My own experiences with the opposite sex were, having been limited to one member of it, much less bewildering and apparently much more satisfactory than Molly Calico’s. My wish to remarry was proof enough of that. I would never give the world reason to suspect my first marriage by resisting a second, or even by delaying to contract it. Indeed, it was a measure of the void that had to be filled that plans for its replenishment were afoot some three months after the commencement of my widowhood.
This involved a complex of civic and private niceties best met, the new lovers both felt, by their meeting, for the time being, secretly and in towns other than Avalon. Most of our rendezvous took place therefore in nearby Chickenfoot, to which I fled on all nights when pastoral duties did not claim me. So named because of the resemblance its fanning streets bore to a splayed hen track, Chickenfoot was a sizable city of a hundred thousand, but still only ten miles from home, and to spare no pains in avoiding premature discovery, we met in one of the more disreputable quarters along the river front, where my parishioners were certain never to wander. This was the Ninth Ward, notorious in municipal politics as “the Disturbed Ward,” and our favorite, or at least customary, haunts were beer halls in whose smoky booths we might linger by the hour safe from molestation, or movie houses in whose even gloomier depths we could hold hands with even greater impunity.
“We can’t go on meeting like this,” Molly said one evening in one of these cinemas, scratching an ankle. It was a remark she had made so often that it had acquired for me the nature of an endearment rather than a threat of discussion, and I merely smiled in the dusk and drew her closer. She brought the subject up again as we were having a bite of supper after the show. The dives into which discretion drove us were a far cry from the restaurants in which I had begun my courtship, but having become serious about one another we cared about what people “thought,” and so resolved to steer clear for a while of places like Anselmo’s, where there was a danger of being seen. The one where we now sat was called the O.K. Grill, and from my chair I could read in reverse a sign pasted to the window with the legend “Franks and Beans 30c,” flanked by the warning “This week only.”
Molly said, “That new Van Druten play is opening in New Haven next Thursday. How about that? We could have dinner at the Hofbrau.”
I chewed thoughtfully, nodding.
“Don’t tell me we have to worry about being seen there? I know there’s lots of Avalon in the audience, but the chances of anybody from your congregation on a given night are so slim …”
“I just remembered. There’s this ceremony Thursday night. A dinner where they’re turning over all of Ida May’s papers to the clinic for their library. It was in her will.”
“Then let’s go Friday. Or Saturday.”
I frowned uncertainly. “It wouldn’t look right. So soon …”
Molly bent over her food. She remained busy with it for a while with her fork, not eating it so much as selecting elements from it for possible later consumption, laying them to one side of her plate. “There’s a melon seed in my turkey,” she said.
“I know. It’s a tough situation,” I said, “a delicate situation. It isn’t as though Ida May were an ordinary woman, and consequently it isn’t as though I were an ordinary widower. Let’s face it—she’s the town heroine.”
“In fact let’s face it, she’s its patron saint. I even heard about her in New York. The Jane Addams of the East.”
“Right. And a certain noblesse oblige is expected of us in this case—of me, anyway. Call it grace under pressure,” I said, taking in with a straight gaze the beautiful girl before me. Breasts like brioches …
“I never knew her, of course, but, Andy, aren’t I right in my feeling she’d be the first to understand?”
“Oh, absolutely! But it’s not her we have to reckon with, it’s the townfolk. This may be Avalon but it’s also New England. The commuters are only floating on top—underneath is the Yankee hard core … Can I order something else for you?”
“No. I’m not hungry.” She put her fork down and smoked a cigarette.
“I know what you mean. This is the first omelet I’ve ever had with bones in it.”
I laid my own fork down and told a story that I thought might cheer her up.
“It seems there were the inmates of this penitentiary who had become so familiar with one another’s stories that they no longer bothered telling them but gave each story a number, and when a prisoner wanted to get one off he simply said the number. A newcomer heard them being swapped this way in the yard one morning. ‘Number twelve,’ a convict called out, and everyone laughed. ‘Nine,’ chimed in another. Guffaws. ‘Twenty-eight,’ said a third. Roars. Finally a small, somewhat ineffectual-looking prisoner piped up from the rear of the group, ‘Thirty-two.’ It was greeted by a dead silence. The newcomer asked his cell partner, a seasoned inmate who had just got through explaining the system to him, ‘What’s the matter? Isn’t that a good story?’ ‘Oh, sure,’ the cellmate answered, ‘but he don’t tell it right.’”
She put down her cigarette and burst into tears. I stared at her miserably.
“I suppose it is a little special,” I said, apologetically. I drew a handkerchief out of my pocket and started to give it to her but quickly put it back, realizing that it was black-bordered. She produced one of her own and twisted her nose with it. I thought about my housekeeper. It was she who put the black-edged handkerchiefs in my pocket every morning. She was Ida May’s sister and appeared to set a great deal of store by these outward symbols. She had even for a while sewn dark bands on the sleeves of my coats. I had acceded to them. Not because such props meant anything to me—they had no more connection with the flesh and blood woman I had lost than did the plaster saint into which public oratory was now busy converting her—but out of a kind of feeling for my housekeepr herself.
Molly had quite regained control of herself and apologized as she put her handkerchief back into her
bag. “But why must we always meet in fleabags?” she said.
“I have my reputation to thing of.”
We called for our coffee, found it not bad, and each had a brandy with it—this place being an annex of a bar. After a few sips, I set my glass down, shoved my cup aside and said, “I’ve got a plan.”
“What?”
“Join my church.”
She let me take her hand and hold it across the table, as she explored my meaning.
“You mean that way we could ‘meet’ and be like thrown together and—”
“Of course. I’d put you on committees I’m on myself, begin to see you home, have eyes for you. I don’t want to make a churchwoman out of you, but this way it would have the effect of happening under my congregation’s eyes, and obviously they’d take it better if I found a wife from among them rather than sprang a total stranger on them. In fact I can see the parish ladies taking one look at you and planning the match themselves. After the well-known discreet interval, of course.”
“Now that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. What is the discreet interval?”
“A year is the customary idea,” I said, “but this is a more sophisticated community and maybe we could knock a few months off that figure.” I took a sip of my brandy, whose low quality seemed to galvanize me into swiftened calculations. “But the thing is, going together might be acceptable at six months, if you were a member of my congregation. Have you been baptized?”
“I’ll ask Mother. She has an uncanny memory. Andy, whom do I see? About joining.”
“Well, my housekeeper is clerk of the parish, as a matter of fact. Just phone her and say you want to join P.L.”
“What’s she like, this housekeeper of yours?”
“Miss Pedlock?”
“You called her Hester.”
“Yes. She’s all right. Very conscientious. Puritan conscience, I might add. She has this tremendous emotional involvement about Ida May. One of those sister crushes. That and an almost fanatical sense of duty made her rush in and fill the domestic vacuum left by Ida May’s sudden passing. She’s simply stayed on in the parsonage, cooking and mending, and so on.”
“I see.”
“Funny.” I smiled. “People don’t talk about a thing like that. I mean a man and woman living under the same roof together day and night. That’s different. Of course Hester’s a relative. All one big happy family.”
“Is it?”
“I just thought of something else. We have what’s generally taken to be a terrific little theater at P.L., and you might have fun there. Don’t look down your nose at it. We’ve had Broadway people in our productions before. In fact the director is a ‘professional theater man. Rather a character, but I think you’ll like him. His name is Todarescu.”
Molly’s face lit up and she clapped her hands together with a loud exclamation. “Mike! You mean Mike’s here? I wondered what became of him. I heard he’d taken on a little theater group but nobody knew exactly where. But this is wonderful!”
“You know Todarescu?”
“Know him! He’s the one I went to Actor’s Lab with. Tell me, does he still have that Jaguar?”
“He still has it,” I said, signaling to the waiter for another brandy.
Molly Calico went on in the same vein of delight for several minutes, shaking her head with fresh bursts of surprise.
“So Mike’s here,” she said. “How wonderful! I’m dying to see him again. When did you say the group meets?”
Chapter Four
TODAKESCU was a lean, mahogany man in his forties, who seemed always over- or underdressed. In summer he strode about in Basque shirts and Bermuda shorts, often being reported barefoot, and in colder weather was to be seen bundled into tweeds and frogged coats secured by wooden pegs and fitted with cowls, reminiscent at once of the merchant marine and monastic orders, and sporting a red or yellow scarf which, streaming behind him in his flying Jaguar, gave him an appearance of flaming and even violent nonchalance. Darting black eyes and glittering teeth conferred a certain crafty charm, Oriental in feeling and possibly partly of extraction, as of a rug merchant by whom one is sure to be bested. He had a curious method of laughing which arose from a habit of clenching his teeth when he did so, as though warring elements within him required that he strangle mirth aborning. The result was a kind of smothered bark or cry, “Hm plim-plam-ploml Oh, plim-plam!”
I often dropped in to hear him rehearse our players, out of whom he got surprising performances by simple threats and abuse, and none of the flamboyant mystiques that had supposedly ruined himself for the stage. He turned out to have gone south for a couple of weeks, between productions of the church players, and it wasn’t till he got back from this holiday that Molly had a chance to see him. I was sitting slouched in one of the dark rear rows of the auditorium when she walked in that night, a Friday. Curiosity was too great for me to deny myself the sight of this reunion, and sight it was.
When they first saw one another, they were at opposite ends of the center aisle, Todarescu up front, Molly just inside the back door. They stood a moment with their arms outflung, and met halfway down the aisle with a series of outcries and embraces that I will make no effort to reproduce here, beyond saying that they abounded in terms like “Macushla,” “Prettyhead” and “Mad Monk.” Work on the stage—tryout readings for a production of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning were being held—stopped while they chatted. There was the inevitable hysterically compressed gossip about what ever happened to so-and-so and have you heard anything about such-and-such. One acquaintance had suddenly turned up in a musical that had opened the night before in New Haven; another had married a very large baggage and vanished. And so on. When he was ready to resume, Todarescu said to Molly, “Doll, how about you in this? I’m needing a Jennet.”
“Oh, I don’t …”
“Can nonmembers of the church be in productions?” I had by this time emerged from the shadows to make myself known, and Todarescu addressed the question to me.
“They have up to now,” I said, glancing at Molly, “but there may be a ruling any day …”
He coaxed her into reading a little of the part anyway, and, needless to say, I was all ears as I resumed my seat and watched her spring onto the stage to do so, assisted by Todarescu. Molly seemed competent and electric enough—certainly by our poor parish standards!—but I thought her wholly unfit for the role of Jennet. I kept these doubts to myself, however, it being a firm principle at P.L. that Todarescu be left to run his own railroad. No casting was done tonight, and after an hour of very preliminary reading the rehearsal broke up. I walked out with Molly and Todarescu.
I had sensed some arrangements going forward between them, and as we reached the sidewalk and Todarescu stopped for a word with one of the players, Molly drew me aside.
“Look, Mike and I thought we’d run in to New Haven tomorrow to catch the matinee of this new musical. There are some kids we know in it. We’d love to have you join us.”
“Oh, I’ve got something on tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “Otherwise I’d love to.”
“Anything you can’t get out of?”
“Well, they’re planting a tree in her memory,” I said. “I think it’s the Brownies, at the playground downtown. It’s at three o’clock. You understand.”
“Of course. But a tree at this time of year?”
“They want to get it in before the ground freezes. I believe there’ll be some kind of plaque. I have to turn the first spade and all. Why, if you want to be in the play, perhaps you’d best join. I see you haven’t yet, Molly.”
Todarescu had by now finished his conversations and he came over shouting offers to drop Molly at her house. As she got into his car she expressed some laughing reservation about his driving, hoping he had got some sense since moving to the suburbs and slowed down.
“In the suburbs it’s all I see, sports cars,” Todarescu retorted, climbing in behind the wheel and organizing
the skirt of his duffel coat. “Supposed to be the male’s new sex symbol. Ask him.” He jerked a thumb at me. “He knows all about those things. That right? Sex symbol?”
“I guess,” I said, striving to insinute my head into the tonneau. “Can’t shoot jaguars any more so we drive ’em.”
Todarescu threw his head back and roared. “Hm, plim-plam-plom. That’s rich! Can’t shoot plim-plom any more so we oh, plam-plom-plim. I must remember that.”
“Well, you be careful,” Molly said, looking hard at him. “There was another accident in one of these things last week on the Parkway. A man got killed.”
“Blessed are the pacemakers, for they shall see God,” I said.
“Mm, plim-plim-plim. Oh, that’s really too … Hear the guy. Blessed are the oh, plam-plom-plim!” The roar of his motor drowned out his laughter and the rest of his remark. I watched at the curb as they shot away down the street and around the corner.
I stood a moment where I was, after they had gone, thinking about my housekeeper. Hester was leader of the Brownie troop, or chapter, that was planting the tree, and it was almost certainly her idea. I must get her out of this obsession about her late sister. It was unhealthy, and a stop ought to be put to it before it was too late. There was not a moment to lose. I would speak to her about it at breakfast.
I sat at breakfast in a coat, rather against my will. I regretted the domestic ease of shirtsleeves and wondered how long it would be before I recovered it. That familiarity wouldn’t have done with a housekeeper, especially one who was herself a model of grooming, even at her chores. Why was the girl always dressed to the nines? There was nobody here but me. It was a puzzle.
I broke the tip from a warm brioche and popped it into my mouth. Then I broke the brioche in two, buttered it and sank my teeth into its steaming heart. I had eaten two or three and was licking jelly from my fingers when I became aware of Hester standing a little behind and to the right of me, watching me with pleasure.
The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel Page 4