The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  This was a new note. I steeled myself now for a tale of adolescent misdeed. Turnbull had a boy of seventeen, Steve, in his last year at Andover. The youth must have gotten into a scrape of some sort, perhaps with a girl. Like father like son. Blood had told. That was it.

  “Is it Stevie?” I said. “What’s he done?”

  Turnbull took something from a table beside his chair and tossed it into my lap. Picking it up, I saw it to be a small book bound in limp leather, privately printed. It was by Steven Turnbull. The title was Some Notes Toward an Examination of Possible Elements of Unconscious Homosexuality in Mutt and Jeff.

  “It’s my punishment,” Turnbull said. “And I had such high hopes for the lad. He would continue his psychology studies, get involved with some nice girl and settle down and work here at the clinic maybe. But this.”

  “Now, now, calm yourself,” I said. “It may not be as bad as you think.” I knew the boy had been interested in the American comic strip, and bringing the analytic technique to its study would certainly be nothing new. I told Turnbull this and added, “Maybe he was assigned the subject.”

  “It’s a term paper, yes, but they could pick their own subject. And why would anyone pick that unless they were personally—Then the term paper was rejected and he wanted to have it privately printed. I gave him the money, how did I know what it was? Look at the dedication,” he finished bleakly.

  I had been paging through the monograph, my eye caught by lines like, “Though Mutt is married, his wife rarely figures in the action. He appears generally to be living in shared quarters with Jeff …” I turned to the front and read the dedication. It said, “To Cyril Sharpe.” “Who is that?” I asked.

  “His roommate. Some character with a fear of italics or some damn thing. Oh, God, is this what I deserve?”

  I thought it wise to pause and take up that question nonrhetorically.

  “For one thing,” I said, putting the booklet by, “boys going off in that direction are supposed to have lacked a strong father image to pattern themselves after. Have you offered him a stable masculine example?”

  Turnbull met this with a smile of ironic tolerance, even pity.

  “Stable masculine example. I was only always high-tailing it after everything in skirts, that’s all. Rutting about the continent, chasing one woman after another. Stevie knew that. What more example do you want?”

  I let that pass and pursued another aspect of the matter.

  “How about his relations with his mother?” I asked.

  “She died when he was five, of course. After that I was a single man, which was partly why I lived the life I did. He was raised by a succession of nurses.” He heaved a great sigh and parted his hands in a gesture. “I don’t know whether that’s supposed to cut any ice in these cases.”

  “I’ll try to find out, but let’s not go calling it a case yet, Turnbull. Let’s pull ourselves together till we see what we see … Would you like me to call on him? I’m going to Boston shortly, and I could stop around that way.”

  “I’d appreciate that. Or he may come home for the holidays.”

  I left presently, having other calls to make, and he saw me to the door.

  “When you do see Stevie,” he said, winding the scarf around my neck, “don’t make it too obvious that you’re spying. Be casual.”

  “Of course. And meanwhile don’t you worry about those arty fancies. Boys will be boys.”

  “That’s all I ask.” Turnbull stepped back to see whether he had my hat on straight, bending his knees to bring himself down to my level. Walking out to the porch, he apologized for not having reached a decision about the memorial. “I’ve been too upset,” he said. “But I’ll hit on something soon, and the minute I do I’ll call you.”

  “Take you time. There’s no rush.”

  “One idea I did have was signs, yes, but clever. Like ‘Have you been living it up? Jesus will help you live it down.’ What do you think of that?”

  “Forget about Jesus, and about signs too. Try to get a whole new viewpoint,” I said, and fled down the stairs.

  I was back in the heart of my problem. Which was, in a nutshell, to take a second wife while the town was still so First-Mrs. Mackerel-conscious. Holding one’s emotions poised to strike at the earliest possible moment consonant with propriety, this was wearing enough without its even more ticklish corollary, keeping Molly interested, willing to “wait” till that psychological moment was reached. Every time I saw her leave the Players with Todarescu it struck me the more acutely that time was running out. He had given her the lead in the Fry piece, for reasons perhaps not altogether based on suitability, but in doing so he had certainly got himself the inside track. I racked my brains for ways and means of recovering it. One evening as I was climbing out of the plastic bubble in front of the parsonage, I saw them emerge from the side door of the auditorium and walk toward the Jaguar, parked just behind me. There was no way of avoiding a meeting, and I went over to them. Todarescu had his usual dark vitality, with a bright neckerchief glimpsed under his coat and the sudden, spastic smile, with its reminder of barbaric pasts. He removed and explained for us a new foam rubber cap of the kind that can, in summer, be soaked in ice water and remain cool on your head indefinitely. It continued to be the theme of forced pleasantries long after he had put it on again, Molly and I regarding it with fixed smiles and protracted study, as though our attention were hopelessly imprisoned there, or would be so unless someone had the strength to change the subject. I asked how the production was coming, and Todarescu frowned. “It’s not ready yet. I want to try it out in some of the smaller parishes out of town,” he said. “Bridgeport and maybe Darien.” We were drifting slowly toward the Jaguar. Todarescu revealed an interest in the classics. “I’d like to try something fresh and exciting with Shakespeare,” he said as the two got into the car.

  “Why don’t you do him in Elizabethan dress?” I said, thrusting my head into the tonneau. “That would be a new slant these days.”

  “Plim-plam-plom,” he said, switching on the motor and away they shot, their necks snapping. “Shakespeare in—oh, plim-plim-plam. Oh, that’s rich!”

  I knew that I had to do something fast. What? That night as I lay in bed I had a brainstorm.

  Hire Molly in the parish office. Why not? We needed a full-time secretary there now, to supersede the part-time makeshifts with which we’d been worrying along. Molly had had some secretarial schooling (was it not a business college from which she’d run away to New York?) and she had professed boredom with her city hall job. I phoned her there the very next day and proposed my scheme. She thought it a wonderful idea. She quit the following week and went to work immediately in my office.

  She broke into harness slowly, but I expected that. For a time, the arrangement entailed my retyping the bulk of the correspondence I had dictated; her stenography was a bit rusty and had to be brushed up on. Meanwhile she was perfectly adequate for typing out my sermons (which made accessible to her the contents of the many which only Tabitha Twitchet would otherwise have heard). The main thing was that we were now, at last, together. There was nobody else in the office. Inside track indeed! Todarescu had her one or two nights a week, I five days. Thus, too, was devised that conjunction which my parishioners might now in all good humor assess as “He married his secretary.” With what joshing affection we would be talked about; how well we would be liked. To open the valves of this gossip there remained but the final step of getting Molly on some committee where she might show her interest in church affairs to be more than narrowly occupational and theatrical, and where I might be seen as having eyes for her in open society. By now I had been six months widowed, Turnbull had not been heard from, and neither had Hester been moved to any new commemoration of her sister. Things seemed to have quieted down on that front. The psychological moment—the moment for my first public date with Molly Calico—seemed at hand. All the signs indicated that I could take her to the annual parish Harvest Supper.
/>
  Fortunately it was late this year, having got shoved on from the Thanksgiving period into early December, and I prefaced my seizure of the moment by a period of walking around town with the lost air of a single man who really ought to find someone again. My chin sunk in a black overcoat, one blustery afternoon in late November, I was aware of three women of my congregation standing on a street corner, watching me. They were Mrs. Comstock, Mrs. Cool-Paintey and Mrs. Sponsible, all fresh from the Wednesday meeting of the Ladies Auxiliary, where they had no doubt been discussing plans for this very supper. Trudging by on the other side of the street with my head lowered, I could well imagine their conversation. “I hate to see a man all by himself like that.” “So do I. He ought to remarry.” “That’s what I say. I was telling Gerald last night, Ida May wouldn’t want to see him this way …”

  Other groundwork was laid in the case of Tabitha Twitchet. Molly had me home to dinner, and I did my best to win her mother over, on the principle that, having her blessing, you couldn’t possibly have any man’s disapproval. She had not only joined the church but had quite blitzed the Ladies Aid, to which she had got herself elected treasurer in a vote to fill a vacancy. The Ladies Aid was dominated by the Old Yankee element with which Fairfield County is, for all its sophistication, still heavily seamed. My cause could have no finer emissary there. They cottoned to Mrs. Calico all right, and I was at conversational pains to have her do the same to me—with Molly as an eager interlocutor.

  “Tell Mother about the boy who wanted to put a Santa Claus in the Christmas crèche,” she said after dinner one evening.

  “Do, do, do,” Mrs. Calico said, wriggling with pleasure over her knitting.

  “Well, that’s all there’s to it really,” I said. “There was this boy who wanted to put a Santa Claus in among the Wise Men. I objected at first, but later relented.”

  “They can be so cute. When Molly was a little girl she used to think Noel was ‘Oh well.’ We’d go caroling and there’d be this one singing away at the top of her voice:

  “‘Oh well, oh well,

  Oh well, oh we-ell,

  Born is the King of Israel.’”

  I felt the conversation to be sliding rapidly downhill. However, I added to it, “When I was a boy, I used to pray, ‘Hallowell be thy name.’”

  We laughed at this a bit, and then Molly said, “I’ll make us some coffee. You stay where you are, Mother, and get acquainted with Andrew.”

  “‘Andrew,’ is it?” said Mrs. Calico, casting up her eyes and pursing her lips in a manner that, perhaps together with the bowl of nuts she kept urging about, revived for me more vividly than ever the impression that she was Goody Tiptoes the squirrel wife, who would keep us warm all winter. “How shall I entertain a man like him?”

  “Tell him about your faux pas with the bridge game. This was in like 1925, before I was born even, but it’s still good,” said Molly from very nearly the kitchen. Then she disappeared into it, and Mrs. Calico and I were alone.

  Mrs. Calico smiled in preparation for her story.

  “It’s just that people rather fancy me a matchmaker,” she began. “Well, anyway, I had these two spotted as made for one another. She was a lovely young lady, tall and elegant in the old-fashioned manner, and dressed for it too. This was when women’s styles still had grace and beauty, before they went to pot under Coolidge. Well, so I got them together for an evening of bridge here—I was a newlywed at the time myself—and when they were introduced they said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. We’ve already been married.’ It turned out the beasts had been divorced a few years before.” She straightened a row of stitches on her knitting needle. “Showing, you see, that I was right in my hunch about them. That they were meant for each other.”

  There was silence, broken only by the soft clatter of her needles and the crunch of an occasional nut in her teeth.

  “Negro toe?” she said, thrusting at me a bowl dominated by salted Brazil nuts.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “You like my Molly?”

  “Very much indeed.”

  “She’s a prince. A prince of a girl, and there aren’t many of those around.”

  “No, that is certainly right.”

  “Balls.” Mrs. Calico tugged crossly at her yarn, with which the cat was apparently again rollicking. “That’s all she wants to play with all the livelong day is balls. Fatima, go away. Scratch the rug, claw Reverend Flounder to bits, but do leave my yarn alone.”

  She retrieved the ball of wool from the floor and set it on her lap. The cat wandered off, and as though acting on the second of the alternatives posed it, sprang into my lap and began to shred the knee of my trousers.

  “Well, when she gets married again, I hope this one sticks,” Mrs. Calico said. “Four is enough. I keep telling her, my dear girl, it’s now time to settle down. Roots!”

  Molly returned from the kitchen where she had set the coffee to brewing. We chatted till it was presumably ready, and then Mrs. Calico rose and went to fetch it. I had again the conviction, this time almost overpowering, that I was four-footed and would spring down from the chair and follow her into the kitchen. There we would sit and talk of Mrs. Raccoon, who took in washing, and what Freddy Frog had said and how the Otters had behaved at Mrs. Woodchuck’s party. We would drink our tea while the sun came in the window or the rain pattered on the roof, and no harm would ever find us there.

  I said to Molly, touching the tip of the cat’s ear, “You were married all those times. You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I thought you wouldn’t like it.” She took a small cushion onto her own lap and pressed the tassels down. “I thought you’d like it better if they were just passing fancies? Not so checkered? I tried, Andy, I really did. It wasn’t my fault. Some people just have this fatal attraction to the wrong mates. I just want that to end. I want it to stick.” There were tears in her eyes. “I do love you.”

  “Have you been seeing Todarescu?”

  “Todarescu’s awful. Still he’s rather nice.”

  “You really thought I’d think you more, well, sullied that way than this? If they were actual marriages?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re a bijou,” I said.

  “You’re no bargain yourself.”

  The cat jumped out of my lap as I shifted toward her, and she dropped the pillow. We were on the sofa. She yielded her face up to be kissed. I felt her tears on my cheeks, and then the tip of her tongue like a delicate fang against mine.

  “I’ll take you to the Harvest Supper,” I said, huskily.

  “You don’t think that’s pushing it?”

  “I’ve got to have you. We can’t go on tearing one another to shreds.” Her warmth and her scent sickened me. I pressed her back against the sofa, and she drew my head down till we were lying length to length. My hand reached to touch her and she drew back with a sound that was both like a sob and a gasp of laughter, as though a bubble of hysteria had burst within her.

  “You won’t think it’s the other way around, will you? That I was lying to Mother that they were marriages?”

  “I never thought of that,” I said, ill. “So that’s the way it was.”

  There was a tinkle of china as the wheels of the teacart bounced over the edge of the rug and into the room.

  “The family is coming back,” Mrs. Calico announced.

  “You have relatives arriving?” I said, almost falling to the floor in the act of rolling back off the couch.

  “No, as an institution. I just heard it on the radio. The divorce rate is going steadily down. The figures for this year are considerably below last.”

  “Statistics show a marked decline,” I said, my voice hoarse with passion.

  I tidied myself while Mrs. Calico stood pouring coffee with her back to us. There was a great shaggy coconut cake, which looked delicious. Molly sat with her legs tucked under her, screwing on an earring.

  “Let’s make one thing clear,” Mrs. Calico said, her back turned
to us as she sliced the cake. “When we speak of putting down roots we don’t mean sticking in the mud. The home will never be the rigid thing it perhaps once was, but it is reviving, and I’m glad to see that because I witnessed its deterioration. I can tell you exactly when it started to go. It started to go under Woodrow Wilson, the so-called idealist. Well, a good deal of world vision there, to be sure, but a thoroughly miserable administration on domestic counts …”

  Thus everything appeared to be shaping up. Everything seemed to be moving toward that psychological moment, for which I would time that quick dash to the altar for which I pined. And then the unforeseen happened.

  Cat hairs were seen on my coat.

  Hester slipped across the arcade between the rectory and the church office, one bright, gusty morning, to consult with me about some household detail. We had to discuss the seating arrangement for a luncheon I was giving the supper committee ladies. When we had finished our talk, she jerked her head toward the closed door beyond which Molly’s spasmodic typing could be heard in the outer office.

  “Quite a looker,” she said.

  “The new member who called you that morning, I believe. Incidentally, now that we’ve got somebody full-time in the office I think it only fair that she relieve you of the clerk stuff,” I said. “Why, yes she is quite pretty. And so interested in the church, Hester. Probably be a ball of fire on the right committee. You might mention that to your ladies. Need help on the Harvest Supper arrangements, don’t you?”

  Hester’s reply, though an affirmative “I will,” was rather abstracted. She was coming around behind the desk, staring at my coatsleeve. “Don’t tell me I haven’t been brushing your clothes any better than this, Andrew.”

  She began to pluck strands of a light yellow color from it and to drop them to the floor with fluttering fingers.

  “Hm,” I observed, picking off a few myself. “Seem to be cat hairs.”

  “Not just ordinary cat hairs. More like Siamese or something. Who’s got one of those?”