The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “I’ve been prey to such remorse I can hardly sleep,” he said. “Oh, wicked man that I am, who shall deliver me from so great guilt? Have I ever told you about the dancer in Biarritz?”

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

  “I tossed and turned all night thinking of her.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  “It’s something you can’t escape from. You carry it inside of you—here. If I take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, he is there and his eye shall find me. If I make my bed in Sheol, lo, he is there. What a worm am I.”

  “Doesn’t it ever seem to you that you’re rather giving yourself airs?” I said, as I had before.

  It is a pet notion of mine that certain theological systems (like Calvinism) are inversions of the humility they profess, since they appeal to human vanity rather than deflate it. Poor man, that he needs the doctrine of the Fall to invest him with a little glamour! Pitiful ego, that must sit in sackcloth and ashes and fancy itself the butt of Reprobation! Unvexed, however, by either my remark or its broader implications, Turnbull went on:

  “We all have our shortcomings, but mine are so great that it would take another lifetime to expiate them. What haunts me is not the dancer as such, but the impact I made on her whole future. She had been engaged, you see,” he continued after a swallow of his highball, “she had been engaged, as I understood it, to a Brussels businessman. Security he could give her, yes, but not, I’m afraid, something else demanded by her Lebenslust. You understand German?”

  “Enough to get the point. Go on.”

  “Well, I was sitting on the beach at Biarritz one afternoon,” he related, settling fluently into the raconteur, “when out of the water rose this …” He expounded in detail the scraping up of acquaintance and the episodes to which it led, listing among his “shortcomings” the number of times he had satisfied his companion in one night.

  Here I felt a twist of irritation, enforced no doubt by the months of absention to which I was myself condemned, and which were beginning to tell on my nerves.

  “Are you quite sure of your figures?” I asked tartly. “It’s a sin to tell a lie, you know.”

  Turnbull assured me of the accuracy of his audit, and hit his narrative stride with brightening eye. The details of this “confession,” more lurid than any before, drew only rudimentary attention from me, who had become fascinated with the rather interesting problem in casuistry it posed: that of a penitent asking to be shriven of transgressions he had not committed, at least not in the degree claimed. Perhaps I was myself in error in giving the man his head? But I had decided it would be pointless to commence to Turnbull exhaustive analysis of what lay behind his bouts of contrition. That I knew very little of his complexities was suddenly driven home to me with a remark for which I was totally unprepared.

  “What I owe womankind in general is nothing compared to what I owe your wife, of course,” he said.

  I had not the slightest notion what he was talking about.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean.” He looked away to pick up his glass. “What happened that day at the cove.”

  I still hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was referring to, though the day of which he was speaking was clear enough, being the one on which my wife had met with her fatal mishap.

  The scene had been the annual parish picnic at Diamond Cove, on the nearby sound. It had been a warm summer day and both bathers and boaters had been disporting themselves in large numbers when a fluke occurrence had thrown the entire seaside into a hilarious uproar. A man in a motorboat had been towing his girl on a surfboard some distance out. She had toppled off and the man had stopped the boat and dived in after her—not because there was an emergency, since she could swim, but more or less in the spirit of fun. The push of his feet leaving the gunwale had somehow jiggled the gearshift, which he had left in neutral with the engine running, back into gear. Without a driver the speedboat had gone winding crazily about the harbor, sending bathers screaming with laughter in every direction. Not all were aware of what was loose in the cove, however, and one of these was Turnbull, afloat on an inner tube with a cigar in his mouth. He reported later that he had dozed off in the summer sun, and that in any case his ears had not caught any sound above the shrill cries that are a common part of bathing beach life. The speedboat seemed finally to be spinning straight for him, but, the warning shouts unheard, he bobbed along oblivious to what was in store for him. Or, rather, for Mrs. Mackerel.

  We had been out in a canoe among the boaters, nibbling sandwiches from a hamper and playing records as best we could on a portable gramophone. Seeing what was amiss, my wife had instinctively stood up and begun to shout and gesticulate with the rest, capsizing the canoe. She sank to the bottom and was not seen alive again. Overturning paraphernalia, undoubtedly the gramophone, had dealt the fatal blow to which death was traced as much as to drowning. No one noticed that mishap until it was too late, indeed, until it was all over—not even I who jumped into the water as the boat tipped, or a split instant before, to help catch the speedboat. In the excitement I was not even aware that the canoe had tipped. A lifeguard and I stopped the motorboat, by managing to catch hold of her gunwales and turning off the ignition.

  It was this accident the old fool was now bent on rehashing. I racked my brains for some clue as to why. Suddenly he was explicit.

  “She was trying to go to my rescue, wasn’t she?” he said.

  I looked at him blankly—unwilling as well as unable to believe my senses.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s no use. You’re just denying it to spare my feelings. That’s why nobody else ever mentioned it either. A conspiracy of silence. It’s so kind of you. But it all came to me in a flash last night as I was lying in bed. She jumped.”

  “She fell,” I said firmly.

  “She jumped.”

  “She fell.”

  “She jumped.”

  “Fell.”

  “Jumped.”

  The absurd crescendo of this argument brought looks from others in the lobby, and even from the adjacent dining room where members had begun eating, and we lowered our voices.

  “But, my dear Turnbull,” I resumed none the less earnestly, “this is the most—You mustn’t punish yourself with such a thing …”

  It was no use—that much of what he said was right. All my attempts to dissuade him from this mad construction of events were futile. My sensation was like that of careening wildly down a twisting road in a car that has gone out of control. Reminders that it was rather I who had gone into the water to help did not figure largely in my expostulations, may I say in my favor, but I did my best to show why my wife could not have, all to no avail. Just what form such aid could have taken in the case of so negligible a swimmer as Ida May did not long detain Turnbull, who could adduce too many instances of the instinctive heroism of women in emergencies, and had apparently no trouble seeing himself as the object of this supreme concern. That was the point—he wanted to believe this. I sensed the pattern in all of it: wallowing in claims of women ruined had the same narcissistic root as the delusion that one could give her life for him.

  “That woman will have a memorial the like of which this town has never seen,” he promised, bringing us back, at last, to the reason why we had supposedly come here.

  “Now, then,” I said, “what did you decide on?”

  Turnbull dropped his half-smoked cigar in an ashtray and drank up. “The whole picture’s changed, actually,” he said. “What I thought of was a fund in her name to train missionaries for service in heathen lands, but that would involve too many problems of what kind of training they would have and so on. It’s got to be more interdenominational.” He glanced into the dining room. “It’s filling up and you must be starved. I’ll tell you in there.”

  Club protocol required that each newcomer take the chair beside the last man
seated at the long communal table that ran the length of the dining room. This landed me between old Meesum and Turnbull. On Meesum’s other side, his left, was Charlie Comstock, scribbling madly on a notepad as Meesum held forth on the subject of the local Crisis. It is to this chance juxtaposition that I owe the whole course of my present life. Here were the seeds of that calamity that was so soon and so speedily to engulf me, whose origins and development were obscure to me at the time, but which, from the vantage point of ruin, I could look back and assess in all clarity.

  “Why, I was thinking of a fountain,” Turnbull said as we drew out chairs. “The idea is that her spirit flows on among us.” I murmured some acknowledgment that this was certainly nonsectarian, but before I could say more, Meesum pricked up his ears, paused in his diatribe, looked over at its subject and growled, “Hello, Turnbull. What’s that about a fountain?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where, a fountain? Where would you find the ground for such a thing?” Meesum went on with needling irony.

  “None of your beeswax,” Turnbull said, and bowed his head in prayer.

  I joined him in grace, rather against my will, and aware that all sounds of conversation and even eating had ceased. Turnbull seemed an unconscionable time at his devotions, but when he did raise his head the pent-up curiosity broke out in an excited buzz.

  “What kind of a fountain? When? Where?” Henry Meesum the mayor, who was still known as Junior, inquired eagerly across the table and two places down from me. When Turnbull answered reluctantly, “Memorial,” Junior asked, “Who for?”

  Turnbull jerked his head in my direction. “His wife.”

  In the respectful pause which followed that, and which was marked by a solemn regard of myself, he added, “She lost her life because of me, and I’ve always wanted to give something to perpetuate her name.”

  Here the city fathers raised their ears as one. “‘Give’?” said the mayor as their spokesman. “Why, that’s wonderful. And you know we’ll co-operate to the full. But where would you put it? As Dad here says, where’s there room for the setting such a treasure deserves?”

  Turnbull straightened in his chair. “You know damn well I’ve got all the land I need for it myself, Junior.”

  During this silence the elder Meesum elected to drink his soup which had been growing cold in front of him. The hydraulic problem of its transfer to his mouth grated on some of his listeners. He put his spoon down and looked past me straight at Turnbull.

  “Frank, I’ve been saying a lot of things about you. I’ve called you a string saver and a skinflint and I don’t know what all. Such names I now find it hard to forgive you for inciting me to. Why didn’t you tell me you were O.K.? If I’ve been abusive it’s because I thought you lacked the civic spirit that’s the only thing that’ll keep this city from withering into a ghost town, which it will do if we don’t do something fast to keep the trade from going to Gilead and Chickenfoot. In short, I thought you were an obstructionist.” As he spoke he made faces that had no bearing on what he was saying but that were technically exciting in themselves. “Now it turns out that you wouldn’t sell your land because all the while you were planning to give it away, with the aim of opening up that whole waterfront in a dazzling and daring new conception of Avalon.”

  “I don’t believe I—”

  “Forgive me. I thought it was just that you were holding out for a price. But I guess you can read the papers as well as any of us. You know juvenile delinquency is spreading because children have no room to play. That congestion is the great evil of our time and the crying need. So you come along with this breathtaking vision for our town: twenty acres from your land augmented maybe by filling in the river there some, and presto—overnight elbow room! Congestion relieved! Children playing in the sun! Shoppers pouring into the twenty, make it thirty, new stores springing up there, with a theme uniting them all architecturally.” He paused to wipe the corners of his mouth with his napkin, as though in his ecstasy he had begun to salivate. An architect at the end of the table began to writhe erotically in his chair, ogling a contractor there. “Make that a hundred new stores, with ample parking space. The greatest modern shopping center in the state. Not just one street front exposure but a double avenue—I know you’re way ahead of me—along the river front there, with a green esplanade between. And that fountain sparkling in it day and night.”

  If this was sly—and it could hardly have been sincere because Meesum was a skinflint himself—it had its effect. Turnbull stopped protesting the assumption of limitless donation and became infected with the vision. Someone whispered “Turnbull Avenue,” but he shook his head. He sat transfixed, looking over the assembled heads. He was witnessing an apocalypse. Someone said later that a tear coursed down his cheek. As if out of a trance he whispered, “The Mackerel Plaza.”

  They gazed at one another with a wild surmise. Then a hubbub broke out such as had not been heard in the Stilton since its founder had died in his sleep in a sitting position and that swelled in volume as the vision vouchsafed the philanthropist became the emotional property of each in turn. The fountain sprang into play for Chisholm, the architect dying to do a civic center. For Kerfoot, an electrical engineer, the lights bloomed each evening like voluminous pearls along the esplanade. The mayor was already cutting tape and leading motorcades on special days. Miles of feature copy unreeled for Comstock, writing feverishly on a fresh pad. Cars were parked in neat herringbones for a bald man named Scanlon, who was seated at the head of the table and ran a paving concern. Old Messum was floating loans for the bank with whose board of directors he could still sit up straight.

  “How soon can we get the property deeded over?” the mayor asked.

  “I’ll search the title this afternoon,” said Sprackling, an up-and-coming partner in the oldest law firm in town. “What Frank will want to decide is what land he wants to give to the city for the esplanade and fountain, and what he’ll sell to those who want in on the shopping center. Those, I take it, are the two parts of which the Plaza will consist.”

  After ten minutes more of this, somebody broke in with a thought.

  “We haven’t heard from Mr. Mackerel about this. Does he have anything to say? Perhaps we could call on him for a few words at this time.”

  The hum of conversation died. All eyes were turned on Mackerel. He was drawing deep grooves on the tablecloth with the tines of his fork.

  “Well, my wife was a simple woman,” he reminded them. He smiled reminiscently. “Her favorite expression was, ‘No fuss, please.’”

  “We’ll put it on the fountain,” the mayor said. “It ought to have an inscription. Now, what else should we bear in mind, thematically speaking? Some little touch, an angle that might be stressed and that we ought to include in our thinking before we get rolling, which will be right now and full speed ahead, of course. Dad, did you have a thought on that?”

  “Well, she was crazy about mental health.”

  “And that is of course already her enduring monument—the clinic.” This from Mackerel in a loud voice.

  “Right. That’s why I was thinking some other inscription than the one proposed might be better, with all due respects to the Reverend,” Sprackling put in. “What about ‘Sans mens sans corpora’?”

  “That’s all Greek to me.” Old Meesum had lit a cigar the length of a scepter, which he tended to flourish as such. “I’m a practical man and I say let’s ring in the Chamber of Commerce this afternoon. With them in the picture we can coordinate and move intelligently on all fronts. If we haven’t gotten much out of our friend Mackerel here, let’s remember he’s in mourning and will probably be for some time to come. The loss of Ida May is ours as well as his, and that no woman can ever, ever take her place is something we join him in taking for granted. Our job is to enshrine in tangible form what is enshrined in his heart. So let’s buckle down and, forgetting everything but the proper celebration of this woman, all projects that would interfere with its proper
and respectful pursuit, make this the fairest jewel in the diadem of our city.” There was a round of applause, and he glanced to the left to make sure Comstock was getting it all down. “Now if we get rolling right away, how long should it take?”

  “I see Junior cutting that tape nine months from now,” said Kerfoot, a lickspittle in whose eyes slumbered a soft dream of contracts.

  “Well, give it a year. A year from now, the Ida May Mackerel Plaza will be a reality.”

  Mackerel was deep in lightning calculations. He saw a quarterly period of obsession at either end of the inevitable Ida May Day—when the Plaza would be dedicated, et cetera—but if that weren’t till a year from now, he and Molly had a good six months clear of canonization in which they could with grace wed (this lull to be reckoned as beginning, of course, after the Testimonial Dinner now in the works was over and that hoopla had subsided in the public mind). He was glad now the dinner was imminent, as it would get the cooling-off period started that much sooner. He was entertaining the image of himself darting to the altar through this chink in time, so to speak, when the mayor dashed cold water on that.

  “Of course there’ll be a ground breaking ceremony.”

  “To kick it off.”

  “When do you figure that?” Mackerel asked, raising his battered head.

  “Oh, early spring.”

  (Damn!)

  “Why not this winter?” said Mackerel, aiming at some overlapping in the encomiums.

  “Ground’s too cold.”

  Mackerel sat back with the expression natural to a man bereft. He said no more for the duration of that lunch, but kept his own counsel. He had said so little, all in all, that they took his silence for more than private feelings on the score of the project now so well launched, and for more than modesty in reflected glory; they took it as a sign of the greatest respect for the Stilton. And on their part they hinted that he might before long find himself enjoying the full member privileges of same. One or two murmured that they might personally put him up. Mackerel, who had till then patterned his bearing on that of his hosts by dragging his feet and walking with a stoop, threw his shoulders back and strode out of that club at a rate calculated to put an end to any such nonsense.