The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

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The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel Page 9

by De Vries, Peter


  He sailed similarly through the door into Molly’s house early the next evening, after phoning to say that he had something urgent to tell her.

  Chapter Seven

  MOLLY was home alone. After letting me in she ran back to the kitchen where she had some beef tea on the stove. She drank it as we sat in the living room together. She really did have a cold. She was curled up on the couch in a quilted bathrobe, belted tight and drawn up around her breasts. Thus did the fruit sway out of reach of Tantalus, his head bobbing on the stream ’neath the cruel branch withheld.

  “You say you had lunch at the Stilton Club?” she asked in surprise.

  “You don’t think I should eat with Republicans and sinners?”

  “Darling, what’s the matter? You don’t act right.”

  “How’s Todarescu these days?” I said.

  “Oh, all right I guess. He has this terrible Weltschmerz.”

  “Is he taking anything for it?”

  “Look, what’s it all about? You intimated you had something to tell me, and I gathered it wasn’t too good. What is it?”

  I blurted out my news, giving a full account of every development at lunch.

  She finished sipping her beef tea in silence. When she had tipped the last of it back, she set the cup and saucer aside and rose. She walked across the room, picking a cigarette from a box on a table in passing.

  “Well,” she said, “I must say, your wife casts a long shadow.”

  “Steady.”

  “How long will we have to lay low now?”

  “I warned you about that from the start, darling. Of course I wasn’t prepared for anything on this scale. What we must do is develop a certain detachment within our ring of secrecy—loving, offhand, yet antiseptic withal. A kind of dolce far niente behind drawn blinds. That appeal to you, sweetheart?”

  “There’s a kind of mockery in it,” she went on. “As though someone’s having a laugh on us. As though she’s reaching out from the—”

  “Whoa, there I must insist you stop this, Molly,” I replied. “You said yourself she’d be the first to understand.”

  “I didn’t know her then. Now I feel I’m beginning to. My problem is how long can I live with the ghost of another woman.”

  I hoisted myself to my feet, bringing my hands down on my knees.

  “I must say, what cheesy, wheezy neo-Noel Coward did you get that line from? Pray favor me with the rest of the speech in that play that folded after three performances. Go on, I’m waiting.”

  “A living rival you can fight. But this.” She nursed her elbows, shivering a little. “I seem to feel a draft …”

  I sprang into action.

  “Watch,” I said. I drew an appointment booklet from my pocket, shuffled its pages and ringed a date with a pencil. “I told you we were going to set a date, and, by God, I meant it. Come here,” I said, sitting down on the couch. She came over and stood behind me. “If the ground-breaking ceremony is then”—I poked the month of April with the butt of the pencil—”or about then, and the Big Day isn’t till fall, that gives us a good four or five months when the coast will be clear to announce our engagement. And set the wedding date for—then.” I vigorously darkened the circle I had made on the calendar. It was in the very month of June.

  She nodded, not as though acquiescing but as though revolving my logic in her mind. She asked at last:

  “Did you figure on a church wedding?”

  “No, I thought a quiet ceremony would be better. Steal away somewhere. I know a minister in Chickenfoot I went to seminary with. There’s no problem there.”

  She scratched an eyebrow, looking down at the memo book open on my knee. “Since we can’t date openly till the ball is well over with, we’re going to have to crowd a lot of courtship in a short time, bud. They’ll no more than see us going together than we’ll have to spring the engagement on them.”

  “Call it a whirlwind romance.”

  The phrase seemed to satisfy her, as though a tribal shibboleth had worked its potent spell. Then I did something that actually did sweep her off her feet. Putting the memo book away I drew from another pocket a small black jeweler’s box, and released the catch. A diamond ring sprang into view.

  “Andy,” she said.

  She came quickly round the sofa and kissed me. I slipped the ring on her finger and her arms went round my shoulders and she melted into my embrace. Then she lay back with her head on my breast, gazing at the stone on her extended hand.

  “I don’t suppose I can wear it?” she sighed regretfully.

  “The time will come.”

  Molly remembered a bottle of champagne someone had given her last Christmas and we chilled it. We kissed again, laughing about her cold which I would surely get, and sipped the wine and were happy for an hour. “We’ll bring it off,” I said, “when the time comes. Don’t worry.” Then the phone rang and she went into the next room to answer it, carrying her glass and drawing away from one of my kisses with a giggle of pleasure.

  I turned the bottle in its ice during her absence, rolling the neck between my palms as they do in the movies; I don’t know why this is done and perhaps the actors don’t either, but I did it, smiling to myself. I could hear Molly in the next room but couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  She came back without her glass.

  “Well, I’m on a committee.”

  “Ah! That ought to blitzkrieg them. What sort of committee, sweets?”

  “Your wife. The Ida May Mackerel Memorial Committee, Women’s Church Auxiliary branch. We’re having our first meeting Tuesday.”

  I raised the wet champagne napkin, which I’d been rearranging around the neck of the bottle, and smacked it down on the table. “That’s the last straw.”

  “Is it?”

  “Who called?”

  “A Mrs. Comstock. She’s heading it.”

  “That downtown bunch certainly don’t let any grass grow under their feet! So they’ve asked the parish ladies to form a group to work along with the Chamber of Commerce. Well, we’re in it up to our ears now.”

  She plopped down on the sofa with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, in the classic female attitude of disgust.

  “This was your bright idea. Me working on a committee.”

  “Not this committee!”

  “I told you there was a hand reaching out from the Great Bey—”

  “Couldn’t you have said no?”

  “After that build-up you’ve been giving me? I’m the greatest little old fireball church worker ever seen in these parts, to hear you tell it.”

  “It was part of the plan.”

  She raised her head and seemed to look thoughtfully out. “Your plan,” she remarked slowly, “but maybe not the divine one.”

  “Oh, rubbish!”

  “Maybe it’s a warning that we’re not compatible. I seem to be more religious than you.”

  “As evidenced by the frequency with which you attend church.”

  “Well, there are places that I do go.” She averted her gaze and said, “I’ve been to Mrs. Balsam. Do you know her?”

  I was genuinely aghast at this. “The theosophist!” I said. “This is the limit. I know you theater people are superstitious and go to clairvoyants and all, but I thought it was no more than that. A medium! This is really too much.”

  “I’m worried and confused, and, besides, what can you lose? Nothing, while you have everything to gain. You quote Pascal that way to me about Christianity. Why doesn’t it apply to a séance?”

  “Séance!”

  “I thought if I could get in touch with her …”

  She had risen and started to turn away. I seized her by the shoulders and swung her around. “I’ll thank you to leave my wife out of this,” I said. “You give me the creeps.”

  “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies,” she said gently.

  “I know, Molly, I know.” I dropped my hands and turned a
way myself. “Why is it people never believe in the hand of God till they get the back of it?”

  There was a silence, and then I saw that she had begun to cry. Or at any rate to tweak her nose with a wadded handkerchief. “Our first quarrel,” she said.

  I went to her and put my arms around her. I gave her a clean handkerchief to complete freshening herself with.

  “Now let’s get back to where we were. Let’s see, where were we? Man proposes, woman accepts, as the fella said. Right, sweetie? Now let’s pin up our hair and try to get on top of this thing,” I said. “It does occur to me to ask—I’m only thinking out loud, remember—couldn’t you have said no?”

  “Not gracefully. Andy, it would have left a bad taste in my mouth,” she said. “You know what I mean. It would have been a—well, a fly in the ointment of, well, of ‘us’ forever after. I couldn’t look myself in the face again.”

  “And I love you the more for it.”

  “Oh, don’t start that again.”

  “But it just isn’t fair to a man! It’s like one long funeral service. No man should have that asked of him.” I circled the room, fetching up behind the sofa, on which she was again sitting. “It’s all such a senseless jumble.”

  “On the contrary I’m beginning to see a definite pattern in the whole thing. Don’t worry, I don’t mean a divine one. I’m talking about a human one now.” She turned her head toward me but not enough to meet my eye, resting her arm along the back of the sofa. “Mrs. Comstock said she got my name from Hester Pedlock, who told her I was high up on the list of eager beavers. Was it you who told Hester that?”

  I held both fists in the air like a conductor leading an orchestra in a prolonged discord, at the same time gnashing my teeth.

  “We should have declared ourselves sooner, struck out boldly, let the chips fall where they may. Now it’s too late. She’s got us trapped. Boxed in. It’s this fixation I explained she has about her sister. It’s so deep she won’t let me remarry. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.”

  “Is it?” Molly said, smoothing her bathrobe along her knee.

  “I’ll do something about her, but meanwhile here we are with the eyes of the world to worry about. Oh, why should an early remarriage have to be justified anyway?” I protested. “It may be a measure of the gulf that has to be filled. Of the very depth—”

  “Yes, yes, I know. You’ve explained all that to me.”

  “In fact, I’ll go farther. I’ll say show me a man who doesn’t marry again and you’ve given me a pretty good idea of what the first one was probably like.”

  “All right. Nobody’s judging you. Don’t let’s start all that again either.”

  We lapsed into another silence. After a moment I said, “I’m thinking out loud again, but what about getting your mother to serve in your stead?”

  “Don’t you see that would go against my grain too? And besides, what good would it do? We can’t get married anyway with all this going on in town, so I might as well be on the committee. I’m going to get all the paper work for it piled on my desk anyhow, as usual. My God, that’s where I’m going to be busy!”

  “Have some more champagne.”

  I went into the other room for her glass. When I returned, it was to find her drawing the ring from her finger. “Better not let Mother see this. I mean it’s best not to take any chances with anybody.” She put it back in the box and the box in the pocket of her robe. I stood over her with the empty glass; she stared at the floor. “Back to Chickenfoot,” she said.

  I set the glass on the table. I was myself as deliberate, as summarizingly direct, as she, but what I said transposed our relationship into a permanently new key. “But this time with a difference,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Be lovers?”

  She rose as if startled to her feet. I took her musingly by the shoulders and pursed my lips in the manner of Walter Pidgeon to rule out any implication of crassness. She turned her head away and said, “Golly …”

  “It’s not our fault. We haven’t wanted it this way. They’ve driven us to it. They’ve won. Outward sanctions are apparently to be denied us for the time being; does that mean we should deny ourselves one another? ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.’”

  “At last I’ve heard it. You’re quoting the Bible.”

  “The demands of taste we should and will meet—gladly—but society has no right to ask a man to behave like a medieval monk! I love you, I yearn for you, I toss and turn for you,” I went on, stumbling blindly into rhyme. “Adultery is just a word in a case like this. But if that’s what it’s called, let’s commit it!”

  “You needn’t preach. I don’t stand on ceremony any more than you. It’s just that—well, I wanted it to be right, and beautiful,” she said wistfully. “Besides, where would we go?”

  “A hotel.”

  She gave a slight shudder, and the truth of the matter is I winced a little under the word myself.

  “I can just see myself slinking up to the desk with a ten-cent wedding band on my finger and a suitcase with housebricks in it.”

  “Housebricks?”

  “Something I read in a novel once,” she explained quickly. “The lovers bought a cardboard suitcase and a ring at Woolworth’s, and on the way to the hotel passed a vacant lot where they stopped and put a few bricks in it.”

  “What happened then?”

  “They were surprised in the room by the girl’s husband, who whipped out a pistol and pumped them both full of lead. But the idea of the housebricks, Andy, is so when the bellboy picks it up it won’t feel empty? Ugh! Could I bring it off? I shouldn’t look right, Andy.”

  “Would you rather I rented a small flat? A little place to call our own,” I said, warming to it. “We could fix it up, have meals there—”

  “That scares me even more. A whole double life. Such a thing would kill Mother if it ever came to light. No, I suppose a hotel is the way. Maybe I could brazen it out.”

  “Of course you could. Too, there are hotels where that isn’t necessary. They’re that type.”

  I had turned away and now stood at a table not facing her, where fidgeting of their own accord in an open box my fingers brought up a cigarette. Momentarily forgetting that I didn’t smoke, I lit it and took a few nervous puffs.

  “Chickenfoot has them in quantities, in the very district we’ve been meeting in,” I said. “I mean we’ve half come to it already.”

  “Like what?”

  I spread my hands philosophically. “The Coker—”

  “The Coker! Why, it’s notorious.”

  “That’s just it. Nobody we know would ever see us there.”

  “But that’s all it’s ever used for. The Coker!”

  “Would you rather a place where one of us might be recognized in the lobby? Don’t you see that’s why it’s right for us: the very fact that it’s just not our sort.”

  “But why a dive?”

  “You forget I’m a minister of the Gospel,” I said quietly, turning to face her with perhaps some stiffness. “I have to keep up appearances.” I went on with the air of one repeating something he had explained fully more than once before. “I told you from the start a minister’s wife has certain obligations from which ordinary women are exempt. Certain standards to meet. She has a special place to fill in the community, and often a difficult one. No stain must touch her. I was fair about that all along, Molly, I was perfectly honest with you from the start. We can’t afford to get off on the wrong foot now. Nor can I in all fairness guarantee that the situation won’t arise again, in some form or other. So there’s still time if you want to back out …”

  She shook her head, which was lowered.

  “No, it’s all right. I’m game.” She sighed after a moment. “But I must say, the strain of being a minister’s wife is beginning to tell on me already. Give me another drink.”

  Chapter Eight

  THE Coker is a nine-story building of no specifiable c
olor but leaning more to gray than to brown, though the bricks beneath the film of soot that covers it are brown, and of no architectural interest save its inclination toward the building next to it at an angle seemingly in excess of the survivable degree. Three stone steps grayer than the building lead to a revolving door flanked by two swinging ones. On the day on which we availed ourselves of its facilities, a square of cardboard served to patch a broken pane in the former. “Snowdrift Cake Flour,” I read as I bumped through a segment of it with the luggage.

  The suitcase I carried was my own Gladstone bag and contained, rather than ballast garnered in vacant lots, the normal changes of clothing and grooming appurtenances a man would take on an overnight trip, which was what I had told Hester I was away on. I said I was running down to New York for a day or two to look up some source material for my book at the public library. In addition to this I carried Molly’s cosmetics case, into which she had tucked a nightgown and a few other odds and ends. She had told her mother she was staying with a girl friend. She had taken a phenobarbital to relax her before setting forth, and had another in her handbag in case it was needed. It was dusk when we entered the hotel and the lights were on in the lobby. The time was also, I may add, a good month after the incident in which we had resolved on this course. The Testimonial Dinner had had the effect of sobering us to volunteered restraint, apart from its public extortion, and then the Christmas spirit had come along and thrown cold water on the project by prolonging the period in which it wouldn’t have seemed “right” to go to the Coker, and all in all it wasn’t till nearly February of the new year that we felt anything like physically and emotionally able to proceed with our plan.

  I was exhausted when I reached the desk, where I dropped the two bags with a thud behind a couple who were ahead of us. It was at this juncture that I recalled that the Coker is banally known as the John Smith. I tried to study the couple’s faces for signs of self-consciousness, furtiveness, excessive nonchalance or melancholy (the last being what I personally mainly exuded), but the man was writing in the register with his back to me and the girl drifted over to the magazine rack. At the man’s feet was a suitcase that, whatever its contents, could itself have been found in a vacant lot. I peered over his shoulder and saw him sign “Mr. and Mrs. Harry McQuade.” I suddenly realized that I had as yet neglected to choose a pseudonym for myself! I frantically put my mind to it, but panic froze it solid. Luckily there was some conversation between the guest and the desk clerk, and I had time to think of something suitable. That done, I felt a little more secure. I smiled at Molly, who stood a short distance off—the offhand inexpressive smile common to married couples. Her response was a tremulous twitching of the lips that made me look at the floor. She turned and walked to the water fountain beside the magazine rack, where the other girl was still browsing. She dug something out of her handbag, put it in her mouth, and bent over to drink from the fountain.

 

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