The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  In the mirror, I saw her walk over. She stood looking hard at my reflection.

  “You mean you have to account to her? With stories? Like a wife, for heaven’s sake?”

  “What did you tell your mother?”

  “That’s different and you know it. But this woman—you might as well be married to her.”

  I went on lining up the ends of my tie in preparation for knotting it.

  “Now look. You do something about her and do it right away. She’s the roadblock and you know what I mean,” Molly said.

  “Right. So your rival turns out to be flesh and blood after all, and not a spiritual one,” I said. “Don’t you feel better already, sweets?”

  “Ah! I’m glad to hear you use that word at last. It’s been on the tip of my tongue for weeks, but I haven’t said anything because—well, I wasn’t sure. Now you’ve said it. It’s out in the open. She’s my rival, and I think now we understand each other.” She tapped her palm with a hairbrush, fixing me in the mirror. “Don’t we?”

  “Of course. I know what you mean. And I’ll do something about it right away. You watch.”

  “I don’t care how you do it—tell her off, give her notice, throw her out of the house—but get that woman off my neck. This may sound tough, but everything’s fair in love and war, as she herself seems to know! She’s got you under her thumb like a husband, and we’re going to fix that!”

  I continued tying my tie, knotting it so as to conceal a small grease spot on one of the stripes, by way of outwitting my dry cleaner.

  “I mean it, Andy. Make it plain who’s going to be boss of that house. Show a little independence.”

  “Yes, dear,” I said, with a sardonic smile that pretty much soured the remains of that hour together.

  We finished dressing and went down for a bite of breakfast, and after breakfast Molly, who had taken her overnight bag with her, got into a cab and hurried to the office.

  I had an extra cup of coffee, which I drank in pleasant leisure. With a decent breakfast under my belt I felt a lot better too. The dizziness was about gone and my headache was clearing up. After paying my check I went out for a walk. I was conscious of the stores I passed, looking for a place where I might pick up a little something for Hester, who probably expected a trinket of some sort from my trip to New York. Besides, it was important to keep her in a good frame of mind if I expected to throw her out of the house.

  Chapter Nine

  I GOT caught in a shower during the course of my stroll and took refuge under an awning in front of a shop. As I was waiting for the rain to let up, a car with a vision of a girl at the wheel glided to a stop. She was going to park at the curb there. A patrician head and a fine throat leading to some cleavage warned me what I was in for. I gritted my teeth and looked for defects.

  There was no incompetence in the way she parked the car; it was whipped into place with shattering skill. She rolled the windows up tight and appraised the downpour, debating whether to wait in the car or make a dash for it. Her hair fell in one angelic torrent to her shoulders, and was blond. Didn’t it seem, though, to come rather far down on her forehead? It would prevent needless suffering if so, for a low brow would definitely undo that face.

  She leaned to crank the window on the curb side down and looked up at the sky, her teeth flashing in a grimace. A gust of wet made her withdraw, but not too soon to show me that my first impression had been wrong: the brow was clear and symmetrical after all, and a ripe red mouth added to what must be borne.

  Two alternatives are always posed me at this stage of the game, which is crucial, and they are precisely those of gambling. I can quit while I’m losing but still have a few coins of doubt to jingle in my pockets, or I can stay and play the possibility of thick ankles or a bad gait’s canceling out my turmoil against, of course, that of a voluptuous figure’s intensifying it. In other words, double or nothing.

  I stood irresolutely under the dripping awning. The girl looked out again, keys in hand. Suddenly she jerked the door handle down and sprang out.

  Getting out of the car exposed a span of thigh that stung my vitals. The ankles were finely hewn and swelled into shapely calves. She slammed the door shut and scurried under the awning. She was standing beside me.

  I looked the other way to generate nonchalance. After some moments I stole a glance. Ah, her chin was imperfect, and thank God there were blemishes on her skin. I developed this. The skin was quite rough, was it not? She would be like that all over: heavy and coarse and reddish along the neck on down to the shoulders, and from there to the breasts, the hips, the thighs turned in voluptuous languor—Hey, how about the rough complexion?—I pasted my mouth to hers and we were rocking through the American night in a Pullman berth, then drifting aboard ship through delinquent seas, and each morning at breakfast—Breakfast, that was it—the way off the hook. Every time she opened that stupid mouth you would shudder and curse the day you laid eyes on her.

  I must make her say something—anything—to confirm this. A phrase, even the inflection of a laugh could betray the entire mental level.

  “I’m waiting for the weather report to take hold,” I said. “Intermittent showers.”

  I grinned encouragingly, but she did not respond, save to cast me a sidelong look. I tried again. Her manner itself did suggest a lack of style, a certain want of esprit. I hurried hopefully on with the business of flunking her out. A word would do it, but I must actually hear her speak.

  “Do you have far to go?”

  Her manner now had esprit. The look she gave me was crisp and not tentative, and ended in visual reference to a policeman reporting at a call box across the street. I excused myself and ducked into the shop.

  Taking stock, I found myself in a book and greeting card store. A salesman was advancing with a smile, with a pantomime of soaping his hands.

  “Yes?”

  “Just browsing,” I said, “if I may.”

  “Certainly.”

  I might have done worse. As I was looking, it struck me that a book might be a good solution for Hester. I went to the fiction table, but found nothing that seemed right. My eye was caught by a corner shelf of art books. Among them was an album of Rousseau prints. I remembered hearing her say she liked Rousseau and I bought it. I asked the man to gift-wrap it, which he did, using, I was glad to notice, paper without the name of the store on it. By the time he had finished tying the ribbon around it the girl was gone. The rain had stopped too, and I stepped briskly along the street with my purchase under my arm, consoling myself with the knowledge that the girl was a goose and certainly deserving of the zero I gave her on the score of intellect.

  I watched Hester unwrap the package and exclaim with delight when she saw what it was.

  “Something for the house,” she said. “Why, how nice.”

  “No, no, it’s for you. I thought you said once you liked Rousseau. He’s not a particular passion of mine, but anyhoo …”

  “It’s awfully sweet of you, Andrew,” she said. She came over to the kitchen sink where I was standing to give me a kiss. Then she sat down again in her chair at the breakfast table and took a closer look at the individual prints in the album. “I’ll have them framed,” she said at last.

  “All of them?”

  “It’d be a pity to break them up. They go together so beautifully, as a set.”

  “Where would you put them?”

  She considered the question, mentally scanning all of the house she could not see from there.

  “I’d run them up the wall along the hall steps,” she said at last. “That gray wallpaper always looks bare to me, and these would brighten it up a lot.”

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t want eight Rousseau prints marching up the stairs with me every time I go up, and down every time I go down. I don’t want them there. Now there’s an end of it.”

  “You don’t?” she said in surprise. “Well, there’s no rush. We’ll figure out a place. But they are just lovely, Andre
w. Thanks so much.”

  I remained leaning against the sink long enough to watch her put the album aside in the wrapping paper. Then I walked over and stood behind my own customary kitchen chair. I faced her, gripping its back.

  “Hester,” I said, “I would like to get married again.”

  “Oh?”

  “But there are obstacles.”

  “What do you mean, Andrew? Like what?”

  In keeping with my injunction to dress more casually around the house she had appeared in a loose-fitting negligee that seemed to consist of a silk morning wrap over her nightgown. She poured me a cup of coffee and depressed the latch of the toaster in which two slices of bread stood ready.

  “Like this endless memorial,” I said. I drew my chair out and sat down. “Do I detect your fine Italian hand in all this?”

  “But why—?”

  “To keep me prisoner in the same emotion in which you choose to incarcerate yourself. What you want to do with your own life is your business, but what if I refuse to spend the rest of mine dissipating my normal energies into a succession of respectable intervals!”

  “Really, Andrew,” she said gently.

  “I can’t help it. All I want to do is live happily again with another woman. It’s as simple as that, damn it! I’m sorry I can’t share your well-intentioned but believe me unrealistically narrow plan for perpetual mourning.”

  “Not mourning—celebration!”

  “It comes to the same thing. A situation where it would be gauche to marry. You can’t ring wedding bells while that other bell keeps tolling. Can you now?” I demanded.

  She shrugged, not to express indifference but a kind of earnest deference. “Why, I think you should get married again, Andrew. I see marriage very much in your future,” she said, passing me the cream. “Whom did you have in mind?”

  “Miss Calico.”

  “Molly!”

  “I knew you’d approve.” I poured some cream into my coffee. “But how can I with all this going on? Now the last straw, they’ve put Molly on the Ida May Committee. Did you give her name to Mrs. Comstock as a Willing Woman?”

  “But you—”

  “Yes, I know. But the way it turned out, as well as the speed, makes it seem a little fishy, if I may say so. You threw up quite a roadblock, girlie.”

  “But why should I want to do such a thing? You’ve only told me now what’s between you. How could I have known that then?”

  My charge was a difficult one to support short of admitting that I went around peering through keyholes. I now felt an irritation with Molly for having pushed me into this trap. Women were always spurring men on to hit the boss for a raise or to speak to so and so about this or that—generally to wage aggressions they themselves harbored. I suddenly remembered that from my own eight years of marriage. However, there was nothing to do now but accelerate the offensive in the hope of inciting evidence of its justice.

  “You don’t want me to get married again,” I said. “That’s clear.”

  “Why don’t I?”

  “Because of this hero worship of your sister. That unhealthy emotion I was telling you about.”

  She lowered her eyes. I plowed ahead with renewed confidence.

  “Why don’t you go out with boy friends?” I said. “I don’t think this sheltered life is good for you. Purity carried to an extreme becomes its own opposite. Rémy de Gourmont classifies chastity as a form of sexual perversion.”

  “Well, every man to his own taste.”

  I twisted my napkin under the table as though it were sopping wet and I were wringing water out of it. “Rejecting all men is a species of promiscuity.” The neglected toast sent up a black billow of smoke. Hester took the ruined slices away and opened the door to clear the kitchen. I watched her dig fresh slices out of their wax wrapper and slip them into the toaster slots.

  “So forget me. It’s you we’re worrying about,” I went on. “You’re a girl in danger of more serious psychological consequences than you may realize. You’ll go from Dr. Chaucer to von Pantz, now I warn you. You’re tense, pale, and the victim of what I know to be an uncommonly strait-laced family. Oh, I know your family, my dear, and I’m not surprised at the end product I see: that sick orchid of Puritanism, a hysterical woman!”

  Intoxicated by my own words, I saw all the elements in the situation rush into place about a dramatic cliché like filings around a magnet. “A warped New England house” was the term that came vividly to mind.

  Hester scraped her chair back and crossed her legs away from the table. I was aware of folds of silk falling about her legs, and of bare thighs beneath the silk nestling warmly against one another. What other garments?

  “We must put an end to these morbid thoughts! There’s not a moment to lose!” I exclaimed, rising. “The mind is like a balloon that’ll stretch just so far, and then—bang.”

  Hester pressed the tablecloth flat with her fingertips and stared thoughtfully while the second pair of bread slices went on to incineration.

  “Mother always used to say you can’t run away from something that’s inside of you,” she said.

  “She has gone to her reward.”

  “Just what do you expect of me? Just what did you want me to do?”

  “Give me a break. You’re close to the central commissariat of women,” I said, a humorous name by which we sometimes called them, “your word will swing a great deal of weight. I need an ally in the parish before I come out in the open about this. You got me into this spot so it’s only fair that you get me out. I just want to get out from under long enough to get married. So take up my cause, around town and all. Give this your blessing. Would you do that, and thereby be a pal? Otherwise the situation between us must be considered insupportable, and I shall expect your notice in the morning.”

  “Will she keep her job? It’s hard for a woman to mix marriage and a career.”

  “It’s sometimes no cinch for a man either! So take up my cause, say this is O.K. and all, around town. Be a matchmaker even. And stop all these confounded commemorations!”

  She rose to dispose of the new batch of burnt toast. “Well, I don’t agree with you there. Mother had her quirks, it’s true. She wore her wedding ring on her right hand because she herself was left-handed. And other things. But she did say this one thing about family loyalties. That if ever—Andrew, what is the matter with you?”

  I was sitting with my head bowed in my hands, shaking it. “So it’s Mother we’re bucking. The inextirpable and quenchless Mama again. Mama who would want this, Mama we’re obeying across the years as well as Sis we’re still playing those duets with. You must go to von Pantz. There’s not a moment to lose.”

  “Listen to me, Andrew. Listen. Mother always said that if anything should stick together it’s families—”

  “That all-devouring and agglutinate mass. I’ll make an appointment.”

  “Families are the links in the chain that gives man the only immortality he has. Human continuity was always sacred in our family. We almost made a kind of ancestor worship of it.”

  “Fine, but don’t bury yourself with them! The Bible tells us—”

  “It’s too late. You told me to read Korzybski instead of the Bible, and I have, and Korzybski speaks of ‘time binding,’ the ability to pass on from generation to generation that gives man his distinction above other forms of life. If survival isn’t true, then let’s make our own! Let’s all pitch in and keep those we love alive.”

  “With adequate parking facilities!”

  “Why not? And I like the idea of a fountain. There was one in our garden when we were little girls in Belle Isle.”

  I raised my head.

  “Ah, then it was you who put that bug in Turnbull’s bonnet too,” I said. “You’re at the bottom of everything.”

  She smiled a little. Her face shone now with a pleased radiance, as if she were the little girl again, watching the fountain plashing in the garden at Belle Isle, in that far-off time.
She spoke with a gentle but firm resolve.

  “We will keep her memory green.”

  My shoulders drooped, the muscles of my face sagged into repose. “I see.”

  I rose and went to the office, where I took off my overcoat and slammed it down on top of my desk. It fell with its sleeve in the Out basket. I walked to the window shaking a cigarette from a pack, for I smoked habitually now too. I was halfway through it when I heard the front door open and my help arrive for work. Tabitha Twitchet or Molly Calico?

  I remained at the window, not turning around. I heard whoever it was hang up her duds in the outer office and come to my open doorway, where she stood evaluating the set of my back, no doubt.

  “Good morning,” Molly said.

  I greeted her and without delay related the events of breakfast.

  “So it’s worse than I thought,” I concluded. “We must get her to von Pantz. He isn’t much, and God knows what he’ll do with a case of necromancy, but he’s all we’ve got, and he may be able to hack his way through this and give her some insight. It’s ironic though, winding up in the place founded by the person she’s mixed up about.”

  Molly was sitting in a chair, where she had been giving the impression of brushing cobwebs wearily from the surface of her face. Now she rose and looked at me open-mouthed, with the expression but not the sound of laughter.

  “Mixed up! Is that what you think this is all about? Do you really for a minute believe that’s behind her shenanigans?”

  “I’ve seen some queer things in my line of duty as pastor,” I told her in calm tones. “This is New England, you know.”

  “Oh, you fool! How dense can you get? She wants you.”

  I trundled my dictaphone toward the desk.

  “I’m really terribly busy this morning. I’ll have another chapter of Maturity Comes of Age in an hour or so. That’ll be enough to shoot to Knopf.”

  “Maybe that’s why you couldn’t see it—because it was under your nose. But it’s perfectly obvious to another woman. She’ll keep this up till she’s got you married to her, and then this necromancy, as you call it, will vanish like a fog. You mark my words.” Molly followed me around the desk, and now stood pretty much over me, pointing toward the parsonage. “Now you go back there and do the whole thing over right.”