“She was not,” I said, sick of this fudge.
“She was too.”
“She was not.”
“Perhaps,” interpolated Mrs. Krakauer, a peacemaker, “the truth lies somewhere in between.”
“I knew her,” said Mrs. Comstock, ignoring this. “Most of us did. And most of us feel that her death was a fitting end to her life. A heroic sacrifice.”
This was the specific myth. Was this the moment to spike that old windbag Turnbull’s legend? To rise and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, she did not jump—she fell in.” I had confided the facts to Hester and to no other; it was the secret we shared. If she had known what was brewing in all this she had certainly given no sign. Turnbull was an old fool, but it nonetheless brought to three the number of persons on whose behalf I was being called upon to exercise grace.
“I know what you mean, Mrs. Comstock,” I said, prudently taking in a little sail, “but I lived with her, and if I told you as her husband that she was a saint you’d probably smile. I don’t want her canonized! I don’t want her dehumanized—oh, yes, that’s what’s happening—I want to remember her as she was. I can’t even recall what her voice sounded like for all this yacketing oratory. Let’s have some honesty, please! Ida May was a brilliant woman, but she had her emotional limitations.”
Mrs. Comstock rose stiffly. “Mr. Mackerel, I’ll thank you to respect the honored dead of this city!” she said.
“And I’ll thank you to use a little intelligence, if I am not asking the impossible,” I said, getting to my own feet. “Ida May was a creative person and they are at the farthest possible remove from saints—as I was at pains to explain in last Sunday’s sermon, and as you would remember if you hadn’t been asleep.”
“I was awake.”
“You were asleep.”
There was another nervous stir from Mrs. Krakauer who appeared about to repeat that the truth probably lay somewhere in between. But Mrs. Cool-Paintey spoke first. She had majored in psychology, and it was out of her wide knowledge in that subject that she was constrained to say:
“I wonder if I may go so far as to detect a note of professional jealousy in Mr. Mackerel’s protests. He’s a creative person himself, and the one thing they cannot stand is living under the shadow of another, more famous …”
This brought an audible laugh from Hester’s corner.
“I think you’re wide of the mark there, Mrs. Cool-Paintey. If I may be permitted to say a word here.” Smiling nods told her to go right ahead. “Andrew was always the soul of kindness toward my sister. I never heard him raise his voice to her the way he is to you tonight. They never quarreled.”
“That’s not a good sign to me,” said Mrs. Sponsible, in about the voice level of soliloquy.
“Oh, but we did,” I differed. “We did quarrel, often very bitterly. Mrs. Sponsible is quite right there. People must agree, to quarrel, as the Frenchman said.”
Hester now got to her own feet. “Why don’t I make us some tea?” she said.
An excellent idea. Tea had the effect of loosening everyone’s tongue, but on a more convivial level, and for a moment it seemed as if the danger of serious eruption had passed. The day might very well have been saved had not an incident occurred in connection with it that angered the women conclusively and drew the fire they had been holding back. What happened was this.
I had braced myself for their arrival with a stiff drink, and now felt the need for another. Hester’s return with the tea gave me an idea. As she poured it, I was struck with its resemblance in color to bourbon; in cups, the two fluids would be indistinguishable. If I could manage to fill one with whiskey I could sit there and sip it while the ladies did their tea and no one would be the wiser.
I drifted to the sideboard just inside the adjacent dining room where she was pouring and offered to finish that while she went back to the kitchen for some Vienna fingers she announced having discovered. Before going, she threw me a last cautionary whisper about my remarks. “Don’t be an imbecile, you idiot!” she said.
“Don’t nag,” I whispered as she made off.
Turning my back as completely as possible to the living room, I stooped and conjured a bottle of Old Fitzgerald from behind a door of the sideboard cabinet and filled one of the cups with it. I whipped the bottle back out of sight and set the cup on a saucer—or rather on one of the plates Hester had got out to accommodate the cookies we were going to have. So far so good. But here a crimp developed. Just then Hester returned from the kitchen bearing a tray on which were sugar and cream and the promised Vienna fingers, and as one the women rose with a babel of protest about being able to fend for themselves and of not having meant anybody to go to all that trouble. In a twinkling they were all elbowing about the sideboard, and in the ensuing confusion I lost complete track of the cup with the bourbon in it.
In another trice they were all seated in the living room chatting again. To this extent the tea had been a happy idea. I picked up the last remaining cup and carried it to my chair, not daring to look and see what it was, much less taste it. I preferred to be in doubt. They were talking about a man in an upstate city who had murdered his wife, three children, and mother-in-law. “When a thing like that happens,” Mrs. Cool-Paintey explained, “it shows that subconsciously that was what they wanted to do.” I held the ear of my cup firmly in my fingers, without touching the cup proper for fear of finding it hot. My eye met Mrs. Sponsible’s across the room and I thrust out my pinkie, smiling innocently. She lifted her cup, drank, and went on in a normal way. So it wasn’t she who had drawn the whiskey. That was one accounted for. My gaze went down and in that second I detected a pale smudge on the side of my cup, which could only be the cream filling of the Vienna finger melting against it. I raised the cup to my lips, shutting my eyes. The beverage in it was tea.
I ran my eye in panic around the jabbering circle. Who had the whiskey? It was like Russian roulette. Six cups like six chambers in a pistol, one with the bullet. Mrs. Sponsible and I were ruled out. That left Mrs. Comstock, Mrs. Cool-Paintey, Mrs. Krakauer and, of course, Hester. Maybe Hester had drawn it. Dear God, let her be the one. Then she drank and took a nibble of her cookie—dashing that possibility.
I now pinned my hopes on Mrs. Krakauer. She was a slight, gentle woman with a sadly tolerant nature. By all means it must be she … I wiped my brow. Russian roulette with teacups. Add to which the grim detail that the whiskey might now have cream and sugar in it. I closed my eyes and waited.
“Perhaps some arrangement can be worked out satisfactory to both Mr. Mackerel and the business element,” Mrs. Comstock was saying. “I mean get the fountain and the Plaza dissociated from the shopping center. See to it that it doesn’t get to have her name, even unofficially. What would Mr. Mackerel think of that?”
I nodded, my eyes closed. “Fine.”
“I mean if we all try to be reasonable, one give a little here, the other give a little there, why, I’m sure the differences can be ironed out. So I move a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce, say, which Mr. Mackerel will attend and air his views.”
There was a violent spluttering followed by severe and prolonged coughing. It was Mrs. Cool-Paintey. She had taken a gulp large enough to have choked her, with enough left over to be liberally spraying the woman seated next to her, which happened to be Mrs. Comstock. “What in the world?” When Mackerel could bring himself to look it was to find the two women sitting face to face wiping one another’s dress fronts with their handkerchiefs. The scene had the exotic gravity of some obscure rite from the comprehension of which all those not directly engaged in it were barred, even those witnessing it at first hand.
“That’s not tea,” Mrs. Cool-Paintey wheezed, when she could speak at all.
“I’ll say it isn’t!” said Mrs. Comstock, sniffing. This was the woman whose husband was the reformed alcoholic, and whose horror of the very word was sufficient to make her turn and regard Mackerel with speculative interest; with new eyes, as the phr
ase goes. Mackerel did something he knew he shouldn’t have but which he was powerless to restrain. He smiled. He lowered his head and shook it, setting his plate and cup down. “I’m sorry,” he said, laughing now. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Maybe someone can tell me what this is all about,” Mrs. Cool-Paintey gasped in a piping whisper. Evidently some of it had gone down her Sunday throat.
Mrs. Comstock could tell her. Half a lifetime of drinks sneaked behind her back and of bottles routed from extraordinary hiding places equipped her to recognize the true boozer at a glance.
“It’s whiskey,” she said. “The very idea. Sneaking it into teacups yet, so we wouldn’t know. He just had to have one. He couldn’t wait. Well, the Lord took care of that little trick, didn’t he, Reverend Mackerel? I’d never have believed it, but now I’ve seen it. The thing is, secret drinkers can sometimes go on for years unsuspected. Now it’s out. We’ve seen it with our own eyes. And having seen that maybe we can believe all the other we’ve been hearing too.”
“What other?” Hester demanded.
“Women.”
“In hotel rooms,” Mrs. Cool-Paintey wheezed, and began to cough again. She and Mrs. Comstock were still wiping away at one another’s fronts. They looked very sisterly. The scene was too grotesque for me to feel it could possibly be the setting for anything sinister, or to pose any serious threat, and so when Hester pressed on with “What hotel?” I replied with ironic flippancy, “The Coker.”
“Ah, so you admit it’s true,” said Mrs. Sponsible.
“It’s what I’ve heard said,” I answered listlessly.
“I don’t believe it,” Hester said, her eyes flashing. She was on her feet. “I will not have such things being said in my house! You ought to be ashamed. Idle gossips!”
“Idle, they work at it twenty-four hours a day,” said I, who felt the witticism worth a second use.
Mrs. Comstock rose and pushed Hester. “Don’t you call me that. I never speak without reason. We haven’t passed a word of this on—we’ve only heard it. I’ve had an open mind—up to now.”
“Just because you can believe he drinks, you believe it all? But he doesn’t. Oh, one or two now and then, sure, but not on the scale you think. Could I live with him day in and day out and not know it?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Comstock answered with simple authority. She turned with a kind of ambiguous outrage to the circle as Hester stamped her foot, burst into tears and went upstairs. “Send them away and come to bed,” Hester said as she hurried off, completing the sense, which I had been increasingly experiencing, that I was in a madhouse.
“You see what you’ve done?” I said to the women.
Mrs. Cool-Paintey rose. Her voice was still a little rickety. “Shall we go? I think we’ve heard enough. Enough for our visit to have served its purpose, albeit a sad one.”
There was a sorrowful sigh from Mrs. Krakauer. She was inclined by nature to charity, but she was far too buffaloed by words like “albeit” to press for it now. She followed the rest into the vestibule, where they crowded into the closet for their coats like sheep without a shepherd. I went to help them.
It was then, as I approached the group, that I heard Mrs. Sponsible say something sotto voce that I couldn’t catch clearly but that sounded like, “What makes me feel a fool is all the matchmaking we’ve been doing.”
“Matchmaking?” I said, wedging my way through them into the closet.
They looked embarrassed, and glared at one another. “Oh, well, let’s not go into that,” said Mrs. Krakauer, dropping her eyes.
My curiosity was too keen to stem at this point. Ducking in among the coats, I said, “Am I to understand that you feel the parsonage should have a mistress? Shall we put it that way?”
Mrs. Krakauer murmured another demurrer and was agreed with by one or two others. “All right,” I said, “I won’t give you these coats till you tell me.” I had them all over my arms, four of them, worth thousands of dollars, if one included Mrs. Sponsible’s and Mrs. Cool-Paintey’s furs. “Just try to get them.”
“We can get a writ,” Mrs. Sponsible said. “We’ll get them back.”
“If you insist on acting like children,” I said.
Mrs. Cool-Paintey relented—if it was relenting and not turning the subject to punitive account. She was the injured one, after all, and I could see her making it as part of my chastisement that I would know in full the womanly solicitudes from which I was to be exiled.
“Naturally we feel a parsonage should have a mistress—” she began.
“But not that a parson should. Heh-heh-heh,” I put in. “But go on.”
“—and a man a wife. We’ve taken a kind of, well, interest in you, yes. Up to now.”
“But wouldn’t you feel that—I mean under the circumstances—?” I began haltingly.
“It’s been a year now, or soon will be,” one of the others said, “and that’s enough.”
I picked the coats from my arms and helped them into them one by one.
“Who did you have in mind, if I may ask. I gather from all this huggermugger that you’ve had specific ideas?” I said.
“Oh, well, now I think this is really …” Mrs. Krakauer murmured.
“There’s no point in being coy about it at this stage,” I said. “A minister is public property, I suppose, so you need have no feeling about making his business yours. Go on, tell me. I’m curious.”
They looked at one another, each declining the role of ultimate spokesman, but itching to hear another undertake it. Mrs. Comstock spoke up.
“He’s right. It can’t do any harm now—now that it can’t do any good either,” she said. They raised their eyes to the ceiling, where Hester’s footsteps could be heard going from one room to another upstairs. Mrs. Comstock lowered her voice. “We all like that secretary of yours. She’s a new member, but she’s fit in so beautifully in both the Players and on committee—and incidentally she regretted she couldn’t make it tonight. We think she’s a jewel.” Mrs. Comstock hunched her shoulders and exhaled sharply. “But what’s the use talking about it? The Coker! She couldn’t possibly have anything to do with you now.”
Chapter Twelve
I SAT on the floor with my eye to the keyhole, looking into the vestibule where Hester was admitting Molly. I was secreted in the room in which I had received Mrs. Calico, the door of which (closed now, of course) commanded a view across the entrance hall into the living room. Molly had done her “work” at home that day and was delivering the “finished” typescripts to the rectory. Both women thought I was out, a belief of which I was taking advantage by doing a little much-needed eavesdropping. Rather at sea as to both women, I thought that if I could overhear them talking about me, aspects of my worth, or whatever, I might obtain some clue as to how I stood and how I might best act in the widening crisis. So I sat squinting through the keyhole with a hardboiled egg in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, which was proof enough of herd tyrannies.
Hester went by my line of vision to answer the door, humming “The Spanish Cavalier.” I took a quick pull on the cold beer and a bite of the egg, snapping my teeth around it and emitting a low growl. The women greeted one another by first names.
“He’s at that meeting in the city hall,” Hester explained. “With the Chamber of Commerce.”
“Oh, yes. Quite a mess all around.”
“House is a mess too.” Hester laughed apologetically. “I haven’t had a minute all day. Hope you won’t think I’m a sloppy housekeeper.”
Molly started into the living room, but in the doorway to it she froze in her tracks. And my heart froze at the realization of what lay in her path.
Articles of my clothing were strewn everywhere. My coat lay on a chair, vest on another. My tie was on the piano, an end of it dangling into the works. My hat was hung on an ornamental metal spear on which the window drapes were hooked back. There would be cigarette dung on the carpets and a shoe, as I remembered it, kicked into a corn
er. A sticky Old-fashioned glass stood on a stack of sheet music, leaving its rings as planned.
Molly let out such a gasp she could only go on and say, “My God! Is he always like this?”
Hester laughed charitably. “Men are all alike. Each with his own individual quirks and crotchets to be put up with. Place does look like a cyclone struck it though, doesn’t it?” She plucked a copy of Time hospitably from under Molly as Molly sat down.
“There isn’t much to discuss in these.” Molly flourished some manuscript and set it on a table. “A couple of spots where I couldn’t make out changes he penciled in. One place I don’t know whether he means the American Army is woefully uninformed or woefully uniformed. You don’t know when he’ll be back?”
“He’s not the soul of punctuality.” Hester was down on one knee digging the other shoe out from under an ottoman with patient grunts. She heaved a sigh as she rose and drew a hand across her brow. Really! I thought, setting my repast aside. It was Molly I moved to keep in view through the keyhole, getting on all fours to do so. Molly watched Hester gather up the sea-wrack mentioned, plus a pair of socks I had discarded in an ashtray. I had gone too far. My one chance now was that, like the Russian people for whose benefit political confessions are exaggerated in hopes that they will recognize the burlesque, Molly would see this was not like me, and smile.
“He throws his coat on the office desk now and again,” Molly observed to herself. “It’s a good thing he doesn’t undress there.”
The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel Page 14