The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Yes, it is.” Hester stood picking the knot out of the tie. She paused to wipe a stain from the piano top with the hem of her apron. She started out of the room with her arms full and my hat on her head.

  “Wait.” Molly turned in her chair. “The drinking. Had you no inkling of that?”

  I withdrew my eye from the keyhole and put my ear to it.

  “It’s not up to us to judge,” Hester said. “So you’ve heard about that too? Well, don’t believe all you hear, and remember that alcohol is a refuge which people like that seek from their problems, which God knows Andrew has plenty of.”

  “Yes. And now Knopf rejecting his book.”

  “He did? Oh, dear.” Hester appraised the sea-wrack with new eyes; almost with Molly’s. I wagged my hind-end to point up the infamy of events, the whole human betrayal, and howled like the dog I was reduced to, mentally. “What did Knopf say?”

  “Knopf seems to think it’s a collection of sermons, or rather Andrew seems to forget that it is. Knopf wrote a very cute letter saying it’s the same with every kind of collection, even short stories—you’re better off taking one up than getting one out. Unless you’re Norman Vincent Peale.”

  I finished the egg and beer and left. I slid open a window and backed out onto the porch, seething. This was no condition in which to go to the meeting, but there was no time to cool off; I was due there at eight and it was twenty to now. Nor was my frame of mind improved by the notice I read on the bulletin board in front of the city hall. It was typewritten on official mayoralty stationery and read, more or less in the form of a proclamation:

  Effective tomorrow, there will be a tradition of dropping a penny into the wishing well on the common across the street and making a wish in memory of Ida May Mackerel, this wish to be in keeping with her known ideals. This charming custom will itself be in accord with an observation once made by Mrs. Mackerel herself, who according to legend observed on that very spot that if there were more well wishers (that is, people wishing others well) the world would be more well and less sick than it is now. The old wishing well will be regularly cleaned out and the proceeds to go for maintenance of the fountain in her name to be erected soon.

  My teeth aching, I went on in.

  The meeting was to be held in the council room on the third floor, and on the way to it I passed the office on the second where I had met Molly. I paused in the corridor and looked into the darkened room through the glass-topped door. I stood there letting melancholy roll over me like a breaker. I tried the knob, expecting to find the door closed, but it was open. There being nobody in sight I slipped in and shut the door behind me.

  In the faint light falling in from the end of the corridor I could see the desk where I had caught sight of the Parrington book, her old chair, the bench on which I had first awaited her. Being a few minutes early, I stretched out on it, with my feet on the wooden arm. It was a deacon’s bench, of course, a period piece. There’ll always be a New England!

  Distantly I could hear arriving footsteps, a muffled laugh; overhead, vague voices. It was peaceful in here. I closed my eyes. I fished two pennies out of my pocket and laid one on each eye. Now it was over. Now I was dead and done with it. The farce was played out.

  I thought of Knopf, not without a certain compassion. He was apparently no longer to be taken seriously as a publisher. They would soon be taking up a collection for him at this rate.

  I appreciate your emphasis on the role of the myth in society, he had further written, but cannot feel it is the all-devouring Moloch you make it out, nor that martyrs must still be regularly popped into its mouth to keep it happy. Perhaps you have some private, emotional reason for your stress of this point? I guess what I am trying to say is that you have overstated the case. You have driven the nail clear through the plank and out the other side …

  Can’t feel it, Knopf? Can’t feel the myth is society’s universal dragon-pet who must be fed its regular diet of victims? Well, the footsteps are gathering overhead this minute, for the sacrifice, Knopf. It is the cabal convening, the conservative interests in full cry for the blood of one who dared to make a stand against them. Come along, Knopf, and we will see how the tribe operates in this supposedly sophisticated community along the eastern seaboard in the second half of the so-called twentieth century (as the old lady said.) The ram about to be led to the slaughter is known to you slightly; you have had correspondence with him. He has kicked against the pricks, and now it is turnabout: they will kick against him. Arise, Knopf, let us go hence.

  The council chamber is a room forty feet wide, in which the major and ten selectmen hold their official sessions. Mayor Junior was to have charge of proceedings tonight and already sat at the head of the long conference table in one of those black, high-backed leather swivel chairs, studded with buttons like navels, nursing a gavel. Strewn at his feet were members of the Chamber of Commerce and the businessmen interested in the Plaza, categories which greatly blended. Along one end of the room is a visitors’ gallery with about forty of fifty seats. A handful of them were occupied by slouching spectators, who twitched tentatively when I strode in. Turnbull was among them, and likewise Comstock, covering the meeting for the Globe.

  “Oh, Andy,” said Mayor Junior, rising to shake my hand. “I guess you know everybody.” I nodded crisply, declining his outslung arm, determined to have no soft soap but a clean fight. They would not embrace me in order to crush me. I sat down at the table behind a name plate which read “Melvin Pryzalski.”

  “I think we can make this brief and friendly,” the mayor began. “My friend Andy here has taken exception—perfectly within his democratic right—to some aspects of the Plaza thing. We know what some of them are, but in case he has others, let’s hear him out so we can whomp out a little agreement among us that will be satisfactory to all and leave no hard feelings with anybody. The main thing will be to separate the esplanade from the shopping center, to which I think we can all agree. However, if Andy—I’m sure he’s that to all of us—has something further, why we can add that to the little agreement I’ve drawn up, sign it and get home in time to hear Ed Murrow, eh, fellows? He’s got Gina Lollobrigida on tonight.”

  I saw what I was up against. The mayor was a numskull apparently without any sense of his role as a diehard reactionary. The smiles of the rest indicated a conciliatory attitude that also augured poorly for an open conflict, with battle lines clearly drawn and blood spilt where it must. “We’ll do anything you want,” Sponsible was saying, “within reason.” Good Lord! Evidently I must instruct them in the rudiments of their own skulduggery if this thing was to be guided on classic lines, or anything like them. Very well, I would needle them into a proper assumption of their parts.

  “Not so fast, boys,” I said, rising. “Let’s not muddle the issues with pretended sweetness and light. Society as it is constituted leaves no room for compromise with those playing the power game and those daring to say them nay. The struggle between them is total, and admits of only one result—a fight to the finish.”

  They exchanged baffled looks and bewildered shrugs. Their comprehension of the factors involved was more elementary than I had imagined. I must begin with the simplest fundamentals.

  “Social elements thus in opposition,” I continued, “enact dramatico-metaphoric embodiments of tribal drives which are at the same time religious in nature. When the economic interests of those in power—now get this—when they congeal with their emotional ones, we have the complete myth in a given culture. This myth operates on all levels and against all opposition, because that opposition challenges both the pocketbook and the prejudice. The Mackerel Plaza is an example of such a myth in our time and in our place because it satisfies all those requirements. It unites your material with your instinctual interests, and having embraced it as sacrosanct, you will defend it with every resource at your command.”

  “We will?” the mayor said, screwing his face up.

  I nodded. “You will stop at noth
ing. It is an inevitable part of the power pattern.” I paused. “Are there any more questions?”

  The mayor looked around at his colleagues again for help. He was clearly out of his depth. A man on his right spoke up.

  “But we just said we’re perfectly willing to sit down with you and—”

  “Ah, ah. Cards on the table, gentlemen, please. We dispense with token displays of amity and strike straight for the essentials. No mealy-mouthed equivocation and transparent subterfuge.”

  A man whom I recognized as Scanlon the paving contractor scratched his head.

  “But, gee, we think you’re a nice guy and …”

  “It’s no use. Compromise is impossible. It’s you against me. One of us must go down in defeat. Already the fire crackles and the idol yawns, but I warn you, gentlemen. Truth crushed to earth will rise again, and the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church!”

  The mayor crooked his finger at his neighbor and bent his head toward him. Others did the same, frowning in frank perplexity and whispering together. A thin man sitting all alone at the end of the table turned a pair of sad, chocolate eyes on me and said, “You don’t have to bully us. We’re only doing our best.”

  “I’m not trying to bully you,” I said. “I’m only trying to bring to a head the inevitable. There’s no point in wasting time in amenities that are doomed to failure. Let’s have done with the politics and declare the wart.”

  He lowered his eyes meekly and resumed picking at a crack in the veneer of the table top. It was Kerfoot, the electrical engineer and lickspittle, who had been present at the luncheon where all this had been hatched. Others seemed equally cowed. Presently he turned to old Meesum on his right and some distance down the table. Meesum had been making circles on a pad with the expression of a man who resents being smoked out. Finally he dropped his pencil and leaned toward a group which included his mayor son. The buzz of voices rose till it was like a beehive.

  Are you watching, Knopf? Are you getting all this? They have their heads together, and their voices as they speak are as the sound of knives being whetted, and as wind in savage grass.

  “Are there any other questions?” I asked. “Before we get on with it?”

  A stocky man in a gray suit got up. It was Sponsible, the head of the excavating firm. He was a self-made man in the sense that he had himself once driven the bulldozers now operated for him by others. He had just returned from a sunny two weeks in Florida, and his face looked like a burnt pan. There are people whose very appearance bespeaks their line of work, and there was about Hugh Sponsible’s knobbed hands and his figure and even his voice a loose, hard, easy-rattling something that seemed to say we are not dust but gravel.

  “You say we’re supposed to railroad you on all them levels.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Just how do we go about doing this? Could you give us a few pointers?”

  “Certainly. You will do it first through your ownership of the mass media: the press, radio and television, the mouths of old women. You will engage in attacks both on my intellectual position and my character. The latter has already begun. All this will be aimed toward your final coup—the attempted removal of my means of livelihood.”

  Sponsible nodded, stroking his nose, in perfect willingness to accept instruction in his role as oppressor but still retaining certain doubts to be aired.

  “Can’t we live and let live?”

  “No. That is against your nature. Individually, yes; collectively, no. There your instinct is to protect the cash nexus of society, as Karl Marx has called it.”

  Sponsible sat down and a hand went up at the other end of the table.

  “Yes?” I said. It was Scanlon again.

  “I’m a simple man without much knowledge of these things, so I’ll have to follow the leadership of others,” he said. “But about this myth business. I don’t quite get that. How we use that to make a buck and so on. Could you explain that a little more?”

  “I’m glad you asked that question,” I said. Now we were coming to grips. “I’ll give you an example of how you’re working it. The first thing you, the reigning oligarchy, do is popularize a utilizable figure, but in order to elevate it for the greatest number you vulgarize it. Just before coming here I read the announcement on the bulletin board about this wishing well twaddle.” The mayor stirred in his chair and a small fidget ran along other parts of the table. “This is real mythology, boys.”

  “Why?” said the mayor.

  “Why? Because Mrs. Mackerel had a mind like a steel trap, an antiseptic, sardonic, modern mind. One of often surgically cruel precision. She could never in all her born days have said a sappy, pappy, preposterous thing like that.”

  Wounded anger replaced the mayor’s air of simple confusion.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” he said. “What’s sappy about that story? I think it’s nice.”

  “If you don’t know, I can’t explain it to you. Where did you hear such a thing?”

  “Why, I found it in a publicity release. I … don’t see our press agent here …”

  “You see?” I shot at Sponsible. “Press agents making up little legends fit for mass consumption. And that ‘effective tomorrow’ bit. Who’s gem was that?”

  “Mine,” said the mayor resentfully. “What’s wrong with that? Doesn’t every tradition have to get started some time?”

  “That’s right,” I said with a smile. “Ida May used to say, ‘One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.’”

  A red-faced man I didn’t know shook his finger across the table at me. “I don’t think she used language like that and I don’t think you ought to use it here!” he said.

  “And calling her cruel,” Scanlon said to him.

  “That story illustrates a fine little sentiment and I think it’s true.”

  The hubbub grew in volume, supported by exchanged nods. The gallery loungers were now galvanized into quite erect positions. Charlie Comstock’s pencil galloped. Turnbull kneaded his mustache excitedly. As Junior banged his gavel I surveyed the scene with an inward smile. The caldron was boiling briskly. Who could doubt my thesis now?

  Junior was rapping for silence for his old pa, who had signaled for the floor. They were all glad to see the old fox rise and take it: he would represent them well.

  “This memorial is close to the heart of all of us,” he began, laying his hand on his heart, where his wallet palpably bulged, “and I am so glad to hear Mr. Mackerel speak of putting the cards on the table. But let’s do one more thing. Let’s turn them face up.” He paused to let this sink in, greeting it himself with a burst of unrequited laughter. “Let’s ask for his motives in all this. Let’s ask whether he’s opposed to just this bandwagon, this trough in which he says we’ve all got our snouts, or to private profit as such.”

  Swell.

  “I’m opposed to cracking open to commercial exploitation the last smidgen of scenic beauty left in this damned town. You got your way by befuddling a philanthropist into parting with more then he intended.”

  “Where shall we expand then, man!”

  “What do I care?”

  “Do you realize how dense the population of this town is?”

  “I have inklings,” I said, looking him steadily in the eye.

  “You quoted Karl Marx. Are you a Communist?”

  All gall is divided into three parts, I have thought since. First there is the basic glandular structure from which the trait derives its name; second, the nervous make-up and shadings of temperament which result in the gift of aggression; and lastly a certain density of mind which blinds the character to the resentment he inspires in others. Meesum had all these requirements in an unabridged degree, and that was why he struck everybody, and not just me, as the brassiest man they ever met. One or two, including Sprackling the young lawyer who had slipped in late, laughed. Most of them, even those whom I had goaded into a sense of their function as oppressors, looked t
o me to answer this absurd question with a loud negative.

  I was not going to let them off so easy. I must lure them on to a full measure of accusation, to drive home to them the depth of their complicity in this enterprise. Guilt by association turned around. They must see that they were equally yoked with their spokesman in a cabal against me.

  “Well, the early Christians were Communists, weren’t they?” I answered evasively. (They didn’t have anything to share, but I must give Meesum enough rope.)

  Meesum grasped his lapels firmly in both hands, and I remembered its having been said that he had once had ecclesiastical ambitions.

  “Do you know how many sheep Abraham had?”

  “Abraham who?”

  “Abraham of old. How many cattle? How many acres of land? He was a very rich man.”

  “Not as a result of private initiative. I understood he got it all from God.”

  This was a barb that really went home. Nothing could more have incited Meesum, who had inherited everything he himself owned.

  “I’m glad to hear you mention God,” he said. “You do it little enough in church. You said once in a sermon that the common people must have loved gods, they made so many of them. Do you think that was respectful?”

  “Of whom, Lincoln or God?”

  Meesum raised and tightened his grip on his lapels, as though in his rage he had only himself to cling to for support. I suspected what was eating him especially these days. He had tried to settle the division, created in his mind by the conflicting genealogical societies as to his ancestry, by retaining a third, which claimed to have uncovered Moorish origins totally absent from the reports of the other two. This had unnerved him further and shortened his temper acutely.

  “It is rumored that on Saturday nights you go about heckling street corner evangelists,” he said. “Is that true?”

  “I have often heckled them, yes.”

  “Is that conduct befitting a minister of the Gospel?”

  “I feel it my duty to oppose vulgarity in any form. Such men are to religion what jingoism is to patriotism.”