The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Oh, Andy,” he said. “Andy, Andy Mackerel. Why? You shouldn’t have. Do you realize what you did, boy?”

  “I couldn’t have! You never know what you’re doing then!” I said in a shrill voice, gesturing with the bread knife. “Your mind goes blank. I didn’t know what was happening then. I don’t know. Doesn’t that prove it?”

  “Risked your life to save mine. That’s all.” Turnbull dropped into a chair and put his head in his hands. “And you not even any great shakes as a swimmer. Yet you jump in and come to my miserable, unworthy, undeserving aid.”

  “Oh, that,” I said, laying the bread knife by. “It was nothing, old boy. Forget it.”

  “And then turning back to see what had happened behind you, you dive underwater to try to save her. Till they had to pull you out. Till they damn near had to save you, you’re such a lousy swimmer. You can see it all on there. It’s as plain as day.”

  He sat shaking his head, his hands plowing his face. He emitted low, muffled moans, and brushed his eyes, whether at real tears or for dramatic validity was hard to tell. He continued after a moment, “Why didn’t you speak up, let me know who my thank offering should be for?” He lifted his head and had another of his apocalypses right there in my kitchen. “It’ll just say ‘Mackerel Plaza.’ No first name. So it could just as well mean—”

  “Now, look,” I said, taking a stance over him and gesturing with the bread knife once more. “We’re not going to open that can of tomatoes again. Do you hear? That’s an order, and if you so much as open your trap about any last-minute changes in the script, so help me I’ll slit your throat with this knife. Is that clear? Is it!” He gave a vague nod and gestured acquiescently. “Because I don’t want to be put through that wringer again. We’ll burn the film for sure now. That is, after we’ve let Fat Chance have a look at it. Poor Fat,” I thought aloud. I imagined him scurrying through town and stirring up half the state of Connecticut. A sudden increase in the sound Hester had noted put an end to this line of compassion.

  Turnbull rose and lifted his shaggy head to yet another vision. “It’s raining,” he said. “My God, it’s raining! Listen to it!” As we did that, listened to it, pattering on the dry leaves and pocking the dust, we heard another sound joining it—a church bell, distantly ringing in acknowledgment, in gratitude. Other bells took up the sound, till presently it threatened to drown out that of the rain. P.L.’s belfry was silent, but we could hear singing: Evans was leading them in a hymn of praise.

  “I’m going over. I’ve got to see this,” Turnbull said. “Come on!” He ran bareheaded out the front door toward the church.

  Hester got cups and put them on saucers. She poured us both coffee when it was done and set the kitchen table for us. We had the sandwiches together there. “I’m starved,” I said, picking a little at mine.

  “I haven’t had dinner either.” Hester bit hungrily into her sandwich and took a sip of coffee. She was still sitting on the high stool, and not across the table from me but around the corner of it, near me. “Patter of rain on the roof is nice.”

  “It is?”

  She smiled and reached a hand through my arm, scratching the back of my wrist. There was a low growl which was not my stomach, having issued in the distant west. I smiled back at her. “Jehovah’s wetness,” I said.

  She twisted about on her chair to look into the dining room, through whose open windows the curtains were billowing into the room. “It’s working up into something,” she said, rising. “Andy, don’t you think you ought to close the windows? Please do. I’m afraid of electrical storms.” There was a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder. “Please.”

  I put my sandwich down and went about the house as bade. A spat of wet caught me in the face as I lowered one parlor window. “Good God,” I said, looking upward through a thrashing maple bough. “Really.”

  Hester went about pulling electrical appliance plugs from their sockets, in the belief that their connection invited currents from the storm. Toaster, percolator, radios, everything came loose. “Now upstairs,” she said, dashing up the staircase as another more deafening crash and a blinding glare ended in a ring of the telephone.

  The house was now being battered like a drum. The windows rattled, the roof rumbled, the very floors throbbed beneath us as the heavens emptied. It was a cloudburst—without there having been a cloud. It was not a question of its raining cats and dogs, sheets and pillow cases or anything else familiar to popular conception: we were in water. We were as solidly underwater as that fabled city which was “removed from the steadfast foundations of the shore to the coral floors of ocean.” And it was now, racing up the stairs after Hester, that I had my apocalypse.

  It occurred to me on the instant of my realizing that the accumulating churchbells, rather than drowning out the sound of the rain as they a moment ago had, were now in the reverse position of being drowned out by it. Oh, it was quite definitely that. They were no longer, as might be said, in it. Then it came to me in a flash—flash of lightning quite, if you will. God was not answering their prayers by sending them the rain they had asked; he was telling them what he thought of this gimme use of prayer, this debauch of its purpose of simply seeking communion with him—which was what I said prayer was for and why I had refused to join the rain dance—he was telling them what he thought of such medieval goings on by sending them more than the rain they had asked for. This wasn’t a blessing, it was a judgment! This wasn’t just a storm, it was a flash flood! I could see it all now. After soaking the crops, it would wash the crops away. Having drenched the ground and glutted the drains, it would flood the streets. Thousands would be rendered homeless as buildings were evacuated, houses and storefronts crumbled. The Red Cross would send a relief corps to stricken Avalon, and down from Greenwich and New Canaan and wealthy Westport would come the foodstuffs gathered in other congregations: cans of vichyssoise and cheese straws and smoked pâté and tomato juice for bloody Marys; onion soup and canned fruit and vegetables and babas au rhum and tinned oysters and Miltown and dexamyl and bundles of old clothes, Brooks Brothers suits and Hathaway shirts and hand-me-down ascots for victims of the flood area.

  “Evidently an object in the vicinity has been struck,” I said hysterically, sprinting down the upstairs hall after Hester as a shattering crash was heard. I had jagged glimpses of her fleeing form in the now almost continuous flashes. I followed her into her old bedroom and pulled the windows down. The front of my shirt was sopping. I turned back and saw her standing rigid in the middle of the room, her hands in front of her face. I went over to her and put an arm around her. “There, there,” I said, in a thick voice. “You can stay here tonight.”

  She whirled around to me and seized and held me in a shivering embrace.

  We stood that way for two or three minutes. Then as suddenly as it had come, the electrical storm drew off. The rain settled down to a quiet, steady, drenching fall.

  “Just what we need,” Hester said, moving away from me.

  I took a shower and got into bed. The house was shut up. I opened my bedroom window and lay in the cool fresh air that came through it. It rained steadily. I could hear sounds of retiring in Hester’s room. A little glow came into mine from the light in hers, for both our doors were open. Then hers went out and I heard her bed creak. A faint illumination still fell across my bed from the streetlamp between the church and the parsonage. I lay staring up at the dark ceiling, on which the shadows of foliage dimly fluttered.

  Presently I heard a sound gentler than the rain, on my open door. A deferential tap, repeated.

  Hester said, “I have no nightgown.”

  I laced my fingers on the pillow and settled my head in the hollow of my two palms. “In what sense?”

  “I’m still frightened.”

  “Come on in.”

  I heard, rather than saw, her advance through the cool dark. She drifted, a pale slim shape, across the foot of my bed. She stood at the window with her arms folded, shiveri
ng as she glanced out. I patted the side of my bed and she slipped over and sat down.

  “I have no more faith,” I said. “That’s gone. That’s all over now. And what I’m wondering is, what have I lost? If it was just an illusion—a workable illusion—then its removal mightn’t matter so much. I mean it’s not such a tragedy. Like losing a wooden leg in an accident.”

  “Dearest Andrew.” She laid a cool hand on my bare shoulder. “A rout for the liberal forces—that what the election returns amount to?”

  “It’s not that I resent finding there is a God after all who answers prayers,” I said, speaking up to the ceiling. “That kind of personal God whose nonexistence was the mast to which I nailed my flag, and said Let’s get on from there. It’s not just having to face up to that possibility (as an alternative to pure fluke), it’s that my position is no longer tenable. If this is his answer, I’m just not his sort. Because who were at those prayer meetings? All the bores, dullards and bigots in town—not a person of civilized sensibility was there. If that’s the lot he gives aid and comfort to, so be it. But I cannot worship him. I can believe in him. But I cannot worship him.”

  “Poorest Andrew.” With one deft motion her feet were under the sheet with mine. The sheet came only up to our ankles. Her hand slipped round me and stroked my back.

  “When I was young, a student I mean, we used to debate whether Christ was the son of God. Now the question is whether God is the father of Christ. Is there a family resemblance, if this is the way he proceeds? We would argue long into the dormitory nights about the divinity of Christ. Now the question is the humanity of God. No, I have lost my faith.”

  She stirred somewhat against me, with a caress of impatience. “They’ll say it was a weak thing, that not even a miracle could save it.”

  “It’s just the other way around. It was so strong it took a miracle to crush it.”

  She seemed to move her head a little and laugh. “Quite a Calvinist.”

  I was so incredulous that I sat up in the bed. “What?”

  She sat up too and, gesticulating, we argued there for a brief bit.

  “Of course. This all-or-nothing idea. Whole hog. It’s got to be one thing or another, splitting hairs right down to the finish. All right, not hairs—essentials. This intolerance with other points of view, Dutch Calvinist stubbornness with people who don’t agree with you. Even your anti-Calvinism is the most Calvinistic thing I’ve ever seen. Certainly a resemblance to your father.”

  I simply let this pass. I dropped back on the pillow and lay with my arms folded over my brow. She parted my arms and peered to engage my vision.

  “You don’t need a god,” she laughed, “you’ll be one. By the time Turnbull gets through with you around here.”

  “Not quite.”

  “They’ll give you your pulpit back, if you want it. They’ll forgive your sins.”

  “It’s the least they can do, seeing I didn’t commit any.”

  “How about this one?”

  “This one won’t count, because I expect we’ll be legalizing it as soon as possible.”

  “Ah, Andrew,” she said, her arms going around me as mine sought hers in the cool dark, “the answer is yes.”

  Her body against me was like a bursting star.

  With the loss of my faith, I threw myself into parish work. It was the only way to forget. If there was Nothing, what did it matter what you did? If there was Nothing, so much the more need to tend your own visions of truth, beauty and goodness. If there was Nothing, it didn’t matter from which direction you drew your validities. For a while there it was Nitchevo, though I knew that in time I would probably be my old self again.

  The next day, I noticed a half-written sermon lying on my writing desk. I shrugged. There seemed no point in not finishing it.

  At breakfast, of course, seeing Hester all bright and fresh there in the kitchen with an apron over her dress, I thought of the passage in Through the Looking Glass where everybody had to run as fast as they could to stay in the same place. That’s how it was with me. I had been running as fast as my legs could carry me for a year, to stay in the same place. With a difference, of course. I thought of how Hester hadn’t ever let an argument drop, once it had been taken up.

  “You go around Robin Hood’s barn with your intellectual arguments, generation after generation, you men,” she said, pouring us coffee, “and there isn’t a religion anywhere in the world that can’t be summed up in a phrase my mother was always fond of.”

  “Let’s have it,” I said, bracing myself as ever. “What did your mother used to say?”

  “‘To be as humane as is humanly possible.’ That was the way she often put it. How we should try to be with one another.”

  Was that it? Was all the back-breaking, skull-cracking thought of the ages to be summed up in that absurd piece of unconscious irony? Was that the fruit of human wisdom? Maybe so, I thought rather sadly.

  “And you can’t say that there isn’t design,” she went on, gesturing with both hands. “You can’t say you don’t see that everywhere you look, everywhere in the universe. You can’t say there isn’t such a thing as a designing intelligence.”

  “Well,” I said, looking across the table at this woman, “I’d be a damn fool if I denied that.”

  About the Author

  Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born in Chicago to Dutch immigrant parents. His father wanted him to join the clergy, but after attending Calvin College and Northwestern University, De Vries found work as a vending-machine operator, a toffee-apple salesman, a radio actor, and an editor at Poetry magazine. His friend and mentor James Thurber brought him to the attention of the New Yorker, and in 1944 De Vries moved to New York to become a regular staff contributor to the magazine, where he worked for the next forty years.

  A prolific author of novels, short stories, parodies, poetry, and essays, he published twenty-seven books during his lifetime and was heralded by Kingsley Amis as the “funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic.” De Vries was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983, taking his place alongside Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and S. J. Perelman as one of the nation’s greatest wits.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1958 by Peter De Vries

  Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-6964-2

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

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