(That part is not quite true. People didn't exactly see it shatter into a thousand pieces. It shattered into only thirteen pieces. It was a trick mirror that old showman Piccone had and it shattered into only thirteen pieces. And these thirteen pieces fit together again easily.)
Nevertheless, Duffey was getting better-looking by the moment. Everybody could see that. “That's wonderful, God,” Teresa chortled. “Did anybody ever tell you how wonderful you really are? Don't overdo it though. He's conceited enough as it is. Can you back it up just a little bit? Oh, that's perfect. Cut it off right there. Thank you.”
Why yes, Duffey was quite a bit better looking than he had been. He still looked like a worn-out shoe, it's true, but it must have been an incomparably better shoe that was now somewhat worn and scuffed. And it wasn't worn clear out. And Teresa was a genuine saint (lots of people had guessed this of her) and she had always been on quite familiar terms with God.
Nobody could adequately describe Teresa. She was sunburned quicksilver. She was fire and ice and holy wine. One description says that she was ‘dark and lithe and probably little’. So she may have been once, for about three seconds. When she had acts at her father's old STAR AND GARTER Vaudeville Theatre she had an act where she could go behind a screen and change clothes and appearance and size and voice and everything else in three seconds, and do it again and again.
But she was a Blue Moon person, a One in a Million Person. She was Duffey's Masterpiece. She was also one of God's Masterpieces. At the fabulous midnight supper there, Duffey had eyes only for Teresa, although he talked wittily with other persons at the supper without noticing that he did. Other voices, strange and mysterious, were adding interest to the conversations, but remember that both Teresa and her father were ventriloquists.
Then Teresa took Duffey into a little room off that thrice-special upstairs dining room. There she hypnotized, or otherwise occultly influenced Duffey, to sit on her lap, and she fondled him and kissed him.
“Wait, wait!” he cried out after a long while. “I shouldn't be doing this. You're a saint.”
“Of course I am,” she laughed. “Guys who never sat on a girl-saint's lap don't know what a really good lap is. Did you ever sit on a lady-saint's lap or have a lady-saint give you a piggy-back ride?”
“Yes to both questions,” Duffey said. “My wife in both cases. I'm as sure that she's a saint as I'm sure that you are.”
“That's wonderful. I'll meet her someday. Get on my back now.”
Teresa gave Duffey a piggy-back ride, and she carried him all around the little room and into the big thrice-special dining room.
“Oh, Teresa, I see that you and Mr. Duffey have become good friends,” her father said with pleasure.
“Isn't she wonderful, Duffey!” Monica Murray Stranahan spoke happily. “I was afraid that you two most extraordinary persons I have ever known might not adjust right away, but you mesh perfectly.”
And yet this girl Teresa had wonderful things in her that are deeper than the ocean and higher than the sky.
Melchisedech Duffey was up quite early the next morning, and he entered the Broadway Oyster House where there was said to be something going on at all hours. A big-nosed kid was sitting at a big table by himself, and at that moment he called out in a damnable accent and a loud voice “One hundred oysters please.” Such an order would have raised eyebrows in many eating places but not in the Broadway Oyster House. “How do you want them cooked?” a waitress asked him.
“What, what, is there more than one way to cook an oyster?” the big-nosed kid asked with a touch of alarm. “I've worked in a dozen oyster bars and I never knew there was more than one way.”
“Where are you from, lad?” called a big man who was probably the proprietor.
“From New Orleans.”
“Give him a hundred New Orleans style oysters,” the man ordered.
“Now wasn't that simple,” Duffey laughed as he sat down at the big table across from the big-nosed kid.
“Oh, I hardly knew you,” the kid said. “Did you suddenly get better-looking in the middle of the night last night?”
“Yes I did, through a certain saintly intercession that I don't completely understand. What Irish hero was it who ate one hundred oysters each of them bigger than a wagon wheel? It was one of the heroic labors he had to perform. Was it Finn McCool? Are you Finn McCool incognito?”
“No, I'm Finn McCool openly. But that was long ago.”
“Who else are you, Finn, and what are all the things in your pockets?”
“I'll show you,” the kid said, “though I don't understand your getting so much better-looking in the middle of the night. It isn't a case of overweening vanity you've suddenly developed, is it? You are an art dealer among other things. What do you think of this?”
“Mm mm, I don't think. I know. It's an original Van Ghi. Where did you get it?”
“I painted it, of course. I'm Van Ghi.”
“No, you're not. You're Finnegan. I don't see how you can stretch far enough to be Van Ghi, the least known painter of the best known pictures currently appearing in the country. Who else are you, Finn?”
Finnegan took big bundle after big bundle out of his pockets and they were all magic bundles, absolutely magic. The one hundred oysters began to arrive then. The eating of them was one of the heroic labors assigned to Finnegan as Irish hero, yes. But before Finnegan had been an Irish hero, several thousand years before, Finnegan had been Iason and Odysseus and others.
“This one here, Finnegan, has to be out of the future,” Duffey commented as he held another very large painting. “I am familiar with the style of Van Ghi, of yourself. He, you, haven't come nearly this far yet. It's something you might be able to do ten years from now. When did you paint it, or when will you paint it?”
“Oh, I don't know. It's a bothersome mystery to me. But keep it for me. I believe it will acquire meaning as the years go by.”
“My universe is about complete again, Finnegan. The circle is nearly full. The two foci are almost in place. You are one of them.”
“A universe with only two foci is like a stool with only two legs. It can't stand by itself.”
“But a metaphor with only two foci can stand by itself, and a universe has to be a metaphor before it is a reality.”
“All right. I'm one foci. Who's the other?”
“Teresa Piccone, soon to be Teresa Stranahan.”
“No, no, no, impossible. You don't understand your own jumble, Duffey, because the affair of myself and Teresa isn't any part of your jumble. Our interval is completely outside of time. It's an isolated happening. It was an alternate that was not used, a discard, a wonderful discard.”
“Possibly, Finnegan, since I don't know at all what you're talking about. Nevertheless, you two are the two foci of the coming reanimation of my universe. We will see.”
“I bet we won't.”
“Finnegan, my universe will soon be complete again. And, by a paradox which I don't quite understand, it has always been complete.”
The hundred oysters were all gone. With the help of a few new and kind friends, they had all been eaten. Finnegan left Duffey for a while then. And Duffey recalled what somebody (probably Stein) had said of Finnegan once:
“You could skin Finnegan and throw his pelt into the corner, and it would still crackle with aura and smoke with essence. But you couldn't find all his essence bottled in one place.”
It was likely on the day following hundred-oyster-day that Finnegan and Teresa finally met in the flesh. This was insisted upon and arranged by Monica Stranahan. Again, as when Duffey met Teresa for the first time, there seemed to be small earthquakes. Finnegan and Teresa both knew that these were time-quakes however. The past and present and future times were all mixed up ridiculously. Again they both came to the meeting with trepidation that was made up of equal parts of awe and delight. But the difficulty was more serious than in the case of Duffey and Teresa. Between Teresa and Finnegan th
ere was a wrenching enormity. Finnegan had tried to explain this to Duffey on oyster morning, that it was an alternate happening, a happening clear outside of normal time, possibly a rejected happening that had been left on the cutting-room floor and could not appear in the final version of the world scenario. But Finnegan could not find any way to tell this to the comparatively innocent ears of Melchisedech Duffey.
Well, in what was possibly an alternate and unaccepted version of things, Finnegan and Teresa had been acquainted. In fact they had been married for twelve years. They had an intense and mostly happy life in those twelve years. They'd had wonderful children. They had lived in grace and joy. They compared their memories of those twelve years now, and their memories agreed all the way to the oil-cloth on that little kitchen table to the broken back step off the back porch of the house.
But there was no room for those twelve years in any chronology. Teresa was just twenty-two and a half years old now. She remembered clearly at least every day of the last twenty years of that time. And there were countless people who remembered the lively Teresa, the daughter of the Show-man who ran the Star and Garter Burlesque Theatre. Teresa was everywhere, she knew everybody, she was known. There was no room in her life for those twelve years with Finnegan.
Finnegan was somewhat older and much more of a wanderer, but he had a good memory of all his years and adventures.
There was no room for those twelve years, but neither of them wanted to give them up. Those years had been crammed with a love unlike any other love ever. Not to be equaled.
Well, how had that period ended in the memories of the two of them? Oh, the memories of the two of them had simply ended after twelve years of it. But it still might be going on in some other time, as wonderful as ever.
“Finnegan, a thing like ours could destroy Melchisedech's World and leave it in total wreckage,” Teresa complained. “How do we get around that?”
“I think we have it backwards, Teresa. I believe that Melchisedech's World is shot through with such anomalies. Haven't you had the feeling, again and again, that not all the Duffeys are as contemporary with each other as they seem? One at least of those I confabbed with during the last two days is dead, but he doesn't seem dead. He is merely living in a past where he is still alive. Another of our close-knit group was killed in New Guinea during the war, and yet I talked with him less than an hour ago. Of course he's a ghost, but he's a convincing ghost, and I don't know whether or not he realizes that he is a ghost. Overseas, in the war in the South Pacific, we had a group that called ourselves, and was called THE SLEAZY SEVEN. But only five of us returned from that war. All seven of us are here at this confab though, five of us mostly alive, two of us a little bit less so. And Duffey himself (Oh Duffey Himself!) is mostly made up of a long series of ‘seven lost years’. Shall we play it that way, Teresa? It's as good a way as any to play it, isn't it?”
“It's too funny not to play it that way, Finn. I'm all for it. But will our accepting it as that way make it that way?”
“To some extent, Teresa. It'll help. If wanting things to be some way didn't help them to be that way, then there wouldn't be much left to Melchisedech's World, or to the generally accepted world either.”
“Now, Finnegan, since we agree that it's funny, let's have a fun-fest for a few minutes. The night before last I got Duffey to sit on my saintly lap and ride on my saintly back. I really am a saint, you know.”
“During the twelve years you certainly were. And I'm sure that you are in the present time. You were and are a hilarious saint.”
“Let's have a little hilarity then. Sit on my lap, Finn, and then bounce on my torso. I have the bounciest torso I know of. Oof, oof, oof, I love to have the wind bounced out of me like that. Oh, how the time does fly when you're having fun! We'd better go out and show them that we're all right.” (This first meeting of Finnegan and Teresa took place in a room at the Stranahan's.)
Then Teresa burst out of that room with Finnegan riding on her shoulders and both of them whooping and in high good humour.
“Oh, isn't she wonderful, Finnegan!” Monica Murray Stranahan cried happily. “There seemed to be all sorts of storminess and apprehension when you two went into the room for your first meeting, but I'm delighted to see that you've come to perfect understanding with each other. Oh, I've never seen two more joyful people! Teresa, you're never so perfectly yourself as when you're giving a man a ride on your shoulders.”
Teresa carried Finnegan through all of the rooms of the Stranahan Mansion and to every group of guests that was there.
And yet this girl Teresa really did have things in her that are deeper than the ocean and higher than the sky.
Vincent Stranahan was to marry Teresa Piccone on the first Saturday of May of that year. Melchisedech Duffey didn't know either of them. He almost didn't know anybody who knew knew either of them. But his ‘creatures’ the Duffeys seemed to have minds of their own. They had a strange homing instinct (had Duffey given it to them, or had it been otherwise generated?) to be in St. Louis for that event. “Where the eagles are gathered together, there will I be also,” Melchisedech Duffey said. The World of Melchisedech Duffey had many tendencies that Melchisedech himself didn't understand at all.
But the World of Melchisedech Duffey did begin its reanimation with that St. Louis Conclave, in spite of it being all full of errors of time and space, in spite of erroneous names being used in several cases for the Persona of the Melchisedech World Drama. The reanimation began there, it found a validity in itself, and it is a living and growing world today.
‘Why haven't we seen hide nor hair of this world?’ somebody asks. Because you're on the inside of it and the hide and hair are on the outside. ‘Aren't the people of that so-called world pretty old by now?’
Some of them are old, some of them are dead and their places taken by others. But Hilarious Saints do not age as fast as other people do. Notice it sometime.
‘Can you not give me some corroborative proof that I can hold in my hand right now?’
You are holding the corroborative proof in your hand right now. It is what you have just been reading. The chapbook or brochure with the name ANAMNESIS exists only in the World According to Melchisedech Duffey. Really.
We defy you to find it in any of those minor alternative worlds.
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