“But who was Hugo then?” Duffey asked.
“There wasn't any Hugo. That's just a name they made up because they knew you couldn't tell one of those kids from another. Sometimes Hugo was Nathan, sometimes he was Avram. Most of the times he was the twins Myron and Efram. They would always be in your store at the same time, and you would always think there was only one of them who got around awful fast. They could steal from you easier, there being two of them.”
“But which one of those damned little kids used to say ‘Duffey, baby, how are you’?”
“I don't know who used it first,” Margaret said. “There were half a dozen of them who took it up later when they found out that it bugged you.”
“Margaret, I am a mentalist and perhaps I am a sorcerer,” Duffey said. (All this conversation took place just the other day, many years after the Chicago era.) “I know what constitutes a person. And Hugo Stone (damn that kid anyhow!) was the same person as Absalom Stein who is present almost too often in these later years.”
“Duffey, you are a moth-eaten sorcerer and I don't believe that you do know what constitutes a person,” Margaret said.
“I know who he was. I made him!” Duffey insisted.
There was also the fact that Casey Szymansky insisted that he hadn't known Absalom Stein until he met him in New Guinea along about 1943 in the army, and that he hadn't known him in Chicago at all. He had heard though that Absalom Stein had been a Communist in Chicago under the name of Hugo Stone. This had always puzzled Duffey. Casey Szymansky used to be in Duffey's bookstore every day (after all, his father owned the building and was a sort of partner of Duffey in the businesses), and Casey had many clashes with Hugo Stone there. There had been a natural antipathy between the boys and sometimes it broke open. Twice Casey had fist fights with Hugo in the bookstore, and Casey lost both fights.
Would it not be a rum thing if Hugo had indeed been non-Hugo twins, and both of them had gotten their knocks in on Casey?
2
Toward the end of the year 1931, about three hundred prominent citizens of Chicago began to receive a well-printed news letter named The Answer. It touched on economics, it touched on ethics, it touched on municipal and federal government, it touched on education and religion and militarism. Mostly it touched on the theory of government and on the voices of the poor crying aloud to be fed. And it was very quippy. Some of the things in it were good, and even the bad ones were startling. It gave a post office box to which comments and rebuttals might be sent. It was a north side post office box. The Answer was to come out thrice weekly, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That startling first issue was out on Monday morning, and it was delivered by U.S. Mail.
In those days, the more deeply populated areas of large cities, and all the downtown areas of them, received four mail deliveries a day. Less densely populated areas received only two mail deliveries a day, and this was felt by some to be an injustice. A mailing dumped into any mailbox by seven o'clock in the morning would be delivered anywhere in the city by ten o'clock of the same morning. Postage was two cents for first class and one cent for second class. ‘The Answer’ with stenciled addresses and its one cent stamp on every publication was a morning newsletter.
Melchisedech Duffey, being one of the three hundred most prominent citizens of Chicago, received The Answer in the first mail one Monday morning, and he read it with his breakfast. He gasped in wonder as he gazed at it. There was something damnably familiar about it, and yet it was a first issue, and its name ‘The Answer’ was not what struck a responsive cord. Melchisedech perused it.
And within one minute he was howling in wrath mixed with other things.
“I have never seen such an astonishing mixture of perspicacity of a truly brilliant order mixed with double-damned-foolishness!” he roared. “Letzy, have a look at this devilish stuff! It is inflammatory, and three-quarters of the time it is right! Look at it! Read it out loud! This pastiche is destined for the rise and fall of many, mostly the wrong ones.”
Letitia Duffey read things out of it aloud. She had a fine scanning eye and a beautiful and haunting voice. Her voice was so good that she had recorded little time-and-temperature advertisements for the radio. People would almost cry when her voice said ‘It is seven fifteen this morning, and seventy-one degrees’. Her voice could move a stone person. And now she read with astonishment and buried laughter.
“Letzy, Letzy,” Melchisedech gave the left-handed voice to her recital. “How is it possible for a person to be so sage and so silly at the same time?”
“You manage that trick very well yourself, dear,” Letitia said with kindness.
“I am a special case,” Melchisedech clarified. “This is a madman writing that stuff. Oh, how he will hook the unthinking! How he will latch onto followers!”
Melchisedech was slow in catching onto it, but Letzy had caught it already.
There were things out of the wisdom of Augustine and Aquinas and Pope Benedict. There were worse things out of Nietzsche and Shaw and the Webbs and Machiavelli and the old and the new Roosevelt. This was ponderous hodge-podge. “But it will catch on!” Melchisedech moaned. “See if it doesn't, Letzy.”
“Oh, I can stop it any time I want to,” she said.
“How, bride of my breast, how?” he wanted to know. But Letitia simply looked at the palm of her hand and smiled.
“The Answer is the Leader!” The Answer proclaimed. “Make yourselves worthy. The Leader will appear this very week, if you are ready for him.”
Listen, that initial Monday edition was nothing compared to the second publication of Wednesday morning. It was expanded from a four page to a sixteen page journal. There were more than a hundred letters from the prominent citizens in that Wednesday morning edition. The letters were favorable. People were howling their agreement. And there was the stunning lead article ‘The Quest for Leadership is Ended; the Leader has been Found: I Am the Leader!!’ That was a thumper. Why, there was something magnetic about all of this! The leader was hypnotic. He made it felt that the need for leadership was the most striking need in the city and the nation and the world, and that the need was being met. This was happening all too fast.
“Why wait till next year for a leader who cannot lead. As it shapes up now, the contest will be between a good but inept man, Hoover, and an evil and even more inept man, Roosevelt. That almost turns the stomach against the whole idea of leadership. Do not let it do that. The world is crying for leadership. Well, that cry will be answered Friday night with the ‘Appearance’. First Chicago, then the Nation, then the World.”
“Letitia!” Melchisedech cried. “Did you ever hear of such a case of ego in all your life? Did you believe that in all the world there could be such an egomaniac as the writer of this stuff? Have you ever encountered such an egotistical person in all your short life?”
“Only one,” she said. “You.”
“I'm a special case,” Duffey said.
“You must admit, Duffey my pride, that he sounds more and more like you. He is coming to be you almost exactly — ”
“Me, with the brains knocked out, yes. I've wondered why he sounded like me and still lacked my sense.”
“Perhaps on some level, dear, unbeknownst to you…”
“No. I have not done this thing, Letitia, not on any level of my being, not in my conscious or in my unconscious. But there is a stunning similarity.”
“It's done on your little press, you know.”
“It is? Oh, of course it is. Why didn't I realize it? That's why it looked so familiar from the very first glance. Why, why, why? Who is doing this?”
“I can't answer the ‘why, why, why’ part of it. I'm not a good enough psychologist for that,” Letitia said. “But it's quite plain who is doing it. How many confounded geniuses are there in this block anyhow?”
“Only myself, Letitia. I can't think of another one.”
“Oh, you blind man!”
“But I believe that somebody has been
entering the shop at night. A box of medals his been stolen.”
“What medals?”
“Mostly world war medals, a residue from Gabriel's old pawn shop, and I've been selling a few of them to collectors. There are all things from congressional medals of honor to French honorifics and the German Blue Max with the old Emperor Maximilian's seal on it. There are generals' and admirals' insignia gone. Could the coming ‘leader’ want such things?”
“Yes, I think he could,” Letitia said.
The Friday morning The Answer was a rouser. It got down to what the quippy publisher called the ‘crushed louse’ by which he meant the ‘nitty gritty’. It gave the time and place where ‘the leader’ would appear that night. It would be at seven o'clock in the evening. It would be in Henry Horner Park beside the big equestrian statue. It was asked that a dozen or so bands should volunteer their services. ‘It will be better, in the day of wrath, that we knew you’ was a warning. It was asked that each of the recipients of The Answer should see to it that at least a thousand people of their rousing should attend the Appearance. ‘Yes, ten thousand each. Three million persons will not be too many to see the great thing.’ There were other exhortations, and then there were many articles of uncommonly good points.
“It worries me that he makes such good sense,” Duffey said in exasperation.
“That is what has always worried me about you, dear,” Letitia said.
“How can anybody be so intelligent, and then reach such irrational conclusions?”
“People ask the same thing about you, dear.”
“But he is so much like me. It's weird.”
“Don't worry about it, Duffey. I think he'll outgrow it,” Letitia said.
There weren't any three million people in Henry Horner Park that evening, but there were about a hundred thousand of them, in the park itself and in the adjacent street. The three hundred copies of The Answer must have been read by quite a few persons and word-of-mouth had been at work. And the Chicago daily papers had been playing the thing up for several days. There weren't any dozen bands there, but there were three of them. It would be better for those three in the Day of Wrath. By the great equestrian statue in the park there was a live white horse. It was clothed in gold lamé and such things and was beautiful. Duffey knew that horse. It lived in his own neighborhood. It had been a fire horse. It had had a proud way of holding its head ‘like a Roman Emperor’ as somebody had said of it. And one man had been so impressed by its dignity that he had bought it from the fire department, which was doing away with horses anyhow, and had given it a pleasant home in a double vacant lot. And there it had reigned as the pride of the whole neighborhood. It wasn't really an old horse, no more than nine or ten years old. It was large and solid. It was itself a living statue.
There were signs about there. ‘When the Leader comes and mounts the horse, then the world will recover its strength’. ‘At Seven O'clock the Leader Comes: Be Ye Ready for Him’. ‘The High Rider of this Horse will Become the Leader of this World: Perhaps He Will Also Be An Angel Out of Heaven’. That was extravagant stuff. It was almost time for the leader to make his appearance. The three bands were playing military and inspirational music. There was an air of expectations.
“This is too much in my style to be a total hoax,” Melchisedech Duffey said. “Letzy, do you think it will be a qualified hoax then? Letzy, Letzy?” But Letitia had slipped off. She intended, for reasons of her own, to intercept ‘The Leader’ and not allow him to arrive in full regalia.
And he was in full regalia when she blocked his path. Croix de la Legion D'honneur, Croix de Guerre, Medal of Honor, and Navy Medal of Honor, Iron Cross, Order of the Golden Fleece Medallion, Crown of St. Stephen, Star of the Ninth Fusiliers, many more decorations. Some of them were non-military, some of them were of Chicago lodges, but that didn't matter. He was in scarlet tunic, belted and bandoliered. He wore a shako on his head. He had a hussar sabre and his father's Knights of Columbus Fourth Degree sword belted on him. He was booted and spurred. And he was walking in a transport with nearly-closed eyes. This was the leader who would take over the world as soon as he got on the noble white horse. But Letitia Duffey stood in his way.
“Oh, don't spoil it, Aunt Letitia, don't spoil it,” the Leader said.
“I'm not spoiling it, I'm saving it,” she told him. “After you get on the white horse, you won't have any idea what to do then, will you? You haven't thought beyond that point, have you?”
“Sure I have. Plan ‘Beta’ goes into effect as soon as I mount, and plan ‘Alpha’ becomes past history. I will take over Chicago and then America and then the world.”
“Nonsense, Casey, it'd never work.”
“If you stop me, Aunt Letitia, you'll be sorry in the years to come.”
“How so, little Leader?”
“You'll get a look at some of the leaders who are really in line to take over the world if I don't. You'll realize in that day that you should have let me go ahead with it.”
“But my opinion in this day is that I should not let you. All right, put all the medals in this paper sack, Casey. And take off that tunic and all those belts and wrap them up together.”
“All right, if I can go on to the park then and see the horse. Oh he does look magnificent! And see the bands up close.”
“All right,” Letitia said. They wrapped up all the regalia so that it looked like a package of almost anything, and went to the park.
So ‘The Leader’ did not appear that night, and The Answer did not publish again. The bands played merry music, and many of the people lingered in the pleasant park for several hours and bought coney islands and hot dogs and candy and pop and bevo and ice cream from the hokey pokey men. Well, it was a good outing, and perhaps it was a hoax on all of them.
Kasmir (Casey) Szymansky was ten years old then. He was the son of Gabriel Szymansky the owner of the building where the Duffeys lived and a sort of partner of Melchisedech. And Melchisedech himself had taught Casey to print on the press in the back of the bookstore. He had also transmitted many of his ideas to the boy. That was Casey's first grab for universal power.
Of course he was a genius. He was one of Duffey's creations, though Duffey had pretty much neglected him so far. Now he would have to be accepted as something anyhow, as a churn in which butter of a particular flavor was churning and coagulating.
In later years, Casey always said that the ‘Leader’ bit was an antic and a hoax all the way. It wasn't though. Letitia who saw his face as he came towards the park that evening knew that it was for real.
One day, it was eight or ten years after the Leader and the White Horse episode, Duffey looked at this Kasmir (Casey) Szymansky more closely than usual. He saw that Casey was a young man and no longer a boy. This was the day that Casey's father, Gabriel Szymansky, had died. Casey had already been to college, off and on, for some time. This business of the kids growing up when Duffey wasn't looking had infected quite a few of the youngsters. In the true and non-lineal accounts, there is never observed a strict sequence of the years, and all the Chicago years were non-lineal. The Chicago series really ran for twenty-one years, from 1925 to 1946, but it never pretended to sequence. People change hardly at all over the years, and then in one minute, they are greatly changed. Attitudes and towns do not change gradually, and neighborhoods and people groups do not. They change suddenly after long times of changelessness. And so it was with the young people.
Duffey did not always have excellent rapport with Casey while the boy was growing up. Kasmir W. (Casey) Szymansky was born on October 7, 1921, so Duffey was about twenty years his senior. Casey thought more of Duffey than he did of his own father (Duffey had made him, and Casey was somewhat aware of that), but he still didn't think very much of him.
During Casey's college years, in and out of Notre Dame and Depaul and Northwestern and Marquette and the University of Chicago, he had always published a college magazine. This was invariably known as the Crock or some variation o
f that name. And when Casey went no more to college, for he never finished, he moved the last of the Crocks to the back room of Duffey's book store and brought it out there on the little press. It quickly reached a few dozen people around the country with eyes for issues and tendencies. It even became known, in a sort of a way, so that Casey was ticketed by recruiters for future reference. Casey, at this time, had come into money and property from his father's estate.
So much for that. But the Crock would play a part in the difficulties of Duffey as well as in the difficulties of Casey Szymansky.
Now, t'was a fact that Casey was a talismanic child of Melchisedech Duffey. And just how much reality was there in this business of talismanic persons? Is there a difference between a person made out of ordinary clay and a person made out of talismanic clay? Was Duffey more than a Pate, a Kumanek, a Nonos, a Nasho, an Athair Baiste, a Sponsor, a Padrino, a Godfather? There are hints forever of non-species sponsors, fairy godmothers and such who have special power over infants. Is that of a creating sorcerer to his creatures the same relationship? God knows. But it is a relationship that is not without its effect.
Well Duffey did have, much of the time, special talents. No human person can see the future clear and uncompromised, but many persons can see pieces of it: scenes, congruencies, cardinal happenings, particular glimpses of the minutiae of special persons, fateful crossroads, tides of persons and groups, disasters, vignettes total and detailed many years before their happening. Melchisedech Duffey had this prescient quality very strongly. And one who can see coming happenings, even a little bit, may come to believe that he is causing those happenings. Duffey believed, somewhere in an uncensored or unaccountable part of his mind, that he had caused and was causing a certain number of people to happen and to continue to happen. These were the talisman people, and it did seem as though Duffey had some part in their creation.
More Than Melchisedech Page 14