More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  Duffey was not an ordinary person. He was the Unique, the One, the Only Melchisedech. He was more than twice as old as the Wandering Jew. So he was not necessarily wrong in believing that he had special powers.

  One of the faculties that Duffey would lose, for the duration of the particular episode of life that he was in, was the faculty of effectively bestowing totems or tokens or talismans. So another prop will be gone from under the bridge. Another power will be lost to him. But he was in full possession of his totemic facility when he gave out the twelve primary talismans.

  The talismans were small magic objects. They were small, graven, flat, gold sticks, maybe in inch wide and eight inches long. That is one description given of a Melchisedech talisman by one designated person who said that he had seen his own talisman. But mostly, a talisman was absorbed by the small child who gripped it in his tight hand for some days until it became a part of him. And just what was graven on the talisman? “The being, the personality, the encounters, the scenario, the fate, the destiny of the person designated by the talisman, all were graven on it,” so said this particular designated person.

  Some time before the year 1920 or 1921, before young Casey was conceived or born, Melchisedech Duffey had given a talisman to Gabriel Szymansky for his son. This giving was within Duffey's hidden years.

  Once in St. Louis, Duffey had given a talisman to his friend and associate Charley Murray to be bestowed on Charley's sister's child, a child as yet unnamed, unborn, unthought of.

  It was also in St. Louis that Duffey had given a talisman to Giulio Solli the monster. Giulio, as far as can be remembered, was the only person sane enough to ask for the object, the fetish, the talisman. He was the only one who understood from the beginning just what he was supposed to do with it: hold it to his wife's belly at the time of conception and often during the months of her gestation, and put it into the hands of the special son the moment he was born.

  And Duffey had once given a talisman to Lily Koch to bestow on her younger sister. This sister was already born but was not fulfilled. It was a special case. That talisman was of a different shape, and it did not count in the primary twelve.

  And somewhere, sometime, in the hidden years most likely or even before them, Duffey had left a talisman for a yet unborn boy in Wisconsin, and another for an unborn boy in Morgan City, Louisiana. He had given one to a job printer in New Orleans for a daughter, and one to a truckline operator in Galveston. And he had given several in Chicago, and one to a seaman from Australia.

  Duffey often wondered how all this progeny of his would get together, for it was a group that he was creating. He wasn't, so far, very good at making up scenes and scenarios for these talismanic children to play.

  Absalom Stein, one of the talismanic children, developed a theory about all of this. It was Stein's Diminishing Theory of the Duffeys and the Groups. He said that a Melchisedech had made a group anciently, that this group had then made another Melchisedech after its own preferences, that this new Melchisedech had made a new group, and with each step the persons involved were slightly diminished. ‘But how far down that series are we now?’, Absalom would ask. If we diminish even slightly at each step, what giants we must have been once!

  3

  The golden melon that had been Chicago in the good years had begun to show spots of rancidness and oiliness and even rot along about the year 1933. Oh, most of that thing would be good for many years yet, but there were soft spots. The depression began on March 6, 1933. That was the symbol and arena of the new rancidness. It was, as Tony Apostolo said, a contrived thing created by a group of crooked men playing at being crooked gods.

  But hadn't the depression begun back in 1929? What, have we one of those in here. No, it didn't begin back then, not really. Here, let Tony Apostolo tell how it all went. Tony was a partisan of very many things. He was extravagant in his opinions and statements; but most often he was able to back up his extravagant statements with facts or with three-quarters facts.

  “There is the black legend that the depression began in October or November of 1929. It's a manufactured legend of unsavory instigation, but today it stands almost unchallenged. I challenge the legend right now. It's astonishing that it could ever have been accepted. Here is a nation that has lived through these sharp and bright and recent years. Here is a people who should have known what happened to them in their day-to-day awareness. But then somebody comes along and tells them ‘It wasn't that way at all: it was this way’. And the nation listens to the screed of false history and says ‘Well, we don't remember anything like that, but if you say it happened, that way then we will have to accept it. We are wrong and you are right and our memories ere false. Who are you anyhow? Oh, we aren't allowed to know that?’ The question of who these falsifiers are is still not answered, but the falsifications are accepted.”

  “You talk tripe!” Rollo McSorley swore savagely. Rollo was a partisan of all things opposite to Tony's things. There were about a dozen persons talking together this day at Melchisedech Duffey's.

  “It's said that the depression began with the stock market crash in 1929,” Tony continued. “I was in New York then working for the old International News Service, and I noticed that the reports of certain persons as to what was happening did not have much point of contact with what really was happening. Oh, the market busted, but it didn't carry very much with it when it went down. In particular it didn't carry any jumpers-out-of-the-windows with it, though the window-jumping suicides remain a showy part of the legend.

  “I was there. I checked out that part of it at the time. We used to get an average of about sixteen suicides a day in New York. The numbers rose and fell, and I knew why they did. People kill themselves out of boredom when it verges onto hysteria, and for no other reason. When there was something interesting going on, people did not kill themselves in great numbers. When there was not much of interest going on, people did tend to kill themselves more readily. The market bust was interesting, as a world series is interesting, as a big flood or a big fire or a big murder is interesting, or the beginning of a war.

  “On October 24, 1929, the day of the market bust, there were eleven suicides in New York, none of them by jumping out of windows. The next day, October 25, when it was realized that something interesting was happening in the market, the suicides fell to four. On the 26th, there were two, on the 27th, there were three (but that was a three-way suicide pact of a personal nature), on the 28th there was one, and on the 29th and 30th, there were none at all. The first time in eleven years that the city had gone two days in a row without a suicide. On the 31st, there were five, on the first of November, there were seven, and thereafter, they rose back to normal. There had not been any suicide that could be traced to losses on the market.”

  “You are going to get hurt talking like that,” Rollo McSorley said. “You're sure going to get hurt talking like that.” McSorley and Apostolo were both newspapermen.

  “But there is a legend of ten thousand suicides caused by the market crash in New York,” Tony continued. “It's true that there were ten thousand cartoons of men suicide-jumping out of windows. And there were ten thousand cheap shot orators and politicians screaming about the suicides. But there weren't any suicides.”

  “You sure can get hurt talking like that,” McSorley said, and he was serious. “You can get killed talking like that.”

  “The depression finally came on March 6 of 1933, this year,” said Adrian Hilton, a banker and an older brother of Sebastian Hilton, “and were those vested interests ever glad to see it come! They had worked so hard to bring it about! The depression came with the bank moratorium of March 6th to 9th.” “You know the comic strip of the wild detective tracking down the purchasers of cans of poisoned beans to keep them from eating them. He shoots all of them through the head just in time to stop them. The purchasers are all dead then, but they aren't dead from eating poisoned beans. That's the way it was with the banks last spring.

  “Some
of the banks were shaky. Some of them were overloaded. A very few were in actual danger of failure. So all of the banks were forced to close. And only the politically pure and amenable banks were ever allowed to open again. Quite a few thousand of the banks were looted completely; the new dynasty that had taken over the country had to get billions of sly money from somewhere. And most of the banks that were not allowed to reopen have never seen their records or assets since then. Some of the bankers objected to being robbed so summarily. Those who objected the loudest were murdered.”

  “You lie in your fool throat, Adrian!” Rollo McSorley howled out.

  “Maybe the legend of the murdered bankers is on par with the legend of the market-bust suicides, Adrian,” Melchisedech Duffey suggested. “Were there really any cases of it?”

  “Yes there were, Duffey,” Hilton said. “More than four hundred such cases.”

  “Name one,” McSorley cried out. “Name just one who was murdered for making a noise about it.”

  “My father,” said Adrian Hilton. “They killed his favorite bank. And then they killed him. We have other banks in our family, but we haven't any other father.”

  “You lie again,” McSorley charged. “Your father was killed by a husband who was jealous of him. And he had a reason to be jealous.”

  Adrian Hilton and Rollo McSorley had a fist fight then. It was a large and free-swinging fight. Both of these men were gymnasium fighters and the fight was a whanger. And after Melchisedech and others had broken up the fight, the whole subject was dropped as being an incitement to violence. So this particular group never did arrive at a clear history of what happened to the nation in those years. And even today, there is much to be said on each side of it. The truth is on one side, and all the wordiness is on the other.

  But with the coming of the depression, no matter when it began, there was one change that only the more civilized of the people noticed. One of the ancient joys had been weakened, and perhaps it was weakened forever. This was the joy of money, the joyfulness and joyousness of money. It became at least a deferred joy. And pray that it may not be deferred forever!

  Joy in money is one of the primordial joys. Melchisedech had known this in his fundamental being of Boy King; and it was not entirely an evil joy. Shakespeare wrote of “Africa and golden joys” . And Clough has it “How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho! / How pleasant it is to have money!” And God the Father tells it “in the day of Prosperity be joyful.” His crony Belloc has the version “I'm tired of life, I'm even tired of rime / But money gives me pleasure all the time.”

  Wealth and weal are things that are well. They are joys. And was there ever a more golden verse than, “The king was in his counting house / Counting out his money” ? In the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, she is called “Tower of Ivory” and “House of Gold” . These things are not allegories. They are holy and joyous wealths. Is it a vanity of God or is it a joy of God to be touched only by the gold of the gold-lined chalice?

  What of Holy Poverty then? Do you still not understand, you of the leather ears? It is the best things that Holy Poverty sacrifices, and not the worst. And money is one of the best things, one of the seven joys. There is a Holy Poverty, and there is a Holy Wealth. Only devils will ever regard an unholy poverty or an unholy wealth.

  “An anemia I'll suffer if there is a dearth of gold dust in my veins,” Melchisedech said once. “Well then, I'll suffer it if I must, but it will be a suffering and a dearth.”

  Have we forgotten what it means to be fortunate? To be fortuned, that is one of the good things.

  And yet, money wise or materiality wise, the depression wasn't important from any viewpoint. But there came a depression in immaterial and aesthetic and spiritual things that was degrading and depressing. There were other sorts of lavishness that disappeared out of the good life along with the lavishness of money. Lavishness in art was straited, and in music. The grandeur had paled. Lavishness in food and drink was lost and was not to be recovered. And even wisdom and goodness seemed to be dealt out with more miserly hands now.

  “There is nothing wrong with fleshpots so long as Irish Stew is what is served in those fleshpots,” Rollo McSorley used to say. There had come a time when Rollo and Josephine McSorley were forever urging Duffey to indulge in the fleshpots. There was a row of particularly gaudy fleshpots on Randolph Street. Yes, they were the opposite of grand; they were gaudy. Letitia went along with Duffey and a bunch of them a few times, and then she would refuse it. “There is something quite a bit wrong with those places,” she would say. “You can talk all you want to about the broad view and the narrow view, but those places are stifling bogs. I am going to have to take some third looks at a lot of things around here if my friends are hanging out in places like those.”

  “These are the green years that we're living in now, aren't they?” Duffey asked, trying to reason with himself and his wife and some of his friends. “Well then, we should provide ourselves with green places for our amusement. But are these places ‘Fiddlers' Greens’? Are they ‘Thelemes’?”

  “Duffey, those places are old fashioned,” Shirley Israel told him. “They just aren't in it with ‘Herm's’ and the ‘Curley Q’ and ‘Seven Steps Down’ and ‘Blow Brass’ and ‘The Farmer's Daughter’ and the ‘Dung Heap’. These places are where all the real people are going now. These, and a few other places make up ‘Fleshpot Row’.”

  “And the only place where they still have real Chicago-Hot Jazz is on ‘Fleshpot Row’,” Rollo McSorley said. Rollo had wooden ears, as a matter of fact, and he didn't know one jazz from another. But there was some slight truth in his statement. Since the speakeasies had turned or closed into legal saloons (this was probably in 1934 or 1935 that Rollo and his gang used to lead Duffey to the pots) there weren't a lot of places where one could still hear really bad music. There never had been any doubt about the worthlessness of Chicago-hot: “But it's our kind of worthlessness,” Elmo Sheehan used to say. The Hot had just been kicked out of the back door labeled ‘To the Trash Cans’ when it came back in again by another door labeled ‘Nostalgia’.

  “I understand that your own place in St. Louis is quite like this,” Ben Israel said once as several of them ate supper at the ‘Curley Q’.

  “No, it is not,” Duffey maintained. “Though that place has nearly passed out of my hands now, yet I know that it would never indulge in some of the things that are indulged in here. Better things and just possibly worse things it might indulge, but these particular sicknesses it would not accept.”

  But there was a wit with a new flavor about those places. There was a fever for newness all along the row. The food was good, though sometimes of a squeamish aspect that was hard to define. The drinks were good when they did not have an illicit needle in them. The music was Chicago-hot right enough, but it emphasized everything that was wrong with the Hot. The loose people drifting about were really loose.

  “I'll come no more to this place nor to any of them on the row,” Demetrio Glauch announced suddenly one evening, and he rose from the table. “It's nothing but a stifling bawdy house. There are good supper clubs to be had; there are good music halls and dance halls; there are good saloons and good honkey beer halls. There are places where fine talk may still be found. But this place is good for nothing. I've had my fill.”

  Demetrio rose to go, and they derided him with their wit and contempt that had toggle barbs on it. Olivia Hallshan, Shirley Israel, Alice Calumet, Josephine McSorley, those women hissed at him like she-adders. All of them except Margery Redfox.

  “Coming, Duffey?” Demetrio asked as he stood in that archway between the dining room and the entrance hall.

  “Ah, not quite yet, Demetrio,” Duffey told him. “I'll just finish my supper first.” And Demetrio looked at Duffey with a weird sort of doubt and disappointment that would stand between these two henceforth.

  Larry and Olivia Hallahan, Ben and Shirley Israel, Margery Redfox, Elmo Sheehan, John and Alice Calumet, Rollo
and Josephine McSorley, and Duffey, they finished a really good supper. There was a comedian who was fair funny there. He was a natural, and yet he picked up a raunchy style that was unnatural. He had a tortured face behind some of his twisted jokes, a laugh-clown-laugh flesh mask.

  Duffey had enough of the libertine in him already. This organized enticement was dangerous for him. He had enough trouble handling the liquor and the girls. The dope and the boys must not ever be for him. There had been certain sorcerers of these two advocacies whom he had not allowed to live when he had been Boy King so long ago. And if he had to let them live now, at least he wouldn't live with them.

  Duffey rose, tardily it's true, and left in disgust. So those women and their slightly womanish men hissed at Duffey as they had at Demetrio a few moments before, with literal venom.

  But later they would come after Duffey again with enticements and strings. They had designs on Duffey and they would not let him get clear.

  Duffey performed his last public act of magic on November 13 of the year 1935. Oh, and it was almost his first public act of magic too, after his childhood or childhoods. Duffey was not a Charley Murray, to be doing magic tricks always. He was a real magician who concealed his magic. Real magic is not the sort of thing that one does for the public unless one is a Messiah. Magic is not given for the entertainment of swine or of the swine that is in everybody. The showboat stuff simply isn't in accord with the genuine article.

  A mixed company was talking at Duffey's one evening, and Morris Poor (Doctor Morris Poor, he had recently become) was expressing doubts as to Duffey having any of his hinted unusual powers.