The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  The MacGuffin

  Stanley Elkin

  I’d like to express my gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation for putting Joan and me up in Ballagio on Lake Como over in Italy in the villa they run there for the villaless, where I not only wrote part of and got a pretty good handle on the rest of The MacGuffin, but also managed to spend the five happiest weeks of my life.

  to Joan

  CONTENTS

  Begin to Read

  A Biography of Stanley Elkin

  Though he was probably about the right age for it—fifty-eight—Druff didn’t suppose—not even when he was most fitfully struggling to bring forth a name like something caught in his throat, or spit out the word momentarily stuck on the tip of his tongue—that what he was experiencing was aphasia, or Alzheimer’s, or the beginnings of senility, or anything importantly neurological at all. Though he wouldn’t have been surprised if something dark was going on in the old gray matter—a kind of lava tube forming, say, or, oh, stuff creeping in the fossil record, putty leaking into his creases and crevices, his narrows, folds and fissures, some sluggish, white stupidity forming and hardening there like an impression formed in a mold. He hadn’t become absent- minded. Indeed, if he was asked to do anything, anything at all—call up to his son when he had finished his shower, pass on telephone messages, tell Rose Helen that the jeweler had called, the clasp on her necklace was ready, she could pick it up when she wanted—not only did he deliver the messages intact, he couldn’t rest until they were delivered; the light, ordinary tasks being what they’d always been, annoying chores, petty charges of being, small anxieties, like, oh, detours on unfamiliar roads whose extent was not known to him, or the go-here, go-there arrangements of red tape. Which was ironic, wasn’t it, his being City Commissioner of Streets and all.

  It wasn’t fugue state, although he’d noticed of late (of late? of late? when did you first notice it?) that information seemed to go in one ear and out the other. He’d become impatient with information unless it was organized as opinion, a column in a newspaper was an example, or a memo someone in his department had signed off on (signed off on?), and then he might recall only the opinion but couldn’t for the life of him give the reasons for it. It wasn’t even that Druff was particularly forgetful, and his character, though it occasionally failed to concentrate, never forgot.

  Rather—there was no way he could measure this—it was as if he had somehow mysteriously lost, well, force. It seemed to him that people made allowances for him, that he lived under some new and infuriating dispensation, on some plane of condescension, like the handicapped, or at least the elderly, in a sort of wit-reamed oblivion. The same people, his oldest acquaintances some of them, who in the past had always been at least a little afraid of him, or at least a little wary—not, mind, obsequious, never obsequious; for they’d known that, caught in their kindness, they had more to fear from him than ever they did from mere opposition, or even open confrontation—fell all over themselves to dredge up anecdotes about him, ancient tales of his old heroic sangfroid. (If they only knew how froid! Druff thought over the chirps and squeaks and other freezing noises in his head, helpless to provide anything for their conversation, to add or detract, chilly behind his smile.)

  Though it was Druff’s opinion they were still afraid of him, not of his power, but of their own. (Why, they’d traded places!) As if, when it came to Druff, they chose forbearance and restraint. No, that was dumb. They chose nothing. It was still a women-and-children-first world, and they weren’t afraid of their power at all, merely mindful of it. City Commissioner of Streets or no City Commissioner of Streets, Druff, in his real avatar, the one they automatically rose to give up their seats to or hold open doors for or help with his packages, was their little old lady. (So what, incidentally, was all that shit about that they had to fear from him if he caught them in their kindness? A lump on stumps could have caught them in their measly, inchworm charities.) What was a poor City Commissioner of Streets to do? Well, if he was really getting stupid, hold on tight, disclose nothing, do whatever he could to muffle the dark screech of the slow stalactites—stalagmites?—dripping in his skull. Trump their tolerance with tolerance, and other-cheek the very breath from their bodies. As, knowing his limitations, but calling it delegation of responsibility, some entirely honorable division of labor, he was on terms with, though dared not second-guess, the civil engineers who worked for him, educated hard-hat types who did the scientific heavy lifting in his department. Hey, he was only little old Bob Druff, City Commissioner of Streets. Not His Highness, not Your Lordship, or Senator, or the Right Honorable anyone at all. He wasn’t even Professor Druff, less real clout to his title than the president of a humane society. Only the buck stopped there.

  And, God help him, the bucks. For his dubious kid kenneled in graduate school, for the built-ins in his back yard—the barbecue, the pool—for the tall, unlovely weathered gray wooden fence around that yard, for the additions to his home—the deceptive bungalow in the modest neighborhood, as riddled with gear (high-tech furnishings in the snazzy basement and remodeled rooms) as an embassy, for the top-of- the-line Chrysler in his garage, for his cashmeres, silk suits and cambrics—all the difficult cloth of their—Rose Helen’s and his—compromised wardrobe.

  Honest? He was honest. He supposed he was honest. Though the graft poured in. They threw it at him, the graft. He didn’t even have to solicit. (As councilman, as council president, and later as under- mayor, he’d taken even less advantage.) So he was honest. In those days, the golden age of his brains, he knew where they were, but had never sought to find, the buried bodies. (He was a politico. It was a kind of received wisdom, the gossip you took in with your mother’s milk. You didn’t seek out information. You didn’t buy it. Aldermen didn’t have spies. You just knew. As far as he was concerned, there were no marks against his innocence.)

  Anyway, it was his force he’d have liked to recover, or was at least nostalgic for, his edge and intelligence.

  “Though maybe,” he informed Dick, the plainclothes chauffeur whisking him on this beautiful spring day on a leisurely cruise through the park, searching out potholes, “that famous ‘golden age of my brains’ I do so like to discuss, was only the absence of overload, in the days before my computer chips, say. Incidentally, I see by the morning paper on my lap here that scientists working on three continents have succeeded in photographing atoms blown up ten million times—count ’em, Dick, ten million—in some new superconductor material. Researchers came up with this compound. They mix these powders and bake them up in ovens. Copper and oxygen. A couple others. Barium. One your commissioner never heard of. Yttrium? Copper, oxygen, yttrium and barium powder. Oxygen cookies. The copper, yttrium and barium assortment. They think what lets them carry so much current with such little energy loss—sounds like crowd control; we know about that in the department of streets, don’t we Dick?—are ‘flaws, imperfections in the alignment of the atoms.’ ”

  “I was reading that paper myself, Commissioner.”

  “Were you, Dick?”

  “Well, the obits anyway. Macklin died.”

  “Macklin, Macklin… Marvin Macklin? He died, Marvin Macklin?” (God knew how he’d come up with that first name; he had not a clue who the guy was.) Dick took the limo deep into the bottom of a pothole. “After a long illness.”

  “Oho. We know what that means.”

  “Cancer.”

  “Well, that’s the thing, Dick. There could be incredible spin-offs.”

  “Spin-offs from cancer?”

  “ ‘Waste-free electronics,’ it says. ‘Powerful new magnets.’ Old Macklin comes back, in eight or nine years they sprinkle his tumors with iron, suck them right up in the Hoover.”

  “Really?”


  “We ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  “Speaking personally, Commissioner, I think I have.”

  “You’ve seen squat jackshit, Dick,” the City Commissioner of Streets said. “What there was whizzed by you just like it did me and about everyone else. Oh, you mean corruption, you mean what goes on. I see what you mean. You’re talking about downtown. You’re talking about significant bricks through important windows. You’re talking about bending some colored guy’s head. Watered cement you could go fishing in, swimming, maybe skate on in winter. You’re discussing the hear-no- see-no-speak-no evils—bribery and blackmail raised to the levels of professions. That’s what you’re on about. Forgive me, Dick, but you’re missing the point, I think. You ain’t, you really ain’t. Seen nothing yet, I mean. We’re living on the cusp here. Like guys standing up in canoes in heavy seas. My goodness, the boneyard of history is shtupped with folks like us, knifed on the cutting edge, caught short between technologies.

  “What are they going to do, retrain us? You hear they’re going to retrain you, you run for the hills.”

  “As a matter of fact,” the chauffeur said, “there was some talk.”

  “Yes? What? No, let me guess. They offered to put you into a program where they teach you evasive procedures, bodyguard driving, executive protection. The swerve and dodge skills, all the eat-my-dust, change-directions, push-them-off-the-road ones.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Dick said. “You heard about that.”

  “No. I swear,” Druff said gloomily. “I love it when I guess.”

  Because where there’s smoke there’s fire, Druff thought, and now maybe they were going to take his drivers—he had two, Dick was one, Doug the other—away from him. (Besides himself, only the mayor, police and fire commissioners had limos.) And he’d been a show-the-flag sort of commissioner. There were times, plenty of them, when he’d sent a riderless limousine out into the neighborhoods. Or, cloning his power, ventriloquizing it—he and his drivers were more or less the same size—ubiquitized himself, had one of them drive while the other rode statesmanlike in the back, a fleeting, shadowy sit-back stand-in for the commish, his deputized decoy presence, like some false Hitler’s. (Being City Commissioner of Streets was not without its perks and splendors.) Though most of the time, of course, it was really only him, genuine Druff, back there. Well, quite frankly, he rather enjoyed being snatched through the city, siren screaming, Mars light flaming on the roof of the big car, to any emergency which required his attention, or at least his presence—he filled the nooks and crannies of his sinecure like a suit he’d been measured for by tailors—in the streets he commissioned. And delighted in municipal occasion, the reviewing-stand condition. Give him a hot day, a parade, and let him strut his stuff (comfortably in place) on a folding chair, or even along the hardest, backless bench. Despite the fact that his was an appointed position, he had an image of a bleachered , shirtsleeved America. Registered voters were his countrymen, pols his tribe. But had some vague aversion, this niggling atavism in the blood, a soft xenophobia—hey, he knew people who wouldn’t give someone from a different precinct the time of day!—toward the whole participatory democracy thing, the League of Women Voters, proclaimed Independents, reformers, kids better off taking the fresh air outdoors but who volunteered to stuff envelopes instead, man phone banks—airheads with all their muddled notions of good government, the various tony freedoms and constitutional amendments. (He believed in good government. Druff did. Anyone would be a fool not to, but good government was services. It was meat inspectors, guys who checked the restaurants, the building codes. It was the department of sanitation, the fire department, a strong police. It was knowing what to do with the infrastructure, making the trains run on time without harming the Gypsies.)

  His ease he meant, taking his ease in the heat. His ease he meant, that he wished he could have over again, like a second chance, his ease he’d have liked to recover, the way some people wanted their youth back. His force and edge and intelligence.

  “I stand by the system. I stand by the system up to my ears.”

  “Sir?”

  He hadn’t realized he had actually spoken.

  “Because, Dick,” he said, putting one past his driver, making the fellow think he hadn’t been paying attention (and maybe he hadn’t; maybe he was figuring the pros and cons, mulling over the offer to become a Counter-Chauffeur in the Counter-Chauffeur Division, weighing his age against his chances), “if the mayor hadn’t appointed me to this job, God knows I couldn’t have made it through another campaign.”

  “You, Commissioner? Sure you would. You had a lock on those people. Those people were your people.”

  “No,” Druff said, “you can’t think that way. I don’t know, how does anyone declare for the statehouse even? And the federal fellows, how do the federal fellows do it?”

  “It’s their calling. Why I drive a limo instead of set up for a taxi.”

  “I guess,” Druff said. And then, leaning forward to close down some of the distance between them, “Just between us, Richard. Answer a question?”

  “Sir?”

  “No no. Between us. Two guys. I’m not City Commissioner of Streets, you’re not my driver.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s the morning line on me?”

  “On you, Commish?”

  “On Bobbo Druff, yes.”

  “Well, to tell you the absolute honest-to-God truth, that you could have been a contender.”

  “Ah,” satisfied Bobbo.

  “And but so how come?”

  “That I’m not? The absolute honest-to-God?”

  “Tit for tat.”

  “It was all that Inderal I was putting into my system,” he told him, naming the old blood-pressure medication, the drug of choice for anyone—politicians, actors, TV and radio people—who had to speak in public.

  “A stand-up guy like you?”

  “I missed my hard-ons, yes.”

  “You, Commissioner? Stage fright?”

  “Jack and Bobby had to have been iron men. Gary Hart.”

  “You’re telling me Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan weren’t disaffected, just two jealous husbands?”

  Sure, he thought, my ease. That bright, cold composure.

  “But I was at that debate. You never even broke a sweat,” said the driver.

  “That’s right.” Druff remembered. “You were there.”

  “Jesus,” Dick said, “the time the guy said ‘my opponent,’ and you interrupted him and spelled out your name? And then when he said ‘my opponent’ a second time and you spelled ‘opponent’? My, that was lovely. He didn’t stand a chance. And him screaming ‘Speak to the issues, speak to the issues.’ And you said, ‘The issues? Right, I’ll speak to the issues.’ ”

  “ ‘Clear the snow,’ ” Druff said, recalling.

  “Clear the snow, yeah.”

  “ ‘Test for safe chlorine levels in the municipal pools.’ ”

  “Yeah,” said his driver, giggling, “the chlorine levels.”

  “ ‘Enforce the bus schedules. Rip out all unnecessary stop signs, but plant them like trees wherever there’s been an accident. More time for your nickel on the parking meters.’ ”

  “Oh, God yes. ‘More time for your nickel.’ Beautiful lovely. Your famous ‘Fourteen Points.’ Continental Divide politics, watershed rhetoric. That caught the old hack off balance, that tumbled him.”

  “Now now,” Druff, like a pop, remonstrated gently, “language. We don’t say ‘old hack.’ A little generosity, Dick, please. We say ‘old trouper.’ They also serve.”

  But didn’t it just, the commissioner thought fondly, cheered by the memory of his inspired old promises. (With an Inderal assist, the soft toxins of his chemical ease, the solid confidence under his evaporated flopsweats like the stout barbecue, cunning pool and beautiful patio furniture on the beautiful patio behind his homely gray fence.) Flabbergasting his opponent with a sudden, off-the-cuff age
nda, the sweet reasonables of ordinary life; astonishing the reporters there, the wide- eyed ladies and gentlemen of the press patting down their pockets for a spiral notebook or a pen that worked while he, on a roll, continued: “If the able-bodied won’t mow their lawns, the city gets someone on welfare to mow them and presents a bill.” Enforcing the weekend curfew for teenagers at the fast food hangouts. All moving violations to be paid by mail. No more futzing with City Hall’s byzantine arrangements. Free jump starts on cold winter mornings if the temperature hadn’t risen into double digits by 9 a.m. (“It’s all traffic,” he’d told them, “government is all traffic and threats to tow your car.”) “In the fall,” he’d said, and quoted himself directly now, in the car, “in the fall, until the first snow, we come by for regularly scheduled leaf pickups. And haul off your oversize objects too, your ancient washing machine, your moldy box spring and mattress. And, if I’m elected, no one—no one—will ever again be required to put anything on the windshield or rear window of his car, safety inspection or tax or city sticker, that has on it any adhesive stronger than the glue on the back of an ordinary envelope.” (“No more senseless scraping!” he’d vowed.)

  “I liked the one where you promised to pull the cops out of the inner city and put them back into the good neighborhoods,” his chauffeur reminisced.

  “Yeah,” said the quite suddenly downed City Commissioner of Streets (who could have been a contender), “that was a good one.”

  “Yes,” Dick the chauffeur said, “the Fourteen Points. Let’s see now, the snow, the chlorine and stop signs and bus schedules. The parking meters, settling fines. Mowing the lawn, curfews. Jump starting the cars is nine. Leaf pickups, no senseless scraping, cops in the low-crime areas, coming by for the furniture in the alleys. I make that thirteen. Did I mention the parking meters? I think so. That’s thirteen. I leave something out?”

  “Deuces and one-eyed Jacks are wild,” the stupid old man said sadly.