The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  Aha! thought the City Commissioner of Streets. (Thinking Aha! Thinking its concomitant, exclamatory dagger, too, as, yesterday, in the limo, he could have slapped the side of his head with the heel of his hand.) Had Margaret called? Probably Margaret had called. Rose Helen was getting him up with her hear-no-evils, waiting to listen in the minute he picked up a phone.

  “Well, no,” he said evenly (and getting sore now, too, recalling the silver or mercury oxide thingummy in its tiny compartment in the hearing aid which, for whatever reasons, Rose Helen, some misleading alchemist of the downscale, was eager to pass off as zinc), setting his own traps and thinking two can play this game (having just thought Aha! and into clichés’ easy, comfortable rhythms now), turning his head away and speaking into his coffee cup, answering the last question which, on the evidence, he could be certain she’d heard. “It’s just that I thought the company you’re making that turkey there for might have canceled out at the last minute.”

  Rose Helen didn’t answer.

  “Because frankly, Rose Helen,” he said, “I was hoping they had. I’m too tired even to go through the motions. Last night really took it out of me.”

  She didn’t say boo. He’d just have to up the ante was all. He turned to face her.

  “They marathoned my tail off, those two. Scouffas and his broad.”

  She smiled at him.

  “Margaret Glorio,” he risked fearfully. Rose Helen nodded and went back to polishing her turkey.

  What? he wondered. Does she or doesn’t she?

  Poor Druff, poor Druff thought, who recognized a no-win situation when it stared him in the face. Because if she really couldn’t hear him it meant not only that she was deaf and that he was married to her, but that he was, well, maybe just a little paranoid into the bargain, and that his suspicions, so reasonable and even exciting during the workweek, seemed so much blown smoke in the glare of a civil-service sabbath. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d been picking on a little sixty-year-old lady with white hair and a failing hearing aid and a limp. And as if that wasn’t, he’d been cheating on her, too!

  A grown man. Well, he amended, once a grown man.

  And then, contemplating an endless vista of the long weekend before him spelling nothing but trouble, he was overcome with a sort of bedrock blues. He didn’t know what to do with himself. Maybe he could run out for half a dozen nice fresh zinc oxides for Rose Helen’s hearing aid. Saying as much, watching her face, testing, uncertain how to read her bland regard, first thinking up and then pulling the old switcheroo, throwing mixed signals, underscoring innocent, cheerful things with sneers and scowls, bad, devastating ones with encouraging smiles, a jaunty facial merriment.

  “I don’t,” she said, “know what you’re talking about?”

  Well, thought Druff, if Rose Helen was in the enemy camp (if there was an enemy camp), she was a worthy adversary.

  He fixed her wagon. Neutrally he asked a question at point-blank range.

  “Do you expect there’ll be an earthquake sometime soon?”

  Neutrally Rose Helen shrugged.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Druff said, “no you don’t!” Making his mistake, as if to shake her reaching out.

  She turned away from him, locking, so to speak, her mouth, throwing away, as it were, the key.

  Druff, steamed, losing it.

  “What is it?” he shouted. “Tell me. What’s going on? I demand to know. What are you people after? What’s the scam? Just what are you pulling here? Out with it, Betty Marjorie.”

  Oh, he was fuming.

  He didn’t even believe the weekend had anything to do with it anymore, and laid down a barrage of piggyback names. Mary Molly, he called her, Annie Mildred. Sonia Eileen. Scandalizing, he figured, an entire generation of Peter Pan-collared women.

  “Because it ain’t as if there were two sides to this story. I’ll tell you something, Beth Jessie—our lives are short enough as it is. Here we are, down toward the precious few. Toward? Into! Does ‘bottom of the barrel’ mean anything to you? I don’t need the aggravation at this juncture.”

  And hoped like hell there was something to it.

  Because as he was just telling Heidi Minnehaha here, he didn’t need it. Here he’d made an eleventh-hour connection. If it didn’t pan out, if his fears weren’t real, why then, that was the aggravation. He’d become cranky, another fearful old fart afraid in the streets (and him their commissioner), shying at bogeymen who weren’t there, at robbers and highwaymen, cutpurses, pirates and rustlers after his cattle, poachers with a blood lust for his fish and his game. If the pillagers and ravagers weren’t at the gates, then his suspicions and fears were merely the sure signs of a withering self-regard, the miserly selfishness of the craven aged.

  “You lied to me about the zinc oxides, didn’t you?” he demanded. “What else is untrue? What else are you keeping from me? Are we having company or not? Out with it. What else? Zahler is cheaper than Williams Pharmacy, isn’t he? Isn’t he, Rose Helen?!”

  And that’s how he left it, slamming out of the house, trailing his furious spoor of sabbath anger, leaving her, if she even heard him, cowed, wide-eyed, dumbstruck, amazed, and about the same, he imagined, even if she didn’t. (Damn, she was clever!) Seeing out of the corner of his eye as he quit his hearth, too, the lurking, hulking, dangerous Mikey, that beamish boy, that piece of work, his son, of whom more later, he thought, and already rehearsing in his head their inevitable confrontation: “There comes a time,” he’d say, “when you get frail and your kids get strong. You’re afraid they’ll hurt you, beat you up, shake you down. It was ever thus. Well, we’re old now, Mother and I, living in fear for our lives, blaming the niggers, blaming the Japs, niggers and Japs just water off a duck’s back when we were healthy and young and you kids were feeble. So get out,” he would say. “I want you out of my tent.” Was this legal? he wondered. Could he call the cops? Would it stand up in court? Be perfectly frank, he didn’t know. Out of his jurisdiction. He’d ask Dick, he’d take it up with Doug. Solons and Solomons of law, Doug and Dick, angels of arbitration.

  And was outside, outraged and angry in the streets—his streets—and had walked as far as a good few blocks before he caught a calm breath, was outdoors in the groomed spring weather, the tactile, sensible air, fussed, clean, scented as shoreline, making as much of itself as a kind of primped, laden, reversed fall, Commissioner Druff clomping along the unaccustomed sidewalks like someone needing an address, a reporter or lawyer in the neighborhood, a fellow with appointments. Commanding—he’d quieted down enough by now to notice—a sort of curiosity, a kind of respect, some thin, hospitable deference anyhow, whatever it was, thought the commissioner, that a competent, assured citizenry owed its strangers and outlanders. This was puzzling and at first he thought, why, of course, the limousine (or its absence, rather), accepting, smiling, surprised, the tribute of his admirers and well- wishers, the shy smiles and unblown kisses of his constituency.

  And who only then, wheedled down from his dudgeon by the curious amiability of their attention, understood it, took it in. Recognizing the truth in their windbreakers and comfortable old-shoe ways, in the holes in their sweaters and the stained sweatshirts they wore, their patched trousers and cotton drawstring running pants, all the lazy weekend mufti of their relaxed civilian stances. Or, looking up at him from the broken concentration of their jogging, their jammed athletic traffic, as if he, respectably dressed, rather than they, clothed in their juices, in all the garb of their flushed selves, their soaked shorts and sweaty T-shirts, curiously revealing and intimate almost as the furious metabolism of violent lovemaking or of bodies in fever crisis, was the street’s odd eyeful. Or stooped, looking up at him from the level of their spades and shovels and trowels, all their trident tools and modified hoes, pausing over paper packets of spinach and pea and lettuce seeds to brush the hair out of their eyes or knock away excess dirt with the Mickey Mouse fingertips of their enormous, rough cloth gardening gloves,
taking, he now realized with some embarrassment, not the pleasure of recognition so much as the quick profit of a small amusement at the sight of their commissioner—only he knew better now, even if they didn’t; they wouldn’t know he was any kind of commissioner let alone “their” commissioner—in full dress, in the workweek’s suit and tie on an early Saturday afternoon. Well, he was stunned to discover himself so set apart from his fellows, stunned!

  Feeling, by virtue of his spick ‘n’ spans and all the tailored accountability of his respectable three-piece suit, caught out, like a man nude in dreams, a comical figure, someone in pajamas, say, accidentally locked out of his house. Forced thus to bluff, to carry it off, vaguely go “through” with it, and wishing meanwhile for props, pamphlets perhaps, or that he might represent himself to the neighborhood as a canvasser, or, of course, a candidate, introducing himself, pressing the flesh, seeking their support, begging their pardon for interrupting their Saturday (though in their shoes, his shoes, he’d probably have welcomed the interruption, even embraced it, pulled the poor guy indoors, offered him coffee, sat him down, invited him to discuss the issues) but wishing to leave just this little bit of campaign literature with them to look over (the pamphlets with their smeary block letters and their blue photographs of poor resolution) when he’d gone. (And feeling, who felt so much, quite out of it, nothing there save a soft nostalgia for the vanished old hurrahs.)

  But the heart had its fingerprints, and old Druff, who either knew better than to wage war against the forensics of character, or understood that there wasn’t all that much diff between a political war-horse and a political appointee, that a City Commissioner of Streets needn’t know any more about macadam or cobble than a Commissioner of Parks and Playgrounds did about landscaping and sandboxes, that power was its own information, gave up, almost volitionlessly—he hoped disarmingly—one of his City Hall, downtown, really blockbuster smiles. Smiling his way, this way and that, down the boulevard, a cheerful, for-a-Saturday-dressed-to-the-teeth, dressed-to-the-nines, suited-up fellow of parts showing the flag. (Was he still troubled? Did he still have the blues? Always up for a bluff, he thought rather not.)

  He’d thought neighborhood, but he’d left his neighborhood long ago, was in a different neighborhood now, a good, upper-middle-class neighborhood, just the sort of precinct—if he lived to be a hundred he’d never understand it—a pol had to win if he was to take the election. America was a well-meaning, go-ahead country. Yet even in America more people were poor or lived on the edges the break-even life than in places like these—doctors’ houses, lawyers’, with wide lawns and a suggestion of property hidden away behind their homes like inner courtyards in architecture. If the poor couldn’t keep up with the Joneses, then maybe they felt they must at least vote with them. It’s true, he thought. Politicians squandered resentment, it was the emotion they least understood or knew how to use.

  So Druff smiled away and was smiled away at in return. A suited-up guy in a one-man parade. What did they make of him all dressed up, anachronistic by a mere day but as out of style for all that as if he wore the fashions of a bygone age? And had them all over again. The blues. Could even put a name to them now. Stopped smiling and put a name to them.—The All-Dressed-Up, No-Place-to-Go Blues.

  And now was passing one of the city’s tonier synagogues. Wooden horses had been set up to close the street to traffic. Druff read the temple’s name, black, transliterated, stenciled across the bright yellow planks of the barriers. (B’nai Beth Emeth, it said, and Druff, feeling lost, momentarily flashed on the old Chi Phi Kappa sorority house of his and Rose Helen’s youth. Sure, that had been about weekends, too.)

  A young man in his mid-thirties, a sharp dresser in a knit skullcap like a tiny area rug, lounged, chain-smoking cigarettes, in the middle of the street against one of the temple’s yellow sawhorses.

  “Yontif, Commissioner there,” said the man.

  “How are you?” Druff said, smiling widely and greeting the man as if welcoming someone invited to an open house. (It was the way he saluted people sometimes, not voters so much as folks vaguely in the political trade themselves, not even cronies exactly, but precinct workers, laborers in the vineyards. A human professional courtesy he extended, was how he thought of it.)

  “Hamilton Edgar,” the man said, lazily raising the cigarette hand he rested on his left shoulder, vaguely posing, and looking more slender than he really was, and oddly taller than his height, like a young man, it struck the commissioner, out of the Jazz Age. “We had a meeting in your office yesterday.”

  “Hamilton Edgar, Hamilton Edgar,” the commissioner said speculatively.

  “The lawyer from the U. You turned me down. Held out the bid I brought you all arm’s length and little pinkie finger like somebody’d pissed on it.”

  “Hamilton Edgar?” the commissioner said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean—‘What’s a guy with a moniker like yours doing under the headgear?’ ”

  It was exactly what it meant, thought the commissioner who, though he couldn’t always put names together with their faces these days, felt he still had perfect pitch for the demographics. “Oh no, of course not. Not at all,” he flustered. “No no.”

  “Because I didn’t change it,” the young man said. “My old zeyde did.”

  Druff nodded.

  “Hey,” Edgar said, “speak of the devil, lookee there who’s coming.” Druff followed the fellow’s arm as he uncurled it once more from his shoulder, flourishing it like a magician’s assistant.

  A third man in a suit, maybe two or three years Hamilton Edgar’s senior—ballpark figures—came down the wide temple steps toward them.

  “Who?” Druff said.

  “Is that who I think it is? Is it? Is it?” the other suited man was saying. “Is that City Commissioner of Streets Druff that Ham ‘n’ Eggs’s been telling me so much about? He said you two were thick, he said he took meetings in your office, but darned if he mentioned he was inviting you. Ham ‘n’ Eggs,” the fellow scolded, “you really should have said something about this. Listen,” he addressed Druff, “you’re too late for services. You’re even too late for the kiddush. The aunts and old uncles were mopping up the last of the wine and sponge cake when I came out to fetch Ham.” He turned back to Hamilton Edgar. “We’re starting lunch up soon. The klezmers have gathered. Don’t you think it would be nice if you got with the program? I mean if you’d said something. Now—excuse me, Commissioner—I don’t know where we could even fit him in.”

  “Dan, he’s City Commissioner of Streets. These are his sawhorses closing the street off to traffic. How do you think B’nai Beth Emeth got them? How do you think it ever got its one-way street? Who gave us yea and nay over the flow-control patterns?”

  “I know,” the Dan one said, “I know, but tell it to the caterers. You don’t draw blood from a stone, Ham.”

  “Isn’t this ridiculous?” Hamilton Edgar, winking at the commissioner, said. “What are we talking about here, an extra place setting? No big deal, I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket. Here,” said Ham ‘n’ Eggs, pulling a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet.

  “Twenty dollars?” Dan scoffed. “You think twenty dollars would even begin to cover it? Filet mignon? Fresh vegetables? Wine? Strawberries out of season? Klezmerin with embouchures on them that go back before the sounding of the first shofar? You’re living in the past there, kiddo. Rosebird! Rosebird!”

  “It’s not enough? It isn’t? Here.” The Jazz Ager held out his wallet. “Take whatever you need.”

  “An extra place setting,” Dan said scornfully, taking the twenty and lifting additional tens and fives from Edgar’s billfold.

  “Look,” said Druff, finally intervening, “there’s been a mistake. He didn’t invite me to your son’s bar mitzvah.”

  “My son’s bar mitzvah, my son’s? Is that what he told you?”

  “What’s going on?” Druff said.

  “What I’d like to know,” Dan m
uttered, pouting.

  “Speak of the devil,” Hamilton Edgar said and looked again in the direction of the temple steps.

  “Oh yeah,” Dan said. “Yeah. This is a guy,” he told the commissioner out of the side of his mouth, “you really have to meet him. Wouldn’t you say so, Ham?”

  “A ‘must.’ A definite ’don’t miss.’ ”

  “Don’t let on, Ham. See if the commissioner catches it.”

  “Even money says he names that tune in three.”

  Were they high? It occurred to the commissioner these two were high. They sounded high. Amused by their own rash slapdash. Into the wine and sponge cake deeper even than the aunts and old uncles. (A judge in these matters, a fine distinguisher—the ground-up coca leaves, he supposed, white against his gums as toothpaste, the fine, frothy hydrophobics of his own hooked rabidity.) And turned to where a new man, another, Druff, who was no judge, judged, baby-boomer came coming—a man (this one suited too, but in a style more deliberate, the belted back of his suit coat seeming to flourish material, throwing out pleats like a kind of sprayed fabric, vaguely reminiscent of the accordion reserves and expanses of backpacks, garment bags) with a raised, forward-thrusting smile he seemed to carry balanced on his chin like a Roosevelt.

  “Jerry,” said Dan, “do you know who this is here?”

  “It’s City Commissioner of Streets Robert Druff,” Hamilton Edgar said.

  “Gosh, is it? No fooling?”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Druff” said.

  “Jerry Rector,” said the baby-boomer and took the commissioner’s hand. He pumped it. “It sure is swell to meet you, sir.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Druff, “I got in late last night. I set the alarm but slept through it anyway, wouldn’t you know? When I finally got up I was totally disoriented. I shaved, showered and dressed just as if it were an ordinary workday. That’s why I’m wearing this suit and tie instead of the more casual clothing you might expect someone to have on on a day City Hall is closed.”