The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  “What I think,” Jerry Rector said, “is he looks mighty yar.”

  Hamilton Edgar, giggling, politely covered his mouth.

  “Well, he does,” Rector said. “Doesn’t he Dan?”

  Now the two of them were giggling, covering their faces like conscientious coughers.

  “Just ignore them, Commissioner. My chums are a couple of stinkers.

  Druff shrugged.

  “That’s just bunk, Ham and Dan,” Rector said. “That’s just bunk and hooey.”

  “Oh Christ,” Hamilton Edgar said. “The man breaks me up. With his yars and bunks and hooeys. He sounds just like Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story.”

  “More like Katharine Hepburn, you ask me,” Dan said.

  “Very nice,” Jerry Rector said, “very nice indeed.” Then he grinned. “I happen,” he explained to the commissioner, “to be an admirer of the screwball comedies of the thirties and forties. It was a more gracious time. I mean anyone can say fuck or call some asshole a cocksucker. I’m sorry,” he said, “but that’s just not my style.”

  Him too, Druff thought. High as a kite. The drugged Jews of B’nai Beth Emeth. It was a good thing the street was closed to traffic. Otherwise it could have been all chaos and fender benders. Like in an ice storm before the salt trucks responded.

  “Well,” Ham said laughing, wiping his eyes, his amusement damp now, run to mucus, settled in his chest and nasals, “I say it’s about time we tucked in to that filet and those berries. Commissioner?”

  “Ham has to have his grub.”

  “Grub!” Dan exploded. “Did you ever? This is some guy, this guy.”

  “Commissioner?” Ham said, taking his commissioner’s arm.

  “Is he joining us?” Jerry Rector wanted to know.

  “That’s very kind,” the commissioner told Hamilton Edgar, “but I guess I’ll take a rain check. My compliments to… the guest of honor.”

  “That might be you,” Hamilton Edgar said levelly, all traces of his moist hilarity gone.

  “You told him guest of honor?” Dan said. “Guest of honor?”

  “Come on, fellows,” Jerry Rector prompted, “let’s get going. It isn’t as if we had all the time in the world.”

  Gently, the commissioner withdrew his arm. “Please,” he said, “let’s have a little separation of church and state here.”

  Jerry Rector laughed.

  “Hey,” Druff said. “Israeli lobby or no Israeli lobby, Bobbo Druff wears no man’s beanie. There ain’t an ecumenical ounce in my entire body.”

  “Yeah,” Dan said, “we respect that in you.”

  There wasn’t, he thought. (Who couldn’t really have been thinking. Their high must be contagious.) That ounce of the ecumenical. Or of the ethnic, either. Not for Druff scamorza, lox, green beer. All the holies and high masses, kissing this one’s prayer shawl and that one’s ring. If these Jews had his sawhorses in their pockets, they must have gotten them as out-and-out gifts, his perfectly civic charity, his skimmed, no-strings, up-front influence. (In this way he must, over the course of a year, have saved a week, a week and a half of his precious time. Just yesterday, who was it Dick told him had died? Marvin Macklin? He’d already dictated the condolence letter. What had it taken him, ten minutes, fifteen? And the family had gotten a letter out of it. Signed by the commissioner on his office’s official stationery. If he’d gone to the chapel or called on the family at home he could have been tied up for hours. And who, in all that grief and distraction, would even remember he’d come? No, a letter was better. The solace that kept on giving. The separation of church and state wasn’t just sound public policy, it was good business.) So spare him the lunch invitations, please. Though there were lunch invitations and lunch invitations. He was, he had to admit, drawn to these guys. There was something about them. They seemed very yar guys. Even old Ham Edgar, whose first impression on the commissioner, let’s be frank, hadn’t exactly been a good one. Druff thought: I believe I thought he was a bagman. And he was hungry. (Denied his All-Bran, his fresh-squeezed oranges, the pancakes and maple syrup of his just desserts. Nothing to show for his quarrels all day but toast and a cup of coffee on his belly. He could almost smell it, his hosts’ catered goodies—the fruits out of season, their mignon, fresh veggies and wine.) And, well, he was in the mood. (High, anyway, peckish and primed by his special Andean mouth appetizers.) And they seemed like folks from whom it was possible to learn a thing or two. If only they didn’t stick him at the head table with the heavy-duty relatives, the parents and grandparents, the bar mitzvah kid, his brothers and sisses. (Although no one, come to think of it, had actually ever said bar mitzvah. For all Druff knew it could have been a wedding going on in there.) He’d mention his head-table aversions, make it the condition of his attendance.

  Dan slapped his temple with an open hand. “You told him there was a head table?”

  Even Druff had to laugh.

  Even when Ham ‘n’ Eggs said, “I told him fucking nothing. He’s out of the loop.”

  “Hey don’t,” Jerry Rector said. “Talk like that’s a lot of hooey.”

  Druff understood that Rector couldn’t really speak the language, that he dropped his few measly words into the conversation like a tourist, like someone who knows how to ask the time, say, or directions to the toilet in French. It was the screwball vocabulary of a screwball. Yet he could not rid himself of the notion—he couldn’t account for this—that these men were sympathetic, that running into them like this was a boon, some omen of endowment, vaguely—they were at a place of worship—heaven-sent. Druff, tossed and turned in his sleep, drugged as a schoolboy on the glamour of a Margaret Glorio whose magical availability had been the cause of his ablutions, his grand investiture, suddenly saw his weekend salvaged. He could talk to them. They would get down.

  And found himself leading the way, onwarding up the synagogue steps like a Christian soldier.

  Not, now he’d taken things into his own hands, so much hurt by their cries—“Hey, hey man, where you going?”—as instantly aware of several sudden, even conflicting urgencies—to call Margaret, to do something about Rose Helen’s batteries, to pee, to come to terms with his understanding new pals. Leaving them behind, beneath him on the sidewalk, calling out and waving like people farewelling passengers on steamships in one of Rector’s screwball comedies. Wondering why they were calling him off and, to win them over, to show his good nature and, turning to face them, and not for the first time, turned the tables, welcoming them, signaling them aboard, urging in semaphore that they join him before the synagogue sailed.

  “Come up, come up,” he called down.

  And pushing open one of the temple’s big doors let himself into a vacant lobby.

  “Gee,” Druff said, “where’s—?”

  “All gone,” said Ham ‘n’ Eggs.

  “Split,” said Dan.

  “Where’s that darn old poop think he’s going?” Jerry Rector muttered.

  But Druff, too, had seen some movies, and was at once put in mind of an old one, a classic, a goodie. Cary Grant was a legionnaire. He’d stumbled onto a cave, a great, mysterious space. There’d been chanting, wicked prayers sent into the interior of the earth by savage assassins, cultists’ blood commitments, the dark, assured fanaticism of an immense pep rally, evil, awful. There was to have been, the commissioner sort of remembered, a virgin sacrificed, a white woman. The daughter of the regiment? Cary’s own sweetie? And what had put him in mind—this in the few seconds left to him (a moment like a fragment of precious time one speaker yields to another in a debate) before the others caught up with him—was the sudden, unexpected silence of the big empty lobby. (If “lobby“—he wasn’t sure—was what you called these bits and pieces of religious architecture, not “nave” or “narthex,” not “sanctuary” or “baptistery.” Not, he meant, its working, moving parts.) Wondering because—the doors were open—no one was in the sanctuary. Surprised by the absence of excited children, running, chasin
g one another in the halls, the sprung shirttails of the boys and collapsed stockings of the little girls, all the loose asthmas and hysterical else- wheres of their unruly attention. (He flashed abruptly on wild Mikey, on his ancient, disorderly holiday encounters with his fleeing cousins. He could have wept, Druff. He remembered wanting to kill the snob assholes, their under-control, son-of-a-bitch parents.)

  “Excuse me,” Druff addressed the three spacey Jews, “but isn’t Saturday your day of worship?”

  “Is that a crack?” Jerry Rector demanded.

  “Jerry, please Jerry,” Hamilton Edgar was saying. “Commissioner here is a trained politician, a pro. A pro’s pro, even. Would such a man pass gratuitous anti-Semitic remarks if he didn’t have to?”

  “Wait a minute,” Druff said, “I meant I thought it was a day of holy observation. That you set it aside for—‘services’ do you call them?”

  “Services, that’s right,” said Rector, upset. “That’s what we call them, all right. That’s just what we call them. Who wants to know?”

  “Well, no one wants to know,” said the City Commissioner of Streets. “I’m here,” he said, pointing to Dan, pointing to Ham ‘n’ Eggs, who’d extended his open wallet to his friend like a submission signal in nature, “as their guest. I come in good faith. No one wants to know,” he repeated. “All I meant is, where’s the festivities? Where is everybody?”

  “Jesus!” Jerry Rector said. “God! A sink of the lip slips ships! Does no one here understand that?”

  “Someone bring that man a drinky winky,” Dan said, giggling.

  “A dry martooni,” said guffawing Hamilton Edgar.

  “You’re their guest? You’re their come-in-good-faith, invited comrade?” said Rector. “I’m hep. All right. That’s all right. Nobody tells me anything, but what the heck? That’s jimmy-fine-dandy. Maybe we’re into Plan C or something and someone simply forgot to inform me. I can live with that. You think I can’t live with that? I can live with it. I can live,” the screwball-comedy-dialogue admirer informed them coolly, “with anything you silly fuck wads can throw against me. Follow me,” he said. “The ‘festivities,’ as my new friend here calls them, are in the rabbi’s study.”

  It’s cumulative, thought Druff. Whatever they’re on. He already knew it was catching.

  “Jerry, man,” Dan said.

  “Rector!” said Hamilton Edgar.

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” said the commissioner, reminded of that film again, of its holy killer thugs, “as it happens, I am. A politician’s politician, I mean. I define that as anyone in public office who can make news with his mouth.” He was following Jerry Rector. The two other guys were following him. New surroundings were generally a maze to him, not a big plus in the City Commissioner of Streets department, he had to admit. For Druff it was the sewers of Paris all over again, new surroundings. And that went double, he thought, when what was at stake was at once as comic and interesting and possibly dangerous as he only just now understood his situation potentially was.

  They went up stairs and down corridors, doing, he felt, these mysterious stations of the Star of David, hearing nothing, passing no one, Druff nervous in the strangely abandoned building (in their odd single file like the forced, time-honored defile of guards with a prisoner) like someone locked for the night in a shut-up office building. (His mazy new surroundings, all the queer, devious landscape and uncharted sewers-of- Paris quality of the apparently vacant temple now somehow powerfully familiar to Druff, as recognizable as the prescriptive tactics of their captured-prisoner maneuvers.) Primarily what he felt was watched.

  So he could either catch up with Rector (clearly point man here), seize the cat’s cradle and perhaps change the pattern of the forced march, or he could distract them, as time-honored and in-the-tradition as anything he’d seen yet.

  He began to talk.

  “Well, I am,” he said. “I do. Make mouth news, I mean. It’s what us pol’s pols are all about. Really. Your kings and your queens, your go-ahead heads of state. Empress to alderman. Lowly streets czars like myself, even.

  “Once, would you believe it, it made the papers just because I said I didn’t think it was fair that the City Commissioner of Streets in Tampa—St. Pete had a bigger line in the budget than I did with all my added responsibilities of weather to worry about—snow clearance, ice storms, pothole repair, the wear and tear of a cold climate. You wouldn’t believe what that started! It was good copy for a week. ‘Oh yeah?’ This was my opposite number, the other pol’s pol, the Tampa—St. Petersburg one, answering back through Reuters, United, the Associated Press. ‘Just ask old Jack Frost for me what he’d do after a hurricane hit and he had to lift all that soaked sand up off the highways and push it back on the beaches where it came from? Maybe our budget’s so high here on the Sun Coast because snow melts and sand don’t!’ ‘Snow melts!’ Can you imagine? He had me with the ball in my court. Hey, they could have asked for my resignation. Mouth newsers go right into the doghouse when the cat has their tongue. They were really after me for copy now, the Reuters boys and A.P. people. ‘Tell him,’ I told them, ‘all that talk about the so-called Sun Coast must have gotten in my eyes and blinded me. I forgot Mother Nature had so damn much weather down there that they had to keep giving it names, as if all those storms and hurricanes were like so many children they had to keep track of before it all got away from them.’

  “Well, that brought their Chamber of Commerce into it, which was just what I hoped would happen. I took the issue away from him, the pol’s pol guy, and now they were issuing actual denials, putting out that they hadn’t had an out-and-out hurricane in thirteen years, putting out they didn’t expect one for another ten years. They’re quoting the goddamn Farmer’s Almanac, for Christ’s sake, and I’m out of it and live to fight another day.

  “Well, it’s the tourism thing of course, their bread and butter. Come back to Jamaica, mon.

  “It’s not farfetched,” Druff said. “This is the way they think. What would be water off a duck’s back in any other country changed in ours to landscaping, fountains, the dancing waters.

  “Are we there yet? Are we even on the right floor?”

  What he’d told them true, never mind he was stalling. Already contemplating other of his mouth campaigns. His newsmaker’s noisemaking. Bobbo Druff’s Greatest Hits. Willing to feed them to them, who would not, he finally understood, be feeding him. (Appetite whetted, peckish as ever.)

  Wafted through—because he couldn’t keep track, was loose, without landmark—these featureless halls, at once burdened and more light than was his ordinary nature. Airy, breezy, dangerously glib. And spotted the congregation’s Negro shammes (recognizing him even if he didn’t know the word for him), identifying by the number of keys he wore on his belt who must have been the factotum here, recognizing him for what he was by the little Hebe beanie, the whaddayacallit, yarmulke, on his spiky hair, which, except for the black man, only Hamilton Edgar was wearing.

  “Shabbes,” said the black man, greeting them, talking through his hat for Christmas gifts a mile off, and in a different theological venue.

  “Shabbes your own self, Richard,” Jerry Rector said.

  Druff, edgy, punchy still with his glibness, his touch of fear, having to admire him for that, admitting as much. “That’s right,” he told Jerry Rector when the man had passed them, “I see you’re no pushover. I’ll tell you the truth. Any workman can strike fear into my heart. Whenever one comes to the house it throws me off. I feel I have to justify myself or something. Whatever it is, I don’t care what it is. It could be anyone. Anything. Telephone repairmen, the guy who reads the meter, the gas, the electric, the man who works in the garden or puts in special trees. It’s emasculating, it pulls on a fellow’s balls. ‘I work,’ I want to tell them. ‘I work. I have a job.’ ”

  “You do,” the Commissioner of Streets heard Dan humor him. “Doesn’t he, Hamilton?”

  “I’ll say.”

  �
��Are we there yet?”

  “We’re just now pulling into the station,” Jerry Rector said, and with a key he took from the breast pocket in his suit coat, he opened the door to what Druff supposed was the rabbi’s study.

  Which was, well, really something. Better, oh far better, he could see, than his own dusty accommodations—the little theatrical agent’s office beyond the low wooden fence around his own poor municipal digs. Druff, catching Hamilton Edgar’s grin, just perceptibly lowered his head, a submission signal, a vague acknowledgment to a man who’d seen the commissioner’s offices firsthand, that, nerve center for nerve center, the rabbi outclassed him—Druff’s empty good sportsmanship.

  “The private sector,” said City Commissioner of Streets Druff, nodding and swallowing (who might have anticipated the trim modern furniture and spiffy light fixtures but never the crisp, rich Oriental rugs), a little miffed that a man of God, under, presumably, all the renunciative vows and dictates of the spiritual, could lord it over a man of Caesar like himself. Someone, Druff figured, was not living up to his end of the bargain. Not bothering to wait until the others arranged themselves—Druff, awarded pride of place, shown to the rabbi’s chrome and leather chair behind his big glass and wood desk, still in a mood and not, removed as he was from the streets he commissioned, yet rid of his nervousness, anxious to make a good impression before men who hadn’t known him when and despising himself for it, despising them, not just for their vigorous primes but for their blatant mockery, Ham ‘n’ Eggs’ languid Jazz Age impressions, Rector’s odd profanity—the commissioner began to speculate, idly to make more mouth news.

  “Impressive,” he said. “He’s political, your rabbi? A captain of industry? He knows about downtown, I betcha, the colorful tantrums of Mafia and all the haunted houses where the bodies are buried? He knows who is in whom’s pocket? What the grand jury said?

  “Is he up on all he needs regarding the other guy’s gridlock and monkeyshines, the kickbacks and setups and inside jobs, who was it hijacked the salt truck?