Merlin of the Magnolias

by Gardner Landry

  There was one member, however, whose walking ensemble was far from pedestrian, at least in his mind. Merlin angled past the guard with a gracious wave and nod. Regardless of his state of preoccupation, he made it a priority never to forget his manners. Looking like a cross between Charlie Chan and Bigfoot, Merlin sidled toward the members’ entrance as a golf cart–steering new employee stared long enough to barely avoid a collision with a brand-new steel-blue Aston Martin entering the club. Oblivious to this near miss, as he was to many of the peripheral things in his world, Merlin kept a laser-sharp focus on his mission.

  When he pulled open the heavy oak door to the locker room, a gnat of a natty man brushed past him. They both acknowledged each other wordlessly—Merlin with the bemusement of an elephant encountering a mouse and the little gadabout with a kind of momentary horror followed by unmasked disdain. The smaller man, Tite Dûche, scuttled off toward the members’ entrance with impatient dispatch, the little tassels on his ballet slipper–thin cordovan loafers flicking this way and that, oscillating with the frequency and vigor of similar accouterments adorning the busts of the most enthusiastic of nineteen seventies–era Bourbon Street burlesque performers. Meanwhile, he had to adjust the cashmere peach pastel pullover sweater he had draped around his shoulders as it had fallen sideways during the little pas de deux with the club’s largest and most geomagnetically attuned member.

  Tite was everything Merlin was not: small, social (like a bee), and the clubbiest of clubby dressers. Merlin puzzled over Tite’s preoccupation with the pettiest of social concerns and displays of the showiest of seasonal wardrobe extravagances. The annual professional tennis tournament, which was just a few weeks away, was the most extreme example of the latter. Tite had a big role in the event and took his status as annual license to wear the same garish neon green and pink plaid madras blazer as he strutted with inimitable officiousness around center court and other tournament venues. Merlin was thankful a few weeks remained before the international sports media would descend and the event would clog his beloved neighborhood’s streets. He quickly regained his composure and, remembering to fold in the antennae protruding from his high-tech hatband, entered the great modern-day mead hall of the men’s locker room at Bayou Boughs Country Club.

  The locker room at the club was no mere utilitarian antechamber to the world of athletic striving. It was an oversized, over-the-top, yet broken-in-baseball-glove-comfortable man cave with staff, a bar, and food service from the club’s downstairs kitchen. The room itself was a great soaring rectangular space with high dormer windows along the sides of its vaulted upper reaches. The center of the space featured square tables and wide leather chairs on rollers. At the end of the room, functioning like an altar, was a three-sided bar. Behind the bar was a high brick wall featuring an intricately carved wooden sculpture of the club’s crest, lighted such that it seemed to glow, an effect all the more evocative during low-light outdoor conditions.

  Merlin had never mastered the art of small talk, so as he lumbered past tables with members he wasn’t sure whether he knew, he held his laser-like focus on an oversized barstool at the right corner of the bar counter next to the wall. Drying a glass and looking in the general direction of the locker room entrance with his usual mix of diffidence, deference, and a dose of genuine compassion for the locker room’s latest arrival was Shep Pasteur, a Cajun from the prairie and bayou country of Southwest Louisiana and longtime club employee who had known three generations of Merlin’s family. It was with fond memories of Merlin’s grandfather and a sense of Merlin’s strange and sad-seeming life trajectory that Shep nodded after catching Merlin’s locked-in forward gaze as he approached his usual spot at the corner—a place that, were this indeed an ecclesial altar, would have been reserved perhaps for a junior acolyte but certainly no one of even slightly higher rank. When he recognized who was awaiting his arrival, Merlin’s anxiety eased a bit, and he focused his rare brand of intensity on the stalwart icon of a Bayou Boughs employee who Merlin could never remember not having known.

  “Ah, bonjour, Merlin!” (Shep pronounced “Merlin” the French way: “Mer-lanh,” in hopes this bit of levity might soften the serious fixedness of the young man’s tunnel-vision gaze.) Shep, like many of his colleagues, had developed a precise radar for discerning club members’ moods, and this morning, in addition to seeing Merlin’s sartorial paean to the season, he noticed an unmistakable spring in the step of the massive linen-clad presence lumbering his way. An image of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man’s giant inflated cinematic likeness in the Manhattan parade in Ghostbusters flashed through his mind as he pulled out the large chair at the corner.

  Additionally, Shep continued to call him by his first name, a practice that was rare among club employees when a member’s son or daughter became a voting member of Bayou Boughs Country Club. Many people relished this aspect of their transformed status on attaining membership, but Shep recognized that for Merlin, such a suddenly formal if not stilted mode of address would be bewildering, and perhaps fray the tenuous strings that seemed barely to hold Merlin to the ground over which he moved so tentatively. Merlin returned the greeting with an unusually upbeat reply.

  “Shep! The seasons are shifting—in the heavens and in the earth!”

  “Like they say, looks like spring, she has sprung.”

  “Even though it springs quite early here, yet it springs indeed.”

  “That’s right, Magic Man. Now how you gon’ celebrate it?”

  Magic Man was the nickname Shep bestowed on Merlin when he was a toddler. Shep hoped that Merlin might mention his attraction to a representative of the fairer sex, equally unusual though she might have been to be attracted to this great enigmatic walker of the neighborhood. He was not surprised to be disappointed.

  “With a hearty breakfast commensurate with the vibrations of this auspicious day, of course!”

  Shep emitted a barely audible sigh and asked, “The usual?”

  “Yes, please! And could I have one of the large mugs of coffee?”

  “Does the pope wear a funny hat?”

  Merlin thought for a moment and then smiled and said, “Well yes, yes he does!”

  Shep shook his head and chuckled as he sent a quick sidelong glance Merlin’s way before signaling a younger employee across the room to put in Merlin’s breakfast order. As the bartender placed a giant mug of piping-hot black coffee to the right side of Merlin’s place setting, Merlin opened the paper to his favorite section, the weather, and looked at the map of the U.S. with its cold, warm, and stationary fronts depicted along with the isobar lines denoting barometric pressure. He checked the list for the temperature ranges and precipitation reports from cities around the country and throughout the world. He tried to jibe this printed meteorological snapshot with the complex matrix of his own calculations. Despite his good mood, he wasn’t getting too far with this exercise, so he turned to the headlines on the front page.

  One caught his eye and polarized his mood from jubilant to concerned. “Oil and Natural Gas Prices Plummet—Industry Analysts Say Bottom Not in Yet.” He began to read the article. “Oversupply in the hydrocarbon industry continues to mount at an increasing rate. Many experts are predicting more shocks with no firm bottoming of oil and natural gas prices until late next year at the earliest. The first wave of layoffs in the energy sector is already impacting the local economy and many pundits are predicting successive waves of industry belt-tightening as fuel supplies increase and profits plummet.”

  Transfixing existential concern clouded Merlin’s sunny mood, as the lion’s share of his discretionary personal income arose from oil and gas royalty payments. The income from the corpus of his trust took care of his phone, utilities, insurance, and club dues, but most of his other expenditures were predicated on the whims of the oil and gas market. He supplemented his income by tutoring neighborhood children at their families’ homes and had become a reliable resource for parents wishing to bolster their kids’ chances at be
ing accepted into the better colleges and universities around the country, but royalty income was the mother’s milk that funded what he called his research, the importance of which was so great to him he considered it his life’s work and calling.

  Mercifully, just when the article’s ramifications began to set in, his breakfast arrived, and what a breaking of the fast it was. Bisecting the main plate was a girthsome ham-and-cheese omelet covered in a generous ladleful of hollandaise sauce. On the left side of this centerpiece were hash browns with caramelized onions, while on its right side, the omelet hosted sharp cheddar cheese grits topped with diced fire-roasted jalapeño peppers and a pinch of roasted serrano peppers—the diabolically fiery chiles toreados that had been known to send many a locker room breakfaster running for the facilities if too liberally applied and consumed. A small satellite plate to the upper right of the place setting contained a side order of bacon and a side of venison sausage. A co-satellite to its immediate left featured a couple of slices of buttered wheat toast. The moon of the omelet-anchored sun was a medium-size plate bearing a short stack of pancakes with thick daubs of butter melting in its inner layers. The topmost pancake featured a whipped cream flourish in the shape of a gyre, evoking ideas of swirling eddies, hurricanes, or even distant galaxies. (They had done this for him since he was an eager youngster breakfasting with his grandfather and talking endlessly about his fascinations with natural phenomena and the cosmos.) At the central point of the gyre, a lone maraschino cherry topped the white peak. A gravy boat of molasses syrup orbited the pancake moon, an unctuous complement to the a.m. extravaganza.

  Scooting the bar stool a couple of inches closer to the counter, he turned to another section and folded the newspaper to frame something reliable and nonthreatening—the crossword puzzle. He gingerly placed his draftsman’s pencil on the paper and moved it aside. Unwrapping his silverware from its napkin-swaddled security, Merlin took manual authority over knife and fork and laid siege to the feast. Thermals of gastronomic pleasure bore him into progressively higher realms of enjoyment as he proceeded through the meal, the largest breakfast served at Bayou Boughs Country Club that morning—or on any morning, for that matter. The staff even had a nickname for it: the Magic Mountain. This clever moniker served as a streamlining shorthand for the kitchen. When a Magic Mountain order came in, the cooks knew exactly what to do. One time someone even snapped a picture of it before it left the kitchen. A breakfast this mind-bogglingly prodigious was worthy of memorializing with a photograph, the harried photographer must have reasoned. It also served as corroboration when disbelieving conversation partners were recounted tales of this feast in bodegas and cantinas on the other side of town.

  Just as Merlin was annihilating the remaining few holdout morsels clinging to his little constellation of breakfast plates, his mobile phone buzzed in his trouser pocket. He fumbled for it as the ingestion of the meal seemed to be challenging his fine motor skills more formidably than such a food-hoovering session usually did, and finally retrieved it. Looking at the phone’s screen, he registered that the number was coming from the offices of Southeast Texas Bank and all of the musculature throughout the length and breadth of his mass tightened simultaneously. His formerly calm stomach wrenched painfully around its copious contents. He knew this could mean only one thing: his trust officer was calling.

  Merlin accepted the call and in a muted tone answered with a sheepish hello.

  “Merlin, this is Curtis Bumpers in the trust department down at Southeast Texas Bank.”

  “Hello, Mr. Bumpers.”

  “We’ve covered this before; you can call me Curtis.”

  “Matters financial are of necessity grave by nature; I prefer to address you with the formality my forbears impressed upon me as appropriate for such interactions, thereby honoring the gravity of the subject, my memory of my bygone blood kin, and of your chosen professional métier in life.”

  Curtis Bumpers paused for a perplexed moment, caught himself while beginning to sigh, and continued. “I wanted to see if we could visit in my office as soon as is convenient for you.”

  Merlin was gripped and twisted from within. His valves of Houston, first described by anatomist John Houston in the 1830s, taunted him and threatened to give way like a breaching dam during a deluge. He pulled himself together to finish the conversation.

  “When would you like to see me?”

  “How about this afternoon?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Four o’clock at my office at the Phal-Tex Energy Tower?”

  “Yes. Very good. I will be there.” Merlin ended the call with a quivering thumb and stared into the middle distance.

  “What you say, Magic Man?” Shep was trying to get Merlin to snap out of the mental eddy he could see was spinning him.

  “My trust officer.” Merlin’s speech was monotone.

  “What he said to you, cher?”

  “He said he wants to visit with me.”

  Now it was Shep’s turn to register surprise. On hearing the word “visit,” the aperture of his eyes grew a little and his spine straightened. He knew what “visit” meant in Houston, and it tripped his usually fluid banter. The pause in the conversation was just long enough for an eavesdropping member at the bar to chime in. Peter Pastime held forth: “Ha! That’s one of my favorites! When they say ‘confer’ or ‘talk,’ never fear, but when ‘visit’ gets trotted out, look out! Something’s about to go down that might not be too pleasant for the party summoned to ‘visit.’ This is one of my favorite hometown euphemisms! When I recounted it to my chums in Ivy at Princeton, it never failed to elicit uncontrollable guffaws!”

  Shep remained silent; he couldn’t disagree with Pastime, and even if he did he was not permitted to contend with him per club policy. It was true. Many times he had overheard a captain of industry saying he would like to visit with someone on the other end of a telephone conversation, and the next thing you knew, the two were locked in a fight pitting the visit requester’s company against the requestee’s company. After that, it was their lawyers who were “visiting” and then the litigation was all over the business section of the newspaper.

  Shep, still off balance from this interjection, remained silent, but Peter Pastime continued. “We Pastimes get quite a chuckle over this local argot. It’s just so unabashedly passive-aggressive. My great-grandfather said no one asks for a visit unless he’s got a sledgehammer literal or figurative behind his back and in his firm grip. Ha! A visit with a banker! Ha! That is rich indeed!”

  With that pronouncement, Peter Pastime went back to his Wall Street Journal, opening it theatrically and looking condescendingly down his nose at an article.

  Shep took a breath and attempted to mollify the rictus that held Merlin in mute astonishment. “Hey, Magic Man, it might not be so bad. You can go down there and see what that banker has to say, but just don’t let it get to you.” Merlin’s attention returned to Shep, and he relaxed slightly as he focused on the wry Cajun. “Okay,” Merlin said just above a whisper, and then, feeling his breakfast do a karate move inside his vast gut, “I’d better go now.”

  Shep nodded, and Merlin rose to his feet, aiming for the door.

  He was so close to completing his project to extend ancient Celtic navigational lines to the environs of Greater Houston, from which he could extrapolate a massive amount of crucial new data. He felt certain that with this information and a little more astronomical charting, he would have a pretty good shot at determining what was governing the negative energy gyre he believed held his beleaguered but beloved home city in its suffocating thrall. He might even be able to formulate a plan to reverse it, ushering in a new golden age of well-being in the ever-burgeoning metropolis (mirrored by his own ever-burgeoning waistline) about which he cared with a depth of concern he could neither fully plumb nor comprehend.

  On his walk homeward, Merlin did not extend the antennae of his listening device. He left the ear buds dangling forlornly by each ear a
nd didn’t touch the gadget’s on switch. Lost in thought and with his gaze fixed on the sidewalk pavement in front of him, he shambled toward his observatory, weighed down with his mountainous breakfast and the burden of a potentially destructive storm gathering on his near financial horizon. When his observatory was in sight, Merlin’s valves of Houston began to give way. He trotted to the entrance, bounded up the stairway, and made it through the bathroom door in the nick of time.

  • Two

  Lindley Acheson sat low to the ground on a wheeled gardening cart scooting along in measured increments as she regarded a bed containing some of her prize roses, a few of many varieties that had won her significant notoriety among area gardeners. News of her accomplishments had even carried beyond the city into other parts of the South. The members of Bayou Boughs Garden Club thought of her as a gardening prodigy, a Mozart of the flowerbed, as she had exhibited an undeniable knack for growing things from her girlhood. Others thought of her as a kind of horticultural Amazon savant, for, inasmuch as the roses and orchids and irises she grew were delicate, through the inscrutable caprices of the gene lottery, she most definitely was not.

  This is not to say she was not good-looking—even beautiful—with luxuriant dark hair framing green eyes and skin without blemish. It’s just that there was quite a lot of her to behold. Earlier in her life, doting female relatives tried to comfort her by assuring her she was just big-boned and that there was a long and well-known history of women with this physical trait being seen as quite attractive. By the time of her early adulthood, however, she had become fully cognizant that the era of Rubens had faded into a tiny speck on the receding horizon of history’s rearview mirror, and that her look, as the fashion police called it, was not remotely in vogue. In fact, she had come to believe that it really never was and that, well-meaning though their counsel was, those relatives’ statements from bygone years were just attempts to mollify a girl who knew that, year in and year out, she would always be the biggest one in her grade school classes. And although some of her friends matured into their adult height on the early side before the boys caught up and often surpassed them a couple of years later, by the time Lindley reached high school, she remained the most physically imposing young lady among her peers. Her personality, however, was far from imposing or aggressive, the way so many Texas women, even those from more established families, can be. It was almost like her outsized physical being caused her innate gentleness to be amplified. This aspect of her personality, along with her prodigious talent in the field of cultivating flora, made her a beloved, if not quite pitied, minor neighborhood luminary.