A less sweet side, perhaps, was that as she grew older she actively channeled all her heartbreak and frustration into her impressive array of flowering plants. This morning she was paying attention to some particularly vicious thorns on the thick stem of a dazzling hybrid red tea rose in full bloom. She exhaled fully while reflecting on the thorns in what she considered her very confounding life. Just as she was about to sink a notch farther on the sadness scale, she heard it, and, unlike the superannuated golf curmudgeons, after listening for another moment to make sure of the sound’s nature and general area of origin, her face softened, and with eyes brightening, she looked up with a wistful smile. She knew that those ethereal strains could emanate only from the lone glass armonica in Bayou Boughs, and that its player could be none other than someone she had known all her years, Merlin McNaughton.
On leaving the club after a late afternoon board meeting, Tite Dûche’s step had quickened considerably from its usual fast pace. Additionally, there was a kind of pucker to his mouth that, taken in view with his sharp little snout of a nose, made him seem all the more rodent-like. Not knowing this little man, one might have thought he had some serious business to attend to, was off to an important doctor’s appointment, or needed to see a school principal about a miscreant child. On all of these counts, such an observer would have been wrong, as this was Tite Dûche’s way of expressing excitement.
The business before the board this afternoon involved electing a new slate of officers for the coming fiscal year, and through years of machinations and shameless flattery of key decision makers, Tite’s grand design had come to fruition. The new president of Bayou Boughs Country Club was none other than N. Teitel Dûche V, aka “Tite” Dûche.
A laundry list of items his new position would empower him to address extended its sharp little elbows into the cramped sides of his mind’s alley-narrow breadth. He had to get going on this. It was his time. Finally. Tite skittered across the parking lot toward his yellow Porsche Cabriolet, his mind racing with a frenzy mimicking the high-pitched whine his little topless German roadster produced while redlining through the gears and spiriting him from one tony engagement to the next.
Merlin sat across from the desk and empty chair of Junior Trust Officer Curtis Bumpers in the banker’s office sixty-six stories above the pavement in the Phal-Tex Energy Tower in downtown Houston, a place radically transformed from the malarial bayou-laced coastal prairie upon which the Allen brothers staked their claim and promoted to unsuspecting, credulous settlers back East in the 1830s. How their minds would have boggled had they been able to foresee their risky venture’s spawn. Or maybe not. From its very inception Houston had been a city of opportunistic dreamers unashamed to believe that they could bring big business ideas to fruition in this new, freewheeling place.
Merlin McNaughton was not such a soul. Although he came from a line of adept businesspeople, perhaps through the untimely death of his parents and his grandfather’s sphinx-like taciturnity, the chain of transmission of business-mindedness was broken. Also, and more importantly, Merlin was always more interested in ideas and concepts than in the feet-on-the-ground, hands-in-the-dirt world of doing business. It helped that he had always been provided for—not lavishly, but certainly adequately. As he waited for his trust officer to return with his file, he resigned himself to the reality that a heavy weight was about to be lowered, if not dropped insouciantly, onto a world that seemed to hang tenuously from its own private celestial firmament—namely his.
His eyes roved around the office. There were a few files stacked neatly here and there, the perfunctory photos of wife and children and a fishing tournament trophy, among other unremarkable mementos. From the walls hung what Junior Trust Officer Bumpers would doubtless have referred to as art, but what was really nothing more than an atavistic expression of basic ancient rites and impulses, albeit rendered with a more evolved hand. There were paintings of men wading in shallow saltwater and casting toward a schooling group of tailing redfish on an idealized Texas Gulf Coast morning. There were men in orange vests poised behind English pointers lifting their shotguns to bring down a couple of unlucky birds in an explosive covey rise of bobwhite quail against a backdrop of classic South Texas brush country, replete with cacti and mesquite trees. There was another idealized depiction of men shooting ducks from a reed and salt grass blind on a remote bay, one duck falling hard and another wounded and sidewinding toward the light surface chop as muzzle flash blows from the barrels of the second shooter’s twelve gauge and a trusty Labrador retriever tenses to dive into the saltwater and swim toward the bobbing inanimate creatures.
All of Junior Trust Officer Bumpers’ paintings were by the same artist—the painter whose work was on the walls of hundreds of bankers, lawyers, and energy professionals around the city—H. Gervey. A print, or if one were fortunate enough to have one, a painting by Mr. Gervey was a kind of religious totem signifying membership in a brotherhood or wannabe warrior class of subduers of nature and the out-of-doors. In the same way the painters of the famous Lascaux cave drawings in France functioned as artist-priests, Mr. H. Gervey officiated for this contemporary demographic and psychographic group. H. Gervey’s paintings, although sometimes bordering on what the intelligentsia might deem a kind of Thomas Kincaid–esque shlockiness, were not without merit. It was just that the proliferation of them in the offices of so many former FIE-nance majors from various state universities around the region had rendered them the kind of predictable, unimaginative totems that they had become.
Although reflections on anthropology and aesthetics were not populating Merlin’s thoughts, a quick glance around at the H. Gerveys brought to mind vivid memories of Merlin’s youthful hunting and fishing trips with his grandfather, the legendary and quirky Arthur McNaughton. Renowned for his intuition for finding and developing productive oil and gas plays, McNaughton was as publicly taciturn as he was successful. In the company of a small group of family members and trusted friends, McNaughton did, however, drop his Mandarin opacity and reveal a genuine warmth and thoughtful, even whimsical persona. He was something of a polymath, especially in his era among his oilman peers, having studied philosophy along with geophysics in his college days. He had special compassion for his grandson who demonstrated a kind of serious inwardness from a very early age.
After his son’s and Merlin’s mother’s death, Arthur McNaughton assumed responsibility for raising the young man. Arthur committed for his remaining years to making a concerted effort to connect with Merlin, and, as best he could, to connect Merlin with the world. One of his favorite ways to engage Merlin with the outside world was through hunting and fishing expeditions. McNaughton was a great club man and a member of the most prestigious private clubs in the region, including hunting and fishing retreats. One of Merlin’s favorite spots was a place on one of the bays on the central coastal bend. And Arthur McNaughton took note that duck season animated his grandson thoroughly. In very short order, Merlin demonstrated just as much interest in fishing the shallow bay waters of the sportsman’s club a few hours south of town. He wade-fished for hours with singular focus, and much to his grandfather’s delight, developed quite a knack for it. That extreme focus was noted over time by club members and guests, and the club’s guides, with a nod to The Who’s rock opera Tommy, began to refer to him among themselves as the pinball wizard, underscoring his rapt attention on the activity and his uncanny ability to catch lunker trout and redfish, along with the occasionally gigged flounder the size of a large pizza pan.
Merlin was fascinated with the effect of the weather and the tides on his endeavors, and Arthur encouraged this line of inquiry. He settled on a particular memory of his grandfather and himself on a calm October dawn casting to a school of redfish tailing at the entrance of a salt grass–lined slough, methodically catching their limits before the sun was no more than a few degrees above the eastern horizon. His reverie broke like a dry rotten bough in a hurricane-force gale as Junior Trust Officer Bump
ers entered the office.
Bumpers took his seat and glanced at the papers in his grasp and his computer screen at measured intervals. He then looked at Merlin with clinical professionalism and said, “According to the terms of the trust created for your benefit, distributions cannot be forthcoming at their heretofore previous rate without impinging on the corpus of the capital. And from what I understand from the level of income generated by your on-again, off-again tutoring of neighborhood students, even if you double it, it will not make up for the shortfall for what you have become accustomed to receiving from your trust on a monthly basis as long as oil and natural gas prices remain depressed.” Bumpers looked across his desk at Merlin in stony silence.
“Very well,” Merlin said, “so what you are suggesting is that—”
A peevish wince torqued Bumpers’ pasty unremarkable face: “Full-time employment would solve the shortfall.”
Now it was Merlin who was silent. He had known this was coming; nevertheless, like the arrival of the news of the expected death of a long-ill loved one or the demitasse signaling the end of a particularly satisfying holiday feast, the shock registered on a visceral level and his integument reacted with predictable violence. He felt his intestines twist into a kind of Gordian knot as his eyes widened and his right shoulder dropped in sympathy with his churning bowels. His valves of Houston threatened, then desisted. On seeing Merlin’s discomfort, Bumpers held him in a cold, unblinking stare. He harbored deep-seated contempt for the beneficiaries upon whom his own livelihood depended, and especially for one as alien to the norms of corporate America as Merlin. The rare occasions when he was able to drop the hammer on a beneficiary he relished with the anticipation of a well-provided-for toddler awakening on Christmas morning.
“Very well,” said Merlin with Roman stoicism and stood to tower above Bumpers’ desk. Taking in Merlin’s sheer upright volume quelled Bumpers’ seething disdain for a few seconds. Merlin was generally not very adept at reading people’s moods by their facial expressions and body language; however, he noticed as he rose to leave that Bumpers’ unbroken icy glare did not meet his eyes. As he walked to the door Merlin imagined the concentrated twin negative energy vortices of Junior Trust Officer Bumpers’ eyes burning through the posterior of his spring-weight ensemble. He grabbed the steely doorknob and turned to say goodbye, but Bumpers was already back to work, tapping on his computer keyboard. Merlin was not able to influence the capricious global oil and gas market, but he was determined not to let Bumpers’ glare do permanent damage to his own internal energy balance.
There was another player holding the thick-gauged puppet cables of Merlin’s financial fate; he was the erstwhile occupant of the house beyond which Merlin’s observatory stood like a middle finger to the neighborhood. He landed in Houston on few occasions, his compulsively peripatetic mode a near runaway train of unsettledness teetering alongside the steep gorge of permanent dilettantism. Although he was only twelve years Merlin’s senior, he was his uncle and Merlin’s grandfather’s youngest and sole surviving child. Merlin knew that Mickey McNaughton called himself a consultant, but about what and for whom he consulted remained veiled to him.
Mickey was named as the sole trustee for the Merlin Mistlethorpe McNaughton Trust created in the will of Arthur McNaughton. Mickey, in turn, had appointed the Southeast Texas Bancorp Trust Department as co-trustee to handle the day-to-day aspects of the management of Merlin’s humble trust fund. His style of trusteeship was arm’s length, to say the least, and he had never balked at, much less reviewed with the barest modicum of fiduciary acuity, any of the quarterly reports Junior Trust Officer Bumpers had provided him. Mickey McNaughton often demonstrated the attention span of a hummingbird and was known in Houston as a kind of Bertie Wooster of Bayou Boughs. Educated at some of the Ivy League’s finest institutions and at a New Hampshire prep school before that, he was one of those Houstonians who didn’t have a Southern or Texan accent, and, owing to his academic pedigree and coming of age at school among New England’s elite, his clipped speech was peppered generously with “So …” at the beginning of his sentences and “Right?” at their conclusions. In short, Mickey McNaughton was a type who born and bred Houstonians looked upon with dubious eyes, if not outright distrust. To many of them, with his Southern credentials so severely compromised, he seemed like a spy in enemy territory—a double agent.
After Merlin’s meeting with Bumpers, Mickey was nowhere near the vicinity of Bayou Boughs or Greater Houston. As Merlin trudged to the bus stop for the Allen Parkway to Kirby Express, he contemplated trying to contact his globe-trotting uncle by telephone, but experience had taught him that attempts to implore Mickey for something regarding his trust almost always fell on deaf ears. Merlin could imagine his cant answers to his questions regarding the account.
“So … the terms of the trust are such that none of the corpus may be spent except in the case of extraordinary circumstances, right?”
“So … Southeast Texas Bancshares Trust Department is one of the most respected such departments in the U.S., right?”
“So … I’m in Dubai doing org consulting, right? So … dealing with the minutia of the vagaries in the oil and gas market is really not in my wheelhouse, right?”
“So, you have a master’s from Rice. You can probably get a job somewhere doing something, right?”
It had become clear to Merlin, through many previous interactions with Mickey, that his not-too-senior uncle had no interest in the grand personal projects Merlin deemed such important priorities. Every time he started to talk with Mickey about things like reversing the negative energy gyre of Houston, Mickey’s spine would stiffen, his eyes would glaze over, and he would say something like “So … I’ve got a squash game in fifteen minutes, right?”
No. This time Merlin was determined to draw on all the internal resoluteness he could muster and face his financial headwinds head-on. He would neither contact Mickey nor allow himself to be humiliated by further interaction with Junior Trust Officer Bumpers. He was prepared to take the proverbial deep breath into his cavernous lipid-swaddled lungs and inject himself into the vast intertwined commercial vascular system of the cacophonous city that thrummed and clanged so close to his sacrosanct refuge of a home in the heart of tranquil Bayou Boughs.
• Three
Merlin fell into a deep funk in the ensuing days, confounded by his newly constrained situation and utterly flummoxed by the dubious prospect of prospecting for work. He had hardly touched his glass armonica or head-encircling listening device. Instead, his hands, or more accurately put, hand, found other occupation as an old nemesis returned to thwart him.
In the foggy zone between sleep and wakefulness, images of Celtic warrior queens and ancient goddesses crowded his imagination. Some were Wagnerian Brünnhilde types, replete with horned helmets and body-length spears. Some were on horseback, swords drawn and sporting armored war bustiers out of which tumbled fierce fulsome breasts ready to do battle in their own right. From mythic Britomartis to indomitable Queen Boudicca of the Iceni forward to red-, white-, and blue-clad Wonder Woman, the images came in increasingly rapid succession, intensity, and Technicolor vibrancy.
Simultaneously, a spear of a fleshly nature was rising in Merlin’s nether regions. And then, most disturbingly, Merlin became conscious of his left hand abetting this development. As the images scrolled in his mind in even more rapid-fire succession, his sinister hand kept pace, and before he was fully aware of the intensity of this hijacking of his more noble self at the hands of base desire, double life-size images of Xena, Warrior Princess, blew up in his mind as his manhood followed suit and erupted in Vesuvian proportions, leaving an aftermath requiring immediate attention in the laundry room on the observatory’s ground floor.
Merlin’s anguish was now even more profound than it had been over the previous days, and he was sure that a self-diagnosed condition was once again thwarting him. Merlin was right-handed at all times … except when it came to the
above-described activity. Because of this idiosyncrasy he was thoroughly convinced that he suffered from alien hand syndrome.
Alien hand syndrome is a very rare condition in which the sufferer loses motor control of a hand such that it wanders and acts as if it has a mind of its own with no volitional agency whatsoever on the part of the person to whom the hand appertains. Video documentation of this neurological disorder is both stunning and rather disturbing—not unlike Merlin himself. Merlin realized that it was time for qualified medical professionals to address his predicament, confirm his self-diagnosis, and present reasonable options for a path forward that would bring his errant left hand once again under his dominion and put an end to its early morning southbound travels.
Fortunately, on this morning’s agenda was a trip to the doctor’s office for a regular check-up. Merlin would plead his case with McLean (Mac) Swearingen, M.D., a longtime family friend and fellow member of Bayou Boughs Country Club. A couple of hours had elapsed, and by now, Merlin was as put together a version of himself as he could be—in stark contrast to his frowsy daybreak mess. Today he chose linen trousers in a neutral beige, complemented beneath, of course, by his special urban hiking boots in their own matching hue of beige. For a shirt, he chose a simple blue oxford cloth buttondown. Merlin selected this humble outfit to give respect to the august institution in the Texas Medical Center whose threshold he was about to traverse. Dr. Swearingen’s offices were in the Witlock Tower, a contemporary wonder of opulence and efficiency in the heart of the largest concentration of hospitals on the planet. Surely, if Dr. Swearingen couldn’t help him, someone in his vast network of colleagues in this city within the city of healthcare providers could get to the bottom of this confounding situation and tame his errant alien hand.
Merlin of the Magnolias Page 3