Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Mrs. Post was standing over them.

“What,” Druff said, startled, “what?”

She laid one finger across the face of her wristwatch.

“Is it curfew? I’m sorry, I mustn’t have been paying attention. Is it curfew already?”

Though here and there there were people about, the room had begun to thin out. The bays and window seats were cleared, the piano bench. No one cuddled in the wing chairs, the sofas were all but vacant.

Rose Helen sat up and, to Druff’s chagrin, immediately began to lay into her housemother.

“How dare you?” she demanded. “He’s not the only one left.” Pointedly, she named names, not only indicating a few of her sorority sisters still lingering with their dates, but ticketing indiscretions, citing violations of dress codes, some general dishevelment of human decency.

“I’m sorry,” Druff mumbled, “I guess I must have lost track of the time.”

Rose Helen interrupted him. “You’ve nothing to apologize for, why are you apologizing?” And turned furiously to Mrs. Post. “Have you looked in the study rooms? Is everyone out of the study rooms?” She tugged at his sleeve. “Let’s just go see for ourselves.”

“I’m sorry,” Druff said, “I wasn’t paying close enough attention, I guess. I just didn’t hear that bell you ring in here ten minutes before curfew.”

“Stop saying you’re sorry. No one else says that. Do you hear anyone else saying they’re sorry? It’s not your job to be sorry, it’s not your job to listen for the bell. It isn’t your job to have people set their watches by you.” She was furious with them both, Rose Helen. And though it was Rose Helen who did the shouting, it was Druff and Mrs. Post who got all the attention. The girls, their dates, looked from one to the other of them following their flabbergast silence. Druff felt an odd connivance with and sympathy for the housemother. It occurred to him that her heavy, almost powerful hair, its immaculate sheen, so at odds with her wan, brittle features, must have been a wig. “Well, come on,” Rose Helen said, “let’s just see what’s going on in those study rooms!”

“Most of those people are pinned,” Mrs. Post defended. “Many are already engaged.”

“So,” said Rose Helen, “they’re in there. They haven’t left! They’re in there, all right.”

“Please,” Druff said.

“No,” snapped Rose Helen, but not at Druff, at Mrs. Post, at her sorority sisters, at the fraternity boys, “I won’t please. Rules are rules. I’m going to empty out those study halls for you!” And then began exaggeratedly to limp about the now silent, curiously passionless passion pit, circling the big room and gathering, it seemed, a sort of momentum, and went out into the hall, going past the big staircase and continuing on toward the studies at the back of the sorority house.

He heard her roughly opening doors, heard her shout “Curfew, curfew” like a hysterical town crier.

“I’m going,” Druff called. “I’m leaving now, Rose Helen.”

“Curfew in there! Curfew!”

“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he called. “Would you tell her I’ll call her tomorrow?” he appealed to Mrs. Post.

But she called him. It was almost three in the morning. It was the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse who came to fetch him to the phone.

“It’s your girlfriend,” he said.

“So late?”

The waiter shrugged. “They ask for ketchup when it’s right out there on the table in front of them.”

“I hope nothing’s wrong,” he told the waiter.

“Sometimes, if it’s chicken cacciatore, or meat in a heavy gravy, they ask us to cut it up for them in the kitchen so they don’t dirty their hands or get grease on their clothes.”

“Rose Helen? Are you all right, Rose Helen?” He expected her to be crying. She wasn’t, though he could tell she seemed excited, even pleased. She didn’t scold him, didn’t even mention that he’d left without saying good night.

“I threatened to resign,” she said. He didn’t understand. “From the sorority, I threatened to resign from the sorority.”

“But why?” Druff said.

“Mrs. Post was there when I told them. Though you know, Robert,” she said, “I don’t blame Mrs. Post. She doesn’t make policy, she takes her signals from the girls.” Druff was uncomfortable. If any of this was on his behalf… “I’ve only just left them,” Rose Helen went on. “It could have been, I don’t know, a beauty parlor in there. You should have seen them. All those girls in their curlers and face goo…” He thought of her own soft, beautiful skin, oddly backlit, pearly from suffering, maybe from grudge. “Except for the few of us who were still in our clothes, it could have been a giant slumber party, all those girls in their shorty pajamas, some still clutching their teddies, the goofy, outsize turtles, froggies and stuffed kitty cats they take to bed with them. It was really rather touching.”

“You woke them? You got them out of bed?” (He thought of the ketchup right out there on the table in front of them, of the cut-up chicken cacciatore and of the meat in heavy gravy.)

“I called a special meeting,” Rose Helen said. “I had charges, I had witnesses. You can call a special meeting when you have charges and witnesses.”

“Charges against who? Mrs. Post doesn’t make policy. She takes her signals from the girls, you said.”

“ ‘If I resign,’ I told them, ‘your room and board goes up. You’ve already lost Jan and Eileen this semester. Rachel’s on academic probation and may flunk out.’ ”

Druff thought of the furniture, of the grand piano, the Oriental rugs. He couldn’t imagine that whatever few dollars Rose Helen’s leaving might cost them could make a difference. He thought them rich enough to take up the slack by themselves. He didn’t want her to resign. He’d grown quite too accustomed to the furniture. Besides, even after he heard her speech, the good arguments she’d presented to get them to keep her from resigning (the money it could cost them if she quit; the straight-A average she maintained and which—“A rising tide raises all boats“—helped keep the Chi Phi G.P.A. just about where it needed to be in order to remain competitive and continue to attract prospective pledges—“Because supposing,” she argued, “Rachel doesn’t flunk out, supposing she just manages to keep her head above water and drags along with a D-plus or even a C-minus average, then losing all those A’s would really mean something”—throwing even her deformity into the argument, that limp that made her look so bad and them so good), he was still uncertain about her reasons. If this had anything to do with Druff… And what about Mrs. Post, who didn’t make policy, who took her signals from the girls? And what about the girls with their stuffed animals and face goo, and who were really rather touching?

“Charges?” Druff said. “Witnesses? Has this anything to do with me? Am I at fault here?”

“Why, against the girls in the studies, silly. And my witnesses against them were those boys I rousted.”

“Was Rachel there when you said these things? Were her feelings hurt? Did she cry?” he wanted to know.

Now she was more interesting than Druff.

She was political, certainly. It was those two years of seniority she had on him, had on most of them, plus all those other years of pure physical outrage, the one or two before they actually knew that anything was wrong, then the fifteen or so when she had to wear the successively larger braces to make the correction in her spine, to bring it to the point where it was barely noticeable, except possibly to Rose Helen, and which left scarcely a trace, unless it was to those who picked up on the tiny shelf she had made for it above her left hip where she could rest her palm. Because all that kicked into the seniority, too. Plus things he could have only a guesswork knowledge of. (Prosthetic bathing suits perhaps, prosthetic evening gowns.)