Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

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The MacGuffin: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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As he's chauffeured about in his official limousine, aging City Commissioner of Streets Bobbo Druff comes to a frightening realization: he's lost force, the world has started to condescend to him. His once fear-inspiring figure has become everyone's "little old lady."
In retaliation, Druff constructs a paranoid plot-his "MacGuffin"-within which (he believes) everyone is out to get him. With unabashed enthusiasm Druff starts an illicit affair (in order to incriminate himself), instigates fights with his employees, invents lies for his family-in short, does everything in his power to create a world in which he is placed safely and firmly at the scandalous center.
One of Elkin's greatest comic figures, Druff's self-conscious madness is surprisingly smart and hilariously inventive. Few characters in modern literatureshow such immense creativity and courage in the face of such a hopeless dilemma-the very slipperiness of existence itself.

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But it was too late, had already been too late when Druff had let himself into the darkened house and, ever so quietly, and with as much care as if there had been a real MacGuffin in his life, made his way into the kitchen to confirm what he should have taken for granted in the first place, which he did take for granted. It would have been too late even if he hadn’t fumbled about at the kitchen table for those few seconds, even if he hadn’t clinked the spoon in the cereal bowl or brushed his arm against the box and shaken the cornflakes in it.

“Dad?” his son stage-whispered from the stairs. “Dad, is that you down there, Dad?”

“I’m all right, Mikey,” Druff said.

Down came the boy the rest of the way and switched on the light in the kitchen.

“Why didn’t you turn a light on? You could have fallen.”

“I didn’t fall. I’m fine. What are you doing up so late? And if you’re so worried about people falling in the dark, why’d you turn off that hall light Mother leaves on all night?”

Now, in their bright kitchen, Mikey performed his strange, blind tic. He shut his eyes. Druff, who’d picked the tic up from his son, shut his eyes. They watched the tinted darkness of their squeezed lids, passed through the waves and breakers of their mutual resentments. Mikey went first.

“So,” he said, “how’d it go, Dad?”

Druff didn’t realize at first what his son meant, answering, “Fine. I said I’m all right.”

“No,” the kid said, “I meant with Scouffas. I meant with that other guy.”

Hurriedly, Druff glanced down at the note Rose Helen had left.

(So you can imagine how he felt. You can just imagine.)

But Mikey was already speaking. “Jeez,” said their man-child, making his queer symbolic associations, working his own ritualized actuarials, factlessly, baselessly, adding years to his father’s life, extending by decades the frontiers of his own boundless childhood, “you could have knocked me over and over with a feather. Any city can have a baseball team. Seattle has one, unlikely towns like Minneapolis and Milwaukee. And all those places in the Sunbelt? Come on. San Diego? Give me a break. They’re jokes, they’re just jokes. I don’t care how many times they win their division, or the pennant. Or the World Series, even. They’re just jokes. Or can you imagine a state like Texas having two teams? In the Lone Star State? That’s just got to be graft. Somebody must have had their hand out big time. You know how that works. I mean I don’t have to tell you! If it ever came out, the people responsible could get years. Years! They’d be put away so fast for so long their kids would never see them again. And how long do you think they’d survive locked up like that? People like that? Privileged people. People accustomed to giving the orders. Just the shame and disgrace would kill them if the hardened cons and the bread and water didn’t get to them first.

“Don’t make me laugh. Those guys would be goners.

“And I’ll tell you another thing, Dad. It’s one thing to have an NBA franchise, or even an NFL one. Or even your own hockey team in the NHL, but you saw what happened in St. Louis. Well, the Blues came out of that one all right, and no one’s more grateful than I am, but what happened in St. Louis could happen anywhere. Let’s face it, Dad, the fans are subject to the whims of the owners. And the only thing those people care about is the bottom line. That’s where their loyalties lie. You’re deluding yourself if you think otherwise. ‘Build us a bigger stadium. Give us a tax abatement, maybe we’ll stay. Promise not to go after us in the press to get better players if we don’t produce. Let us raise ticket prices whenever we want. Give us a bigger percentage of the popcorn and peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Permit us to keep more from the Cold beer, cold beer here!’ They’re such babies! And we’re at their mercy. We’re at the mercy of people who have no mercy!

“You tell me I should be realistic. Well, I am. I am realistic. I’m realistic enough to know that the Indianapolis 500 is locked in, that the Kentucky Derby is, that it’ll always be run in Louisville. That the Preakness belongs to Baltimore, and the Rose Bowl to Pasadena, and the Masters to Augusta. Those are American Classics, Dad, and no so-called owners can ever come along to try to change the venue.”

Druff, fascinated, terrified, thought, he knows “tax abatement,” he knows “venue.” He’s almost eloquent, he is eloquent.

“Well, then,” the son said, “you can just imagine how I felt when I saw Mom’s note. You can just imagine. So how was it? How did it go? What did they say?”

“Scouffas?” Druff said. He took up his wife’s note and read in the light all he’d known in the dark would be in it, failing to predict only the additional details of his visitors’ names. Rose Helen had managed to get even the difficult I in McIlvoy right, a tribute, he supposed, to his careful pronunciation of his absurd, complicated, unpremeditated lie. (Thinking, Why, I’m good, I’m really good. Under the guns of Old MacGuffin I’m really good.)

“Yes,” Mikey said, “and that other one. What’s his name, the stuffed-shirt one, the stickler — oh, what is his name? — McIlvoy. Did you get to see the gadget, the thing no bigger than a stopwatch? Did they let you hold it?”

“The gadget was Scouffas’s department.”

“Oh,” Mikey said, “you’d think it would have been the stickler’s.”

“Life is strange, Mike,” he told his son truthfully. “How’d you even know about the gadget? There’s nothing about it in your mother’s note.”

“I think it was written up somewhere. Anyway, Mom told me about it after I got back and read her message.”

“She was in bed. You woke her up? What for, to do your dishes?”

His son’s eyes closed tight for three beats. It was as if he was in pained, desperate biofeedback trance. He sniffed the air, opened his eyes, then aggressively asked his father if he’d been smoking.

“What? No. Of course not.”

“Maybe McIlvoy, maybe Scouffas,” his son said. “There’s this funny smell.”

“What funny smell? I don’t smell anything funny. What funny smell?”

“I don’t know. This funny smell. It’s not a bad smell.”

The trace elements, Druff thought. Margaret Glorio’s hair tars and breath shellacs. Royal dust from the crown rack. He smelled it himself, tasted it. Love laundry, the stale savories and sweet fetids of their rich, cloyed traffic. Was this a counterattack? Nonsense. The child was factless. Yet he’d heard him be eloquent. Could he also be clever? He spooked at the notion of a clever Mikey. Suppose he hated him. Suppose there was malice there, bad blood, evasion like the unsettled soup of magnetic aversion, some call in the bones for revulsion, repugnance, abhorrence, revenge. Suppose there were menace, rancor, all the pledged bitters and solemn loathelies of stalled grudge? Suppose this was the long, slow abiding of crusade, jihad, uprising, holy war? He had always known that his son’s fear for Druff’s life had little to do with love. But suppose his son’s behavior had nothing to do with love? Suppose he needed him around to give his hatred something to believe in? What if his dependency had been adversarial all along? Only a campaign? Some Hundred Years’ War of Getting Dad’s Goat? MacGuffins were abroad in the land tonight. Thick as pea soup. Druff was breathless, he couldn’t move. It was MacGuffin gridlock.

Yet when his son began speaking again it was in the same loopy register and tropes of his ancient argument.

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