Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

That’s why the lady is a tramp, signaled the MacGuffin.

“Wait,” Margaret Glorio said, but he was already at the door. “Listen,” she called after him in the hallway, but he had already pressed the button for the elevator to come for him. “Where are you going?” she asked, but he had already stepped inside the little box and was sinking toward the street.

Where it came to him. Not bothering even to check out the building’s guardian in the lobby who was checking him out, rushing past him, inspired by his destination, the day’s one more additional errand which would keep him going, keep him from returning home just yet where he knew he would probably have to fight for his life, hold him on the route along the now quite pointless odyssey on which he was engaged (who could have stepped into a movie theater — the coward’s way out — or saloon, or even gone bowling for that matter, or dined in a restaurant, or checked into a hotel — all, all cowards’ ways out). Where, as if it were a scene from the life of a drowner, he was splashed by a memory, not even a memory, Marvin Macklin’s name like a clue in a scavenger hunt. The fellow who died, whose death “after a long illness” had been reported to him yesterday by Dick, his chauffeur and spy, during their hunt for potholes in the park. He turned around and went back into the lobby from which he’d just emerged, up to the desk behind which the doorman (for whom he’d have to supply a new job title since he was never anywhere near a door and who seemed to conduct all the building’s traffic from his post in the lobby, almost, it occurred, like someone in a war room) sat waiting for him, grinning.

“Say,” said the concierge almost pointedly (in light of the puzzles Druff had been putting to himself only moments before), “are you trying to establish an alibi or something?”

“Do you have yesterday’s paper? There’s something I have to check.”

“As it happens,” he said. Stooping, he produced a newspaper from some little cubby behind his desk. Druff thanked him and took it with him to the armchair in which he had dozed off only last night. (Only earlier today, actually, he thought. My God, he thought, I’m observing the unities.) He flipped through the paper, found the announcement of Marvin’s death. Then, turning to some more neutral page, he refolded the newspaper before handing it back to his old friend, the wise-guy concierge.

“Would you call a cab for me?”

“Sure. Where should I tell him you’re going?”

Damn! thought the Commissioner of Streets and, from his less-than- vast knowledge of the city’s neighborhoods, named a section of town he thought to be in the general vicinity of his destination.

Almost as if he had other fish to fry, the concierge phoned up Druff’s cab and permitted him to leave the building without incident.

The City Commissioner of Streets gave the driver the name of the chapel.

“Wait for me,” he said when they’d pulled up to the funeral parlor, “it doesn’t look as if anybody’s home.”

And thought again, Damn! Realizing even as he rang the night bell and waited for someone to come and open the door for him that Macklin had died Thursday, that Catholics didn’t bury on Sunday, that in all likelihood they wouldn’t have waited till Monday, that he’d probably have gone into the ground today. He stood forlornly, conscious of a chill developing in the evening air.

“I’m sorry,” he told the man on duty, “I got into town too late for Marv Macklin’s funeral. Would you happen to know if the family is taking condolence calls? Would you happen to know the address?”

“It just so happens,” the night man told him, echoing the concierge/ doorman of Ms. Glorio’s building.

He told the cabbie and they drove in silence to Mrs. Macklin’s house, Druff chastising himself for his stupidity. And you call yourself a politician! You, City Commissioner of Streets, where’s your vaunted street smarts? You’re supposed to be this big old-school political figure, a man of the wards with turkeys and gift hams in his Christmas and Thanksgiving hampers, how come you don’t know your Catholics? How come it never occurred about Saturday interments? (How come, for that matter, when you got up this morning you didn’t even know it was Saturday? A savvy, moxied-up power broker like you? Or is time so jammed up on you you just don’t bother to keep track any longer?) Have you forgotten everything you ever knew about the political forks? All those precinct clichés, all that district and ward lore? Names of the wives and kiddies in the prominent families, the not-so-prominent, of deadbeat in-laws with input, of ethnic strivers, the police and fire fairs, hinge events in the inner city, graduations, track meets, barbecues?

Where had he been, oh? What had he been doing that he hadn’t had a good idea since the Fourteen Points? (Bringing a marathon to town was a good idea but he’d only been teasing.) And why, since there was no doubt about it now, had they bothered to put spies on him? Was it to discover his incompetence? They could have done that before lunch, they could have done it in an afternoon. A fly on the wall could have done it within buzzing distance of Margaret Glorio’s pallet. Druff knew he was in trouble. It was no good asking MacGuffins to play with him, to go along with him for the ride. But for the life of him, the life of him, he couldn’t imagine what he’d done.

Though he knew now what he must do, the only thing he could do. And that he’d have to wait till Monday to do. He would have to meet with the mayor and turn in his resignation. He’d have to plead for terms. See could he still get his benefits he resigned in midstream. (Or maybe, they wanted him out bad enough, they’d double-dip him, carry him on phantom books, bench him, pay out his contract, debenture his life, do him up like a human junk bond.) Technically, of course, he hadn’t a leg to stand on. It would all come down to mercy of the court, technically. All his bragging notwithstanding (the buried bodies in the city’s closets), his news was old news. Like John F. Kennedy gossip, Martin Luther King. Or guys in history — Ben Franklin, Abner Doubleday — whose claims of discovery were unproven, a matter of folklore their only standing. Druff’s claims had no standing. He knew it. Did his old nemesis, the mayor, know as much? Or was it all, as he now suspected, just some almost good-natured deference they allowed him, the lip service convention paid to myth?

And just who, as far as that’s concerned, was Marvin Macklin anyway?

Trusting to luck — ha, ha ha — Druff figured it would all fall into place once he got there.

He paid and tipped the driver. Who, along with almost everyone else among Druff’s encounters that day, didn’t know him from Adam. As he in turn, even as they rode up the driveway, passing the automobiles parked there (eclectic — a limousine, expensive German and Italian jobs, some mid-list G.M.’s, a Ford Tempo or two, a Chevy Nova), and he left the taxi and went up to knock on the large double doors of the imposing brick house (quite, he thought, like Rose Helen’s old sorority), didn’t recognize it, knew only that he’d never been there before.

The taxi had left. It was too late to withdraw.

A butler came to the door. A butler.

“Macklin’s?” Druff hesitantly asked.

“The family is in the drawing room, sir,” the butler said. (A mourner’s black arm band attached to the sleeve of the butler’s uniform surprised Druff, lending to the occasion a quality of a kind of official corporate woe, rather like the players on a professional football or baseball team donning some black badge of collective tribute for a dead colleague.) The man stepped deftly aside for him, almost as if it were a tight squeeze and he were permitting Druff right-of-way in the narrow passageway of a Pullman car.