Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“That way?” Druff said.

“Yes, sir. Go right on in.”

He started in the direction of the drawing room. Well, Druff thought, it wasn’t a wake. There wouldn’t be clog dancers. All he heard through the room’s cracked doors was indistinct voices, vague figures moving dimly about all he saw. Where was he? How did he know that name?

He recognized it, recalled he’d fixed the fellow’s given name to the surname Dick had spoken when he’d mentioned the death. Everything else was a blank. It really was time Druff offered his resignation. Where was he? Who was Marvin Macklin? Some big contributor? Some old opponent? Or just one of those famous buried bodies Druff’s kind so liked to brag about? Well, sure, thought Druff, now!

And caught himself grinning and paused to adjust his demeanor. Well, he thought, you haven’t quite lost it, have you, old-timer? You’re still savvy enough to recall you don’t march to the muffled drums with a shit-eating grin all over your face. And had this sudden, bleak take on himself — his worn, now scruffy suit, rumpled from a day in the weather, creased from sitting prim on toilet seats in rabbis’ studies, squeezing into tight restaurant booths, from lying in it across a sofa along a lady’s lap, strewing its component parts down in passionate abandon, stretching its coat out to cover himself and tucking its sleeves under his body to create some snug illusion. From getting in and out of it so often! And his cuffs, his poor shot shirt cuffs grubby with grime, the streets’, his streets’ contributory grease and air. Though on the other hand, he thought, he would almost certainly look more the mourner than any of them. Sure. He was dressed for it, struck just exactly the correct note of stale, unshaven grief, and probably gave off — his unfed breath — some quality of aged, fermenting fruit.

This bleak but fitting take, he thought, and decided not to bother to pat himself down or buff his uppers against the cloth of his trouser legs. Fixing only his expression, neutering it, balancing upon it a kind of shy politeness, he carefully presented himself to the drawing room.

Aiming himself, as best he could determine, straight for the doyenne here, the widow Macklin herself. (Still enough of the politician to do that much at least, following some spoor of bereavement, of hysteria, to pick from a crowded room the one dressed in the most suitable black, the one with the twisted handkerchief, the one — by God, he was still at least a little good! — with the palest cheeks, whose makeup had sustained the heaviest losses, whose face powder had been practically rubbed off by hugs and the cheek-to-cheeks as effectively as if soap and water had been applied to them.) Trusting in his on-again, off-again MacGuffin not to trip him up, let him down, not to cheapen things by turning him over to farce, play him for a fool, having him make up to some wracked sister, some distant, dithered cousin. Consoling the maid.

He picked his woman, found his man.

“Paula,” he told her boldly (recalling this detail from the little death squib in the paper), “Bob Druff. I’m so sorry. What can I say at a time like this?”

“I know,” she said, reflexively touching the handkerchief to her nose. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Druff. Marvin would have appreciated it.”

“I apologize for not being at the funeral,” he said. “I only just found out.”

“Yes,” she said, “thank you. It was a shock to us all.”

“At least his suffering is over.”

“Do you think so?”

“Well,” Druff said, and broke off mindlessly. He smiled ambiguously, nodded politely from his thin store of boyish reserve, and withdrew. Retreated, he wondered? Routed, he thought. Backing off from the woman who seemed to gaze down at him from the high ground of her power in the room, he made his way to the bar where he poured a drink for his empty stomach, then pulled himself to a neutral corner, the far, unoccupied end of a genuinely immense sofa on which, Druff observed only after he’d joined him, his mayor was already seated. The very man he’d been thinking about it couldn’t have been fifteen minutes ago. Don’t tell me there’s no God! Druff thought. Or at least that my life ain’t haunted! Before he was able even to acknowledge him, however, he heard his name being summoned, pronounced in just precisely that curious tone (only reversed) of vocal conjure he himself had employed with Dick when he’d mused aloud, “Macklin, Macklin… Marvin Macklin?”

“Druff, Druff. Commissioner Druff?”

It was the widow addressing him. At full room temperature.

“Why yes,” said the City Commissioner of Streets.

“Isn’t there some scandal?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think so.”

“I thought there was a scandal.”

“No,” Druff said. “But I know where the body is buried. Oh,” he told Macklin’s widow, “sorry.”

“No problem,” she said, and Druff wondered if that famous hankie he’d looked for and which she’d touched to her nose wasn’t perhaps used just to blot a cold or tap the itch of an allergy.

Druff thought he recognized a tentative, amused but sycophantic wheeze or snort.

“Is that Doug?” he said.

“Yes, sir, Commissioner. Top that off for you, sir?” And there he was suddenly, practically up in the commissioner’s face, extending the very same bottle of rye from which Druff had just serviced himself, dressed in the suit Druff had seen when he had called on Doug a few hours earlier. This was Druff’s thinking: Doug had made a day of it. He’d been at the funeral home, gone on to the cemetery, returned to his apartment to shower and prepare for an evening chez Macklin. Then this was: if Doug had been at the funeral home and gone on to the cemetery, why Dick must have, too. And, if he had, then perhaps he hadn’t been home when Druff called from the restaurant. Then, frightfully, this: the Charlotte person had been left behind. To be there in case the commissioner called. What terrified him now was that whatever it was it turned out they were trying to pin on him, so many were in on it. Not a ring, no conspiracy or compact, plot, scheme, plan, deal or design, but a cabal, out and out. And, indeed, this is exactly Druff’s feeling, that he’s stumbled into a cabala. Was it devil worship here? Some soiled, municipal arcana? Whatever, it was certainly widespread. Widespread and up-front.

“We see each other socially only at funerals, ceremonial evenings when the family has us in,” Doug explained quietly as he filled Druff’s glass. “You sure you don’t want any ice, Commissioner? No extra charge.” What he was saying seemed at absurd odds with the man’s take-charge moves, his expansive, liberal ways with their liquor, their ice. “I’m not saying folks don’t kick the bucket often enough for my tastes. That would be callous. It would be stupid and mean. But there ought to be a middle ground.”

“Death vigils?”

“There you go.”

There was a sound of a sort of muted, general amusement throughout the room. Druff hadn’t looked around yet, had still to take a census in the room, large almost as one of the public rooms on a cruise ship, but he’d a sense that when he did there’d be many here he already knew. Mr. Mayor, of course. Dick, perhaps. Dan, Ham, Jerry Rector. The doorman-cum-concierge, taking some well-deserved time off from his duties, might even be there. Maybe Mikey, maybe Margaret. Maybe the colored guy from the synagogue. His waitress. The pharmacist, perhaps. Edouvard Mrentzharev. The guy who’d given him a ride in the pickup. Neighbors, joggers he’d passed in the streets. (It could happen. If they were tailing him, why not?)