Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

He recalled all the fat hints so freely given, the warm, warmer! hot! tips Ham and his pals had been so careful to pass him. (Which was what troubled him about this caper, that no one connected with it — it was almost his style with Meg Glorio — bothered to cover their ass.)

So he did, he looked around. He sought out familiar faces, but they were strangers. Only Doug. Only the mayor.

Maybe Mrs. Macklin was a mind reader.

“It’s been a long evening,” she said to Druff. “Yours must be the third wave.”

Turnover she meant. A third complement of condolers. (Even now a few people were making the collective sighs and coughs and peremptories, all their collected-bundle sounds and shifts preparatory to leave- taking.)

Druff, still thinking cabal, hated this. It offended him, he meant. His notions of economy. Well, he was old school, was, to all intents and purposes, practically out of it. Which didn’t mean it didn’t register, that he couldn’t object. So many. Too many. (Never mind there were only Doug and the mayor. Mrs. Macklin herself had told him as much. His was the third shift. He’d just missed the others.) It was enough to choke a guy. Signaled a sort of gridlock. Something foul was going down in his streets. Was he their commissioner or not? All right, he was a little paranoid, but that only put a spin on his vision, it didn’t obscure it. Conspiracies, compacts, plots and plans required decorum. At least a little decorum. Druff, who was no snob, had always felt there ought to be standards, that any scam worth its salt should be run rather along the lines of a good country club. The power of the blackball had to be reserved or you’d end with this huge balance of probity deficit. That was bad for business, bad for traffic, bad for crime. Even if they weren’t here — Ham, he meant, Margaret, Jerry, Dick and Dan, his goofy son — they’d been by, or would be. And City Commissioner of Streets Druff suddenly remembered certain things said in the synagogue earlier that day — Dan’s and Ham’s and Jerry Rector’s articles of faith— their Fourteen Points. “Throw caution to the winds,” Dan said, and suggested there ought to be something personal, something malevolent. And Ham said he knew psychiatrists who wrote prescriptions for dinette sets, expensive cars. Awful, he thought now, awful, awful, but it was the idea of throwing caution to the winds which had most chilled him. It was as if the world had gone a-wilding.

“Paula,” the mayor said, “it’s late and I’m tired. God knows you must be too. I think I’ll go back to the Mansion. Perhaps I can stop by tomorrow. I’ll try to bring Frances.”

“Thanks, Frank, for everything.”

“Nonsense. But listen, if there’s anything I can do, anything, just let me know.”

“You’re kind, Frank.”

“Paula, I mean it. Keys to the city, kid. Keys to the city.”

“That’s no campaign promise, kid. He means it,” put in the City Commissioner of Streets, who’d been sucking down the rye.

“She knows I do, Bob,” said Hizzoner.

Which earned Monsieur le Mayor the City Commissioner of Streets’ studied glance for trace irony. None to empty-stomached drunken Druff there seemed to be. Which oddly reassured him, oddly. For hypocrisy’s simply-saked decency of the thing. But, hey, cautioned the remnants of Druff’s sobriety, you’re throwing caution to the winds yourself here. Is there a full-court cabal on or not? It’s your call. If there is, look to your moorings, chuck the footwork. Don’t say chuck. Check, it amended.

Druff wanted his MacGuffin.

How did he know that name? Where was he?

Reassured. Hypocrisy of the thing. Check.

Because it was so. The mayor’s bland response was reassuring. He’d not taken Druff’s bait, he’d honored Marv’s death. He’d humored the room. He’d shown self-control when all about him were losing theirs. Druff thought that all mankind needed to make a better world was a little deniability, enough energy to establish a decent alibi. It showed respect.

The mayor was standing. He’d taken Paula’s hand. He’d leaned down to peck at her cheek, to tell her something.

“Time, gentlemen,” Doug said gaily. “Do you again, sir, before I leave?” He offered more rye. Druff, straining to hear, waved him away.

“Good night all,” the mayor addressed the room. “May we meet again on a happier occasion,” he solemnly said. “Did I have a coat with me, Doug?”

“I don’t think so, Your Honor.”

The son of a bitch, thought sobering Druff. That limo we passed in the driveway. He drove him here! And that other son of a bitch. “Did I have a coat with me, Doug?” That was for Druff’s benefit. Grandstanding bastard. He took back his banquets and bouquets, everything he’d thought that evening about Hizzoner’s circumspection. “Did I have a coat with me, Doug?” Thinks he can play rub-my-nose with me, does he? Druff could hardly believe it. Whatever happened to discretion? Didn’t they know what a dangerous world it was, coming and going, outdoors and in? Did they give no thought at all to appearances? Druff sized up the room, took a deep breath, and only prayed the MacGuffin was within hearshot and sightshot.

He’d considered turning in his resignation Monday morning. He would probably have to spend Sunday not only drafting the letter but typing it up as well. (He was, what he was. He had, he congratulated himself, too much class to drag Mrs. Norman into it.) But why bother? he thought. Why not strike while the iron was hot? Why should he show any more consideration for them than they did for him? Why not run with the flouters and flaunters?

The City Commissioner of Streets stood up. “Saay,” he said, “it is late. I wonder could you fellas give me a ride home?”

Well, he was what he was. Why drag others into it? If he was so considerate of Mrs. Norman, a woman he didn’t particularly like, why should he be less so to Mrs. Macklin’s visitors, people he didn’t even know?

He watched Doug, who looked to the mayor for guidance.

“You’re one of his drivers, aren’t you, Doug?” asked their mayor.

“Oh, on occasion, sir. Yes sir, Your Honor.”

“You’d be in the best position to know then. Tell me, Doug, is it well out of our way?”

“Well, Your Honor, you’ve put your finger on it, sir. The city commissioner lives in the Homan district. Off Overodey, two or three blocks down Page.”

“Why, that’s all the way across town, isn’t it?”

“Near enough, Your Honor.”

“Not only in the opposite direction of the Mansion but close to all that new construction?”

“Well, sir, from where the overflow on Edson feeds into the detour on Valor and Hoe.”

Druff observed the two comedians. Someone should have gone over to the piano and hammered out rim shots for them. If he’d known any more about the piano than he did of the districts, streets and phantom construction sites in the imaginary city they pummeled him with, he might have done so himself. And now he turned his gaze away from the two municipal clowns working Mrs. Macklin’s big room to the audience itself. There were still a number of people in the house, people frozen along the fault lines of their imminent departures — the scufflers and seat shifters he’d detected earlier but who’d been caught by “Hizzoner and Doug” and their surprise, unexpected floor show like a pop quiz.

Although she maintained perfect control, Mrs. Macklin seemed more amused than anyone in the room. She might almost have been a royal dowager witnessing some slightly irreverent Command Performance. Well, it was a distraction, Druff supposed. Marv shoveled into the ground just that afternoon, all the holy, highfalutin goings-on at the funeral chapel, her dark clothes and strained graciousness and this not yet even the first full day of her official mourning. So it was a distraction. Druff could hardly blame her.