John Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces

“What?”

“Will you please stop shrieking like a fishmonger and run along? Don’t you have a bottle of muscatel baking in the oven? Now let me alone. I’m very nervous.”

“Nervous? You been in that hot water over an hour.”

“It’s hardly hot anymore.”

“Then get out the tub.”

“Why is it so important to you that I leave this tub? Mother, I really don’t understand you at all. Isn’t there something that, as a housekeeper, you feel compelled to do at the moment? I noticed this morning that the lint in the hallway is forming into spheres almost as large as baseballs. Clean the house. Telephone for the correct time. Do something. Lie down and take a nap. You’re looking rather peaked these days.”

“Of course I am, boy. You breaking your poor momma’s heart. What would you do if I dropped dead?”

“Well, I am not going to participate in this idiotic conversation. Carry on a monologue out there if you wish. Quietly. I must concentrate upon the new offenses that M. Minkoff has conceived in this letter.”

“I can’t take it no more, Ignatius. You gonna find me laying in the kitchen one of these days with a stroke. Just watch, boy. You gonna be all alone in the world. Then you gonna fall on your knees and pray to God for the way you treated your poor dear mother.”

From the bathroom there came only silence. Mrs. Reilly waited for at least a splash of water or a rustle of paper, but the bathroom door might as well have been the door of a tomb. After a minute or two of fruitless waiting, she walked off down the hall toward the oven. When Ignatius heard the oven door creak open he returned to the letter.

He said, “With that voice and personality, you should be appearing before the people in prison.” This guy was really amazing; in addition to his tough mind, he was a real mensch. He was so gentlemanly and thoughtful I could hardly believe it. (Especially after dealing with Samuel, who is dedicated and unafraid but all a little too loud and something of a clod.) I never met anybody so dedicated to fighting reactionary ideas and prejudice as this folk singer. His very best friend was a Negro abstractionist, he said, who made magnificent smears of protest and defiance across the canvas, sometimes slashing the canvas to shreds with a knife. He handed me this brilliant pamphlet that showed in detail how the Pope is trying to assemble a nuclear armory; it really opened my mind, and I forwarded it to the editor of The New Democracy to aid him in his battle against the Church. But this guy also had this big thing against WASPS. Like he hated them. I mean, this fellow was sharp.

The next day I got a telephone call from him. Would I lecture to this social action group he was going to form somewhere in Brooklyn Heights? I was overcome. In this world of dog eat dog, it is rare to find a friend…a really sincere friend…or so I thought. Well, to make my point as briefly as possible, I had learned the hard way that the lecture circuit is something like show business: the casting couch and that routine. Get what I mean?

“Do I believe this egregious offense against good taste that I am reading?” Ignatius asked the floating soap dish. “This girl is without shame entirely!”

Again I have been awakened to the fact that my body appeals to some people more than my mind.

“Ho hum,” Ignatius sighed.

Personally, I feel like exposing this phony “folk singer” who I guess is preying on some other dedicated young girl liberal at this moment. Somebody I know said she heard this “folk singer” guy is really a Baptist from Alabama. Boy, what a fraud he was. So then I checked on this pamphlet he had given me and discovered that it was printed by the Klan. This will give you some idea of the ideological subtleties which we have to deal with today. It sounded like a good liberal pamphlet to me. Now I have had to humiliate myself by writing to the editor of The New Democracy to tell him that the pamphlet, although challenging, was written by the wrong people. Well, the WASPS struck back and got me this time. The incident reminded me of the time in Poe Park when this squirrel I was feeding turned out to really be a rat which at first glance could have passed for a squirrel any day. So live and learn. This phony gave me an idea. You can always learn something from crumbs. I decided to ask up here at the ‘Y’ if I could get the auditorium one night. After a while, they said o.k. Of course, the audience up here at the Bronx ‘Y’ will probably be a little parochial, but if I make good in the lecture, I might one day end up speaking down at the Lex. Ave. ‘Y’ where great thinkers like Norman Mailer and Seymour Krim are always airing their views. It won’t hurt to try.

I hope that you are working on your personality problems, Ignatius. Is the paranoia getting any worse? The basis for the paranoia, I think, is the fact that you’re always sealed up in that room and have become suspicious of the outside world. I don’t know why you insisted on living way down there with the alligators. In spite of the complete overhaul that your mind is crying for, you have a brain that could really grow and flower here in N.Y. As it is, you are thwarting yourself and your mentality. The last time I saw you, when I was passing through from Mississippi, you were in pretty bad shape. You’ve probably regressed completely by now living in that substandard old house with only your mother for company. Aren’t your natural impulses crying for release? A beautiful and meaningful love affair would transform you, Ignatius. I know it would. Great Oedipus bonds are encircling your brain and destroying you.

I don’t imagine that your sociological or political ideas are getting any more progressive either. Have you abandoned your project to form a political party or nominate a candidate for president by divine right? I remember that when I finally met you and challenged your political apathy, you came up with this idea. I knew that it was a reactionary project, but it at least showed that you were developing some political consciousness. Please write to me about the matter. I am very concerned. We need a three-party system in this country, and I think that day by day the fascists are growing in strength. This Divine Right Party is the sort of fringe-group scheme that would syphon off a large part of the fascist support.

Well, let me stop. I hope the lecture is a success. You, especially, would benefit from its message. By the way, if you ever do activate the Divine Right movement, I can give you some help in organizing a chapter up here. Please get out of the house, Ignatius, and enter into the world around you. I am worried about your future. You have always been one of my most important projects and I am interested in hearing of your current mental condition, so please get out of the pillows and write.

M. Minkoff

Later, his puckered pink skin wrapped in the old flannel robe that a safety pin held around his hips, Ignatius sat at the desk in his room filling his fountain pen. In the hall his mother was speaking to someone else on the telephone saying, “And I used every last cent of the insurance money his poor old Grammaw Reilly left just to keep him in college. Ain’t that awful? All that money down the drain.” Ignatius belched and opened a drawer to search for the stationery that he believed he still had; there he found the yo-yo that he had bought from the Filipino who had been selling them in the neighborhood a few months ago. On one side of the yo-yo there was a palm tree which the Filipino had carved at Ignatius’s request. Ignatius spun the yo-yo downward, but the string snapped and it rattled across the floor and under the bed where it landed on a pile of Big Chief tablets and old magazines. Removing the piece of string that hung from his finger, he dug into the drawer again and found a sheet of paper with a Levy Pants letterhead.