More Than Melchisedech Page 7

  He was good at everything. He excelled at everything. But there is something that comes after excellence. It can't be named, but one will know it when he meets it. And Duffey wasn't meeting it very often in his own work. He ordered his invisible giants to assist him with their hands. He could not feel their hands, and he ordered them still more loudly.

  “We are here, we are here,” they answered, but he could hardly tell where the answers were coming from. These art giants were of a different and more exterior sort than other giants that he called up. He followed their voices to various places. And, in each case, he did find the thing that comes after excellence. It was always there with them, and he could always touch it. But it was something that had already been done by other hands than his.

  So Duffey knew that he must always be more of an art dealer than an artist. He would be an artist for the love of it, but only a few times in his life would he touch in his own work that something that is beyond excellence. But he knew it when he saw it.

  Bagby said that Duffey cheated on himself though. He had divined that there was much more money in being an art dealer than in being an artist, and he had suppressed his slim money proclivities.

  Duffey won seven of his first nine fights in those his palmy days as a fighter. He was pretty good and he worked up to where he was making as much as a hundred dollars a fight. But here also he would be a better dealer than an artist.

  3

  Duffey sometimes saw his sister, if she were indeed his sister, there in St. Louis. It is almost certain that she was his step-sister and had always been. At these new encounters she was a flaming stranger to him. Yet he had already, some years before this, absorbed her personality and the continuing flow of her memories and her life. That being so, it seemed that her person itself should be somehow superfluous to him. Duffey told her that she was superfluous, and she laughed. She was two years older than he was, and she tried to deal with him as if he were still a child. But not even this new flame-top, false kindred could deal with Melchisedech as if he were a child.She was a likeable person. Duffey knew that she was very much like himself, and he counted this as totally in her favor. She was his own anima made animate. She was the flame-red part of his own soul. She had fire-red hair, redder than his own. She had fire-blue eyes that were his exactly. He could see out of them without distortion. With all other eyes that Duffey looked out of during his personality ransacking, there was distortion. She gave the impression of body strength beyond her size, and she wasn't small. She had the very large and strong hands and the swinging shoulders of Duffey himself. And she had a strong touch of the bovine. This might be counted against some persons. It couldn't be counted against this Mary Louise. This was the royal bovine, this was the sacred cow that all chthonic goddesses become and are and pass through at some stage of their story.

  Mary Louise was intelligent and proud and friendly. She was very ghostly; yes, that was the word. She was much in the manner of an apparition.

  “What if she is the prime and she has made me superfluous?” Duffey worried in one of his flashes. You'd shiver to behold her every time, and there would be awe and fear as well as delight at her appearance. One does not meet one's own personality pieces without some trepidation.

  Duffey's sister now bore the name of Mary Louise Byrne. She had been given the surname of the kindred or pretended kindred who raised her. Duffey now loved her with a suddenness that scared him. He realized that she was the near perfect person, and at the same time he realized that she was a fit portion of himself. She was himself without the abysses. And no, she should never have been exteriorized. But that direction of thought ran into a vortex. If none of the parts of him should be exteriorized, then there wouldn't be any world. Everything in the world was to some extent a part of Melchisedech.

  “If this be arrogance, let it be so,” he said resolutely. He made jolly and kidding and hilarious love to Mary Louise much of the time, but sometimes…

  “I will have to get me a handmaid,” Mary Louise said. “I think it's cheating, but the sisterly wives of the patriarchs always had handmaids for the diversion of their consorts.”

  “We are a royal family,” Melchisedech said, “and besides that, I have never been sure that you were my real sister. The Kings of Egypt had their sisters to wife, and I'm not sure that the Kings of Judah did not. Should not the King of Salem have his? There's a love between us that is a plain outrage, but should it be bridled?”

  “It should be, yes. It will be. Oh, Melky, stop that! I will get me a handmaid.”

  Mary Louise had a close girl friend that she decided to bestow on Duffey. But could Mary Louise be trusted? And could any handmaid of hers be trusted? The almost perfect Mary Louise had slanted humor, and the handmaid was sure to echo it. This handmaid was Elizabeth Keegan. At first meeting Beth Keegan came into Duffey's room ahead of Mary Louise. She came with arms wide open and she gave Duffey a large kiss.

  “I love him. I'll keep him,” she said to Mary Louise as that royal sister entered. This Keegan girl was so handsome that one felt she had to be kidding. Nobody could be that pretty. It had to be a joke. It was, of course.

  Beth had the blackest hair ever, and the lightest ivory skin. No one could be built as she was. It was architecturally impossible. It was a beautiful burlesque, a pleasant fraud. Even the ideas of such a form can only be found in cartoons, or digged up from under five thousand years of soil deposit in some illicit part of the world. But time stopped when she came. All the observation of her took place in a fragment of an instant.

  She was small. She had child's feet. But there was more than full contour to her calves and thighs. The waist of the girl was so small that it seemed unsafe for her to be walking about, but her hips were ample and her breasts were superb. Her neck and shoulders and arms passed belief. “How did the ancients make them so?” one wanted to ask. But Beth wasn't an ancient. Duffey discovered that he was looking at her as at a work of art. He also realized that he had been more excited by works of art than he had ever been by live people, a situation that was perhaps temporary with him.

  Duffey had to know something. He put his hands upon her. She was cold to the touch. He had to know something else. He put all his weight on her. She scarcely swayed. She was unbreakable. She was a piece of ivory statuary. She was not real. She would always have this elegant coldness of body and strength of grained ivory, for all of her clowning and her torrid behavior.

  No one could be dressed as Beth was. Duffey found out later, about three minutes later, that she was wearing a costume for a play she was in. But she had made it herself, and nobody else could have filled it that way. And what passion was the voice of Beth Keegan when she cried out:

  “Oh my love, my prince, my boy, be with me forever!” Real passion, yes. But there was a strong touch of something else. And then, at that first meeting between the dumbfounded Duffey and the confounding Keegan, Beth broke up into total laughter and was joined by Mary Louise. Beth Keegan didn't really have any such passion voice as that. She didn't have any such walk as that. (Her walk had seemed to be a thing that hadn't happened in thirty centuries, not since the fall of Tarshish: her walk was unfair enticement.) And she almost didn't look like that.

  Her shattering beauty was only something that she put on for a lark, as though it were a funny hat. The voice and walk were put-ons. They were among the things that she was practicing for the school play. But if she had really been like that, and no put-on, then she would have been one of the great ones of the ages. She would have been the great love of Duffey's life, if he could have won her. And if he could not have won her, she would have been the great lost love of his life.

  Somebody (herself and a consortium of friends) had contrived the whole of her. Someone had made her up. Almost the only words that she ever said were lines taken out of plays, but she had her own superbness. “If only she were real flesh and blood,” Duffey said sometimes. “If only she were real ivory,” he said other times. She flustered D
uffey so much that he would never get over it. She scared him. The stories of living statues are all really ghost stories.

  Duffey would play it brash and showy with her sometimes, and then he would fall into confusion again. He, a man of the world, was confounded by this little figurine that somebody had created for fun, and perhaps he became her final creator. But what to do with her when she was created?

  Often Duffey would kiss her or fumble with her or sit on her lap because he didn't know what to say to her. And what he did say was always trivial stuff, and he would flush hotly at the shallowness of it as soon as it was out. He was afraid to be alone with her, he a successful businessman and a practitioner of all the arts. And this was a big joke with Beth herself and with Mary Louise.

  “She is solid ivory,” Mary Louise would say. “Why are you afraid of an ivory doll?”

  “She is solid artifact, yes,” Duffey answered.

  “Think how many billiard balls you could cut me up into,” Beth said. “You could be rich, honey. And I cut so easily.”

  But when they were gone that time, Duffey said a curious thing.

  “If only she weren't alive! If only she weren't alive she would be worth a million and a half dollars.” His art-dealing eye was appraising her correctly as a life-sized ivory statuette. Sometimes Duffey with another young man, Charley Murray, or Edward Ranwick of the art school, or Philip Manford of the school of music, would pick up Mary Louise and Beth at the little college they attended and take them for rides or to dinner and theatre. They would go in one of Duffey's own rigs, a carriage or a buggy. Or sometimes they would go in Philip Manford's overland automobile.

  There was real pride in being with such handsome girls. Mary Louise was large and red-headed and of a sandy serenity, and she was lightly freckled. And Elizabeth Keegan was small and statuesque, and she was all ivory and midnight in her coloration. Oh, they did make an animated tableau when they swung around the town!

  They would dine at Meinkmueller's French Restaurant. Or at Duffey's own Rounders' Club “Golden Buffet” , or at his small “Bread and Wine Room” . For class combined with rowdiness, there was nothing like Rounders in all St. Louis. Or they would eat at Schotts, or at Kelly's Steak House. Then they would go to the Roxie or the Music Hall or the Broadway Theatre or the Star and Garter. Beth and Mary Louise would often go up on the stage at the Star and Garter and mix in the skits. Piccone, the little Italian who ran the S & G, said that he would give them both jobs there any time. He had known Beth and her family forever.

  “I will do my thesis in innovative stagecraft at the Star and Garter,” Beth told him in her stagey voice.

  “Just walk like that, just talk like that, just look like that,” Piccone would say. “You yourself are innovation enough.”

  Later the party might go to the Bavarian Club to drink and sing. Oh, those chubby, breasty, costumed, Germanish blonde girls at the Bavarian Club. Duffey was very good friends with one of them, Helen Platner.

  “Like brewery horses!” Edward Ranwick used to laugh at the sturdy girls it the Bavarian. Aw, that wasn't true. They were powerful but trim young girls, not like brewery horses at all. This Edward Ranwick had already made quite a name for himself at the art school, but his art didn't impress art expert Duffey. It was “skinny art” , as Duffey called it, and there were things lacking in it.

  Or they might go to the Dublin where Evelyn London would chide Duffey for leaving her for this new girl Beth.

  “Oh my love, my prince, my boy,” Evelyn would say. “You have left me for this little figurine who isn't even real flesh. She is Dresden China. She is crockery. Come back to me, love.”

  Evelyn and Beth used to take each other off, and both did good imitations. They achieved a sort of blending of styles.

  The party would often go back to Schott's or Kelly's late. Those places had fine music bars that adjoined their restaurants. And sometimes they would go back to Duffey's own Rounders' Club which was really the most entertaining place in town. Where else could one pitch horseshoes in a music bar? Where else did they have live horses and circuses in the divided-off part of the main dining room? Where else did they have a flea market with ten thousand import-free bargains in an old stable yard? Where else was there an Olga Sanchez with her torchy shoulders. She mixed drinks at the main bar.

  And sometimes they would gather in Duffey's own rich walnut rooms upstairs and lie on the sofas and on the floor before the old fireplace.

  But once Duffey came on Beth, alone and crying. She was never alone, and it would be impossible that she would cry.

  “It's that bird,” she said. “Hear what it sings? ‘The year is almost over with.’ That's what.”

  “What bird, Beth?”

  “Don't you know anything? The catbird, the one that didn't go south. It's in a draft corner of your own fireplace chimney here.”

  “I use a calendar myself. Yes, I know that the year is almost over with. What is that to thee and to me?”

  “It means that my youth has fled,” Beth sniffled. “There's no way to slow things down.”

  “I know a hundred ways to slow time down,” Duffey told her, “and I'll show some of them to you. But, Beth, you're only seventeen.”

  “I will be eighteen in another month, and you will still be sixteen. I think you cheat at it somehow. It's going, Melky, it's going, it's almost gone.”

  Beth Keegan had made the most horrifying of discoveries, that it isn't going to last forever.

  “We haven't had much ‘family’ together, Melky,” Mary Louise said once, “and we should have. I am your sister, in some respect anyhow. Oh sure, I am your passionate consort also, and yet we hardly know each other. There is, of course, that other life in which you know me completely, but we will keep that below the threshold. I insist that we have these party evenings together for the sake of the ‘family’ that we comprise. And they are fun. We all love each other. I love Beth, and also all the boy and girl friends who make up our set. And if Beth will not love you, I will pull all her hair out. And if you will not love her, then I will kill you and strew your limbs for the buzzards to play with. She is the prettiest girl I can find or make and the most exciting. Make love to her more, romp on her more, kiss her more.” Well, the Keegan loved to be kissed and romped on and ridden on. But it was all joke-romps and joke-rides and joke-kisses. And it wasn't true that everything that Beth said was lines out of a play. A lot of it was lines out of comic magazines.“This is my telephone operator's kiss,” she would say. “Smooch, smooch, smooch, your three minutes are up, please.” Or…

  “This is my watermelon-eater's kiss,” and she'd give slurping kisses overflowing with sweet juice to Duffey, and then break up in laughter. Beth could never help laughing when she was being kissed. It ruined some kisses but it improved others. Or she would say “This is my schoolteacher's role. We're going to get this right if it takes all night.”

  Or she might call out “Pony Express” and bend her statuesque back to be ridden. Duffey liked to ride her. But Beth was not real. She was a piece of ivory statuary that laughed. She was Etruscan, she was Cretan with all that three-thousand-year-old color and freshness. The living statue is one of the archetypes of the deep universal unconscious. It is one of the primordial dreams, and so was Beth Keegan. Duffey modeled one of his talismans on Beth. It was already authentic and lightning-struck. Now it would be Beth Keegan-struck, for she carried it with her for six months. To whom would Duffey give that one?

  The slightly changing group of young people held together in season and out of season, swimming in the summertime and sledding in the winter, touring and celebrating at all seasons. All of these young people (there were other girls, Dorothy Tarkington, Mary Marinoni, and there were other fellows) were delighted with each other. They were young  —  it is easy to forget just how young  —  and talented. Some of them were successful far beyond their years. And they all saw each other, correctly, as brighter than life.

  “Now that the April
of your youth adorns…” as the poet said.

  Sometimes it seemed as though Bagby were a part of Duffey's person, a part of his grosser future person. A few people in the Rounders' Club neighborhood on Walnut Street had always believed that Bagby and Duffey were brothers, and there was no persuading them out of it. And Duffey's sister Mary Louise was already acquainted with Bagby before Duffey ever created the Rounders' Club. How, in a city is large as St. Louis, could such different kinds of people as Mary Louise and Bagby, living in such different parts of town, maintaining such different kinds of lives, have become acquainted?This was something that neither of them would ever tell Duffey. And just how well had they been acquainted? “But I know everyone just as you know everyone, Melky,” Mary Louise said once. “I'm as royal as you are, and I also have my attributes and talismans. Mine cannot bring about the creation of persons as easily as yours can, but mine can bring about the coincidence of persons and things. Do you believe that it was an accident that you met the old horse barn and that you met Bagby? And I can create. Who do you think it was who made Beth Keegan? But don't you know that Bagby is a part of our own person? Oh, there are some gross ones who share it with us!” How would Bagby and Duffey be taken for brothers? They didn't look alike. Bagby was black of hair and whiskers and swarthy of skin. Duffey was russet-haired and red-bearded and freckled and blue-eyed. Both were a little broad for their height, but Bagby was a bit the bigger man. Oh, they both had oversized hands and swinging shoulders; they both had that swagger stride. They both had that voice that was strong and of good range, clear and high sometimes, bulky and broad often; theirs were muscular voices if you want to call them that. Duffey could invade and ransack the mind of Bagby as he could that of everyone he encountered. But often he had the feeling that Bagby was growling in the Duffey mind, and that Bagby held at least a faintly scribbled permit to be there.