A Confederacy of Dunces (7 page)

"Oh, my heavens!" a voice shouted from the parlor. "These girls are doubtless prostitutes already. How can they present horrors like this to the public?"

"I wish I had me a hobby like that."

"You oughta try bowling."

"Ay-yi-yi. I already got arthuritis in my elbow. I'm too old to play around with them balls. I'd wrench my back."

"I got a aunt, sixty-five, a grammaw, and she goes bowling all the time. She's even on a team."

"Some women are like that. Me, I never was much for sports."

"Bowling's more than a sport," Patrolman Mancuso said defensively. "You meet plenty people over by the alley. Nice people. You could make you some friends,"

"Yeah, but it's just my luck to drop one of them balls on my toe. I got bum feet already."

"Next time I go by the alley, I'll let you know. I'll bring my aunt. You and me and my aunt, we'll go down by the alley.

Okay?"

"Mother, when was this coffee dripped?" Ignatius demanded, flapping into the kitchen again.

"Just about a hour ago. Why?"

"It certainly tastes brackish."

"I thought it was very good," Patrolman Mancuso said. "Just as good as they serve at the French Market. I'm making some more now. You want a cup?"

"Pardon me," Ignatius said. "Mother, are you going to entertain this gentleman all afternoon? I would like to remind you that I am going to the movies tonight and that I am due at the theater promptly at seven so that I can see the cartoon. I would suggest that you begin preparing something to eat."

"I better go," Patrolman Mancuso said.

"Ignatius, you oughta be ashamed," Mrs. Reilly said in an angry voice. "Me and Mr. Mancuso here just having some coffee. You been nasty all afternoon. You don't care where I raise that money. You don't care if they lock me up. You don't care about nothing."

"Am I going to be attacked in my own home before a stranger with a false beard?"

"My heart's broke."

"Oh, really." Ignatius turned on Patrolman Mancuso. "Will you kindly leave? You are inciting my mother."

"Mr. Mancuso's not doing nothing but being nice."

"I better go," Patrolman Mancuso said apologetically.

"I'll get that money," Mrs. Reilly screamed. "I'll sell this house. I'll sell it out from under you, boy. I'll go stay by a old folks' home."

She grabbed an end of the oilcloth and wiped her eyes.

"If you do not leave," Ignatius said to Patrolman Mancuso, who was hooking on his beard, "I shall call the police."

"He is the police, stupid."

"This is totally absurd," Ignatius said and flapped away. "I am going to my room."

He slammed his door and snatched a Big Chief tablet from the floor. Throwing himself back among the pillows on the bed, he began doodling on a yellowed page. After almost thirty minutes of pulling at his hair and chewing on the pencil, he began to compose a paragraph.

Were Hroswitha with us today, we would all look to her for counsel and guidance. From the austerity and tranquility of her medieval world, the penetrating gaze of this legendary Sybil of a holy nun would exorcise the horrors which materialize before our eyes in the name of television. If we could only juxtapose one eyeball of this sanctified woman and a television tube, both being roughly of the same shape and design, what a phantasmagoria of exploding electrodes would occur. The images of those lasciviously gyrating children would disintegrate into so many ions and molecules, thereby effecting the catharsis which the tragedy of the debauching of the innocent necessarily demands.

Mrs. Reilly stood in the hall looking at the DO NOT

DISTURB sign printed on a sheet of Big Chief paper and stuck to the door by an old flesh-colored Band-aid.

"Ignatius, let me in there, boy," she screamed.

"Let you in here?" Ignatius said through the door. "Of course I won't. I am occupied at the moment with an especially succinct passage."

"You let me in."

"You know that you are never allowed in here."

Mrs. Reilly pounded at the door.

"I don't know what is happening to you, Mother, but I suspect that you are momentarily deranged. Now that I think of it, I am too frightened to open the door. You may have a knife or a broken wine bottle."

"Open up this door, Ignatius."

"Oh, my valve! It's closing!" Ignatius groaned loudly. "Are you satisfied now that you have ruined me for the rest of the evening?"

Mrs. Reilly threw herself against the unpainted wood.

"Well, don't break the door," he said finally and, after a few moments, the bolt slid open.

"Ignatius, what's all this trash on the floor?"

"That is my worldview that you see. It still must be incorporated into a whole, so be careful where you step."

"And all the shutters closed. Ignatius! It's still light outside."

"My being is not without its Proustian elements," Ignatius said from the bed, to which he had quickly returned. "Oh, my stomach."

"It smells terrible in here."

"Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate."

"If I know it was like this, I'd been in here long ago."

"I do not know why you are in here now, as a matter of fact, or why you have this sudden compulsion to invade my sanctuary.

I doubt whether it will ever be the same after the trauma of this intrusion by an alien spirit."

"I came to talk to you, boy. Get your face out them pillows."

"This must be the influence of that ludicrous representative of the law. He seems to have turned you against your own child.

By the way, he has left, hasn't he?"

"Yes, and I apologized to him over the way you acted."

"Mother, you are standing on my tablets. Will you please move a little? Isn't it enough that you have destroyed my digestion without destroying the fruits of my brain also?"

"Well, where I'm gonna stand, Ignatius? You want me to get in bed with you?" Mrs. Reilly asked angrily.

"Watch out where you're stepping, please!" Ignatius thundered. "My God, never has anyone been so totally and so literally stormed and besieged. What is it anyway that has driven you in here in this state of complete mania? Could it be the stench of cheap muscatel that is assaulting my nostrils?"

"I made up my mind. You gonna go out and get you a job."

Oh, what low joke was Fortuna playing on him now? Arrest, accident, job. Where would this dreadful cycle ever end?

"I see," Ignatius said calmly. "Knowing that you are congenitally incapable of arriving at a decision of this importance, I imagine that that mongoloid law officer put this idea into your head."

"Me and Mr. Mancuso talked like I used to talk to your poppa.

You poppa used to tell me what to do. I wish he was alive today."

"Mancuso and my father are alike only in that they both give the impression of being rather inconsequential humans.

However, your current mentor is apparently the type of person who thinks that everything will be all right if everyone works continually."

"Mr. Mancuso works hard. He's got a hard road at the precinct."

"I am certain that he supports several unwanted children who all hope to grow up to be policemen, the girls included."

"He's got three sweet chirren."

"I can imagine." Ignatius began to bounce slowly. "Oh!"

"What are you doing? Are you fooling with that valve again?

Nobody else got him a valve but you. I ain't got no valve."

"Everyone has a valve!" Ignatius screamed. "Mine is simply more developed. I am trying to open a passage which you have succeeded in blocking. It may be permanently closed now for all I know."

"Mr. Mancuso says if you work you can help me pay off the man. He says he thinks the man might take the money in installments."

"Your friend the patrolman says a great deal. You certainly bring people out, as they say. I never suspected that he could be so loquacious or that he was capable of such perceptive comment. Do you realize that he is trying to destroy our home? It began the moment that he attempted that brutal arrest in front of D. H. Holmes. Although you are too limited to comprehend it all, Mother, this man is our nemesis. He's spun our wheel downward."

"Wheel? Mr. Mancuso is a good man. You oughta be glad he didn't take you in!"

"In my private apocalypse he will be impaled upon his own nightstick. Anyway, it is inconceivable that I should get a job.

I am very busy with my work at the moment, and I feel that I am entering a very fecund stage. Perhaps the accident jarred and loosened my thought. At any rate, I accomplished a great deal today."

"We gotta pay that man, Ignatius. You wanna see me in jail?

Wouldn't you be ashamed with your poor momma behind bars?"

"Will you please stop talking about imprisonment? You seem to be preoccupied with the thought. Actually, you seem to enjoy thinking about it. Martyrdom is meaningless in our age."

He belched quietly. "I would suggest certain economies around the house. Somehow you will soon see that you have the required amount."

"I spend all the money on you for food and whatnots."

"I have found several empty wine bottles about lately, the contents of which I certainly did not consume."

"Ignatius!"

"I made the mistake of heating the oven the other day before inspecting it properly. When I opened it to put in my frozen pizza, I was almost blinded by a bottle of broiled wine that was preparing to explode. I suggest that you divert some of the monies that you are pouring into the liquor industry."

"For shame, Ignatius. A few bottles of Gallo muscatel, and you with all them trinkets."

"Will you please define the meaning of trinkets?" Ignatius snapped.

"All them books. That gramaphone. That trumpet I bought you last month."

"I consider the trumpet a good investment, although our neighbor, Miss Annie, does not. If she beats on my shutters again, I'll pour water on her."

"Tomorrow we looking at the want ads in the paper. You gonna dress up and go find you a job."

"I am afraid to ask what your idea of 'dressing up' is. I will probably be turned into an utter mockery."

"I'm gonna iron you a nice white shirt and you gonna put on one of your poppa's nice ties."

"Do I believe what I am hearing?" Ignatius asked his pillow.

"It's either that, Ignatius, or I gotta take out a mortgage. You wanna lose the roof over your head?"

"No! You will not mortgage this house." He pounded a great paw into the mattress. "The whole sense of security which I have been trying to develop would crumble. I will not have any disinterested party controlling my domicile. I couldn't stand it. Just the thought of it makes my hands break out."

He extended a paw so that his mother could examine the rash.

"That is out of the question," he continued. "It would bring all of my latent anxieties to a head, and the result, I fear, would be very ugly indeed. I would not want you to have to spend the remainder of your life caring for a lunatic locked away somewhere in the attic. We shall not mortgage the house. You must have some funds somewhere."

"I got a hundred fifty in the Hibernia Bank."

"My God, is that all? I hardly thought that we were existing so precariously. However, it is fortunate that you have kept this from me. Had I known how close we were to total penury, my nerves would have given out long ago." Ignatius scratched his paws. "I must admit, though, that the alternative for me is rather grim. I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me."

"What do you mean, babe? You a fine boy with a good education."

"Employers sense in me a denial of their values." He rolled over onto his back. "They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe. That was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library."

"But, Ignatius, that was the only time you worked since you got out of college, and you was only there for two weeks."

"That is exactly what I mean," Ignatius replied, aiming a paper ball at the bowl of the milk glass chandelier.

"All you did was paste them little slips in the books."

"Yes, but I had my own esthetic about pasting those slips. On some days I could only paste in three or four slips and at the same time feel satisfied with the quality of my work. The library authorities resented my integrity about the whole thing.

They only wanted another animal who could slop glue on their best sellers."

"You think maybe you could get a job there again?"

"I seriously doubt it. At the time I said some rather cutting things to the woman in charge of the processing department.

They even revoked my borrower's card. You must realize the fear and hatred which my Weltanschauung instills in people."

Ignatius belched. "I won't mention that misguided trip to Baton Rouge. That incident, I believe, caused me to form a mental block against working."

"They was nice to you at college, Ignatius. Now tell the truth.

They let you hang around there a long time. They even let you teach a class."

"Oh, it was basically the same. Some poor white from Mississippi told the dean that I was a propagandist for the Pope, which was patently untrue. I do not support the current Pope. He does not at all fit my concept of a good, authoritarian Pope. Actually, I am opposed to the relativism of modern Catholicism quite violently. However, the boldness of this ignorant lily-white redneck fundamentalist led my other students to form a committee to demand that I grade and return their accumulated essays and examinations. There was even a small demonstration outside the window of my office. It was rather dramatic. For being such simple, ignorant children, they managed it quite well. At the height of the demonstration I dumped all of the old papers-ungraded, of course-out of the window and right onto the students' heads. The college was too small to accept this act of defiance against the abyss of contemporary academia."