Mayor of the Universe: A Novel

  “Enjoyed yourself, hmmm?” said Aunt Edna, pouring coffee from a silver service.

  “And good morning to you,” said Deke courteously, settling himself into his place at the breakfast table. Dressed in the tuxedo he had put on again after leaving Barbette’s apartment, he tried not to lunge as his aunt passed him the china cup and saucer—he needed coffee and he needed it bad.

  “When are you going to realize you don’t need to dress for breakfast?” said Edna, trying to suppress a smile. “A nice shirt and cardigan would have been fine.”

  “For you, I’d consider anything less than a tuxedo an insult.”

  “Like hell you would.” Chuckling, she clamped a sugar cube with tongs and dropped it into her nephew’s cup. “Now, seriously, Deke, why waste your mornings with women left over from the night before?”

  “Auntie, I should think you would have learned something about rationing from the war: leftovers are patriotic.”

  Coffee and laughter had an unfortunate coalescence in Edna’s sinuses, and she sputtered a laugh, waving the air with one hand and dabbing at her nose with her napkin.

  Deke, ever mindful of his aunt’s comfort, was out of his chair and at her side, patting her on the back and asking if she was all right.

  “How many times have I told you?” she said after a moment, blinking rapidly against the tears that had risen up in her eyes. “Don’t make me laugh when I’m drinking my coffee!”

  Deke slunk like a kicked dog back to his chair.

  “You’re trying to make me laugh again!”

  Sitting down and rearranging his napkin on his lap, Deke looked at her mournfully.

  Edna refused to take the bait.

  “Now, certainly, amusing your aunt is . . . nice, but it’s hardly a pastime, and certainly not a vocation.”

  Deke looked up at the ceiling and began to whistle.

  “Now Larry Watling has said all along there’s a place for you at his firm, and of course the same thing goes for Irving Orman.”

  “Aunt Edna, I don’t want to work for the stock exchange. Nor do I want to work in banking.”

  “Well, Deke dear, you’ve been home for nearly three months. Isn’t it about time you set your course and follow it?”

  I already have, he thought, and then time spiraled further backwards into his not-too-distant past, and he found himself gasping for air in a bed sodden with wet sheets.

  Terror gripped him as he flung himself up, gulping like a fish on a dock. He sat against the headboard, his eyes wide, the damp blanket pulled up under his chin, and gradually his racing heart slowed and the panic simmered to a low boil, and he said out loud, “You’re okay, Deke. You’re all right.”

  He looked around the room. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he made out the shape of the dresser, the small chair, the curtains drawn across the window.

  “I’m in my room,” he said, orienting himself. “In my room at Mrs. Bozell’s in Clapham Common, London, England.”

  He got up, shivering in his soggy pajamas, and put another pence into the electric heater that spit out warmth in stingy bursts.

  The bear of panic that had squeezed all air out of him had backed off now, but not far. He felt it skulking in the corner, a stinking, matted-fur beast, waiting for him to show a twitch, a hiccup of fear so that it could once again pounce.

  With a shaking hand, Deke reached for the robe hanging from the painted metal hook on the door. Belting it, he felt the bear move up on its haunches, but Deke gritted his teeth, ignoring it, and went into the bathroom to take a piss, to wash his face, and to brush his teeth, normal things that would push the bear back into its cage.

  12

  Deke Drake had been raised by his Aunt Edna, who took him in after his parents died in separate freak accidents—his father first after falling down the stairs of a New York speakeasy and his mother two months later from an infected blister she’d gotten while playing tennis.

  His widowed aunt did not hesitate to claim him, taking the six-year-old to her palatial home in Palm Springs, Florida, and it was her kindness as well as the home’s proximity to the vastly engrossing ocean that went a long way in patching the little boy’s holes of grief and confusion. Edna answered every question he had about his parents: “No, they’d never return, but they’d always be with him.” “No, they didn’t die because they didn’t like him—they had loved him.” And “Yes, she would look after him for what she hoped would be a long, long time.”

  He made little-boy promises to honor his parents—he would never go into a speakeasy and never play tennis—but when he was twelve, the daughter of a woman in Edna’s bridge club invited him to play and because he thought this girl was just about the prettiest he’d ever seen, he accepted her invitation, demonstrating in tennis an immediate, natural affinity. Lessons followed and through the years, he was always up for a game, becoming everyone’s opponent or doubles partner of choice (always meticulously checking his feet for blisters after each game). As far as his first promise, by the time he came of age speakeasies were long a thing of the past, and he hardly saw it a display of disloyalty to patronize nightclubs.

  He was a smart, considerate young man, and the icing on the already fine cake was that he was as handsome and stylish as a movie star.

  “He looks like Tyrone Power,” a member of Edna’s garden club opined, “only without that awful widow’s peak.” “Oh, no,” said another, “Deke is the spitting image of Ray Milland, only with dimples.”

  He had promised his aunt that he would finish college before enlisting, and so as World War II raged, he was playing football, taking exams, and dating girls from nearby Rider University and the Westminster Choir College. A week after he collected his diploma from Princeton, when he had sobered up from all the graduation parties, he joined the army, grateful the war had lasted long enough for him to play a part in it.

  Edna had the highest hopes for her nephew and was convinced that the loss of his parents protected him from further tragedy and that his good fortune was innate and inviolate, even on a battlefield. She sent him off after throwing a party that featured better brands of alcohol than the graduation parties, an eight-piece band, and at least three tearful women pledging to be faithful to Deke while he was off fighting the Nazis.

  He was shipped out in the fall of 1944, and while intellectually the young soldier knew that war was hard and bloody, he could not conjure the depth of the difficulty or the blood.

  He was in Belgium in December when Slater, a convivial cutup able to amuse his fellow soldiers with dead-on impressions of Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny, and Ma Kettle took a bullet in the neck. A moment before, Deke had been immersed in a conversation about holiday meals with him and Kendricks, a welder from Pittsburgh whose forearms were bigger than most men’s calves.

  They had debated what side dishes best complemented a Christmas dinner and were on the subject of turkey dressing.

  “Chestnut’s the only way to go,” Deke had said.

  “Like hell!” answered Kendricks. “There’s nothing like cornbread. Nothing like the cornbread stuffing my mother makes.”

  “You men are such simpletons,” said Slater, “when everyone knows it’s sage and onion.” These last words he had sung à la Al Jolson, on bended knee, arms outstretched.

  Seeing the look of outraged surprise on Slater’s face, Deke had laughed, assuming it was part of his friend’s act, but there was nothing funny when his friend fell to his side, a geyser of blood spurting from his neck.

  “Sniper!” shouted Kendricks, as they dove behind a snow bank, and as gunfire filled the air with its pops and zings and whistles the world Deke Drake thought he knew was riven apart, and he fell into Hell.

  Live Field Report/Sense-O-Gram

  To: Charmat

  From: Tandala

  I hesitate to send you this, but you need to feel this vice of fear that squeezes these men in war. Not just a vice, but a vice with teeth, stabbing them as it chokes the air out of their lu
ngs. Whatever mission Fletcher and I are on—this shouldn’t be a part of it. Should not be a part of anyone’s.

  Peace had been declared, but not in the hearts and minds of soldiers like Deke Drake. His dreams were stained with the sights and sounds of war; with Selby, calling for his mother; Peterborough, hiccupping bubbles of blood; Brewer’s frozen body being dug out of the snow, his tongue as blue as a plum. Awake, he felt assaulted by the slightest noise—a dropped book in the library, a child dragging a stick along a metal fence, a dog barking. His heart stopped with each of these noises and he’d duck or run for cover or, if he were out in public, strain against the impulse to do so. Once, drinking in a pub, he had been seized with fear when a drunk, flopping off his stool, knocked it over. The fact that he made eye contact with another customer whose face registered the same fear did not offer him consolation but embarrassment, for himself and the other serviceman, for their weakness.

  What’s wrong with me? Where’ve I gone—the easy, affable guy who could charm his way in and out of any situation, anyone’s arms? Why had I thought that charm had been important? What kind of empty shell am I?

  He spent hours—whole days—walking London’s streets, his arms folded tight in front of him like a shield, his head down, asking himself these questions. Sometimes, looking up at a crosswalk, he’d notice passersby looking at him strangely, and he’d wonder if he’d been asking the questions aloud.

  What did they die for? Slater and Selby and Peterborough? Brewer and Borris and Mellom?

  The bear of panic waited at the corner, massive, clawed paws ready to grab him. Deke crossed the street, reassuring himself: They died to save the world. They died for our freedom. But he couldn’t help his postscript: What about theirs?

  His aunt wrote him chatty letters about engagements and parties and reminders to look up this Earl or that Lady, all old friends from Edna’s extensive and international address book.

  “Everyone here’s in a celebratory mood, dear, of course, how can we not be? The war is over! That awful man Hitler is gone! I’m tremendously proud of you, Deke, for doing your part in our glorious cause, but when are you coming home? It’s a question the young women keep badgering me with . . . ”

  Deke couldn’t help his dry, cynical laugh. “That awful man Hitler”? Now there was an understatement. And “our glorious cause”? Who did she think she was, Aunt Pittypat from Gone with the Wind?

  His own letters were jam-packed with trivia about the weather (“They’re not kidding about the fog!”) the food (“Bangers and hash—sounds like a car repair business rather than a breakfast staple, doesn’t it?”), and his pension owner (“Her Cockney’s so thick I can hardly understand her, so whatever she says, I just nod”). He never answered his aunt’s questions about when he was coming home because he himself had no clue. All he knew was that he wasn’t ready to go home to pretty, intact America; he needed to be in a city ravaged by war, needed to walk past jagged shells of buildings, past piles of bricks, needed to be in a place that was like him, damaged but still alive. It gave him, in a strange way, hope.

  So did Millicent Preuve-Bailey.

  “Of course, all my friends call me Millie,” she said, after he had thrown her onto his bed in his room at Mrs. Bozell’s.

  Normally he wasn’t the type to throw anyone onto his bed—everyone in past experience had gotten on and into his bed willingly—but if he were to throw anyone onto his bed, a woman like Millie wouldn’t be the type. For one thing, she was thin as a boy (Deke preferred curves to straight lines, hills to prairies) and homely, with acne-pitted skin and deep-set eyes ringed in dark circles.

  He wasn’t inclined to call her Millie either but, rather, “Thief!”

  “Forgive me, sir, for my confusion; I thought this was the flat of my friend.”

  The woman’s posh accent was not one he’d expected from a burglar.

  “Then what’s my watch doing in your hand?”

  “I was only checking the time, sir.”

  It was as if a switch had been turned off and all the anger that had pulsed through him was stilled.

  “Is that right?” he said amicably. “Then you probably don’t mind showing me what else is in your satchel.”

  The woman clutched the battered leather bag to her chest. “Really, sir, the contents of a woman’s handbag should be considered private.”

  Deke laughed at her effrontery.

  “In normal circumstances, I’d agreed with you. But these circumstances aren’t normal.” He held out his hand. “My cufflinks, please.”

  “Your cufflinks?” she asked quizzically.

  Deke nodded, waggling his fingers.

  A trace of a blush colored the woman’s thin, scarred cheeks, but she smiled as she fished in her bag.

  “Imagine my surprise at finding these in here,” she said, depositing the cufflinks in Deke’s open hand.

  “Imagine.”

  He couldn’t explain it, but a lightness of spirit had overtaken him, an invitation to take a bite of life’s deliciousness. It had been a long, long time since he’d felt anything like it.

  “Say, Millie,” he asked, “are you hungry?”

  Uncertainty briefly puckered the woman’s forehead before she smiled.

  “Why, a morsel or two might be to my liking.”

  Deke laughed again and taking the thief’s hand pulled her off of his bed.

  After watching the thin woman eat her way through a bowl of vegetable soup, a shepherd’s pie, and a plate of fish and chips, Deke said, “Excuse me, but if that was a ‘morsel or two,’ I’d like to see what you consider a full meal.”

  The woman finished the last remaining inch in her pint of Guinness and patted her mouth with a napkin.

  “Weren’t you ever told it’s impolite to comment on a lady’s eating habits?”

  Deke looked around the pub. “Is there a lady here?”

  “Oh, sir, you wound me.”

  Deke smiled at the woman and nodded to the barkeep, indicating yes, another round of Guinness.

  “So, Millie,” he said, clinking his pint against hers, “tell me a little about yourself. What do you do when you’re not burgling?”

  “I make no confessions without the presence of my solicitor,” she said, and her smile, although revealing teeth in obvious need of cosmetic dentistry, was nonetheless beguiling.

  “I’m sure you’ll make an exception for me,” said Deke, his smile offering its own beguilement. “Now, how did you come to choose me as one of your marks?”

  “Convenience. I noticed the front door of the pension opened, and that’s all an invitation I need.”

  “You make your own invitations.”

  “A person like me has to.”

  The bar girl set down two more pints and Millie waited until she left.

  “It’s obvious I’m not a member of the ruling class, even though I have more brains than most of those who are. Unfortunately, I live in a time and place where bloodlines are far more important than brains or imagination.”

  “So you became a thief because your options were limited?”

  “Sometimes one’s options are that limited,” she said seriously. “Look at me. Even if I were the type to put my body up for sale, I hardly think I’d get enough takers to feed, let alone clothe, myself. There’s always scullery work, but a maid’s life has never held much appeal for me. My feeling is that it’s much more fun to break into homes than to clean them.”

  “How is it that you sound like Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver?”

  “Oh, guv’nor, it’s just a ruse, a course. By way of entertainin’ meself.”

  Deke laughed—it felt so good to laugh! “I suppose you could do a fair job imitating me.”

  “I can imitate anyone my little ol’ heart desires,” she said, exaggerating Deke’s slight drawl. “I’ll swipe yeh accent and yeh wallet!” This sentence was said like a Brooklyn native.

  Deke listened to Millie, enthralled as she told him stories of her life in
crime that began when she was a little girl, abandoned by her father and trying to help her mother put food on the table.

  “There wasn’t a greengrocer in a two-mile radius who wasn’t subject to my brother’s and my fast and crafty hands.”

  Deke’s enthrallment ended when she told him how she volunteered in a veterans’ hospital during the war and stole from the patients and patients’ visitors.

  “I don’t like hearing that,” he said gruffly. “Some people are off-limits. Soldiers are off-limits. They were putting their lives on the line so they could come back home and be burgled by you when they were in the hospital?”

  “It’s a jungle out there,” said Millie with a shrug of her narrow shoulders.

  Anger heated the blood pumping through Deke’s circulatory system.

  “You have no idea what those men went through! You had no right to prey on them when they were at their most helpless!”

  “Relax,” said Millie, patting his hand. “I chose them wisely. Only the meanest, most cowardly were the beneficiaries of my light touch.”

  “Who are you to determine cowardice? Have you ever been to war?”

  Millie stared at her pub mate for a long moment.

  “No, but I’ve seen the aftereffects in a war hospital,” she began, her voice low. “And that’s the cowardice I was speaking about—the babies who cry and moan about a broken arm or leg—something that’ll heal—whereas you don’t hear a peep from chaps like my brother, who was lucky enough to come home, but whose legs weren’t!”

  Deke was the first to break their stare; he looked away as the sadness that Millie’s company had made him forget sidled up to him again.

  “Believe me, I’ve got my morals,” said Millie. “I wouldn’t do a job without approval from Gerry.”

  “Gerry being your brother?”

  Millie nodded. “He spent nearly two months in hospital when he came home. That’s why I started working there. I saw all the soldiers who needed company and thought, ‘Oh, I can do that. I was able to make them laugh—and the ones who’d lost their sight thought I was a knockout too.”