Mad, Mad Marjorie Chapter X: Revelations...or Apocalypse?

Humming along to winsome thought that in a few minutes this old millstone of a prisoner would no longer be about her neck, Marjorie Mayfield arrived back again at her own personal Bastille.

With a hand sticky from the dregs of an emergency tub of Maple-Mango Medley Melt (picked up at one of her feeding stations secreted strategically throughout our fair Merryweather…) she pushed on the door to enter. However, as she did so, a small, furtive, rough sound, came to her ears. But without pausing an, she strode dauntlessly on with the intrepidity of an Hippolyta or an Hippodameia or another one of those Hippo Women. Giving a quick scan to the room, she mentally ticked off that her captive was waiting in his chair with an agreeable smile, his hands behind him, the bungee cord about his neck, and his feet together.

Marjorie squinted at the corners of the room. "Templeton?” she called out.“Aloysius?Fat Lucy?" No squeaks echoed in reply and heading for her easy chair, she confided to her captive, “I like to name the rats. It makes them feel like they’re a part of something bigger.”

“Always important,” Geoffrey conceded.

“Just like you’ll soon be, when you’re part of the landfill.”

“Very ominous,” he predicted.

At these words Marjorie Mayfield found her thoughts catching on a stickerbush of suspicion. This man’s tone and delivery was as dispassionate and detached as a tiger among wild dogs; he was no longer the inebriated Meistersinger that she had dragged bumpity-bump down the stairs, nor the bibulous jongleur she had heave-hoed into position on to his throne, where he sat with a face not so much waxen as sculpted with dignity and self-collection.

Hmm, she forced herself to muse. (Cue the Theremin music.) But, she decided, business was ringing the cowbell and Marjorie was loping up to the slaughterhouse.

Taking in hand the gleaming Van Cauwenberghe canister, its sides large-letter-labelled with warnings in several languages like travel stickers on a steamer trunk, Marjorie held it up with the kabuki of a pretty lady on a gameshow and gave it a few turns. "See this, Chatty Cathy?” she asked.

Then, with the care of a surgeon nestling the heart of a bush pig into the gaping chest cavity of a drug runner, she placed the canister onto the floor equidistant between herself and him and announced with vaudevillian showmanship, “Exhibit A.”

He quietly scanned the labels embracing the curve of the cylinder. “Ah,” he gave out. "Liquid nitrogen.”

“No, no, no,” clarified Marjorie. “Death.Let me explain.”

“It builds suspense,” said Geoffrey.

“Oh, yes. So, first of all, I will open the canister...”

“You know, a better name is flask or dewar.”

“I will open the canister...” she repeated.

But her captive, no doubt a bright kid in his younger days, deflated her delivery. He said, “The liquid nitrogen will vaporize into gas, just as water becomes steam. Then the newly-formed nitrogen gas will proceed to displace the ambient oxygen in the room, and as this is a relatively enclosed space, we will all suffer what is known in medical circles as hypoxia.”

“Or as they say in Special-Ed...?”

“We will suffocate.”

“Not we. You. Not a pleasant way to go, they say, but at last check, no way is a pleasant way to go.”

“That is what they say.”

“This time next week, your face’ll be on a carton of fiber powder. And now, Exhibit B...” From her shoulder bag Marjorie fished out a pair of lengthy gloves that resembled jodhpurs for the hands; these she laid on the chair’s beefy arms. Next out of her bag of tricks appeared a pair of mundane shop glasses; she propped these in the front fringes of her hair like a rusty piece of farm equipment parked in the weeds.(Marjorie Mayfield had a chronic history of letting her tresses “go,” causing some colleagues in the early days to call her Medusa Mayfield behind her back. But discreetly-placed listening devices always led her to the gossipy chatterboxes, who within a week were nowhere to be found, except as filler stories on unsolved crimes shows.)

She went on. "And now: Any last words?”

With the resignation of a marquis hearing the tumbrel pulling on the emergency brake and laying on the horn outside the gates of the chateau, Geoffrey shook his head.

Just then, Marjorie’s eyes widened with a dawning realization. “Oh, I get it. You haven’t had anything to chug in a good while, have you?, and without a bit of bubbly on board you’re a dull, boring, party pooper. As clear as a martini glass.”

His grin became an unwilling smile. “C’est ça. I am a touch embarrassed, since men of my generation were always taught to hold our liquor.”

“Well, you flunked that class, Betty Ford.”

“But you still wish me to unburden myself?" Marjorie did not answer. She had taken up the rubber gloves and was poised to slide one hand within. But finding the glove to be the wrong one for her paw, she switched it around. While Geoffrey watched her plight without any sympathy, he confessed in the clearest tone, “The reason I drink to excess is because I live in Summerfield Estates.”

“Uh-huh,” she grunted, still playing with the gloves.

He went on. “But I live in Summerfield Estates because honor and decency still exist.”

Marjorie only half-heard this prologue and was making ready to don her hand garb.

“And I live in Summerfield Estates,” said Geoffrey, “because of you.”

Marjorie shook one glove loose for a nice insertion and answered, “You don’t even know who I am, buddy.”

“But I do know who you are: Sandra.”

The glove fell from her fingers like a wing off of an airplane.

“I know exactly who you are.”

With oh-so slight shivers of timbre, she said, “No, you don’t.”

But Geoffrey nodded, “You are Sandra Summerfield.”

“No. No, I’m not,” she repeated, as if she had seen the reflection of a reflection.

“The daughter of Sam Summerfield. The daughter of the great builder. Sandra Summerfield, doing business all these years under the trade name Marjorie Mayfield. And I know all of this because I am Geoffrey Durant-Dupont.Esquire. Look in your papa’s old papers, if you have not offered them up in sacrifice to the dark powers. Geoffrey Durant-Dupont. Esquire. I was Sam Summerfield’s attorney.”

Out of his words had shimmered a quiet echo. "No, you aren’t. I’d have remembered.”

“But it’s hard to get to know people when you’re being shipped between reform schools, summer schools, convents, and work camps for chronic vandalism, delinquency, and suspected arson.”

Marjorie wanted to barrage him with some of her trademarked, blunt-edged invective, but could only muster a muttered, “Girlish pranks.”

Geoffrey gave her a long-suffering gaze. "You know, you were just a little girl when your father had his vision of Summerfield Estates.”

“The American dream.”

“For your papa, it was. And I was at his side every moment. Old Man Sam said, ‘I want this place built,’ and Geoff Durant made it happen. I wined and dined the investors and the buyers, I took a microscope to the zoning code to find every loophole, I drew up more contracts than Uncle Clancy has pills—and in return I received a little house of my own in the quietest corner of the place. Chez Cockaigne.I sit in my cottage and all of Summerfield comes to me. My Christmas card list stands in a two-volume seal-skin edition. I have been in every house in Summerfield, I have dined at every table, I have rewritten over two thousand wills and proof-checked at least five hundred DNR orders.”

Marjorie scoffed airily, “And they pay you with Pinot Grigio?”

“Chateau d’Yquem. First editions of Proust. A Faberge chess set. A celadon fingerbowl. Even a Paul Klee after a particularly delicate matter.”

“And where’s that hanging?”

“In plain sight. The only thing that is locked up is the Countess’ tiara. I wish I knew to whom Andi will be leaving it…”

“Not to you.”

Geoffrey steered the docudrama back on course. “Your father...”

“He goes by daddy.”

“…I knew your father since 1957, when we were at university together. Then came the travels around the globe and those jobs for the quiet men.”For a moment, Geoffrey was more than remembering.“So quiet that they were dressed in shadows.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Marjorie said. "Are you sure the dementia hasn’t kicked in?”

Geoffrey only smiled, gazing beyond her into the past. “You’re not supposed to understand. But since my end is nigh, let the truth come out: your father was a spy.”

“A spy?”

“A spy. Even I was a spy.”

“A spy?”

“But it didn’t last. You need to be a certain type for that and Sam Summerfield wore his heart on his sleeve, which is fatal for an operative. His only other fault—”

“No,” said Marjorie, “daddy was perfect.”

“Just like Summerfield?”

“Just like Summerfield.”

“Your father’s—”

“You mean ‘daddy’s.’”

“His only other fault was that he wanted more than he needed. Sam was a simple man who tried to be complicated. Sometimes human imagination—.”

“Hey, imagination is the American way, you internationalist.”

“Cosmopolitan, please. Just as your father wanted to be. But what he ended up with Summerfield.”

“Summerfield is perfect,” she said again. "Like daddy.”

Geoffrey gave her a point for filial piety and went on. “But since the jungle can only have so many panthers—”

Her eyes blazed like embers coming to life. “ me.”

“Please. You are only a jackal, at best. But as I was saying: Sam Summerfield—”

“You never knew him. You never knew him.”

“Sam Summerfield thought he should be a lion. He’d seen too many beautiful things in the sixties that he wanted to make his own Shangri-La, to be lord of the manor, and saint all in one.”Geoffrey paused for half a beat, waiting for Marjorie to remind him of her father’s perfection, but as she seemed to have missed her cue. He carried on. "But the saddest turn of all is that Summerfield is like a thousand other places just like it. Change the name and you have the same boring gray and white houses with the same little yards and the same Japanese maples. And I told him not to put those mermaids at the main gates.”

“Summerfield is paradise on the earth,” Marjorie insisted. "A paradise on the earth. Because no one’s unhappy in Summerfield.”

Geoffrey told her, “Well, my happiness has been spotty at best.”

“Like you’ve been sober enough to notice.”

“For over thirty years, I have endured internal exile in that holding tank of the Greatest Generation, the sagging swingers, the Annette Funicello understudies, and the Rat Pack dropouts. Thirty years.”

“So, where do I fit into all this?”

He went on. "It is a sad fact that sometimes we must keep secrets and as an attorney, I have had to keep many secrets. But since you’re part of the secret and my client is long dead and you’re trying to kill me, I don’t think that confidentiality has turned into an unnecessary luxury.”

She crossed her legs in a rather masculine jauntiness. "Let’s have it.”

“Sam was a good friend. Your father may not have always done what was legal, but he always did what was right. And when he wasn’t blinded by his dreams, he was wise. He knew what you were, Sandra, and from a safe distance I saw it, too. As a toddler you were naughty, as a schoolgirl you were a handful, and once young womanhood was upon you, you were sly and cunning. Then you became wicked and two-faced. And now evil. The obsessive seeks order, the histrionic attention, the narcissist adulation, the avoidant safety, and the psychopath, as heartless as a demon, seeks unalloyed power.”

“And I’ve got it,” she said, pointing at the nitrogen canister on the floor. "Death in a can. Right here, right now.”

“And you know, you still are a little girl—no longer a slip of a thing, but oh, so wicked, without fellow-feeling, sympathy, or a tear for anything or anyone. But despite what you were, your father loved you, Sandra, or that’s what he said in the hospital, before that thrombosis took him out.”

“A descending aortic aneurysm is what I heard.”

“Very well. But the last thing he asked me from his hospital bed, other than that he wanted a magazine from the gift shop, I think it was Field and Stream—”

“We’re big on the sporting life,” Marjorie said and pointing at him with her index finger, her thumb erect, bounced her digit like a discharging weapon.

“The last thing Sam said was ’You know, bud, I’m sorry I can’t leave Summerfield to Sandy. But I’ve given her life, if that’s worth anything.’” Geoffrey looked on Marjorie with the placidity that seemed to concede what his friend had said. "Not that anyone’s life is worth anything to you, I’m sorry to say.”

“Least of all yours,” she said, blowing on the end of her ballistic finger and shoving it into an imaginary holster.

“The people in Summerfield are all old—”

“Genius-level observation, grandpa.”

“—and one by one over the years they’ve died.”

“That’s what old people do. Start practicing.”

“But a few of them did not just die. They perished in bizarre tragedies.”

“There is no tragedy in Summerfield,” Marjorie recited as if answering a pesky reporter.

“And whenever anyone died, there were—usually—no close survivors or heirs. All too pat, too coincidental. So, we began to keep track. Allow me to recite the litany of the dead.”And he named a roll of old fogies and grannies that as Marjorie remembered things were some of her most profitable sales. Geoffrey summed up rhetorically, “How many years did it take to assemble all the clues?”

“Plenty, by the looks of you.”

He made a wry smile that only the very aged can deploy. "Your father was a wise, wise man, so he cut you off without a cent. He knew that if you had money you would be more evil than without it. But even though you’ve had to spend your life working, you’ve still gotten into trouble.”

Marjorie said, “I bet you pushed him to it. Then you move into your little ticky-tacky cardboard box for free. A typical ingrate flunky.”

“Trust me, Sandra, I did not plan to pass these last thirty years sitting sauced in the cultural obsolescence of Summerfield Estates. But we have made a home. And I have evaded your revenge. Up to now.”

“Up to now,” she said and bent down for the gloves on the floor.

Then, with the sanguine unemotionality of an anatomist with scalpel in hand, Geoffrey said, “Young lady.”

Against her better judgement she halted and bent back up. Maybe another cannonball of history was about to hurl at her.

“Just as I have answered the questions who and what, let me tell you that I do know where we are. I know exactly where we are. Right above us is a branch service office for the whole complex. There are service maps for all of Summerfield hanging right there on the wall.”He nodded to a shadowy field of reinforced concrete behind Marjorie. "In the ceiling right there are vents leading to any number of houses, maybe even mine own.”

Marjorie did not bother to turn or look about, being well familiar with the industrial décor of the room from all of those protracted bouts of waterboarding those pesky interlopers from Sing-Along Sales, with their Sound of Music costumes. Which reminded her: how long could greasy Marco and mousy Michael hold their breaths? That Michael would probably just float, with those ears of his.

Geoffrey continued. “So, I have answered who and what and where. But now for why. What makes Marjorie tick?”

“The heart of a T. rex.”

Geoffrey only chuckled. "You say that do not remember me? You tried before, Sandra. Now try to say it again: Mr. Durant-Dupont.”

Marjorie blinked as if hot volcanic ash was blowing into her face.

“You did try. And your papa said, ‘Well, Geoff, maybe that’s too much of a mouthful.’You turned as red as the tomatoes in Paula Paglia’s vegetable garden that year. And then you said, “Mr. Geoff.’ And I handed you an ice-cream cone to make it all better.”

Marjorie chanted, “Mr. Jeff.”

“I hope in your head you’re spelling it with a G and not a J.”

With a cataclysmic implosion quaking through her inner world, with stalactites and frozen icicles of memory crashing down into the pools of childhood recollections, with her voice shaking and staggering, Marjorie Mayfield muttered, “Thank you, thank you.”

But suddenly, in a spasm of self-protection, she grabbed up from the floor the nitrogen canister, and without even snatching the heavy gloves from the floor, willing to take a bit of frostbite for a good cause, she brought it to her chest and took in a generous lungful of wholesome oxygenated air. With cheeks swollen as if she were a reject from a clandestine program to crossbreed humans and hamsters, she looked at Geoffrey a last time like a puffy Pandora knowing all-too-well what nastiness she would evoke. But the old fellow only sat with immaculate serenity and self-assurance, his face a script of calm. Still, she tightened her fingers about the canister lid, twisted her wrist to the left, and loosed the cap.

But no frigid gases snaked out between her fingers. Her hands were not suddenly scarred with welts of frostbite. After a few seconds of stupefaction, she dropped the lid to the floor and looked down into the canister’s sterile depths. There, without murky mist or even the dregs of the clear watery element, a respectable waxboard tub of Ace-Of-Spades Licorice Lickity Banana Split, ‘compleat’ with a foil ribbon sealing its dainty quatrefoil lid, sat alone.

Marjorie looked at Geoffrey, who nodded toward the bottom rim of the container, which all this while had been facing him. With the macabre curiosity of a schoolgirl examining a human skull, Marjorie turned the traitorous object about in her hands and saw a crack; and she realized that when she had not caught it at the drop-off, it had struck the roof of her building and had broken oh-so-slightly open. In those few seconds, even before she had retrieved it, the liquid element had escaped and had seeped away into the sky over Merryweather, where it was just another nebula of unseen molecules and not even the birds had gasped that their air had become a little less breathable.

But even at this nemesis-blow, Marjorie Mayfield wailed in her soul, for she saw a greater and crueler tragedy: her ice cream was becoming all soft and runny.

Then from her pocket, sounded a spright, efficient little beep. Being as much a thrall to her iThing as any staring, slack-jawed millennial, Marjorie pulled her iThing into the light and read the screen.

"I hope you can help us. Problem with new client. Need some professional guidance. Come by house on Vera Lynn Lane ASAP."

Marco Panzi, P&P Estate Sales.

Ah, thought Marjorie. She tapped on the screen in response:

"Oh thats horrible, send me the street address and Ill be there in a jiff MM"

Marjorie offered Geoffrey a smile. "You just stay right there, Mr. Jeff,” she commanded. “I think you’re a little lonely. I’m going to bring you some company.”