One of my troubles, of course, was that Dan Flattery was so thoroughly a type rather than a person, as I’d noticed when he and two of his look-alikes had emerged from that boat of his at our first meeting. Buffeted by the throng, I kept haring off in the wake of one thick neck after another, none of them turning out to belong to the man I was looking for.
Brother Mallory fought his way to my side at one point, saying, “Did you see him? The son, I mean, Frank.”
“I haven’t even found the father,” I told him. Then, noticing how fixed his jaw and eyes looked, I said, “Brother Mallory, you promised. No pugilism.”
“I just want to look at him,” he said, and ducked away from me again. Worried about him, but with more urgent problems to concern me, I went back to my search.
With all of this scrambling about, I was picking up stray bits of conversation along the way, and gradually I was coming to realize that this was the society whose iceberg tip I’d met down in Puerto Rico. All the people who had been so thoroughly character-assassinated by that group down there were now here, the parents and cousins and schoolmates, the dishonest uncles and frigid aunts and round-heeled older sisters, and of course these people were merrily dishing that absentee bunch down south.
All of which was well and good, but where was Dan Flattery? Not in the living room, with its buffet-style table of food surrounded by stocky patrons. Nor in any of the rooms behind it as far back as the enclosed porch where we’d all had lunch that first day I’d ever met Eileen Flattery Bone. And not in the kitchen full of liquor and drunks, not in the dining room full of hoppity dancers and the accordionist (a shriveled old man accompanied by a machine that made drum sounds), not in the line for either bathroom, not in any of the second-floor bedrooms with their beds under mounds of coats and their populations of two or three or four people in serious tête-à-tête, and finally not in the library.
Wait! In the library. I’d just given up on that room and was about to press on to the outside world — there seemed to be more partygoers doing something or other in the icy dark cold of the back yard — when I spied the man himself, leaning against his shelves of self-improvement and talking with fierce red face to two identikit replicas of himself.
How white that face went when he saw me, without losing any of its fierceness. Shock, in fact, seemed only to emphasize Dan Flattery’s patriarchal air of bulldog determination. Without a word to his companions, he pushed his way through the intervening partygoers, thrust his face toward mine, and yelled, “I thought you were going to stay away from her!”
“I want to talk to you!” I yelled back. (Whatever other reason he may have had for yelling, it was the only way under the circumstances for either of us to make himself heard.)
“You’ve done e—” he started, and then blinked, looking past me, and yelled, “Who’s that?”
I turned. “Brother Quillon,” I said. “And Brother Leo.” The former was deep in conversation with a pair of beaming buxom maidens, and the latter was disapprovingly browsing among the sets of Dickens.
“You brought them with you?” He couldn’t believe it.
“We want to talk with you about the lease,” I yelled, and then the first thing he’d said finally triggered itself in my head and I double-yelled, “WHAT?”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Before that! The first thing you said to me!”
“I said—” Then he paused, and frowned at me; apparently a similar triggering event had just taken place inside his own head. “You’re here to talk about the lease?”
“What did you mean, ‘stay away from her?’ I am away from her.”
“You—” he looked at his watch. (Nothing like Dwarfmann and his skittish red numbers, this was a monstrous old turnip of a pocket watch with roman numerals.) “Come with me,” he announced, put the turnip away, grasped my elbow in a non-gentle grip, and started hacking his way through the wall of human flesh, pulling me along like a canoe behind him.
We crossed the central hall and waded into the living room, where Flattery suddenly stopped, pointed the hand that wasn’t welded to me, and cried, “More of you?”
I followed his pointing finger and saw Brother Flavian in haranguing dialogue with half a dozen college-age youths. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves tremendously. Beyond them, Brothers Clemence and Dexter, cocktails in hand, were in civilized discourse with several ur-Flatterys.
Flattery shook my arm, crying, “How many are you?”
“We’re all here,” I told him. “Sixteen of us.”
“Christ on a crutch!”
And he towed me onward, through the living room and into the dining room — Brother Peregrine was fox-trotting to “How Much Is that Doggy in the Window?” with a suspiciously blonde blonde, while Brother Eli was managing to do the monkey to the same music with a girl who looked like all folksingers — and across the dining room to a door I already knew was locked because I’d tried it earlier in my search. Flattery, however, had a key, and without releasing my arm (my hand was beginning to suffer from lack of blood) he unlocked the door and pushed it open by shoving me into it.
An office, small and compact and horridly messy. It reminded me of field engineers’ offices in mobile trailers, with its charts and blueprints and scale drawings thumbtacked over one another on the walls, its leaning stacks of flimsy papers on the desk, its looseleaf manuals crammed every which way into the narrow tall bookcase, and even its outsize air-conditioner jutting so far into the room that anybody sitting at the desk would have to lean slightly to the left at all times or else remove his head.
Flattery closed and relocked the door behind us, and now we were in privacy and comparative quiet. The rattle and roar of the party could still be heard, but at least we wouldn’t have to yell at one another to be heard.
Flattery yelled anyway: “What the hell do you think you’re up to now, you son of a bitch?”
“You don’t have to yell,” I told him. “I can hear you.”
“It isn’t enough,” he yelled, “you steal my daughter away from me, now you want to blacken my name with my family and friends!”
“Not at all,” I said. “We had no idea you were having a—”
“Well, I don’t care, do you understand me? Bad-mouth me all you want, those goddam freeloaders out there bad-mouth me all the time anyway, what do I care about that?”
“Nobody wants to—”
“But when it comes to my Eileen,” he said, shaking a fist close enough to my face for me to admire every orange hair and orange freckle and knee-shaped knuckle, “it’s about time you started to watch yourself.”
“I don’t have anything to do with Eileen,” I said. “We said goodbye to one another.”
“That’s what she told me,” he said. “She called me and told me.” The fist became a pointing finger. “But you didn’t fulfill the deal,” he said, “so don’t come around as though you did. You left her to believe her own father’s a two-faced liar and a crook.”
“Her own father is a two-faced liar and a crook.”