The Complete Roderick

Other voices rolled on, full of pride in a new vehicle, scorn for an untried idea, trust in a dubious therapy. A waiter brought a frothy drink to Mrs Fleischman, who tasted it and waved it away. ‘No, Toy. No, Toy…’

Father Warren settled himself beside Mrs McBabbitt, his leather cassock rustling like batwings. ‘Yes I guess you could say I’m in the camp of the enemy here, heh heh, I am the pro tern chairman of the local branch of the New Luddites. And I realize almost everyone here is connected with computer science in some way. But where else can I find converts? Our Lord made his mission among evil persons.’

She broke a pose slightly to look at him. ‘You think computer people are really evil?’

‘Not necessarily. I just meant—’

‘Because I’ve got this real good friend, he’s very big in computers, and he says the only evil is being poor. And when you look at that guy over there with the dirty beard, you kind of get the idea — just look at him!’

Father Warren craned around, only to catch General Fleischman staring at him with a look of distaste.

Someone else glowered at Indica. ‘I knew her when she was plain old Indica Franklin, just another faculty wife who wanted to be a dancer. She made it, too. Got to be a dancing pizza-flavoured taco on TV.’

‘Maybe he is a priest, maybe he ain’t,’ the General said to Roderick. ‘You can’t hardly tell the clergy from anybody else these days, they go around wearing drag and smoking pot just like human beings.’

‘I guess they are human beings, General.’

Fleischman looked at him to see if this was a joke. ‘Yeah. Last priest I listened to was good old Father Cog on the radio. Before the war.’

‘The war?’

‘Okay, sure, maybe he went a little far, using Goebbels’s speeches for his own sermons. You ain’t Jewish, are you, Rod?’

‘I’m not anything.’

‘Good boy. If you ever need a job, we can always use a smart young fella like you at the bank. You just see Personnel, tell ’em I said to give you a job. Now what was I saying?’

‘Before the, er, war…’

‘Crazy times, Rod, crazy times. You know somebody even kidnapped Charlie McCarthy? In 1939 that was I always wondered if maybe Father Cog knew something about that, only they wouldn’t let him speak out, you know? Then, well the war came along and they shut him up. You can’t go around telling people the truth in wartime.’

Edd McFee, who was across the room talking to Francine, turned to glower at Roderick. ‘Who is that guy, anyway? He’s been talking to old Fleischman a hell of a long time.’

‘What do you care?’

‘Me? I don’t care. Only I wanta get the general to back my new project, I figured I’d get a chance to soften him up a little here. He brushed out a wrinkle in his new Army fatigues. ‘I wanted to explain to him how important it is for his bank to get deep into the visual arts, to really communicate the visual the impact of the visual—’

‘Don’t give me the sales talk,’ she said laughing. ‘What’s the project?’

‘I want to set up this satellite link between a dozen different artists all painting in different locations, see? Like one can be in the desert and one even in the middle of the ocean on a raft, one in the mountains, one in New York and so on — and all of them have two-way visual and audio all the time. So all of them just paint what they feel — the total group experience.’ He paused. ‘You don’t like it?’

‘Where do you come in, Edd?’

‘I direct. I tell everybody what to do and I watch them do it. So the whole thing becomes really my work, see?’ He looked over at Fleischman again. ‘I got a really good story for the general. Did you know that Whistler went to West Point?’

‘No.’ Francine sneaked a look at her watch.

‘He did. And he flunked out on chemistry. He said. “If silicon was a gas, I’d be a major general.”’

Nearby the piano thundered and a ragged chorus took up ‘Frosty the Snowman’ as a waiter passed bearing a frothy pink cocktail which he conveyed down the room to the dumpy woman in purple, who was speaking to an astrologer.

‘No kidding? The same day as Monet, well there you are! Talent is talent. You know I was just talking to some young smartass kept trying to tell me Rodin’s works were like cheap Jap movies, how do you like that? I mean, Gate of Hell, how can you compare that to a cheap—’

She paused to sip the drink. ‘That’s better, Toy. That’s the ticket. Now just keep ’em coming.’

Allbright heaved himself to his feet nearby and, smiling at everyone with bleeding gums, made his way along the room, pausing to collect a drink, to lend a cigarette to Mrs Doody, and to confront Felix Culpa.

‘Hello again!’

‘What?’

‘I said hello again. I met you before didn’t I? Aren’t you some kind of — pet-food market research was it?’

‘Mistake,’ said Felix Culpa hoarsely, keeping a glass in front of his face. ‘I’m in satellite leasing, on the educational side. We network to school systems, linking them on a broad spectrum of, of achievement-based multifaceted synergies, excuse me.’ He almost knocked over Judi Mazzini in his hurry to escape.

‘I’ve scared him off. Funny.’

‘Maybe if you took a bath now and then, people would find you nicer to be near,’ said Judi Mazzini. ‘We were just talking about The Machine Dances. Know it?’

‘I ought to, I wrote it.’

‘Oh come on, Allbright.’

‘I did. Ghosted it for a guy named Rogers, that’s why it’s the only book of his anybody reads. Rest of his stuff is so loaded with sociological jargon it moves along like the shoes of Boris Karloff. Matter of fact he writes a little like your friend here talks.’

‘Felix? I think he only talks that way when he’s nervous.’ She looked at Allbright. ‘You’re disgusting, why don’t you ask Francine if you can take a bath here, maybe borrow some clothes from Everett?’

He swayed a little, looking into his glass and trying to frame an answer, while behind him someone complained about sinus trouble in Prague.

‘What were you saying about my book, then?’

‘I said it wasn’t very well thought out. I mean, it’s kind of easy to just make a list of all the ballets with mechanical people or dolls or puppets in them, from Coppelia to Petrushka —’

‘Satie’s Jack-in-the-Box and Bartok’s The Wooden Prince —’

Yes and The Nutcracker, but isn’t it all kind of easy? Why does it have to be significant that people wrote “robot” ballets? The fact is, they were just interested in setting up problems in movement, Coppelia was just—’

‘They started to think of people in terms of machine movements, that’s the whole point. Once you reduce a man to a gesture, you can set up assembly lines, that’s the whole point! People reduced to therbligs, goddamnit, that is the—!’

‘Shh! Okay, okay.’

‘And the Rockettes are an assembly line, assembling a gesture, a pure gesture.’

Harry Hatlo, though forgotten, stood by, still holding his toupee in place. ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘My own work is more like pure therapy I guess, I choreograph routines to work over postural and coordination problems; right now I am working with some young people who as kids some time ago got brain damaged from mercury poisoning, it leaves you with a little parasthesia, some weakness and tremors. So what we been trying…’

His monotone was lost in the general surge of voices arguing over stale politics, declaring faith in a rising stock market, seeking reassurance about a cancer cure, or wondering whether Frosty really had a very shiny nose.

‘Indica!’

She turned, preparing a smile for a friend, to find the masklike face of a stranger. No one. No one important,