Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center

Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center

BLOWN IN LIKE A DUST-COVERED September leaf, the bearded man arrived on a Sunday morning. Twisted and whirled like that leaf, he meandered down through the small, Sabbath-silent square, and around it twice, as though seeking an exit from his own personal maze. Then, having found it, he wandered from one side of Pearse Street to the other, heading East toward the Bethany Baptist Church. When he got there, held by the sound of the boys’ choir and the organ, he hunkered down on the white cement steps, jacket open, his unclipped tie hanging down between his knees, and waited.

When the service was over, he was the first thing to be seen as the holy-refreshed throng erupted softly through the double doors. He clashed with the Sunday scenery. Everyone stared rudely. He was the only bearded man in the town of Prince.

For a second that backed the crowd into each other as those in front paused in mild shock, the bearded man held the eyes of the people. He held the deep-blue eyes lidded by heavy lashes of Gregg Bancroft, the grey-green eyes of Wilma Foltin, the brown eyes of Guy Earl and the amber eyes of his wife Iris, he held the bloodshot, smoke-stained eyes of old Jerry Dozier. A bond of sight, hurled between the strange, bearded man and five citizens of Prince, then as quickly undone and gone.

The crowd shoved forward and soon everyone was milling about, almost as though afraid to walk down the space between the church and the man; they milled and muttered, waiting (for what?) and asking each other why they were hesitating, who the man was, what was going on.

Then the bearded man slowly rose to his feet, methodically buttoned his jacket, and walked back down toward the center of town. He did not look back.

Reverend Archer, a stern but receptive man in his late fifties, was deeply disturbed by the bearded man. He was a new factor in Prince, a town distinguished (as he put it in his occasional pieces for the secular bulletins) by sense, sensibility, and system. Reverend Archer called Gregg Bancroft, vice-president of the Prince Better Business Bureau, to his side and suggested, mildly but with a voiced overtone of apprehension, that Gregg find out who the stranger was. How long he planned to stay in Prince. What his affairs might be here. Why there was a tension in the air — product of the bearded man.

The wind had died down. It was very quiet, tremulously so, in the town of Prince. The Reverend stared at the sky: storm?

Again, across that abyss, they stared at one another. Bancroft’s eyes fell, and the bearded man said, “Won’t you come in, please, Mr. Bancroft.”

He stepped aside, allowing the vice-president of the Prince Better Business Bureau passage into the motel room. Bancroft stepped inside, and felt rather than heard the door close behind him. The Gideon bible was huge and black against the white towel covering the dresser. The shower was running.

“I hope I haven’t interrupted your shower, Mr. — ” He extended it, and the bearded man did not accept. It had been a poor attempt, product of movie clichés, wasted on the strange newcomer. The inquiry about the shower was also fraudulent, for the bearded man still retained his tie and jacket.

“No, certainly not,” he replied, “won’t you sit down, I’ll be with you in a moment.” He entered the bathroom, closed the door behind him and for a minute the running water muffled any sounds that might have come from the bathroom. Then, abruptly, the water ceased, and a moment later he returned.

The bearded man hovered over Bancroft — how unnerving he could be without apparently trying — and then settled down in the other chair, hunched over, staring.

Bancroft was for starting the conversation, learning what it was he had to learn, and leaving. But his purpose was thwarted, for at the precise instant that he summoned breath to speak, the bearded man said, “I’m very happy you’ve come to see me, Mr. Bancroft. I would have had to look you up in any case.” Bancroft treaded water in a confusion’s span of inarticulateness. Finally, having no grasp of what was happening, really, he smiled. Fatuously.

“As an official of the Better Business Bureau,” the bearded man went on, “where would you say the best location might be in Prince for a shop I’m contemplating opening?” He smiled back. It disturbed Bancroft, that smile.

“Well, ha ha,” Bancroft squirmed, questioned, not questioning, “that all depends on what sort of shop you had in mind. You know we’ve got about everything we need in this town. We’re small, but comfortable, ha ha.”

“An art gallery,” the bearded man said softly.

Gregg Bancroft sucked in a breath, then never used it to speak. His face showed a pastel tone of incomprehension. “An art gallery,” he said, partially a query.

The bearded man nodded. “An art gallery. The Duvoe Art Gallery. I’m Gunther Duvoe, how do you do, Mr. Bancroft.” Gregg Bancroft accepted the extended hand with a maelstrom of confusion spinning him. He was not ordering this interview as he had wanted; he was not a shilly-shally … in Prince he was known as a strong man. But this stranger unnerved him. The eyes. They seemed to see more than eyes were meant to see. He did not realize the moment Duvoe had freed his hand.

“I want a small store, something with a rather good front display space, so the paintings may be seen to their best advantage. Do you have such a place for rent, Mr. Bancroft?” Duvoe seemed purposeful, intent. He stared.

Thus, when Gregg Bancroft returned to Reverend Archer, and explained Mr. Duvoe was an artist, in town to open a small gallery, the good Reverend did not find it strange that Gregg had handshake-closed negotiations with Duvoe on the shop that had been the Bon Ton Millinery (now moved to larger quarters in the remodeled Hotel Prince).

He did not even deem it peculiar to see Duvoe quite frequently, thereafter, on the streets, in the shops, even at the services. Even though Mr. Duvoe seemed to be observing rather pointedly. There was even talk that the man took long, late night walks in obscure parts of the town, though he never spoke to anyone.

There was no doubt about it, however, Mr. Duvoe got around quite a bit. He seemed to be everywhere, in fact. And his shop had not yet opened.

But the Reverend Archer did not find that strange, nor did Gregg Bancroft, nor anyone else in Prince. The bearded man was merely feeling out the tenor of the town, sizing it up for this business. That was how they analyzed it.

They could not have been more correct.

Many nights, in the little motel room, the lights glowed. And there was very often the sound of running water. The maid — who had been given instructions not to bother cleaning the room, that it would be done by the tenant — found dirty towels neatly folded outside the door each day. These she replaced with fresh ones, wondering how the laundry would ever get all that paint off the dirty ones. She never tried to peek inside the room: there was no telling when the bearded man was there and when he was not. He came and went so silently, she was afraid she might open the door a crack, and be staring directly into those strange eyes. Duvoe was left quite alone. His rent he paid weekly, his peregrinations about Prince continued. For a while. Until the first paintings appeared in the shop’s window.

It was obvious who it was. There was no way to pin it down, no way to bring action legally, because the identity was not so much in what he had painted but in what he had not painted — what he had inferred. Yet there was no question who it was. It was Gregg Bancroft, and he was performing some highly intimate acts with Robin Walker, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Mayor Walker. Everyone knew Robin was wild, but Bancroft was over twice her age. That was the first painting. The others, if anything, were worse. Gregg Bancroft was at least a bachelor.

The one in which two women stared at each other with unmistakable passion, in that split-instant before their bodies touched, was terrifying in its clarity. Duvoe (if it had been painted by him) had a rare and remarkable gift. His was an amazing talent, not only the setting down of expression and intent, but the peripheral intangibles that surpassed mere photographic art. One of the women was Wilma Foltin; the grey-green eyes of the painted Wilma cried out in unnatural hunger for the other woman, obviously her love partner. Wilma Foltin was the librarian, a still water that apparently, as Duvoe had indicated, ran very, very deep, and very, very muddy.

There was a painting of Jerry Dozier, the town wino, the town beggar, in his shack at the edge of Prince. He was counting the silver dollars stacked neatly in old socks, hidden under the floorboards. He was laughing cruelly, and indicating with idiocy the townfolk who kept him alive and wealthy.

Guy Earl and his wife Iris were the subjects of two small vignette canvases, set side by side. Theirs were unspeakably frank and alarming. They told in as few lines and tones as a master could demand, that Guy and his wife should never have been married. What can a full-blooded woman do with a husband who cannot have sex?

There were more. Many more. Twenty-six in all; some quite large, others small, but each revealed — without a definite place to point the finger — the innermost personality, the vilest secret, the facet that damned most completely, of everyone Duvoe had met in Prince.

In one morning, the first morning of display, the town of Prince had its soul bared. It recoiled in horror from what it saw.

The gasoline bomb exploded through Duvoe’s window shortly after one o’clock. Perhaps it had been thrown by Vern Bressler, whose portrait had revealed that he was half-Negro. Perhaps it had been thrown by Emil or Maxine Lupoff, whose relationships to a local waitress and an intern at the Prince Medical Center were revealed in a long, horizontal canvas, predominantly red.

But no matter; the damage had been done. Everyone who had seen those paintings would remember them. Those who had not seen them learned about them, in grossly exaggerated rumor (needless in the face of Duvoe’s art).

Duvoe was accosted on the street by Gregg Bancroft who swung on him, without hello or preamble. Duvoe held his own quite nicely; he looked down on Bancroft, who was nursing the raw, fist-made gash in his cheek, and said: “If you trouble me again, Mr. Bancroft, I will have to unveil a further canvas I’ve done. Mayor Walker’s daughter is seen from a slightly different angle.”

Gregg Bancroft limped back to his office. He was shot, later that day, by Mayor Walker, a man known throughout the area for the jealousy and protectiveness he felt toward his daughter, the reigning high school football queen.

Jerry Dozier was robbed and mercilessly beaten by a small but intense group of Negro boys from The Hill, a poorer section of Prince where Jerry Dozier had often cadged meals from those not much better off than he had seemed to be.

Vern Bressler’s wife left him. She was so repelled by the concept that the man she had married twenty-two years before was half-Negro, that she attempted to forget in a wild round of drinking and debauchery. She was inevitably placed under custody of the Prince Medical Center, for her own protection. There was some talk of insanity.

Wilma Foltin was summarily dismissed from her librarianship, and Guy Earl sold out his holdings in Prince, left town during the night, and left a note for his wife, Iris, the pith of which seemed to be that half a man was no man at all.

Since Duvoe’s shop had been burned out, the front window broken and the canvases destroyed, the reminders were gone, but not the perpetrator. Whatever threat of blackmail through revelation-of-painting he employed to thumb-under Daniel Makepeace (owner of the Prince Hotel) it was sufficient to force Makepeace to display still another, larger painting in the huge front window of the hotel.

This painting, unlike the others, dealt with an entire scene of activity, involving more than essential characters. It was, in fact, a crowd scene. A large crowd scene. It had been done primarily in the shadow colors of blue and dark grey and amber, flashed throughout with angry bursts of violet, stark white, red, and yellow. It was perhaps twelve feet long by four feet high, and its detail-work was both graphic and arresting.

It neatly divided the town of Prince into two armed camps:

The townspeople who were determined they would not see their town ruined by the scandal; who were determined even if they had to take the law into their own hands that they would not stand trial with those who had done it; who loathed and despised the perpetrators of that long-forgotten crime they had thought was buried by time and forgetfulness.

And then there was the other group …

The townspeople so adroitly pictured in Duvoe’s canvas, who had set fire to that house on Fairlawn Boulevard, so many years before, burning alive the old man and his wife.

On one side, the murderers.

On the other, those so frightened, they were the avengers.

It was a matter of defense before the world outside Prince learned of this suddenly uncloseted skeleton and stepped in for retribution. At which point everyone would begin to shout mea culpa!

In the rage for justice — an out-of-hand justice with its foundation laid in the quicksand of mob rule — terrible things were done to those beast-eyed residents of Duvoe’s canvas. Few managed to escape the noose of insanity and fanatic verve that swept Prince. And in the storm, the eye of that storm moved silently, nearly forgotten. Duvoe packed his easel and brushes, and prepared to leave town.

Till the door of his motel room was kicked inward by one of the few who had escaped.

The bearded man spun from the suitcase lying packed and open on the bed, and confronted his visitor with an air of mixed surprise and horrified fascination.

Reverend Archer seemed quite at home with the pistol in his hand. “Another instance where scripture and science don’t conflict?” Duvoe asked.

“What are you, some merchant of evil? A purveyor of miseries?Who are you! ” The Reverend’s face was blotched with emotion. He spoke heavily, each word syllable drawn out emphatically, with hatred and bewilderment in the tone. The pistol stayed very level, aimed directly into Duvoe’s face.

The bearded man smiled and turned back to the suitcase. He pulled tight the inside straps and began to close the bag. The Reverend stepped up behind him and spun the artist viciously.

“Answer me, man, because I’m here to wreak vengeance of one kind or another, and nothing will keep me from seeing you dead if you don’t talk your way out of it.” He was both appealing and condemning. He hated, obviously with an intensity he could not feel for an abstraction: evil. But at the same time he sought an answer, a way out of what he had come to do. He was a man of God, and he could not kill … unless it was to kill an abstraction.

“Who are you?” His temples throbbed. His voice was vengeful, urging, throaty.

The bearded man smiled again. Wistfully. “I’m a wandering agent of Satan, padre. I’m just a doer of evil because it’s my stock in trade. I’m a traveling salesman of sin.”

The Reverend’s hand lashed out, suddenly. The bearded man’s gibes were too much, and the pistol caught Duvoe at the right temple, spun his back against the bedpost and opened a livid wound in the flesh at his hairline. He put a hand up to his face and smeared the warmness down toward his cheek. “Go ahead, Reverend. Go ahead, do it again. It won’t stop what’s happening in your clean, ordered little town. It wouldn’t stop it if you killed me a thousand times over.”

“But go ahead anyhow, Reverend. Do your damnedest!”

Archer stood shaking at his own brutality. His hand holding the pistol wavered and trembled, while the holy man’s eyes shut tight in an agony of self-examination, consideration of depths till then unknown. He had destroyed himself more than a bit with the action.

“Why have you destroyed my town?” he asked softly, pathetic, almost childlike. “Why? I can’t understand how a man could do it. You did it … why?”

Duvoe ran a hand across his dry lips. The emotion of the other man drenched him, made him think, made him remember, forced him to consider all that had gone before, what he had done, who had known what was coming, the whys and hows and realities of it, festering till it had had to be lanced.

“Why …” he murmured the question softly, half to himself, “why indeed, Reverend. Why indeed.”

He slumped down on the bed.

What he said came very gently, as though all the broken glass edges of memory had been sea-smoothed by the wash of emotions.

“They did it in 1942. I was seventeen, away at art school in New York; I didn’t learn about it for several weeks. I couldn’t understand why my letters never got answered, or why the money stopped coming. Finally, I came home and saw the rubble where my home had been. Do you remember it, Reverend? You were here then; you were tending to the souls of your flock even then. Your flock of bigots and murderers! Do you remember, Reverend?”

Archer’s face came up. Comprehension dawned. His mouth worked and he said, “Not Duvoe. Not Duvoe at all. Deutsch! I know …Deutsch! ”

The bearded man’s eyes burned steadily, strangely, with a flickering light of inner intensity, “That’s right, Reverend. That’s right! Deutsch. Gunther Deutsch, not Gunther Duvoe. Gunther Deutsch, son of Cara and Horst Deutsch, who ran the home bakery on Pearse Street for nineteen years, until we went to war with Germany, and the bigots decided old Horst and his hausfrau were Nazis, and burned them alive in their house on Fairlawn Boulevard!”

“Nowdo you remember, Reverend?Now do you know what makes a boy of seventeen run away from even the ashes of his parents, what makes him go mad a little, Reverend, what makes him want to kill something as big as a town? Do you knownow , my holy father of the guilty ones? Now do you see what warps a boy’s life so he doesn’t marry, doesn’t settle, doesn’t live till now? Is it clear, at last?”

Archer stared in horror at the warped expression, the burning, desperately needing eyes. “You’re a fanatic, you’ve done this, do you know what you’ve done …”

The bearded man stood up, fierce, tense.

“Do I know? Reverend, the God you talk about is the only one who knows how much and how well I know.”

“They didn’t know what they were doing … the war … all the talk about saboteurs … they were sick people …” Archer flailed at nothing, trying to establish a rationale, failing completely.

“So they burned alive an old man and his wife who’d been in this town for almost twenty years. They indulged their patriotic fervor in the defence of their country; old man Deutsch and his wife …” he sneered vindictively, “ … oh, they were dangerous, all right!”

Archer dropped the pistol and turned away. The .45 lay black and huge on the carpet; the Reverend’s face (in artistic contrast) was small and milky. Duvoe would not let him retreat, however; he followed him with, “And what did you do, Reverend? What did you do to set right the wrong? Did you say anything to anyone outside Prince? Or did you let the conspiracy of silence stand? Did you succor them in their hour of need, Reverend? Did you make sure their souls were unblemished?”

The Reverend Archer did not turn. He raised his hands to his face, and soft sobs escaped between the prisoning bars of his fingers. “It was good here, so … so ordered …”

The bearded man laughed, fur-soft and deeply.

Then he said: “Well, don’t let it bother you, Reverend Archer. It doesn’t matter.”

Then,Archer turned. “What are you talking about? What do you mean?”

And Duvoe said: “It’s all a lie, Reverend. My name isn’t Deutsch. It isn’t Duvoe, either, but it certainly isn’t Deutsch. They had no children.”

The Reverend Archer’s strong chin could not support the wild weight of his slack mouth. His lower jaw dropped open, and he cast about frantically for the reason in this suddenly mad situation. “You’re …not? Then who … what did you …”

Duvoe’s smile was that of the shark. “Everyone has a hobby, Reverend, and when you’ve done evil for so long it’s the only way you know, the only product you can merchandise, well, then I suppose your first guess about me was correct.”

“Evil!” the Reverend bellowed, starting forward. “You work for him …”

“Oh, don’t be melodramatic, Mr. Archer. I’m quite as human as you. But all this wearies …” and he methodically emptied the .45 into the Reverend Mr. Archer.

He fell halfway into the bathroom, and lying there with his face cool against the tile, he smelled the last traces of incense that steam from running shower water was not able to conceal. The cool began to fade, and so did the light as Duvoe wandered about the room carrying his suitcase, murmuring abstractedly, “Now where did I put that road map …”

Exit the fanatic, to the smell of sulphur, offstage right.