Panflick

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Book One — Chapter Thirteen Melchizedek’s Remarkable Progress, The Birth of Our Hero, Adam Panflick’s Cone Shaped Head

I have asked the muse for special assistance as there is more to fit into a small chapter than may ever have been contained to so few words before. Or so it seems to me.

Melchizedek progressed between 1927 and 1935 by doggedly sticking to advice his Uncle Stanley gave him when he was barely able to understand words. It came down to the “right friends”. I have already noted that Melchizedek, at Exeter and Harvard, had a small circle of rather small acquaintances. I should except Froggy who was rotund and reached Adam’s relatively tall — for the group — 5′9″. Already I digress. Apologies

The first right friend Melchizedek made in Manhattan was Reginald Wardwell. Wardwell had actually been a classmate at Harvard, but they had had only a nodding acquaintance. Now, more adrift in Manhattan than he had been in Harvard Yard, Melchizedek’s net expanded. A chance meeting on Park Avenue, a few months after he and Mildred were settled in, led to a friendly luncheon and turned into a close relationship. Reginald was a willing fount of information and advice. He responded happily to Melchizedek’s often urgent questions. This urgency was well-disguised but it was real.

They spoke of Wardwell’s progress in a small law firm downtown and of Melchizedek’s prospects as a dealer in fine things. When Reginald probed him about this, Melchizedek simply replied, “Why would I not want to deal in fine things?” or “Fine things are always of interest.”

“I see that, old chap,” Reginald answered. “But there’s a trick to doing it so you do not appear to be, how shall I say it, on a par with those you are dealing with.”

“How do you stay on a par with those you are dealing with?” Melchizedek asked.

And, to make the matter plain, with Reginald’s help and Mildred’s coaching, he developed in his mind a picture of the gentleman-expert, neither above nor below anyone he dealt with. He would earn well and enable Mildred to live out a superior style. He would buy and sell from all to all, but always at the very highest level.

Reginald was a child of some wealth and a long story can be shortened by saying what you may already have anticipated. His father Lancelot, a famed Wall Street banker, was among the most ruined when the unexpected Great Depression began with the crash of 1929.

Seeing the future, Lancelot opted out. He used a mint pearl-handled 38 caliber Colt revolver that had never been fired. He was apparently oblivious to the mess that resulted and the feelings of those he left behind. There was no suicide note, He left no will.

It turned out to be a shining moment for Melchizedek. What he was unable to sell directly to customers, he auctioned off. This was for Melchizedek the model for many subsequent operations — disposing profitably of fine things for people in difficult circumstances.

The successful disposition of the Wardwell estate — furniture, jewels, paintings, rare objects — was a boon to Reginald. He more than repaid his gratitude by tipping Melchizedek off to a magnificent mansion on Madison Avenue in the 70s, available in depressed 1931 for a song. Panflick House was born. Melchizedek made his first million disposing of the fine things of the wealthy by the time Mildred experienced her first labor pains.

It was a dismal pregnancy, messy and nauseating. They had agreed that it was the right thing to do to have a child. While pregnant, Mildred lost her robust and grounded color. Her ash blonde hair was disheveled. Her wonderful eyes of emerald green went pale. Even in extremis, she remained beautiful. But the words “never again” were continually on her lips. Melchizedek’s efforts to comfort her were ineffective. In a ten room duplex, there was ample space for Mildred to be miserable and for Melchizedek to occupy himself with his own thoughts. There was even an extra bedroom for him to sleep in on nights when Mildred was particularly down.

Reginald had impressed upon him the need to read important books, so he had begun a collection. On the night they went to the hospital, he was reading Candide.

Fathers then were spared the indignity of being present during labor and hearing the screams of new mothers in labor close up. Melchizedek’s first glimpse of Adam was traumatizing enough without the noise. The boy had a cone head. It disgusted him. He ran to find a doctor. The cone-headed boy was lying in a basketlike contraption visible through a window. The image would not leave him.

The cone receded but it took two days and then Mildred and the boy came home. There was a nurse on the premises who knew about cones and who understood parental trauma. But even her ministrations could not erase her sense that the parents were deliriously happy to leave the baby in her care. She shrugged and patted the red top of Adam’s head which was now practically normal.

Thus ends this first book.

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