Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [124]
“Oh, my goodness!” Mr. Gonzalez squeaked. “This is horrible.”
“Silence!” Miss Trixie snapped.
“What is it, Gus? Something you didn’t handle correctly? Some authority you delegated to somebody else?”
“Yes, it’s a problem. It’s a problem that means we could lose the shirts off our backs.”
“What?” Mrs. Levy grabbed the letters from Mr. Gonzalez. She read them and became a hag. Her lacquered curls turned into snakes. “Now you’ve done it. Anything to get back at your father, to ruin his business. I knew it was going to end like this.”
“Oh, shut up. I never write the letters around here.”
“Susan and Sandra will have to quit college. They’ll be selling themselves to sailors and gangsters like that one there.”
“Huh?” Mr. Zalatimo asked, sensing that he was being discussed.
“You’re sick,” Mrs. Levy shouted at her husband.
“Quiet!”
“And will I be any better off?” Mrs. Levy’s aquamarine lids were trembling. “What will become of me? Already my life has been wrecked. What happens to me now? Prowling in garbage cans, following the fleet. My mother was right.”
“Quiet!” Miss Trixie demanded, this time much more fiercely. “You people are the noisiest I’ve ever met.”
Mrs. Levy had collapsed in a chair, sobbing something about going out to sell Avon products.
“What do you know about this, Gonzalez?” Mr. Levy asked the office manager whose lips had turned white.
“I don’t know a thing,” Mr. Gonzalez piped. “It’s the first time I’ve seen that letter.”
“You write the correspondence around here.”
“I didn’t write that.” His lips were quivering. “I wouldn’t do something like that to Levy Pants!”
“No, I know you wouldn’t.” Mr. Levy tried to think. “Somebody really had it in for us.”
Mr. Levy went over to the files, pushed the scratching Mr. Zalatimo aside, and opened the files in the A’s. There was no Abelman folder. The drawer was completely empty. He opened several other drawers, but half of them were empty, too. What a way to begin fighting a libel suit.
“What do you people do with the filing?”
“I was wondering about that myself,” Mr. Zalatimo said vaguely.
“Gonzalez, what was the name of that big kook you had working in here, the big fat one with the green cap?”
“Mr. Ignatius Reilly. He handled the letter to go out.” Who had composed that awful thing?
“Hey,” Jones’s voice said over the telephone, “you people still got a fat mother with a green cap workin there at Levy Pant? A big white guy got him a moustache?”
“No, we don’t,” Mr. Gonzalez answered in a shrill voice and slammed the phone down.
“Who was that?” Mr. Levy asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Someone for Mr. Reilly.” The office manager wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “The one who tried to make the factory workers kill me.”
“Reilly?” Miss Trixie said. “That wasn’t Reilly, that was…”
“The young idealist?” Mrs. Levy sobbed. “Who wanted him?”
“I don’t know,” the office manager answered. “It sounded like a Negro voice to me.”
“Well, I guess so,” Mrs. Levy said. “He’s out trying to help some other unfortunates right now. It’s encouraging to know that his idealism is still intact.”
Mr. Levy had been thinking of something, and he asked the office manager, “What was the name of that kook?”
“Reilly. Ignatius J. Reilly.”
“It was?” Miss Trixie said with interest. “That’s strange. I always thought it…”
“Miss Trixie, please,” Mr. Levy said angrily. That Reilly blimp was working for the company at the time that that letter to Abelman was dated. “Do you think that that Reilly would write a letter like that?”
“Maybe,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “I don’t know. I had high hopes for him until he tried to get that worker to brain me.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Levy moaned. “Try to pin it on the young idealist. Put him away where his idealism won’t bother you. People like the young idealist don’t deal in underhanded things like that. Wait until Susan and Sandra hear about this.” Mrs. Levy made a gesture that indicated that the girls would clearly go into a state of shock. “Negroes are calling here to get his counsel. You’re about to frame him. I can