Word: machek
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...present seems to be deadened by the drone of Hail Marys and weighted by the sweet stench of stale funeral flowers banked around a seven-day-old corpse. The past, for the mourning family of Stanislaw Machek, is a terrain of lust and violence, seen dimly through the murk of love, greed, self-righteousness and madness. In a brilliantly constructed first novel, Author Richard Bankowsky, 29, leads the mourners at Machek's wake, one by one, back across that dark landscape...
...down in the middle of it without bearings, the reader at first sees only blurred shapes. An undertaker, in the first of a series of long interior monologues, recognizes Stella, Machek's beautiful youngest daughter. With guilt and confusion, he recalls a day ten months before when Stella, a stranger, climbed in beside him as his empty hearse idled at a stop light, said "Take me to your place.'' Slowly some details emerge: he drove her from the Polish quarter of their New Jersey factory town to a cheap Manhattan hotel, later fled, left her to stare...
Gradually, through the musings of other mourners, the answer emerges. A gentle drunkard, Machek's brother-in-law, dreamily remembers how Stanislaw came to the U.S., how he became foreman in a knitting mill, fathered five daughters. Stella herself appears, a slut (or so it seems) newly married to a fat cloak-and-suiter. As details of her childhood come into focus, the reader approaches the shattered central figure of Stanislaw Machek...
Five Hundred Smackers. In Milwaukee, the will of Bachelor Arthur Machek bequeathed $500 to a woman, long since married to another, "with whom, together, I kept company in 1889 . . . and who gave me the only kisses I ever...
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