Eddie Jr., positioned to see down the kitchen runway, cut off his mother’s reply by announcing, “Yo! Here comes the man of the hour.” And there was Dad, as little as life, trapped in his swollen body, framed in the doorway.
“I’ve just had the most marvelous idea,” he said on cue, in showman’s voice. “You guys are always egging me on to make a buck, ragging me about living up to my earning power.” None of them had ever once mentioned money to the man. “How’s this: I’m going to put up a booth just to the side of all the other toll booths out on the East-West and charge five cents less than the others. It’ll corner the market. The American entrepreneurial tradition. As an initial promotion, I’ll even give out discount coupons for the return trip.”
A grand entrance; Dad again in peak form. It was once more impossible for any of them to insist on the facts. Artie snorted. Eddie Jr. toyed with his place setting and managed a deferential grin. Rachel shook an eggy spatula at him, and Mom morosely kissed him good morning.
In the morning light, Pop looked as hearty and hale as in the family-scrapbook photos. Artie recalled a page of three snapshots: a swimmer; a wrestler in attack crouch; and a cocky, slender man in uniform. They were from when Dad was just Artie’s age—a beautiful, gravity-defying gymnast, a scrapper. And seeing Dad’s clean factual break, his full departure from the past, Artie felt his intestines contract as he sailed over a crest that dropped off sharply.
Big Eddie swaggered in, signing his own full bill of health. “My work goes on trippingly, if anyone cares. I’ve finally busted out of a bottleneck that’s been holding up the show for years. At last I have an angle on how to bring the thing I know best into the modern world. Without offending the authorities, that is.” He looked around magisterially—quizmaster, king of the heap until someone said otherwise. He took his chair at what he managed to make look like the head of the round table and breathed in deeply. “I knew that taking the . . .” His malicious eyes belied a sheepish mouth. “The early retirement was a great idea.”
As even the most Pollyannaish among them now admitted, the latest “retirement” had been forced on Dad some months back when he passed into near coma in front of a class of high school American history students. Again the kitchen filled with the stale air of mutual knowledge. “Get a load of this guy,” Rachel said, somehow immune. “Jeez. I don’t have to take this. Lemme out of here.”
“What’s all this, then?” Dad asked, indicating the sumptuous table setting. At last Ailene noticed what her child had done with her mint-condition treasures. She screamed softly, as if bitten. She leapt to her feet and grabbed two bowls to return them to the hutch before she realized the deed was done and sat down again, sadly.
Had Dad come downstairs obviously ill, Artie, as oldest son, might have beseeched the rest: We can stop this guy, stand up to his retirement jokes, force him to face facts. But with Pop the picture of health, their combined strength counted for nothing. Had Artie appealed to solidarity now, he knew what the others would say: That Artie. Always exaggerating. Why fight the man when he is feeling so good? Their own perpetual hope prevented action.
The man routed them into themselves. Reduced to one on one, Rachel was the only person who stood an even chance against him. She squeezed open his jaws and stuck the penultimate vitamin in, sending OJ in after it. Then she slammed his mouth shut and kissed him. “Would you care to see our dessert menu?”
Unflustered, Pop primped his place setting until it met his satisfaction. With a few deft origami folds, he transformed his linen table napkin into the protruding cups of a brassière, which he promptly held up to his chest to the delight of Eddie Jr. and the cultivated indifference of everyone else. When Rachel began to sling her carefully prepared slop, a much-guarded recipe midway between scrambled eggs and hash browns, he called out, “Hey! Wait a minute. We’re not going to start eating without number-two child present, are we? Count off.” And he made the closest sound to a whistle that his partial plate allowed.
From some distant recess of the house Lily’s disembodied voice called, “Start already. Leave me be.”
Hostile enough in tone, Lily’s outburst, chiming in on cue, so compromised her that it curled Dad’s lips. “You heard the woman,” he said. Each Hobson started in as instructed, without any face giving away its private reasons. Artie, eggs in hand, ate along with the rest, trying unsuccessfully to remember the source of the old adage he had read somewhere, confirmed so clearly in this silent, common consensus, that each of us is truly alone.
As he had done for every family meal over the last twenty years, Eddie Sr. put forward something for the tribe to consider while digesting. These instructional sessions had grown more intense over the years and seemed to peak whenever he was between jobs. “So what’s the topic for this morning’s meal?” he asked, simulating democracy.
Artie suggested, “How about multiple choice Q and A about corporate litigation?” Dad overruled him, as expected.
Suppressing that outburst, Dad began, “I’ve been doing a little reading on a puzzle called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. The modern form of the paradox comes from a guy at the Rand Corporation, 1951, a year wedged between a couple of dates that ought to go off like bells in your brains. But we won’t examine the historical milieu just yet.” He nibbled on a bacon end, pretending to take food. “Here’s the gist of the problem, in my personal version. Two men are summoned into Joe McCarthy’s office . . .”
Rachel groaned. “Not this again. We’ve done witch hunts.” They had all heard Pop speak many times of his bout with collective policing, his minor brush with martyrdom in front of committee years before.
“No, no. You misunderstand. The questioner is not the villain in this one. We can make it anything. Let’s make it two countries exchanging . . .”
“Make it two men and McCarthy, and get it over with,” Rachel said.
“Two guys are up in Senator Smoking Joe McCarthy’s office, sometime in the early 1950s. The gentlemen are both prominent public servants. The senator says, ‘Fellas, we know that you are both Reds. I’ve got plenty of evidence for an indictment, but not enough to guarantee the conviction you deserve. Let’s make a deal. If either of you comes forward with the dope on the other, the man who talks will go free and the other will fry. If neither of you spills the goods on the other, you’ll still suffer public humiliation at the very least.’”
“What happens if they both squeal?” Eddie Jr. interrupted, drawn into the game despite the situation.
“Good question, number-two son. That’s important. If they both rat on each other, their double crosses partly invalidate the other’s testimony. But they still lose more than they would compared to shared silence. Let’s say mutual incriminations will hurt them more than if they both say nothing, but that in undercutting each other, they prevent the unopposed squealer from leading them to electrocution.” Dad looked frustrated at articulating a very simple situation. “Here. Let me draw it for you.”
He jumped up from the table and looted a pen from Ailene’s purse. Ripping off a sheet of paper towel, he drew a few quick lines, adding some all-caps block printing. Dad never wrote in cursive or lowercase. “As you can see, I’ve been brushing up on the numbers racket.” He dropped the finished product in the center of the table:
HIM
KEEP QUIET SQUEAL
KEEP
QUIET
ME
SQUEAL
I GET 2 YEARS
HE GETS 2 YRS
I GET CHAIR
HE GOES FREE
I GO FREE
HE GETS CHAIR
I GET 10 YEARS
HE GETS 10 YRS
Artie reached for the sheet, looking it over cursorily. “I can see what’s coming,” he said.
“It’s amazing what law school can salvage from undergraduate liberal-arts training,” Pop noted.
Ailene put down her fork but declined the sheet when Artie offered it to her. “I for one don’t see where there’s any
paradox. It’s obviously in their best interests to keep quiet. That way, neither of them will end up in bigger trouble. The two men simply have to trust each other, not be intimidated, and realize that they’re in the same boat and would end up worse off if they start naming names.”
“That’s exactly what they do realize, for about two seconds. They’re in the same boat, as the lady says. They make eye contact, and it occurs to them both that as long as they hang together they can’t hang separately. Then the senator puts them into separate rooms, going back and forth between them and asking, ‘Well, how about it now?’ No rubber hoses, you understand. This is America; it’s all done with logic.”
Rach grabbed the paper from Artie’s grip. She looked it over quickly and spun it in little Eddie’s direction. Hearing the man weave his special breed of silence, Lily came quietly out of her room and sat herself in the last empty place. She took Dad’s drawing from Eddie and held it in front of her as she sipped orange juice, grimacing.
Dad, with expert timing, let them each have a look before going on. “Then each guy starts to reason, ‘The other guy can do one of two things. Suppose the other guy says nothing. Then I can save myself two years, two good years of my life, by talking, getting off free rather than being publicly humiliated. On the other hand, what if he talks? Then if I stay silent, I go to the chair. But I can preempt my opponent by delivering the goods first. Ten years, while stiff, still beats high voltage. Whether the other guy talks or not, I can improve my payoff by talking.’”
“And since they both reason that way,” Artie said, as if co-inventor, “they end up with five times the jail term.”
A dry silence followed. “I’ve got it,” interjected Rachel, rising to her feet and slamming the table with her fist. “They say, ‘Joe, if you do this to us, we’ll tell everybody about what you do with that Errol Flynn.’”
Ignoring big sister’s routine outburst, Eddie Jr. handled the summing up. “So the point is, when reasoning separately, they drag themselves down. But what about reasoning from above?”
“Good man. I like that. Reasoning from above.” Dad sat triumphantly at table, gratified by the response from his brood. “But how can they get there? What does it mean?”
Ailene ignored his question, even more distressingly hypothetical than the original problem. “Never mind above. They’re both in it. They both know what they need to do.”
“But they can’t be sure the other can be trusted,” Lily added, catching up to where she could doublethink the old man.
Ailene was now near tears over the apparently abstract problem. “Where’s the flaw, then? Which way should they reason?”
Dad explained, “There is no flaw, dear. And there is no should in reasoning. There’s only practical outcome.”
“And so, folks,” said Rachel, voice-over style. “Yer dandruff you do and dandruff you don’t.”
“Now for some variations,” Dad persisted. “Airplane hijacking with hostages. Price wars at the fuel pump. Food hoarding. Bank runs. Industrial poisoning. Amatory jealousy. Divorce proceedings, for that matter. The arms race. Double-parking. Anyone want to take a stab at how they’re all related?” An average breakfast-table question, at home, Saturday morning with the Hobsons.
Just then Artie, who had gotten the now dog-eared paper towel back and was juggling the numbers for any mathematical escape trick he might have overlooked, flashed onto a little reasoning from above of his own. He thought: Good Christ. Ten minutes ago the topic was how to save the man’s life. Now it’s game theory. Artie held the epiphany in his hand for a fraction of a second. His father’s miniature classroom was a prisoner’s matrix all its own. Dad diverted them from addressing the real catastrophe by drawing them into this game of defection and cooperation. They had to play his dilemma if he was to play theirs. Pop trapped each Hobson in an inverted payoff matrix where the promise of a phantom premium, the threat of being left holding the bag, drove each to be the first to defect and the last to come clean. Artie saw the circling antagonists caught in the need to cut a deal but not knowing how to reach it. Dad himself had become this contest between “he” and “I,” an agile, evasive mind trying to outdance the slow process of his disease, whatever it was.
And the island of mutual collaboration that logic and good judgment kept unattainable, the ability to step out from the unassuming and familiar breakfast nook of the last family in these parts choosing to eat at home, left Artie powerless to defy reason, set aside decorum, and say, “Listen, old man. You are patently and dangerously ill. You’ve spent the last few days with something haywire in your cells. You’ve killed the last several years nursing an antisocial obsession. You’ve lived the last few decades chased by God knows what. And you must now, against your will and for the greater good, pack yourself off to whatever sanatorium will take you, to purge the symptoms for one weekend at least, to do what all our combined anguish cannot do for you.”
Before Artie had power to say behold, Pop’s breakfast-table robustness made it seem that perhaps his dizzies were, after all, only a persistent virus. Artie watched the man conduct his class and thought that maybe the family should consider itself lucky that Pop felt better than last night. The big stink, the showdown, could wait, in any case, until the family was not all together, steeped in a harmless word game where reasoning from above was so much more difficult than the harmless and more acceptable solution to the dilemma: stay still and preserve diplomatic relations. And reasoning this way, Artie walked away from resolution.
The next minute, Dad, sensing that the magic web was weakening, the entangling dilemma in danger of being outflanked, held up a ringmaster’s hand and in familiar carnival huckster’s voice announced, “Friends, for your listening alarm and delight . . .” He sprang from his seat and fiddled with the ancient tube receiver that kept court on the top of the refrigerator. The radio looked to have been last tuned in for the Bay of Pigs flash. Dad tweaked a variable capacitor and the device squealed the ethereal, high-frequency audio-graffiti that is second language to anyone born in this century. Ghostly tracers of disembodied banshee bands blared out along the dial, asserted themselves temporarily on center stage, grew garbled, then died off just as suddenly in the shift of frequencies.
At last, in a recess of the radio band where citizens ordinarily never ventured, the man found what he looked for. As if nothing had changed since the days when women were virtuous and men were tenors, dulcet Rudy Vallee, CVL (Certified Vagabond Lover), amplitude modulated but still unbowed, filled up the breakfast room too brightly for this hour of the second week of Daylight Savings Time, releasing the prisoners from their McCarthian matrix with a nifty number from Dr. Vallee’s Musical Hospital: “Spread a little music wherever you go, and nothing can ever go wrong,” replete with Helen Kane’s boop-boop-de-doop.
The family issued a collective groan. Lily stood, whined a muffled “I hate you,” and stamped out, punctuating her exit with an offstage slam of bedroom door. Eddie Sr. threw his hands out to the side in a mock objection. “What did I do? What’s wrong with a little old-time religion?” But they were not panning Rudy, criminally optimistic as he was. It was Eddie the others howled down, Eddie and his thirty-year claim to the psychical ability, which he himself never attempted to explain, to sense, anywhere and in any circumstance, whenever any radio signal carried any popular tune from the years between 1939 and 1946. The kids had, on a few occasions, gone to great efforts to set up controlled experiments to disprove the talent, to show it up as a hoax. But to date, Dad had repeatedly stymied the positivist strain that he himself attempted to nurture in them. Eddie Jr. had, the year before, even tried to persuade the old man to be his high school science-fair project, claiming it would get him into Carbondale at least, if not Stockholm.
Dubbed by Rachel the Glenn Miller Tiller, Dad’s gift was incontrovertible. Every time he turned the radio on it would be Harry James or Benny Goodman or Les Brown and His Band of Renown. Worse, Pop never dropped in on the middle o
f a tune but always on the very opening bars. Sometimes, for a special splash, he fiddled with the dial before turning the set on, and then he’d land right on the target with a Midway Island precision.
The effect of Mr. Vallee, Artie suspected, was exactly what the big guy had intended: the school session immediately ended, the students heading off to whatever private work called them, while the invalid instructor slipped out of the conversation’s back door without further interrogation. Rach attended to dishes, puffing on her pitch pipe, Toy of the Week. Mom went upstairs. No further sound issued from Lily’s room. Eddie Jr. pushed back his chair, strode for the runway, and put his shoulder into Artie’s gut in simulated slow motion, saying “Pigskin” as he spun off-tackle and fly-patterned for the front door.
“In a minute,” said Artie, clamping down on his escaping father’s shoulder. “Just a second, sir. There’s something we’ve got to talk about.”
Dad interrupted him with the same hand wave of voilà he’d used to introduce his radio act. “I think I can anticipate what you are about to say,” he said, pulling back the sleeve of his cotton T-shirt as he spoke. On what would have been the fleshy part of anyone’s armpit whose flesh hadn’t dropped off the limbs and slid into the belly was a round, cherry ring. Too surprised to do anything else, Artie reached forward and touched the spot gingerly.
“Did you know that that old children’s game about pockets of posies and ashes was really a medieval invocation to ward off infection? Seems the rings and the rosies were, in historical fact, buboes.” Artie could only stare at the sore, a gap of many centuries separating him from the man who had raised it. Choosing between the bad taste of going forward and the impossibility of going back, Dad pressed the issue, explaining, “Plague, you see. All fall down.”
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