Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  The site on which his house had stood remained a vacant space, a parking lot for visitors in high season who now had automobiles. Where his spangled wonderland had flourished famously now functioned objects of lesser reputation. Nowhere he looked was there any new thing under the sun he envied. His gilded age had passed. He saw decline and corrosion at the end of an era. If Paris was France, as he'd been wont to repeat, Coney Island in summer certainly was no longer the world, and he congratulated himself on having gotten out in time.

  He could play with the color of things in the windows of General Groves's railroad car, could see the sun go black and the moon turn to blood. The modern skylines of large metropolises did not appeal to his sense of the appropriate and proportionate. He beheld soaring buildings and gigantic commercial enterprises that were not owned by anybody, and this impressed him with a negative dismay. People bought shares of stock which they might not ever see, and these shares had not one thing to do with ownership or control. He himself, as a matter of scale and responsible moral behavior, had always put effort and capital into only such projects as would in entirety be his, and to own only such things as he could see and watch and wish personally to make use of with a satisfaction and pleasure enjoyed by others.

  He was better off now than poor Mr. Rockefeller and autocratic Mr. Morgan, who had put their wealth in bequests and their faith in a sympathetic Supreme Being overseeing a mannerly universe, and now lived to regret it.

  Mr. Tilyou could have told them, he did indeed keep telling them.

  Mr. Tilyou always kept at hand a shiny new dime to give to Mr. Rockefeller, who, though there were no days, came begging almost daily in his repentant struggle to collect back all those shiny new dimes he had handed away in a misguided effort to buy public affection, which he now understood he never had needed.

  Mr. Morgan, gimlet-eyed and eternally furious, was firmly convinced that a mistake had been made of which he was the diabolical and undeserving victim. Like clockwork, although there were no working clocks, he demanded to be told if the mandates correcting his situation had come down from on high yet. He was not used to being treated that way, he crossly reminded with sullen astonishment and obstinate stupidity when told they had not. He had no doubt he belonged in heaven. He had gone to the Devil and to Satan too.

  "Could God possibly make a mistake?" Mr. Tilyou was finally compelled to point out.

  Although there were no weeks, almost a full one passed before Mr. Morgan could answer.

  "If God can do anything, he can make a mistake."

  Mr. Morgan seethed openly too over his unlit cigar, for Mr. Tilyou would no longer permit anyone to smoke. Mr. Morgan owned a deck of playing cards that he would not share, and although there were no hours, he spent a great many of them alone playing solitaire on one of the gondolas on the sparkling El Dorado carousel created originally for Emperor William II of Germany. One of the more flamboyant chariots on that wheel of fortune that never went anywhere was still embellished pompously with the imperial crest. With the emperor aboard, the carousel always played Wagner.

  Mr. Tilyou had warmer sentiments for two airmen from the Second World War, one of them Kid Sampson by name, the other McWatt--sailors and soldiers on leave had always been prevalent in Coney Island and welcome at Steeplechase. Mr. Tilyou always was gladdened by any new arrival from the old Coney Island, like the big newcomer Lewis Rabinowitz, who learned his way around in record time and recognized the George C. Tilyou name.

  Mr. Tilyou enjoyed the company of good-natured souls like these, and he joined them frequently on their speedy plunges on the Tornado and the Dragon's Gorge. For relaxation, and in persistent inspection, he cruised back often into his Tunnel of Love, flowing into darkness beneath the lurid billboard images of the Lindbergh kidnapper in the electric chair and Marilyn Monroe dead on her bed, into his wax museum on the Isle of the Dead, to find his future by floating into the past. He had no visceral aversions, none at all, about taking his place alongside Abraham Lincoln and the Angel of Death, where he was likely to find himself in front of a New York City mayor named Fiorello H. La Guardia and the earlier president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mortals from the past who lay ahead in his future. They had come along after his time, as had the Lindbergh kidnapper and Marilyn Monroe. Mr. Tilyou could not yet bring himself to say that the man now in the White House was another little prick, but that was only because neither he nor the Devil used bad language.

  Mr. Tilyou had room to grow. Below him was a lake of ice and a desert of burning sand, some meadows of mud, a river of boiling blood, and another of boiling pitch. There were dark woods he could have if he could think what to do with them, with trees with black leaves, and some leopards, a lion, a dog with three heads, and a she-wolf, but these were never to be caged, which ruled out a zoo. But his imagination was not as supple as formerly; he had fears he might be getting old. He had triumphed with symbols, was used to illusions. His Steeplechase ride was not really a steeplechase, his park was not a park. His gifts were in collaborative pretense. His product was pleasure. His Tornado was not a tornado, his Dragon's Gorge was not a gorge. No one thought they were, and he could not imagine what he would have done with a true tornado or a genuine gorge and a real dragon. He was not positive he could hit upon sources of hilarity in a desert with burning sand, a rain of fire, or a river of boiling blood.

  The recapture of his house filled him still with pride in his patient tenacity. It had taken thirty years, but where there is no time, one always has plenty.

  The house was of yellow wood, with three floors and gabled attic. No one seemed to comment when, shortly after his death, the lowest floor had disappeared and the house of three stories had become a house with two. Neighborhood pedestrians did sometimes remark that the letters on the front of the lowest step appeared to be sinking, as indeed they were. By the time of the war, the name was almost half gone. During the war, young men went into military service, families moved, and Mr. Tilyou spied again his chance to act. Soon after the war, no one found curious the empty space, soon a parking lot, that was where the house had been. When shortly afterward his Steeplechase amusement park disappeared too, and then the Tilyou movie theater closed, his name was gone from the island and out of mind.

  Now, in possession of everything he wanted and safe at home, he was the envy of his Morgans and Rockefellers. His engaging magic mirrors never had any deforming effect upon him or his ticket takers.

  Returning to his office after work near the end of a day, although there were no days and he had no work, he found Mr. Rockefeller. He gave him another dime and chased him off. It was hard to associate the poor figure even remotely with that complex of business buildings in Rockefeller Center and with that oval pearl of an ice-skating rink. He saw from an imperious note on his rolltop desk that Mr. Morgan would be back to have it out with him once more over Mr. Tilyou's new no-smoking policy. Rather than face him again so soon, Mr. Tilyou took back his dust-free bowler from the peg on his coatrack. He fluffed up the petals of the flower in his lapel, which was always fresh and always would be. With energetic gait, he hurried from the office to his home, humming quietly the delightful Siegfried Funeral Music that resonated from his carousel.

  Bounding up his stoop of three steps, he stumbled very slightly on the top one, and this had not happened to him before. On the shelf above the pair of sinks at his kitchen window, he spied something strange. The Waterford crystal vase with the white lilies looked perfectly normal, but, mysteriously, the water inside seemed to lie on an angle. In a minute he found a carpenter's level and set it down on the sill of the window. He shivered with a chilling surprise. The house was out of plumb. He strode back outside with wonder, his brow furrowing. At the stoop with the vertical face bearing his name, he had no need for the carpenter's level to tell him the steps were awry, as was his walkway. The right side was dipping. The baseline of the letters spelling TILYOU was tilting downward and the oval bottoms of the letters at the end were already out
of sight. He went rigid with alarm. Without his knowledge or intent, his house was beginning to sink again. He had no idea why.

  BOOK

  TEN

  30

  SAMMY

  For reasons she did not know, her father had not seemed to like her as a child or exhibit anything closer to acceptance when she was older and married. He was friendlier to her sister and brother, but not by much.

  She was the oldest of three children. Her mother was more of a comfort but could effect no alleviating refinements in the household atmosphere dominated by the restrained and aloof male parent. They were Lutherans in Wisconsin, not far from the state capital in Madison, where, in winter, the days are short, the nights black and long, and the biting winds frigid. "It was just the way he always was," explained her mother, defending him. "We knew each other from church and school." They were the same age and both were virgins when they married. "Our families picked us out for each other. That's the way we did things then. I don't think he has ever been really happy."

  He ran a small retail agricultural supply business he had inherited and enlarged, and he bantered more freely with his employees and suppliers, who were fond of him, than he was likely to do at home. He was commonly more at ease with others. It was nothing against her personally, her mother kept insisting, for as a child she had always been good. But at her father's death, from lung cancer too, they found out he had made no provision for her in his will, although he bequeathed to her three children portions that in total equaled that left her brother and her sister, and he awarded her discretionary power as trustee. She was not altogether surprised.

  "What else would I expect?" Glenda said, when she spoke of it. "Don't think it still doesn't hurt."

  As a youth, the Lutheran father, who had no taste for music and no feel for dancing or any other kind of the festive foolery the mother savored--she made masks for Halloween and loved costume parties--had revealed a native talent for drawing and an excited curiosity in the structures of buildings and elaborate architecture. But these latent aptitudes were ignored in the severe circumstances of a rural environment regulated by a father sterner than he turned out to be, with parents leading lives of restriction more spare than his own. No thought was given to college or art studies, and the suppression of these propensities could have been crucial in the forging of his dour personality and the inexpressible anguish in which his character was rooted. Only later could she define him that way and pity him sporadically. A frugal man of cautious extravagances, he nevertheless made known early his aspiration to provide a higher education for each of the children and the sentiment that he would be pleased if they availed themselves of the opportunity. Glenda alone made use of this singular generosity; and he did not ever let abate his disappointment with the others, as though rebuffed and mortified intentionally. He was pleased with her performance in her primary schools but gave voice to his praise critically, in a vein of reproach that provided little ground for rejoicing. If she brought home a test paper of ninety in algebra or geometry, perhaps the sole person with a grade so high, he wished to know, after a reluctant compliment, why she had missed the one problem in ten she had failed to solve. An A--would evoke questions about the minus, an A would impel him to sulk about the absence of the plus. There was no drollery in his seriousness; there was a wry kind in her retelling.

  It is a miracle of sorts that she grew up to be lighthearted, with little self-doubt, and was competent and decisive, which was much what I needed.

  In her secondary school, with some support from her mother and much encouragement from her younger sister, she succeeded in winning a place on the cheerleading squad. However, still somewhat shy and not then by nature gregarious, she was never inducted wholeheartedly into the buoyant social life the other girls enjoyed among themselves and with the school athletes and their gross acolytes. There were many parties and social rallies she did not attend. She was shorter by an inch or two than most her age, with dimples, brown eyes, and honey-colored hair; thin when young but with a noticeable bosom. She did not date much, mainly because she was not always comfortable when she did, and in this too lay the occasion for mixed signals from her father. He was vexed when she went out unchaperoned, as though she were guilty of indecency merely by going; and on the other hand, he spoke in self-referential humiliation, as though himself shunned, when she was home evenings on weekends. He prophesied in dire admonition of the lifelong, bleak pitfalls inherent in becoming a "wallflower" early, as he was inclined to feel he himself had been, and of the misuse he had made of his chances when young. Wallflower was a word he spoke often. Personality was another; it was his grim conclusion that a person always ought to have more. Neither she, her brother, nor her sister could recall ever being held by him in a hug.

  She was not sexually active. One time in the front seat of the automobile of an older football player she allowed her panties to be slid down before she could realize what was happening and was stricken with terror. She pulled his penis; she would not kiss it. That was her first sight of semen, about which she had heard girls in school titter and talk with grave understanding, she remembered uneasily, when I asked. I would assume a blase objectivity in these explorations into her past, but my dilemma was ambivalently both prurient and painful. After the football player, she dated more warily and schemed to avoid being taken off somewhere alone by any boy older who was self-assured and experienced. Until she met Richard in college. She enjoyed petting and of course was aroused, but detested being forced and mauled, and throughout almost all the rest of her teens, as far as I could find out, rather strong erotic surges and powerful romantic yearnings were unfulfilled and, with clean, religious rectitude, repressed.

  In her first year at college, it was her very good fortune to fall in as friends with two Jewish girls from New York and one beautiful blonde music major from Topanga Canyon in California. She was astonished and enthralled by what she took to be their savoir faire, their knowledge and experience, their loud voices and brash self-assurance, by their unconstrained humor and bold and unabashed disclosures. They took pleasure in coaching her. She could never adapt without diffidence to their heedless sexual vocabulary, which seemed the university norm. But she was their equal in wit and intelligence, and in the integrity and fealty of friendship too. By her second year the four were living in rather carefree circumstances in a large house they united to rent. They remained in touch thereafter, and all three came to see her in that final month. All had more money from home than she did but shared it bountifully.

  Richard was the first man she slept with and both were gratified, because he competently and proudly did the needed work well. He was two years older, already a senior, and by then had been to bed at least one time with all three of the others, but no one back then thought anything about that. They saw each other some more in Chicago, where she went to work summers, because he was already employed there and could introduce her to other people in an interconnecting cluster of social circles. He was in the regional office of a large Hartford insurance firm, where he was doing very well and quickly establishing himself as an outstanding personality and go-getter. Both liked to drink evenings after work, and often lunchtimes too, and they usually had good times together. She knew he had other girlfriends there but found she did not mind. She dated others too, as she had been doing in college, and more than once went out with men from the office she knew were married.

  Soon after graduating, she moved to New York, where he had joined another company in a significant promotion, and found herself in her own small apartment with an exciting job as a researcher with Time magazine. And soon after that, they decided to try marriage.

  She was ready to change and he would not. He remained charming to her mother, much more than he had reason to be, and produced chuckles from her father, and she began to find his habitual outgoing friendliness irritating and unworthy. He traveled a lot and was out late often even when back home, and when the third child, Ruth, was born with
conjunctivitis that stemmed from an infection of trichomonads, she knew enough about medicine and the techniques of medical research to verify it was a venereal disease and enough about him to know where the affliction had come from. With no word to him, she went one day to her gynecologist and had her tubes tied, and only afterward did she tell him she wanted no more babies from him. Largely because the infant was new, it took another two years for them to part. She was too principled then to take alimony, and this soon proved an awful misjudgment, for he was incorrigibly tardy with the child support agreed to, and deficient in amount, and soon was in arrears entirely when involved with new girlfriends.

  They could not talk long without quarreling. After I was on the scene, it grew easier for both to allow me to speak to each on behalf of the other. Her mother came east to help in the large, rent-controlled apartment on West End Avenue with the many large rooms, and she was able to go back to work with good income in the advertising-merchandising department of Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine, and that was where I met her. She sat facing a low partition, and I would lean on it and gossip when neither of us had anything important to get done. She was smarter than the man she worked for and more responsible and particular, but that never made a difference for a woman back then at that company--no female could be an editor or a writer in any of the publications or the head of any department. Without me she would not have been able to manage expenses and possibly would have had to retreat from the city with her mother and three children. Naomi and Ruth would not have had time or money to go through college. There would have been no funds for the private schools in Manhattan or, later, despite the excellent Time Incorporated medical plan, the expensive personal psychotherapy for Michael, which in the end did no good.