Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  Morris knew the value of money and did not want to waste any. Before he loaned us the ten thousand we needed to get started, he came up to inspect the building we wanted to lease, a condemned mousetrap factory, infested with mice, no less, poor Lew, at seventy-five dollars a month rent, our budget. He loaned us the money--we knew he would--but at ten percent interest, when banks were charging four. But he took the risk when the banks wouldn't touch it, and the money he wanted for his old age was also there for the rest of us too when we needed it. Shylocks asked less, we joked with him, but the old boy never stopped worrying about the money for his old age. Even after he got out of bed after his stroke, he would have someone drive him to the junkshop to do as much work as he could.

  Lew was the sixth child, the second son of eight kids, but he was already making the decisions when I met him. After the war Morris expected Lew to keep working there and maybe someday take over to look after the place and everyone in the family. I, like a fool, thought I wanted him to stay in the army, but it was absolutely no go. He had a few thousand saved from his sergeant's salary, most of it banked--they paid him for all the time he was a prisoner of war--and the money he sent home from gambling. His father offered him a raise to keep him there--from his prewar thirty dollars a week or so to sixty-five a week. Lew's laugh was as kind as could be.

  "Listen, Morris, listen good, because I will do better for you. I will give you a year, free, but then I will decide my salary. I will decide where, when, and how I will work."

  "Accepted!" said Morris, with the soft grind of his dental plates. Everyone old had false teeth then.

  Of course, Lew always had extra cash in his pockets for bargaining with janitors and with dealers of scrap. Sometimes you could remove a steam boiler from an apartment building intact. Repair it somehow and then sell it to a different landlord as something used in good condition. The shortages made many such opportunities, along with kitchen sinks, pipes, radiators, toilet bowls, everything that goes into a house. Junkers did not think as far ahead as we did. Janitors--Lew always called them mister and spoke of them as managers or superintendents when he called on them to work something out--always liked the idea of making a little extra on the side. There was so much of that stuff around, and that's what gave us the idea of starting a business selling used building supplies in some place outside the city where there wasn't enough. I think the idea first came from me. It was a time to take chances. What we needed most was a sense of humor and a strong sense of self, and by then we both had plenty of that.

  I have to laugh a lot again when I look back. We both knew so little, and with many things I knew more than he did. I knew what stemware was and Lew had never heard of it. But after I mentioned I wanted stemware, he made sure I had it for our first apartment. It came from a guy named Rocky, an Italian peddler of sorts he had made friends with somewhere, an "anything you need?" kind of entrepreneur. He was always dressed to kill, even when he dropped by the junkshop, a fashion plate with brilliantined hair. Our first car too came from Rocky, a used one. Rocky: "What do you need?" Lew: "A car." Rocky: "What make?" Lew: "A Chevy. Blue. Aqua, she wants." Rocky: "When?" Lew: "March of this year." In March it was there. That was 1947, and the car was a '45. Also the stemware, which Rocky had never heard of either, and I still have the image of the shy glance he gave me and the scratch of a head, with his fingers pushing back his generous mop of wavy hair. But no other sign that he did not know the product. Who did back then? But delivered the next week in partitioned paper leaf--each piece wrapped in a brownish tissue paper--came the two boxes, marked Woolworth's. No charge. A wedding gift from Rocky. Wow! I still have some pieces, I've kept them. And now it's almost fifty years later and Wow! once more, because Rocky pops back out of nowhere and turns out to be the partner on that piece of land in California who Lew said I could trust. They'd been in touch all those years, and Lew never said boo.

  "Why didn't you ever tell me?" I had to ask.

  "He's been in jail," said Lew.

  Do people still make friendships that strong? Lew was hungry, always hungry, and filled with ambition, and always something of a foreigner in the world he saw around him that he wanted to be a part of, never stopped wanting to be in and own. He could have gone to college too, and he could have done as well as anyone else, because he learned fast, but he didn't want to take the time. His mother liked me too--they all did--because I was the only one who wrapped her presents in gift wrap and ribbons. I would sit and spend time with her, even though we could not talk much to each other. I didn't understand much Yiddish and that's about all she spoke, and soon she had what the doctors called hardening of the arteries of the head and was probably Alzheimer's disease, and she hardly ever made sense to anyone. Today it seems we'll all get Alzheimer's disease if we don't die of cancer first. There was Glenda, there was Lew.

  "My father too," said Sam. "And don't forget about strokes."

  "I don't forget. My mother had one."

  "So did mine, finally," said Sam.

  I would sit with Lew's mother anyway. My trick was to always answer yes. Every once in a while a no was required, and I could tell by shakes of the head and a kind of muttering that I had said the wrong thing, and when that didn't work and there was still no understanding, I smiled and said, "Maybe."

  Lew learned fast enough, and when he struck out with the big oil company with his metered heating oil plan, he saw there were people he could not make headway with and places he would not be able to go, and we were smart enough to stick inside our limits. He never even tried joining the Gentile golf club, even when we had enough friends there to probably get in. He got a bigger kick out of inviting them as guests to ours. We both learned fast, and when we had money for two cars, we had two cars. And when the foreign cars came into fashion and were better than ours, we had two of those too.

  No synthetic fibers for Lew, no imitations, ever. Cotton shirts made to order, as long as the cotton did not come from Egypt. Egypt was another pulse tingler for him after the wars with Israel. Custom-tailored suits from a shop named Sills even before anyone knew that John Kennedy was having his suits made there too. And most important: manicures, manicures! He never tired of manicures. I'm sure that came from the dirt from the junkshop, and then in the prison camp. We passed the time that way at the end, when he couldn't even watch television anymore. I gave him pedicures too, and he'd just lie back and grin. We used to do that a lot after we were married; it was something between us. I told the nurses at the hospital to work on his fingernails when they wanted to keep him happy, and they did, the staff nurses too.

  "He died laughing, you know," I said to Sam.

  "He did?"

  "It's true. At least, that's what they told me." I'd said it on purpose that way, and Sammy popped with surprise. "He died laughing at you."

  "What for?"

  "Your letter," I said, and I laughed a little. "I'm glad you sent us that long letter about your trip."

  "You asked me to."

  I'm glad I did. I read it to him in parts when it came to the house and we both laughed about it a lot. Then he'd read it again himself. He took it along into the hospital when he knew he was going in for the last time, and he would read it aloud to the nurses. At night he might have the night nurse read it aloud back to him. The nurses adored him up there, I swear they did, not like those cranky, snobby ones here in New York. He was always asking them about themselves and telling them how good they looked, the married ones with children and the old ones too. He knew how to jolly them along and to say the right things when they had problems. "Mary, tell your husband he'd better watch out, because as soon as I get just a little bit better, you're going to have to start meeting me after work and on your days off too, and he'd better start learning to make dinner for himself. And breakfast too, because some mornings when he wakes up you won't be there." "Agnes, here's what we'll do. Tomorrow, I'll check out. You'll pick me up in your Honda at five, we'll go out for drinks and dinner at the Motel on th
e Mountain. Bring enough along with you in case you want to stay out all night." "Agnes, don't laugh," I'd say too, because I'd be sitting right there. "He means it. I've seen him work before, and he always gets his way. That's how come I'm with him." It was really a nice, full trip Sam laid out for us in his letter.

  "New Zealand, Australia, Singapore ..." I praised him. "And with Hawaii, Fiji, Bali, and Tahiti thrown in? Did you really mean all that?"

  "Most of it. Not Fiji, Bali, or Tahiti. That was put in for you two."

  "Well, it worked. He got a big kick out of imagining you in those places. 'Poor Sammy,' is what he said to the night nurse, while she was reading it back to him again on that last night. He died at night, you know, and they phoned me in the morning, and those were just about his last words, Sam. 'Just when he needs me most, I have to be laid up in the hospital. Here the poor guy is going off without us on a trip around the world, and he still hasn't learned how to pick up a girl.'"

  BOOK

  ELEVEN

  32

  Wedding

  The four thousand pounds of best-grade caviar were divided by automated machines into portions of one eighth of an ounce for the five hundred and twelve thousand canapes that, with flutes of imported champagne, were on hand for distribution by the twelve hundred waiters to the thirty-five hundred very close friends of Regina and Milo Minderbinder and Olivia and Christopher Maxon, as well as to a handful of acquaintances of the bride and the groom. The excess was premeditated for the attention of the media. Some of the surplus was reserved for the staff. The remainder was transported that same night by refrigerated trucks to the outlying shelters in the suburbs and New Jersey into which the homeless and other denizens of the bus terminal had been rounded up and concentrated temporarily for that day and night. The bedraggled beggars and prostitutes and drug dealers thus dislodged were replaced by trained performers representing them whose impersonations were judged more authentic and tolerable than the originals they were supplanting.

  The caviar arrived at the workshops of the Commercial Catering division of Milo Minderbinder Enterprises & Associates in eighty designer-colored canisters of fifty pounds each. These were photographed for publication in vibrant high-style periodicals devoted to good taste and to majestic social occasions of the scope of the Minderbinder-Maxon wedding.

  Sharpshooters in black tie from the Commercial Killings division of M&M were positioned discreetly behind draperies in the galleries and arcades on the various balconies of the bus terminal, watching most specially for illegal actions by the sharpshooters from the city police department and from the several federal agencies charged with the safety of the President and First Lady and other government officials.

  Accompanying the caviar and champagne were tea sandwiches, chilled shrimp, clams, oysters, crudites with a mild curry dip, and foie gras.

  There must be no vulgarity, Olivia Maxon had insisted from the beginning.

  In this, her anxiety was allayed by the self-assured young man at the console of the computer model of the wedding to come, now taking place as having already occurred, on the monitors in the Communications Control Center of the PABT building, in which the equipment for the computer model had been installed for display and previewing. He flashed ahead to another of the sixty video screens there.

  On that one, after the event that had not yet occurred was over, the socialite master of a media conglomerate was answering questions that had not yet been asked.

  "There was nothing vulgar about it," he was asserting, before he even had attended. "I was at the wedding. I thought it was fantastic."

  Olivia Maxon, her fears for the moment assuaged by this reassuring demonstration of what was projected as inevitable to occur, squeezed Yossarian's arm in a gesture of restored confidence and began fishing for another cigarette while extinguishing the butt of the one she'd been smoking. Olivia Maxon, a smallish, dark woman, wrinkled, smiling, and fashionably emaciated, had been anything but joyous at the unforeseen withdrawal from active cooperation by Frances Beach because of the serious stroke suffered by her husband, and by the need to rely more extensively than she wanted to on John Yossarian, with whom she had never felt altogether secure. Frances stayed much at home with Patrick, forbidding casual visitors.

  The equipment in the command bubble in the South Wing of the terminal, between the main and second floors, was the property of the Gaffney Real Estate Agency, and the breezy young computer expert elucidating now for only Yossarian, Gaffney, and Olivia Maxon was an employee of Gaffney's. He had introduced himself as Warren Hacker. Gaffney's burgundy tie was in a Windsor knot. The shoulders of his worsted jacket today were tailored square.

  Christopher Maxon was absent, having been told by his wife he could be no use there. Milo, bored by this replay of the event taking place in the future, had wandered outside to the surrounding balcony. Anything but at ease so near transvestites at the railing above looking with shining iniquity on the figures below, of which he understood he was one, he had coasted down the escalator to the main level below, to wait and go with Yossarian on the tour of the terminal that now was authorized for all of them and which some in his family thought he should make. With the income from his plane now assured, he had skyscrapers in mind. He liked his M & M Building and wanted more. He was perplexed as well by a nagging enigma: upstairs on a screen, he'd been disoriented to observe himself at the wedding in white tie and tails delivering a short speech he had not yet seen, and then dancing with that dark-haired woman Olivia Maxon, whom he'd only just met, when he still did not know how to dance. He was not sure where he was in time.

  Before drifting down, he had taken Yossarian outside for a word in private. "What is the fucking problem," he had wondered absently, "with the fucking caviar?"

  "It's not the money," Yossarian informed him. "It's the fucking fish. But now they think they've caught enough."

  "Thank God," said Olivia, hearing that news again.

  In the social archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art were precedents with guidelines and milestones to be emulated and exceeded. The Minderbinder-Maxon affair would surpass them all. Even in a recession, the country was awash in money. Even amid poverty, there was room for much waste.

  Although it was spring, the florist in charge had installed eighty Christmas trees in the five banquet halls and had surrounded them with thousands of pots of white narcissus. There were two sections with dance floors and bandstands on the main and second floors of the South Wing, and one on the main floor of the North Wing. From midafternoon on, spotlights illuminated the entrances on Eighth Avenue and Ninth Avenue and the lesser, more secluded doorways along the side streets. The effect inside through the smoked plate-glass windows of the major outside wall for two whole city blocks was of lots of sunlight on stained glass. Rolling buses seen through the panes were acclaimed as a clever approximation of the real world. Lauded equivalently as an impression of reality was the occasional wafting scent of diesel fumes filtering in through the natural clouds of perfumes from the women and emitted by fragrances infused into the central ventilating system. All of the subcaterers, florists, and other workers contracting with M & M Commercial Catering, Inc. were required to sign confidentiality agreements with the Commercial Killings division of M & M E & A, and the secrecy of these confidentiality agreements was publicized widely.

  The bottom floor of the North Wing, which was separated from the South Wing by a city street that the bride with her procession would have to cross, was converted into a chapel and select banquet area. Effecting this renovation had required the removal of massive staircases leading to the floor below, together with an information booth and the enormous activated sculpture of moving colored balls that normally occupied much of the floor space. The staircases, information booth, and work of sculpture were put on exhibition under a temporary canopy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the place where the Great Hall of the museum normally stood, and these attracted respectable attendance and decent reviews from ar
t critics. The Great Hall of the museum had itself been transferred into the bus terminal, on loan for the occasion for a consideration of ten million dollars. Uprooting the staircases and sculpture from the North Wing made room for pews and rows of walnut benches, and, of more moment, for the installation there in the bus terminal of the Temple of Dendur from the same Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, through the peaceful application of much persuasive pressure and a fee of another ten million dollars, was also lent out temporarily by the museum for the evening. It was in the North Wing of PABT that those now watching in the Communications Control Center would soon observe the wedding ceremony enacted. There was space left as well in that area for a small head table for the principal participants in the ceremony and their two guests from the White House, and for six round tables, each with seats for ten people who were most closely connected with the proceedings and with those eminences at the oblong table in front of the columns of the Temple. The altar inside the Temple of Dendur was banked with flowers and blowing candelabra.

  One million, one hundred and twenty-two thousand champagne tulips had been procured as door prizes and souvenirs. A massive variety of fabulous hanging chandeliers from different epochs was installed throughout all five banquet sections, and these were wrapped in curly willow branches. Wisps of raffia were added to the willow branches, and there were tiny twinkling lights in all of the leaves and in the boughs of all eighty Christmas trees. Ravishing tapestries for tablecloths, masses of staggered candles, antique cages full of live birds, and rare books and silver plate from different periods were in abundance everywhere. Thickets of summer asters in the twenty-two hundred Malaysian pots flanking all of the entrances into the principal terminal halls helped turn half the South Wing of the main floor of PABT into a miniature Versailles, with thousands of flickering lights in the terra-cotta pots simulating millions of candles. In one hundred and four vitrines along the sides of all banquet areas were living actors in poses and activities re-creating the hustlers, whores, drug dealers, child runaways, panhandlers, drug addicts, and other derelicts who regularly inhabited the terminal. Shops still surviving profitably in the terminal were paid to remain open all night, enhancing the novelty of the surroundings and setting, and many of the guests enjoyed spending time in the intervals buying things. Sixty-one sets of attractive female identical twins, all that could be found in the world for that work, posed as mermaids in the fifty or so artificial pools and fountains created, and thirty-eight pairs of male identical twins performed as heralds and banner wavers and offered humorous responses to questions.