by Robert Riche
The original diner structure remains, but is used now as a ceremonial entryway and reception area, new skylights giving it the appearance of a greenhouse, filled with hanging baskets of plastic plants which we pass under and through on our way to the business end of the restaurant with its Colonial decor of roughcut barnboard siding (no windows) and little coach lights along the walls, illuminating pots of indeterminate plastic red blossoms. The food here is neither good nor bad, but it is plentiful, and to the local folks who continue to come back regularly it is reassuring to know that Marie in her green and black print silk dress and high heels and cradling a stack of menus, and Teddy in his chocolate brown double-breasted suit and orange shoes are still taking responsibility for providing “good food at an honest price.”
“Hello! My name is Cindy, and I’m your waitress today. Can I get you something to drink?” The local high school girl appears at our table in mobcap and a Colonial print gown that doesn’t quite cover the tips of her blue jogging shoes, sing-songing her announcement, and bringing a pencil up to her order pad.
“That’s a good idea,” my father says. He has had at least three doubles already, so he is feeling pretty jovial. Actually, the two I have had have loosened me up, too, and I am ready for a third. My wife and I both order martinis, which is what we have wanted all along, anyway. The kids have Cokes, and Tillie has a plain ginger ale.
The drinks come, and ignoring Cindy’s recommendations, we all order dinner, my father, the birthday boy, going for the prime rib which will come with bone in, an inch and a half thick and hanging over the edges of the plate. Tillie orders roast Vermont turkey. So does my daughter. My wife will have roast veal, and I will try the lobster tips in sherry wine sauce. My son decides on none of the above, picking, instead, a variety of hors d’oeuvres, including a shrimp cocktail, clams Casino, stuffed mushrooms, and melon and prosciutto, a selection I wish immediately that I had chosen, but which causes ripples of alarm to form on the low brow of Cindy, who will require assistance from Marie on how to bill it. My father doesn’t know quite precisely what is going on, but figures it is okay, because it has to do with Old Pete.
The food comes, in gross proportions, and as expected, is edible, if not exactly exquisitely appealing. But with the effect of the cocktails racing through our bloodstreams, we shovel it in like trenchermen.
It is after we have finished, and Cindy is in process of clearing the table, when suddenly I feel Annie’s hand grip my forearm tightly. I turn to her, but she is not looking at me, as I might have expected, rather, she is turned to Tillie who is sitting on the other side of her. Tillie is smiling, which is customary with her, but the smile has something about it of a rigor-like grimace. And I am immediately aware that her head seems to be wobbling slightly on her neck, almost puppet-like. My wife darts a frightened glance back at me. In another instant, Tillie is making little chuckling noises, and a bit of foam bubbles out at the corners of her mouth. My wife springs up, knocking over her chair, and in another instant I am at Tillie’s side just in time to catch her from falling off her chair. She cannot possibly be drunk. She is having some kind of seizure.
“Call 911!” I blurt out to Peter.
“What?” he says.
“Tell the manager to get an ambulance!”
Tillie is sitting in the chair, her head tilted sideways as though listening to something attentively, with a kind of leer on her face now, and making little noises that don’t quite form into words. She partially raises an arm and gestures vaguely. “Do you want to go to the ladies’ room?” my wife asks.
“What’s the matter?” my father asks, possibly with a note of irritation. We have interrupted something he was telling Old Pete about fly fishing.
“We’re taking Tillie to the ladies’ room,” I say hurriedly.
My wife and I get on either side of Tillie, and holding her under the arms we conduct her to the ladies’ room, where we assist her to lie down on a couch. A woman emerging from one of the stalls is not overly pleased to see me in there.
“She may be having a stroke,” my wife says. She turns to Tillie. “Are you all right, Tillie?”
Tillie moves her head from side to side, then raises it up and down, producing a combined effect of yes and no that tells us nothing.
As other ladies are entering the powder room, I go outside. My daughter is sitting next to my father, and talking to him earnestly as he sits upright with a worried expression and fingers the silverware on the table.
“What’s the matter with her?” my father asks, as I join them.
“I don’t know. Something’s wrong.”
“She’ll be all right,” he says. “She probably ate too fast.”
My son joins us. “They’re sending an ambulance,” he says.
My father frowns. “She’ll be all right.” He turns to my son, “Don’t be upset, Old Pete.”
I get up, and go over to Marie, to follow up on the ambulance.
“They’ll be here any minute,” she says. “Is she all right?”
I have no idea whether she is all right. Actually, I am fearful that she may be dying. I have never seen anybody die, but I would think this might be the way it would be.
Back at the table my father is talking to the children now, about how he is thinking of buying a new Buick. Mercifully, it seems to me, I hear the wail of an ambulance, which comes closer and arrives outside the building, with a screech of tires on gravel, which we can hear even through the wall. People at other tables sense that something has happened, and they are looking over at us, and at the emergency Exit Door which happens to be located right next to our table.
I am up, and push the bar down, and the door opens, and two hospital medics in white and with a stretcher chair are already about to enter.
“This way,” I say, and I lead them to the ladies’ room.
“What’s the trouble?” says one of the medics.
“I don’t know,” I say. A moment later they are conferring with my wife, and bending over Tillie who continues to leer and stare blankly.
The medics hoist Tillie onto the stretcher chair, and quickly roll her out into the main dining room toward the exit door near our table. My wife remains behind, while I join the entourage. As we pass our table, Tillie seems to struggle to raise herself from the stretcher, succeeding only in reaching a limp hand out in the direction of my father, who at the moment is stuffing into his mouth a large buttered popover that somehow has been overlooked.
“Hello, there,” my father says, as though speaking to a vague acquaintance at a neighboring table. Incredibly, he refuses to look at Tillie, continuing to stare straight ahead as the medics wheel her quickly by, and a small groan escapes from her throat.
“Dad! She’s signalling to you!” I hiss at him.
“That’s okay,” he says. “Hi! Okay.” He still doesn’t turn, and Tillie is lifted quickly out the exit door.
They slide her into the back of the ambulance, and are about to slam the doors.
“Can I ride back there with her?” I say.
One of them is already in the driver’s seat. The other shrugs. “Can if you want.”
“I’ll just tell the others.” But Marie, the owner, has already closed the exit door, and it means going around to the front diner entrance.
“You’re wasting valuable time, fella.”
There is a moment of terrible indecision. “All right, I’ll catch up with you at the hospital.”
And the assistant jumps in beside the driver. The lights go on, the hooter commences, and they spin their tires out of the parking area.
I re-enter the building through the front diner greenhouse. At our table the atmosphere is bizarre, with everyone looking bleak and frightened, and my father chatting about the superiority of Buicks over Cadillacs.
“She’s on her way to the hospital,” I break in.
“Oh?” my father says. “Anything wrong?”
I look at my wife, then back to my father. “They’l
l find out at the hospital.”
“Good,” he says. And then adds, “It’s too bad. Kind of spoils things for the kids.”
Marie, still clutching her menus, approaches my wife and me, and bends over, with a smile in my father’s direction, to confer with us privately. It seems they have baked a special birthday cake for my father, and Marie is wondering if they can bring it in now.
“We have a cake, Dad,” I say.
“Good,” he says. “You think of everything.”
Marie smiles, and a moment later, from across the floor of the dining room we have sight of two maidens in Colonial gowns and mobcaps pushing forward a wheeled table with a cake and burning candles, and launching into the first notes of “Happy Birthday to You.”
People at other tables immediately join in the singing, and there is nothing for us to do but add our voices, too. My daughter looks horror-stricken. My son mouths the words with neither more nor less enthusiasm than he might while singing his school’s anthem, and my father, as always in the past, joins in singing his own praises with gusto, and with a great smile suffused across his face.
“Happy Birthday to Geo-o-o-o-rge,” he brays. “Well, well, well,” he says after the applause of the entire dining room has died down. “Isn’t this nice.”
I feel my wife’s hand grip mine tightly under the table.
We eat our cake in silence, though my father throws in a few lines of “Old Pete. How’s the cake, Old Pete?”
Skipping coffee, shortly thereafter we shuffle out of the Coach House, taking the remaining half of the birthday cake with us in Reynolds Wrap.
“The boys and I will finish this off,” my father says.
“Come back again real soon, Mr. Brock!” Marie says to my father.
“We will. Very nice,” he says. “Thank you.”
I retrieve the Pontiac and drive up to the front of the diner. My wife helps my father into the front seat, and the others climb into the back.
“Very nice,” my father says, as we drive off. “Nice birthday.”
We drop him and the kids off at his apartment, the kids taking an arm on each side and leading him into the building, while my wife and I remain in the car to go off to the hospital to check on Tillie. My father declines to come with us, giving as an excuse that his presence there would serve no important purpose, and he would prefer to look in on her in a day or two “when she feels better.” He says this before we know whether or not she is still alive.
It turns out that Tillie is alive. My wife and I are permitted to visit her in a cubicle behind a sheet in the hospital emergency room. She has a tube down her nose, for what reason I have no idea, and she is conscious and smiles wanly and takes hold of my wife’s hand. The intern on duty says she has had a mild stroke, but there seems to be only the slightest paralysis in her right cheek, and that will probably go away, leaving no serious impairment of her speech.
“Tillie’s fine,” my wife says to my father when we get back to his apartment. He nods and smiles and says, “She probably ate too fast.”
I suddenly find myself feeling that if I don’t get away from him I am likely to leap on his chest and start pounding on his head. Quickly, and with as little ceremony as possible, I round up everyone and herd them out the front door, leaving it to their own ingenuity as to how best to call out their good-byes and final happy birthday wishes.
With a curt salute of the horn at my father standing on the front porch waving, we drive off, and immediately I am launched into a tirade against him.
“Unforgivable!” I say. “The unspeakable obtuseness!”
“Well,” my wife puts in at a certain point, “it’s a pretty tough reality for him to have to face on his 78th birthday.”
But I am in no mood for conciliation. For the major part of the trip home I can only rage against him. “He’s always been this way, Annie.” I cannot bring myself to let it alone. Memories of other similar times, it seems, keep roiling up. “Obtuse.”
“He doesn’t realize,” my wife says. “He wants things to be—a certain way. It’s his birthday. Birthdays are supposed to be joyous, with a cake and singing. You’re not supposed to have strokes in the middle of it.”
“Well, too damn bad!” I almost shout it.
“When I told him Peter had a problem at school, he simply blocked it out. It was as if he hadn’t even heard me. He actually said to me, ‘Isn’t that nice.’”
I can only shake my head in dismay.
“He’s a man who believes in a kind of—perfection. It doesn’t matter what the reality is. He doesn’t want to know about it. He removes it from his mind, obliterates it.”
I’m thinking now that when I was a child he was always criticizing me. More quietly, I say, “He always wanted everything to be—to come out—just exactly the way he had it fixed in his mind.”
“It’s not that he’s a bad man.”
I grip the wheel tightly, squinting into the twilight that is fast approaching. “He’s always ending up doing all these unforgivable things.”
We drive along in silence. We are not far from home now, having traveled the distance of 100 miles in record time, it would seem. It is almost dark, with the children in the back asleep, and the headlights picking out the underbrush and trees that grow close up to the edge of the winding country road that leads to our house.
In a little while the driveway to our house appears, and I turn into it and bring the car to an abrupt stop. With the engine off, I hunch over the wheel a moment in the dark. The anger of before, in fact, seems to have actually drained away, leaving in its place a lingering dull ache that weighs now on my chest sorrowfully, rather, like a cold and heavy stone.
Suddenly my daughter is awake, sitting up sharply and looking out. “Are we home?” she asks.
“We’re home,” my wife says. “Wake up your brother.”
CHAPTER XIV
Sunday, my day of rest. A week ago today we drove my son to his school. I have a sense of having done nothing since except stamp out fires.
It’s another sunny fall day, (We are beginning to hurt for a bit of rain), a good day for football and for scraping the house. As I hunch over late morning coffee and toast, my son already is up on the ladder working away. I can hear through the blast of “The Grateful Dead” the dull scraping sound of his putty knife. A telltale electrical cord runs from a kitchen plug through the slightly ajar sliding doors to the foot of his ladder and the stereo box I bought for him last Christmas. I am now obliged to debate with myself whether or not to go out and ask him to lower the volume. After five minutes of vacillating, I decide finally to let Chet Dowd go and do the dirty deed, if it is too much for him. Though, now that I think of it, Chet may very well be flying to Las Vegas or Honolulu today, and Jane most likely is busy vacuuming or something, and doesn’t even hear it.
That settled, I proceed next to tear apart the New York Times for the Book Review section. I love the Book Review section, and spend hours every Sunday lolling lovingly over its contents. After I have gone through The New York Times Book Review I have a feeling of restoration, of becoming whole again, of being up on what is happening in the world, my cherished poetic sensibility nourished by new revelations concerning relationships Freud may or may not have had as a child with a distant cousin, new insights into the etiology of Nazism, the appearance of a highly acclaimed first novel written by an overlooked genius who for the past fifteen years has survived by selling firewood in Alaska. I rarely read any of these books. Not that I wouldn’t like to read them, but there just doesn’t seem to be time, what with dinner, and wine, and TV, and paying bills in my office/den, and also, these books can cost anywhere from $15 to $35, and at the library there is almost always a waiting list of people ahead of me for the one copy of any new volume available.
Anyway, I love the Book Review, and, of course, am always on the alert to see if there is anything new by my old pal Pritchard Bates, though reviews of his books are increasingly hard to find, since f
or the most part they are relegated now to the back fiction round-up pages.
The Book Review is buried in the fold of Part II of the real estate section, and it takes a while to find it. On the front page of the news section much space, of course, is devoted to developments on the hostage situation in Central America. The guerrillas are now demanding an exchange of captives, charging that the government has been torturing rebel prisoners. Several Latin America nations have called for a meeting of the Organization of American States. Our State Department in separate notes to all O.A.S. member nations has let it be known that it will not under any circumstances negotiate with terrorists. A group of Congressmen from the Midwest has organized itself around the issue, and a sizable group of members from both parties is calling for an immediate air strike.
The Book Review is a bit tame by comparison with all of this, and also, I am feeling a little uneasy and maybe even a little guilty reading it while my son performs his solitary slave work on the side of the house. There is no more boring and tedious job on earth than scraping peeling paint, which is the reason why in the first place I assigned the job to him, as penance. So I debate with myself now as to whether or not I should go out and help him. On the one hand, I don’t want to do it, simply because it is Sunday, my day to take it easy; on the other hand, the poor guy probably needs to know that he has not been completely forgotten in his consignment to purgatory. So, I read only half of the Book Review, and finally give it up to straggle outside to the rock concert and to see how things are going.
I bend over, and tune down the stereo box so as to chat with my son, which immediately I realize is a mistake, because he darts a black look at me from his perch on top of the ladder. “Dad! That’s my favorite tune!”