About Harry Towns

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  Now maybe events like that were a dime a dozen in Taos, New Mexico. He doubted it. On the other hand, he had never been there so he couldn't say.

  If there were small daily shockers in his life, the broad lines of Harry Towns's life had been clean and predictable. He had a good strong body and a feeling that it was not going to let him down. Thus far, knock wood, it hadn't. He had always sensed that he would have a son and they would have baseball catches in a back yard somewhere. He had the son and they had plenty of catches. About ten years' worth. After a shaky start, he realized he had the knack of making money, not the kind that got you seaside palaces, but enough to keep everyone comfortable. Which he did. Early on in his marriage, he saw a separation coining; he wasn't sure when, but it was coming all right, and it came. He had read somewhere that when it came to the major decisions in life, all you had to do was listen to the deep currents that ran inside yourself, and they would tell you which way to go. He listened to his and they told him to get going. His wife must have been tuned in to some currents of her own. So they split up and there wasn't much commotion to it. He gave them both a slightly above-average grade on the way they had handled it. After all, take a look at the reason they had gotten married. It dated back to a time when, if you slept with a girl, it meant you had somehow “damaged” her and were obligated to snap her up for a lifetime. He had never told that to anyone, including his wife, but under oath, he would have to identify that as the reason he had gone down the aisle with her. (And it was some sleeping. Exactly twice, in a Plymouth, or at least half in and half out of one, with a door open. During the second session, her father had run outside in a bathrobe and caught them at it. His way of handling his daughter's getting laid was to put his hands on his hips, stick out his jaw and say, “I see that position is everything in life.”) Towns had to be fair. There was at least one other reason he had gotten married. She was pretty. She'd had a screen test. The first time he spotted her, it almost tore his head off. He wasn't sure what he was, and at the time he'd felt it was a little on the miraculous side that he'd been able to get such an attractive girl interested in him. So he felt he had better marry her, because there was no telling what was coming. It might be his last shot at a pretty girl. That had all been a long time ago. He liked cocaine now—let's face it, he had a modest habit going. On occasion, he had slept with two girls at a time and he had gotten to the point where he didn't think it was anything to raise the flag about. The first time, it was really something, but after that, it was just a matter of having an extra girl in there with you. Even if you had twelve to work with, all you could really concentrate on was one.

  In any case, there had been some significant detours along the way, but you couldn't say, overall, that there had been any wild outrageous swerves to his life. Only when it came to his father did he get handed a script that was entirely different from the one he had had in mind.

  For forty years, Towns's mother and father had lived in a once-pleasant section of the city that, to use the polite phrase, had “gone down.” To get impolite about it, it meant that the Spanish and black people had moved in and the aging Jews, their sons and daughters long gone, had slipped off to “safer” sections of the city. Whether any of this was good or bad, and no matter how you sliced it, it was now a place where old people got hit over the head after dark. Young people did, too, but especially old people. Harry Towns's father had plenty of bounce to his walk and had been taking the subway to work for sixty years. Towns was fond of saying that his father was “seventy-five, going on fifty”; yet technically speaking, his parents were in the old department and he didn't want to get a call one day saying they had been hit over the head. Clearly, he wanted to get them out of there. It was just that he was a little slow in getting around to doing something about it. He sent them on a couple of minor-league vacations to Puerto Rico. He took them to at least one terrific restaurant a week and he phoned them all the time, partly to make sure they hadn't gotten killed. The one thing he didn't do was rent an apartment for them, get it furnished, lay out a year's rent or so, take them down to it, and say, “Here. Now you have to move in. And the only possible reason to go back to the old place is to get your clothes. And you don't even have to do that.” He was in some heavy tax trouble and he was not exactly setting the world on fire in the money department, but he could have pulled it off. How about the cocaine he bought? A year's worth of it—right there—could have handled six months' rent for a terrific one-bedroom apartment on lower Park Avenue. Which is what his father, in particular, had his eye on. From that location, he would be able to take one of his bouncy walks right over to work and bid a fond farewell to the subway. But Towns didn't do any of this for his folks and it was a failure he was going to have to carry on his back for a long time.

  One day, Towns's mother received a death sentence and it all became academic. She wasn't budging and forget about a tour of the Continent before she went under. Maybe Towns would take one when he got his verdict; she just wanted to sit in a chair in her own apartment and be left alone. It was going to be one of those slow wasting jobs. She would handle it all by herself and give the signal when it was time to go to the hospital and get it over with. As she got weaker—and with this disease, ironically, you became physically bigger—Towns's father got more snap to him. It wasn't one of those arrangements in which you could say, metaphorically, that her strength was flowing into him. Or that he was stealing it from her. It's just that he had never handled things better. He had probably never handled things at all. It got into areas like holding her hand a lot even in the very late stages when she had turned into some kind of sea monster and the hands had become great dried-out claws. (He had seen something like what she resembled at California's Marineland, an ancient seal that could hardly move. It wasn't even much of an attraction for people; it just sat there, scaled and ancient, and about all you could say about it was that it was alive.) When they took her false teeth out so she wouldn't be able to swallow them, it gave her mouth a broken-fencepost look, with a tooth here and a tooth there, but Towns's father kissed her snaggled lips as though she were a fresh young girl on her way to a dance. He just didn't see any monster lying there. Harry Towns did, but his father didn't. When he was a boy, Towns remembered his father wearing pullovers all the time. He had been a little chilly all his life. The hospital released Towns's mother for a short time. The radiation made her yearn for cold air, so Towns's dad laid there next to her all night with great blasts of bedroom air-conditioning showering out on the two of them. He offered her the soothing cold while his own bones froze. Towns didn't know it at the time, but he was going to remember all of this as being quite beautiful. Real romance, not your movie bullshit. And it hadn't been that kind of marriage. For forty-five years, they had cut each other to ribbons; they had done everything but fight a duel with pistols. Yet he led her gently into death, courtly, loving, never letting go of her hand, in some kind of old-fashioned way that Towns didn't recognize as going on anymore. Maybe it had gone on in the Gay Nineties or some early time like that.

  And Towns's father kept getting bouncier. That was the only flaw in the setup. He probably should have been getting wan and gray, but he got all this extra bounce instead. He couldn't help it. That's just the way he got. The only time he ever left Towns's mother was to go down to work. He would bounce off in the morning looking nattier than ever. He was the only fellow in the world Towns thought of as being natty. Maybe George Raft was another one. Towns remembered a time his father had been on an air-raid-warden softball team and gone after a fly ball in center field. He slipped, fell on his back, got to his feet with his ass all covered with mud—but damned if he didn't look as natty as ever. In fact, there was only one unnatty thing Towns could remember his father ever doing. It was when he took his son to swimming pools and they both got undressed in public locker rooms and his father tucked his undershirt between his legs so Towns couldn't see his cock. The maneuver was probably designed to damp down the sex
iness of the moment, but actually it worked the other way, the tucked-in undershirt looking weirdly feminine on a hairy-chested guy and probably turning Towns on a little. His father definitely did not look natty during those moments.

  It was a shame the old man (an expression that never quite fit) had to leave Towns's sick mother to go down to work. There was a Spanish record shop across the street that played Latin rhythm tunes full blast all day long and into the night. There was no way to get it across to the owners that a woman was dying of cancer about fifty feet away and two stories up and could they please keep the volume down a little. In their view, they were probably livening up the neighborhood a bit, giving it a badly needed shot in the arm. Possibly, on their native island, they kept the music up all the time, even during cancer. On two separate occasions, the apartment was robbed, once when his mother had dozed off. The second time, she sat there and watched them come in through the fire-escape window. They took the television set and a radio. The way Towns got the story, she merely waved a weary sea claw at them as if to say, “Take anything you want. I've got cancer.” Oddly enough, they never got to Towns's father's strongbox which was in a bedroom bureau drawer and not that difficult to find if you were in the least bit industrious. All his life, Towns had wondered about the secrets that were in there; and also how much his father made a week. The news of the robberies just rolled off the shoulders of Towns's dad. It didn't take a bit of the bounce out of him. He comforted Towns's mother with a hug and then zipped inside to cook something she could get down.

  A cynical interpretation of all this snap and bounciness might have been that Towns's dad was looking ahead. Towns was fond of saying his father had never been sick a day in his life. Actually, it wasn't quite true. He had had to spend a year strapped to a bench for his back and Towns remembered a long period in which his dad was involved with diathermy treatments. They didn't sound too serious, but Towns was delighted when his father could say good-bye to them. That was about the extent of it. He had every one of his teeth and a smile that could mow down entire crowds. Towns's dentist would stick an elbow in his ribs and say, “How come you don't have teeth like your dad's?” Tack on all that nattiness and bounce and you had a pretty attractive guy on your hands. Maybe he was just giving the old lady a handsome sendoff so he could ease his conscience and clear the decks for a terrific second-time-around. Was it possible he had someone picked out already? For years, Towns's mother had been worried about a certain buyer who had been with the firm for years and “worked close” with Towns's dad. Except that Towns didn't buy any of this. There were certain kinds of behavior you couldn't fake. You couldn't hold that claw for hours and kiss that broken mouth if you were looking ahead. You could do other things, but you couldn't do those two. At least he didn't think so. Besides, Towns was doing a bit of looking ahead on his dad's behalf. He had put himself in charge of that department. And that's about all he was in charge of. He was almost doing a great many things. He almost went down to the Spanish record shop and told them that they had better lower the music or he would break every record over their fucking heads. After the second robbery, he called a homicide detective friend and said he wanted to make a thorough cruise of the neighborhood and take a shot at nailing the guys who'd come up through the fire escape. He would go through every mug shot in the files to find the sonsofbitches. Except that he didn't. He came very close to getting his mother to switch doctors, using some friends to put him in touch with a great cancer specialist who might give her a wild shot at some extra life. He was Captain Almost. Over and over, he asked his father if he needed any money to which he would reply, “We've got plenty. You just take care of yourself.” One day Towns said the hell with it and wrote out a check for two thousand dollars; this was money he really needed, although, in truth, a third of it would have gone over to coke. Mysteriously, he never got around to mailing it. There was only one department in which he demonstrated some follow-through. It's true he hadn't rented an apartment on lower Park Avenue for his parents and gotten them out of their old neighborhood, but that's a mistake he wasn't going to make again. He would wait a polite amount of time after his mother died and then he would make his move, set up the place, get his father down there to lower Park if he had to use a gun to get the job done. He sure as hell was getting at least one of them out. He would give up the coke for that. He would give up two fingers and a toe if he had to. He was going to put his father right there where he could bounce over to work and never have to ride a subway again. About ten blocks away from work would be perfect. Towns's father didn't want to retire. That business place of his was like a club; his cronies were down there. And the crisp ten-block walk to work would keep that snap in his walk. There was more to the script that Towns had written. His father could take broads up there with him. That buyer, if he liked, or anyone else he felt like hanging out with. Someone around forty-seven would be just right for him. Towns would scoop up a certain girl he had in mind and maybe they would all go out together. He didn't see that this showed any disrespect for his mother. What did one thing have to do with the other? Once his father was in the city, they would spend more time together, not every night, but maybe twice a week and Sundays for breakfast. He had had his father out with some friends and some of them said he fit right in with them. It was nice of them to say that. And even if he did not exactly fit in, at least he didn't put into play any outrageous old-guy things that embarrassed everybody. They would just have to accept him once in a while whether he fit in or not. Otherwise he would get some new friends.

  That was the general drift of the script he had written for his father. But the key to it was the apartment. Right after they buried his mother, Towns called a real-estate agent and told her to start hunting around in that general lower Park vicinity. He used the same agent who'd gotten him his own apartment. He read her as being in her late thirties and not bad. Nothing there for him but maybe for his father. Towns's dad and the agent would prowl around, checking out apartments, and maybe get something going. He didn't have the faintest idea if his father's guns were still functional in that area, but he preferred to think they were. Maybe he would ask him. So Towns set the apartment hunt in motion and, after a few weeks, took his father to dinner at a steak house and hit him with it. “Let's face it, fun is fun, but you've got to get out of there, Dad.”

  “I know, Harry, and I will, believe me, but I just don't feel like it right now. I have to feel like it. Then I will.” At that moment, Harry Towns noticed that his father had lost a little weight, perhaps a few more pounds than he had any business losing. He was one of those fellows who had been one weight all his adult life—and now he was a different one.

  “I don't have any appetite,” he said.

  “But look how you're eating now,” Towns told him. And, indeed, his father had cleaned up everything in front of him. Then Towns gave his father a small lecture. “Let's face it, Dad, you're a little depressed. You can't live with somebody that long and then lose them and not be. Maybe you ought to see somebody, for just an hour or two. I had that experience myself. Just one or two sessions and I got right back on the track.” He didn't want to use the word “psychiatrist.” But that's what he had in mind. He knew just the right fellow, too. Easy on the nerves and almost the same age as his father. He had expected to hear some grumbling, but his father surprised him by saying, “Maybe you have a point there.” And then Towns's dad looked at him with some kind of wateriness in his eyes. It wasn't tears, or even the start of them, but some kind of deep and ancient watery comprehension. Then he cleaned off his plate and brought up the subject of bank books and insurance. Towns felt he was finally getting in on some of the secrets in the strongbox. He had about fifty grand in all and he wanted his son to know about it, “just in case anything happens.”