“There ain't anything gonna happen,” said Towns.
“Just in case. I want it split fifty-fifty, half for you and half for your brother.”
“Give it all to him,” said Towns.
“Never,” said his father, with something close to anger. “Half and half, right down the middle. And it's nothing to sneeze at.”
“I know that.”
“I thought you were making fun of it.”
“I wasn't,” said Towns. “But will you get the goddamn apartment?”
“I will,” he said, mopping up the last of the cheesecake. “But first I have to feel like it.”
The appetite thing worried Towns. He was sure it connected to some kind of depression, because he ate so well when he was out with Towns. But he couldn't have breakfast with his father every morning. And no matter how much he loved him, he couldn't eat with him every goddamn night. What about lunches? Was he supposed to run over and have lunch with him, too? He finally teamed the old man up with the real-estate lady, and on a Saturday morning they checked out a few available apartments. On lower Park. That afternoon, the woman called Towns and said his father had gotten dizzy in one of the apartments and hit his head on the radiator. She said she had made him swear he was in good shape before she let him go home. She was all right. Towns got his father to go to the doctor—he admitted to getting dizzy once before on the subway and having to ask someone for a seat—and they ran some tests. They used the same doctor who hadn't performed any particular miracles on his mother's claws. Towns had meant to switch off to another one, but that's something else he had not gotten around to. The tests zeroed in on his prostate and Towns felt better immediately. He had a little condition of his own and he knew it was no toothache, but there was no way it could turn you into a Marineland exhibition. The prostate had to go and the fellow who would take it out was named Doctor Merder. Towns and his dad had a good laugh about that one. If you were a surgeon with a name like that, you had better be good. So they didn't worry a bit about him. The book on the doctor was that he had never lost a prostate case. Towns's dad checked into the hospital. He was concerned about how the business, or “place” as he called it, would run in his absence and he didn't relax until the boss called and told him to take it easy, they would cover for him and everything would be just fine; just relax and get better. The boss was around thirty years younger than he was, but Towns's dad couldn't get over his taking the time to do a thing like that. Once in the hospital, he went from natty to dignified. Maybe he had always been dignified, even though he had blown his one shot at being head of his own business, years before. Using some fancy accounting techniques, his partners had quickly cut him to ribbons and eased him out of his share of the firm. This would have left most men for dead; but Towns's dad had simply gone back to his old factory job as second in command, dignified as ever. In the hospital, the only thing he used the bed for was sleeping. He sat in a flowered New England chair, neat as a pin, reading the books Harry Towns brought him. His favorite kind of book dealt with generals and statesmen, people like Stettinius and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the goings-on behind the scenes during World War II. Or at least Towns assumed they were his favorites. Maybe they were his own favorites, and all those years he had been pushing them on his dad. Whenever Towns brought him a book, his father felt obliged to “read it up,” as if it would be “wasted” if he didn't. Like food. So whenever Towns showed up at the hospital with another one, he would hold up his hands and say, “Stop, for crissakes. How much can a guy read?”
Along with at least one volume about Secret-Service shenanigans in World War II, Towns would also bring a fistful of expensive Canary Island cigars. For most of his life, his father had smoked a cheaper brand, Admiration Joys when Towns was a boy, but in recent years Towns had promoted him to these higher-priced jobs. He complained that Towns was spoiling him. Sixty cents was too much to spend for a cigar. And there was no way to go back to the Joys. But he got a lot of pleasure out of the expensive ones. Towns had gotten the cigar habit from his father; he remembered a time when his father would greet a friend by stuffing a cigar in his handkerchief pocket and the friend would do the same for Towns's dad. It seemed like a fine ritual and Towns was sorry to see it go; there was probably a paper around proving it was all very phallic and homosexual. Now, when Towns showed up with the cigars, his father would say, “What the hell am I supposed to do with them?”
“Smoke 'em,” said Towns.
“What if I don't feel like it?”
‘Then just take a few puffs.”
“All right, leave 'em over there.”
And he would. He would take a few puffs of each one. So they wouldn't go to waste.
They kept taking more tests on Towns's dad; he didn't leave the room very often, but he did spend a little time with one other patient and he got a tremendous kick out of this fellow. He was trying to impeach the President and Towns's father couldn't get over that. If he had great admiration for people like Cordell Hull and Omar Bradley, his respect for the office of the President was absolutely overpowering. The idea of a guy running around trying to get the top executive impeached tickled the hell out of Towns's dad. It was so outrageous. “You got to see this guy,” he told Towns. “He's got a sign this big over his door, some kind of impeachment map. He's trying to get some signatures up. And he's important, too. I don't know what the hell he does, but he gives off an important impression. He says he wants to meet you.”
“What's he want to meet me for?”
“I don't know. Maybe he heard you were important, too. Why don't you go over there and give him a tumble?”
Towns wasn't terribly interested in the impeachment man. He was more interested in the tests. But for his father's sake, he met the fellow in the lounge. He was a sparse-haired gentleman, a bit younger than his father, who talked a mile a minute and seemed to be carefully staying off the subject of impeachment. At the same time, he kept checking Towns's eyes as if he were looking for a go-ahead signal. Towns gave him a signal that said nothing doing. “What'd you think of him?” Towns's father asked as they walked back to the room.
“He's all right,” said Towns.
“Well, I don't know what you think of him, but to me he's really something. Imagine a thing like that. Going around trying to impeach the President of the United States. And he's no bum. You can tell that by looking at him. I think he's got some dough.” All the way back to his room, Towns's dad kept clucking his tongue about the fellow. He acted as though it was the most amazing thing he had ever come across in all his seventy-five years.
“Would you like to see that map he's got on the outside of his door?”
“I don't think so, Dad.”
“I think you ought to take a look at it.”
“Maybe I will, on the way out.”
They decided to build up Towns's dad by giving him a couple of transfusions before the surgery. While this was going on, Towns ran into a nurse who came an inch short of being one of the prettiest girls he knew in the city. He had always meant to get around to her, but she lived with a friend of his and he claimed that was one rule he would never break. Or at least he'd try not to break it. She had a private patient down the hall and said she knew about his father and that a week before, he had stood outside his door and asked her to come in and have a cookie. Towns wished his father had been much more rascally than that. Why didn't he just reach out and pinch her ass? On the other hand, the cookie invitation wasn't much, but it was something. Towns made her promise to go in and visit him and sort of kid around with him and she said of course she would, he didn't even have to ask. He had the feeling this was the kind of girl his father would love to fool around with in an old-guy way.
The transfusion gave Towns's father some fever, but they went ahead and operated anyway. This puzzled Towns a bit. Except that his father seemed to come out of the surgery all right. He didn't appear to be connected up to that many tubes, which struck Towns as a good sign. Towns
kept bringing him books about desert warfare, the defense of Stalingrad, Operation Sea Lion, but he kept them over to the side where his father couldn't see them and have to worry about “reading them up.” Before they got spoiled. On the third day after the operation, he brought along a real torpedo of a cigar, long, fragrant, aromatic, the best he could find.
“What'd you bring that for?” asked his father, who was down to one tube.
“Why do you think?”
“I ain't smoking it, Harry.”
“The hell you're not.”
The next day, his father looked a little weaker, but the doctor said it was more or less normal to take a dip on the way back from surgery. When they were alone, Towns's father asked his son, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I came to see you, Dad.”
He turned his head away, waved his hand in disgust and said, “You ain't gonna do me any good.” Then he turned back and chuckled and they started to talk about what was going on outside, but that cruel random slash had been there. Maybe you were allowed to be a little cruel right after surgery. Towns wasn't sure. It was only the second piece of bad behavior Towns could think of since he'd been born. The other had to do with Towns at around eight or nine, using the word “schmuck” about somebody; he didn't know what the word meant, but his father instantly lashed out and belted him halfway across the city. So that added up to two in more than forty years. “Schmuck” and “You ain't gonna do me any good.” Not a bad score. The next morning, the doctor phoned and told Towns he had better come down, because his father's pulse had stopped. “What do you mean, stopped?” Towns asked.
“The nurse stepped out for a second and when she came back he had no pulse. She called a round-the-clock resuscitation team and they were down there like Johnny-on-the-spot. They do quite a job.”
“How come the nurse stepped out?”
“They have to go to the bathroom.”
“Is he gonna live?”
“It depends on how long his pulse stopped. We'll know that later.”
Towns got down there fast. He met the doctor in the intensive-care unit. The doctor asked if he would like to see the team working on his dad and he said he would. He took Towns down the hall and displayed the huge resuscitation units the way a proud Soviet manager would show off his plant for a group of Chrysler execs. His father was hooked up to plenty of tubes now. He was like a part in a huge industrial city. The whole city of Pittsburgh. He was the part that took a jolting spasmodic leap every few seconds. Towns got as close as he could—what the hell, he'd seen everything now. He tried to spot something that wasn't covered up by gadgets. Something that looked like his father. He finally picked off a section from the wrist to the elbow that he recognized as being his father's arm. He was pretty sure of it. “There's no point in your staying around,” the doctor said. “I know that,” said Towns.
He went up to his father's room and got the cigar. Then he walked to the end of the hall and took a look at the impeachment map. It showed how much strength the fellow had across the country. He didn't have much. A couple of pins in Los Angeles, Wisconsin, New York, and out. On the way down, Towns stopped in at the snack bar and had some peach yogurt. It was the first time in his life he had ever tasted yogurt and it wasn't bad. It went down easy and it didn't taste the way he had imagined it would. He made a note to pick up a few cartons of it. The fruit kind. He went back to his apartment and fell asleep. The call came early in the evening. Towns had promised himself he would fix the exact time in his mind forever, but a week later, he couldn't tell you what time or even what month it had happened.
“That's it, huh?”
“I'm afraid so,” said the doctor. “About five minutes ago. I'd like to get your permission to do a medical examination of dad so that maybe we can find out something to help the next guy who comes in with the same condition.”
“How come you operated on him with fever?”
“We tried to contact you on that to get your permission.”
“You should've tried harder.”
“See,” said the doctor, “that's just it. We talk to people when they're understandably upset and they say no to medical examinations. In Sweden, it's automatic.”
“Work a little harder on what you know already.”
“The next one could be your child. Or your children's children.”
“Fuck you, doctor.”
So that was it. The both of them. And for the moment, all Harry Towns had out of it was a new expression. Back to back. He had lost both his parents, back to back. He leaned on that one for about six months or so; especially if someone asked him why he was “low” or why he was late on a deadline. “Hey,” he would say, “I lost both my parents, back to back.” And he would be off the hook. He told his brother from Omaha to fly in as fast as possible and take care of everything, clean out his dad's apartment, settle the accounts, the works. He was better at that kind of thing. Maybe Towns would be good at it, too, but he didn't want to be. The only thing he could hardly wait to do was get in touch with the rabbi who had officiated over his mother's funeral. He was a fellow the chapel kept on tap in case you didn't have any particular rabbi of your own in mind. It was like getting an attorney from Legal Aid except that this one turned out to be a real find. He showed up in what Harry Towns liked to recall as a cloud of smoke, with a shiny black suit and a metaphysical tuft of hair sticking up on his head. He turned up two and a half minutes before the ceremony and asked Towns to sum up his mother. “What are you, nuts?” said Towns. “Trust me,” said the rabbi, a homely fellow with an amazingly rocklike jaw that was totally out of sync with his otherwise wan Talmudic features. Towns took a shot. He told him they really shouldn't have limos taking his mother out to the grave, they ought to have New York taxis. Whenever she had a problem, she would simply jump inside one and have the driver ride around with the meter going while she talked to him until she felt better. Then she would pay the bill, slap on a big tip, and hop out. That was her kind of psychoanalysis. She couldn't cook and Towns didn't want anyone laying that word “housewife” on her. Not at the funeral. It was very important to get her right. This was almost as important to him as losing her. She was close to cabbies, bellhops, and busboys and she could brighten up a room just by walking into it. And damned if this faded little mysterious house rabbi didn't get her. In two and a half minutes. “Sparkle” was the key word. And it was his own. He kept shooting that word “sparkle” out over the mourners and it was as if he had known her all his life. Towns had never seen a performance quite like that.
After they had buried her in the Jersey Flats, the rabbi asked if anyone could give him a lift back to New York City. Everyone was staying at an aunt's house in Jersey, so no one could. With that, he hopped on the hearse. And then he disappeared; once again, it might just as well have been in a cloud of smoke. And he was only seventy-five bucks. So you can see why Towns was anxious to have him back for a repeat performance. It was enough to get Towns back to religion. Why not, if they had unsung guys like that around? Except that the minute he showed up at the chapel the second time, something was a little off. The rabbi looked barbered for one thing. And he was wearing flowing rabbinical robes. What happened to the black shiny suit that he had probably brought over from Poland? And he didn't get Towns's father at all. “Good, honest, hard-working man.” “Lived only for his family.” Shit like that. Right out of your basic funeral textbook. The very thing Towns wanted to head off. His diction was different, fancier. He could have been talking about anybody. And he seemed to be playing not to the audience but strictly to Towns. It occurred to Harry Towns that maybe there wasn't any way to get his father. Maybe that was it—honest, hard-working, et cetera. But for Christ's sake, he could have found something. “Sparkle” wasn't it—he had used that anyway—but how about that bounce in his walk. What about nattiness for a theme. The sharpness of his beard against Harry Towns's face when he was a kid. Anything. Cigar smoking. Handing them out and getting some
back. His being an air-raid warden. An all-day fist fight he had with his brother. (When it was over, they didn't talk to each other for twenty-five years.) Anything at all. Just so they didn't bury a statistic. Maybe it was as simple as the old second-audition syndrome. A performer would come in and knock you on your ass the first time. He would get called back and bomb. Show people explained it by saying there was nothing on the line the first time a performer auditioned. If you called him back, it meant you were considering him for the part. In that situation, nine out of ten performers choked. The rabbi didn't choke. He was as smooth as silk. He probably felt he was really cooking. But he sure did bomb.
Out they went to the Jersey Flats again, and after his father was in the ground, alongside his mother, the rabbi took Towns aside and said, “With your mother, I didn't even know who you were.” Who in the hell was he? A screenwriter? So that was it. The rabbi had caught his name on a picture and felt he had to be classier. “I'm being sponsored on a little trip to Israel,” said the rabbi. “Is there any chance you could meet me there so we could see it together? It would be meaningful to both of us.”
“I don't give a shit about Israel,” said Towns. It wasn't true. He did give a shit about Israel. When the chips were down, he was still some kind of Jew. He was just sore as hell at the rabbi for letting him down and not getting his father right. And for not being that magical fellow with the tuft of hair who had shown up in a cloud of smoke and almost got him back to religion. After everyone had climbed back into the limos, Towns went back to the grave and dropped that big torpedo of a cigar inside. He was aware of the crummy sentimentality involved—and he knew he would probably tell it to a friend or two before the week was over—as an anecdote—but he did it anyway. No one was going to tell him whether to be sentimental or not—not when he had just lost his mother and father. Back to back.
He hung around the city while his brother cleaned things up for him. He said he didn't want anything from the apartment except an old-fashioned vest-pocket watch he remembered. And maybe his dad's ring, with the initials rubbed over with age so you couldn't really make them out. They got the finances straightened out in his brother's hotel room. The money coming to Towns was enough to cover his back tax bill to the government, almost to the penny. He hadn't slept easily for a year, wondering where he was going to get that kind of dough. And there were a handful of salary checks to be divided up. So he finally found out what his father's salary was. It was probably the last secret in the strongbox. He was sorry he found out. They had cut him down to nickels and dimes, probably because he was seventy-five. And here he was, settling his son's tax bill. Towns hugged his brother, saying, “Let's stay in touch. You're all I've got,” and then his nephew came dancing out in one of his father's suits. Wearing a funny smile and looking very natty. Towns recalled a fellow he had once worked for who had come to the office wearing his father's best suit, one day after the old man had died. At the time, he wondered, what kind of a guy does that. Now, his brother said, “It fit him like a glove, so why not?” Towns couldn't answer that one. He just felt it shouldn't be going on. About a month later, he changed his mind and was glad the kid took the clothes.
About Harry Towns Page 10