This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  “Splen—” Reinhart began, meaning gently to remonstrate with him, something like ‘Splendor, how could you, who were devoted to reason in high school, be so taken in?’ But what was the point, now that he had paid the 225 dollars, done the work, and got his degree? Anyway, he had cured numerous headaches, if one believed him; and one must, since it was a principle of life that dupes were never liars. So instead of saying “Splendor,” Reinhart muttered “Splendid” as his host fetched from the bookcase, from the shelf below Mein Kampf, a black, looseleaf notebook and presented it to him.

  Inside were clamped, to three rings, the fifty-two weekly lessons, mimeographed on a crude paper the early leaves of which had already turned purplish-brown. On the first page were certain vital facts: “UNIVERSAL COLLEGE OF METAPHYSICAL KNOWLEDGE, PO Box 1000, Pocatello, Idaho. Lorenz T. Goodykuntz, President. Beatrice Spain Goodykuntz, Registrar. L. Goodykuntz, Dean of Men. B. S. Goodykuntz, Dean of Humanities. G. Lorenz, Dean of Science. G. Beatrice, Chancellor.”

  “Turn overleaf,” advised Splendor, hanging over Reinhart’s shoulder though careful not to touch him; he smelled of the toothpaste which contained Irium.

  On the following page, no doubt to save paper, the title was crowded toward the top—“Comprehensive Nonchemical Medicine, Degree Course, by Dr. Lorenz T. Goodykuntz, M.D. (Harvard School of Naturepathy), Sc.D. (Princeton Institute of Creative Dynamism), Ph.D. (Akademie der Naturwissenschaft, Stuttgart, Germany), Former Medical Advisor to the Sovereign of Andorra.” The course started hard after.

  GENERAL ANATOMY

  When the Prime Mover (whom some call God, others Allah, Jehovah, Yaweh, Manitou, etc.) created Man, It (which some call He) constructed the human body to make it a intergal yet diffuse structure embodying the three principal life energies, Reason, Sympathy, and Passion. Reason=Head, Sympathy=Heart, Passions=the Reins. Reason governs the body structure to the point of the ingathering of veins, muscles, and ducts in the little hollow below the neck. (You can see a pulse beating there if you look in the minor.) Sympathy rules from that point downwards, including chest, shoulders, the lac-tatory glands if the subject is female, lungs, belly, and all the internal organs therein: heart, stomach, duodenum, jejunum, spleen, pancreas, Alimentary Canal, appendicts, viz., viz., & i.e. At the crucial junction of the limbs to trunk, including the generational organs, we enter the domain of the passions, thighs, hams, calves, falling to the pedal appendages.

  GENERAL OSTEOLOGY

  Meaning bone structure. The Humerous (vulgarly called the funny-bone) is in the arm; the navicular, in both hand and foot. (Wait for next lesson.)

  “Well,” said Splendor, moving away, “I don’t want you to ruin your eyes reading in this bad light. Take the lessons home with you. Oh no”—he fought off Reinhart’s negative gestures and tapped himself on what Reinhart knew, without Dr. Goodykuntz’s help, was the frontal bone. “I’ve got them all up here.”

  The ex-corporal was glad to seize that opportunity for leaving. Splendor’s gullibility was about to break his heart. He had sworn never to feel sorry again for another person, having become convinced of the fundamental immorality of sympathy. But this poor devil!

  “Now I think you begin to get the idea,” said Splendor. “When I saw by your lapel insignia you were an Army doctor, and by your manner, which was forlorn, that what you needed most was another fellow with something in common, well, it is self-evident.”

  “What is? I was only a corporal in the medics. I had a first-aid course and then worked in an office until the end of the war.”

  Splendor shook his smiling face. “Now don’t tell me the United States Army would put a caduceus insignia—the historical symbol of the healer, dating to the time of Hippocrates—on a fellow unless they believed he was equipped for the job. See here.” He brought forth his wallet, from which he withdrew an identification card showing his name and role: Interne, Nonchemical Medicine, Universal College of Metaphysical Knowledge—an institutional title which since he had first heard it reminded Reinhart of something else, an old radio quiz show operated by an orchestra leader noted for a kind of cretin enthusiasm, the name escaped him.

  “What’s your idea?” he asked sarcastically. “To go into practice?”

  “Yes, let’s!” Splendor replied, putting away his little card. “You for the chemical therapy, I for nonchemical.”

  “I don’t understand this stuff about chemistry,” said Reinhart, beginning to stride around the room, hoping Loretta would come out again.

  “My persuasion employs no drugs or fluids, introduces no alien substances into the life stream, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t tolerant of other schools, despite the great evidence that the orthodox practitioners are every day poisoning thousands of our countrymen. You see we believe that if the Prime Mover approved of aspirin, say, He would have built into the human body a gland secreting same. Which he did not. Therefore in treatment of a headache we employ instead the laying on of hands, the introduction of rather the life force from the physician’s body into that of the afflicted, to liberate the congested channels of the latter.”

  Seeing Splendor approach him, Reinhart threw up a guardian hand, saying: “Yes, I remember your other demonstration.”

  “But live and let die, is our motto—a little joke Dr. Goodykuntz is fond of making,” said Splendor with a professional smirk.

  Man, is this crazy, is what Reinhart was aching to say, but such a statement is not advisable, we all know, to someone of whom it is literally true.

  “Anyway,” Splendor said, with gloomy glee, “what have you got to lose? What else are you going to do? Has it ever suddenly come over you that all at once you are tired of everything: one piece of self-indulgence is like the last; gorge three times a day without relish; one dental cavity after another, hair ineluctably turns gray, clothes wear through, make more money to pay more taxes, politics with its ritual resentments, routine religions with their rivalries, and we all know what education is in this country: tasteless. And one’s own face! Why can’t we wake up one morning with green eyes, lantern chin, and red hair, instead of the old predictable us we have seen every day since children.”

  Reinhart waited for an opportunity, found it, and said: “That’s true.”

  “It figures in what I say about Breaking Through the Barrier. Through what barrier? Why, through the Is!” Splendor shook his fist at the old hassock, which was an excellent focus for his threat, being even more conspicuously sick of the Is than Reinhart. “We could use a little triumph!” Splendor shouted, his ears vibrating like hummingbirds buzzing each side of his head.

  Reinhart felt a suggestion of invigoration but found, through his contempt for fake science, that he could handle it.

  “Now, be cautious,” he said, patting his friend’s shoulder. “There are laws against qua—irregular medical practices. I’m afraid the state of Ohio, perhaps unjustly, doesn’t recognize your college, eminent though it may be. Why don’t you take a course in something else that the law considers harmless, like philosophy or Latin, or Spanish, which will qualify you for a job among our neighbors to the South in the vigorous young republics of Latin America?” He had just that noontime read such an ad and rejected it for himself on the ground that he didn’t like food fried in oil.

  “You know why they won’t let me practice,” Splendor answered sullenly. “You know why, and the only reason.” He made himself look so Negroid, so much the projection of other men’s vileness that Reinhart, insulted to the core, was almost moved to strike him.

  Instead he replied: “Use your head.” Which Splendor did, to illustrate his refusal to conform; he pulled his eyebrows towards his mouth, and his lips in the direction of his eyebrows; between, his nostrils rose to the perpendicular.

  Reinhart soon surrendered, paternalism being his Achilles’ heel. “Oh for Christ’s sake all right. Open your dispensary and if I get syphilis you can cure me by a knock on the scalp.”

  Splendor relaxed from his scowl. “I’m not
so naive as you seem to think. I know you can’t practice in the regular way without A.M.A. authorization, who are poisonously hostile to natural therapy. But that is just the point. We are talking here of the union of science and religion. Anybody, can open a church. Anybody can rent an empty store and make devotional addresses, and if the Prime Mover sees fit to heal the afflicted in the audience, who paid no admission charge, all contributions voluntary, no ordinance is defied.”

  “I think you’ve got your project nicely worked out,” wryly said Reinhart, with a wistful glance at the brandy bottle so richly transmuting the light that fell on the table doily. “But I’m not going to be your co-sky pilot.”

  “My dear friend, I ask nothing more of you than that you attend the first meeting and sit conspicuously in the front row of seats. You might, if it’s not too corny, interject certain phrases from time to time in my remarks, such as ‘Ah, Lord!’ or ‘Bless Him,’ or even just ‘Amen.’ Okay, okay! It was just an idea.” He had followed his guest to the hallway, where Reinhart got into the Army overcoat unassisted and at this point was wincing.

  “Is that all?” Reinhart asked. “I guess I can manage that, the sitting there, I mean—but what good will it do?”

  “You have no idea,” Splendor replied, taking the crook of his arm and applying pressure towards the front door, “how beneficial a white man, a white man with fair hair and blue eyes, of the king-size, if you don’t mind my saying it, would be to my humble efforts.”

  Suddenly Reinhart was out on the porch with the medical course under his arm instead of Splendor’s hand, and his host could be seen only as an obstruction within a rapidly diminishing rectangle of light. “Wait a minute!” he cried, thrusting back the screen and getting his fingers inside the inner door. With superior weight he could have forced Splendor back, but chose rather to offer him the alternative of letting his guest re-enter or maiming him.

  “Yes?” asked the interne when he again came into full view.

  “Remember me?” Reinhart said in snotty humor. “I’m collecting money for the Old Soldier’s Retirement Fund.”

  Unsmiling, Splendor wanted wanly to know if he had forgotten something.

  “Yes, but I’ve forgotten what.” He remembered when he saw Loretta prowling quietly down the passage from the kitchen, all great soft eyes and tender mouth and long tan legs.

  “Miss Mainwaring, it’s been more pleasure than I can say.”

  Her brother said: “Don’t try then, Carlo. There are people with whom the amenities are useless.” With a sigh, a promise soon to get in touch, and an adjuration to learn his Goodykuntz from the lessons, Splendor tirelessly applied himself for the second time to Reinhart’s departure and succeeded unconditionally.

  Feeling his overcoat pockets, Reinhart discovered that Mr. Mainwaring had indeed confiscated the last cigar.

  Chapter 5

  Now Reinhart needed no urging to look at Dr. Goodykuntz’s text. He wanted to find a particularly glaring piece of quackery that, when contrasted with established medical practice—of which he remembered a modicum from his Army first aid—would convince even Splendor Mainwaring that his mentor was not only a fake but a criminal; something like treating polio with the Dutch rub, was what Reinhart sought. But as it happened, stretched on the rack of the couch later that night, holding in one hand the Zippo’s blue-and-yellow flicker—he dare not illuminate the table lamp, honoring Maw’s claim that it could miraculously negotiate fifteen feet of hall and two right angles to murder her sleep—and in the other the three-ring notebook, he read precisely one sentence of the second lesson, “General Osteology continued: the Fibia and the Tibula constitute the bonal structure of the calve of the leg,” when he heard Maw bound from the bedroom on naked soles and be sick in the bath. Even when under the weather, she was athletic, and came running out again, screaming over the toilet’s Niagara: “Douse that light, you dirty dog,” and vaulted bedwards, presumably kneeing the lump of Dad, who let out air.

  In the succeeding hour, she repeated the performance thrice, while Reinhart listened in the darkness, cramped with the general guilt which comprehends all specific ones from the dawn of man: but for the grace of God, there vomit I. He wished he were capable of some other emotion than regret. For all his added flesh and veteran memories, and the seams of heart that, like the fabric of an auto tire, show from travel, it was if he had never, three years ago, marched away. Maw suffered, or enjoyed, one of her spells, and it seemed queer to him that she had waited so long to institute it; he was home two weeks, and she never had needed time to work up to anything, being able to fall ill on the instant the world, or a son, did not go her way.

  Along towards dawn, all crumpled at the middle from being repeatedly vaulted over, Dad stumbled through the living room to the secretary desk just beyond Carlo’s head and clutched the telephone, grunting till Dr. Perse agreed to come. Obviously the doctor then returned to bed, for he did not arrive at the house before ten A.M. and when he did was still snorting from the night’s phlegm. The doctor knew Maw of yore, not to mention Carlo, whose navel in fact he had knotted more than two decades earlier. He had not bought a suit of clothes since, if one went by the salt-and-pepper jacket, back-belted, he wore as he entered now and headed straight for Reinhart, who though dressed was yet snoozing in the living room, the nearest recumbent figure to the door.

  Quick as a wink, Dr. Perse had Reinhart’s shirt up and an ancient stethoscope, of which the hard-rubber cup was chipped like the rim of a bottlecap, applying suction to his stomach.

  “Gee,” said the doc through his white mustache. “Oh my, you’re in trouble. Sounds like a crowd of elves are in there, eating popcorn. Lay off bananas, herring, egg-drop soup, mutton, and shirred eggs.”

  Reinhart protested, striving to rise.

  “Don’t fight me, Ralph. I know the history of your system since you were small enough to swim in a teacup. Still got the sneezes, too, I’ll warrant. Therefore lay off all raw meats.”

  Reinhart struggled, but the old doc was incredibly strong and held him down with the stethoscope as you might pin a beetle to a cork.

  “Don’t fight me, Paul. I pulled you wet and hairless into this world and you weren’t much then, nor will be unless you get off your back and play more with other kids.”

  At length the ex-corporal managed to explain to Perse the proper state of affairs—though not without promising to eat wheat germ, charcoal, etc., and eschew cumquats, mussels, and guava jelly—“If you ever go to Cuba, take your own food along,” said Doc—and got him down the hall to the right patient.

  If anything, Maw looked healthier than ever, there in her bed of illness, both HIS and HER pillows propped behind her Psyche knot, flannel nightgown arms rolled up to where her big biceps stopped them. With her fair hair and muscles, Maw might have been Holland’s entry in the Olympic high hurdles. However, the whites of her eyes were pinked with self-sorrow and when she saw the doctor she gasped and began to slide beneath the covers as if they were water and she an amphibian.

  “Not her!” blurted the doc in stage astonishment. “Oh, never! That girl’s built of steel tungsten.” He stepped to the bed, cupped his hands, and shouted down, but as if from a distance. “Hallooo there! I say Miz Reinhart, you can’t fool Powell Perse, M.D. Come out, you strapping wench, I see youuuuuu.”

  Without showing her face, Maw extended a coquette wrist from the blankets, and Doc, creaking at many of his articulations, sat bedside and felt its pulse while eying his dollar watch on a chain of braided hair with dependent Elk’s tooth, and humming what Reinhart was at the point of identifying as “Lady of Spain” when it ceased at an arbitrary note.

  Doc chided: “You young girls are all alike, your giddy heads filled only with parties and proms and beaux.”

  Maw emerged from the purdah of the sheet as a gigglish maiden, mouth curved like a barrel-stave ski, eyes like jacks: grotesque, and looking ten years older.

  Reinhart refused to witness any more of this; he
could never understand why his mother would not, like everyone else, use a mixture of pleasure and pain instead of taking them singly. Either she was a charwoman for fourteen hours a day, or an invalid for twenty-four. Who knew how long her current recumbency would last? With Dad doing the chores and creeping around as if he had piles and couldn’t sit, and chiding Carlo for indifference.

  Carlo now went into the kitchen and indifferently stuffed himself with a second breakfast, two more eggs, a slice of fried boiled ham large as your shoe sole, and two and a half pecan rolls from the familiar cellophane package which made its contents sweat: the icing was all sticky. Yes, he grew fatter and fatter, and knew not what to do about it. Demonically he gouged out cavities in the center of the rolls and pushed into them stout bullets of butter. He could hear Maw and Doc in some push-pull gaiety over the purple-pills-or-the-red-ones. Maw shrilled: “Now Doc!” Doc boomed: “Now Miz!”

  Reinhart drank a cup of coffee with sugar, and then in a spasm of swinishness made himself some hot chocolate, so sweet he gagged. He swore he could feel the molecules of starch and sugar being translated into pounds of lard at his midsection, like the lead waist-weights of a diver. He was going down, down, down in the quicksand of suburban faeces: your only real horror, making concentration camps and secret police a sport. What an ass he was not to have stayed in Middle Europe, joined some ruthless movement, and maltreated small-businessmen.

  On the other hand, he expected a summons at any moment, from an unexpected quarter: some slight acquaintance come suddenly into power and wealth, would cable; or he would be chosen, by chance, as sole heir to an aging tycoon, whose bibliomancy was potent enough to find him in the phone book, where he wasn’t listed.

  Paradoxically, the telephone did ring at that point, and he fell over several articles of furniture, breaking one, a Louis Krantz chair from the matching suite of same, in his haste to answer: “I accept!”