The Last Marlin

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  It took forever before a surgeon was in the room and they were pushing Dad back into the operating room. His eyes were back in his head.

  I had to get out of the hospital. I knew he was dying and I couldn’t bear waiting for the nurse or doctor to come back to his room to tell me my father was gone. I drove to the boat and phoned Bonnie and my mother. I couldn’t stop crying and they said soothing things—now he’s gone to a better place, his pain is over.

  But Abe didn’t die. I came the next morning and was stunned to find him sitting up in bed with a weary but cheerful expression. They had stitched him up and given him blood and now Dad was feeling better, as he put it. He was hungry. And he had made the decision to go back to Boston. He wanted to go to the Clinic to be with his doctors—they would know how to fix him up.

  I was confused and exhausted. I had spent the night considering how I would make it without him. Now I didn’t want to read his lips. I had fallen off the wave. I didn’t want to make arrangements and talk plans, but he still needed me.

  With a nurse we flew north on Eastern, his favorite airline. Dad seemed energized and collected being in the plane. He’d flown to so many cities to meet with his customers to close deals.

  In the Clinic all of his doctor friends came to visit as they had so many times before when he came in for operations and follow-ups. They came up with an ambitious plan to build his strength. It involved feeding him with a tube that entered an artery in his chest. Dad looked pleased with the idea, although every night he fought with the nurses and pulled out the feeding tube. In the morning I would find his arms tied to the bed and he would tell me that in the night the nurses had done bad things to him. When I asked if they beat him, he nodded that they had.

  Celia came to visit him every day. I don’t think that my father had any memory of the legal case or the terrible rift with his sister. Even in the evening, when he grew distracted and suspicious, he allowed Celia to hold his hand.

  One night when I came to his room, Dad was hopping like a puppet on a string, smiling, crying, explaining how to wire a fixture or maybe it was the garage door in the old house. Then he began persuading, gesturing with his hands. You had to believe him. That’s how I saw him the last time.

  Alan Fischbach didn’t come to my father’s funeral, which surprised me greatly and seemed to compromise the affair. So many of his orders had been at the center of my father’s happiness. Some other key customers also weren’t able to make it because of the cold, raw weather. But the Commissioner came up from New York with several big men I didn’t recognize. The Commissioner’s friends wore dark suits and sunglasses and flanked him on both sides. My mother sat next to Celia. Their tenderness toward one another surprised me.

  I wrote a few pages about my father and Diran read them. I had wanted to describe Dad’s incomparable selling—that he pulled out all the stops to close the deal. But it seemed as though no one, even the salesmen attending, would understand why I idolized his selling, which was unremitting and sometimes involved extravagant and unattractive tactics; it might sound as though I were belittling him, and so I wrote something tame and considered. At funerals there is the pull to put everyone into the ground with the same kind words.

  At the end of the service the Commissioner came over to where I was sitting, and when he leaned to whisper in my ear, my heart began jumping: if you ever need a favor, anything, anything at all, you call me. He handed me a card with a phone number and then his hand lingered on my shoulder in a manner both majestic and sinister. The Commissioner could bestow giant favors or he could exact awful revenge. To the best of my knowledge he had never once failed my father and I shuddered with the power of his offering.

  At the funerals of family members and beloved pets, my brother stepped forward, made sharp decisions and showed an attention to detail not generally apparent in his daily life. I think at such times the past came alive for Bill and he felt a calling and responsibility. He had long been fascinated by the pharaohs and had studied the Book of the Dead. He believed in a connection between the meticulous preparation of the grave site and some form of eternal life. While I was spooked and tentative around my father’s death, it was my brother who selected Abe’s coffin. He knew what color and style were best for Dad, what shaped pillow and what little objects—pliers, pen, writing pad, cigarette lighter—to place in the pockets of his business suit, and which suit, which little shoes would travel with Dad through all of time.

  And now weeks after Abe’s death, Celia, Bill and I were seated in a cramped office with two dusty desks piled high with notebooks, directories and old stencils. On the plate-glass window was a sign that read, “Sam Canter & Sons, Artistic Granite Monuments.”

  My aunt’s face was puffy and red. It’s not fair, she said, wiping her eyes.

  Sam Canter, a portly man, nodded to her in a caring manner. Sam understood the slow and intractable rhythms of grief. He had walked with a thousand customers down this path.

  My brother was wearing the pants from one of Dad’s old suits, his stomach bulging over the top, and his beard was full, his bushy hair brushed back for the occasion and held in place with a rubber band.

  You know, you look like a rabbi, my aunt said, trying to smile. She used to say that to calm my father down when he was incensed about Bill’s appearance and incomprehensible life choices.

  Sam was very smooth and we hardly noticed when he brought out the big and shiny book of possibilities. There were gray and red gravestones, one big black one, an imposing stone. That one is rarely used, he said in such a way as to imply an impropriety. My aunt shook her head decisively, never, never that one. But size really wasn’t an issue. The stone would be the same height and gray color as those to the left and right, his father and cousin. We wouldn’t want to make it look like he was a king, right? she asked Sam Canter, who nodded and paused a beat.

  The big thing, he explained, is whether to choose the polished or the natural surface and whether you want the top of the stone straight horizontal cut or one of several sloping curves and the kind of border you want, which depends completely on whether you choose polished or natural and, of course, the wording of the stone itself. But the big decision would be between the natural or polished stone: that’s what determines the lettering technique and the border, Sam repeated.

  It was a confusing and painful choice made more difficult by the plastic page coverings that protected Sam’s photographs from rough handling but made it difficult to tell the difference between natural and polished.

  After some time we decided that the polished was best for Abe. Then Sam pulled out his drawing pad in order to sketch out a few stones. Should we keep it simple? he asked drawing with dexterity. Usually it’s the Hebrew name over the American, although we can do it the other way. What is the Hebrew name? he inquired looking up from his sketch. Avram, my aunt said tentatively.

  Sam nodded and took a solemn breath. Avram above Abraham, he continued. Then comes the dates below the names; or you can have it the other way around, put Abraham over Avram. Sam was sketching it both ways, so we could make a considered decision, when my brother spoke up.

  I’d like to put a fish at the top of the stone.

  A fish?

  Well no, not just a fish. A blue marlin. That’s a very special game fish.

  Celia stretched her skirt lower on her legs. She had been hoping this idea would go away.

  It might be wrong, she said emotionally.

  Is this fish on a line?

  No, it’s free. In the evening when the sun is setting, marlin sometimes jump like this. No one knows why they do it. I want the marlin leaping off the top of the stone. I’ll draw the fish. And you make a stencil from my drawing. Just like these stencils of flowers here on your desk. Except this will be a leaping marlin. That’s it.

  Was your father in the fishing business? Sam asked, absorbing a new wrinkle in an old business.

  No, my father was in the electrical business.

  S
am shrugged.

  Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with it? my aunt asked. Nothing in the Jewish Law which says we shouldn’t?

  Sam seemed to be searching through the Jewish Law for the answer.

  I don’t know anything in the Jewish Law which says we can’t put a marlin on the stone.

  Are you sure, Sam? she pressed him.

  There is one thing. You people decided on the polished stone. But with this fish we’ll have to cut it on the natural.

  Later that night Bill drew the blue marlin. It was a simple outline of a stout jumping fish that looked remarkably similar to marlin he began drawing as a kid in Great Neck on his school assignments. My brother had dragged the marlin of his childhood across the years and put it more or less unchanged onto the margins of his favorite books like Madame Bovary and Gone with the Wind and on the pages of rough drafts of his magazine profiles of afternoon soap stars. He also put them at the bottom of postcards from distant places to me and Dad, like a signature. To the best of my knowledge my brother stopped sketching this frisky, guileless marlin after the one he gave to Sam Canter for Dad’s stone.

  PART III

  PUSHING SOUTH

  Stella’s Books

  I WENT THROUGH DAD’S APARTMENT IN CAMBRIDGE, CAREFULLY packing away manila folders of business letters and canceled checks as if these trappings might contain crucial clues or someday would bring me great pleasure. I went through his clothing and was surprised to find that his white business shirts were threadbare at the collar and the terry-cloth bathrobe given to him by Alan Fischbach on his birthday was worn through at the elbows. I became upset about the bathrobe, deciding that Alan’s gift had been less than top quality.

  Diran tried to persuade me that I could write and sell wiring troughs at the same time, together we could make calls on Fischbach and build Lee Products into a powerhouse company. I felt bad letting him down, but without Dad the family business had no allure for me. In fact it seemed alien. I sold Dad’s interest to my aunt and uncle for a modest sum. Diran felt betrayed, I suppose. He wouldn’t talk to me after this.

  Even when I was a teenager pledging to Mother that I would spend my life selling fluorescent lighting, I felt like an oddball around Dad’s electrical contractors and union guys. I had no gift for small talk with Alan Fischbach and Charlie Zweifel. But now, leaden and dull-witted without my father, and despite giving up the business, I believed that Abe’s connections gave me an edge.

  I wanted it both ways. I coveted my father’s power to pick up the phone and take care of matters, and also I wanted the license to explore subterranean worlds like writers I admired or even my brother. Settling Dad’s affairs had left a void, as my so-called career at this point was mainly the desire and ambition to write—not much was coming out of me. Dad’s connections were a part of my fantasy life along with the New York Knicks and fishing. I could always call the commissioner and ask him to help me out with the magazines that were sending back my stories and proposals. I sometimes imagined meeting Alan Fischbach for dinner at one of the steak joints frequented by lighting guys, soaking in the glow of being Abe’s son. Abe’s doctors at the Clinic, the contractors and the Commissioner were power and cachet in reserve.

  Three or four months after Dad’s funeral I was thrilled to receive a letter from Alan Fischbach. I expected an apology and explanation for missing the service and then some extravagant offer or invitation, which I would probably refuse, at least for the present. We’d both leave the door wide open.

  In Alan’s one-page typed letter he came right to the point. He said that I was a bad son who had caused my father a lot of pain. I had embarrassed my father by demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. I had fought with him up and down the line, and after his death I had let my father down by selling his business instead of going into it as Abe had desired. Alan made it crystal clear that this letter would be our final communication. He would never again speak to me in person or on the phone.

  As I read these lines my face was burning. Maybe Alan was afraid that I would ask a big favor or maybe it had struck a deep chord, years before, when Dad had complained about my antiwar activities. I read Fischbach’s letter again and this time noticed on the bottom left of the page the initials “KT,” which stood for Kate Turner, Dad’s longtime secretary whom he had passed on to Alan when Dad moved back to Boston. Kate had typed the letter, maybe she had even composed it for Fischbach. Many times Dad would give Kate a general idea of what he wanted to say and she would compose the letter herself, putting her initials on the lower left of the page. Dad was proud of her ability to write his letters and always called her a terrific secretary. I felt such shame that Kate had been a part of this. I ripped the letter up and threw it in the trash. Kate and I had spent a hundred afternoons together figuring deals and looking at blueprints.

  Surely Alan had told everyone in the trade that Abe’s son was a bum, an ingrate. He would have told the Commissioner. Forget any favors. I was out. Dad’s friends could give you every deal in the city or they could shut you out.

  There was no way to pay the upkeep, and I had to sell the big Ebb Tide. The fishing boat of our dreams was worth hardly anything, explained the yacht broker in Fort Lauderdale, old, slow and made of wood, while the newest generation of sportfishing boats was speedy and constructed of fiberglass, requiring much less maintenance. It was difficult to sell the boat at any price at all, like an old horse, but finally a charter skipper from North Carolina took the Ebb Tide, and we never saw it again. My brother made some kind remarks before leaving for his new life in Morocco, but in truth I felt hardly anything for the boat.

  I wrote a few articles and taught literature classes to senior citizens. These seventy- and eighty-year-olds had much more energy than I had and the classes exhausted me. I walked the city streets like a sick man. I rarely laughed and had no interest in seeing friends.

  Stella was impatient about Abe. No fond memories. He treated me like a postage stamp, she said acerbically. He stuck me on the boat or with his business cronies, wherever he wanted. Mother rushed ahead unfettered by nostalgia.

  She moved into the Chelsea Hotel soon after my brother left for Tangier. For more than a century the hotel had catered to the quirky needs of artists, including Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Arthur Miller, Arthur Clarke, Janis Joplin, Willem de Kooning, just to mention a few. My father wouldn’t have cared about this august history. He would have felt contempt for the ungroomed, oddly dressed patrons rushing through the lobby studying manuscripts or carrying instruments or canvases up the grimy elevators to their small rooms and crucial, lonely work. Abe would have regarded the Chelsea Hotel as a freak show, and I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t tell which attitudes were mine and which were his. I was out of it on my best days and even more dampened by the surfeit of art and commitment at the Chelsea.

  The hotel was run by Stanley Bard, harried, materialistic and saddled with an enormous hostelry of demanding eccentrics. Racing from his office to a disaster on the fifth floor, Stanley couldn’t believe what he had to put up with to earn a buck: dissipated lives, alcoholism, drugs, unusual sexual behavior, early despair and suicide. He continually surprised himself with the sympathy he felt for artists and the favors he had bestowed over the years—as if his largesse went against all reason. Stanley had been known to give painters a break on the rent or to allow them to pay a month late, and sometimes he even bartered rent for canvases and sculptures. Artists would constantly press him for better deals.

  They’re not like us, he would complain to me when I visited the hotel and he had me cornered in the lobby. Maybe it was my blue button-down shirts, or something on my face that told Stanley that at the core I was a businessman and wheeler-dealer like him—as if we could calm one another down or offer solace. To the best of my knowledge Stanley knew nothing of my father and my persistent yearnings to hear the talk of lighting fixture salesmen, as if this would brighten my life. He usually approached me to seek consolation about
my mother.

  Your mother is crazy, Stanley complained to me, as if Stella were someone else’s mother.

  Why do you say that, Stanley?

  She never wants to pay the rent. She expects me to carry her. A couple of months ago, when I asked for money, your mother got all red in the face and I ran away from her because I was afraid she’d have a heart attack.

  Every night, it seemed, police officers were in the lobby trying to deal with a soul who had gone mad or to investigate an assault or suicide. Stella was charming and conspiratorial at the edge of chaos and dissipation. She made chicken soup for me and whispered about the police in the hall on the day the critic Barry Schwartz leaped out of his fifth-floor window directly above her apartment, splattering onto 23rd Street. His huge despair was a function of his genius, Mother explained to me as I ate her matzoh balls. Mom was friends with George Kleinsinger, the composer of “Tubby the Tuba,” who lived on the top floor within a forest of tropical plants, monkeys, rare birds and large snakes. George liked to show his place off and we often visited. Around the time of Barry Schwartz’s suicide, Kleinsinger’s young black girlfriend was murdered, and for a week their friends drank sangría in the Quixote Bar and speculated about whether George had killed her. This didn’t turn out to be the case, but the rumor was thrilling and seemed to spin writers, filmmakers and composers into months of composition. At the Chelsea life’s biggest downers and disasters were first and foremost grist for the art mill.

  Mom still melted glass in her kiln, no more gold, and her hi-fi poured out Coltrane, Monk, Garner, Fruscella and her musician friend Dollar Brand, who was living down the hall. For several years she had been making polyester resin sculptures of books. Books were perfect for Mom as she was foremost a storyteller and illusionist. She was allowing faces and forms to come into her work like the lyrical refrains that surfaced in the jazz of Coltrane and Monk.

  She called her floor-to-ceiling living room of books “Details of a Lost Library,” and on many nights writers, painters and musicians came by and perused Stella’s myths, dictionaries, novels and religious texts, all of them without words; they sampled her chicken soup and chopped liver and listened to her advice about the future based upon numerology and her interpretation of the stars. Her apartment was a stimulating place to visit, even for me, although I was navigating through the night and taking bearings from Dad. I smirked like him when she read the stars for writers I respected like Claude Brown, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg.