by Sol Stein
Being rich didn't always help. In those days in Oswego being rich meant owning a grocery instead of a shoe store. You could patch up last year's shoes but you couldn't eat yesterday's meal today. Joey was the grocery kid in our class. He used to dispense candy to buy favors the way John D. gave away dimes, but he got beat up more often than most because all the other kids wanted to be sure Joey and his parents got the message: being rich didn't mean being safe. My father used to say that when the Turks came, being a rich Armenian was no advantage over being a poor Armenian, it just made you complacent.
My mother, Marya, was a totally dependent person, an old-world clinging vine who would have had trouble surviving if my father had died. He instructed her, commanded her, praised her, insulted her, loved her, and she lived by his words. I didn't take her as a model. And I couldn't take my father as a model because strong-willed as he was, he couldn't defend himself against the Turks, or the prejudices of Americans toward immigrants, or the depression. The thought that clicked my life together was that I could gain and preserve my independence by fortifying myself against whatever Turks or Americans or anybody had in store. My senses told me it wasn't money or even political power that was indispensable for defense and protection, it was learning the methods. First, you had to cut through all the idealistic bullshit used to control people, you had to see how people were not how they were supposed to be. Then the techniques. A compliment would sometimes work. Other times a stare, a fist, a kick in the ass, or better yet, a way of carrying yourself and walking that made troublemakers pass you by because you didn't look like an easy mark. It got me through school. It got me to the point where I knew that I could count on one person, me. Having allies was okay, as long as privately you didn't trust them. Having friends was okay, too, provided you didn't turn your back on them when they had something to gain by knifing you in the back. I guess you could say I eventually became a lawyer because once you saw how the justice system worked, you didn't want to depend on another lawyer to get you in and around it.
I got on pretty well. People who knew me didn't tangle with me unnecessarily. I learned the rules for getting around other people's rules. I was ready for the Turks, any time. But I wasn't all strength. If I was stronger I could face up to the idea of sorting out the baggage in my head on Dr. Koch's couch, but I wasn't about to show my doctor how I had put myself together. It'd be giving some of my strength to a weaker person. I suppose that might explain why I didn't get married. When I was in my twenties, everybody else did, but the idea seemed a burden I could do without. If the Turks came, I didn't want to protect a wife also. The trouble is you meet a woman like Francine and you wonder who would be protecting whom. She's young and there's a lot she doesn't know yet, but she's learned at a rate that might put her ahead of me in know-how when she's my age. She's self-sufficient. She's willing to share her life, which makes her stronger. Once I had a crazy feeling that if I ever lived with a woman, she'd have to be a Turk to start with so I'd know I was in the enemy camp!
Well, this evening I didn't want to think about any of that, I wanted to drift, do nothing in particular, take my shoes off, read through the junk mail I should have thrown away unopened. Nothing on the television schedule made me want to turn the damn set on. I picked up a novel I'd bought at the airport and never started. In the middle of page one my mind started to wander. There was a girl in the book, not like Francine, but it started me thinking of Francine, and I didn't want to think about Francine, but there I was doing it and the phone rang.
I wanted it to be her, but it was my father, saying, "George? George?"
"It's me. Pop. What's up?"
"Nothing's up, ha-ha," he says, "too old. Want you to come visit. Important. Bring the girl."
"I'm antisocial these days. Pop. Is there anything I can do from here?"
"Say yes. Say when."
"Pop, I've got my life scrambled at the moment—"
"Soon three minutes up," he interrupted. "Hurry say yes."
"You should have called collect."
"God damn George, if I call President of United States I pay for call. If I call you, why should you pay God damn phone company racketeers? You coming, yes, no?"
"What's so urgent? Are you sick?" I asked.
"I sick making phone company rich."
"How about May," I said, "when the weather's good?"
"Now."
"Important?"
Again his silence. I could hear him swallow before he said, "Please."
I didn't remember his ever saying please to me in his life. George Thomassy, man of steel, folded like a tin cup.
"It'd have to be Saturday."
"You bring girl?"
"The girl and I aren't — Pop, I'll come alone."
"Too bad. Girl not Armenian, but very nice. You make mistake, George."
"All my life," I said. "According to you."
"What's that mean?"
"We'll talk when I get there, okay?"
"Dress warm. Cold up here."
"Yes, Pop."
"George, I have important talk with you."
"Are you all right?"
"I live to Saturday, ha-ha."
I've never been one of those work fanatics that uses the weekend to catch up on the week's undone work. For me the weekend has always been R and R time, more recreation than rest because I think it's the change that recharges the motor more than sacktime. I hadn't made my usual Friday- and Saturday-night dates for this coming weekend. I had expected to spend Saturday morning in the stand of trees around my house, cutting off deadwood and chainsawing three or four fallen trees into logs and kindling. But chainsawing can be dangerous if your mind is somewhere else, and I knew my head would be more full of images of Francine than if she were with me all the time. I felt haunted by her, hating the intrusion, and the weakness that had let me break my rules and get overinvolved with one person.
After my father's call, it was like a ping-pong match inside my head: Papa, Francine, Papa, Francine. He knew instantly she was not another one of my women. The old bastard was all instinct. Going to see him, the geographical wrench, might get Francine out of my head.
What a pain in the ass it was getting to Oswego. You got to La-Guardia by seven in the morning to catch the one and only from there to Syracuse, where the car you had reserved might or might not be there for the twenty-six-mile drive. You could get more than halfway to Los Angeles in the time it took to get to Oswego.
The flight to Syracuse was bumpy. I had broken my rule and instead of a novel, brought a case full of briefs on the plane. I couldn't concentrate on them. Her face was there. Her body, all too recent to obliterate.
It was damn cold in Syracuse, with the wind whipping around the airport like an invisible flail. I ducked inside the car rental office, and wouldn't you know: no reservation for George Thomassy.
I told the klutz behind the counter that I had made the call myself, and I had taken the name of the clerk who had confirmed the reservation. I showed Klutz the name.
"She don't work weekends," he said.
"What's that blue four-door?" I said, pointing to a car just outside the plate glass window.
"It's reserved," said Klutz.
"By whom?"
"I don't have to tell you that."
I guess I looked like I was going to hop over the counter and grab him by the throat.
Klutz looked in the box on the counter. "It's for Mr. Patterson. He called this morning."
"I called two damn days ago. What time's that reservation for?"
"Eight A.M."
"Good. It's nearly nine. I'll take that car."
"What do I do if Patterson shows up?"
"I assume you didn't walk to work this morning. You rent him your car. Let me have the form."
I signed, initialed the collision extra, took the yellow copy, and held my hand out for the key,
"It's in the ignition."
"Thanks," I said.
It's like that everywher
e in this garbaged-up world. They clean the ashtrays but they lose the reservations.
Pop was waiting for me. He opened the door before I could knock, and instead of backing off when I was inside, he did what he hadn't done in thirty years. He actually put his arms around me. Just for a second.
"Cold here," he said, pouring thick, dark Turkish coffee.
"You never minded the cold."
"Mind now."
We sat in front of the fire like in the old days, side by side. Finally he said, "George, I glad you come."
I nodded.
"George, I have something to say."
I nodded again, this time looking at him.
"I die."
"What's wrong?" My heart pumped.
"Nothing wrong. Everybody die. Soon my turn. I been thinking. I got no wife, no other kids, I pop off, somebody find me, maybe, not too sure, call you, not too sure, what happen to the pictures? Worries me."
"What pictures?"
"Wait."
I followed him up the stairs. He puffed more than I remembered him to. When he reached the top, he turned around and said, "I told you wait."
Like a kid I backed off, retreated to my place at the fire. I could hear him opening doors, pulling a chair, wondered if he should be standing on a chair in his condition, whatever his condition was. I held back. I didn't want to upset him.
It took him five or six minutes to come back down with the three cardboard boxes stacked in his arms.
"Not too close to fire," he said.
The boxes were full of ancient photographs, some in a sepia tint. "You know what these are?" he asked.
"Old country?"
"Some. Some here when we first come. Some after you born. No more pictures after Marya dead." He looked at me. "Marya your mother."
That's when I first wondered if the arteries in his head were hardening, whether there wasn't something physically wrong besides age.
"You write good, George. I tell you each picture, you write on back careful, what I say."
And so we went through them, Shushan Bedrossian, a very young somewhat pudgy girl. "Write down," he said, spelling the name, "write down she a cousin of a cousin from Zeytoon."
Then he said, "Your mother sometimes cry when I take that picture out to look at it. Jealous of dead girl. Have to look, to remember. When I poof, you have to keep these pictures, look at all the dead so they are in your memory for your children."
I did not speak to him about the chances of a forty-four-year-old bachelor continuing the family.
I must have written on the back of pictures for more than two hours, spelling out the Armenian names and the Turkish names and checking them with the old man to see that I got them right.
"We ought to get these into albums," I said.
"What for?" His anger at the idea seemed very important to him.
The stew he warmed up wasn't bad. We sat at the table in silence for a while, and then he pushed himself up with his arms and went for the stairs. He had only gone up one or two when he turned to me and said, "George, by my bed, three small bottles, big white pills, small white pills, pink pills. Bring pink pills."
I went up the stairs two at a time. His room was as messy as I had remembered it. On his bedside table there was a pharmacy of bottles. But three small ones were in front and apart from the rest. I tried to read the labels for hints as to his condition. I learned nothing.
Downstairs he said, "You take too long." He swallowed the pink pill with cold coffee. "Doctor terrible," he said. "Always new medicines. Gets kickback from drugstore."
"You could try another doctor."
"All crooks. All got drugstore kickbacks."
"What's wrong with you, Pop?"
"Too old."
"You're not old. Pop, by today's standards."
"I not today. I yesterday. Tired. Stairs hard, prick soft, no good."
"Maybe it'd be a good idea to come down to the city. I'd have you checked out at one of the good hospitals. How about it?"
"What for?"
"You have to know what's wrong. Doesn't the doctor tell you?"
"Tells me mumbo-jumbo. I tell him write it down for you."
He took a piece of paper out of the drawer. It said, "Arteriosclerosis." He was watching my face.
"You can live a long time with that. If you follow the doctor's rules."
"I follow my rules. I take pills okay when I remember. Just like you, George."
"Who chops the firewood?"
"Who you think? You think I crazy buy wood with trees all over?"
"You shouldn't do strenuous things."
"Bullshit. Pretty woman walk in here, take clothes off, I do what I do, who cares strain?" He laughed through his brown teeth. "I not dead yet. You send two women, okay too." He laughed again, gestured at the coffee pot.
"Does the doctor know you drink all that black coffee?"
"George, you nuts? I think I gonna call doctor four five times a day say okay I drink coffee now?"
I made tea for us both.
Then, sitting by the fire, he sang an Armenian song. It sounded like a lullaby.
"You no remember?" he asked.
I remembered my mother singing, not him.
"I'm not sure," I said.
"You getting old up here," he said, gesturing at his head. "How's your girl?" he said. "Better make sure you don't get old down there." And he was singing again. A love song, I think. I wish I had learned Armenian, however useless it was for dealing with the world.
When it was time to leave for the last plane from Syracuse to La-Guardia, I got him to promise that next time he would come and visit me, and stay as long as he wanted to. He didn't believe I meant it.
"I mean it," I said, and I kissed his rough cheek.
At the door, he steeled himself not to let his wet eyes run. "When I dead," he shouted after me, "you can put pictures in albums, okay?"
Forty-three
Francine
I have been neglecting Bill.
I have not been neglecting Bill. He doesn't interest me.
He is such a nice man.
George is not a nice man. He is an interesting man. Can't a nice man be interesting? I must ask Joan and Margaret, they're both married to such nice men.
I have been neglecting my sisters.
Joan and Margaret come in to town from their respective exurbias once each month to do Bloomingdale's, have a wicked two-cocktail lunch, take in a matinee, exchange gossip.
Dear Joan and Margaret, I thought I'd join you for lunch today. You are older, more experienced. Tell me, am I looking for trouble with George Thomassy, what do you think? I'm making him sound like a sheriff? Oh no, he's a lawyer, Gary Cooper Thomassy.
How old is he? Let's see now, Joan, your husband is two years older than you are, and Margaret, your husband is three years older than you are, and George Thomassy is seventeen years older than I am, isn't it obscene? Have I what, gone to bed with him? Now Joan, I haven't asked you about developments in your predicament, as you called it, does Bob still fall asleep in the middle of things? And Margaret, is Harvey still too shy to you-know-what? I see, you want to know if my lawyer friend and I are compatible, considering the difference in our ages and that he's an ethnic? Well, I enjoy his company afterwards, is that a good sign?
Is he successful? Mmmmm. I assume that's a money question. I don't know about his money, he has his eye on the process, not the destination. It's called drive. I have no idea what his annual income might be. He lives modestly compared to J. Paul Getty. By the way, did I tell you I was raped? I didn't? I don't suppose either of you have ever had the experience or you would have told us, I'm sure. A gas station owner in my case, not very classy. He's going to jail, if he's not already there.
Why thank you. Without sisters, who would wish me luck?
Comment by Thomassy
I don't believe in luck. Sometimes a fortunate coincidence comes along to help, but the engine isn't driven on luck. Virtue doth not
beget its own rewards. I am not a cynic. I am a realist.
What in stupid hell is a realist doing getting in deep with a kid of twenty-seven?
She is not a kid. I hate to remember what I was like at twenty-seven.
She is demanding. I have no respect for rugs and dishrags in the form of people. I am demanding, why shouldn't she be?
What evidence, Your Honor, is there that she and I are right for each other?
Is it objectively verifiable that I'm happy when I'm with her and unhappy when I'm not with her?
Your Honor, that is circumstantial evidence, at best. Besides, I got restless as hell in the studio the other night.
I was not with her? A spectator, watching her? Your Honor, if she came to this court, she would be a spectator watching me in my arena.
Should lovers watch each other performing professionally? Their acts for the world are what?
Theater.
Your Honor, life happens offstage, in private, unnoticed by strangers.
I feel convicted. I didn't do anything. Your Honor. I request a stay of sentence.
Forty-four
Francine
I couldn't wait for my interview with Mr. Straws. That show with Butterball started a chain reaction in my head. For the first time, I had not been putting stuff together for others to use, but speaking my own mind, I loved it! If my vocation wasn't in broadcast, it had to be in something like it. Dealing with Butterball not in someone's drawing room but on the air, live, with people listening to me skewer him, gave me the biggest high I've ever had in a work situation. It wasn't work, it was play, and people got paid for it! And the notoriety was not incidental. My ego was flowering.
Straws's first name turned out to be Henry. He was wearing one of those suits with overly wide lapels and slanted pockets, Cardin or something Italian. He popped up from his chair and came around to shake hands enthusiastically. His shoes had tassels.
"Do sit down," he said, hovering over me for a second or two before retreating behind his desk.