He moved over to the armchair near the window. “I can’t sit here very long,” he said, “it sinks down too low. In a moment I’ll change to the hard chair. You see, with all this harness on it gets pretty uncomfortable at times, especially when it’s warm.” As he talked he kept pressing the long tube which ran down his leg. “You see, it’s getting gritty again. Just like sand inside. You’d never think that you pass off all that solid matter in your urine, would you? It’s the damndest thing. I take all the medicines he prescribes religiously, but the damned stuff will accumulate. That’s my condition, I suppose. When it gets too thick I have to go to the doctor and let him irrigate me. About once a month, that is. And does that hurt! Well, we won’t talk about that now. Some times it’s worse than other times. There was one time I thought I couldn’t stand it any more—they must have heard me for blocks around. If everything goes well I can stretch the visits to five or six weeks. It’s five dollars a crack, you know.”
I ventured to suggest that it might be better if he went oftener instead of trying to stretch it out.
“That’s just what I say,” he responded promptly. “But Mother says we have to economize—there’s nothing coming in any more, you know. Of course she doesn’t have to stand the pain.”
I looked at my mother inquiringly. She was irritated that my father should have put it thus. “You can’t run to the doctor every time you have a little pain,” she said scoldingly, as if to rebuke him for having brought up the subject. “I’ve told him time and again that’s his condition.”
By condition she meant that he would have to endure his suffering until . . . well, if she had to put it baldly she would say—until the end. He was lucky to be alive, after all he had gone through. “If it weren’t for that old bag, for that awful leakage,” she ruminated aloud, “Father would be all right. You see what an appetite he has—and what a color!”
“Yes,” my sister put in, “he eats more than any of us. We do all the work; he has it easy.”
My father gave me another look. My mother, catching his mute appeal, tried to pass it over lightly with a little joke, one of those crude jokes which the family were fond of. “Look at him,” she said with a slightly hysterical laugh, “hasn’t he a good color? Why, he’s as tough as an old rooster. You couldn’t kill him off with an axe!”
It was impossible for me to laugh at this. But my sister, who had learned to take her cue from my mother, suddenly grew apoplectic with indignation. “Look at us,” she exclaimed, rolling her head from side to side. “Look how thin we got! Seventy times a day I climbed the stairs when Father was in bed! Everybody tells me how bad I look, that I must take care of myself. We don’t even have a chance to go to the movies. I haven’t been to New York for over a year.”
“And I have a cinch of it, is that it?” my father put in pepperily. “Well, I wish I could change places with you, that’s all I want to say.”
“Come now,” said my mother, addressing my father as if he were a petulant child, “you know you shouldn’t talk like that. We’re doing our best, you know that.”
“Yes,” said my father, his tone getting more caustic, “and what about that cranberry juice I’m supposed to drink every day?”
With this my mother and sister turned on him savagely. How could he talk that way, they wanted to know, when they had been working themselves to the bone nursing and tending him? They turned to me. I must try to understand, they explained, that it was difficult sometimes to get out of the house, even to go as far as the corner.
“Couldn’t you use the phone?” I asked.
The phone had been disconnected long ago, they told me. Another of my mother’s economies, it seemed.
“But supposing something happened during the night?” I ventured to say.
“That’s just what I tell them,” my father put in. “That was Mother’s idea, shutting off the phone. I never approved of it.”
“The things you say!” said my mother, trying to silence him with a frowning grimace. She turned to me, as if I were the very seat of reason. “All the neighbors have phones,” she said. “Why, they won’t even let me pay for a call—but of course I do in some other way. And then there’s Teves up at the corner. . . .”
“You mean the undertaker?” I said.
“Yes,” said my father. “You see, when the weather permits I often take a stroll as far as the corner. If Teves is there he brings a camp chair out for me—and if I want to make a call why I use his phone. He never charges me for it. He’s been very decent, I must say that.” And then he went on to explain to me how nice it was to be able to sit up there at the corner and watch the promenade. There was more life there, he reflected almost wistfully. “You know, one gets sick of seeing the same faces all the time, isn’t that so?”
“I hope you’re not sick of us!” said my mother reproachfully.
“You know that’s not what I mean,” replied my father, obviously a little weary of this sort of exchange.
As I got up to change my seat I noticed a pile of old newspapers on the rocker. “What are you doing with those?” I asked.
“Don’t touch them!” screamed my sister. “Those are for me!”
My father quickly explained that my sister had taken to reading the papers since my absence. “It’s good for her,” he said, “it takes her mind off things. She’s a little slow, though . . . always about a month behind.”
“I am not,” said my sister tartly. “I’m only two weeks behind. If we didn’t have so much work to do I’d be up to date. The minister says. . . .”
“All right, you win,” said my father, trying to shut her up. “You can’t say a word in this house without stepping on some one’s toes.”
There was a Vox-Pop program due over the radio any minute. They wanted to know if I had ever heard it, but before I could say yes or no my sister put in her oar—she wanted to listen to the choir singing carols. “Perhaps he’d like to hear some more war news,” said my mother. She said it as though, having just come from Europe, I had a special proprietary interest in the grand carnage.
“Have you ever heard Raymond Gram Swing?” asked my father.
I was about to tell him I hadn’t when my sister informed us that he wasn’t on this evening.
“How about Gabriel Heatter then?” said my father.
“He’s no good,” said my sister, “he’s a Jew.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” said my father.
“I like Kaltenborn,” said my sister. “He has such a beautiful voice.”
“Personally,” said my father, “I prefer Raymond Swing. He’s very impartial. He always begins—‘Good Evening!’ Never ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ or ‘My friends,’ as President Roosevelt says. You’ll see. . . .”
This conversation was like a victrola record out of the past. Suddenly the whole American scene, as it is portrayed over the radio, came flooding back—chewing gum, furniture polish, can openers, mineral waters, laxatives, ointments, corn cures, liver pills, insurance policies; the crooners with their eunuchlike voices; the comedians with their stale jokes; the puzzlers with their inane questions (how many matches in a cord of wood?); the Ford Sunday evening hour, the Bulova watch business, the xylophones, the quartets, the bugle calls, the roosters crowing, the canaries warbling, the chimes bringing tears, the songs of yesterday, the news fresh from the griddle, the facts, the facts, the facts. . . . Here it was again, the same old stuff, and as I was soon to discover, more stupefying and stultifying than ever. A man named Fadiman, whom I was later to see in the movies with a quartet of well-informed nit-wits, had organized some kind of puzzle committee—Information Please, I think it was called. This apparently was the coup de grâce of the evening’s entertainment and befuddlement. This was real education, so they informed me. I squirmed in my seat and tried to assume an air of genuine interest.
It was a relief when they shut the bloody thing off and settled down to telling me about their friends and neighbors, about the acciden
ts and illnesses of which seemingly there was no end. Surely I remembered Mrs. Froehlich? Well, all of a sudden—she was the picture of health, mind you!—she was taken to the hospital to be operated on. Cancer of the bladder it was. Lasted only two months. And just before she died—“she doesn’t know it,” said my father, absent-mindedly using the present tense—her husband met with an accident. Ran into a tree and had his head taken off—just as clean as a razor. The undertakers had sewn it back on, of course—wonderful job they made of it too. Nobody would have been able to tell it, seeing him lying there in the coffin. Marvelous what they can do nowadays, the old man reflected aloud. Anyway, that’s how it was with Mrs. Froehlich. Nobody would have thought that those two would pass on so quickly. They were only in their fifties. . . .
Listening to their recital I got the impression that the whole neighborhood was crippled and riddled with malignant diseases. Everybody with whom they had any dealings, friend, relative, neighbor, butcher, letter-carrier, gas inspector, every one without exception carried about with him perpetually a little flower which grew out of his own body and which was named after one or the other of the familiar maladies, such as rheumatism, arthritis, pneumonia, cancer, dropsy, anemia, dysentery, meningitis, epilepsy, hernia, encephalitis, megalomania, chilblains, dyspepsia and so on and so forth. Those who weren’t crippled, diseased or insane were out of work and living on relief. Those who could use their legs were on line at the movies waiting for the doors to be thrown open. I was reminded in a mild way of Voyage au Bout de la Nuit. The difference between these two worlds otherwise so similar lay in the standard of living; even those on relief were living under conditions which would have seemed luxurious to that suburban working class whom Céline writes about. In Brooklyn, so it seemed to me, they were dying of malnutrition of the soul. They lived on as vegetable tissue, flabby, sleep-drugged, disease-ridden carcasses with just enough intelligence to enable them to buy oil burners, radios, automobiles, newspapers, tickets for the cinema. One whom I had known as a ball-player when I was a boy was now a retired policeman who spent his evenings writing in old Gothic. He had composed the Lord’s Prayer in this script on a small piece of cardboard, so they were telling me, and when it was finished he discovered that he had omitted a word. So he was doing it over again, had been at it over a month already. He lived with his sister, an old maid, in a lugubrious big house which they had inherited from their parents. They didn’t want any tenants—it was too much bother. They never went anywhere, never visited anybody, never had any company. The sister was a gossip who sometimes took three hours to get from the house to the corner drug store. It was said that they would leave their money to the Old Folks’ Home when they died.
My father seemed to know every one for blocks around. He also knew who came home late at night because, sitting in the parlor at the front window all hours of the night waiting for the water to flow, he got a slant on things such as he’d never had before. What amazed him apparently was the number of young women who came home alone at all hours of the night, some of them tight as a pigskin. People no longer had to get up early to go to work, at least not in this neighborhood. When he was a boy, he remarked, work began at daylight and lasted till ten in the evening. At eight-thirty, while these good for nothings were still turning over in bed, he was already having a second breakfast, meaning some pumpernickel sandwiches and a pitcher of beer.
The recital was interrupted because the bag was beginning to fill up. In the kitchen my father emptied the contents of the bag into an old beer pitcher, examined it to see if the urine looked cloudy or sandy, and then emptied it in the toilet. His whole attention, since the advent of the bag, was concentrated on the quality and flow of his urine. “People say hello, how are you getting on, and then biffo! they forget about you,” he said, as he came back and resumed his place by the window. It was a random remark, apropos of nothing as far as I can remember, but what he meant evidently was that others could forget whereas he couldn’t. At night, on going to bed, he had always the comforting thought that in an hour or two he would be obliged to get up and catch the urine before it began to leak out of the hole which the doctor had drilled in his stomach. There were rags lying about everywhere, ready to catch the overflow, and newspapers, in order to prevent the bedding and furniture from being ruined by the endless flow. Sometimes it would take hours for the urine to begin flowing and at other times the bag would have to be emptied two or three times in quick succession; now and then it would come out in the natural way also, as well as from the tube and the wound itself. It was a humiliating sort of malady as well as a painful one.
Out of a clear sky my mother, in an obviously false natural voice, suddenly requested me to accompany her upstairs, saying that she wanted to show me some of the improvements which had been made during my absence. We no sooner got to the landing than she began explaining to me in muffled tones that my father’s condition was incurable. “He’ll never get well,” she said, “it’s . . . ,” and she mentioned that word which has come to be synonymous with modern civilization, the word which holds the same terror for the man of today as did leprosy for the men of old. It was no surprise to me, I must say. If anything, I was amazed that it was only that and nothing more. What bothered me more than anything was the loud voice in which she was whispering to me, for the doors were all open and my father could easily have heard what she was saying had he tried. I made her walk me through the rooms and tell me in a natural voice about the various renovations, about the thermostat, for instance, which was hanging on the wall under my grandfather’s portrait. That fortunately brought up the subject of the new oil burner, thus precipitating a hurried visit of inspection to the cellar.
The appearance of the cellar was a complete surprise. It had been denuded, the coal bins removed, the shelves taken out, the walls whitewashed. Like some medieval object used by alchemists, there stood the oil burner neat, immaculate, silent except for a spasmodic ticking whose rhythm was unpredictable. From the reverence with which my mother spoke of it I gathered that the oil burner was quite the most important object in the house. I gazed at it in fascination and astonishment. No more coal or wood, no ashes to haul, no coal gas, no watching, no fussing, no fuming, no dirt, no smoke; temperature always the same, one for day and one for night; the little instrument on the parlor wall regulated its functioning automatically. It was as though a magician had secreted himself in the walls of the house, a new electro-dynamic, super-heterodyne god of the hearth. The cellar, which had once been a frightening place filled with unknown treasures, had now become bright and habitable; one could serve lunch down there on the concrete floor. With the installation of the oil burner a good part of my boyhood was wiped out. Above all I missed the shelves where the wine bottles covered with cobwebs had been kept. There was no more wine, no more champagne, not even a case of beer. Nothing but the oil burner—and that peculiar, unnaturally rhythmed ticking which however muffled always gave me a start.
As we climbed the stairs I observed another sacred object also ticking in a mechanically epileptic way—the refrigerator. I hadn’t seen a refrigerator since I left America and of course those I had known then were long since outmoded. In France I hadn’t even used an ice-box, such as we had been accustomed to at home. I bought only as much as was required for the current meal; what was perishable perished, whatever turned sour turned sour, that was all. Nobody I knew in Paris owned a refrigerator; nobody I knew ever thought of refrigerators. As for Greece, where coal was at a premium, the cooking was done on charcoal stoves. And, if one had any culinary instincts, the meals could be just as palatable, just as delicious and nourishing as anywhere else. I was reminded of Greece and the charcoal stoves because I had suddenly become aware that the old coal stove in the kitchen was missing, its place taken now by a shining white enameled gas range, another indispensable, just-as-cheap and equally sacred object as the oil burner and the refrigerator. I began to wonder if my mother had become a little daffy during my absence. Was e
verybody installing these new conveniences? I inquired casually. Most everybody, was the answer, including some who couldn’t afford to do so. The Gothic maniac and his sister hadn’t, to be sure, but then they were eccentric—they never bought anything unless they had to. My mother, I couldn’t deny, had the good excuse that they were getting old and that these little innovations meant a great saving of labor. I was glad, in fact, that they had been able to provide for themselves so well. At the same time, however, I couldn’t help but think of the old ones in Europe; they had not only managed to do without these comforts but, so it seemed to me, they remained far healthier, saner and more joyous than the old ones in America. America has comforts; Europe has other things which make all these comforts seem quite unimportant.
During the conversation which ensued my father brought up the subject of the tailor shop which he hadn’t set foot in for over three years. He complained that he never heard a word from his former partner. “He’s too miserly to spend a nickel on a telephone call,” he said. “I know there was an order from So-and-So for a couple of suits; that was about six months ago. I haven’t heard a word about it since.” I naturally volunteered to pay a visit to the shop one day and inquire about things. “Of course,” he said, “he doesn’t have to worry any more whether things go or not. His daughter is a movie star now, you know.” It was possible too, he went on to say, that the client had gone off on a cruise; he was always knocking about somewhere in his yacht. “By the time he comes in again he’ll have either gained a few pounds or lost a few, and then everything will have to be altered. It may be a year before he’s ready to take the clothes.”
The Henry Miller Reader Page 12