Far From the Sea

Tuesday

Sunlight was streaming through the window.

He looked at his digital watch. It was a little past 6:00 a.m. The room was still hot. He didn’t know whether he should close the drapes, blotting out the sunlight but also the air, or simply get up to face the day. It was almost five hours before he could see his father again.

He got out of bed.

He was naked, he always slept naked. Molly went to bed wearing a T-shirt and panties. Never just the T-shirt alone. He kept asking her if she was expecting a rapist in the middle of the night. She always answered, “Well, what business is that of yours?” That first time on the phone in Rockaway, she told him she was wearing a white T-shirt and blue bikini panties, WQXR lettered across the front of the shirt. She still listened to classical music a lot. He had never developed a taste for it.

He went into the bathroom and sat on the bowl to urinate. Whenever Molly asked him why he sat to pee, like a woman, he told her he was resting. More and more, over the past few years, he had felt the need to rest. He thought about the case he had just lost. The plaintiff rests, Your Honor.

He flushed the toilet and then looked at himself in the mirror. He rarely studied his face in the mirror, except when he was drunk. When he was drunk, he looked at himself long and hard and said aloud, “You’re a damn fool, Counselor.” He thought it sad that the times he could remember most vividly were the times he’d made a fool of himself. Molly kept telling him he was guilt-ridden. All Jews are guilt-ridden, she said; that’s why so many Jews become lawyers. He honestly could not see the connection.

He looked at himself in the mirror now.

He studied himself for a long time.

Then he went into the shower.

He was waiting for room service to bring his orange juice and coffee when he saw the girl crossing the tiled area around the pool, fifteen stories below. The pool was empty, the entire area was empty, this was still only seven in the morning. The girl was surely the same one he’d seen in the restaurant last night, tall and slender, her blond hair loosened now to fall below her shoulders. She was wearing a scanty black bikini. Her skin was very white. She strode across the tile in high-heeled sandals. At the steps leading to the beach, she took off the sandals. With the sandals dangling in one hand, she stepped down onto the sand. He watched her as she crossed the beach to the edge of the sea. Sandals still in her hand, she began walking along the shore. He watched her for a long while, until she was very small in the distance.

He had smoked almost a full pack of cigarettes by a quarter to nine. He had watched a morning talk show on television. He had finished his coffee and ordered another potful. He looked at his watch again. He did not want to call Kaplan until after nine. The digital seconds ticked away, the minute indicator changed. The room-service waiter brought the second potful of coffee.

“Another scorcher,” he told David.

“Have they fixed the air conditioning yet?”

“Still working on it. Place feels like a tomb here, don’t it? Six hundred rooms, we only got sixty booked. Mostly English people. But we got a big party of South Americans coming in next week. Should be a lot livelier then. You here on vacation?”

“No,” David said.

The waiter offered him the check and he signed it.

“Have a nice day, anyway,” the waiter said, and went out.

David poured himself a cup of coffee and dialed Kaplan’s number. The answering service told him she would make sure the doctor got his message. On the television screen across the room, a talk-show host was leading a group of fat women through an exercise class. Legs moving like scissors. Thick thighs. Leotards. David sipped at his coffee. He looked at the phone. Across the room, the women on television were doing pushups now.

He went to the window and looked down at the pool. A handful of people were in the water. Mostly English, the waiter had said. He remembered a conversation he’d had with a London barrister (or solicitor, he never could get them straight) when he and Molly were planning a side-excursion to Clovelly. “You won’t like Clovelly,” the man had said. “All you’ll find there are a great many lower-class Englishmen sitting on jackasses to have their photos taken.” He wondered now what kind of Englishmen came to Miami in the month of June.

They were younger then, he and Molly, much younger.

Time weighed heavily in this room.

He debated going down to sit by the pool before it was time to go to the hospital. Or perhaps a walk along the beach. The sea was calm today, it was a season of calm weather. But what if Kaplan called? He supposed he could leave word that he was at the pool. He decided against it. He lit another cigarette. He smoked too much, he knew he did. Molly was always nagging him about how much he smoked. Molly nagged him about his drinking, too. His father drank only in moderation. His father rarely smoked more than three cigars a day, one after each meal. His father watched his diet. His father was careful to get enough exercise. But his father was lying in a hospital, unable to heal properly.

He poured another cup of coffee.

He sat watching the television screen.

They were all laughing on the television screen.

He looked at his watch.

Kaplan did not call until a quarter past ten.

“Mr. Weber?” he said. “Dr. Kaplan.”

His voice was soft and tired, somewhat sad. For a frightening moment, David thought the doctor was calling to tell him his father was dead.

“How is he?” he asked at once.

“The same,” Kaplan said in his soft, tired, sad voice. “No change at all.”

“Have you seen the X rays yet?”

“They’re not X rays exactly. The scan works somewhat like a Geiger counter.”

“But there are pictures?”

“Yes, and I’ve seen the first of them. I didn’t want to call until I’d had an opportunity to discuss them with the radiologist.”

“What did they show?”

“Nothing. Well, that isn’t precisely accurate. There was a tiny dot that might or might not indicate something. We’ll know better when we complete the series.”

“What might it indicate? The dot?”

“A possible area of infection. But, really, it’s too early to tell yet. When the dye’s been more fully assimilated, we’ll have a better idea of what’s there.”

“When will that be?” David asked.

“Sometime this afternoon.”

“May I call you then?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What would be a good time?”

“Five? A little after five.”

“I’ll call you. Thank you, Dr. Kaplan.”

“Mr. Weber,” he said, and hung up.

His cousin Sidney came into the waiting room at a quarter to eleven. Sidney was a distant cousin, so damn distant that David hadn’t even known him till after his father moved down to Florida. Sidney was related on his mother’s side of the family, the Katz side. His mother’s uncle’s son’s son, which made Sidney a second cousin to his mother, a second cousin to his father by marriage only, and a total stranger to David.

Sidney lived in Fort Lauderdale. He came to Miami every Tuesday for rehabilitation therapy at the Veteran’s Hospital. Sidney had served with the U.S. Army during World War II. In the mechanized cavalry. A mine had exploded under his tank. He was a little older than David, fifty-three or — four David guessed, and he looked reasonably whole and healthy. But he collected his pension nonetheless, and he went every week for rehabilitation therapy. Sidney was a stream-of-consciousness talker who said everything that came into his mind. He did not need a conversational partner; Sidney was a one-man soft-shoe duet.

“So when did you get down here, Davey?” he said. “I came to see him right after the operation, you know, he looked fine then, the doctor told me there were no complications, it was cancer, huh, was that what it was, malignant, huh? I’ve been having trouble with the car, what kind of a car do you drive up there, had to get a new muffler, two hundred bucks it cost me, well, you have to have a car that runs, am I right? He didn’t know you were coming down, he said he didn’t want to bother you when you had that big case, how’d it turn out, did you win it or lose it? What’s happening with him, anyway, he’s still in Intensive Care? I call the hospital, they tell me his condition is critical, that’s what they tell anybody who calls about a patient in Intensive Care, his condition is critical. That doesn’t mean he’s dying, it only means he’s in Intensive Care. So how’d the big trial go? Where’s your office now, still in Manhattan? I don’t miss New York at all, you can shove New York. My mother’s still up there in the Bronx, neighborhood all full of spies and niggers, I can’t get her to budge. Says she was born there, and that’s where she’ll stay till she dies. I got this great house in Lauderdale, ask your dad, he’ll tell you. Swimming pool and everything, have you got a pool up there? Do you live right in the city, or outside someplace? You got a pool? I keep telling your dad he should move to Lauderdale, all these Cubans here now, it’s worth your life to walk up Collins Avenue. He tells me he likes it here, worth his life. Listen, I do my best for him. I take him anywhere he wants to go, he’s eighty-two years old, never did like to drive even when he was younger. I take him anywhere he wants to go, it isn’t cheap to run a car these days, gas is expensive, I had to put in a new muffler, cost me two hundred bucks. I’ve got close to sixty thousand miles on that little buggy, keep it in top-notch shape, where are you staying down here, at the old man’s apartment? You should be staying at the apartment, save a few bucks, what are you doing, staying at a hotel? It’s like a ghost town right now, all those reports about crime in Miami, there’s crime everywhere, am I right? Not only in Florida. They make such a big deal about it on television, it scares everybody off, it’ll kill this town, what they’re saying on television. I was telling your dad last week, he should be careful walking late at night, these Cubans. Still, there’s crime everywhere, am I right, look at Atlanta. What are you doing about his bills, are you paying his bills? I’d pay them myself, I told him I’d lay out the money, but I’m short of cash just now, I had to get that new muffler, you know, and Lillian, your cousin Lillian, had a big dental bill, it’s murder trying to keep up these days. But you should pay his bills or they’ll cut off his electricity, everything in the refrigerator’ll spoil, the apartment’ll stink like a city dump. The phone, too, you don’t want them to cut off his phone, you should be paying his bills, Davey, I’d pay them myself if I wasn’t so short of cash. How’d you come down here, did you drive down? What kind of car do you drive up there? When did you get here?”

“It’s eleven o’clock,” the pink lady said. “You can go in now.”

He had the feeling, as he passed the open doors to the rooms in the unit, as he passed the overflow beds in the corridor, that all of the people here looked alike. They were all old, they were all very sick, and they all resembled his father. Even the old women resembled his father. He could understand now the mistake he’d made yesterday, when he’d thought the man in the corridor bed was his father. They all looked alike in their misery and their sickness. They all looked as if they were dying.

“Hey, Morrie, how you doing?” his cousin boomed. “Look who’s here, Davey’s here! Do you know Davey? Can you recognize Davey? Can you recognize me, Morrie?”

“Hello, Sid,” his father said wearily.

“See,” Sidney said, “he recognizes me. Good, Morrie, that’s very good. I was just telling Davey he ought to pay your bills. I’d pay them myself, but I’m a little short of cash just now. You don’t want your electricity cut off, do you, Morrie? They cut it off in a minute nowadays, you miss a single bill you’re in the dark for the rest of your life. I was telling Davey...”

“Don’t bother him about bills,” David said. “How are you feeling, Pop?”

“Just wonderful,” his father said.

“You’re looking better.”

“I must look terrific,” his father said, “the way they’re taking pictures of me day and night.”

“Pictures?” Sidney said. “What pictures? X-ray pictures?”

“No, technicolor pictures of my putz,” his father said.

“That’s very funny,” Sidney said. “He’s still got his sense of humor, you see that? Keep your sense of humor, Morrie, that’s the main thing. Did you hear the one about the three old guys sitting around talking about their health? The first one says he’s in perfect health, these are three old cockers, you understand, Morrie?”

“Like me,” his father said.

“No, not like you,” David said quickly.

“So the first one says he’s in perfect health, except that he’s constipated, he can’t move his bowels. The second one, another old cocker, says he has no trouble at all with his bowels, but he can’t urinate, he has trouble urinating. The third old cocker, he says, ‘I have no trouble with my bowels. Every morning, as soon as I wake up, I move my bowels like clockwork. Then I urinate every morning like clockwork. And then I get out of bed.’ ”

Without blinking an eye, deadpan, David’s father said, “That joke’ll be the urination of me.”

“It’s a killer, ain’t it?” Sidney said, laughing. “I told it to Lillian yesterday, she said, ‘Sid, you’re disgusting,’ but she was laughing to beat the band. You got to keep your sense of humor in this world, otherwise what’s it all about? What’s it all about, Alfie, that was some song, that was a song that told people what it was all...”

“Sidney,” David said, “I’d like to talk to my father privately.”

“What?”

“I said I’d like...”

“Sure, hey, you want to be alone with him, sure, I know we only got just a few minutes in here, sure. I’ll try to come back on Thursday, Morrie, OK? It’s a long drive from Lauderdale, but that don’t matter. I had to get the buggy fixed, you know, I was having trouble with the muffler. Cost me two hundred bucks, just what I needed like a loch in kop. That’s why I can’t pay your bills just now, I’m a little short of cash, otherwise I’d lay it out for you. Get him to pay your bills, Morrie, you hear? Pay your dad’s bills, Davey. Otherwise you’ll go home, the apartment’ll stink. I’ll see you outside. So long, Morrie,” he said, “keep your sense of humor,” and walked out.

“I’m paying your bills,” David said.

“I know you are.”

“Pop, I talked to Dr. Kaplan a little while ago, he won’t really know what the pictures show until sometime later today. If they find something, and they can clear it up, you’ll be out of here in no time.”

“Sure, no time at all.”

“That’s the truth, Pop.”

“Sure. I’m in Intensive Care it’s been three weeks already, who are they trying to kid?”

“Your heartbeat looks good and strong...”

“When did you become a doctor all of a sudden?”

“Well, I can see your heartbeat up there...”

“I never had any trouble with my heart. That’s not the trouble. The trouble is I have a hole in my belly.”

“Only temporarily.”

“Only till I die.”

“You’re not going to die, Pop.”

“Who says? My son the doctor?”

“Well, I’m...”

“My son the lawyer who can’t win a case?”

The room went silent.

“You see that wall?” his father said.

“Which wall?”

“The wall there. Can’t you see the wall?”

“What about it?”

“It’s a fake wall.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s nothing behind it.”

“There’s another room behind it, Pop. The room next door.”

“No, there’s no room next door.”

“Sure, there is. I saw it myself. There’s another patient in the room next door.”

His father shook his head. “There’s no room there, David, are you telling me? There’s only shelves behind that wall.”

“Shelves?”

“With goods for sale. The stuff they steal from the patients. Their suits and rings and watches and robes and slippers, all the stuff the people come in with. When they die, they put all that stuff on the shelves there, and they have a sale. They mark it up, of course, they have to make a profit on it. There’s nothing behind that door there. Just a big hole in the wall. People go through that hole day and night, to look over the goods on the shelves, pick out what they want. There’s a sale day and night.”

“Your robe is behind the door there, Pop. Just your robe and the wall. There’s no hole behind the door.”

“There’s a hole there, David. Bigger than the one in my belly. It has to be bigger, all those people marching through to look at the goods.”

“I’ll close the door if you like, so you can see there’s no hole behind it.”

“You don’t have to close the door.”

“Pop...”

“I can see there’s a hole, am I blind?”

“No, Pop.”

“So don’t tell me there’s no hole there.”

“Okay, Pop.”

“Did you meet Alvin?”

“Who’s Alvin?”

“Allan, I mean. One of the nurses. He used to lift weights. He picks me up like I’m a baby, lifts me right off the bed. They want me to sit up a little each day. I don’t want to sit up. All I want to do is get out of here.”

“You’ll get out of here. Soon, Pop.”

“Where’s Bessie? She didn’t come this morning?”

“She’ll be here for the two o’clock visit.”

“How do you know? Did she tell you that?”

“She had to do her marketing.”

“She told you that?”

“Yes, Pop.”

“That’s more important than coming here? Her marketing?”

“She’ll be here at two.”

“Her marketing is more important than I am. I’m going to die, and she’s out buying oranges.”

“She’ll be here later.”

“Who needs her? What are those things they brought in? Those cartons?”

“Where?” David said.

“Over there. On the sink.”

He went to the sink. There were two white cardboard cartons like the ones Chinese takeout food came in. One of them was marked in pencil with the words “Strawberry Jell-O.” The other one was marked “Cherry Jell-O.”

“It’s Jell-O,” he said. “Would you like some Jell-O?”

“No, I wouldn’t like some Jell-O. I hate Jell-O. I always hated Jell-O. Even when Jack Benny was doing Jell-O, I hated Jell-O.”

“Is there anything you would like?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“The doctor is hoping you’ll start feeling hungry again.”

“Is that all the doctor is doing? Hoping? I can hope, too, and I’m not a doctor.”

“I’ll be talking to him again later today, after they take the other pictures. He’ll...”

“You try to get him on the phone, it’s like trying to reach the President.”

“He’ll tell me then what the pictures showed.”

“They took twelve pictures already.”

“But who’s counting?” David said, and smiled.

His father reacted with a weak smile of his own.

“Don’t let them put my stuff on the shelves behind that wall,” he said suddenly.

They talked in whispers in the corridor outside the waiting room.

“So what’s it all about?” Sidney said.

“It’s about him being a very sick man who doesn’t need bowel-movement jokes,” David said.

“What?” Sidney said.

“He had a goddamn colostomy,” David whispered, “he doesn’t need you making jokes about...”

“I beg your pardon, sue me,” Sidney said. “I was only trying to cheer him up.”

“And he’s got enough damn worries without you mentioning his bills!”

“Why? Is it wrong to suggest his bills should be paid? I’d lay the money out myself if I wasn’t...”

“You’d lay shit out,” David whispered.

“What? What?”

“He loaned your goddamn son five hundred dollars to put down on an automobile. Did he ever get it back? Did your son ever repay the loan?”

“My son is out of work,” Sidney said.

“My father’s not a bank,” David said. “Your son should have gone to a bank.”

“Why? Is it a sin for a family...”

“Don’t give me any ‘family’ bullshit,” David said.

“You’re a riot, you know that?” Sidney whispered. “Where the hell have you been these past three weeks, when I’ve been shlepping to the hospital every Tuesday? Where’ve you been the past three months, the past three years, Davey? Who’s the one drives him wherever he wants to go, you think I’m a taxi service? I got headaches of my own, I don’t have to take care of your father because you put him out to pasture down here in Miami!”

“He moved to Miami because he wanted to,” David said.

“Sure, because his big-shot lawyer son had no time for him up in New York. You think I don’t know? I’m wise to you, Davey. You send the old man a box of cigars on his birthday, and you think that’s enough. Well, it ain’t. I’m the one who’s been wiping his ass ever since he moved down here. So now you tell me my son should’ve paid back the money, you think he doesn’t plan to pay back the money, these are rough times, we’re not all of us big-shot lawyers with fancy offices in New York, driving Cadillacs. You think I don’t know you drive a Cadillac? You think your father didn’t tell me? I’m driving a Chevy with the fenders falling off, I had to spend two hundred bucks for a new muffler, and you’re driving a Cadillac and complaining my son should pay back a lousy five hundred bucks when I’m shlepping your father all over the countryside! That’s what I call chutzpah, Davey, that’s what I really call chutzpah.”

“And don’t call me Davey.”

“What?”

“I said don’t call me Davey! Nobody calls me Davey! Not in my entire life has anybody called me Davey!”

“Calm down, willya? You don’t want to be called Davey, I won’t call you Davey. But don’t call me pisher, either, not when I’ve been busting my ass for the old man, doing what you should be doing for him. Look, he’ll get the money back, you think he won’t get the money back? What do I look like, what does my son look like, some kind of gonif? He’s out of work just now, all I got is the pension, your father keeps buying stamps and plates and first-day covers, I had to spend two hundred bucks for a new muffler, he’s got more than he knows what to do with, your father, you think I don’t know? Who do you think drives him to the bank where he socks away the social security checks? He’s got four banks, your father! Four of them! He doesn’t need those checks, he just socks them away, you think I don’t know he’s clipping coupons and spending the money on all those stamps and plates? He’s got them stacked to the ceiling in his apartment, three locks on the door, it’s like Fort Knox, that apartment! You ever been in that apartment? Or are you too busy chasing ambulances in New York? Why don’t you move down here, you want to take care of him so bad? Why don’t you do that, Davey — I beg your pardon, sue me, I’m not supposed to call you Davey. Why don’t you move down here and drive him wherever he wants to go, and invite him to parties in Lauderdale where I have to come down and pick him up and take him back home again? You’re his son, why don’t you do that, huh? I tell a joke to cheer him up, next thing you know I’m getting mugged in a dark alley. Listen, who needs gratitude, who needs thanks? Take care of your own father, do me a favor, okay? Pay his bills, don’t pay them, who gives a shit? He’s your father, not mine!”

“Where do we send the Oscar?” David said.

“Sure, make smart-ass wisecracks,” Sidney said.

“Maybe you’d better go now, okay?”

“I’m going, don’t worry. Be sure to tell your dad you chased me out. He’ll be tickled to death to hear that. Tell him you chased his cousin out of the hospital. Is that what you want, Davey? You want me never to come back here again? How long you think he’s going to be in here? How long are you going to be here? What happens when you go back to New York? Who comes to see him then every Tuesday? Chase me out, go ahead.”

David sighed.

“I’m not chasing you out,” he said.

“You sound like it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you’re upset just now, don’t you think I know? We’re all upset. But that’s no reason to turn on your own family. No reason at all.”

“Okay, Sidney, I said I was sorry.”

“Forget it,” Sidney said. “I’ll come back Thursday night, the seven o’clock visit. I got things to do during the day, I got a life of my own, too, you know. It’s a long drive from Lauderdale, but the old man may need me.”

David watched him walking heavily down the corridor. For the first time, he noticed that Sidney walked with a limp. His anger was gone now. He stood watching his distant cousin as he turned out of sight around the bend in the hall, and he wondered why he’d been so angry.

And suddenly he was confused.

What of this man is me? he wondered.

The looks, he supposed. The Weber looks. He was taller, of course; his father was only five-eight, and David was five-eleven, the generational advantage. His own son had been almost — he closed his mind to the thought. But the dark hair and brown eyes, the “famous Weber nose,” as his Uncle Max called it, refined a bit in David, the Semitic curve smoothed out somewhat, but distinctive nonetheless. And the mouth perhaps, with its pouting lower lip, especially when his father was in a self-pitying funk about all the taxes he had to pay each year, the big entrepreneur whose successive businesses had collapsed even in the best of years, living solely on the money David — but that was another story. Clipping coupons, cousin Sidney had said. Clipping coupons from the investments in the irrevocable trust David had established for him fifteen years ago. “I worked hard for my money,” his father was fond of saying, but he’d been virtually penniless back then when David established the trust. “I worked hard for every nickel I’ve got.”

Perhaps.

Worked hard, and went under, each and every time.

David to the rescue — listen, what difference did it make? He’d have had to give half of it to Uncle Sam, anyway, so what difference did it make, really? The crochet-beading business, back in the twenties, before David was born, going very strong for a while, until the fashion changed and women wouldn’t be caught dead in beaded gowns. The pool hall on Fordham Road in 1936, when David was five and they were living on Jerome Avenue, in the shadow of the elevated structure. (“The wops there love to shoot pool,” his father said.) He took the train to work every day, banker’s hours even then; wouldn’t open the pool hall till noon and then left it in the hands of a “trusted employee” at five sharp. The trusted employee was stealing him blind; the pool hall went under in less than a year. And the parade of businesses after that, the shoe stores, first in Harlem (“The niggers love fancy shoes”) and then on Fourteenth Street (“Lots of spies moving in, they love fancy shoes”) and then in New Rochelle (“Lots of rich kikes there”) — his father’s prejudices were all-encompassing. “I’m a merchant,” he said about himself. “What else can a poor Jew do?” the appraisal punctuated with the self-pitying pout.

He formed the Weber Bureau of Clipping in 1938, when David was seven years old. This enabled him to work out of the new apartment they were renting on Mosholu Parkway. In those days, they changed apartments frequently. David later learned that this was his father’s way of beating the landlord. The Depression was still exacting its toll; the war in Europe — America’s economic salvation — hadn’t yet erupted. Most landlords offered a month’s free rent as an inducement to lease. They threw in all sorts of perks like a new refrigerator, a fresh paint job, sometimes even free gas and electricity for a month when you rented one of their empty apartments. The Webers moved every month. David had trouble remembering what his address was.

His father sat in the living room of the Mosholu Avenue apartment, scanning copies of all the city’s daily newspapers, searching for items about ordinary citizens. There were always items of local interest. He clipped out all the engagement notices, wedding announcements, obituaries, human interest stories, anything that mentioned the name of someone who lived in New York. He consulted the telephone directories for all five boroughs and then either wrote or phoned the persons the news items were about, asking if they’d like a clipping of what had appeared on them in the newspaper. The people would come to the house for the clippings, paying cash on the barrelhead. There was a steady stream of people to the front door of their apartment. (“Our neighbors’ll think I’m a courva,” his mother said; back then David didn’t know the word meant hooker.) His father charged twenty-five cents for each clipping. He was forced to end the business when a six-foot two-inch, two-hundred-pound shvartzer appeared at the front door one day while his mother was alone, frightening her half to death. “I could’ve made a fortune with that business once the war started,” his father said. “All those kids being drafted, stories about them in the papers, I could’ve made a fortune.”

He could have made a fortune, too, David supposed, with the men’s clothing store he started in the latter part of 1940 (was, in fact, making money enough to afford a permanent address for a while) if only half the young men in America hadn’t been drafted in 1942, thereby drastically reducing the demand for civilian attire. (“How can you operate a business when your only customers are twelve-year-olds and cockers?”) The business went under in the fall of 1943, just after David’s twelfth birthday. When the war ended, David’s father opened a new store grandly called Weber’s Army & Navy Surplus Supply Outlet, a good idea in that many such stores were doing good business. Maybe that was the trouble. Maybe there were too many of them, or maybe he’d opened in a bad location, or maybe — who the hell knew? He finally sold his entire stock to a chain store at an 80 percent discount. “It was all a matter of timing,” he said later. “If I just could’ve waited till the hippies started...”

By the time “the hippies started” — David set the date as approximately the same time the Beatles achieved recognition and prominence, sometime in 1964 — his father had been through at least another dozen failed businesses, and David had been through the Korean War, four years of college, three years of law school, a wedding, an apprenticeship with Dolger, Pierce and Parsons, the birth of his son, and the formation of his own law firm. Two years after that, David established the trust for his father, the man who’d “worked hard” for every nickel he had. However many nickels he now possessed, David knew, had been generated by the trust. Whatever David inherited from his father would really be David’s own, anyway. He was his father’s sole beneficiary; he knew because he had drawn the will himself — well, wait, that wasn’t quite true. He had drawn the will ten years ago. Stephen had been alive then; his father had willed him his stamp and plate collection.

The stamps and plates were no surprise. His father had been an inveterate collector for as long as David could remember. He collected everything. When David was growing up, his father was always counting coins (he stopped collecting those when things got really bad), or pasting stamps into albums, or sorting through first-day covers, or cutting out articles from newspapers (a residual habit from the days of his clipping bureau). He sent away for anything that captured his limitless fancy. David caught the bug — well, there, he thought, that of him is in me, or at least was. He sent away for a Tom Mix Six-Shooter, and a Little Orphan Annie Shaker, and a ring The Shadow sent you that glowed in the dark like Blue Coal, and another ring that you could look into and see whoever was behind you. He sent away for Omar the Mystic code books and Dick Tracy badges. He waited for the mail to come each day, just the way his father waited for the mail to come. He constantly searched the newspapers and magazines for new opportunities to send away for something exciting, just the way his father did.

“A chip off the old block,” his father said. “Ike and Mike, we look alike.”

“A lot of junk,” his mother said.

She was always telling him to get rid of it.

“Clear out all this junk, and I could make a nice room for my sewing machine,” she said.

“Esther, it’s my hobby!” David’s father protested.

“Your whole life is a hobby,” his mother said.

Maybe it was.

The way he would throw himself into any of David’s school projects, as if they were challenges to his own ingenuity and imagination. David could remember once — this was when he was in the third grade, he guessed, and there was a class contest for the best scrapbook on transportation. David’s father dug into his cartons of newspaper and magazine clippings (God, why had he saved all this stuff?) and came up with hundreds of pictures relating to transportation: ox carts and camels; horses and rickshaws; coaches and wagons; Chinese junks and sampans; steamships and steam locomotives; automobiles from the first Model-T right through the rumble-seat Ford his Uncle Martin had owned and including the streamlined prewar models (this was 1941 or thereabouts, David guessed); dirigibles and airplanes; and even some science-fiction drawings of what transportation in the future might look like, spaceships and Buck Rogers rocket packs — had his father known somehow that one day David would be in a scrapbook contest on transportation? David arranged all the pictures by topic (Land, Sea, Water, Air), in chronological order, and then painstakingly lettered onto each page a description of the pictures he pasted into the book. He won first prize. His father was thrilled. “We won it, David!” he said. David always felt his father had won it.

And the puppet show.

Not really a full-scale puppet show in that there was only a single hand puppet in it, which David’s father had helped him to make out of papier-mâché. The sole puppet was the master of ceremonies, who introduced each act from a small curtained arch cut into the proscenium David’s father had built from a cardboard grocery-store display for a beer — David forgot the brand — two giant golden lions on a blue field, flanking the opening that was the stage for the show. Rheingold, was it? David manipulated the hand puppet from behind the curtained arch (the curtain was operative; David’s father had made it with pulleys and strings), announcing each act in a falsetto voice. The other actors in the show were David’s toy soldiers, either arranged in tableaux or else mounted on orange-crate slats that could be moved back and forth from either side of the stage. There was a Western scene with David’s cowboy-soldiers sitting around a fire (David’s father rigged a flashlight with a red piece of cellophone over it), and Hymie the Mutt, so-called because he was a Western Union delivery boy, singing “Home on the Range.” And there was a World War I scene with David’s soldier-soldiers mounted on the orange-crate slats and being moved back and forth in counterpoint to simulate them marching off to battle while Hymie sang “Over There” in his high, sweet soprano voice. Then there was a battle scene with his father banging pots and pans behind the stage in imitation of an artillery attack, and David and Hymie yelling “Gas! Gas!” and his father running from one side of the stage to the other to blow cigar smoke in from the wings. It really looked like a gas attack; everyone in the audience was amazed. All the kids in the building came to see that puppet show. They charged ten cents’ admission for each kid. “We should’ve charged a quarter,” his father said, “we’d have made a fortune.”

And the newspaper David started when he was eleven, and they were living in a better apartment on Mosholu Parkway, bigger than the first one up the street. His father did all the hand-lettering for the four-page newspaper, on the stencils you had to make for the Hectograph. The Hectograph was a tray of yellow Jell-O, it looked like, and first you rubbed the stencil with its lettering over the stuff in the tray, and then you put the blank sheets of paper in the tray and you rubbed those, and what was on the stencil appeared on the blank paper, in purple ink. The lead story was about a two-headed cat. David’s father copied it word for word from a clipping he’d cut out of the Bronx Home News, and then he made up a new headline for it: DOUBLEHEADER FOR KATZ FAMILY! The puns, ah, yes (“That joke’ll be the urination of me”), the puns were something else David had inherited, he supposed.

They were his father’s revenge upon the English language, perhaps, his way of coming to terms with the fact that he’d never got beyond the first year of high school because his own father (the grandfather David had never met) died when he was just a boy and he and his brother Martin had been forced to find jobs to help out their widowed mother. That was when Uncle Martin became the only Jewish apprentice house painter in the city of New York. It was also when his father became the only Jewish kid on the Lower East Side who was rushing the growler for an Irish bar on Canal Street, a job that was short-lived because the owner of the place learned first that he was only fourteen and not sixteen (as he’d claimed) and next that his name wasn’t Webb (as he’d further claimed) but was instead Weber. “He took me for a Sweeney,” his father later told David, “but I was only a sheeny.”

Whatever the psychological roots of his word games, they never ceased. When he caught David smoking for the first time, he said, “Put out that cigarette before you make an ash of yourself.” He described an inept tailor on Fordham Road as a man “panting for customers,” and then compounded the felony by adding, “ill-suited to his trade.” Of an uppity barber, he said, “He thinks he’s hair to the throne,” which was better, but only somewhat, than his constant remark about his own baldness, “Oh, well, hair today, gone tomorrow.” He punned interminably and often outrageously. When his brother Max caught a trout he claimed was two feet long, David’s father said, “You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you?” and then immediately added, “Well, maybe I will, just for the halibut.” When his cousin Bernice began cheating on her violinist husband, David’s father said, “He’s fiddling while Bernice roams.” The first time he met Molly (but that was another story) and learned she was a nurse, he said, “I’ve always wanted a panhandler in the family.”

During the trial David had just lost, opposing counsel was a man who prefaced each of his harangues by first removing his eyeglasses and then jabbing them in a witness’s face whenever he posed a question. In objecting to one such verbal and physical attack, David said, “Your Honor, my brother is harassing the witness,” and then could not resist adding, “and he’s also making a spectacle of himself,” which the judge did not find amusing. (“Chip off the old block. Ike and Mike, we look alike.”) But back in 1943, when his father came up with the “MRS. KATZ” headline and despite the fact that his mother’s maiden name had been Katz — was there more to the headline than David guessed? — he’d thought it was the cat’s meow. (“What has four legs and follows cats?” his father asked that very same day. “What?” David said. “Mrs. Katz and her lawyer!” his father bellowed in triumph. Jesus!) In fact, David believed that the headline, together with a gossip column about all the kids in the neighborhood, was what sold out the first issue. They made fourteen dollars on that first issue because there were ads in it from all the neighborhood merchants, including one for David’s father’s clothing store that was about to fold in the fall, a full-page ad that had cost a dollar. The newspaper suspended publication after its second issue, but only because David dropped the Hectograph tray one afternoon and the now thoroughly purple jelly spilled out all over the floor. “That jelly’s gonna get you in a jam,” his father said, smiling, even though he’d already hand-lettered his way through half of the third issue.

His father had good penmanship (“I like to keep my hand in,” he said), and he was a good letterer as well (“A man of letters,” he said), a skill he had acquired when making signs for the front windows of all his failed businesses. David’s mother yelled that he’d ruined the rug on the floor of the room where his father kept all his collected junk and which had been the newspaper office. David said he would give her all the paper’s profits to have the rug cleaned. His mother graciously declined the offer, but she never stopped telling everyone how David had spilled all that purple shmutz on the heirloom rug her grandmother had carried on her back all the way from Russia — “See the stain? You can still see it. This is exactly where he dropped the tray.”

His father said, “That stain has real stayin’ power,” which was reaching, even for him.

His father used to cheat at poker.

His poker game was on Wednesday nights, a floating game that met at their house every seventh Wednesday. If David had finished his homework, his father would let him pull up a chair beside him, and he would explain all the poker hands to him. The men played for pennies; none of them could afford higher stakes. But every now and then, David noticed his father shortchanging the pot when he put his “lights” in. Each time, his father gave him a little wink that meant he was just kidding around, there wasn’t any real theft involved here, he was just putting one over on these wisenheimers. “A penny saved is a penny urned,” he said, whenever he dropped a coin into David’s piggy bank. It took David years and years to realize he was making another pun, a rather literary one at that since its appreciation depended on visual input. His father’s cheating delighted him. He kept fearfully waiting for the other men in the game to catch his father at it, but they never did. His father invariably won. Years later, when David was on the troopship heading for Inchon and monumental poker games were being played on blankets all over the deck, David wished his father were there with him. His father would have cleaned out all those fancy gamblers in a minute.

Everything about his father had delighted David when he was a boy.

He wondered when it all had changed.

He wondered when his father had become a pain in the ass.

The waiting room, and his father’s room, and his own room at the hotel were beginning to blend into a single unit. The only reason David went back to the hotel between visiting hours was to get away from the hospital, but the hotel room was becoming an extension of the hospital. He had been here only since yesterday afternoon, and already his life was ordered by the sign on the waiting room door:

The other people in the waiting room seemed to spend their entire day there, watching television, talking to each other or to whichever pink lady was at the desk, going down for lunch in the hospital coffee shop, returning to wait for the two o’clock and then the four o’clock, and only then leaving the hospital to return later for the seven o’clock. Their patience was infinite; they all had people who were maybe dying in there.

He sat beside Bessie on one of the leatherette couches and listened to the voices all around him.

“My mother hit me this morning,” the thin woman with the flushed, excited face said. This was shortly before the two o’clock visit. Or perhaps the four o’clock. It was all becoming a blur for him. “She wants to go home, she hit me. I don’t know if I’ll come to see her again. She gets upset whenever I come. Maybe it’s better if I stay home.”

“No,” the pale woman in the wedgies said. Her daughter was not here today. Neither was the man from Toronto; David assumed he had already flown his comatose wife back to Canada. “You have to keep coming. They can carry on all they want, but they like to see you.”

“I don’t think she likes to see me,” the other woman said, and lit a cigarette. “I really don’t think so. If she likes me so much, why does she take a fit every time I come?”

“Because you’re the only one she can take it out on.”

He was beginning to learn their names. The pale woman in the wedgies, the one whose husband had had open-heart surgery twice, was Mrs. Daniels. Her fat daughter, who was not here this afternoon because her little girl had a ballet recital, was named Louise. David did not yet know her last name. The woman with the flushed face, the one whose mother had come in for a simple hernia operation and who was now violently insisting that she be taken home, was Mrs. Horowitz. She smoked even more than David did. There were other people in the waiting room now, strangers, the way Mrs. Daniels and her daughter and Mrs. Horowitz had been strangers to him yesterday. On the television screen, a man wearing a tuxedo was talking to a woman in a slinky evening gown. They were both sipping brandy from large snifters.

“That guy’s been wearing a tuxedo for the past two weeks,” a swarthy man across the room said.

“Things go slow on soap operas,” Mrs. Daniels said.

“Things go slow right here,” the man said.

He was growing a mustache; it sat like a smudge on his upper lip. He kept touching it constantly, checking on its progress. He had black hair and very dark eyes. He introduced himself as Albert Di Salvo. He told the others that his mother had suffered a stroke two weeks ago. He came to visit her whenever he could. He was worried that she was still in Intensive Care. He was an only child; he wanted to visit her more often, but he had to go to work, didn’t he? As it was, he was losing a lot of work hours. Mrs. Daniels comforted him. She told him he was of course doing the best he could; he couldn’t come here every minute, could he, and maybe lose his job?

“Same tuxedo for the past two weeks,” Di Salvo said. “I’m forty-three years old, I don’t have a tuxedo. That kid there on television is what, twenty-four, twenty-five, he’s got his own tuxedo.”

“It really belongs to the show,” Mrs. Horowitz said, puffing on her cigarette.

“Yeah, but it’s supposed to be his,” Di Salvo said. “He’s supposed to be rich.”

“He probably is rich,” Mrs. Daniels said. “I mean, in real life. Those TV actors make a lot of money.”

“Sure, they do,” Di Salvo said.

David lit another cigarette. Mrs. Daniels turned to him and gently said, “You shouldn’t smoke so much, Mr. Weber. I know this is a difficult time for you, but you have to watch your own health, too.”

“Let him smoke if he wants to,” Mrs. Horowitz said. “My mother never smoked a day in her life, she’s here in Intensive Care hitting her own daughter. Let him smoke.”

“You should eat, too,” Mrs. Daniels said. “To keep your strength up. There’s a coffee shop downstairs, they serve a nice lunch. Did you have lunch today, Mr. Weber?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Keep your strength up,” Mrs. Daniels said.

“When he finally takes off that tuxedo,” Di Salvo said, “it’ll walk across the room all by itself.”

Bessie, silent until now, suddenly said, “It always seems like forever. Waiting.”

It must have been during the four o’clock visit that David met the psychiatrist. The man walked into the room unannounced, the way they all did. He was holding a clipboard; David figured at once he was a doctor.

“Hello, Weber,” he said, “how are you feeling today?”

“Great,” his father said.

“Better than yesterday?”

“Better than yesterday, worse than today,” his father said.

The man looked at him shrewdly.

“What do you mean by that, Weber?”

“You’re the psychiatrist, you figure it out.” He looked at David. “They’re sending me a psychiatrist, they think I’m nuts.”

“That’s not true, Weber.”

“I’m his son,” David said, and extended his hand.

“Dr. Wolfe,” the psychiatrist said. He did not take David’s hand. “He’s been very depressed,” he said as if David’s father were not in the room with them. “We thought he’d be happy when they took the tube out of his nose, but he’s still depressed. Why are you so depressed, Weber?”

“Some psychiatrist,” David’s father said, and shook his head.

“Why are you depressed, can you tell me?”

“No reason at all,” David’s father said. “I’ve got a hole in my belly, they’re taking pictures to see if I’ve got more blockage, why should I be depressed? I should be dancing in the streets instead.”

“They’re trying to help you,” Wolfe said. “We’re all trying to help you.”

“You can help me by leaving me alone. I never had such a crowd of people around me in my life. It’s like the New York subway system in this room.”

“Have they...?”

“During rush hour.”

“Have they been taking more pictures?” Wolfe asked. Whenever he talked directly to David’s father, he raised his voice a decibel or two, as if he were talking to a dull child or a deaf person.

“No, I made that up so your day’ll be interesting,” David’s father said.

“Have you been making anything else up?”

“I’ve been making up all the beds on the floor.”

“When do you do that, Weber?”

“After I get through making the nurses. They’re very hot numbers, these Cuban nurses.”

“How about the shelves behind the wall, Weber? Have you been seeing those again?” He turned to David and lowered his voice. “He’s been hallucinating,” he said.

“By the way,” David’s father said, “I may have a hole in my belly, but my hearing’s fine.”

“I didn’t say anything to your son that I wouldn’t say to you,” Wolfe said, raising his voice again.

“Why do you sound like you’re calling long distance when you talk to me?”

“What?”

“You yell like you’re on long distance. I’m not in Philadelphia.”

“Have you been seeing those shelves again, Weber?”

“I don’t know what shelves you’re talking about.”

“The ones you told me were behind the wall.”

“That isn’t a wall, it’s a fake wall.”

“It’s a real wall. With a room behind it,” Wolfe said. He was writing on the clipboard pad. “When you get up and can walk around, you can see for yourself there’s a room there. No shelves.”

“I’ll give you a full report when I can get up and walk around,” David’s father said. “Don’t hold your breath, though, it may be a while.”

“How’s your memory? He’s been forgetting things,” Wolfe said to David, lowering his voice. “Can you remember things a little better now, Weber?” he asked, raising his voice again.

“What was your question?” David’s father said. “I forget your question.”

“Can you remember things a little better now? Do you remember when you came into the hospital?”

“The first Thursday in May,” David’s father said.

“That’s close, it was May twenty-sixth.”

“But a Thursday.”

“No, a Tuesday.”

“Close, but no guitar,” his father said. “All these Cubans,” he said to David, explaining the pun.

“If I gave you a hundred dollars...” Wolfe started.

“I wish you would.”

“If I gave you a hundred dollars, and you gave seven back to me, how much would you have left?”

“You give me a hundred...”

“Yes. I give you a hundred, and you give me back seven. How much is left?”

“Seven from a hundred,” David’s father said. “That’s...”

It was painful to see him struggling with the arithmetic. He had always prided himself on his meticulous bookkeeping. His checkbooks were as balanced as a high-wire act. His brow furrowed now in concentration. He wet his lips. “That would be... well, sure, that...”

“Pop, what he wants to know...”

“Let him do it himself, please,” Wolfe said, even though David hadn’t been about to prompt his father.

“It’s ninety-seven,” his father said.

“No, it’s ninety-three,” Wolfe said.

“Somebody must be hitting the cash register,” his father said. “That gonif who worked for me in the pool hall.”

“If you had three wishes, Weber, what would they be?” Wolfe asked..

“I wish you’d go away, that’s my first wish.”

“And the other two?” He was writing on the pad again.

“That’s all three. I wish you’d go back to Vienna.”

“Why Vienna?” Wolfe asked, still writing.

“Why not Vienna?”

“He’s making a reference to Freud,” David said.

“Let him answer himself, please,” Wolfe said. “Why Vienna, Weber?”

“Go away, will you, please?”

“Tell me your three wishes, seriously.”

“Serially?” David’s father said. He was looking up at the ceiling. “I wish I could get out of this place, that’s my first wish.”

“And your second wish?”

“I wish I could go someplace and sleep in peace, without people coming in all the time and bothering me.”

“Yes?”

“Yes what?”

“Your third wish?”

“I wish I could go to temple again soon and thank God for relieving me of the pain of this suffering.”

“Those are all really the same wish, aren’t they?” Wolfe said.

“Are they?” David’s father said, and turned his head into the pillow.

He called Kaplan from the hotel room at ten minutes past five. The answering service told him the doctor would get back to him. Kaplan called fifteen minutes later. The same soft, tired, sad voice.

“Mr. Weber?” he said. “Dr. Kaplan.”

“Hello,” David said, “how are you?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Have you seen the new pictures yet?”

“Yes, I have.”

“And?”

“Well, there’s a slightly larger area that may be an abscess, but we can’t be certain.”

“By larger...?”

“The size of a dime.”

“Why can’t you be certain whether...?”

“It may simply be a scar. From the operation.”

“Can’t you tell whether it’s a scar?”

“No, I’m sorry, we can’t.”

“I mean, don’t you know where the scars are supposed to be?”

“Yes, but... Mr. Weber, I wish I could be more definite, it would make life easier for all of us. This may or may not be something, we simply can’t tell.”

“Let me understand this,” David said. “If there is something in there, an infection, an abscess, whatever, wouldn’t it have to show on the pictures?”

“Not necessarily. There are yards and yards of intestines in the abdominal cavity, all of them in loops. There may be something hidden between the loops, inaccessible to the scan.” He paused. “Mr. Weber,” he said, “I feel I ought to be perfectly frank with you.”

“Please,” David said.

“We’re doing everything possible for your father, but if he keeps deteriorating at his present rate... Mr. Weber, it would have been very nice if we’d found something positive on those pictures, something we could really have gone after. But lacking such evidence — and I’ve asked for other opinions on this, believe me — lacking such positive evidence, I feel obliged to do exploratory surgery, anyway.”

“He’s eighty-two years old,” David said.

“I realize that. And we’re all well aware of the risk...”

“How great a...?”

“... but if we go in and find something that isn’t showing on the pictures...”

“How do you know you’ll find it?”

“If it’s there, we’ll find it.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“We’ll keep trying to isolate the source of the infection.”

“How great a risk is involved?”

“An estimate? Fifty-fifty.”

“I see,” David said.

“That’s an estimate.”

“And if you don’t do the operation, the exploratory surgery?”

“Well... unless something unforeseen happens in the next few days...”

“Like what?”

“A marked and dramatic improvement. Normally, we shouldn’t be having this problem at all. Your father should have healed by now.”

“But he hasn’t.”

“No, he hasn’t,” Kaplan said, and sighed. “Sometimes a patient loses his will to live, Mr. Weber. He simply gives up. I hope that isn’t happening here.”

“What do you feel his chances of improvement are?”

“I don’t know how to answer that. That may be up to him, you see.”

“Up to him?”

“His will to stay alive, yes.”

“But do you think there might be a marked and dramatic improvement?”

“No, I do not.”

“Then what you’re saying is if you do the operation he’s got a fifty-fifty chance of survival, and if you don’t do it, he’ll die.”

“In effect, that’s what I’m saying.”

“In effect? Well, that is what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

“Your father tells me you’re a lawyer,” Kaplan said.

David visualized the man smiling and for the first time felt some sort of kinship with him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m simply trying to get this straight.”

“I’m giving it to you as straight as I know how,” Kaplan said. “If he continues on his present downward course, I think he’ll die, yes. And his chances of surviving surgery in his present condition are fifty-fifty. That’s all I can tell you, Mr. Weber.”

“He’s very fearful of another operation, you know,” David said.

“Well, of course,” Kaplan said.

“Apparently the first one was very painful.”

“Not the operation itself. There’s always some pain following surgery, of course. But we try to moderate that with drugs.”

“He told me he was suffering.”

“Not now? You don’t mean now?”

“No, not now. After the first operation.”

“Well, yes.”

“Are you sure you have to operate again?”

“I would not take the risk unless I were positive.”

“When would you do it?”

“Tomorrow. First thing in the morning. He should be back down by the time you get there.”

“At eleven, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Back down where? The Recovery Room?”

“Intensive Care.”

“Will he recognize me?”

“Not until the anesthesia wears off.”

“But I can see him.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Will you be the only surgeon?”

“I plan to ask the chief surgeon to attend.”

“What about my father? Will you tell him, or shall I?”

“I’ve already told him,” Kaplan said. “He had to sign an authorization form. I think we’ll need your signature as well. His hand was a bit shaky.”

His father’s signature on the hospital form almost moved David to tears. The fine curlicues and loops of the Morris L. Weber had deteriorated to a scrawl that meandered across the page. He looked at his father’s signature for a long time, remembering the signs he had meticulously hand-lettered for the puppet show and posted all over the building, the signs he had made announcing the first issue of the short-lived newspaper. He read the consent form while the Cuban nurse waited. He signed his name in the space provided for next-of-kin and hoped he was not signing his father’s death warrant.

He went into his father’s room. The machines blinked and beeped beside his bed, electronic sentinels. His father’s eyes were closed. It occurred to David that he had never seen him asleep before. He kept looking at his face. They had not shaved him today; a gray beard stubble covered his chin and his jowls. Asleep, he did not look sick. Three thousand calories a day, the Cuban nurse had said. He hadn’t lost a pound of weight. But he was dying. He would die unless they found whatever they were looking for and cut it from his body, or drained it, did whatever they had to do to it.

His father’s eyes popped open.

He let out a startled little gasp.

“Oh,” he said.

“Hello, Pop.”

“Another operation, right?” his father said, instantly awake.

“Yes, Pop.”

“When?”

“First thing tomorrow morning.”

“Terrific. Just what I need, first thing in the morning.”

“It is what you need, Pop.”

“What’d they find? All those pictures.”

“Something that may be an area of infection.”

“How’d I get so infected all of a sudden? I’ve never been sick a day in my life.”

“Well,” David said.

“I forgot to dot the i,” his father said.

“What?”

“On that thing they gave me to sign. I forgot to dot the i in Morris.”

“That’s okay, Pop, don’t worry about it.”

“They’ll think somebody forged my signature.”

“No, they won’t think that.”

“Maybe you ought to get it back, so I can dot the i.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“The ayes have it,” his father said, and suddenly twisted his head on the pillow. “Where’s my jaw?” he asked.

“Your jaw? Right there, Pop, where it’s supposed to be.”

“My jaw, my jaw.”

“What do you mean?”

“Half of my jaw is gone.”

“No, Pop, all your...”

“How am I supposed to chew, if I ever get anything to eat here?”

“Your teeth, do you mean? Your dentures?”

“My jaw,” his father said, and nodded.

“They’re right over there in the tray. On the sink there. Do you want to see them?”

His father nodded.

David went to the sink. He picked up the pink plastic tray in which his father’s dentures rested. He carried the tray to the bed.

“Okay?” he said.

His father nodded. He kept nodding. He seemed very tired all at once. “They steal things, you know,” he said. “To put on the shelves.”

“Well, I don’t think they’ll steal your teeth,” David said, carrying the tray back to the sink.

“They’ll steal anything,” his father said.

“They’d get about thirty cents for them,” David said, smiling.

“More than that,” his father said. “For the jawbone of an ass? At least a buck and a quarter.”

He took his father’s hand between his own.

“Pop,” he said, “you’re going to get better after this operation, you’ll see. They’re going to fix you up this time.”

“They fixed me up last time,” his father said. “They fixed me up just fine.”

“I mean it,” David said.

His father nodded.

“I have to go,” David said, looking up at the wall clock opposite the bed. “I want you to get a good night’s...”

“That thing keeps going around,” his father said.

“What thing?”

“On the wall.”

“The clock, do you mean? The sweep hand on the clock?”

“No, no.”

“What then?”

His father pointed to the wall. His finger rotated in a small circle.

“The wallpaper? The design in the wallpaper?”

“No, no. The thing they have. The shelves with all the stuff on them. It goes around and around, so the people can see the goods.”

“Pop, don’t worry about all that, okay? You get a good night’s sleep.”

“Fat chance of that.”

“Well, you try to sleep, okay? And tomorrow, once they finish the operation, you’re going to feel much better. I promise you.”

“Who are you to promise me?” his father asked, and then abruptly said, “Did I give you Josie’s address?”

“Josie? Who’s Josie?”

“A friend of the family,” his father said, and David remembered when they used to call his grandmother’s boyfriend “a friend of the family.”

“I don’t know her,” David said.

“I know it by heart. Her address. Write it down.”

“Josie who?”

“Write it down,” his father said.

The Cuban nurse appeared in the doorway. “I’m sorry, swee’heart,” she said, “your son has to go now.”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” David said. “Right after the operation. I’ll be here at eleven, waiting for you to come down. You get a good night’s sleep, okay?”

“You can write it down tomorrow,” his father said.

“I will.”

“Bring a pencil and paper. They don’t have any paper in this cheap hotel. Why don’t you get some paper in here?” he asked the nurse.

“We ha’ paper, darlin’.”

“Bring a mirror, too. I want to see what I look like.”

“You look beautiful, swee’heart.”

“I’ll bet. Mirror, mirror, on the wall...” his father said, and then his voice drifted.

David leaned over the bed. He kissed his father on the forehead. His flesh was hot and damp.

“Good night, Pop,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep well, okay?”

His father nodded and closed his eyes.

It suddenly occurred to David that he might never see him alive again.

He called home at seven-thirty and got the answering machine. Molly’s cool voice: I’m sorry, we can’t come to the phone just now. Will you leave a message when you hear the beep? He left word that he was going down to dinner and asked that she call him later tonight. He debated whether or not he would need a jacket for dinner, decided against it, and left the room. The fifteenth-floor corridor was empty. He rang for the elevator and waited. He could hear it whining down the shaft. The doors opened.

The British girl was standing against the far wall. Tonight, she was wearing white slacks, high-heeled sandals, and a shrieking-red blouse. Her blond hair was loose. He stepped into the elevator.

“Good evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” she answered.

The elevator doors closed.

They rode in silence for a moment.

Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, she said, “Wasn’t that comical last night?”

“The empty dining room, do you mean?”

“Last Year at Marienbad,” she said, nodding.

Her voice was soft, well modulated, very English. She was wearing an Elsa Peretti heart on a gold chain around her neck. I almost bought you a heart at Tiffany’s, he thought. There were freckles across the bridge of her nose. She had taken a bit too much sun today. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were almost as bright as the blouse she wore. Her eyes, he noticed, were intensely green.

“I felt as if the Russians had dropped The Bomb,” she said, smiling, “and no one had bothered to tell us. We were the last two people on earth, but we hadn’t been informed.”

The elevator doors opened.

“Is this the lobby already?” she asked, surprised.

“Yes,” he said, and held his hand over the electric eye while she walked past him. He detected the faintest scent of mimosa.

“Well, good night,” she called over her shoulder.

“Good night,” he said.

At the front desk, he handed the clerk his key and then asked if there was a good restaurant close by. He did not want to eat in the hotel dining room again. The clerk told him there was a French restaurant on Collins Avenue, just a few blocks north, but he had never eaten there.

“Have you tried our restaurant, sir? They serve a nice veal parmesan.”

David thanked him and went out into the street.

The air was hot and humid; it smelled of fetid things rotting in the sun. The stretch of Collins Avenue along which he walked was lined with souvenir shops, lingerie shops, stores selling bathing suits and inflatable rubber rafts. He remembered floating inside his inner tube, the vast blue sky overhead. “Watch out for horseshoe crabs,” his Uncle Max used to say. He would have to call his Uncle Max. After the operation tomorrow, he thought. An Englishman wearing a white T-shirt and wrinkled blue shorts, brown walking shoes and white socks, strolled past, savoring Miami Beach. David guessed he was an Englishman. His wife wore wrinkled yellow shorts and a purple tube top. Their pudding-faced children were eating chocolate ice cream cones. He caught a cockney accent. Lower-class Englishmen sitting on jackasses to have their photos taken. He wondered how accurate the description of Clovelly had been. He and Molly had never made it to Covelly, only one of the many places they never seemed to have made it to. How does it go by so fast? he wondered.

The restaurant was small and empty.

He took a table near a fish tank with three tropical fish in it. He watched the fish. In the kitchen, a radio was going. Frank Sinatra. He did not recognize the tune. A waiter came to the table.

“Would you care to see a menu, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, but first I’d like a drink. Canadian and soda, please,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir, we don’t have a liquor license,” the waiter said.

“Oh,” David said.

“Only wine and beer, sir.”

He debated leaving. He wanted a drink very badly. He had been wanting a drink ever since Kaplan told him they would be doing the operation tomorrow morning.

“Well, let me have a... do you have any Beaujolais?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A bottle of Beaujolais then. A half-bottle, if you have it.”

“I’m sorry, sir, we don’t have Beaujolais in the half-bottle.”

“What do you have in the half-bottle?”

“Nothing, sir. We have only the full bottles, or you can order by the glass.”

“Let me have a full bottle then.”

“Yes, sir, a bottle of Beaujolais.”

“And I’ll look at the menu, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

The waiter came back a few moments later. David was watching the fish in the tank.

“Shall I open it now, sir? Let it breathe a little?”

“Please,” David said. He didn’t know you had to let Beaujolais breathe.

The waiter showed David the label on the bottle. David nodded. The waiter uncorked the bottle and poured wine into David’s glass. He handed David a menu.

The special tonight is seafood marinière,” he said. That’s catch of the day with shrimp and lobster, sautéed in a tomato sauce with garlic and shallots.”

“What’s the catch of the day?” David asked.

“Red snapper.”

“Well, give me a minute to look this over.”

“Take all the time you need, sir,” the waiter said, and walked off.

David lifted the wineglass to his lips. He sipped at the wine. He raised his eyebrows. Nice, he thought. Not much body, but amusing nonetheless. And a trifle foxy. He smiled. They used to make a game of imitating wine mavens, he and Molly.

They walked, he and Molly, off the boardwalk and out into the side street where her hotel nested in a warren of similarly gray-shingled buildings. The storm clouds had blown far out to sea. The leaves were wet and brilliantly green after the storm. The streets were wet, too; they glistened and steamed in the sunshine. Everything smelled of summer. Her stride matched his. Long legs. High-heeled sandals clicking on the rain-washed pavement.

Her name was not Regan with an a, she told him, but Re gen with an e. A harried Ellis Island customs official had mistaken the name of her grandparents’ town for their surname and had then summarily shortened it to something that sounded more “American.” Her grandparents had come from Regensburg, in the southern part of Germany, not far from Nuremberg. His shiksa was a Jewish-American Princess.

She took off her sandals and walked barefoot in the puddles alongside the curb. He put his arm around her waist. He could feel the heat of her body through the thin summer dress. She sidled away from him. His heart was beating so fast he thought he would collapse right there on the street. There were two old ladies in house-dresses sitting on the rickety porch of her hotel, rocking, looking out at the sunshine, rocking.

“Will I see you again?” he asked.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Tonight?”

“No, Tm busy tonight.” She looked at her watch. “In fact, I have to get dressed. He’s picking me up at six.”

“Early date,” he said.

“Well, what business is that of yours?” she said.

Typical, he thought. Why couldn’t she have been a shiksa?

“How about tomorrow night?” he said.

“Well, why don’t you call me in the morning?”

“What’s your number?”

“Look it up. There’s the name of the hotel,” she said, and gestured breezily over her shoulder.

He kissed her suddenly and impulsively. The two old ladies kept looking out at the sunshine, rocking.

She broke away from his embrace. “Hey,” she said.

She was trembling. He could see her trembling. He wanted to kiss her again.

“Just...” she said.

Her green eyes met his.

“Take it easy, okay?” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Have you decided yet, sir?” the waiter asked.

David looked up at him.

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

The phone was ringing.

He fumbled for the receiver in the dark and then turned on the bedside lamp.

“Hello?” he said.

“David?”

“Yes, hi.”

“I’m sorry, were you asleep?”

“That’s okay.”

“I just got in. Is everything all right?”

“Where were you?”

“I went to a movie.” She paused. “With Marcia.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Did I tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That I was going?”

“I don’t remember.”

“How is he?”

“They’re going to operate again tomorrow morning. See if they can find what... what’s...”

“David?”

“Yes?” He had almost said “what’s killing him.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“Where’d you have dinner?”

“A little French place up the street.”

“I’m sorry I woke you, go back to sleep. Call me in the morning, will you? After the operation. What time will they...?”

“First thing.”

“David? Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. Really. The air conditioning’s on the fritz, but aside from that...”

“You poor thing,” she said.

“I’ll call you in the morning.”

“Good night. I’m sorry I woke you.”

“Good night,” he said.

He lay wide awake, looking up at the ceiling.

He had left the drapes and the window open again, and the lights from his own hotel and the surrounding hotels cast a glow that illuminated the window frame. The window frame was a giant rectangle of light on the southern wall. To the east was the ocean; he could hear its rumble. To the west was the hospital, where his father was sleeping now, he hoped, before an operation tomorrow morning that had only a 50 percent chance of survival as its hidden clause. Caveat emptor, he thought.

What time is it, anyway? he wondered. He pressed the little button on his digital watch, illuminating the dial. Eleven forty-seven. It was never a quarter to eleven anymore. It was always either eleven forty-four or eleven forty-six or eleven forty-seven, but never eleven forty-five, never a quarter to eleven. Digital watches, he thought. Can anybody tell time anymore? She had called — what, five minutes ago? Just got back from the movies. Went with Marcia. Who the hell was Marcia? He tried to think who Marcia might be. He could not think of anyone named Marcia.

That summer at Rockaway, he had not waited till morning to call her. He was sharing a rented room with a dental student who had found a girl with whom he spent virtually all of his days and nights. David was alone most of the time, in a seedy room with sticky sheets. He called Molly at ten o’clock and got no answer. He called her again at eleven, and again at midnight.

“Hello?” she said.

“Molly?”

“Yes?”

“It’s David.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“How was your date?”

“Well,” she said, “what business is that of yours?”

Goddamn Jewish-American Princess, he thought.

“How about tomorrow night?” he said.

“I told you to call me in the morning.”

“Why? How’s the morning going to be different from tonight?”

“Well,” she said again, “what business is that of yours?”

“How long will you be here in Rockaway?” he asked.

“Till Sunday. I’m going back Sunday.”

“Back where?”

“To New York.”

“Where do you live in New York?”

“Well, look it up,” she said, “I’m in the book.” She hesitated. “You really shook me up, you know,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Kissing me like that. I could hardly find my key. It took me ten minutes’ fumbling in my bag to find my key.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

“I’m not so sure it’s good.”

“What are you wearing?” he asked.

“What?”

“What are you wearing?”

“I just got home. I’m still in my dress.”

“Do you have shoes on?”

“No.”

“Put on your shoes, and come on over. I’m all alone here.”

“No, I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t need a reason,” she said.

“Then why don’t I come there?”

“No.”

“It seems silly, you being there alone and me being here alone.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s so silly.”

“Come on over,” he said.

“No.”

“Come on.”

“No. Really, now. No. Call me in the morning, okay? You really shook me up,” she said.

There was a small click on the line.

He fell asleep at last.

He awoke shivering in the middle of the night. The air conditioning had been fixed, apparently, and the room was icy cold. He snapped on the bedside lamp, got out of bed, turned on the overhead light, and went to the thermostat. The room temperature was sixty-four degrees. He raised the thermostat setting and then searched the closet shelf for another blanket. He opened all the dresser drawers searching for another blanket. Finally, he took the quilted bedspread from the chair over which he’d draped it and threw it on the bed over the single blanket. He closed the window. He drew the drapes. Even with the drapes and the window closed, he could hear the sound of the crashing sea. He turned off all the lights again and got into bed. He was still cold.

He suddenly had to go to the bathroom.

He turned on the bedside lamp, got out of bed again, and crossed the room. The attack of diarrhea was immediate and surprising. He tried to think what he could have eaten to have caused such a sudden attack. The bland veal chop? The side order of broccoli? He thought of his father’s severed intestines, his father’s body fluids seeping along a soiled tube into a soiled bag.

He wiped himself several times, kept wiping himself until there was no trace of stain on the toilet tissue.

Then he went back to bed.