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For three years at NYU he meandered, unfocused, through vapid business courses. One day he complained to the editor of the school newspaper about what he considered inadequate coverage of the baseball team and was asked to rectify it himself. He started to write for the newspaper, taking journalism courses in his senior year. The college writing helped him to an Army job with the post newspaper at Fort Dix, and when he returned to the city he was determined to be a newspaperman. He knew there would be less anxiety about his job-seeking if he informed his parents about his plans after he had a job.

“A reporter? For sports?” his father responded when Doug said he had been hired by the
Yonkers Herald Statesman.

They were ashen. They stared at him, disbelieving.

“You went to college for business,” his mother said.

“I don’t want business.”

“If you’re not a doctor, then all there is—is business,” she said.

“How much is the pay?” his father asked.

“Fifty-five dollars to start.”

More disbelief. Four years of college and the Army only to work for fifty-five dollars a week.

“That’s the pay scale. It improves.”

“How can it not?” his father said.

“I was a business-administration major. There isn’t a business I could administer, even if I wanted to. And they wouldn’t want me. My parting with corporate America is mutual.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” his mother said.

“I’m going to have to rent a room in Westchester.”

“Why don’t you become a ballet dancer, a wedding photographer with your college diploma?” she told him.

“I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you,” he answered softly.

He watched his parents staring at him, trying to decipher this. How did this happen to them? Who was a reporter? They were looking at him as if he were a ship slipping beneath the horizon, carrying away their dreams and leaving them with themselves.

Andy said he was ready for sleep and Doug came into the room to say goodnight to him.

“So—this is it. I can’t believe you’re the boy I used to carry on my shoulders every day.”

“When was that, Dad?”

“You must have been two, three. Every morning I’d carry you straddled on my shoulders and we’d walk to the newsstand for the morning paper. Then you just got too big.”

“I guess I don’t remember.”

“Do you remember the bread in the jar and fishing for killies?”

“Sort of.”

“We were at the bay on Fire Island. And I had this trick Grandpa showed me. You take a jar, put bread in it, drop the jar in the water with a string, leave it there for a few minutes and pull it up and you have a jarful of killies. You used to get so excited, you thought it was great.”

“I remember once we went to the Bronx Zoo, Karen wasn’t with us, I don’t know how old I was. It was a cold day and we must have gotten there very early because we didn’t see any people around and the animals kept coming right over to us.”

“I remember that day.”

“We didn’t see anybody else there for a long time. Just the two of us. It was like we owned the place.”

“What you don’t remember because you didn’t know is the day you first walked to school by yourself. And I followed you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mom and I were nervous. We’d been over the route with you, but you were always with one of us. And the first day you went by yourself, I walked a block or so in back of you, just so we were sure you were all right.”

“You’re not planning to follow me to college, are you?” Andy joked.

“You’re on your own now.”

They were quiet for a few moments with the seriousness of that thought.

“Once I was in a hallway outside the Knicks’ locker room,” Doug said. “Red Holzman was the coach. This was when Walt Frazier was his playmaker, and Holzman said to him, ‘You’re my main man.’ You’re going to need me less and less, but for whatever it is, for whatever you need, I want you to know, I’ll always be there, to be your main man.”

Karen’s gymnastics group was scheduled to give an exhibition. Nancy was at a baby shower for a woman in her office, and Doug went to the gym by himself carrying a bouquet of roses. The head of the gymnastics school, Elsa Vladic, a compact woman in her 40s, conducted the proceedings briskly, head up, chin erect. Doug felt out of shape just watching her stand.

Broeden was seated in the front row with Susan and he was wildly enthusiastic, applauding and calling out, “Way to go! Fantastic!” as Karen performed. She did a dazzling turn on the parallel bars and Broeden was on his feet yelling “Bravo!” Doug was also in the front row farther along the line, applauding, but he wasn’t sure Karen saw him. I watched her on the monkey bars. I pushed her on a swing when she was little. I put up a chinning bar in the apartment and brought home a trampoline. I told her how wonderful she was when she really wasn’t yet and needed the encouragement. I was there all those hours, you loudmouth.

When the performance was over, Broeden moved through the gym congratulating Elsa Vladic, Karen, the other children, their parents. He had elected himself mayor of this event.

Doug made his way to Karen and gave her the bouquet.

“You were wonderful.”

“Thank you, Dad.”

Then she had to leave. This was Susan’s custodial time, and Susan and her husband were taking his daughter to lunch.

“Wasn’t she terrific?” Broeden said to Doug.

“Yes, terrific.”

As he led Susan and Karen out of the gym, Broeden was still beaming.

You’ve even stolen the smile I should be smiling.

At the University of Minnesota the results of a study were announced concerning parents’ responses to children leaving for college. As reported in USA
Today,
fathers were hit particularly hard by separation, especially those who had spent considerable time with their children. I could have told them that.

Doug felt his situation with Karen was now especially precarious. Without Andy shuttling back and forth with her, an ally in custody, would she just as soon forgo the arrangement and live in one place? He doubted she would choose the apartment where the light was not “optimum.” And yet she was not sullen in his presence. She announced one night she wanted to start a Chinese food festival with him, they would try every new Chinese restaurant in New York at least once. “It’s a lifetime project,” she told him. “Someone said they have the same chefs, who rotate. Wait until they find out it’s the same customers.” He volunteered to distribute literature for Bronx Educational Services at a street fair. Karen asked to go with him, working alongside her father for several hours on a Saturday. And she still liked his being on television. He could not say his daughter had
rejected
him. With the small but obvious signs—tennis, trips, references to Broeden, liberties she took with the custody arrangement—he would have had to characterize her as
partial
to being around Broeden. Partial. After the years, the commitment to her, to have her come up partial to another person—he may not have been
rejected,
still—
partial
was a terrible word.

Doug was talking on the phone with Susan about their joint disposition of checks for Andy’s college expenses, a typically flat conversation for them. When the business was concluded, Doug said, “I miss him so much.” Something in his voice, or in the fact that Andy had been their little boy, suddenly, dramatically altered the mood. “I miss him, too,” Susan said. “Very much.”

“Separation is healthy, but it’s awful.”

“I know. You’ve been such a good Daddy.”

“Daddy. That’s archaic usage with them.”

“Right. I haven’t been Mommy for a long time.”

“It’s late for this, Susan, but I have to say I owe a lot to the women’s movement.”

“Can we inform the media on this?”

“It’s just that I realize I was a good father, but it did make me a better one.”

“If only I were still in a consciousness-raising group—”

“You could have done a good ten minutes on that.”

“Doug, there’s a gymnastics competition coming up in Philadelphia in a couple of weeks. Karen wants to see it. It’s on our weekend, but why don’t you take her?”

“I’d love to. But how come, Susan?”

“Because a girl still needs her Daddy.”

“We are going to fill your life with so much joy and intellectual stimulation, you will not believe it,” Nancy announced one childless evening to Doug.

“When does this begin?” he asked and jokingly checked the time.

“A week or two. If we’re uncomfortable with it, or if it seems silly or forced, we’ll stop, but if it works, we’ll have fun with it.”

Nancy commenced a series of Friday-night events at Doug’s apartment. She invited several people from her office, he asked Jeannie, Bob and Sarah, John McCarthy and his wife. Two of the single women who worked with Nancy brought men, at other times they came by themselves. Buffet dinners were served and each evening was devoted to a subject for discussion—politics, events in the news, sports. People were told the subject beforehand and they were to read what they could about it in advance of the gathering. On some weeks, instead of the discussion groups, they had musical events: they rented a piano and had a sing, another time they read scenes and sang songs from
Guys and Dolls.
When they began, Doug thought the idea was ridiculous and he felt foolish participating. But the evenings developed their own momentum. People weary of repetitive dinner parties and the sameness of their social lives responded to the gatherings. Doug understood that for Nancy there were two projects here—the events were one and he was the other. She had managed to widen his social circle and bring activity into his quiet rooms, showing him there was life after the empty nest.

“You’re fabulous,” he said to her after one of these nights. “You’re creating a little community.” “We are.”

“No, it’s your doing.”

“It’s us, don’t you understand that?”

“I was just trying to give you a compliment.”

“I never would have thought of these evenings if not for us, all the magazines you read, the musicals you love—that came from you and
then
I had the idea.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be. I’m very upset with you.”

“I only meant it’s something I never would have done.”

“Well, it’s not just you. There’s another unit here and it’s called
us.”

Doug was jogging around the reservoir on a Saturday morning thinking about ideas for columns, about bills, about future tuition payments, about Reynolds, who had sent him a computer note the previous day, “How about another column on personal fitness, Doug? You’re getting slack around the middle on this,” and near the mile mark he felt a pain in the back of his leg, a seizing sensation. He limped back to the apartment. The leg continued to hurt over the next two weeks. He had read that for some serious joggers their passion for running resembled addiction. When these joggers could not run for a while they experienced the same kind of depression that accompanied drug withdrawal. But not me, not a slow, non-Marathon type like me. And yet he was becoming moody about not exercising, and he observed a gradual weight gain.

“I was running to relieve my stress, thinking about what makes me stressful when it happened. It’s like a self-inflicted wound,” he said to Bob Kleinman at lunch.

“People die jogging. Actual death. All you got was a pain in your leg. You’re several limbs and life functions ahead.”

The pain persisted and he went to see the orthopedist who had treated his shoulder, a man in his 60s with a practice that included several professional athletes.

“It’s a muscle tear, Mr. Gardner. No running or long walks or any strenuous flexing of the ankle for about six weeks. You’ll be back to normal.”

“I don’t understand it. I was fully warmed up.”

“That’s what happens.”

“I never had this before. Is this from my inexorably advancing age?”

“Do you want me to tell you the truth?”

“You just have.”

“As we get older, the muscle fibers aren’t as elastic any longer.”

He was to wear a small foam pad in the heel of his shoe to relieve the strain of his injured left leg. Wearing the pad and compensating for the muscle tear, unconsciously he changed his gait. After a week he had a pain in his theoretically sound
right
leg. Andy came into New York for a weekend and asked Doug if he wanted to spend some time with him. Doug was unable to walk more than two blocks without discomfort. They took a cab to the East Side and saw a movie. Doug went to the studio for his television segment, Andy came to watch him, then linked up with friends, while Doug returned to the apartment to soak in a warm bath. First middle-age eyes. Now middle-age legs.

Doug and Nancy were at Marty and Ellen’s apartment for dinner, Doug was helping Marty serve drinks, and Marty inquired about his leg.

“It’s healing slowly, Marty.”

“My back gets me now. Goes in and out. Ellen says it started around my birthday. On account of my fiftieth.”

“Please don’t say that. You’re my model of mental health.”

“Me? I was Looney Tunes. The closer I got to fifty, the loonier. It’s like I didn’t have enough, my life wasn’t enough. I was making deals, negotiating for leases, I was going to buy businesses, go into donuts, nut shops. I was the nut shop.”

“Marty, if fifty got you …”

“I’ve had some wild ideas. Ellen straightens me out. And the thoughts. Do you ever see yourself at your own funeral?”

“Is that next?”

“Incidentally, thank you. At mine you said some very nice things about me.”

Doug was too suggestible to let this pass. He emerged from the subway on his way to work Monday morning and saw himself lying on the street, a simple, basic heart attack brought on by the very act of worrying about his death. The funeral is well attended. Pat Lahey is there. He steps to the lectern. “I knew Doug Gardner and I just want to say—he was a newspaperman.” John McCarthy nods, concurring, as do the other mourners. Wait a minute! That’s it? That’s my entire eulogy? “He was a newspaperman.” I find it a little terse, guys. His dog, Harry, has come. He speaks. Harry speaks! Harry, if you could have done this when I was alive, we would have been in clover. Harry says, “He was a fine owner. He never forgot to walk me.”