Last Respects (44 page)

I have often wondered why things, as well as people, fall on bad times. As I recall mine, and I have had what still seems more than my fair share of these unpleasant moments, I did not fall on them.
Au contraire
, as we used to say on East Fourth Street where I was born and raised. They fell on me. When they did, I proceeded to do what everybody around me did: I struggled to my feet and started again.

Not, however, my client. He didn’t have to start again. Schlisselberger was loaded. He could afford to make other people start again.

In short, Schlisselberger brought an antitrust suit. Against a national chain of theater owners. He believed it was their monopoly that had caused the theaters he owned in Philadelphia to fall on bad times. He asked me to come to Philadelphia to help, not as a lawyer but as a witness. I logged the trip into my work diary, and went. With an eagerness I concealed. Even though I don’t like to be treated as a liar, the unpleasant fact is that I am. So I repeat: My reason for being in Philadelphia was not Mr. Schlisselberger’s reason. As I have indicated, I had my own reason. Mr. Schlisselberger was my beard.

“The pot roast here is delicious,” he said after the pepper pot.

Pot roast scares me. The gravy. The mashed potatoes. The green peas. Or, as we used to say on East Fourth Street, the petit pois. At least eight hundred calories. As my mother used to say: in tips alone.

“I think I’ll settle for the pepper pot,” I said. “It was delicious.”

Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger stared at me across the menu as though I had suggested that we build in Central Park a monument to the memory of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

“You don’t like pot roast?” he said.

“I love pot roast,” I said. “But I have two problems. My doctor, Artie Steinberg, he says I should weigh one hundred and fifty-five pounds. This morning, before I left home, I checked in on the bathroom scale at one hundred and fifty-seven. Do I have to say more?”

“Sure you do,” said Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger. “You said two problems. What’s the second?”

“Before I meet you in court at two-thirty,” I said, “I’d like to run over to Wanamaker’s and pick up a wedding anniversary present for my wife.”

Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger stared at me with what I can only describe as disbelief. And why not? Since I was lying.

“You live in New York,” he said, “And you come here to Philadelphia to buy for your wife a wedding anniversary present in Wanamaker’s?”

He made it sound as though I had come to Mecca to buy a set of phylacteries.

“When my wife and I met more than thirty years ago,” I said, “she lived in Greenwich Village. Wanamaker’s was the classy store in the neighborhood. On Astor Place. That’s where I bought her wedding ring. For years, on our wedding anniversary, I used to get her a little something at Wanamaker’s. But in New York Wanamaker’s is out of business now. So I thought, as long as I’m in Philadelphia...”

Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger dropped his menu. “Benny Kramer!” he said angrily. “What the hell are you doing here in the Bellevue-Stratford fooling around with pot roast? You get your
toochiss
over there to Wanamaker’s and you buy that nice girl her wedding anniversary present, and you add to it a big fat one-pound box of Whitman’s Sampler candy, which she gets compliments of Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger. No, make it a two-pound box. I will meet you in court at two-thirty. Hurry up!”

I did. It was not a long journey. Dr. McCarran’s office was almost around the corner. In the Warwick Hotel. Checking my wrist watch as I came into the reception room, I saw that I was almost ME 7-1212 prompt: 1:15 on the nose.

“Mr. Kramer?” the receptionist said.

So I knew I was in good hands. The sensitive nature of my mission had been impressed on Dr. McCarran’s staff: a pretty redhead in a starched white office smock that Dior would probably have considered too tight. Not Benny Kramer. The girl looked great. All the bulges were in the right places.

“Please come right in,” she said. “Dr. McCarran is expecting you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I followed her across the reception room, past the print of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson” and the framed diploma from Cornell Med. She opened a door.

“Mr. Kramer,” she said, dropping the four syllables into a room I could not quite see clearly.

“Ah, yes,” a voice said. “Do come in.”

I am susceptible to voices. I like human sounds. I had not yet seen Dr. McCarran, but I knew at once I had come to the right place. The softly spoken words did something Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger’s bowl of pepper pot had not done. The tension with which Benny Kramer had been living for more than a month began to ease away. It was as though a ribbon, knotted tightly around my head, had been snipped with a scissors.

“It’s very kind of you to allow me to come and see you,” I said. I hesitated, then decided the hell with it. This was my last chance to tell the truth. “I’ve been more upset than I’ve been able to admit to anybody,” I said. “Even to my wife.”

Dr. McCarran waved his hand. The gesture seemed to break the light pattern in the room. As though a switch had been pulled. Suddenly I could see him. The sight was a shock. Dr. McCarran was a dead ringer for an actor I have admired ever since I was a member of Miss Merle S. Marine’s Playgoers’ Club in Thomas Jefferson High School. Osgood Perkins. Then playing in
The Front Page.
And—

I wonder if it is possible to convey the magic of that moment in time. Benny, I told myself sharply, stop wondering. It is not possible. Magic happens to you. When it does, be grateful and clutch it to your bosom. Don’t try to do the impossible with it. Magic cannot be passed on. All right, then. It happened to me. And here I was. Forty years later. In a hotel suite doctor’s office in Philadelphia. Remembering the magic. And feeling it again. A little bit, anyway. But it was enough. There had been only one Osgood Perkins.

“Please sit down,” said Dr. McCarran. “And please try to relax. All men who come to see doctors in secret have things on their minds that they have not been able to tell their wives, and don’t want to. Clap?”

The word hit me just as I sat down in front of Dr. McCarran’s desk.

“What did you say?” I said.

“Clap,” Dr. McCarran said.

I gave it a moment, then caught on. I was angry, but I knew I did not have the right to be.

“Nothing like that,” I said. “It’s about my son.”

“Sons, I have found, are more likely to suffer from the ailment than their fathers.”

“No, that’s not what my son is suffering from,” I said. “If he were, I would be troubled, naturally, but I would not go to all this CIA subterfuge to arrange for his treatment. Our family doctor, Artie Steinberg, would know what to do.”

“He would know better than most,” Dr. McCarran said. “Artie Steinberg and I rode a Bellevue ambulance together for two years after we got out of Cornell Med.”

I stared at him with delight. You think of life as something lived in compartments. Then you run head on into a surprise. There really are no compartments. Everything runs into everything else, like pancakes poured too close together on a griddle.

“Are you saying,” I said nervously, “that you know Dr. Arthur Steinberg of 435 East Fifty-seventh Street?”

“New York, N.Y. 10022,” said Dr. Osgood Perkins.

“Well,” Benny Kramer said. And that’s all he did say. Words—Miss Merle S. Marine probably would not believe this—words failed me. “He checked my blood pressure a week ago,” I said. “On East Fifty-seventh Street.”

“So he told me,” Dr. McCarran said.

Astonished, I said, “He did?”

“Yes,” Dr. McCarran said. “Artie called to say you’d been in, and among other things you’d talked about your son, and while he said you hadn’t said anything, he suspected what you might do, and I’m the only man he knows who is capable of telling you what you want to know, so he called me here in Philadelphia and we talked about you. You’re taking two Aldomet tablets every morning, one every afternoon, and one at bedtime. Correct?”

“Yes,” I said. “And one Esidrix every morning.”

“Yes, of course,” Dr. McCarran said. “That’s for getting rid of the water in your system. We must get rid of the water, mustn’t we?”

“I don’t know why,” I said, “but I do everything Artie Steinberg tells me to do.”

“Very sound,” said Dr. McCarran. “Getting rid of the water is of the utmost importance.”

“Well,” I said, “I seem to be doing it.”

The conversation seemed at this point to fall apart. I did not know what Artie Steinberg had told him, but Dr. McCarran apparently did not believe that I had come to see him solely about Jack. I wondered if Artie thought I did not trust him and was checking on his medication with another doctor. Anyway, I liked Dr. McCarran, but I did not know how to handle this. Until Dr. McCarran said in a most friendly way, “You’ve been a friend to Sebastian Roon for a long time?”

Light invaded the shaded room. Sebastian Roon is my oldest friend. That’s the truth. I am a bald-headed boy from East Fourth Street, later Tiffany Street, and my oldest friend is named Sebastian Roon. Can you beat it? If you can, please don’t tell me. We live by small bits of brightness. To me, for forty years, one of the brightest bits has been a man named, most improbably, Sebastian Roon. Don’t take it away from me.

“Forty years,” I said. “We met when we were both seventeen. That’s forty years ago. He arranged this appointment, as you know.”

“Indeed I do know,” said Dr. McCarran. “If he hadn’t, I’m afraid I would not have seen you. I met Seb during the war. He’s a great actor, I think. Don’t you?”

I was not sure. Acting is a troubling art. It seems to me it’s largely an accident. If you have a face shaped in a certain way, if you bring out on the stage, or in front of a camera, an image that is
sui generis,
you are a great actor even if you are a dope. Sebastian Roon is no dope. And he is my friend. I knew what to say.

“He is the greatest actor I have ever known,” I said.

Safe enough. I have known only two actors. The other one may be greater than Sebastian. But he is a bastard. Nuts to him.

“My wife will be pleased by your opinion,” said Dr. McCarran. “She is very fond of Seb.”

The last wife who had not been fond of Seb was Anne of Cleves, and we all know what happened to her.

“So is my wife,” I said. “That’s why I felt it was okay to come see you behind her back.”

“It’s perfectly okay,” said Dr. McCarran. “I may not be the best doctor in the world, but I think I am about as good a friend as most human beings. I have never violated the confidence of a friend. You can ask Seb.”

“I have,” I said. “He told me I can tell you anything.”

“Then let me tell you what he told me,” said Dr. McCarran. “It may make things simpler, and probably speed them up. I understand you have to be in the Federal Courthouse on Walnut Street at two-thirty.”

“Seb doesn’t seem to have left anything out,” I said.

“Good actors rarely do,” said Dr. McCarran. “Here is what Seb told me. You have a son named Jack. He has just graduated from Harvard. He has gone to the University of Indiana to work for his masters in fine arts. His New York draft board has told him that they are forbidden to grant any more graduate school deferments. Your son Jack’s draft board told him before he went to Indiana that, if he did go, he would be in the Mekong Delta in three weeks. Is that correct?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “As Jack reported it to me, the draft board said two weeks.”

“Close enough,” said Dr. McCarran.

He lifted a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses that hung around his neck on one of those couturier braided ropes. He set the glasses on his nose, and looked at me exactly coldly but with a sort of clinical interest. As though up to now he had been going through a boring duty he had promised to go through for a friend, but now his own emotions had been engaged. My stomach reacted with a small tremor. He
was
Osgood Perkins!

“This is obviously difficult for you,” Dr. McCarran said. “It’s easier for me. May I continue?”

“Please,” I said.

My mother did not learn English until I was almost eighteen. But she learned me my manners. In Yiddish. Thanks, Ma.

“Seb says you don’t want that boy killed in the Mekong Delta,” Dr. McCarran said. “Is that correct?”

I looked at him for a couple of moments. I decided that nothing would be gained by hitting him. Even though I knew just how to do it. Corporal Isherwood had taught me the blow during a commando course I had to take in Kent a month before D-day.

“Strike for the bahstid’s jug,” Corporal Isherwood had barked at his dozen uneasy pupils. “It’s where these bahstids are vulnerable. Get them while they’re too confident to protect themselves. Make your choice. The nuts or the guts. The nuts is more decisive. But the guts is closer. Straighten you hand, palm flat, and swing like this, like you wuz cuttin’ the bahstid’s air flow. Which is what you’ll be doon. Easy. Sharp. Hard. That will take care of the bahstid.”

I never got a chance to put Corporal Isherwood’s instructions into practice. By the time I got to Caen the bahstids were all running like crazy from Patton’s tanks. Just as well. I doubt that I could have done what Corporal Isherwood urged.

So I said, as calmly as I could, to Dr. McCarran: “No, I don’t want that boy killed.”

Dr. McCarran said, “Seb tells me he has told you in confidence about my service with the draft board during the last war.”

“He has,” I said.

“Please forgive the next question,” Dr. McCarran said. “Are we both agreed on the phrase ‘in confidence’?”

The bahstids. Even the best of them. They had to close the shutters.

“Completely,” I said. “Except for my wife and my son. I will have to tell them, of course.”

“Of course,” said Dr. McCarran. “Okay, then. During the last war, I served as one of the chief medical advisers to General Hershey. The average citizen is quite savage about the draft. Understandably so. Since the days of Crassus nobody has looked with delight on a system that can take a son, a husband, a brother, a lover, perhaps even just a nice neighbor, from his normal routine and shove him into an enterprise where he may very probably get his head blown off, and often what gets blown off is worse than his head. Anyway, if you don’t look with delight on something, you begin inventing ways to circumvent it. The best way is to wet the bed.”