Psychology and Other Stories (23 page)

“What makes you think I was ever married?”

“You're a hoot and a holler, doll. I like you. Who was your father?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “we should discuss terms.”

“To be honest with you,” he said, circling the chair he had been offered, “I don't like mixing business with women.”

“Neither do I.”

“I
like
women, you see. But business—business is brutal. I like my business competitors to be men. I like my chicken to have bones in it.”

“Not everyone you make a deal with is your competitor, Mr. Singleton. There is such a thing as a mutually beneficial—”

“Men pay lip service to that idea too, but let me tell you something, sweet pea: it's just the polite ceremony around the duel. The aim in business is always to shoot the other guy before he shoots you.”

“Your people don't want me to sell to you,” she said. “Neither do my people.”

“But you—you don't like being told what to do, do you? Sure—I know your type. I can read a woman like a billboard. Bill-broads, I call 'em. Heh—you like that?”

She stood by the open door and said, “I'll call you when I've made up my mind.”

“I get it. You want to talk it over with your accountant, your manager, your brain trust—the
boys.
I understand.”

“What hotel can I reach you at, Mr. Singleton?”

He could not remember. “Never mind,” he said. “Never you mind. Maybe
I'll
call
you
, angel. Yeah, maybe I will. Maybe I will and maybe I won't. Never mind.”

He wasn't licked yet, goddamn it; he still had a few tricks up his sleeve; they weren't going to farm him out to the minor leagues yet, goddamn it.

She had been weak. He would be strong.

The chairs in this house had cushions on the seats and the cushions had dust on them. In this house, everyone whispered.

The boy he was playing with kicked him in the leg. “Ha ha, you're hurt!”

“No I'm not,” he spluttered in rage and incomprehension.
“You
are!”—and he kicked the boy as hard as he could. The boy's mother yelled at his mother, but it didn't matter: he'd made the boy cry. Jan was happy. Jan was strong.

“What do you want a hundred and fifty thousand barrels of sheep dip
for
, anyway?”

“You think I'm going to tell you?” he screamed.

The train was moving so slow, he half expected water to come pouring in when he opened the window.

“Would you mind terribly closing that, please? The smoke …”

“Goddamn it, a little coal dust never killed no one.” He stuck his head out the window and gulped wind. The little old couple excused themselves to the dining car.

“They call me eccentric,” Singleton said, “but goddamn it, it ain't me—it's the times that're
un
eccentric. We used to ride cable cars hanging upside down from the straps—nothing to it. We used to sing ‘Oh, Lady Be Good' in the street—and no one blinked. We drank gin neat from iced melons and made egg-nog in June—big deal! We rode from New York to Milwaukee in the dead of winter with the windows all open wide—just to make the gin taste warmer, goddamn it.”

Each of these moments came to his mind as clearly as the faces of his grandchildren.

The manager informed him that the matter of his bill had been satisfactorily resolved—and that there was a telephone call waiting for him.

“Of course it has,” Singleton said irritably, mistaking the man for a bumptious bellboy. “I told you it would be.”

“The call, I gather, is of an urgent nature.”

Singleton rubbed his hands together. But it was not the baroness; it was little Dougie.

“You've got to come home, Dad. It's Kate.”

What was she doing back there? Why wasn't she in New York? She'd escaped all that, like he never could—so why had she let them drag her back? Something must be terribly wrong.

Doug and Germaine were waiting for him at the station. He was shocked by how old they looked. They walked him to the car, their faces as solemn and flaccid as those of board members.

“What for the love of God is going on here? Why are you behaving like two goddamn robots? Where is she?”

“She's at home,” was all they would say.

But she was not. Instead, waiting for him, in the house that he had helped design and paid cash money to be built, were the deputy and the sheriff.

“It's best if you don't make a fuss here, Jerome, but just come along with us now.”

Their moist eyes and embarrassed posture gave them away: Katy was dead.

“What the fuck is going on out here?” said a voice pained with bewilderment. It belonged to a man with a neck as thick as his head, which protruded from his beige uniform like a big pink pencil eraser. The face had a disrespectful expression on it.

Singleton said, “You watch who the hell you think you're talking to, goddamn it.”

The orderly, who was known in the hospital as Bullneck, opened his mouth. His scalp began to tingle. With a heroic,
indeed angelic effort, he closed his mouth. This man was a new intake.

“Get back to bed,” he stuttered at last. “And don't let me catch you out here making that bloody racket again.”

Singleton began to vibrate. “How
dare
you—”

It was Bullneck's belief that, since the patients of the asylum had something wrong with their heads, the best way to correct their behavior was to hit them in the head, the way you might slap a fuzzy television.

Singleton had never been sucker-punched in his life. Instinctively he reared back and kicked the man in the shin as hard as he could.

Bullneck's screams soon brought assistance, as well as onlookers. When the orderlies had pinned Singleton's writhing body to the floor, Bullneck asked, “Now are you going to shut up or do I have to really hurt you?”

Singleton choked on his hatred. “Goddamn you to hell you goddamn sonofabitches!”

Bullneck slapped Singleton's face as hard as he had ever allowed himself to slap any patient's face. “I
said
, are you going to shut up or—”

“By all the gods in heaven you'll pay for this you goddamn dirty whoring sonofa—”

Bullneck clapped his hand over Singleton's mouth and squeezed.

(Years later, he would remember none of this. He would recall the poor wages, the snooty doctors, the terrible working conditions, and the patients who spat on him; and he would admit that there were times when he had lost his temper. But he would not recall wanting to kill this old man who would not shut up; he would not recall how earnestly he had tried to crush his face in his fist. It was a moment that did not fit into his self-story—for he was not, he believed, a cruel or violent man.)

“There's only one God in heaven,” he said, and squeezed. Singleton bit his hand.

He'd thought he knew what dying was: dying of malaria in that stifling thatch hut in Peru; freezing to death that night in a Minnesota cornfield; awaiting the imminent explosion of Hardy's bullet cutting into his chest; drowning in the anonymous Atlantic after falling overboard like a goddamn fool; dying of an old, broken lung in a barren hospital room. But he'd been wrong. None of those were dying. Dying was this flailing panicked fight, this all-out war against death. He could not breathe—he was a sucking lung submerged in the ocean. Every nerve in every tissue of his body screamed like a firecracker—every cell within him burned with life, fought against death—he had within him a dying animal, a wild thrashing shrieking rodent—he kicked, punched, clawed at their faces, whipped his head from side to side, gnashed his teeth—an arm as strong as the bole of a tree snapped the cartilage in his neck like a dry wishbone—hatred, indistinguishable from the will to live, seared his veins—they were killing him—
the goddamn sonofabitches were killing him
—

He bought her an ice cream cone. “Thanks, pop,” she said sarcastically. He tousled her hair sarcastically. They went into their funnywalk routine. The passersby gaped. They were the show; everyone else was just onlookers, just passersby.

“And that of course,” he said, “is the famous Waldorf Astoria where maybe you'll stay someday, huh.”

“I won't need to,” she said, slipping comfortably into their future-making patter, “I'll own an apartment across the street, right there.”

“What,” he said, aghast, “you won't own the whole building?”

“I
do
live here, Dad,” she said. She was old now. “Remember?”

He didn't want to remember.

“Dad, it wasn't me. It was you.” She huffed a sigh—she was thirteen now, fourteen.
“You're
the one dying.”

He threw back his head and his shoulders and quickened his pace. She had to jog to catch up.

“Then why does your age keep flimflamming around like that?” he demanded.

She explained it to him. He was reviewing his life one last time before leaving it. His life, as they said, was flashing before his eyes.

His bruised, burning, straitjacketed body told him that she was telling the truth. He let out three quick sobs—thinking of his patents, his factories, his grandchildren. “I'm not leaving nothing,” he said.

She wouldn't meet his gaze.

“You might not have to leave
everything
behind,” she said at last.

She explained it to him.

Everyone was against Dr. Ngi. They didn't like him because he was new, because he was short, and because he was foreign.

They had liked Dr. Kenneally, his predecessor, well enough. His approach to administration had been, for forty-two years, that of a man about to retire: he didn't attend rounds, didn't like reading incident reports, didn't insist on proper stock-taking of the medicine room, and commandeered all the meat for his staff. Of course they liked him.

Dr. Ngi, on the other hand, was young, and subject to the belief that bad situations can sometimes be ameliorated. He was trying to make the asylum into a hospital—a place where the ill might actually, once in awhile, recuperate. This made him unpopular.

The latest controversy was his no-television policy. The nurses and orderlies hardly cared what the patients did—what horrors they
observed, what trash they took into their brains—so long as they kept quiet. The television kept them quiet. According to the nurses, and even now some of the doctors, the dayrooms had become much noisier and more violent since the TV ban. But Dr. Ngi simply could not believe that murder mysteries and garish news reports of fires, plane crashes, and natural disasters were conducive to the mental health of his inmates. Perhaps a person had to get worse before they would get better. But he could hardly argue this to his beleaguered, volatile staff. Instead, to placate them, and not always because he thought it was in the best interest of the patient, he authorized each day more of the requests that came his way for paraldehyde, veronal, insulin, and isolation.

On top of all his other worries, Dr. Ngi made a point of seeing patients personally. He did not have the time, but it was one more area in which he was determined to outshine the repugnant, beloved Dr. K.

He sent the sobbing man away with a grounds pass, and called in the next.

“I guess you're the one I've been waiting for,” said the old man as soon as the door was opened to him, nodding with approval at Dr. Ngi's open report book. “Katy told me there'd be someone to take down the things I've been holding on to. Well, I've been thinking it all over for I don't know how many days, and let me tell you it hasn't been easy, a lifetime is a long time and I don't know how much longer I could have remembered some of this, but if you're going to get it all down there in your book now then I guess maybe I can start letting some of it go. I hope there'll be enough time.”

Dr. Ngi, whose English was functional but largely devoid of idioms, did not fare well with fast talkers. He nodded seriously, matching the patient's expression, gestured to the chair, and consulted the man's file.

“My mother was not a bad woman but she was weak,” said Singleton, circling the chair he had been offered. “I've left behind many things about her but I don't want to forget it all. She was always kind to me, it must be said. Those
sarmale
she used to make— No, goddamn it. Let me start with the important things. The companies I started and the money I made, all that was well and good but the best thing I ever made, because I made her make herself, was Katy. She never understood that. She always got me all wrong. Well, all right, maybe that was the price I paid, but let me get it straight for the record. She thought I told her she could do what she liked—that I didn't give a damn. But what I tried to tell her was, Do what you
want.
Make the world be the world you want to have around you. Goddamn it, I had to show the boys what to do each step of the way because they didn't have the mettle, I had to give Doug the cracker factory because he couldn't have done anything else, but I always tried to get Katy to surprise us, because she had it in her. I wanted her to be
like
me by
not
being like me—by not being like
her
old man, either. When she was twelve—and get this down, because this is what I want to save, more than anything else. When she was twelve, I came home on the train …”