Assorted Prose (24 page)

As, side by side at the window, we talked, I was surprised that my father could answer so many of my questions. As a young man, before I was born, he had travelled, looking for work; this was not
his
first trip to New York. Excited by my new respect, I longed to say something to remold that calm, beaten face.

“Do you really think he meant for us to stay out here?” I asked.

“Quin is a go-getter,” he said, gazing over my head. “I admire him. Anything he wanted, from little on up, he went after it. Slam. Bang. His thinking is miles ahead of mine—just like your mother’s. You can feel them pull out ahead of you.” He moved his hands, palms down, like two taxis, the left quickly pulling ahead of the right. “You’re the same way.”

“Sure, sure.” My impatience was not merely embarrassment at being praised; I was irritated that he considered Uncle Quin as smart as myself. At that point in my life I was sure that only stupid people took an interest in money.

When Uncle Quin finally entered the bedroom, he said, “Martin, I hoped you and the boy would come out and join us.”

“Hell, I didn’t want to butt in. You and those men were talking business.”

“Lucas and Roebuck and I? Now, Marty, it was nothing that my own brother couldn’t hear. Just a minor matter of adjustment. Both those men are fine men. Very important in their own fields. I’m disappointed
that you couldn’t see more of them. Believe me, I hadn’t meant for you to hide in here. Now, what kind of drink would you like?”

“I don’t care. I drink very little any more.”

“Scotch-and-water, Marty?”

“Swell.”

“And the boy? What about some ginger ale, young man? Or would you like milk?”

“The ginger ale,” I said.

“There was a day, you know, when your father could drink any two men under the table.”

As I remember it, a waiter brought the drinks to the room, and while we were drinking them I asked if we were going to spend all afternoon in this room. Uncle Quin didn’t seem to hear, but five minutes later he suggested that the boy might like to take a look around the city—Gotham, he called it, Baghdad-on-the-Subway. My father said that that would be a once-in-a-lifetime treat for the kid. He always called me “the kid” when I was sick or had lost at something or was angry—when he felt sorry for me, in short. The three of us went down in the elevator and took a taxi ride down Broadway, or up Broadway—I wasn’t sure. “This is what they call the Great White Way,” Uncle Quin said several times. Once he apologized, “In daytime it’s just another street.” The trip didn’t seem so much designed for sightseeing as for getting Uncle Quin to the Pickernut Club, a little restaurant set in a block of similar canopied places. I remember we stepped down into it and it was dark inside. A piano was playing “There’s a Small Hotel.”

“He shouldn’t do that,” Uncle Quin said. Then he waved to the man behind the piano. “How are you, Freddie? How are the kids?”

“Fine, Mr. August, fine,” Freddie said, bobbing his head and smiling and not missing a note.

“That’s Quin’s song,” my father said to me as we wriggled our way into a slippery curved seat at a round table.

I didn’t say anything, but Uncle Quin, overhearing some disapproval in my silence, said, “Freddie’s a first-rate man. He has a boy going to Colgate this autumn.”

I asked, “Is that really your song?”

Uncle Quin grinned and put his warm broad hand on my shoulder; I hated, at that age, being touched. “I let them think it is,” he said, oddly purring. “To me, songs are like young girls. They’re all pretty.”

A waiter in a red coat scurried up. “Mr. August! Back from the West? How are you, Mr. August?”

“Getting by, Jerome, getting by. Jerome, I’d like you to meet my kid brother, Martin.”

“How do you do, Mr. Martin. Are you paying New York a visit? Or do you live here?”

My father quickly shook hands with Jerome, somewhat to Jerome’s surprise. “I’m just up for the afternoon, thank you. I live in a hick town in Pennsylvania you never heard of.”

“I see, sir. A quick visit.”

“This is the first time in six years that I’ve had a chance to see my brother.”

“Yes, we’ve seen very little of him these past years. He’s a man we can never see too much of, isn’t that right?”

Uncle Quin interrupted. “This is my nephew Jay.”

“How do you like the big city, Jay?”

“Fine.” I didn’t duplicate my father’s mistake of offering to shake hands.

“Why, Jerome,” Uncle Quin said, “my brother and I would like to have a Scotch-on-the-rocks. The boy would like a ginger ale.”

“No, wait,” I said. “What kinds of ice cream do you have?”

“Vanilla and chocolate, sir.”

I hesitated. I could scarcely believe it, when the cheap drugstore at home had fifteen flavors.

“I’m afraid it’s not a very big selection,” Jerome said.

“I guess vanilla.”

“Yes, sir. One plate of vanilla.”

When my ice cream came it was a golf ball in a flat silver dish; it kept spinning away as I dug at it with my spoon. Uncle Quin watched me and asked, “Is there anything especially Jay would like to do?”

“The kid’d like to get into a bookstore,” my father said.

“A bookstore. What sort of book, Jay?”

I said, “I’d like to look for a good book of Vermeer.”

“Vermeer,” Uncle Quin pronounced slowly, relishing the
r
’s, pretending to give the matter thought. “Dutch school.”

“He’s Dutch, yes.”

“For my own money, Jay, the French are the people to beat. We have four Degas ballet dancers in our living room in Chicago, and I could sit
and look at one of them for hours. I think it’s wonderful, the feeling for balance the man had.”

“Yeah, but don’t Degas’s paintings always remind you of colored drawings? For actually
looking
at things in terms of paint, for the lucid eye, I think Vermeer makes Degas look sick.”

Uncle Quin said nothing, and my father, after an anxious glance across the table, said, “That’s the way he and his mother talk all the time. It’s all beyond me. I can’t understand a thing they say.”

“Your mother is encouraging you to be a painter, is she, Jay?” Uncle Quin’s smile was very wide, and his cheeks were pushed out as if each held a candy.

“Sure, I suppose she is.”

“Your mother is a very wonderful woman, Jay,” Uncle Quin said.

It was such an embarrassing remark, and so much depended upon your definition of “wonderful,” that I dug at my ice cream, and my father asked Uncle Quin about his own wife, Edna. When we left, Uncle Quin signed the check with his name and the name of some company. It was close to five o’clock.

My uncle didn’t know much about the location of bookstores in New York—his last twenty years had been spent in Chicago—but he thought that if we went to Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue we should find something. The cab driver let us out beside a park that acted as kind of a back yard for the Public Library. It looked so inviting, so agreeably dusty, with the pigeons and the men nodding on the benches and the office girls in their taut summer dresses, that, without thinking, I led the two men into it. Shimmering buildings arrowed upward and glinted through the treetops. This was New York, I told myself: the silver town. Towers of ambition rose, crystalline, within me. “If you stand here,” my father said, “you can see the Empire State.” I went and stood beneath my father’s arm and followed with my eyes the direction of it. Something sharp and hard fell into my right eye. I ducked my head and blinked; it was painful.

“What’s the trouble?” Uncle Quin’s voice asked.

My father said, “The poor kid’s got something into his eye. He has the worst luck that way of anybody I ever knew.”

The thing seemed to have life. It bit. “Ow,” I said, angry enough to cry.

“If we can get him out of the wind,” my father’s voice said, “maybe I can see it.”

“No, now, Marty, use your head. Never fool with the eyes or ears. The hotel is within two blocks. Can you walk two blocks, Jay?”

“I’m blind, not lame,” I snapped.

“He has a ready wit,” Uncle Quin said.

Between the two men, shielding my eye with a hand, I walked to the hotel. From time to time, one of them would take my other hand, or put one of theirs on my shoulder, but I would walk faster, and the hands would drop away. I hoped our entrance into the hotel lobby would not be too conspicuous; I took my hand from my eye and walked erect, defying the impulse to stoop. Except for the one lid being shut and possibly my face being red, I imagined I looked passably suave. However, my guardians lost no time betraying me. Not only did they walk at my heels, as if I might topple any instant, but my father told one old bum sitting in the lobby, “Poor kid got something in his eye,” and Uncle Quin, passing the desk, called, “Send up a doctor to Twenty-eleven.”

“You shouldn’t have done that, Quin,” my father said in the elevator. “I can get it out, now that he’s out of the wind. This is happening all the time. The kid’s eyes are too far front in his head.”

“Never fool with the eyes, Martin. They are your most precious tool in life.”

“It’ll work out,” I said, though I didn’t believe it would. It felt like a steel chip, deeply embedded.

Up in the room, Uncle Quin made me lie down on the bed. My father, a handkerchief wadded in his hand so that one corner stuck out, approached me, but it hurt so much to open the eye that I repulsed him. “Don’t torment me,” I said, twisting my face away. “What good does it do? The doctor’ll be up.”

Regretfully my father put the handkerchief back into his pocket.

The doctor was a soft-handed man with little to say to anybody; he wasn’t pretending to be the family doctor. He rolled my lower eyelid on a thin stick, jabbed with a Q-tip, and showed me, on the end of the Q-tip, an eyelash. My own eyelash. He dropped three drops of yellow fluid into the eye to remove any chance of infection. The fluid stung, and I shut my eyes, leaning back into the pillow, glad it was over. When I opened them, my father was passing a bill into the doctor’s hand. The doctor thanked him, winked at me, and left. Uncle Quin came out of the bathroom.

“Well, young man, how are you feeling now?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“It was just an eyelash,” my father said.

“
Just
an eyelash! Well, I know how an eyelash can feel like a razor blade in there. But, now that the young invalid is recovered, we can think of dinner.”

“No, I really appreciate your kindness, Quin, but we must be getting back to the sticks. I have an eight-o’clock meeting I should be at.”

“I’m extremely sorry to hear that. What sort of meeting, Marty?”

“A church council.”

“So you’re still doing church work. Well, God bless you for it.”

“Grace wanted me to ask you if you couldn’t possibly come over some day. We’ll put you up overnight. It would be a real treat for her to see you again.”

Uncle Quin reached up and put his arm around his younger brother’s shoulders. “Martin, I’d like that better than anything in the world. But I am solid with appointments, and I must head west this Thursday. They don’t let me have a minute’s repose. Nothing would please my heart better than to share a quiet day with you and Grace in your home. Please give her my love, and tell her what a wonderful boy she is raising. The two of you are raising.”

My father promised, “I’ll do that.” And, after a little more fuss, we left.

“The child better?” the old man in the lobby called to us on the way out.

“It was just an eyelash, thank you, sir,” my father said. When we got outside, I wondered if there were any bookstores still open.

“We have no money.” “None at all?”

“The doctor charged five dollars. That’s how much it costs in New York to get something in your eye.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. Do you think I pulled out the eyelash and stuck it in there myself?
I
didn’t tell you to call the doctor.”

“I know that.”

“Couldn’t we just go into a bookstore and look a minute?”

“We haven’t time, Jay.”

But when we reached Pennsylvania Station, it was over thirty minutes until the next train left. As we sat on a bench, my father smiled reminiscently.
“Boy, he’s smart, isn’t he? His thinking is sixty light-years ahead of mine.”

“Who? Whose thinking?”

“My brother. Notice the way he hid in the bathroom until the doctor was gone? That’s how to make money. The rich man collects dollar bills like the stamp collector collects stamps. I knew he’d do it. I knew it when he told the clerk to send up a doctor that I’d have to pay for it.”

“Well, why
should
he pay for it?
You
were the person to pay for it.”

“That’s right. Why should he?” My father settled back, his eyes forward, his hands crossed and limp in his lap. The skin beneath his chin was loose; his temples seemed concave. The liquor was probably disagreeing with him. “That’s why he’s where he is now, and that’s why I am where I am.”

The seed of my anger was a desire to recall him to himself, to scold him out of being old and tired. “Well, why’d you bring along only five dollars? You might have known something would happen.”

“You’re right, Jay. I should have brought more.”

“Look. Right over there is an open bookstore. Now if you had brought
ten
dollars—”

“Is it open? I don’t think so. They just left the lights in the window on.”

“What if it isn’t? What does it matter to us? Anyway, what kind of art book can you get for five dollars? Color plates cost money. How much do you think a decent book of Vermeer costs? It’d be cheap at fifteen dollars, even second-hand, with the pages all crummy and full of spilled coffee.” I kept on, shrilly flailing the passive and infuriating figure of my father, until we left the city. Once we were on the homeward train, my tantrum ended; it had been a kind of ritual, for both of us, and he had endured my screams complacently, nodding assent, like a midwife assisting at the birth of family pride. Years passed before I needed to go to New York again.

 
MY UNCLE’S DEATH