They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee (2 page)

The waves were gone, the twinges forgotten, even the hints were faded. Harry felt he could almost sleep. He passed the remote back into his right hand, but his right thumb was disinterested. Harry's lids flickered. He fought the urge to close them. Harry was afraid of sleep, but the fear was weak in him tonight. He clicked off the television and let his eyes close. Harry rolled over and let a pillow be his wife. In this twilight time, he laughed to himself that his wife had never been so thin as a pillow. It was good to pretend, though. And as he drifted off, Harry thought he could hear her call to him that she would protect him from the waves forever. With that promise, Harry's twilight was ended.

 

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby

Damaged Goods

I turned to look over my left shoulder at MacClough seated two pews back. I didn't think it possible for a man to age so much in a month. He seemed thicker around the middle than I remembered. Four weeks hadn't lightened the blue of his eyes any, but that mischievous sparkle, though not gone, seemed dimmer somehow, smudged like old wax. His golden, surfer-dude hair had gone gray. Maybe it had been graying for years and I'd been blinded by close proximity. Maybe I hadn't wanted to see.

Johnny noticed my stare. His sad smile and signature wink told me so. They were gestures meant not to distract, but to acknowledge and give comfort. Sleight of hand was not MacClough's way. His wink let me know that he too had seen in the mirror the changes in him I was only noticing now. The smile. . . Well, the smile said many things. It said he knew I was hurting and that showing it was all right with him. But beyond that, it seemed to say that a funeral was no place to judge a man by his looks or to judge a man at all.

He was right, of course. Often, the only person at a funeral who seems at ease with him or herself is the body in the box. And today, not even that was true. My father was a stranger to me and, if he could have seen what they had done to his face, he would have felt a stranger to himself as well. It wasn't the vaudeville greasepaint—powders and rouges aren't, when all is said and done, very good understudies for coursing blood and muscle tone—that made him so alien. On the contrary, as he'd always had a maudlin love of clowns, the makeup was perversely appropriate. It was that they had shaved off his moustache. They shouldn't have done that. I didn't know him without that moustache.

My first impulse was anger. Anger is always my first impulse. It was my dad's legacy, anger. Anger is like an interesting mixture of black paint and acid. It blots out, erodes anything already on the canvas or on the pallet or in the heart. First, I wanted to slap the funeral directer: “For chrissakes! Who let the undertaker shave him?”

I slapped no one. I said nothing. Cowardice is the other half of the legacy.

Anger then turned to my brothers. How could they let him be shaved? But no one had asked their permission—“Excuse me, Mr. Klein, but would you like your dad's hair done in a shag cut? And that moustache. . . If you ask me, it's got to go!” I guess my brothers assumed, as I would have, that the whole world—okay, maybe not the whole world, but all of Brooklyn for sure—knew that Harry Klein always had a moustache. Always!

Finally, I directed my anger to where it would have gone anyway. I let it tear at me. Who was I to rage at anyone else? Where had I been when that twenty-five-cent razor was making a stranger of my dad? I'll tell you where I was. I was pitching, man, pitching. Four weeks in Los Angeles had schooled me in things the streets of Brooklyn never could. In Brooklyn, you learn to watch your back. In L.A., your back is the least of your worries.

Hollywood'd been my agent's idea: “The numbers on the book aren't so hot, but the artsy-fartsy types out there love it. You'll throw in a Latina partner for your detective and up the body count a little. . . . Don't worry.”

He didn't let the fact that there was no screenplay bother him: “Who needs a screenplay? No screenplay means you're more flexible. You're not invested. They like flexible. Don't worry.”

I should have worried. The first week we were out there, pitching my idea meant making a competently written detective novel with an arcane plot and surprise ending sound like the best investment since Microsoft. In week two it meant begging with dignity. By the third week it was just begging. By week four I'd taken to farting during meetings to get their attention. It was at the last of these performances that I'd gotten the call to come home. Suddenly, their attention mattered very little.

I nodded to MacClough and looked along the pew at my family. I took John's unspoken advice, trying not to judge them. My sisters-in-law seemed shaken down to their shoes. My brothers, on the other hand, appeared nearly catatonic. It was as if both their faces had been coated in a quick-setting mortar, color-matached perfectly to their skins. But when you gazed closely enough, cracks showed in the plaster and there was an unmistakable redness in the folds of their eyes. Sometimes, tears themselves are unnecessary. My nieces and nephews were appropriately confused.

Zak, my brother Jeffrey's oldest son, was AWOL. Commitment to family was not high on my nephew's list of priorities. And as he seemed destined and determined to take up my mantle as the family fuck-up, his absence had not exactly set the world ablaze. No one was calling in the troops or printing Zak's likeness on milk cartons. I think he would have caused more of a ripple if he had just shown his face.

The rabbi began his routine. He was a man clearly inspired by the
Minute Waltz.
It had taken Harry Klein seventy-four years to live out his time, but the rabbi was intent upon summarizing them in as many seconds. I might not have minded the pace so much had he been able to muster some semblance of genuine feeling. He didn't have it in him. And when, twenty seconds into his tribute, the rabbi began buzz sawing through the third and fourth decades of my dad's life, I stopped listening and checked out the decor.

The chapel hadn't changed much since the service for my mother seven years earlier. It was only slightly more awful. There were faux bricks and faux beams and faded decals on the windows meant to give the appearance of stained glass. There was mylar wallpaper depicting scenes from the Old Testament and avocado cushions on the pews. With a splash of bad taxidermy you might mistake the place for a Hadassah hunting lodge.

Josh, the Klein brother with the misfortune of being born between Jeffrey and me, was up to do the eulogy. He said that he had found himself strangely ill-prepared for my father's passing. Me too, Josh. Me too. It was strange because we had been in dress rehearsal for his death since we could cross the street by ourselves. My dad had been stricken with a particularly insidious form of cancer. Excruciatingly painful and snail-like in growth, it killed him in pieces. Tenderness being one of the earliest casaulties. Harry Klein had collected scar tissue like some men collected baseball memorabilia. He had averaged one surgical procedure for every year of my life. I would be glad to see that streak come to an end. Josh said just that. We would all be glad the pain was finally over.

I forced myself to look at the cherry-wood coffin that held those few pieces of my father that had not been divvied up between the surgeons and the sarcomas. For me, the doctors and the disease were two sides of the same coin: two gangs of clumsy thieves who had taken forever to make off with the goods. I remembered lying awake as a boy, praying for my father just to die. Some kids might have prayed for miracle cures, but even then I had dreadfully low expectations of the Almighty. But rather than killing off one embittered grocery clerk, God took the path of least resistance and murdered my faith instead. If my dad had died when I was young, I might've been able to imagine him as a man composed of something more than hard edges. In my fantasy, he might even have been capable of loving me back. As it was, I saw him much like I saw the dented and discounted cans he brought home from work. I saw him as he saw himself, as damaged goods.

At the cemetary, only the noise and backwash of passing jets prevented the rabbi from setting another speed record. I wondered if he kept a stopwatch in his pocket. When we finished taking turns at throwing our spadefuls of dirt on the coffin, people fractured into cliques. Talk turned to food. It's traditional for Jews; suffering and food. Aunt Lindy and Uncle Saul visited other graves. Their world had just gotten much smaller. Now they were the only two left from their generation.

“Whadya think of L.A.?” MacClough asked, squeezing my hand.

“I think Los Angelenos are lucky God feels bad about Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Terrible, huh?”

“Worse.”

The preliminaries out of the way, we hugged. Our embrace saddened me more than I could say. Never once had my dad and I held each other in such an unselfconscious way. Surely now, we never would.

“Give me a ride back to Sound Hill?” I wondered.

“For a fee, my boy.”

“I think I've got a spare quarter, you shanty Irish prick.”

“Yeah, I missed you too, ya heathen Jew.”

Jeffrey came away from one of the limousines and walked over to us. We hugged out of habit. Jeff's awkward embrace was not unlike my dad's.

“We need to talk,” he said, taking a step back.

MacClough turned to go: “Meet you by my car.”

“Stay,” Jeffrey fairly commanded.

“I'll pass,” Johnny kept going.

“No, please,” Jeffrey insisted. “I want you to hear this.”

To say that MacClough and my oldest brother were enemies would be an overstatement, but not much of one. Cops, even retired ones like Johnny, tend to develop a reflexive distaste for lawyers of Jeffrey's ilk. And Jeffrey's affection for the MacCloughs of this world was tepid at best.

“What is it, Jeff?”

“Zak's missing,” he answered.

“Yeah,” I said. “Par for the course.”

Jeffrey shoved me. “You really are such an asshole, Dylan. Isn't it bad enough that he looks like you? Why does he have to put his parents through the same shit you pulled on Mom and Dad?”

There he was displaying the anger I was telling you about. But when I tried to display a little of my own, vice like fingers held back my left fist. John might have been weathering badly of late, but there wasn't a thing wrong with his grip.

“What do you mean he's missing?” MacClough asked, putting himself between Jeffrey and me.

“Let go of my arm!”

He didn't. “Shut up and let your brother talk.”

Jeffrey opened his mouth to speak and stopped when he noticed the three of us had attracted a wee bit too much attention. Even Rabbi Rocketmouth let himself be distracted. MacClough let go of me and we all just stood there smiling like a trio of fools. When everyone realized there would be nothing more to see, they let us out of their sights.

“Do you still own that bar?” Jeffrey asked MacClough.

“The last I looked, yeah.”

“What time do you close tonight?”

“Don't worry about when I close,” Johnny said. “I'll see that it's slow when we need it to be.”

“Thank you.” Jeffrey about-faced.

“Don't forget your investigator's file,” I called after him.

“How'd you know—” he started.

“I know you, Jeff. That's all I need to know. You would never come to me first.”

He walked on. He was scared. And now, so was I.

Three Legs

Sound Hill is an old whaling village out toward the end of Long Island, some eighty miles east of the New York City line. George Washington never slept here, but he built us a clapboard lighthouse. It's got a bronze plaque on it and everything. We've got local Indians. We've got potato farms, sod farms, vineyards, and wineries. We've got several Victorian mansions, some shotgun shacks, but no high ranches. That pretty much sets us apart from the rest of Long Island. Sound Hill—The Last Bastion of High Ranch-lessness West of the Atlantic. But what we were proudest of was our lack of a golf course. That was us.

The Rusty Scupper, on Dugan Street off the marina, had been the only bar in town for a hundred years when MacClough bought it. He had owned it for two years when I moved my office from the City to a room above the bookstore. Sound Hill needed an insurance investigator about as much as it needed a greenskeeper, but I moved here anway. Business was bad in Brooklyn, I hated high ranches, and I wasn't much of an investigator. If I had a company motto, it would have read:
If you want mediocrity, you want me.
I think I'm maybe one of the eight people in history who actually believed he'd make more money as a writer. Luckily, I convinced a few editors.

Jeffrey, on the other hand, was Jeffrey. Operating according to some master plan the rest of us mere mortals were not privy to, Jeffrey acted like an escapee from the cast of
Götterdämmerung.
I have never been one to subscribe to the axiom that you can't argue with success, but my brother's list of achievements did make argument a difficult proposition. Summa cum laude at NYU, editor of the law review at Columbia, top litigator at Marx, O'Shea and Dassault, a seven-figure income, a beautiful wife, two healthy kids, and five acres overlooking the Hudson River, Jeffrey had reached about as high as most men dare to dream. If only he could have managed to tone down his imperious manner, I might have been able to share the same room with him for more than ten minutes. Don't misunderstand, Jeff was my big brother and I loved him. I admired him in ways I could not express. I only wished I liked him a little more and loved him a little less.

MacClough was true to his word without trying. During the summer, when Sound Hill enjoyed a modest seasonal boom and benefited from the Hamptons' overflow, the line at the Scupper's bar would have been three deep at 9:30. Such was not the case during the last week of February. The locals were all done with their Budweisers by 8:00. The college crowd was all dart-and-eight-balled out by 9:00.