MY FATHER DIED. He was buried today. At the moment I’m here alone with my mother. My father had a heart attack ten days ago. He and my mother were coming back from playing bridge with two friends, and the thing began in the cab on the way. This one was bad. I mean, not only because my father finally died, but they knew it was bad even before. The doctor said my father possibly had a previous attack that hadn’t been recognized as one. Or maybe he had one and never told us about it, which would be like him. You know the old line about never sick a day in his life. Well, that was my father in a way. He was never sick in bed. But he looked lousy for, I guess, years. He was seventy-one. He was forty-nine when I was born and in many ways not a father. He seemed old to me even when I was a kid, more like my mother’s father than mine. Anyway, let me tell you what happened and bear with me. If I was on with Mary I don’t think I’d be writing this. But I feel very much alone. My mother is in bed, it’s one A.M., and I’m out in the kitchen with the door closed, so she can’t hear the typing. I’ve got six cans of beer to see me through this, and if it gets too much for you, open a bottle and send me the bill. Well, on the night of the attack I was out and got home late. My mother had had the doctor, he had given my father an electrocardiogram and told her it was a heart attack. Now get this. My father didn’t get into the hospital until four o’clock the next afternoon. This crummy doctor is associated, as they say, with one of those private profit-making hospitals, and there wasn’t an empty bed at the moment. The doctor claimed it didn’t matter, that he was doing all they would do at the hospital, which turned out not to be the case, but anyway that’s what he said. So my father was awake and asleep all through the night and next day, from sedatives, and the poor bastard kept talking about the pains in his hands. Even his finger tips hurt, he said, and he didn’t seem to understand how it could hurt him down to his finger tips. Well, finally two clowns showed up with a stretcher on wheels and wraparound blankets like a shroud, and we shoved off. My father was pretty low by that time. I was sitting right there next to him in the ambulance, and he asked my mother where I was. And then—Jesus, it’s hard to believe—we waited in the lobby of the goddamned hospital for twenty minutes while the room was being fixed up. People walking in and out, nurses, doctors, visitors, patients, and there was my father on the stretcher on the floor, wide awake now, embarrassed or confused or something, and all I could think of was the hundred thousand times he had taken us out to dinner or a play, or anything really, and it was always the best. You never met him, but he was kind of a distinguished-looking man. Everybody moved for him. And here he was, brought low, in the hands of some neighborhood jerk doctor, in some neighborhood jerk hospital, waiting on the floor for his life to be saved. If it was me on the floor he would have made them move. Christ, we wouldn’t have been in this crummy little death factory to begin with. I remember when I was a kid and had my appendix out, how it was zip zip, the best room, the best nurses, the best surgeon—the guy who discovered the appendix or something—and here I stood at the admittance desk whining politely while the jerk clerk assured me that everything was being attended to as quickly as was humanly possible. Well anyway, when we finally got him into a room the house quack, a guy with an accent who looked like he thought he was too good for the job, took my father’s blood pressure, which was down to about nothing, and ordered this and that, a bottle on a hook with a needle dripping into a vein, and a nurse to take my father’s blood pressure every ten minutes, that sort of thing. Anyway, he came around. His blood pressure went up, and they took out the needle and gave him some more dope and by ten o’clock the next morning he was asleep and still alive. Before I left, the neighborhood jerk doctor showed up, looking fresh and rested, and asked if I wanted an oxygen tent for my father. I stared at him. I mean, who was running the show? I don’t know, I said, should he have an oxygen tent? He pursed his lips and nodded diagonally. I didn’t get it. I mean, I really thought this jerk was asking for my medical opinion, and finally I realized it was money. What could I do to reassure him? I mean, I wanted to stroke his cheek and say Please, please don’t worry about money. Please get oxygen. Please get radium. Well, I got over to him, I guess. But it made me think, because here we were living in a nice place, the same building as the doctor himself. We have lived there a long time, so obviously we paid the rent, and the doctor knew it was a high rent. So what did this question mean, in terms of the doctor’s experience? Well, it meant either a lot of people with dough tighten up when the provider can’t sign the checks any more, or else it meant that a lot of people live nice and never have an extra dime around. I don’t know what oxygen costs, but if oxygen makes one thousandth part of one thousandth part of a small difference, would anybody not buy it for his father? Apparently. Anyway, it shook me. I didn’t like this creepy little jerk doctor to start with, so that morning after I left the hospital I went to see the head of the physiology department at school and asked him who the best cardiologist in the city was. A guy named Newman. I called him up and he came to the hospital as a consultant that afternoon. You ought to see the jerk doctor scrape and bow and sir him. Dr. Newman told me my father had a fifty-fifty chance, and the more time that passed, the better the chance would become. But I watched him with my father. He was great, Newman, and my old man saw the quality. He had felt demeaned, just as I had, in the hands of the local jerk. O Jesus, maybe I shouldn’t be putting this guy down. I tell you why. Newman must have seen I was unsure, because he told me the guy was a good doctor and had done the right things. But I wanted the best. That’s understandable, isn’t it? To want the best for your father? When I was a kid and he took me downtown to get my suits we went to the boys’ department of the same store he went to, and he’d get his own salesman to oversee the operation. They moved for him, my father. He wasn’t an educated man. He only finished grammar school and then went to work and occasionally he said don’t when he should have said doesn’t, but he impressed people. He had the mark on him. He had a sense of his own dignity. He was steady-on, you know what I mean? He retired six years ago, but he used to go down to meet his business friends once in a while for lunch, and sometimes I went along, and I saw how they treated him, even though he was out of the line and an old man. They listened to him. He had the mark on him, and I’m glad I got him the goddamned cardiologist. Well, I spent a lot of time at the hospital. Every day that passed, the chances got better, so that by the time he died I was sure he’d recover. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning and my mother called me from the hospital. My father had taken a turn for the worse and maybe I should come up. I knew he was dead. I mean, I knew it and I didn’t know it. If you’re on the edge and you take a turn for the worse, you’re dead, aren’t you? But I didn’t press it, I told my mother I’d be right up. Well, it seems she was waiting for me at the front entrance, but I went in the back and walked up to my father’s floor. As soon as I saw his door was closed I was sure. But I wasn’t sure either. I asked the head nurse to see him. O, she said, and went off to confer with another nurse, and they hemmed and hawed and finally they told me he was dead, and I burst out crying. One dopey nurse said Your father must have been a very good man, but she looked uncomfortable, with her eyes shifting like she wanted to be somewhere else, and I could have kicked her in the mons veneris. Well, I stood there blubbering and this little colored nurse came from the other end of the hall and put my head on her shoulder, and she understood, and I slobbered on her for a while. I pulled myself together and went downstairs, and there was my mother. She and I patted each other on the back for a while, but all the tears were gone, and we talked and went home. We went to the bank and brought back the contents of the safe-deposit box, the will and bonds and a lot of stuff, so the Revenue Department wouldn’t seal it up. I knew the will left everything to my mother, my father told me that when he made me executor on my birthday five months ago, but I expected some message. That’s what I wanted my father to leave me. Something, even some corn like To thine own self be true, or A rolling stone gathers no moss. But nothing, just legal jerk talk. Anyway, there’s a lot of money, so my mother doesn’t have to worry, and neither does the oxygen company, I’m glad to say. In the afternoon I went to the funeral home. I expected this to be the bottom, some unctuous professional asshole expressing his sorrow and all. But it wasn’t. The guy I talked to was all right, quiet and human, and the next day we began the vigil. Either my mother or I was there from ten in the morning till ten at night for two days. Friends of my parents and their grown children, my friends, relatives—a few I had never seen before—all came. Some were very sorry my father had died, some were sorry that anybody had died, some were neutral and philosophical, and some were inwardly reassured, as if there was a certain quantity of death to go around and now their own chances were a little better for a little while. But I dug it. It was a long, sleepless, exhausting time, but it was good for us, at least for me. We were able to do something, able to use ourselves up. Exactly what my father died of you couldn’t tell without an autopsy. Either he had another heart attack, or his heart burst or just stopped. But anyway, it seems that right before he died he couldn’t talk, a nurse was in the room, and he took a pencil and paper and wrote Get the …, and then he died. Well, my uncle, my mother’s brother, was convinced that the missing word was priest, and he kept the piece of paper with him to show to people that came to the funeral home. I don’t know why this should have irritated me so, but it did. I mean, it’s possible my father wanted a priest. But I doubt it. He was a Protestant, you know. My mother was the Catholic, and as a result religion was never discussed in the house. I was sent to a Catholic grammar school, but unlike the other kids I wasn’t completely surrounded by Catholicism. In the fifth grade the nun asked if anyone in the class had a non-Catholic parent. When I confessed, she called me up and told me it was my duty to pray for my father’s conversion. Well, maybe some priest told my uncle that too, and maybe he’s been praying all these years, and maybe his prayers were finally answered, but I’d be sorry to know they had been. You see, my father was the avenue to another world for me. He was proof that non-Catholics were human beings. You have no idea the strange notions Catholics are imbued with. There is a secret understanding among Catholics that non-Catholics are, not evil or wrong-minded or ill-willed particularly, but terribly misguided. Protestants especially. And as for pagans, Asian babies and such, why they’re raw material for the machine. Catholics are like Communists in this, I guess, except that they haven’t been doing so well lately. In fact, that’s why Catholics get excited about communism. It disturbs their dreams of progress in the propagation of the faith. I’d say that Catholics are like Jews too, except that Jews are desperate to maintain their exclusivity. Sometimes I think the worst thing that could happen to Jews would be for everybody to become a Jew. Who’d be left to crap on them then? Who’d be left to be better than? But Catholics, Jaysus! Well, the very word catholic tells the story. Anyway, my uncle kept this paper to show to visitors. I’d watch him from across the room, and I’d see the furrowed brows on the people as they studied the paper and then their intensity as they listened to his explanation, and finally the noddings of agreement when he’d spring the snapper, Get the … priest! I couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t my uncle’s foolishness that bothered me, it was that my father was being defined in absentia. He never went to church, Catholic or Protestant, for as long as I knew him. That was the life he led, and why now at the close his brother-in-law had to ascribe to him a failure of nerve and sense I couldn’t understand. Anyway, after he did his stuff for the tenth time, I went over and asked him for the paper to show to someone. I took it to the funeral director’s office and filled in the word bedpan. Then I gave it back to him. Inside of ten minutes he had it out again. The guy he showed it to didn’t laugh or anything, but did he looked puzzled! Today when my uncle came home with us for a while I sneaked the paper out of his pocket and flushed it down the toilet. But my sad story’s not done. The services were a problem. Since my father wasn’t connected with any church in a going way, we decided to ask the minister from the nearest Episcopalian parish to come. No speeches, just a prayer and whatever. I was surprised how alien he looked. I mean, a priest I would have been at home with. Even some red-faced Irish slob or midget wop I would have understood. I’d have felt he was representing something—something false, it’s true—but in its way something sincere. But this minister! In the first place he looked like a young God the Father, and I’ve never had much use for God the Father. Big, about thirty-five, with a great head of live white hair. Impressive, but as I said, alien. Tremendous vacuous mush, the kind of mush Billy Graham stirs the gallstones of old ladies with. Something was wrong, I mean objectively wrong. Here this guy had come to do the dirty deed, and he was a stranger to my father. I wanted him to know something about the man he was burying, as if he had actually ministered to him in his life. So I went up and introduced myself. He turned his big benign smile on me, and I said My father wasn’t a religious man but he was a moral man, and I started to cry. The tears came pouring out, and do you know what this big oaf did? Nothing. He just kept on smiling as if I had told him I had a cold. Well, I got away and went to the can and I was furious. I mean, a priest—the cruddiest, drunkenest, faggiest priest—would have responded. Would have made a sign, not of compassion or anything like that necessarily, but a sign that he understood. Not this character, however. O he did the bit later, which I’m sure impressed all the Catholics in the audience. Did it suavely, and I thought to myself So this is what Protestants hire to guide them along life’s perilous paths. Get the bedpan, man.