“Oh, yes,” said Myron T. Brink. “You’re the man I heard about from my young friend up in Vermont, right? Well. Let’s look at the record.” He was muscular, grey-haired and well-tailored, reclining in a black leather lounge chair with a file folder open on his lap. Neat piles of similar folders lay closed on the carpet beside him, right and left, as if the whole task of being a world-renowned psychiatrist were a matter of orderly paperwork. “All right, Mr. Wilder,” he said at last. “I think we can do business together. Just let me ask a few routine questions first; then I’ll prescribe some medication and send you on your way. Fair enough?”
Wilder went home that day with four pill vials rattling in his coat pocket, and he was stowing them in the medicine cabinet before he realized that he couldn’t possibly keep them here: he would have to keep them in his desk at the office, or up at Pamela’s place. Looking at each label in the bright bathroom light, he tried to memorize the names of the damned things. Brink had assured him that the names didn’t matter—they were silly names dreamed up in pharmaceutical houses—but they were as baffling as words in a foreign language. How could he ever tell Hilafon from Haldol, or Plithium from Plutol? One was a tranquilizer, he knew, and one was an antidepressant, and still another was what Brink had called an antipsychotic, good for someone recovering from a breakdown, but if Brink had explained each prescription before handing it over the message was lost on him now. And if the names were confusing, what about the dosages? “100 mg, three times daily,” one label read, and another: “8 mg, one capsule at bedtime.” Could an absent-minded man be expected to keep track of all this?
“Dinner’s ready,” Janice called; so he knew it was time to stop worrying and wash his hands.
“We’re having Tommy’s favorite tonight,” she said when he was settled at the table. “My own very special meat loaf, baked potato with sour cream, and a simple tossed salad. It used to be one of your favorites too, John. Is it still?”
“Sure is. Especially the meat loaf. You suppose I could have another slice?”
“Why, certainly, kind sir,” she said. “I’m very flattered. I know what your real favorite is, though, and if you’re very good we might have it on Sunday.”
“What’s that?”
“Roast beef, of course. Good roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and Brussels sprouts. How could you forget?”
“Right. That’ll be fine, Janice; I’m looking forward to it already.”
Was this really happening? Was she sitting there forking meat loaf into her mouth and dabbing at her lips with a napkin, and was Tommy really there across the table? How could any family as unhappy as this put on such a show every night, and how long could it last?
“How’d school go today, Tom?”
“Okay, I guess,” the boy said around his chewing, and he swallowed. “It’s only the second week, though.”
“Like your new teachers?”
“They’re okay. I like Mr. Caldwell the best; he teaches math and he’s funny. He’s really a funny guy, like a TV comic or something. And the older guys told us he never stops; he keeps it up all year.”
“Well, good. Here’s hoping you keep it up all year.”
“Keep what up, Dad?”
“Your grades. What’d you think I meant? Aren’t you the boy who finished up last year with a straight B average?”
“I don’t know; I guess so.”
“Almost a straight B-plus average,” Janice said, and the three of them went on that way all through dinner.
“We having dessert, Mom?”
“We certainly are. Which would you rather have—butter-pecan ice cream or coconut cake?”
It was incredible.
“You’re an escapist, Wilder.” That was what his old Latin teacher had said back at Grace Church School, and he remembered it now as he escaped uptown on the subway, ostensibly bound for an AA meeting but really to visit his mistress. “You’re an escapist pure and simple. I watch you drag your poor tired body into this classroom every day and then bolt for the door like an athlete when the bell rings, and I know. What’s the matter with you, boy? You want to be an escapist all your life?”
“What? Speak up, I can’t hear you. That’s another thing, another sure sign of the escapist character. You can make enough noise when you want to—I’ve heard you do those big soprano solos in the choir—but whenever it suits your purpose you’re quiet as a snail. I want you to open your mouth now, as wide as you do down in church, and tell me what you just said.”
“I said I guess not, sir.”
“Guess not what?”
“Want to be an escapist all my life.”
“Then you’d better shape up. You know what they say in the Navy?” Wilder had long forgotten the old man’s name but he would never forget this lecture, or the faint scent of halitosis that hung around the old man’s desk, or the way his wrinkled hands trembled or the fact that he used a paper clip for a tie clasp. “You know what they say in the Navy? They say ‘Shape up or ship out.’ And that applies to you, boy, as long as you’re in my classroom and as long as this funny little school pays my salary. Is that clear?”
Well, he had never really shaped up—the world had spared him that—but he’d never really been made to ship out either, unless he wanted to count his flunking out of Yale. There had always been some middle course and he’d always taken it; and now, as the loud dismal cars of the IRT pulled away from Grand Central and there was nothing to do but wait and watch the Bellevue-like faces of passengers across the aisle, he guessed the old Latin teacher had been right after all: he had grown up an escapist; he would be an escapist all his life.
But by the time the train set him free at Pamela’s stop he had put the whole dark issue out of his mind. This was no night for tortured introspection.
“Hi there,” she said. “Feel like a drink?”
“I guess not tonight; I’ll cool it.”
“You? Turn down a drink? Really?”
Really. And it was all because Dr. Brink had worried him today by saying, at the very end of the interview, “You drink much, Mr. Wilder? Well, as long as you’re on this one—” here he’d held up one of the prescriptions, but by the time Wilder was out on the street he couldn’t remember which—“I’d lay off the drinking altogether if I were you. This is your antipsychotic, you see, and it doesn’t mix with alcohol. Just remember that; doesn’t mix at all.”
“Saw my new doctor today,” he said when they were nestled deep in her blue sofa and he’d drawn her close enough to let her head rest on his chest.
“Oh? What’s he like?”
“Very busy. I guess he has to fit his private patients in between jet flights to South Africa, or China, or wherever the hell he goes. No, he’s nice enough. And it’s great to deal with someone who doesn’t expect you to talk all the time; I can’t tell you how great that is.”
“Mm.”
Was she just sleepy, or was this the beginning of what he’d feared since Elizabeth Fanning Hospital—that she might soon grow tired of hearing about his delicate mental health? There was no point in taking any chances, so he shut up. “How was your day?”
“Oh, all right, I guess; same old stuff at the office, with Frank Lacy mooning at me all day. God, how I’ve come to despise that man. Why doesn’t he just fire me and be done with it?”
“You could always quit.”
“No, I won’t do that. It’s not a bad job, and it’d be a terrible bore having to look for a new one. Besides, the job keeps my father happy. Oh, John, I almost forgot—Julian called today.”
“Has he started cutting the picture yet?”
“No, and from the way he talked I have an awful feeling he’s going to put it off. We’ll have to keep after him. He wanted to know how you were, of course, and he asked us both to come to a party at his place next week. Jerry’ll be there, of course, and Peter, and some of the other Marlowe crowd. You won’t mind, will you?”
“Course not. They’re nice kids.”
There was a long, increasingly heavy silence before she said “John? You know something? I wish you’d quit referring to my friends as ‘kids.’ They’re all full grown, after all. Did you like being called a kid when you were that age? After being in the army and everything?”
In the end he agreed to have a drink with her (“Make it light,” he said, like Paul Borg), because it seemed the only way of restoring some romance to the evening. It even seemed, though he hardly dared to admit it to himself, that having a drink was his only guarantee of success with her in bed. What was the matter with him tonight?
“God, that was something,” she said when they’d exhausted themselves. “And you know what, John? I waited for this all day long in that terrible office. Just this.”
“Mm. Me too.” But he lay staring in the dark for a long time—he might as well have been in bed with Janice—wanting to creep away and fix himself another drink. Oh, just a very light one, doctor; I promise; the lightest drink you ever saw. Could it really matter much, after all, on his very first night with the pills working in his bloodstream?
“Honey?” she called. “Where are you? Where’re you going? Is it time to go home?”
“Not yet; I’ll come back before I leave.”
Out in the semidarkness of the living room he went straight to her gleaming little bar, and then to the kitchen for fresh ice. There, he told himself, like a mother soothing her child. There … there … there …
The view of the city from Pamela’s living room was extraordinary, every bit as grand as from the white-pebbled terrace at her office, and watching the subtle play of light and dark out there gave him something to do as he sipped and breathed, sipped and breathed. He took his time, though, because it was very important to make this ceremony last.
Julian’s loft might have served, if stripped of all decoration and darkened for business, as another setting for the celebration of Sylvester Cummings’s single candle; but on the night of his party its multicolored brilliance hurt the eye, its enormously amplified music rocked and rolled from the walls and it was packed deep with a laughing, jostling crowd in which, at first glance, no face looked a day over twenty-five.
“Pammy!” Julian yelled from the makeshift doorway of his bedroom. “And John! Great to see you, man! You’re looking great! Feeling better?”
Julian seemed a little drunk, or high, as he took their raincoats and flung them on top of the heap on his bed—or maybe it was just that being a host intoxicated him. “Jerry ’n’ I figured it was us that put you in the hospital up there,” he said, “as much as anything else—all of us, I mean. That was a pretty frantic couple of weeks. Fun, though, wasn’t it? I mean it would’ve been fun, if you hadn’t gotten sick.”
“Yeah; yeah, it was fun.”
“Julian,” Pamela said, “this may not be the time to bring it up, but when are you going to finish the picture?”
“Pammy, I told you on the phone. I’ve got so damn many things going now I honestly don’t know when I’ll get to it—and the point is, these other things pay money. Got to have some money, don’t I? Don’t worry, though; ‘Bellevue’ has a very high priority in my plans. But what’re we talking shop for? This is a party! I want you two to go out there and have fun tonight. Move around! Relax! I know you don’t light up, John, but there’s plenty of wine, cold beer in the tub, and you’ll find some hard stuff over in the corner near Chester Pratt. Okay?”
“Okay, Julian.”
They found a place to sit on the floor close to the beer tub, and it wasn’t long before Jerry came over and sank beside Pamela. He rolled a joint and shared it with her, and for a little while they talked quietly between themselves.
“… I don’t think I want to meet him if he’s that awful-looking skinny man,” she was saying. “Is he always this drunk?”
“He’s amazing. I never saw anybody put away so much booze in my life. I’ve seen him five or six times now, and he’s been bombed out of his mind every time. Even the night I went out to Princeton for his reading.”
“When do you suppose he ever gets his work done?”
“Beats me. Sure does get it done, though. Christ, what a book.”
“How’d you get to know him, Jerry? You didn’t say.”
“Wrote him a letter, that’s all; told him I’d like to do a film adaptation, and he wrote back.”
“Who’s this?” Wilder asked.
“Chester Pratt,” she said. “He wrote Burn All Your Cities, and he’s standing over there.”
“Come on,” Jerry said, getting to his feet and reaching down for her hand. “I might as well introduce you. Isn’t every day you get to meet an important writer.”
For once Wilder was not intimidated by a tall man—even a celebrated one, even when Pamela said she was “so happy” to meet him and called him “sir.” The important writer was tall, all right, but thin to the point of frailty, and his drink-distorted face was that of a weak, sad boy more than a man.
“What kind of a book is Burn All Your Cities?” he asked her when they were back beside the beer tub.
“I thought it was a fine novel; now I’m not so sure. Have you ever seen such a wreck?”
“… Pammy! Oh, Pammy, it’s marvelous to see you!”
“Pam!”
A breathless cluster of Marlowe girls descended on her now—girls she hadn’t seen since graduation, girls of all shapes and sizes in all varieties of dressy and casual clothes, all with their smiling “dates” in tow—and although she managed to be pleasant enough she was clearly no match for their enthusiasm.
“… and Ruth, Grace, Polly; this is John Wilder.”
They were delighted to meet him; they had heard so much about him; and as soon as they’d gone she said “John? Do I seem as young as that to you?”
“No.”
“Good. And you know something? You were right. They are kids. Not just the girls; the boys too. Julian with his swinging pad and his strobe lights and his amplified rock; Jerry giving us the inside dope on his Important Writer—you notice how he’s been over there sucking around the man all night? Let’s go home.”
“It isn’t even ten yet.”
“I know, but this is awful. I don’t care if I never see any of these people again. And I’m glad it’s early; that gives us more time to ourselves.”
Janice was asleep when he got home, as usual, and before going to bed himself he lingered in the living room to prowl along her bookshelves for Burn All Your Cities. There it was, close to the floor, in a bright yellow jacket with red lettering. Pratt’s photograph on the back was scarcely recognizable: it must have been taken when he was sober.
It was nearly a month before his next visit to Dr. Brink, and by then the only thing to do was lie a little about his drinking.
“… Oh, I’ve had a little since I saw you last, yes,” he said while the doctor scribbled something in his folder. “Not much; a few very light ones here and there.” The way the doctor seemed able to listen and write at the same time was unnerving.
“Well, I don’t imagine a few very light ones’ll kill you, Mr. Wilder.” He was still writing, glancing up only occasionally as if to make sure his patient was still there. “How’ve you been otherwise? Feeling any better?”
“Feeling fine. That whole breakdown business up in Vermont seems like ancient history now; hard to believe it ever happened.”
“Good; that’s the spirit.”
“Doctor?”
“Mm?”
“I don’t mean to be nosy, but can you really listen and write at the same time?”
That earned him a light, dry chuckle. “Don’t worry about the writing; the writing’s just routine. When you’ve been in this field as long as I have you learn a few things.” He put the folder aside and got up. “Now I’m going to play doctor for a minute. Mind taking off your jacket and rolling up your left sleeve? I want to try something.” He advanced on Wilder, seized his wrist in a powerful grip and began flexing his arm vigorously at the elbow, up and down. “No, no, you’re all tense. Just relax; go limp. There, that’s better. Good, that’s fine.… Good.” He went back to his chair, made a quick notation and closed the folder.
“I think you’re doing very well, Mr. Wilder. As you’ll see, I’m taking you off Haldol today—that’s the antipsychotic—so you can relax a little on the drinking. Not too much, of course; you’ve still got to be careful because none of these medications are meant to be taken with alcohol. Just remember one drink will have about the same effect as two for you from now on, okay? If you were a hard-core alcoholic it might be different, but I don’t think you are. Hard-core alcoholics don’t hold down highly paid jobs with distinguished magazines. Incidentally, some day when we have more time I wish you’d tell me more about The American Scientist.”
“Do you read it?” He was so relieved about the drinking question, as he put on his coat again, that an exchange of harmless pleasantries about his job seemed just the thing. He even forgot to ask what the arm-flexing had been all about.
“Oh, I’ve been a subscriber for years. Started taking it originally because my wife liked the covers and the artwork—she’s an artist herself—and then I got hooked on it. Even wrote an article for them once last year. It’s surprising: for a commercial magazine they do maintain a very high level of scientific integrity.”
“What issue was your article in, Doctor? I’ll look it up.”
“Oh, don’t bother. August issue, I think. I don’t mean to rush you, Mr. Wilder, but this is one of my busy days.” And he rose to shake hands, walking Wilder to the door in readiness for his next patient.
Later that week Wilder found a copy of the August issue on his desk—he had asked one of the girls to pull it from the file—and there it was, as big as life in the table of contents: “The New Psychiatry, by Myron T. Brink, M.D.” There wasn’t time to read it in the office, but he took it home and promised himself to read it soon. In the end the magazine somehow found its way to Pamela’s apartment, and when he asked her about it at Christmastime, long after it had ceased to matter very much, she said she guessed she’d thrown it away.
All at once it was spring again, and Julian still hadn’t edited the film, let alone arranged to have it “scored” for recorders and guitars. For all they knew he hadn’t even taken his exterior footage of the streets around Bellevue. And he no longer made the excuse of having to work for money; all he could talk about these days was his deep involvement with Jerry’s adaptation of Burn All Your Cities, which he said might well be the professional breakthrough for them both.
“I could slit him,” Pamela said after one more futile phone call from her apartment, one night when Wilder was there. “He seems to feel he doesn’t even have to apologize to us any more. I thought directors were only supposed to be arrogant and callous after they got famous.”
“What I don’t see,” Wilder said, “is how Pratt would let a couple of kids do his book in the first place. I mean if it’s such a great novel he must’ve had offers from real movie people.”
“No, I don’t imagine he has. The book wasn’t a big seller, and it’s a very downbeat story. Besides, he must find it flattering to have eager young men dancing attendance on him this way, talking about his Integrity all the time. Anyway, Pratt’s beside the point. It’s Julian. You know what I think? I think he’s decided he doesn’t really like ‘Bellevue,’ and he’s just too cowardly to say so.”
“Well,” he said, “there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it, is there.”
“All we can do is ride herd on him. I’m going to call him night and day until I wear him down, and I think you ought to call him too, from the office—will you promise to do that?”
He did—or at least he tried: he got three busy signals at Julian’s number, and he was about to try again when his phone rang.
“John?” Janice said. “I’m sorry to bother you at work but this is important. Could we meet somewhere for lunch today?”
“I’m afraid not, dear. George wants me to—”
“All right; wait. Let me think.”
“Is everything all right? Is Tommy all right?”
“Well, that’s the thing, you see; it’s something about Tommy.”
“What? What is it?”
“It’s not a thing we can discuss over the phone.”
So there was nothing to do but sit there while she waited and thought. Somewhere in the outer office one of the girls shrieked with laughter over the clatter of typewriters, and another said “Oh, Mr. Taylor, you’re terrible!” He wanted to get up and shut the door, but the phone wire was too short.
“Janice? You still there?”
“Yes. I’m thinking. Oh, wait—we can discuss it tonight. I just realized you don’t have a meeting tonight. I know: we’ll tell Tom we’re going to a movie, and then we’ll go to that nice new coffee shop around the corner, what’s it called? You know the one. It’s all red and black, and they serve good pastry. We can talk there in comfort as long as we want.”
For the rest of that day, all through his boring business lunch and his long afternoon of business calls, he was as preoccupied as a conscientious family man. But it wasn’t Tommy that kept his mind far away from the job, it was Janice. What in God’s name was he ever going to do about Janice? He couldn’t get over how pitiful she’d sounded on the phone—talking of nice new coffee shops all red and black, where they served good pastry and where two tired parents, however badly estranged, might go and discuss something painfully close to their hearts “in comfort.”
“Oh, this’ll be such fun,” she said at dinner that night. “I don’t think I’ve been out to a movie in ages and ages.”
“Sure you have, Mom,” Tommy said. “You went to a movie last week.”
“That isn’t what I mean,” she told him quickly. “I mean going out to a movie with your father. It’ll be like a real old-fashioned date for us, won’t it, John?”
“Sure will.”
“Do you want to call up the Borgs, dear, and see if they’re free? If they are we could make it a foursome; that might be even nicer.”
Was she kidding? What was he supposed to say to that? He glanced uneasily at his son before answering. “Isn’t Paul out of town this week?”
“Oh, that’s right, he is. Of course we could call Natalie—I imagine she’d love to get out—but somehow a threesome isn’t nearly so much fun, is it?” And when he stole a quick look at her he found one of her eyes wrinkled shut in an elaborate wink of conspiracy. The funny part was that Tommy wasn’t even paying attention.
“May I be excused, Mom?”
“Of course you may.”
Because the night was warm she wore a summer dress—the same blue-and-brown, breast-enhancing dress she’d worn to visit him in Bellevue, the dress she always called his favorite—but because it might turn chilly later she carried a wide, light stole over one arm. That stole, too, was a heartbreaker. He had given it to her as a birthday present years ago, after seeing one just like it slung from the shoulders of a pretty girl at the office. But the girl at the office had known how to wear the thing, as a sort of elegant loose shawl, and Janice hadn’t. From the moment she’d rushed from her birthday celebration to pose with it at the hall mirror (“Oh, I love this, John …”), he knew she would never learn to wear it—it looped and dangled from her elbows like a rope—and every time she tried only made it worse.
“We’re going now, Tommy,” she sang now from the vestibule. “Be sure and get to bed the minute that program’s over. No fooling around tonight, okay?”
“What was the point of all that about the Borgs?” he asked her in the elevator.
“I don’t know; I just felt I had to keep talking about something, so he wouldn’t see how anxious I am.”
The coffee shop was very much like the one uptown where Bill Costello had dramatized the value of Alcoholics Anonymous for him, but this turned out to be an even more dramatic evening.
“Oh, let me see,” she said to the harried young Puerto Rican waiter. “I think I’ll have some of your lovely cherry cheesecake, and coffee with lots of cream. Are you sure the pastry’s fresh tonight?”
The waiter could only stand there with his order pad, sweating and looking confused.
“One cherry cheesecake, two coffees,” Wilder told him.
“God,” she said before the waiter was out of earshot, “doesn’t anybody speak English in this town any more?”
“Sh-sh.”
“I know. I keep forgetting how much New York has changed. Everything’s changed. All right. Let me start at the beginning. Last Friday there was a phone call from the school. All his grades are down and he’s failing two subjects. They’re going to hold him back, John. He’s not going on into seventh grade with the rest of his class; at this rate he may never get to college—and that’s only the beginning.” She fumbled in her handbag for Kleenex, pulled out a cluster of the stuff and blew her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I knew I’d cry.” And there was nothing to do but reach across the damp plastic table and hold her hand.
“Look, Janice; this is nothing to get upset about. Kids go through phases, that’s all. He can go to summer school. You should’ve seen my grades when I was that age.”
“Yes, and you were a great success at Yale, weren’t you? You’ve had a wonderful, distinguished career, haven’t you? Oh, you earn good money, I’m not saying that, but since when has the measure of a man been—oh, I’m sorry; I’m sorry; don’t let me get this way. It’s just that I’ve been so—”
“Okay; okay.”
“I’ve been so lonely, John, and there’s never anyone to talk to. I’d be in analysis myself if I thought it would do any good. Oh, thank you so much, waiter, this is lovely. Oh, and look, it is fresh too—it must’ve been baked just this morning—thank you; that’ll be all for the moment.”
“Missus? Something else?”
“No, I only said—” She closed her eyes and whispered “God, God” through clenched teeth.
“That’s all for now,” Wilder said, and the waiter retreated with a wavering smile.
“But that’s only the beginning,” she said. “That was last week, and it was only the principal’s office. Yesterday there was another call, and this time it was the guidance counsellor.”
“The what?”
“Guidance counsellor. All the schools have them now. He wouldn’t say a word on the phone; he said I’d have to go in, and I did. I thought he’d just want to talk about the grades, and it was partly that, but the rest of it is much, much worse. He said—oh, John, he said Tommy’s emotionally disturbed and he thinks we ought to have him see a psychiatrist. Right away.”
Wilder had learned once, in some elementary science course either at Grace Church or at Yale, that the reason for a retractable scrotum in all male mammals is to protect the reproductory organs in hazardous or distressful situations: sharp blades of jungle grass, say, will brush against a running animal’s thighs, and the testicles will automatically withdraw to the base of the trunk. He wasn’t sure if he had it right—did he have anything right that he’d ever learned in school?—but the basic idea seemed sound, and in any case it was happening to him now: his balls were rising, right there in the coffee shop.
“What does he mean, emotionally disturbed?”
“He exhibits hostile, antisocial behavior,” she said. “He doesn’t have any friends. Twice this term—or maybe it was three times—he’s pulled chairs out from other boys just as the other boys were sitting down, and one of those boys had to have X rays taken of his spine.”
She had been slicing her cherry cheesecake into neat, moist sections; now she raised one piece to her bared teeth but it crumbled and part of it fell on her dress, and it seemed to be this small disaster as much as the spinal X rays that reduced her, once again, to tears.
“A child psychiatrist, you mean?” Pamela said. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“I thought so too, at first. Went in and talked to the guidance counsellor myself, tried to have a few hearty, man-to-man talks with Tommy, but I finally had to give up. There’s no denying it: he is kind of withdrawn and sullen. Janice says I ought to spend more time at home, and I guess she’s probably right.”
“Oh, you guess she’s right, do you? Well, I think it’s emotional blackmail.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, John, you’re too much. Do you really think she still doesn’t know you have a girl? After all this time?” She sat up quickly in bed—not to stand and fight, as he’d feared, but only to make sure her cigarette wasn’t burning the sheet. “Sometimes you’re the most sensitive, intelligent man in the world, and sometimes you’re as dense and naïve as a—I don’t know. Certainly she knows. If she hasn’t asked you about me point-blank it’s just part of her strategy.”
“Okay, I’m naïve,” he said. “I guess the really naïve thing was thinking I could talk this over with you.”
“I don’t know; it seems to be a thing married men do. God knows Frank Lacy spent enough time pouring out his dreary little domestic problems.”
This was bad. If she started comparing him with Frank Lacy he might not survive the night. He got out of bed and put on the terry-cloth robe she had bought him for Christmas, and the feel of the robe alone was enough to brighten him. “Let’s change the subject,” he said. “In fact let’s not talk about anything at all. Let’s sing.”
“Sing?”
“Sure. If there’s one thing I know better than old-time movies it’s old-time songs. Didn’t I ever tell you that? Wait. We’ve got to do this right.” At the bathroom mirror he doused and combed his hair and made sure the lapels of the robe were straight, and then he was ready. “You ready?” he called. “Turn on the light, then, and get this.” Only when he’d heard the click of the light switch did he throw open the bathroom door and advance on her with a tricky little dance step, in full song:
Columbus discovered America
Hudson discovered New York
Benjamin Franklin discovered the spark
That Edison discovered would light up the dark
Marconi discovered the wireless telegraph
Across the ocean blue
But the greatest discovery
Was when you discovered me
And I discovered you
“But that’s marvelous,” she said when she’d finished laughing and clapping her hands. Throughout the performance she had sat up in bed and hugged her knees like a little girl, and now her face was radiant. “You even sing well. I mean you don’t just carry a tune, you really sing.”
“Sure.” At least she wasn’t close enough to feel the rapid beating of his heart. “I wasn’t a choirboy for nothing.”
“Sort of a light, funny Eddie Fisher,” she said, “or a heavier Fred Astaire. Listen. Go back in there and come out again. Sing me another.”
“Nope. The secret of any entertainer is knowing when to stop. Anyway it’s time to—you know. Go home.”
“Oh, please. Will you promise to sing another one next time?”
“Sure. I got a million of ’em.”
He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, staring at his empty shoes, and the shape of his back must have been eloquent because her arms came tenderly around him from behind and her fingers played with the hair of his chest.
“Poor baby,” she said. “I know you’re feeling terrible about your boy.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just—hell, you know. Going home, is all.” Because going home meant riding for miles on the IRT with the city’s lost and beaten night people, with nothing to do but remember nights long ago when a plain, pleasant girl named Janice Brady had said she loved the Brooklyn Bridge and the Staten Island Ferry, and because “Columbus Discovered America” was the best of the many, many songs that had helped win Janice Brady’s heart.
He did begin to spend more time at home—he told Janice he would cut down to two or three AA meetings a week, instead of five—and though it meant less time with Pamela it made him feel like a responsible father. Twice he left work early to take Tommy to ball games (wasn’t that the kind of thing responsible fathers did?), and both times, nursing an after-game beer in some clamorous eating place near the stadium, he tried to draw him out.
“How’s summer school going, Tom?”
“I don’t know; all right, I guess.”
“Think you’ll do a little better next year?”
“I don’t know.”
Once he asked him about the psychiatrist—“You getting along all right with Dr. Goldman?”—before he realized that this was an invasion of privacy, and he amended it quickly: “I mean, you know, you don’t have to tell me about that if you don’t want to,” while Tommy soberly chewed his hot dog and kept his own counsel.
“Does he ever talk to you about the psychiatrist?” he asked Janice.
“Not a word—and I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad one. What do you think?”
Seeing Pamela only two or three nights a week did make a difference: every time, it seemed, she was full of news that had nothing to do with him.
“I had lunch with Chester Pratt today,” she said one night, “or rather I had lunch with Jerry and he brought Chester Pratt along. He’s really very nice when he’s sober.”
“Oh?”
“Jerry made something of an ass of himself, as you can imagine—trying to hog the conversation, calling him ‘Chet’ all the time—but when Pratt did get a word in edgewise I thought he was charming. Very intelligent and witty and—well, charming, that’s all.”
“He writing another book now?”
“No, that’s the sad part. He says he can’t afford to start a new book yet; he has too many debts. He owes money to his ex-wife, and he owes back taxes and I don’t know what-all. He’ll have to get some kind of job; it seems an awful shame.”
“Why? Most people work for a living.”
“I know; I just meant—you know. It’s a shame because he’s so terrifically talented. Of course you haven’t read the book; you wouldn’t understand.”
“Well, if he’s going to hold down a steady job he’d better go easy on the booze.”
“Oh, that’s silly; just because he was drunk at Julian’s party that time doesn’t mean—besides, you drink a lot, and you hold down a job.”
“What kind of job is he looking for?”
“He said he might go back into public relations—he’s done that before—or he might look for work in Hollywood. He said both prospects were equally bleak.”
But Chester Pratt settled for neither of those things. Two or three weeks later Wilder was waiting in Dr. Brink’s outer office, flipping through a copy of Newsweek, when he came across this item on the “Periscope” page:
Justice Department
After months of searching, the Attorney General has found a new speechwriter. He is 37-year-old novelist Chester Pratt (Burn All Your Cities), who was recommended for the job by Harvard critic T. J. Whitehead, a Kennedy intimate.
“I know,” Pamela said that night. “Jerry told me. Jerry said Pratt says he’ll be the only man in the New Frontier who’s in it for the money.”
That was the first of several nights when she failed to respond to the urgency of his lovemaking—“I’m sorry, John, I guess I can’t tonight”—and the following week she called him at the office to say she wasn’t feeling well; she was coming down with the flu or something; she would call again as soon as she was better.
He could taste the end of the affair like bile as he went about his business routine and endured his time at home, and he tortured himself with wondering where he’d gone wrong. It now seemed clear that things had never been quite the same since his breakdown at Marlowe—and was that so surprising, after all? How could any healthy girl be expected to care for a mentally unbalanced man?
On two or three nights he really did go to AA meetings; other nights he drifted from bar to bar, or sat with Janice and did his level best to hold up his end of the endless conversation about their son. One night Tommy was so expansive at the dinner table, telling the plot of a television comedy he’d liked and interrupting himself with laughter, that Janice was heartened.
“… Oh, I am beginning to see daylight in all this, aren’t you?”
But the next night she was in darkness again: the first report card from summer school had come in, and Tommy was still failing the same two subjects.
When Pamela was well again her voice on the phone was more polite than eager, but even so the knowledge that he would see her tonight was bracing; it helped him sit quietly through a dinner with the Borgs.
“… Maybe you could have a talk with him, Paul,” Janice said the minute Tommy’s door was shut for the night.
“Why me?”
“Because he loves and admires you so; he’s always thought of you as a kind of uncle, ever since he was tiny.”
“Well, that’s nice to hear, Janice, but I think you’re exaggerating. In any case I don’t see much value in ‘having a talk’; I agree with John there. Seems to me you’re doing all you can; the only thing now is to wait and hope for the best.”
“Paul’s wonderful with children,” Natalie Borg said. “I’ve always said he would’ve made a wonderful father, if only …”
There was nothing she relished more than a chance to talk about her youthful hysterectomy; and Wilder sat through it all sipping coffee and congratulating himself on his patience.
“If you people will excuse me,” he said at last, “I have a meeting to attend.”
All the way uptown he tried to decide what song he would sing tonight. He’d used up “You’re the Top” and “I Get a Kick Out of You” and some of the other standards; besides, they weren’t so effective because Pamela knew all the words. Only when he was in the elevator did the perfect song occur to him: an old and little-known Al Jolson number called “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?” He almost giggled to himself, picturing the way he’d deliver it in the terry-cloth robe.
“There’s something we have to discuss,” she said, and from the way she said it he knew it wouldn’t be a discussion at all. She had something to tell him—something he wouldn’t like—and he had better shut up and sit down and listen. He did, nursing his whiskey as if it were the last drink in the world, while she walked around and around the room in her working clothes with her arms folded across her chest. “I’m moving,” she said. “I’m quitting the job and I’m giving up the apartment and I’m leaving New York, probably for good. It does mean the end of things between you and me, and I’m sorry, but we always knew it couldn’t go on forever, didn’t we?”
“Yeah,” he said, surprised that his voice was low and calm. “Yeah, I guess we always did know that.” He wanted to spring to his feet in fury and say “Who’s the man?” or to go down on his knees and throw his arms around her thighs and beg her to stay, but he did neither of those things because it seemed important to play the scene her way. And one small, irrational part of his mind suggested that if he did this well, if he was “civilized” and kept his emotions under control, she’d be so impressed that she might still change her mind. He took a careful sip of whiskey before he spoke again. “Where you going?”
“To Washington.” She was sitting down now, tapping the ash from her cigarette, and she was clearly so relieved to have the worst of it over that she told a little too much. “I have a friend there who thinks I might qualify for a job in the Justice Department, and it’s too good an opportunity to—”
“Wait a second. It’s Chester Pratt.”
“What if it is?”
The hell with being civilized; the hell with everything. He was on his feet and bearing down on her in a jealous rage. “How long have you been sleeping with that bastard? Huh? I asked you a simple question: how long?”
“John, I don’t see any point in losing your temper. There’s really—”
“How long, God damn it. Answer me!”
“It’s not a question that deserves an answer.”
And suddenly he passed from anger to an agony of self-abasement and pleading: “Oh, baby, don’t go.” He touched her shoulder with one hand. “Please don’t go. I need you; I need you.…” He had done both the things he’d sworn not to do—he had shouted and he’d begged—and there was nothing left.
“I knew this would be difficult,” she said, “but you can’t bring back something that’s over. We had some good times together, but it’s—well, it’s over, that’s all.”
All that mattered now was to get out of here before she asked him to leave, and he managed it in a kind of stupor that might have passed for dignity. “Okay,” he said, moving for the door, and he stood with one hand on the knob for ten beats of his heart, giving her every chance to call him back, before he said “So long” and let himself out.
Then he was in the Irish bar with the tall picture of President Kennedy on the wall (and maybe Bobby was shorter, but it couldn’t be denied that there was something very tall about all the Kennedys and all their men, and all their women). He was drinking double bourbons and staring into the mirror at his Alan Ladd haircut and his painfully familiar Mickey Rooney face, wondering how it would be possible to go on living.