Monday morning was relentless in the wake of my undone cartooning work, with the curve of the pen itching away at my bones, Wurster hanging over my shoulder, barking instructions, the house’s oily cold clinging to my skin and clothes. By the time I got out, the early clouds that had been massing on the horizon had arrived and gushed forth their rain, and the heat wave had finally broken. I blinked in the bright gray light, listening to water dripping off trees.
When I got home I asked Pierce for money. I hadn’t wanted to do this, but I had been letting him pay for groceries and gas for weeks now, and he hadn’t appeared put off by it.
“Oh, yeah, okay,” he said. We were in his bedroom, where he had been playing solitaire and smoking cigarettes. He got up and went to the closet. I heard some clunking around from there. When he came out, he had a neat handful of twenty-dollar bills, which he handed to me.
“You’ve got cash in there?”
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Where from?”
“The account Dad left me. I got a lot out at once.” He sat down on the bed, reluctant to meet my eyes. “Banks make me nervous.”
I glanced at the money. It was a thick little pile, and I had to restrain myself from counting it. “Jesus, Pierce, thanks.”
He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s a lot.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
His tone was dismissive. But I lingered, letting my eyes navigate the room, wondering if he had other things stashed here: drugs, old photos, letters. “Speaking of banks,” I said, and felt the temperature in the room drop half a degree. “That key.”
He bent farther over his game, emphatically flipping cards into piles.
“Are you going to look and see what’s in it? Aren’t you curious?”
“Nope,” he said.
“Not even a little bit?”
He placed a club onto the pile slowly, his hand shaking. He straightened but didn’t look at me. “It’s just the title. Or something.”
“Or something?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t go back to his game, either. He just sat there, staring at the closet doors as if into a deep darkness, where the ominous outlines of things were barely visible. After a while I looked down at the money in my hand and felt like a thief. Not long after, I left.
* * *
I was running out of certain supplies, so I decided to go to the art store. Nobody was around now that FunnyFest was over with, and the streets were empty of cars. Shopkeepers propped their doors open, letting in the cool summer air. A woman sat cross-legged on the floor of a clothing boutique, painting her fingernails.
The art store was in a small converted town house just off Main Street that was also home to a music studio. I’d often gone there with Dad, and while I poked through the dusty rows of art supplies I could hear the muffled sound of scales artlessly played on a variety of instruments. Occasionally an instructor would grow bored with one of her students and begin playing something beautiful, and I would stand transfixed, listening.
When I got there I found that little had changed. The proprietor, a barrel-shaped man in his sixties, was standing on a ladder, repainting the hanging sign that had read “Riverbank Art Supply.” He had finished the first few letters of “Mixville.” When I approached he looked down and called to me. “Timmy Mix!”
“Hi,” I said.
“You remember me? I used to sell your daddy his pens and paper.”
“Sure do,” I said. “I’m here for the same stuff.”
“Yeah, yeah!” he said. “Hear you’re taking over!”
“Looks that way.” I pointed to the sign. “How’s it going?”
He shook his head. “No offense,” he said. “But I’m not voting for that Francobolli next time around. This here’s a pain in my ass. I gotta send out change of address cards, for Chrissake. All of a sudden I’m living in a different town.”
Inside, I noticed one other customer. He looked familiar to me—a fiftyish man, thin hair, wearing khaki shorts and a blue chambray shirt—but I couldn’t place him. We passed in an aisle and he smiled at me in a comradely way. I gathered a few items—pens and pencils, fresh paper, all from the list my father had included with his letter, which I kept in my wallet. Overhead, something that sounded like a cello grunted through something that sounded like Bach. I went to the counter, where the familiar-looking man was already waiting for the proprietor. “Hello, Tim,” he said.
We shook hands. “Hey, uh…”
“It’s Father Loomis,” he said. “You didn’t recognize me.”
“Oh! No, you know, your clothes…”
“Not very priestly.”
“Uh-uh, no.” I smiled at him. There was the ecumenical collar, tucked discreetly under the work shirt. He looked weirdly like his Family Funnies counterpart, who almost invariably was depicted at a great distance: behind his pulpit, in the background of one or another whispered misunderstanding over matters ecclesiastic. I’d been having a lot of trouble drawing him. He had spread out his purchases on the counter: red sable brushes, cadmium red and cerulean blue oil paint, turpentine. I said, “You paint?”
He blushed. “Oh, yes, a little bit here and there…”
“What sort of thing?”
“Landscapes, mostly. You know, glory of God and all that.” He said this with more than a little irony. I liked him. “So,” he said, “I hear you’re in the driver’s seat now.”
“That’s the rumor.”
“How’s it going?”
I told him briefly about my lessons, how easy it all seemed at first, and how hard it turned out to be. “I have new respect for my father,” I managed to say, “as an artist.”
He nodded expansively. “Your dad was a strange man, Tim.” His face froze a little at this; he thought he had gone too far. “I mean, he was complex, very complex. A troubled man. There was more to him than people know.”
“I’ve guessed that.”
“Pardon me, I’ve said too much.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m very interested. He seemed so…covert, I guess.”
Father Loomis wagged his finger in the air, and nodded faster now. This had obviously been on his mind. “Yes, yes! At our last confession…” But then he stopped himself. “Well, he had a lot of guilt, Tim, a lot of pain. He made his mistakes, you know, but…” He reached out and touched my shoulder. “He was a good man. I truly believe that. He was a friend. I think there will be a place for him in God’s Kingdom.”
“Great!” I said moronically.
The proprietor appeared, red-faced and paint-spattered, and rung us both up. When I went outside with my purchases, Father Loomis was standing on the sidewalk, gazing up into the sky. “Yes,” he said. “A lovely day indeed,” as if this had been the subject of our conversation.
“It was good to see you,” I said.
“Oh! You too! It would be nice to see you a little more often. Sunday mornings, perhaps.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well…”
He waved his hand in the space between us. “No, no guilt please. I have to make my pitch, though. There was nothing wrong with your father a little extra prayer wouldn’t have fixed.” He raised his eyebrows. “And maybe a little therapy.”
“Maybe a lot.”
We had a quick laugh together. Something of the previous day’s rush of happiness had stuck with me, and the new, cool air tasted like lemonade. Father Loomis and I said our goodbyes. And then—I guess it was something in the way he had spoken that made me think of it—I said, “By the way, when was the last time you saw him? For confession, I mean.”
We were standing half-turned from one another, gazing up at separate patches of sky. Father Loomis shrugged. “A few weeks, I guess.”
“A few weeks?”
“Well, yes.”
“He was coming to you up until he died?”
I realized I was making him uncomfortable. “Yes, Tim, he was.”
“Wow,” I said. “Sorry. I just didn’t know.”
“Well. You never know everything, I suppose.”
“I guess not.” Father Loomis was shifting from foot to foot, and I decided to let him off the hook. I raised my hand, bid him a good day, and left.
* * *
That night I drove to Philly and got my stuff. There wasn’t much. A few records, some clothes. I left all the furniture and dragged the remains of my art studio out onto the sidewalk. Most of it went into the wet, reeking dumpster out back, where it landed with a deadened clang on the bottom. It didn’t look out of place there at all. The trash can that had been part of my work-in-progress I left on the curb, next to the one it was modeled on, and the two stood there, identically scratched and dented, like a frowzy set of twins waiting for the school bus.
Before I left, I opened and closed each of Amanda’s drawers, looking at the clothes there. I set the box of things from her car on the bedroom floor. Maybe I cried a little. Mostly I felt the bulky and annoying weight of things, which massed to ruin the otherwise modest pleasure of clearing out of the place forever. I shut the door on the apartment’s dim double in my mind, which though closed would always be there, taking up space. Then I dropped my key on the coffee table and closed the door on the real apartment. I went home and slept badly.
One morning that week, when I got to Wurster’s house, I found him sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of the cool, shade-ruined yard. He was drinking a glass of iced tea and squinting. “Good morning,” he said. It wasn’t something I’d ever heard him say before.
“What’s up?”
“We’ll be doing something different today. You mind driving? I don’t drive.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right.” In fact, I had been, for perhaps the first time, actually looking forward to our session. I’d been working on a portfolio of the characters, one drawing of each of them doing ten different things, and I thought it was going extremely well. I was beginning, in fact, to believe I could start doing full strips.
“Good,” he said. “Put your work away. We won’t be talking about drawing today.” He stood up, stroked his chin. “Actually, that’s not true. It’s always about drawing, one way or another. We’ll be implying about drawing.” He walked to the Caddy and got into the passenger seat. I stowed my work in the trunk with some consternation, climbed in beside him and started the car.
“So what is this mystery topic?”
He fastened the seat belt, and when he was through gave it a sharp tug. “Gags. What kind of driver are you?”
“Careful.”
He leveled me a skeptic’s glare. “Are you, now?”
“Yes! I’m very careful. What about gags?”
“We’re going to make up gags. We’re going to see how good you are at Family Funnies humor.”
“Oh, great,” I said, pulling out.
“Drive the speed limit, please,” said Brad Wurster.
* * *
We went to the Brunswick Plaza, one of the early malls: a single-story quarry-tiled complex with no skylights and a central fountain, dark with thrown pennies, that juggled filthy warm jets of water. Wurster and I walked slowly around the fountain, our hands in our pockets. He nodded every now and then.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“What do you think?”
I looked down at the fountain. A soaking child was kneeling at the water’s edge, raking the cement bottom with a grubby hand. He came up with a fistful of pennies and ran off, trailing damp footprints. “I think it stinks.”
Wurster shook his head. He took two small spiral notebooks and a couple of pencils from his shirt pocket and handed me one of each. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” he said. “The Mix family is at the mall. I want you to sit on this bench and make up five gags about this fountain.”
“Five!”
“For starters, yes.” He took a seat on the bench. “We’ll compare notes in a little while.”
I sat beside him and stared hard at the fountain, concentrating this time. It wasn’t very funny. He began to push his pencil almost immediately, a maddening sound, like mice scrabbling in a cell wall. It took me twenty minutes to come up with any jokes, and by the time half an hour had passed my little notebook read:
bitty wants to go swimming
lindy holding bittys hand, says ‘bitty wants to know
how come we cant go swimming’
stranger kid floating in fountain
timmy says I’d sure like to go swimming
bobby saying how come they telling timmy if you
throw your pennies in there god gets ‘em
lindy
This was as far as I got. The fountain was so perfectly vapid, so meaningless and foul, that I might have believed it was specifically constructed to befog my comic sensibilities. Furthermore, I didn’t know how to draw water. Resigned, I turned to Wurster and admitted I was finished.
“Let me see,” he said. I gave him my notebook. He read it carefully, then pointed to what I’d written. “This one about God is pretty good. You got one of the common FF themes in there. I like that. The other stuff, though…you get a twenty-five percent. That’s an F.”
“Gee, thanks, teach,” I said. “What have you got, then?”
He handed me his notebook. The gags covered several pages in his neat, heavily slanted handwriting.
1. Lindy tells Bitty, “It’s called a fountain ‘cause there’s lots of money found in it.”
2. Timmy says to Carl, “How come we don’t get one of those in the bathtub at home?”
3. Bobby says to Carl, “How come we can’t throw dollar bills in there?”
4. Drawing shows lots of kids playing in the fountain; Lindy tells Bitty, “It’s the fountain of youth, because it’s got kids in it.”
5. Bobby says to Bitty, “It’s not a sprinkler. You can’t run through it.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Not too bad.”
“One and five are terrible,” Wurster said. “But four will do.” He cracked his knuckles. “Okay, we’ve got two we like. You draw mine and I’ll draw yours.”
“Really? I’ve never tried a whole cartoon.”
“It’s time. Go to it.”
I made several test sketches of the fountain of youth gag: in one, Lindy and Bitty were sitting at the edge of the pool with their feet in the water; in another they were on a bench, off to the side. In the end I decided to put them left of center, standing in the foreground; the fountain was visible in the background, small enough to obscure my poor draftsmanship. Kids frolicked in it. Lindy was bending over, her finger held up like a teacher’s, while Bitty, in a typical pose, had her hand in her mouth. It looked all right to me—something that an expert inker, which I was not, might be able to make whole. When I was done I found that Wurster had already finished his. He handed it to me.
I was amazed. My father might well have done it himself. In the background of the strip, a woman—endowed with that flawlessly bland matron sensuality that all women had in the Family Funnies—leaned over her child, who was tossing pennies into the fountain. And in the foreground, Bobby was telling me the punchline, the one about God getting the pennies, and I was listening. Bobby’s expression was perfect in its groundless confidence, while mine was one of effusive awe, both of what he was saying and that he knew it at all. It was marvelously stupid, exactly the kind of thing the guy who cleaned the fountain would cut out and tape to his fridge.
“Wow,” I said.
“Let’s see yours.” I gave it to him. He nodded. “Okay, sure. You could ink this up into something half-decent, couldn’t you?” He handed it back and stood up. It was time to move to a new site.
I was frustrated enough with Wurster’s effortless aping of the strip that I stayed an extra couple of seconds on the bench. Wurster was already walking. “Why is it,” I called after him, “that everybody can draw this goddam strip but me?”
He turned around. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said. I don’t even know why I’m up for this job. You ought to get it yourself. Or Ken Dorn.”
His eyes bugged out, and he took a step forward. It was a funny step, the kind you might take toward a caged lion in a poorly maintained zoo. “What did you say?”
“You ought to get the job.”
“Did you say ‘Ken Dorn’?”
“Yeah, Ken Dorn. You know him?”
Wurster sat down again, his eyes never leaving my face. “How do you know him?”
“He was at the funeral,” I said. “And at FunnyFest. He’s been hanging around town.”
“Riverbank?”
“Mixville.”
“What!”
I explained the name change to him. He shook his head. “For Christ’s sake. How stupid.”
“Well, whatever. But Ken Dorn.”
He brought his finger to my face. “Ken Dorn is a leech, Tim. He’ll grab you and suck all the blood out before you know what hit you, and by that time you’ll be dead in the water.”
I unmixed his metaphors and offered a respectful nod. “How do you know him?” I asked.
Wurster shook his head and stared off into the depths of a shoe store. “That’s not important,” he whispered.
* * *
That Friday, at lunch in New York, I got an idea of what Wurster was talking about. Susan had been gloomy and evasive the entire meal, and while we were eating—the time I would least expect her to speak—she put down her chopsticks and sat up straight in her chair. “Tim.”
“Mmph?”
“I have a confession to make.”
I finished chewing and raised my head. Already the rhythm of the meal was draining away from me. “What?”
“Remember I said the syndicate would have somebody else…on deck? Just in case?”
“Yeah?”
She turned her head to watch a waiter glide by. “It’s, uh, Ken Dorn.”
My innards tingled, as if girding themselves against an impending nausea. Still, I was not surprised. Before I could respond, she said, “I only found out a week ago. And then, bumping into him at FunnyFest…it just looked strange. I should have told you then.”
“But they still want me, don’t they?”
She nodded. “Well, yeah, sure. I mean, I hope.”
“You hope?”
“I found out about this through a memo from Ray Burn to the syndicate’s law firm. They were working out the legalities of turning it over to Dorn. Who gets the merchandising rights and all that.”
I said, “I guess Dorn would.”
“Well.”
“Well?”
“This memo was asking the lawyers to look into Dorn not getting the merchandising rights. That is, the syndicate getting all that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think…I think maybe if you get the strip, you get merchandising money. But if Dorn gets the strip, the syndicate would keep it all. I think.”
I gave this a little thought. “So you’re saying it’s not in their best interests to go with me.”
She opened her mouth. It took a few seconds for anything to come out of it. “Uhh…no, not exactly. We’re talking about your father’s dying wishes, here. I mean, they still want you. At least I think. I mean, no, they definitely do. Why would they be pumping money into this thing otherwise? Free lunches, et cetera.” She didn’t look like she was convincing herself. She let the et cetera hang in the air a moment, then plunged, embarrassed, back into her food. Now I set down my chopsticks.
“Susan,” I said. “I don’t want to do this if I’m just going to get screwed.”
She chewed and swallowed, and stared at her plate. “Well, there are things you can do to impress them. Go to this conference, for one thing.”
“Conference?”
“The cartoonists’ conference I was telling you about? Next weekend?”
“Oh, right.”
“And then meet with Ray Burn. Tell him you mean business. Dorn would be a hard guy to sell, to work with. He’s a notorious weasel. Everybody hates him.”
“And you can set this up?”
She nodded quickly. “After the conference, sure.”
“So now what?” My food looked sticky and unappetizing on the plate, like it had just been dragged from the bottom of a lake.
“I, uh, got the day off,” she said. “Maybe we could go somewhere? The Met? A bookstore? A drink?”
“A drink sounds good.”
“On me,” she said. “Not the syndicate.”