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He handed her the file he had compiled for her, and she was momentarily startled by the attention to detail. She nodded in thanks and took it to her room.

Doug received a phone call from his mother when he was in the office. “It happened,” she said grimly.

“What?”

“Your father. He had a heart attack.”

“Oh, no.”

“He’s all right. He’ll live.”

“Where is he?”

“Roosevelt Hospital.”

“I’m on my way. Does Marty know?”

“I just spoke to him. So it starts. Hospitals.”

Frank Gardner lay in a ward that smelled of bedpans. Marty, Ellen, and Doug stood by his bed, Norma sat in a chair. Frank had experienced chest pains and, familiar with the signs from stories of his friends he had called for an ambulance.

“I wasn’t in any danger. I could have taken a taxi.”

“Sure, you might have walked, too,” Doug said. “Next is to get you into a private room.”

“I’ll be home in a few days. I don’t need a private room.”

“We’ll pay for it, Dad,” Marty said.

“I don’t have to have a private room. You want to argue with me and give me another heart attack?”

“That’s a neat trick to get your way from now on,” Doug teased.

“Like he didn’t get it before?” Norma said.

They left his room after a while and convened in the hospital lobby.

“He really should think of retiring,” Marty said.

“I told him,” Norma replied. “He’s sixty-nine. It’s enough. I got news for him, Rockefeller he’s never going to be.”

“We’d like to get him into a decent room,” Ellen said.

“Fine. But he’ll be out soon. They don’t keep them. If you live through the first heart attack, you’re okay. A man I know, he made a career out of heart attacks. Six. He had them like you take out the garbage. His wife is the one it did in.
She
had a stroke. She died, and he lived and got married again.”

“This is
Tales from the Crypt
,” Doug said.

On the night before Frank was to be released from the hospital, Marty, Ellen, and Doug met at Norma’s apartment and looked over brochures she had collected of Florida condominiums.

“This place has the best clubhouse,” Norma said. “Pools, indoor and outdoor.”

“Why don’t we see if he wants to retire first, then we can fill in the rest?” Doug suggested.

“I want Florida. I want a suntan while I can still enjoy it. And no more New York winters. We can afford it.”

“Can you?” Doug asked.

“Maybe not the apartment by the lake,” she said, showing them a page in the brochure. “That’s another six thousand dollars in the purchase price. But we can afford behind the lake in the less desirable area.”

Doug and Marty looked at each other in agreement. They would upgrade them to the apartment by the lake.

“What am I going to do there all day?” Frank said when he returned home from the hospital.

“Stay alive,” Norma answered.

“They have activities,” Marty offered.

“I don’t play golf. I don’t swim. I don’t make pots. What’s there for me? What I do is fish.”

“You don’t think there’s a fish in Florida?” Norma said. “Somewhere in all that water there’s a fish.”

“There’s fine fishing,” Marty said.

“This is true. I don’t think I’m ready.”

“Your heart recently attacked you,” Norma said, “which is how ready you are.”

Negotiations between Frank and Norma behind closed doors resulted in an announcement a few days later. They were moving to Palm Vista, a development north of Fort Lauderdale, the apartment by the lake.

Frank attempted to sell his business, making phone calls, placing ads in classified sections. Since he rented factory space for manufacturing and owned only his office furniture, what he had to sell, apart from his furniture, was his goodwill, the name “Norma Creations,” and nobody wanted it. On a Saturday, Marty was working, and Frank asked Doug to accompany him to the factory to help clear out his belongings. Doug suggested they rent a car or borrow Marty’s. Frank said it wasn’t necessary, he had already shipped the paperwork to his accountant and wouldn’t be bringing anything back. He preferred to travel there by subway as he had always traveled. The place was four blocks from the Hunts Point station in a commercial section of the South Bronx. The office was entered through a side door of a one-story manufacturing plant. Adjacent to the door was a square sign in blue with white lettering, “Norma Creations.” The room, about ten by twelve, had been furnished with dark wood office furniture, not good enough to be antique, the room painted red for some reason, red walls, red ceiling.

“Did you and Mom paint this yourselves?”

“Sure. You don’t have to pay good money to a painter.”

Frank told Doug to push the furniture from the office to the sidewalk, where it was to be picked up later that day by a junk collector. Frank sat in a swivel chair giving instructions, and then the chair itself was pushed outside. Frank looked around, nodded his head with finality, and closed the door. He had a screwdriver in his pocket which he had apparently taken for this purpose and he pried the “Norma Creations” sign off the outside of the building. He walked to a trash bin and was about to toss the sign in.

“Wait, Dad, don’t you want to keep that?”

“Why?” he said, taking the sign, which was made of thin metal, bending it in half and throwing it into the pile. “There’s no Norma Creations anymore. What do I need a sign for?”

He turned for one more look at the building, nodded again, affirming that it was finished, and walked away.

“I came here without anything. I leave without anything,” he said as they headed for the subway.

“You leave with a place in Florida.”

“For all that? Fifty years of working?”

Doug tried to envision that span of time. Frank and Norma were married as teenagers, Frank was 18 when Marty was born, 19 for Doug—fifty years, many of those years paying bills for his family of four. Doug, who had been so bedeviled by bills in his life, found that to be an extraordinary effort, month after month of food and clothing and utilities for fifty years. I can’t even grasp it. It’s a time concept Carl Sagan would talk about. The goddamn perseverance, and in such a cause, Norma Creations. And out of it, to have paid all those bills. It’s heroic. He turned and suddenly kissed his father.

Declaring their possessions “junk,” Frank and Norma Gardner left everything in the apartment for the Salvation Army. They bought a used car and set out for Florida.

Doug agreed with the appraisal that their possessions were junk. The economic distress that darkened his parents’ lives would not be his. Aggressively he pursued a tie-in with Palton, manufacturers of athletic footwear, selling the vice-president for promotion on a series of specialty mile runs down the main shopping areas of major American cities. When the Palton tie-in was signed, he decided nobody he conducted business with lived in an apartment like his—this was workers’ housing. After a day of Manhattan apartment seeking he learned he was still another year or so away in bonuses from moving up in the real-estate market. For the moment, though, at least he could get rid of the furniture he bought at the time of the divorce. He went to various stores and while in Lord and Taylor saw a display living room he liked, an eclectic combination of modern pieces and American crafts. He bought a sofa and two chairs shown in the display, and in antique stores located an antique oak chest to use as a coffee table, two patchwork American quilts, a Navajo rug as a wall hanging, and then, for sheer affluence, he bought a new stereo system.

He no longer had the time or the interest to prepare for a television appearance every Saturday afternoon. His mind was not on sports results or yesterday’s heroes. Scouting locations in other cities for the latest tie-in, he was obliged to miss a television appearance, and he could anticipate this happening more often in the future. He called the general manager and informed him he was leaving the show.

Doug sat in his new living room sipping cognac with the cast album of
Annie Get Your Gun
playing on his new stereo system. If he smoked cigars he would have been smoking cigars, like Red Auerbach lighting up on a victory. The dirty little secret was that the work he did before, writing three columns a week, and before that, covering a sports beat, was far more difficult than this and paid far less. He had cut all ties with sports journalism. He was purely an entrepreneur now, back on schedule for making it by 50, and with antiques, no junk in his apartment.

J
OHN GANNON, RECENTLY THE
subject of a piece in the
Wall Street Journal
on the profitability of his company, Gannon, Inc., manufacturers of timing mechanisms for industry, said to be a confidant of Ronald Reagan, was interested in meeting with Doug to discuss a possible sports tie-in. Mr. Gannon would be arriving at La-Guardia Airport at eight at night, Gannon’s secretary told Doug, his limousine would take the men to a restaurant in Westchester, and after taking Mr. Gannon home, the limousine would bring Doug back to Manhattan. Doug was given instructions on where to meet the limousine. He and the driver waited until nearly nine, when John Gannon appeared. In his late 50s, tall, lean, his hair graying at the sides, he walked with long strides, carrying an attaché case and a squash racket. Doug was outside the limousine. As Gannon entered, he barely made eye contact with Doug. “Mr. Gannon, I presume.”

“Sir.”

Doug followed Gannon into the car. Without speaking to Doug, Gannon made six phone calls from his car phone. They were now well along on the highway.

“Saw President Reagan today,” he said, finally directing his attention toward Doug. “Great guy. Ever met him?”

“I’ve seen him on TV.”

“I have his confidence. That’s a position of public trust, having the confidence of the President.”

He proceeded to talk about his relationship with Ronald Reagan for fifteen minutes; Doug exhausted his “uh-uh”s and just shook his head after a while.

“So, sports tie-ins. That’s why you’re here. What did you have in mind?”

“I read that you like golf and I was thinking of a golf event.”

“I saw something in the paper about one of your tie-ins. But now, as I think about it, why would an industrial company like ours want that kind of publicity?”

“Let me do a little salesmanship—”

“No, no, it won’t work out. We’ve had a change of plans here. Phil!” he called to the driver. “Take me to the house, then take Mr.—”

“—Gardner.”

“To the train station.”

“What are you doing?” Doug asked.

Ignoring Doug, Gannon picked up the phone and began to make a call.

“At the very least the arrangement was for the driver to take me back to the city,” Doug said.

“The arrangement has been changed.”

Gannon was on the phone until they arrived at his home in Mamaroneck, a large Colonial on heavily wooded property. The driver held the door for him, and, as Gannon left the limousine, Doug said, “Maybe we’ll do this again sometime. We’ll meet on the subway and I’ll leave you stranded in Coney Island.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“This has been for me what they call in baseball the Instructional League. There are guys and then there are the other guys. I’ve got a way to go before I can be the other guys.”

Not understanding, and with no interest in doing so, Gannon waved his hand dismissively and walked toward the entrance of his house.

“Sorry. I have to do this,” the limousine driver said. He left him at the secluded railroad station. The next train was not scheduled to arrive for forty minutes. What would my father do in this situation? He’d sit. What would Reynolds do, Macklin, Broeden? Doug called a local service and hired a limousine to take him back to Manhattan. He still felt humiliated but discovered that it was easier to deal with humiliation in a limo.

He told Ann the story the next day. “A dreadful person,” she said. “I’m going to put you together with Tom Daley. He’s every bit as powerful as John Gannon, and very nice.”

“I decided someone who needs to discard people like Kleenex is not basically a happy person,” he said, trying to be light about it.

“Doug, you meet enough of these men and you realize he’s probably blissfully happy.”

Jeannie asked Doug to join her for a drink at the Algonquin. She showed him a wedding ring. She and David had eloped and were married in Rome.

“I hope you’re not hurt about the way we did it. When we started planning a wedding we decided, why go through it? We already had the party.”

“It’s great news. You’re a married lady!”

“The other thing I have to tell you is we’re going to leave New York.”

“Oh—”

“David has a home in Scottsdale and he has real-estate interests out there. Even though he’s retired he wants to oversee things, busy work.”

“What will you do?”

“The boutique. Accessories, jewelry. I’ve had it with the publicity business. Bob is working on a marriage contract after all, so David’s children don’t feel I’m encroaching on their father’s money. I’m not really offended. I like the idea that after working so hard for a living, I could be considered in the same category of woman as Jackie O.”

“Bob is going to put an earthquake clause in it for sure.”

“I gave him the details on the phone this morning, and when I was through he said, ‘Scottsdale, Jeannie? Arizona? Stay out of the sun. You’ll get cancer. And you can die.’ ”

“You’ll be coming back to visit, right?”

“Absolutely. Buying trips. And if there’s something good playing in the movies, just give me a call. That’s what wealth and jet planes are for.”

“Okay.”

“You know, at the party, when David said that about your keeping me company until he could show up, it was true. You helped keep me sane. Having a pal for a hamburger and the movies, I wasn’t all gnarled and crazy by the time he got here.”

“You did that for me, too.”

Outside on the sidewalk Jeannie put her arms around Doug tightly and pressed her head against his chest.

“Thank you, my pal, my good pal.”

“Have fun with it, Jeannie.”