The Dick Gibson Show (13 page)

“Is Papa dead, Mama?”

“No, God love you, boy, but only down t’ the corner fer a pint. Ah, bejazus, where’s me manners?” She took his heavy suitcase from him and would have had him lean on her as they went up the stairs, but he eluded her and walked up them unaided into the house. His mother followed him inside, calling, “Arthur, Arthur lad, ye must guess who’s come. It’s himself, Arthur, it’s young himself himself.”

They heard a rough noise, a clumsy banging and clatter from behind one of the closed bedrooms off the hallway. It was exactly the sound of something outsize and heavy being maneuvered into position, a full steamer trunk, perhaps. He looked at his mother, but she would not meet his glance. Her eyes which had burned with a feverish humor when she had done her imitation had now gone dead; her shoulders sagged.

“Mama?” They heard the noise again and his mother turned away from him. He looked around to see his brother Arthur pushing himself down the hallway in a wheelchair.

“Arthur,” he said. “My God, kid, what is it?” He rushed to the boy’s side.

“I can do it
myself,” his
brother hissed. “Hands off,” he said sternly. He wheeled himself past his brother and then turned when he was in the center of the living room. He looked at Dick Gibson contemptuously for a moment and then, tilting his head, his eyes so wide it must have pained him, he displayed the utter dependency of love. “Did you make good? Did you, brother?”

“Don’t, lad,” their mother said quietly.

“No, Mama, I want to know. Did you? Did you find your fortune? Oh, you must have done, you must have. God knows our prayers have been with you—Ma’s, anyway. She took money off the table just to buy the damned candles to light for you.”

“Shut up, son. Don’t blaspheme.”

“No, Ma. Tell him. Tell my bigshot brother how you turned the parish into a Broadway with those candles you kept burning for him.”

“He came in a cab, Arthur,” his mother said shyly.

“Did he? Did he now?” Arthur said contemplatively. He seemed to subside, considering his brother, sizing him up as if looking for a purchase before attempting to scale him. Which of his brother’s faces would be the easiest for him, he seemed to wonder. Then, suddenly, he raised both arms, brought his fists down viciously and beat mercilessly at his thighs and legs. “What about
me?”
he screamed. “What about
me?”

“Arthur,” his mother said. “Darling.”

“Shit,”
he yelled.
“Shit
on that.”

Their mother looked helplessly at Dick Gibson.

Dick went to his brother and put a hand on his shoulder. “You say shit to our mama? You’re shit yourself.” With that he grasped the rubber handles at the back of the wheelchair and overturned it, tumbling his brother.

Arthur bounded up quickly and held out his hand. “Long time no see,” he said.

“You had me going at first,” Dick said.

Arthur shrugged. “Ah, it’s a tic,” he said. “Like Mama’s imitations.”

“Beware of imitations,” his mother said, a sybil in a cave.

They were zany, and Dick remembered why his family’s characters oppressed him so. It wasn’t simply that they worked so hard to show off. Rather it was that their divertissements were a delaying action that held him off. In a while they would drop their roles and behave normally. Their masquerades were reserved for homecomings like this one, or leavetakings, or their first visit to a patient in the hospital, say. It was their way of concealing feeling, thrusting it away from them until all the emotional elements in a situation had disappeared. In this way his family life was as sound, that is to say as even-keeled, as any. It was like living with lawyers, with cops who had seen everything. If he were to die right then and there, they would probably make his body a prop in a game, and the game would continue, the show go on until every last atom of their grief had been absorbed—until, that is, real grief would be ludicrous, coming so past its time. Oh, they were hard. He recalled the story Miriam had told about her father, how she’d had to shield him. Why,
his
family was like that and he hadn’t even known it. Why couldn’t folks take it? Why did they insist upon the quotidian? What was so bad about bad news? Surely the point of life was the possibility it always held out for the exceptional. The range of the strange, he thought.

Dick asked for his father and was hurt when they brought him up to date in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner. It meant that they had already absorbed his homecoming and that their long neutrality had begun.

And it had.

Except for his dealings with his father, whose roles were endless and played with a rabid verve, a hammy, polished vehemence. The man had become a missing person. That is, he had somehow done away with the father Dick remembered—once a heavy smoker, he had even given this up—and had taken on a variety of characteristics which had nothing to do with himself. (And nothing to do with the man he’d asked about, whose situation had been subsumed in a painless generality; “Fine,” his mother had said when he’d asked. Not even “Foine.” Fine, then. But could her placid sketch of the man be another performance? Was neutrality itself a further concealment, a new way of handling the really felt?) His father’s behavior shocked him. In the past his dad’s performances during those momentary seizures of spirit that were an affliction to all his family—Dick, the exception, was their audience, though his bland submission to their moods, like the drowned man’s in a first-aid demonstration, may also have been a sort of performance, as his leaving home may have been, or even his famous apprenticeship—had been strictly amateur, never parodic and thus professional, like Arthur’s or his wife’s. His father’s roles had always been only a sort of graceless variation of his usual condition, as someone with a head cold is said to be “not quite himself” while it lasts.

When Dick Gibson had left home a few years before, Arthur, then a boy just entering high school, had been ferociously exuberant, proud, almost worshipful in Dick’s presence, developing the conceit that Dick had enlisted in the navy and was off to see the world, have adventures, fight the country’s enemies, get drunk in the world’s low bars. He was kid brother to Dick’s hero and bounded about the older boy like an excited puppy. Given Arthur’s superior height, this was quite patently ludicrous, and Dick was actually physically cowed by the broad, satiric slaps and jabs with which Arthur mocked his brother’s shy, serious journey. His mother, on the other hand, called Dick aside and before his eyes transformed herself into the sacrificing mother in a sentimental fable who covertly slips all her life’s savings and most trusted talismans into her boy’s pockets to tide him on his way. She managed to make him feel like someone off to medical school in Edinburgh, say, fleeing the coal mines in which his father and his father’s father before him had worked for years, ruining their healths and blunting their spirits. When he looked in the envelope later he saw that she had given him her recipe for meat loaf. The talisman was no St. Christopher’s medal but only a penny some child had laid on the streetcar tracks.

But his father, an inventor who had had something to do with the development of radio and who was essentially a serious man, had merely joked lamely with him, rather embarrassed, Dick thought, and perhaps a little impatient for the train to leave. “Listen, kiddo,” he’d told him, “good luck. Stay out of jail.” Then he’d made a fist—noticing the fingertips, not tucked into the palm but exposed and almost touching the wrist, Dick was ashamed of his father’s forceless fist—and pretended to clip him sportily on the jaw. He’d hit him with the wrong set of knuckles, and Dick had felt the gentle flat of his father’s fingernails on his cheek. Now he wondered if this might not have been the subtlest turn of all.

The man never let up. There was something driven and fervid and accusing in his narrow postures. He concentrated the full force of his masquerade on Dick alone, and it was always as if the two of them had never had anything to do with each other before, as if the father, now pontificating, now relaxed and expansive—though always abrupt, like someone speaking out at prayer meeting—was seizing some initiative the son had not even known was at stake, throwing him off balance, casting first stones.

“Today, downtown, I bought my paper from the man at the corner of Carnegie and Allegheny. You’ve probably seen him though you may never have noticed him. He is a fixture there—the sort of person of whom it’s idly said, ‘Him? He’s probably worth plenty.’ He’s a cripple, an amputee. His name is Harold, though I don’t know how I know this, we’ve never been introduced, I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning his name to me. He has no arms. He merely stands, sentinel-like, behind his stock of newspapers and administers their sale. Customers count out their change from a bowl of coins and bills beside a greasy iron weight that lies across the top paper in the pile.

“Because it was very warm this afternoon, in the nineties, most people had taken off their jackets and walked the streets in their shirtsleeves. Harold had taken off his jacket too, and one could see the long empty sleeves wrapped about his stumps and neatly attached to the body of his shirt with safety pins.”

What’s all this about cripples, Dick thought. Why cripples? Why always cripples lately?

“Two things struck me. First, that the shirts of such men are almost always blue workshirts. Why is that? Is it simply that Harold, being a member of the working class, would naturally wear denim shirts? Ah, but Joseph, who has a shoe-shine stand on the same corner, wears
white
shirts. Is Joseph affected, is he ambitious? Would you distinguish between Joseph’s craftsmanship—he deals in a service—and Harold’s mere agency? No. What is that makes blue-shirted Harold an amputee and arms white-shirted Joseph? Isn’t it really a roughness of mind that differentiates between them and tears arms from those who could probably use them most?

“But this isn’t what concerns me. I mean to speak of the shirt, the shirt itself, of the useless sleeving of the armless, the redundancy in their cloth. Why not sewn short sleeves in which Harold might pocket his stumps? Why does a paralyzed man in a wheelchair wear shoes? What use have so many blind men for glasses? Consider the humiliation of the paralyzed man. Consider what must be such a person’s mortification when someone not only has to put his feet into his shoes for him, fitting the dead foot into the dead shoe, but lace them as well, making a lousy parcel of his flesh. And when he is done the man in the chair looks for all the world like anyone equipped for a walk in the park. And the President himself is like that. FDR is. This is how the leader of the most powerful nation on earth begins his day. Regard the doomed, cancer-wizened man whose doctor has given him eight months to live. He wears a tie. Ah.”

Is he saying he loves me? Dick Gibson wondered.

“Decorum, decorum’s the lesson even when decorum flies in the teeth of reason. Decorum preserves us from the fate of fools even while making us foolish. Would you like to see a section of the paper I bought?”

He isn’t, Dick Gibson thought. He’s saying something else, but I don’t know what.

On other occasions his father might deliver himself of a political speech which Dick felt had been prepared, actually written down in advance and memorized. But the word “occasion” is wrong. These were not occasions; indeed, a few times when something might actually be expected from his father nothing was forthcoming.

He and his father went to the movies together. It was a love story, and during one of the romantic scenes a man who was sitting in the same row with them suddenly leaped up from his seat and stumbled past Dick and his father and down the aisle toward the stage.

“Look, Dick,” his father whispered dreamily, “I hadn’t noticed it before but the first seat across the aisle from us has one of those concealed lights at just about calf-level. What are those for anyway? They seem to be staggered in alternate rows on either side of the aisle. Do you suppose they’re meant to give a shape somehow to the theater?”

Meanwhile the man had scrambled up onto the stage, where a portion of the film was to be seen projected on his white shirt. Is it Joseph from the shoe-shine stand, Dick wondered. Carole Lombard’s hand flashed in an embrace around the back of the man’s shirt; because the man stood forward of the screen, the hand seemed
introduced
into the movie house, a projecting presence that would draw him up into the screen, more real than the great undefiled remainder of the image, realer too than the drifting shards of image sprayed like a pale tattoo across the madman’s neck and ears and hair and dark pants, as if the pictures reached him on the other side of thick aquarium glass. The man, his head turned in angered, twisted profile toward Carole Lombard’s enormous face floating above him, was heard to scream, though what he might be saying was lost, drowned out by the soft but amplified sigh of the kiss’s aftermath and the suggestive crackle of the characters’ clothing.

His father had nothing to say.

The next day they saw a woman run over just outside their house. His father had nothing to say.

Then, for no reason, or none that Dick could see, his father, unchallenged, would seize upon an issue and explode into opinion. The man would harangue against low tariffs, then against high; now he would condemn Wall Street, now defend free enterprise; now he would blast the Jews, now Hitler, in see-saw postures of a loggerheads passion. In a way it was easier to deal with his father’s set-pieces—if only by letting the man run down, or treating what he’d said as a joke (which seemed to delight him), both of them pretending that whatever position he’d taken had been satirically meant, a rebuke—than with his silences, and easier to deal with his silences than with his moods. In these moods, frequently pantomimed, his father, normally a fastidious man, might undertake to go about in his underwear, say, scratching abstractedly at his belly hair or even plucking at his genitals. Or he might suddenly come up to his son while Dick was reading and slap him abruptly on the shoulder. “Come on,” he’d say, “I feel mealy, let’s go down in twos and threes and toss the ball around.” That they had no ball, that it was almost dark anyway, and that if they were to go through with the idea they would first have to find a drugstore that was still open where they could buy a ball, seemed to make no difference to his father. Indeed, the journey on the streetcar to the drugstore was an extension and deepening of his performance, his father nudging him in the ribs with his elbow and winking, or making two parallel, descending waves with his hands to indicate the female shape whenever a pretty girl—or even an ugly one—came on board. Or he might pointedly take a cigarette from a pack he carried for just this purpose and light it in full view of the motorman and the No Smoking signs posted about the car.