The Dick Gibson Show (42 page)

With his brother Arthur it was something else again.

Like Marshall, Arthur had never married. In real estate now—they were staying with him until they found an apartment—Arthur lived in a big house in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. After his mother’s death he had tried to convince his father to come and live with him, but had been unable to budge the old man. Carmella and Marshall were present on one such occasion, Carmella sitting on the sofa between Arthur and the father.

“Be reasonable, Papa. Why do you need the aggravation of a house? List it with me. I’ll give it my special attention. We’ll put it on the market for twenty thousand, add another thousand realtor’s fee, and when I dump it you can keep the extra grand yourself. The buyer doesn’t have to know I’m your son. Then you come in with me. There’s the solarium, for God’s sake. Remember how you and Mama used to enjoy sitting in the solarium when you came out to see me in Squirrel Hill? You don’t need this cave.”

“Cave?
You call where your Mama and me lived our lives and raised our children a
cave?
Are you a cave man? Is your brother a cave man? Am I? Did I ever pull your mama around—may she rest—by the hair? Did I hit her on her head with a club? Music you had. Every Saturday afternoon these walls were alive with the sound of the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. What’s the matter, you don’t remember Milton Cross? Is music like that heard in a cave? Carmella, tell him.”

Carmella, looking from one to the other, was taking it all in.

“That’s not the point, Papa. What I’m—”

“It’s not the point? It’s not? Big shot, what’s the point? What’s the point, teddy bear? That you got a solarium, that my big-shot son owns the sunshine? You don’t own the sunshine. I want sun I go in the yard. My backyard is covered with sunshine like a lawn. You think you get more in your solarium? In fact you get less.”

“Papa, why are you so upset?”

“I’m not upset, sonny, I’m not upset. But when you ask me to give over my memories, you ask something which will never happen. Your mama’s spirit is in this house. A woman don’t live in a home forty-two years so her spirit can be listed with her son for twenty-one thousand dollars.” Here his hands flew up like a bird to Carmella’s tits, one finger getting caught in the décolletage.

“Mama’s dead, Papa. When are you going to face that?”

“Mama’s dead not even two weeks, Arthur,” Marshall told his brother quietly. “You’ve got to give Papa time.” He had never called them Mama and Papa in his life. Neither had Arthur.

“Now, Dad, you know that’s perfectly silly,” Carmella told the old man, pulling his hand out from where it had become caught in her brassiere.

“Time,”
Papa said fiercely, turning on Marshall. “You could give me a million years. I’ll
never
forget her.” His palsied old hand floated down to splash about in Carmella’s crotch.

Carmella took the hand and held it in both of her own. “Please, Dad,” she murmured sweetly.

The two sons were having the time of their lives. Biblically ferocious, they shouted back and forth at each other like Italian sons in melodrama. They glowed with a Fifth Commandment intensity. Meanwhile the old man was now a wild Greek patriarch, now ancient Bulgar, now wily WASP whittler and fisherman, now proud old chief, between the peaks of his wrath declining to mournful Jew, actual tears in his eyes when he spoke brokenly of his dead wife, the late lady who for years had led him a merry chase with her Maw Green stunts. Carmella might have been on the sidelines of some three-sided tennis match as she followed the volleys from father to son to brother to father to brother. For her their vaudeville turns were like a dream come true; the vague religiosity of their syntax was holy to her. There was
gemütlich
in the room like sunshine in the backyard.

“I didn’t know Methodist families were this warm and close,” she broke in during a lull.

“What, are you kidding?” Arthur said. “Methodist families are the closest families there are. The
closest.
We’d kill for each other. Anything, anything at all. One for all and all for one among Methodist brothers. Right, kid?” He punched his brother’s arm.

“Right,” Marshall said. “Right, kid.”

“You know,” Carmella said shyly, “you all make me feel ashamed.”

“Ashamed?”

“Of what, dear?” Papa asked. In a sudden seizure, his fingers leaped across her cleavage to her far nipple.

“Of the way I’ve deceived you.”

“Deceived?” Arthur said.

She covered her eyes with her hands. “We’re not really married,” she said, and peered out at Arthur from behind what would have been her ring finger.

Marshall had been expecting a widower, someone with children in high school. He had looked jealously on the balding and pot-bellied and pin-striped. Love would come from that quarter, he thought. And it
would be
love, hearts erupting in floozy passion, Carmella the Queen of the Cocktail Lounge and Wild West, a Claire Trevor knocking like last opportunity on Mr. Right’s storm doors and aluminum siding. He had been wary of just such a juxtaposition; even at Mama’s funeral he had steered her clear of all avunculars, his brother’s corny cronies, men in liquor, furniture, restaurants and automobiles. He had been rude, accepting their condolences with perfunctory replies as he jerked Carmella next to him as if for support—though the gesture was vicious, like a man with a beast on a stage doing hidden, close-order things with the leash. For the truth was he loved her as much as the man in liquor ever could—perhaps even more since it was still rare and grand for him to be with a woman. It was lovely waking up beside her. On those mornings when she was out of bed first he felt deprived of some special treat he had come to depend on. It was lovely to be in rooms with her or to sit with her in taxicabs, lovely to share space. It was lovely to have her with him in restaurants, to see her head bent over the big menu as in prayer.

Carmella loves Arthur.

In an instant his brother had been transformed. From a life-long kibitzer he had become one of the earnest of the world. Suddenly he seemed to acquire wrists, great rawboned red things that hung from hick cuffs. He had become all that Carmella wanted merely by Carmella’s wanting it.

But now Arthur took them for lovers and grew shy. Even his father had to find some other role to play. It was all right to feel up a daughter-in-law but a mistress was a perfect stranger. Carmella’s strategy in revealing the true state of their arrangement was superb. What followed was inevitable. Arthur grew more sedate and Carmella more ardent, his humility like a sign to her from an astrologer. Now she had a focus for her needs. She was convinced—and so was Marshall—that Arthur was the one and only. For Marshall it was as if all the torch songs he had played all those years on the radio were suddenly coming true, a delphic Tin Pan Alley. His heart
was
breaking. It was terrible, but not unpleasant.

One day he told Arthur—they were in Arthur’s solarium—“She’s set her cap for you.”

“Aw, come on,” Arthur said, “what are you talking about? I’m your brother, for gosh sakes.”

“She’s got a crush on you, kid.”

“Blood is thicker than water.”

“You’re the apple of her eye, I get a feeling.”

“Say, what do you think I am?” Arthur said. “We grew up together. We lived under the same roof. We’re flesh and blood.”

“My impression is the love bug has bit her. That’s the long and the short of it.”

And it
was
love. Seeing it in her, Marshall was as embarrassed and awed in its presence as his brother. It was profane, it was passionate. Ah, his heart. Breaking, breaking, broken. He had the blues. He had the blues to his shoes. He moped. He moped and hoped. He saddened and baddened. He felt the terror of exclusion and loved Carmella the more, estrangement dislocating him and making him feel as he had as a child tuning Atlanta, St. Louis, Cleveland or Toronto.

Carmella joined them, and Arthur, decent but flustered and guilt working in him like a decision, went off to fetch tea.

“I suppose you haven’t actually slept with him yet,” Marshall said miserably. Of course he knew that she hadn’t, that she wouldn’t dream of going to bed with his brother until he was out of the picture, so that by her propriety the adultery became deeper than the mere technical one of flesh.

She seemed as miserable as he did, her pain—she wasn’t very intelligent, the strategy had been a lucky stroke—conceiving how to get out of her difficulties. “What are you going to do?” he asked her.

“Oh Richard”—he hadn’t told her he was no longer Dick Gibson—“what’s going to happen? He loves you.”

“Blood is thicker than water. I’m the apple of his eye.”

“He’s so ashamed. Sometimes I think he hates me for what he’s doing to you. I could be a good Methodist wife to him—I know I could. Redemption happens, people change. We could have kids. The house is marvelous, but there’s a lot that needs to be done. Once we were married we might even be able to talk Dad into staying with us. Children need grandparents. Did Arthur have grandparents?”

“He used mine.”

“Oh Rich, forgive me. I didn’t mean—”

“Has he made his move?”

“He’s too good. He wants your word that it’s all right.”

He hadn’t thought Carmella would stay with him after she blew their cover, but if anything she was with him more than ever now. Their lovemaking grew wilder in the last days. It was as if she understood the criminal source of Arthur’s feeling for her and tried to make herself worthy of it.

One night about a week later, she put him to sleep with the most incredible lovemaking of all. He rode Carmella about the room like a horse, slapping at her ass as she, bucking and running, strong as a wrestler in her passion, carried him. Later, he inexplicably woke up. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again, he got up without even looking toward Carmella’s side of the bed and went up to the big solarium at the top of the house and entered the great diced glass room. He had never been there at night before. Rain fell heavily on the glass ceiling and he kept ducking his head involuntarily. Remaining dry under the steadily ticking rain seemed another facet of the illusion. Great storm-trooper shafts of lightning flashed all about him and he blinked timidly. He walked to one huge vaulting wall of glass and looked out. Though he was higher than the trees and saw nothing moving, he sensed a great wind. The rain simply appeared, visible only as it exploded against the glass. It was if he were flying in it. He thought of radio, of his physics-insulated voice driving across the fierce fall of rain; it seemed astonishing that it ever got through. Now, though he was silent, it was as if his previous immunities still operated, as if his electronically driven voice pulled him along behind it, a kite’s tail of flesh. He stood in the sky. He raised his arm and made a magic pass.

“This is Dick Gibson,” he whispered, facing the thunder, “of all the networks, coast to coast.” The lightning burned along its fuse. “Latest flash from Dick Gibson: Dick Gibson loves Carmella Steep.” It exploded and made an electric alphabet soup of the wet, dark sky. “This is not Dick Gibson,” Dick Gibson said. “This is God,” he called softly across the heavens and raised his right arm and threw a thunderbolt at downtown Pittsburgh. It was just possible that because of all this turbulence his voice
would
get through, that someone might pick him up on the rib of an umbrella or the buckle of his galoshes. And he thought of Carmella as of some mortal woman he had loved, the memory of his recent ride apt, as if he’d had to change her into a horse in order to love her.

Arthur was touching his shoulder.

The radio man wheeled. “I want you to have Carmella,” he said. “I want you to teach her the laws of calm and Methodism and to get all that dreck out of her pussy and line it with mortal children before it’s too late. I want her to be charming to your clients and rearrange the furniture and mix it up in the Mix-master. I would marry her myself but I am not religious, though I am a god.”

“Don’t,” his brother said. “I’m sorry, I’m—”

“Can you stand in the sky?”

“Please,” Arthur said, “I feel lousy about this.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ve been very decent. You’ve—what’s that? Who’s there?” A pale shape was moving in the darkness. “Carmella?” The lightning flashed again and he saw that she was naked, as was Arthur. So she hadn’t waited. It was exactly as if she had broken an appointment with him.

Now his heart
was
broken. It was a Dick Gibson first. He went downstairs and packed. There wasn’t much. He played the radio as he put his few belongings together.

He had been off the radio for three months when he left Pittsburgh. For the next few months, into the winter of 1960, he traveled about the country. He had some money—he had saved perhaps $30,000 over the course of his career—and he used planes and rented cars as he had once used trains and buses. Since the apprenticeship was on him again, he went to the places where he had first broken into radio: to Kansas and Maine and eastern Washington, to Roper, Nebraska, where he had worked for the Credenza brothers on KROP, to Arkansas and Montana, to all those unbeaten paths and peripheral places on the American pie where he had been young. There were motels everywhere; it was all beaten paths. He stayed in the motels and listened to the radio, monitoring the stations he had once worked, referring to his log, the by-now thick notebook in which he kept records not only of the programs he had done but the times at which they had been broadcast. He listened out of some deep anniversarial sense, not celebrational but memorial. These time slots were his birthdays and sacred holidays, the ear’s landmarks, and what he heard came across to him not as news or music or sports but as the sound of time itself.